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The Judy File

Ever since I started blogging about Judy Miller's role in Plamegate (and in the selling of the war in Iraq), I've been showered with tips and tidbits about the jailed reporter, whom one e-mailer from Sag Harbor ("her summer hometown") archly referred to as "the amazing Ms. Miller, intrepid girl reporter."

And since I spent the weekend in the vicinity of her summer hometown, some of what I heard was delivered by people who know her well. Together all these pieces of information now comprise my newly labeled -- and ever-expanding -- Judy File.

A recurring theme in many of the conversations and e-mails is how Judy, to the dismay of many of her colleagues, never played by the same rules and standards as other reporters. One source e-mailed to give me some examples of this pattern: "In Feb 2003, Judy was in Salahuddin covering the Iraqi opposition conclave. Iraqi National Congress spokesperson Zaab Sethna told a reporter who was also there that Judy was staying with Chalabi's group in Salahuddin (the rest of the reporters had to stay 30 minutes away in crappy hotels in Irbil), and that the I.N.C. had provided her with a car and a translator (Did the New York Times reimburse them?). The I.N.C. offered another reporter the same, but he turned it down. Judy had just arrived in a bus convoy from Turkey, big footing C.J. Chivers, who was also there covering the story for the Times. While everyone else on the buses had to scramble for accommodations, she was staying in a luxurious villa loaned to the I.N.C. by the Kurdish Democratic Party...

"Two years earlier, she was on assignment in Paris for the Times and conducted her reporting out of the ambassador's personal residence, where she was staying. Felix Rohatyn, the ambassador at the time, was out of town, but it would be interesting to know whether the Times reimbursed U.S. taxpayers for the use of the embassy while she was there on assignment. What is certain is that the Paris bureau was buzzing about this at the time, as getting too close to sources or accepting hospitality -- accommodations, meals -- is a violation of the Times's ethical standards. The feeling was that somehow Judy was able to do whatever she wanted.

"For those interested in visiting Judy at the Alexandria Detention Center, one source emailed that Miller's visiting hours "are fully booked until September 15."

Another I ran into told me that the Committee to Protect Journalists is very divided over Miller: "There are those of us who feel that this is not a good case for us to be identified with. There are too many unknowns and too much that's murky here." The AP reported on Friday that a delegation of the Committee to Protect Journalists (clearly not including those who do not believe that protecting Judy Miller is what they should be doing) visited her last week. During her meeting with the group, which included Tom Brokaw, Miller wore a dark green uniform with "PRISONER" written on the back. According to the CPJ reps who visited her, Miller told them that while she is allowed to read and write in jail, she's been permitted to go outside only two times in the three weeks she's been locked up. I can't figure this one out. Are prison authorities worried she might get in trouble in the yard? Convince her fellow inmates that Iraq did indeed have (as she wrote in Sept 2002) "12,500 gallons of anthrax, 2,500 gallons of gas gangrene, 1,250 gallons of aflotoxin and 2,000 gallons of botulism throughout the country"?

Besides being able to read and write, she's also able to make long-distance phone calls (collect, I assume). According to a source, she used one of her allowed calls to phone her publisher pal Mort Zuckerman to complain about a Lloyd Grove column that ran in Zuckerman's New York Daily News, in which Grove reported, correctly, that while Miller is in jail her husband, "famed editor Jason Epstein," is cruising around the Mediterranean aboard the Silver Shadow cruise liner. The Grove column included a delicious riff from Chris Buckley. Miller, apparently, was not amused. Grove's piece also featured a priceless quote from Miller's attorney Bob Bennett who, when asked about Epstein's travels, replied, "We all serve our time in our own way."

Speaking of Bennett, we had a brief but memorable e-exchange with him on Friday, when the HuffPost contacted him to ask about a tip I'd gotten that Miller was in the process of negotiating a book deal about her Plamegate/prison experiences. When asked to confirm the story, Bennett e-mailed back a lawyerly: "Where did you get this info?" Was he expecting me to give him the name, address, and blood type of my source? We replied that I had heard it through "publishing sources" -- to which he emailed back: "No Comment". Thanks, Bob. Should we take "No Comment" to mean "yes" -- since if you'd meant "no" you surely would have said so? Unsolicited advice to Alice Mayhew, Judy Miller's legendary editor at Simon and Schuster (if she's the one negotiating with Bennett): Hold your horses or, if you can't, keep the advance very low. A reporter going to jail to protect her own ass and not a source smells like remainder to me. But what worries my Times sources the most is that it smells like the straw that could break the Gray Lady's back. A lot hinges on how much of what Judy knows, Bill Keller and Arthur Sulzberger also know. Keller has been very cagey on the subject. When asked by George Stephanopoulos on Nightline if he knew who Miller's source was, he refused to say yes or no.

And no fewer than four sources have either e-mailed, called, or, in one case, run up to me on the street to tell me that what I termed Miller's "especially close relationship" with Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzales, the leader of the WMD-hunting unit Miller was embedded with during the war, might have been, well, very close indeed. According to one insider, Miller had emailed a picture of Gonzales to a colleague at the Times with the message "Lucky Lady".

So thanks to all those who contributed to the Judy File... which is open and ready for more. Keep 'em coming...
Posted at 02:40 PM

Comments:

Arianna,
RE: Judy File
On a talk radio program the other night, the author of Bush's Brain, replied to a query about Judy Miller, the 1st amendment, yadayada, this way, 'I can't believe anyone considers her a journalist, she's been a STENOGRAPHER for the BUSH ADMINISTRATION for years!'
Posted by: Kevin at July 31, 2005 05:08 PM

What about Dr. Kelly's email to Miller, describing the "dark actors" out to get him just before he died? This connection should be looked into.
Posted by: OXM at July 31, 2005 05:15 PM

July 19, 2005
FYI, here is what I and others closely following the inside story think has happened: Rove and Libby, at least, learned of the Plame ID from the official, highly classified, State Dept. memo on Wilson/Plame which Powell had on Air Force One on July 7, 2003, the day after Wilson's inflammatory Op-Ed appeared in the NYT, July 6. (It is impossible to imagine that they neither saw nor heard about it.) Rove then maliciously leaked the info to NYT reporter Judith Miller, notoriously sympathetic to the White House rationales for the war, knowing she would spread it. (She has long taken widespread and embarrassing condemnation for her gullibility in eagerly reporting on the bogus evidence -- such as she got from impostor Ahmed Chalabi -- for the WMD/ Al Qaeda connection). Miller, not wanting to publish it herself, tells all to fellow journalist and political bedfellow Bob Novak, who promptly calls Rove on July 8 to confirm it. Rove does so, saying he, too, had "heard about it", as does someone else, probably Scooter Libby. Three days later, on July 11, Time's Matthew Cooper calls Rove about the Wilson piece and Rove discloses Plame's ID, claiming he heard it somewhere, from a reporter or someone else (Rove apparently told the GJ he learned it from Novak). But Novak got it from Judy Miller, who got it from Rove, creating a dizzying circle of leaks difficult to trace.
Judy Miller holds the key to the riddle and Fitzgerald knows it, which is why he has pressed her so hard for testimony, even to the extreme of sending her to jail for contempt. How does he know? Because, in order to save his own ass from Miller's fate, Bob Novak rolled over and spilled the beans on Miller, which is why Miller is in jail and Novak is scot free.
And another riddle: Why is Miller so steadfast in her refusal to testify, perfectly willing to go to prison to avoid it? She says it is her journalistic duty to refuse to identify her "SOURCE". (Normally, I am extremely sympathetic to such a reporter's contention.) But wait, what "source"? Source for what? She never said nor wrote a single word about the issue. She told no story. So how can she claim journalistic privilege for a story she never wrote? (For example, if she knew who committed a murder, could she claim immunity from testifying based on her employment as a journalist? I don't think so.) Further, the Prosecutor has not asked her for her "source." Rather, she was subpoenaed to testify to the GJ as a "witness" to a possible crime of which the Prosecutor knows or suspects she has direct evidence. (And, BTW, the reporters' tradition of protecting their sources was intended to help reveal and correct injustices not to cover them up.) All of the several courts, including an appeal to the Supreme Court, have ruled that she has a legal duty to testify. But she refused. WHY, really and truly?
Because she is protecting Karl Rove, and the Prosecutor, who knows it, is now said to be considering busting her for Criminal Contempt, beyond the Civil Contempt for which she is now in jail, which could send her up to the Big House for years. She may be inclined to reconsider her options at that point. Fitzgerald is young, 44, ambitious, politically impartial (though they say he is a fair minded Republican) and he is said to be on a mission, determined to kick some ass and undoubtedly make a name for himself in the bargain. He could become the next Archibald Cox, hero of Watergate, if he pulls this off. And he would not be considering such Draconian measures if he were not certain that something dead serious has happened.
But, like Watergate, the wheels are coming off of this cover-up, there is blood in the water and the press and public smells it. Republicans and Democrats together are rightly pissed about leaking the identity of a CIA agent, as we all should be, regardless of whether a crime has been committed. (A CBS poll today reveals that only 25% of the public believes the White House is "fully cooperating" in the investigation. And 75% believe the leaker should be fired, regardless of the law. T-R-O-U-B-L-E.) So, I suspect Rove is a short timer. Still, an immediate Supreme Court nomination could wipe the Rove story off of the front page and just might save him. Look for that event this week. Stay tuned, fun seekers. It is going to be a very bumpy ride.
Posted by: John Smith at July 31, 2005 05:16 PM

has anyone done a FOIA to see if she was on the WH payola train too, ala Armstrong Williams et al?
Posted by: preznit giv me turkee at July 31, 2005 06:00 PM

John Smith, excellent comment containing some good information. One question... I must be missing something. How can the Supreme Court nomination furor "save" Rove? I don't think it will deter Mr. Fitzgerald one bit. If Rove is indicted, he will have to resign, don't you think?
Posted by: Ralph at July 31, 2005 06:15 PM

Judith Miller is a Shakespearian Tragedy. But who is she and how did she get as far as she's gotten? I mean family history, childhood, educational background with a word or two from some of her professors, job history, including a history of her political connections, marital status/history, children, brothers, sisters. I mean who is this person?
Posted by: Joe Merz at July 31, 2005 06:18 PM

Miller's "not for the better" impact on the MET Alpha unit in Iraq, despite unit Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzales' commendation or her "contributions"
:http://gnn.tv/articles/184/Fatal_Error_The_Lies_of_Our_Times
Later, she played a starring role in a ceremony in which MET Alpha’s leader was promoted. Other officers were surprised to watch as Miller pinned a new rank on the uniform of Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzales. He thanked her for her “contributions” to the unit. In April 2003, MET Alpha traveled to the compound of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi “at Judy’s direction,” where they interrogated and took custody of an Iraqi man who was on the Pentagon’s wanted list-despite the fact that MET Alpha’s only role was to search for WMDs. As one officer told the Post, “It’s impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better.”
Posted by: voxpopgirl at July 31, 2005 06:46 PM

One need not shed a tear for Judith F. Miller. As a company woman who is no doubt on the payrolls of the GOP, the CIA, the NSC and the White House, she has played stenographer and propagandist for bushCo and beyond for decades. She's learned from the best. Why not have an "insider" at the Grey Lady if only to accomplish two missions with one sortee...
First, discredit the "liberal" bastion of "news" and at the same time, disseminate your GOP propaganda with which to launch a war.
bushco has destroyed any semblance of a "free" press since it now obviously has a price. Pay it and they are yours.
But we already knew that about that dang 'libRul media'
Mishun Akompleshd.
Posted by: jack at July 31, 2005 06:47 PM

if youve heard judy miller's voice, you know all about her: an adult woman who speaks in shirley temple-cutsey-pootsey li'l girl voice to get her way with men in power. only some men in power are smart enough to use her & let her think she's getting her way, while she's actually doing their dirty work for them. she really plays up that role of "intrepid girl reporter", even though she's much too post-menopausal to get away with the ingenue bit.
Posted by: n69n at July 31, 2005 07:24 PM

Yes, who is Judith Miller...do you think we could convince Edward Klein to do a biography?
"The Truth about Judith - What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Protect the President"
Posted by: Lance at July 31, 2005 07:25 PM

Is Bob Bennett Bill Bennett's brother? (Yes... --DN)
Posted by: Steve J. at July 31, 2005 07:41 PM

for Joe Merz and others wanting background material on Judy Miller -- check out this June 2004 NY Metro story, "The Source of the Trouble":
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/ Posted by: jennifer poole at July 31, 2005 08:02 PM

Of course she's covering her ass... and monkeyboy's ass, cheeney's ass.
She's obviously on the payroll, along with all the bin ladens etc.....
If you crack her, monkeyboy falls too!
I personally feel that impeachment is way TOO GOOD FOR TREASON!
Posted by: KJ Lovell at July 31, 2005 08:11 PM
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Progressive News & Views (since 1982)

"A lie can go halfway around the world before the truth even gets its boots on." -----Mark Twain



Fabrications of the Bush administration

Hans Blix, Chief Weapons Inspector, said this before he saw the Downing Street memos: "There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts about their attitude [as] to the weapons inspections."

Blix said that the U.S. fabricated evidence in an attempt to convince the weapons inspectors that there were these banned weapons in Iraq. Blix also said there were no weapons of mass destruction. And if there weren't and the U.S. insisted there was, it was because the U.S. had its own agenda -- and that is clear to most of us. But some of us simply don't care. Some don't care that the U.S. agenda cost over a hundred thousand Iraqi lives, and ~1,800 American troops. Life has little value for a criminal regime like we have in Washington and, sadly, for too many de-sensitized Americans. It just becomes so much easier to understand the pro-war hysteria that affected the masses in Germany during the Holocaust period. I use to hear it could happen anywhere and I believe it could.

"I think the Americans started the war thinking there were some WMD. I think they now believe less in that possibility. But I don't know - you ask yourself a lot of questions when you see the things the administration did to try and demonstrate that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons, like the fake contract with Niger," he explained.

If they ever found anything in Iraq it would have been because they put it there. In fact there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There is depleted uranium, and we put it there.

"The United States maintains that the war on Iraq is designed to send a signal to other countries to keep away from weapons of mass destruction. But people are getting a different message. Take the announcement North Korea has just made. It's tantamount to saying 'if you let in the inspectors, like Iraq did, you get attacked'." (Blix speaking to a Spanish television station after the war started)

George Bush has managed to manipulate 9/11 emotions into supporting this immoral war of aggression because of fear. People are afraid of being attacked again even though evidence for a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda is non-existant.

I asked my wife who probably talks to far more people than I do what her impression was of John Q Public's attitudes toward the policies of George W. Bush, and she said as far as she could tell there was a lot of griping going on about the economy but there is still trust in the president. (sic) It is totally weird that conservative types, especially Joe six-pack Americans, still believe in the American ideal and everything they see on FOX TV and from right wing talk shows. There is no reaching them. I asked my son who gets as exercised over all this as I do if he ever tries to argue with these people and he said: - why even try because their minds, what little there is in them, are made up.

When I was active in the anti-Apartheid efforts and spoke before African Americans I was always somewhat disappointed because I didn't seem to be getting the kind of response that I thought was going to be useful to fight the government's policies and associations with the South African government. They would tell me that they had enough of their own problems. I think this same kind of feeling is pervasive and the public view is that as long as it doesn't touch them personally, they are not going to be influenced by what is going on.

If starving kids in the Sudan don't move them why should what we're saying and Sy Hersh is saying about Abu Graib and dying Iraqis move them? When their kids are hurt or killed they will become interested. When those they know have kids hurt or killed they will also become interested in these crimes committed by the Bush administration.

Unfortunately, that is the reality; what the Bush administration and all these right wingers rely on - that nobody is going to get that upset over anything that doesn't directly cause them discomfort. Even indirect discomfort is not enough. It must get really bad. (Which is why the Dictatorship is not asking us to make any sacrifices for their illegal wars of opportunity - like tax increases and a Draft... --DN) Reforms always put off the extreme changes that are necessary to make things right. But reforms only reduce pain and that is why that debate was never settled. The radical left, which is always waiting for the revolution to shake up the public, doesn't always realize that real change comes with revolutionary change, not piecemeal reformist baby steps.

I dont' see a Revolution coming anytime soon, do you?

Hank Roth

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... and to answer the nationalist's question: I would if I could. (ABA) All things considered, I can't. At least I'm choosing not to at this time. Perhaps next lifetime I'll pre-plan better. Funny how the thought never occurred to me, though. Until December 13, 2000, that is... --DN

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July 29, 2005
French Family Values
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Americans tend to believe that we do everything better than anyone else. That belief makes it hard for us to learn from others. For example, I've found that many people refuse to believe that Europe has anything to teach us about health care policy. After all, they say, how can Europeans be good at health care when their economies are such failures?

Now, there's no reason a country can't have both an excellent health care system and a troubled economy (or vice versa). But are European economies really doing that badly?

The answer is no. Americans are doing a lot of strutting these days, but a head-to-head comparison between the economies of the United States and Europe - France, in particular - shows that the big difference is in priorities, not performance. We're talking about two highly productive societies that have made a different tradeoff between work and family time. And there's a lot to be said for the French choice.

First things first: given all the bad-mouthing the French receive, you may be surprised that I describe their society as "productive." Yet according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, productivity in France - G.D.P. per hour worked - is actually a bit higher than in the United States.

It's true that France's G.D.P. per person is well below that of the United States. But that's because French workers spend more time with their families.

O.K., I'm oversimplifying a bit. There are several reasons why the French put in fewer hours of work per capita than we do. One is that some of the French would like to work, but can't: France's unemployment rate, which tends to run about four percentage points higher than the U.S. rate, is a real problem. Another is that many French citizens retire early. But the main story is that full-time French workers work shorter weeks and take more vacations than full-time American workers.

The point is that to the extent that the French have less income than we do, it's mainly a matter of choice. And to see the consequences of that choice, let's ask how the situation of a typical middle-class family in France compares with that of its American counterpart.

The French family, without question, has lower disposable income. This translates into lower personal consumption: a smaller car, a smaller house, less eating out.

But there are compensations for this lower level of consumption. Because French schools are good across the country, the French family doesn't have to worry as much about getting its children into a good school district. Nor does the French family, with guaranteed access to excellent health care, have to worry about losing health insurance or being driven into bankruptcy by medical bills.

Perhaps even more important, however, the members of that French family are compensated for their lower income with much more time together. Fully employed French workers average about seven weeks of paid vacation a year. In America, that figure is less than four.
So which society has made the better choice?

I've been looking at a new study of international differences in working hours by Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, at Harvard, and Bruce Sacerdote, at Dartmouth. The study's main point is that differences in government regulations, rather than culture (or taxes), explain why Europeans work less than Americans.

But the study also suggests that in this case, government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff - to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family - the kind of deal an individual would find hard to negotiate. The authors write: "It is hard to obtain more vacation for yourself from your employer and even harder, if you do, to coordinate with all your friends to get the same deal and go on vacation together."

And they even offer some statistical evidence that working fewer hours makes Europeans happier, despite the loss of potential income.
It's not a definitive result, and as they note, the whole subject is "politically charged." But let me make an observation: some of that political charge seems to have the wrong sign.

American conservatives despise European welfare states like France. Yet many of them stress the importance of "family values." And whatever else you may say about French economic policies, they seem extremely supportive of the family as an institution. Senator Rick Santorum, are you reading this?

(Speaking of the devil, here's RICK!... --DN
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/07/17/the_apostle_of_bizarre_insensitivity/)

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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(From last year...)

Bush-Hitler Comparison

A lot of Bush supporters have expressed outrage over moveon.org's "Bush in 30 Seconds" project, specifically with two entries that compared Bush with Hitler.
http://www.bushin30seconds.org/
Matt Drudge made a big to-do about it on his site, with many other pro-Bush sites following suit, all aghast that anyone could compare the two men. I've seen comparisons floating over the internet for over two years now, so it shouldn't have come as a shock. I am glad Drudge made a stink because thousands of outraged Republicans scoured the internet in search of the offensive videos, which means that thousands of Republicans saw two commercials showing the fascist parallels between the two men. They might all still be in denial, but the important thing is that the seed was planted in their mind. If Drudge wasn't such a Republican suck up, I would almost think that this was his intention all along.

People want to say that Bush is not another Hitler. I think they need to add the word "yet". Actually, Hitler was far more astute than Bush. Hitler built up the German economy. Under Bush, we have lost 3,000,000 jobs in three years. Hitler's popularity was real, as opposed to the fabricated polls that keep telling us Bush is doing a great job. I have to say, I don't see many flags or signs that say "I support President Bush and our troops" in many neighborhoods, and I live in the guy's home state. With all the resignations from political appointees in his adminsitration, I am guessing that not even many Republicans support the guy.

Still, the parallels between German society post Reichstag and the United States post 9-11 are eerily similar and grow stronger with each passing day. Bush hasn't achived full dictator status yet, but all it takes is one event and a bunch of panicked sheep. Another strike on American soil is of no benefit to a foreign terrorist. It will, however, benefit Bush. If someone really wanted to damage the American elite, would it not have made more sense (and saved time and money) to have carpet bombed the Cayman Islands? Just think of all the money and hidden assets that would have disapearred. And anthrax. If the anthrax attacks were from a foreign terror group, wouldn't they have struck the headquarters at Halliburton and Bechtel? Wouldn't that be a simple and fairly inexpensive way to shut down a war machine? Why target Leahy? Who benefits?

It's the Reichstag factor of 9/11 that has generated comparisons between Bush and Hitler.

I came across a letter to the editor on Truth Out called "The Bush Hitler Thing." The letter is written by a woman whose family members were victims of Hitler's regime. The author spoke to many people growing up, always asking, "How could this have happened? How could you remain silent." She repeats the answers given to her in her letter to Truth Out.

On the comparison of Hitler and Bush she says:

So far, I've seen nothing to eliminate the possibility that Bush is on the same course as Hitler. And I've seen far too many analogies to dismiss the possibility. The propaganda. The lies. The rhetoric. The nationalism. The flag waving. The pretext of 'preventive war'. The flaunting of international law and international standards of justice. The disappearances of 'undesirable' aliens. The threats against protesters. The invasion of a non-threatening sovereign nation. The occupation of a hostile country. The promises of prosperity and security. The spying on ordinary citizens. The incitement to spy on one's neighbors - and report them to the government. The arrogant triumphant pride in military conquest. The honoring of soldiers. The tributes to 'fallen warriors. The diversion of money to the military. The demonization of government appointed 'enemies'. The establishment of 'Homeland Security'. The dehumanization of 'foreigners'. The total lack of interest in the victims of government policy. The incarceration of the poor and mentally ill. The growing prosperity from military ventures. The illusion of 'goodness' and primacy. The new einsatzgrupen forces. Assassination teams. Closed extralegal internment camps. The militarization of domestic police. Media blackout of non-approved issues. Blacklisting of protesters - including the no-fly lists and photographing dissenters at rallies.

There are too many Americans who say, "It could never happen here. This is America." Well, it's happening now. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. This is why I believe that the negative publicity of the infamous Bush-Hitler commercials is a good thing. At least we have a chance to stop this madman before it gets worse. But if we close our eyes to the past and the present, then history will certainly repeat itself. What are you going to do then?
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T H E H U F F I N G T O N P O S T


This week on the Huffington Post, I explored Judy Miller's role in Plamegate. Keep checking huffingtonpost.com for updates on this unfolding story.



Judy Miller: Do We Want To Know Everything or Don't We?
Posted July 27, 2005 at 8:17 p.m. EDT

Not everyone in the Times building is on the same page when it comes to Judy Miller. The official story the paper is sticking to is that Miller is a heroic martyr, sacrificing her freedom in the name of journalistic integrity.

But a very different scenario is being floated in the halls. Here it is: It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has "manipulate[d]" and "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war -- and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller's credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an "unnamed government official"). Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.

This is why Miller doesn't want to reveal her "source" at the White House -- because she was the source. Sure, she first got the info from someone else, and the odds are she wasn't the only one who clued in Libby and/or Rove (the State Dept. memo likely played a role too)... but, in this scenario, Miller certainly wasn't an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history. She had a starring role in it. This also explains why Miller never wrote a story about Plame, because her goal wasn't to write a story, but to get out the story that cast doubts on Wilson's motives. Which Novak did.

This version of events has divided the Times into two camps: those who want to learn everything about this story, and those who want to learn everything as long as it doesn't downgrade the heroic status of their "colleague" Judy Miller. And then there are the schizophrenics. Frank Rich is spending his summer in the second camp, while at the same time writing some of the most powerful and brilliant stuff about the scandal: "This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit...is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped up grounds... That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war."

But this unmasking -- if it is to be complete -- has to include Judy Miller and the part she played in the mess in Iraq. Of course, the division over Miller is nothing new... it predates her transformation into media martyr by many months. For an early look at this rift, check out Howard Kurtz' May 2003 reporting on the way Miller ferociously fought to keep Ahmad Chalabi, her top source on WMD, to herself and the anger it caused at the paper. And also the paper's extraordinary mea culpa from May 2004, in which its editors admitted that the Times' reporting on Iraq "was not as rigorous as it should have been" -- yet steadfastly refused to even mention the less-than-rigorous reporter whose byline appeared on 4 of the 6 stories the editors singled out as being particularly egregious. "It looks," the Times' public admission concluded, "as if we, along with the administration, were taken in." And yet just two months earlier, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller called Miller, who was one of the main reporters "taken in," a "smart, well-sourced, industrious and fearless reporter." Nothing about her less than "rigorous" reporting. Nothing about her reliance on Chalabi being less than "well-sourced."

Any discussion of Miller's actions in the Plame-Rove-Libby-Gonzalez-Card scandal must not leave out the key role she played in cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq and in hyping the WMD threat. Re-reading some of her pre-war reporting today, it's hard not to be disgusted by how inaccurate and pumped up it turned out to be. For chapter and verse, check out Slate's Jack Shafer . For the money quote on her mindset, look to her April 2003 appearance on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where, following up on her blockbuster front page story about an Iraqi scientist and his claims that Iraq had destroyed all its WMD just before the war started, Miller said the scientist was more than a "smoking gun," he was the "silver bullet" in the hunt for WMD. The "silver bullet" later turned out to be another blank -- and the scientist turned out to be a military intelligence official.

Amazingly, however, even as her reporting has been debunked -- and her sources discredited -- Miller has steadfastly refused to apologize for her role in misleading the public in the lead up to the war. Indeed, in an interview with the author of Bush's Brain , James Moore, she, in the words of Moore, "remained righteously indignant, unwilling to accept that she had goofed in the grandest of fashions," telling him: "I was proved fucking right."

As recently as March 2005, in an appearance at Berkeley, she stubbornly refused to express regret. Indeed, she showed that she shares a key attitude with the Bush administration: an unwillingness to admit mistakes when faced with new realities. She even compared herself to the president, saying that she was getting the same information he was getting... and suggested that since he hadn't apologized, why should she? Maybe she's angling for the Tenet treatment: promote faulty intel, get a Medal of Freedom. Miller also echoed the words of Don Rumsfeld ("You go to war with the Army you have") when she justified her flawed reporting on WMD by saying "You go with what you've got." Really? Wouldn't it be better to wait until what you've got is right?

It's nice that Bill Keller is visiting Judy in jail giving updates about how hard this is for her, having to be away from her family and friends. But it would be even nicer if we'd had some acknowledgement from Miller of her complicity in sending 138,000 American soldiers away from their family and friends. And, unlike Miller, they won't be returning home in October. Indeed, as of today, 1,785 of them won't be returning home at all.

This story gets deeper with every twist and revelation, including the reminder (via Podhoretz) that Fitzgerald had a previous run in with Miller over her actions in a national security case, and the speculation (via Jeralyn at TalkLeft) that Fitzgerald is considering seeking to put Miller under criminal contempt, rather than the civil contempt she's now under.

But one thing is inescapable: Miller -- intentionally or unintentionally -- worked hand in glove in helping the White House propaganda machine (for a prime example, check out this Newsweek story on how the aluminum tubes tall tale went from a government source to Miller to page one of the New York Times to Cheney and Rice going on the Sunday shows to confirm the story to Bush pushing that same story at the UN).

So, once again, the question arises (and you can't have it both ways, Frank): when it comes to this scandal, do you want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or do you want the truth -- except for what Judy Miller wants to keep to herself?

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Judy Miller: How Deep Do Her Connections Run?
Posted July 28, 2005 at 10:39 p.m. EDT

The more I'm reading about Judy Miller and her actions leading up to and during the early days of the war, and then through the unfolding Plame-Rove-Libby-Gonzalez-Card scandal, the more I'm struck by the special access and relationships she enjoyed with many of the key players in the Iraq debacle (which, at the end of the day, is really what Plamegate is all about).

For starters, of course, we have her still unfolding involvement in the Plame leak. Earlier this month, Howard Kurtz reported that Miller and Libby spoke a few days before Novak outed Plame -- and I'm hearing that the Libby/Miller conversation occurred over breakfast in Washington. Did Valerie Plame come up -- and, if so, who brought her up? There is no question that Miller was angry at Joe Wilson… and continues to be. A social acquaintance of Miller told me that, once, when she spoke of Wilson, it was with "a passionate and heated disgust that went beyond the political and included an irrelevant bit of deeply personal innuendo about him, her mouth twisting in hatred."

Miller's special relationships go much further than Scooter Libby, Richard Perle and the rest of the neocon establishment. Take her involvement as an embedded reporter during the war with the Pentagon's Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha -- the unit charged with hunting down Saddam's WMD. As extensively reported by both Kurtz and New York Magazine's Franklin Foer, Miller's time with the unit was highly unusual.

First, there was the fact that she landed the plum assignment in the first place. It would give her first dibs on the biggest story of the war... the hoped-for reveal of Saddam's much-touted WMD (with much of the touting done by Miller herself and her special sources). Was this the reward for her pro-administration prewar reporting?

Foer cites military and New York Times sources as saying that Miller's assignment was so sensitive that Don Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Once embedded, Miller acted as much more than a reporter. Kurtz quotes one military officer as saying that the MET Alpha unit became a "Judith Miller team." Another officer said that Miller "came in with a plan. She was leading them... She ended up almost hijacking the mission." A third officer, a senior staffer of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, of which MET Alpha was a part, put it this way: "It's impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better."

What did Miller do to create such an impression? According to Kurtz, she wasn't afraid to throw her weight around, threatening to write critical stories and complain to her friends in very high places if things didn't go her way. "Judith," said an Army officer, "was always issuing threats of either going to the New York Times or to the secretary of defense. There was nothing veiled about that threat."

In one specific instance, she used her friendship with Major General David Petraeus to force a lower ranking officer to reverse an order she was unhappy about. (Can we stop for a moment and take the full measure of how unbelievable this whole thing is?)

Miller also had a special, ten-year relationship with Ahmed Chalabi, which led to the MET Alpha unit, which had no special training in interrogation or intelligence, being given custody of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Sultan. Miller was even allowed to sit in on the initial questioning of Sultan -- a turn of events that didn't go down well with some Pentagon officials.

Miller apparently ended up developing an especially close relationship with Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzalez, the leader of the MET Alpha unit. Along with puffing him up in some of her dispatches -- once describing his "meeting tonight with Mr. Chalabi to discuss nonproliferation issues" -- Miller took the unusual step of taking part in the ceremony where Gonzalez was promoted, actually pinning his new rank to his uniform (has the bizarreness of all this hit you yet?).

Later, when Miller's reporting came under serious fire, Gonzalez was only too happy to return the favor, writing an impassioned response to the Times' Iraq reporting mea culpa. "We have been deeply disturbed," Gonzalez wrote in a letter to the Times that was co-signed by a pair of his colleagues, "by the mischaracterizations of the operation and of [Miller's] reporting... We were particularly disturbed by the recent New York Times editor's note apologizing for having been 'taken in' by WMD 'misinformation' and citing one article she wrote while embedded with our unit... We strongly disagree with that assertion and remain firmly supportive of the accuracy of her accounts of the events she described, as well as other articles she wrote while embedded with our unit." Wow. I'm kinda surprised he didn't sign it "JM + MET Alpha, N.A.F (Now and Forever)".

But Gonzalez and his pals seem to be the only ones standing behind the accuracy of Miller's reporting. Even the administration is no longer barking up that tree, with top weapons hunter Charles Duelfer closing his investigation this spring saying that the search for WMD "has been exhausted" without finding any -- while at the same time dismissing the Miller-touted claim that WMD had been shipped to Syria just before the U.S. invaded.

So the WMD investigation has ended. But the investigation into Judy Miller's role -- both in the WMD fiasco and the Plame scandal -- is just beginning.

© 2005 TheHuffingtonPost.com, LLC
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The Manchurian Candidate
by Joel Peskoff

Recently, I watched the 2004 remake of the Manchurian Candidate with my 12 year old son. After that, we dusted off and viewed the 1962 version for comparison. The 1962 film centers on foreign communist plotters who try to install a double-agent brainwashed puppet in the Oval Office. In the 2004 remake, a Halliburton-like multi-national corporation is behind the plot.

I began pondering the policy initiatives of a double-agent president. Clearly, his objectives would be:
- long-term economic harm to the United States
- disrupt American military power
- loss of American prestige in the world
- increase world hatred and distrust of the United States

I think diary passages of a Manchurian Candidate president would read something like this:

Plan and attack the U.S. budget and revenues. I'll need to cut the revenues of the U.S to weaken the U.S. income stream. In 2000, the federal budget ran a budget surplus. Massive tax cuts are the best method to reverse this trend. I am sure that I can convince the Republicans, who are in the pockets of corporations and rich individuals, to go along with it.

To get tax-cuts, I'll craft a plan that uses a decoy "job growth." This will lure a jobs-conscious public into accepting tax-cuts. Of course, I really don't want to foster job growth, so I won't let the tax-cuts get steered to the lower and middle income citizens -- they'll spend them and stimulate the economy. Therefore, it's instrumental that they go inefficiently to the wealthy so as to minimize any stimulus. I'll also deploy a smoke screen that says that the vast majority of the cuts go to middle class Americans.

To keep American forces busy so that they can't combat America's real enemy, al Qaeda, I need a maneuver to draw attention away. A war with Iraq would fit nicely. I'll ask for new weapons programs, too. That war would keep the military personnel occupied while draining roughly half the Pentagon's budget. (Note to self :) Hire a bunch of neocon wingnuts, that have wanted to attack Iraq for a decade, to fill key spots in DoD and other agencies. Appoint an NSA Director that doesn't know anything about terrorism -- maybe someone whose specialty is obsolete -- like cold war studies.

Devalue the American dollar in relation to other currencies and widen the trade gap. Encourage outsourcing away from the U.S. and make American workers fearful.

I'll degrade America's water, forests and air by passing laws with Orwellian names like "Healthy Forests," "Clear Skies" and "Clean Air Act" that chop trees and make the air and water dirtier.

I'll divide the American people along religious, regional, racial and cultural lines. At the same time, I'll instill a sense of fear that will cement my authority and I'll pass laws that will allow my administration to suppress dissent and I'll make sure that we have the means to fix elections -- further solidifying my power.

The United States has a 1.5 million person fighting force capable of deploying anywhere on the globe. Terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda are the major threat to the U.S. If they got nukes, they could threaten America. [(Note to self :) reduce funding for programs to secure former Soviet nuclear material.]

Since American credibility and prestige in the world relies upon America's perception as a country that respects international standards of behavior, I'll violate those standards of behavior. I'll sanction torture in violation of the Geneva Convention and I'll imprison suspects; hold them without trial; forbid access to families or attorneys; and refuse to charge them with a crime -- in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution. Should any of these actions become exposed, I'll court-martial privates while promoting high ranking officials -- damaging the principle of command responsibility and undermining military morale.

* * *

Four years later...

Dear diary, since last writing I won re-election to a second term -- thanks to those Diebold voting machines. This is a dandy time to assess my mission's progress. I've conditioned Americans to expect dreadful economic news; the public cheered the revised Congressional Budget Office's 2005 budget projection of $325 billion. They don't realize that the good news is temporary. The drop in the deficit is due to one-time events. Let me list other accomplishments for myself:

- So far, I've added trillions of dollars to the national debt.

- America's standing in the world is at an all-time low. In most middle-eastern countries, Osama bin Laden is more popular than America. In others, America is viewed as more dangerous than Iran or North Korea.

- Oil prices are double that of two years ago -- causing exports of American dollars to nations that hate America.

- The dollar is significantly less valuable.

- The Iraq war ploy was a stroke of genius. America is bogged down in a no-win quagmire. They can't stay and they can't leave. In the meantime, there's little surplus military to engage true foes. National Guardsmen aren't re-enlisting. The resources are being used in Iraq instead of defending their homeland against terrorism.

- The American people are more divided than ever.

- I've strengthened our ruling party and the opposition party is in disarray and act like sheep.

* * *

I don't accuse President Bush of being a foreign agent, (Uhh, that wouldn't be much of a stretch, Joel, given that he's buried in the deep pockets of the "multi-national" fascist corporations, who long ago proved they didn't give a crap about America... --DN) but can anyone imagine how a real Manchurian Candidate could have weakened the United States any more effectively?
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Pat Roberts

If Tony Blair is George Bush's poodle, Kansas Senator Pat Roberts is his obedient lapdog.

Roberts is, sadly for the security of America, the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But Roberts does not see his primary role as protecting the citizens of the United States. Oh no, the first and foremost task of Roberts is to protect the Bushevism power base.

As the Boston Globe pointed out, despite Roberts' post-election promise to do so, he now refuses to hold hearings on the now-proven false pre-Iraq War intelligence assertions of the Bush Administration.

According to the Globe, last year Roberts vowed that "his panel would examine whether Bush or his top aides misled the public about prewar intelligence, or pressured CIA agents to make a stronger case for invading Iraq. But since then," the Globe continues, "the Intelligence Committee has made no measurable progress on the investigation. Instead, Roberts has offered vague public promises of picking up the key pieces of the probe at some point but has warned that other more pressing matters must be dealt with first."

Apparently, one of those pressing matters is being the boy toy of Karl Rove, who recently dispatched Roberts to "review the probe of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been investigating the Plame case for nearly two years." Ah yes, instead of uncovering lies, Roberts is intimidating a federal prosecutor and enabling treason.

On February 25, 1999, Pat Roberts stood before the Senate and indignantly declared: "I today voted to sustain both articles of impeachment of William J. Clinton. I so voted because I believe the President is guilty of obstructing justice and lying to a grand jury and because I believe these crimes are so serious they warrant his removal from office."

What's the matter with Kansas? (Still too close to places like Mississippi might be one guess... --DN)

How about senators like Pat Roberts who are more loyal to their party than to their country?

When you sell out a CIA operative who specializes in trying to save America from weapons of mass destruction, you're not just the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week, you are just despicable and immoral.

Until next week, remember our motto at BuzzFlash.com:

So many Republican hypocrites, so little time.
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EXCERPT:

He's waited patiently for almost five years, and now - finally - President Gore, in his second term in office, has his long-desired chance to nominate a Supreme Court justice and so tip the court decisively in his direction. Thanks to the infamous 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2000 that threw the disputed Florida vote recount to Gore, the Republicans still nurse bitter feelings. Five years later, they have no doubt that Election 2000 - in which their candidate won the majority popular vote - was stolen from them by the dreaded and hated "Democrat Court." Gore nonetheless seizes the moment, appears on national television in prime time, and announces his nomination of a sturdy-jawed woman of color, an exceedingly liberal lawyer, a Clinton favorite and former aide to Attorney General Janet Reno, whose name appears on the founding lists of Moveon.org (though she now claims she has no memory of "membership" in the organization). Soon after her nomination, it is reported that, in 2000, when the Florida case was in the balance, she paid her way to Florida and played a behind-the-scenes role on the David Boies legal team, worked in the shadows, and spent half an hour in a "very arcane discussion" with the busy then-candidate Al Gore. The people around Gore at the time now claim not to remember much about her role and are sure that means it was insignificant.

Okay, what would the Republican Party and the right-wing do (and I give you far less than three guesses)? First of all, their media universe would crank up to the decibel of a garbage truck smashing trash. Rush Limbaugh would be denouncing the "feminazi" Gore nominated and railing against her as the chief election-stealer of 2000; Fox would be fair-and-balancing her out the door; right-wing bloggers would be going nuts; right-wing think-tanks would be issuing position papers on the history of the filibuster and how to use it; the National Review would have a "Florida Court: Day of Shame" cover issue; the Republican National Committee would have issued scalding talking points on the question of whether this nomination was, in fact, a court-packing, future-election-stealing, impeachable offense; and in Congress, the Republicans would be demanding immediate investigations, refusing to attend congressional sessions on the nomination unless the Gore administration released the candidate's Clinton-era governmental papers and the full records of her role in the Gore Florida deliberations of 2000. They would, of course, be demanding that the President withdraw his nomination or face an unwinnable filibuster. And that would probably just be for starters...

(Click the link...)
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Apparently we can't get near enough folks to drop their remotes and grab a pen. Or a crayon. If we don't tell 'em, they think we don't care.

Oh, wait, I forgot. This is Amerika. We DON'T care... --DN

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DeLay's Sweetheart Deal

Majority Leader Tom DeLay may have faded from the front pages, but he's still up to his dirty tricks.

Yesterday, Rep. Henry Waxman revealed that DeLay slipped “a $1.5 billion giveaway to the oil industry, Halliburton, and Sugar Land, Texas” into the energy bill. (That's one and a half BILLION, folks, in case you glossed over it... DN)

But it gets worse. The provision was "mysteriously inserted" into the text of the energy bill "after the conference was closed, so members of the conference committee had no opportunity to consider or reject this measure." DeLay has launched an assault on the democratic process.

Write your representatives and demand this provision be removed from the energy bill.

THE ANATOMY OF A SCAM: The $1.5 billion is designated for "oil and natural gas drilling research." Ordinarily, any company could apply for these funds directly from the government. But DeLay does things a little differently. In this case, the bulk of the money must be handed over to "a corporation that is constructed as a consortium." As it so happens, "the leading contender for this contract appears to be the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America (RPSEA) consortium, housed in the Texas Energy Center in Sugar Land, Texas," Tom DeLay's home district. RPSEA "has been advocating such a research program and is in a better position than any other group." (DeLay testified in support of the program before a House subcommittee last year.) If RPSEA wins the contract they can keep "up to 10% of the funds - in this case, over $100 million - in administrative expenses.

"DISPENSING WITH DEMOCRACY: The $1.5 billion giveaway was added to the bill after "Democratic negotiators went home Tuesday at 4 a.m. believing a deal had been finalized and the provision wasn't in the bill." The program was not included in the draft version of the bill and a DeLay spokesman said "he could not explain how the item was added to the final version of legislation prepared by the Senate and House negotiators."

A spokesman for Rep. Joe Barton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, noted that Sen. Jeff Bingaman, (D-NM), and Rep. John Dingell, (D-MI) were also informed. Bingaman's spokesman, Bill Wicker, said "We don't see this as a sweetheart deal for anyone.

"DELAY - ROBIN HOOD IN REVERSE: The broader question is: why do taxpayers need to provide another huge subsidy to the oil and gas companies? As Waxman notes "The oil and gas industry is reporting record income and profits. According to one analyst, the net income of the top oil companies will total $230 billion in 2005." Halliburton, which is a member of the consortium, would be eligible to "receive awards from the over $1 billion fund administered by the consortium.

"DELAY - ATTACKING THE MESSENGER: Instead taking responsibility for his action, DeLay attacked the messenger. DeLay spokesman Kevin Madden said, ''Henry Waxman knows zero about Texas, zero about energy security, and apparently even less about how a bill becomes law." The RPSEA consortium, for their part, doesn't want to know. Melanie Kenderdine, who represents Gas Technology Institute, a company in the consortium, said, "how the sausage is made is not important to me."

That leaves a big opening here for a rather rude comment about dear Ms. Melanie and the possibilities as to what I think she might do with that sausage, but, being the highly civilized and cultured person that I am, I'll decline to state the obvious - this time ... --DN
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Many thanks to KW & BK for this amusing satire...



Why I'm Becoming a Republican

Published on Sunday, May 29, 2005 by the San Francisco Chronicle

by Jeff Gillenkirk

After a lifetime voting for and working for Democratic candidates and independents, I'm finally going to make the switch and become a Republican. The reasons are many, not the least of which is age. I turned 55 recently and, having lived more than half my life, I can't afford to worry anymore about the other guy.

It's time for me.

As a Republican, I can now proudly -- indeed, defiantly pledge to never again vote for anyone who raises taxes for any reason. To hell with roads, bridges, schools, police and fire protection, Medicare, Social Security and regulation of the airwaves. President Bush has promised to give me more tax cuts even though our federal government owes trillions of dollars to its creditors. But that's someone else's problem, not mine. Republicans are about the here and now, and I'm here now.

As a Republican, I can favor exploiting the environment for everything she's got. No need to worry about quaint notions like posterity and natural legacy. There are plenty of resources left for everyone, and if we don't use them, someone else will. I want a party that doesn't worry about things before we have to. Republicans refuse to get hog-tied by theories such as global warming, ozone depletion, fished-out oceans and disappearing wetlands. The real problems -- if there are any -- aren't forecast to take hold for at least 50 years. So what do I care? I'll be dead.

As a Republican, I can swagger and clamor for war --in Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, wherever -- even though I've never fought in one or even been in the military. I can claim that we're fighting for Democracy, ignoring reports of torture at Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base and Guantanamo Bay, and a spreading gulag of secret detention centers around the world. Freedom, as every American should know after spending $300 billion for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, isn't free.

As a Republican, I can insist on strict moral values when it comes to sex and ignore the growing moral chasms in business, politics, sports, journalism and the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. A society that loses control of its sexual urges faces unwanted pregnancies, socially transmitted disease, broken families. Those overzealous about wealth, however, produce only a higher GDP, lifelong security for their family and more minimum wage jobs for the lower classes. What's wrong with that?

As a Republican, I can favor strict punishment of criminals, except for those who happen to be my friends or neighbors. Isn't that the very definition of community -- looking out for friends and family? I will be pro-death penalty and anti-abortion, pro-child but anti-child care, for education but against funding of public schools. As a Republican, I'll have a better chance of getting to spout my opinions in the media, which for some reason seems convinced that since Bush was re-elected with the smallest electoral margin of any sitting president in history, liberals are passe.

As a Republican, I'll say goodbye to "old Jesus" and hello to "new Jesus". Sure Christ started out as a liberal Jew, and look where that got him. Compassion, love and diatribes against the rich only encourage the weak and punish the most successful among us. The Jesus that Republicans worship is a muscular, decisive, pro-war crusader hard at work cleansing the world of evildoers, not, God forbid, turning the other cheek.

My decision to become a Republican didn't come easily. For years I clung to the idea that the foundation of a democratic society was our implied social contract, each of us committing some level of personal sacrifice to the common good of all. I regarded taxes as dues we pay for better roads and schools, safe inspection of meat and dairy products, maintenance of parks and protection of wilderness areas. I see now that looking out for the common good resulted in shortchanging the most important element in this formula -- me.

Let Democrats continue promising the "greatest good for the greatest number." Republicans clearly have my number -- No. 1. I'm sure a lot of my friends reading this will ask me, "How can you sleep?" My answer will be, "Who's got time? I'm busy earning money." While they're bellyaching about rising deficits, the outsourcing of jobs and casualties in Iraq, I'll be marveling at the march of freedom in the Middle East, upticks in the GDP and the president's plan to link Social Security to the magic of the marketplace.

As a Republican, I simply won't listen to bad news anymore. Bad news doesn't get me or my family anywhere. If you don't have anything good to say about somebody, don't say anything at all -- unless it happens to be about a Democrat, of course.

Jeff Gillenkirk was a speechwriter for former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo. He lives in San Francisco.

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As a change of pace, things get a little more serious, though no less truthful, in Mr. Beattie's blog. Warning to all the children in attendance - some embedded adult language was discerned: (DN)
http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008014.html

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July 22, 2005

THE question for Congress to ask Judge John G. Roberts' during his confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice

Can loyalty to the President also be treason?

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by One Citizen

This is possibly THE question for Congress to ask Judge John G. Roberts' during his confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice. The balance of power between the three branches of our government here in the U.S. may be at dire risk due to a long-time loyalty between the nominee and the President. The answer to this question may stop the nomination process in its tracks if the answer reveals that loyalty between friends trumps his loyalty to do justice.

Let's imagine for a moment that a member of the Bush Administration was pardoned by the president after being indicted for say, leaking a CIA undercover agent's name to the public. And let us also say for the purposes of this question that the Executive Clemency order was issued after the indictment was proffered but before the case was prosecuted. The very timing of this pardon would virtually steal the golden fleece of justice from American citizens before our Justice system could work its magic.

So then let's further imagine that the federal prosecutor had no choice but to challenge the legality of the executive branch's pre-empting the full and fair prosecution of the law.

Now, finally, here's the question to be posed to Judge Roberts...- "If the President issued this imaginary pardon BEFORE the conviction, and the resolution of this imaginary case came all the way down through the system to end up on your docket, how would you, as a Justice of the Supreme Court, likely rule?

"Bearing in mind, of course, that the subject being prosecuted might well be innocent. Or guilty. We'd never know for sure unless you issued a verdict against the President, finding it to be an abuse of power. Now for the purpose of this question, let's say that the pardoned subject was very close to the President himself, having been a member of his immediate Cabinet ever since the beginning of the first term in office. And because of his position, likely knew and could provide testimony against the very person who had actually cooked up this foul conspiracy and set it in motion in the first place.

"If only he could be compelled to testify. And that's the real twist to this whole puzzle we're asking you to solve. Let's say that due to strong loyalty and friendship, this person could not be compelled to reveal the source any other way than by being threatened with the possibility of prosecution and the resultant serious jail time for criminal conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

"Now wouldn't that be a fine kettle of fish if, by the sheer timing of his pardon, the President was allowed to protect himself, or perhaps shield some other guilty party in his Administration from prosecution for this most serious offense against homeland security?"

Now before you, dear reader, accuse me of a most fantastic flight of fancy that would never actually come to pass in the real world, let me explain. I didn't just pull this specter of an inopportunely timed pre-emptive pardon out of thin air.

In fact, I am only reframing an earlier case that actually set a legal precedent, which was pulled off by none other than George H.W. Bush. That's right, the father of our current president, and former head of the CIA successfully kept special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh from exacting justice for crimes committed during the Iran Contra illegal war which was secretly run out of the basement of Ronald Reagan's White House.

You may recall when members of the CIA illegally traded arms for the crack cocaine that then saturated our West Coast neighborhoods and then somehow U.S. citizens who were being held as hostages in Iran got mixed up in that very clandestine and very, very illegal deal.

Unfortunately, you and I will likely never know the answer to who masterminded that one because Poppy Bush actually did order Executive Clemency for those whom Special prosecutor Walsh had just nailed. But did Bush Sr. have an act of compassion in his mind, or was he motivated by loyalty and self-preservation? And did this act harm the best interests of the citizens of this country?

Because wasn't this an abrogation of Judiciary power by the Executive Branch? It is now obvious that a proper determination of the Weinberger Six's fate by our court system could have stood as a very real deterrent to those now in the Executive cabinet who committed the very real and very dangerous crime of spotlight-the-agent.

Allowing former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and five others to skate away scot-free from their heinous actions likely did more harm than anyone ever thought possible.at the time. Besides making it possible for others higher up in that earlier Administration to avoid any threat of embarrassment or inconvenience that an indictment might have rendered, it also set a dangerous precedent and virtually guaranteed that there would be an escape plan for future White House Cabinet members as long as the President could be tied to the crime solely by the threat of their testimony.

All future Presidents could be virtually forced to shield his cabinet from prosecution. He would be required to protect himself from being tainted with the ever-standing threat of any- or- all being plea-bargained into (at the very least) tying him (or others in the Cabinet) with foreknowledge of virtually any crime.

The well-timed Presidential pardon is thus a program which provides Plausible Deniability Version 3.0 for the entire posse.

On Feb. 28, 2001, House of Representatives Judiciary Committee held hearings on the constitutional limits of the President with regards to the power of Executive Clemency. During those hearings, one member eloquently expressed his opinion that "Improperly exercised, the pardon is a travesty of justice—an act borne not of mercy, but of tyranny"

Besides pardoning his Secretary of Defense, Bush Sr. also ordered that the records produced as a result of the Iran Contra hearings be permanently sealed from public disclosure. Executive Order 12356 (also known as the "Weinberger Declaration") classified that material as "Top Secret" due to the probability that the material within would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to our national security. Yet his pardons weren't determined to pose a treasonous threat, because they were held to have only possibly protected him from prosecution.

It is notable that he proclaimed that the "common denominator of their motivation -- whether their actions were right or wrong -- was patriotism."

Yeah, right. They're Patriots.

Now according to Alexander Hamilton the ''power of pardoning in the President has...been only contested in relation to the crime of treason.'' The delegates to the Constitutional Convention believed treason was a crime leveled at ''the immediate being of the society''— an offense meant to strike at the heart of America's institutions and values. Article III of the Constitution includes giving aid and comfort to the enemy in its definition of treason. In 1999, George H.W. Bush said "... I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors." But Gee Dubya obviously disagrees with that assessment. It's loyalty above all else in HIS White House.

Now in their twisted attempt to shield whoever in the Bush cabinet leaked the name of a CIA undercover agent to the press, supporters of the current President have done everything from downplay the importance of the position of the CIA's undercover agent to question the intent and the patriotism of those who support her. The act of downplaying her position is important to the upcoming fight over the question of whether the act itself constituted treason.

What it will ultimately come down to is a test between the branches of government and Judge Roberts' loyalty to the President who he had worked for during the election debacle of 2000.

You remember, that's when Al Gore got more votes for President but was prevented by legalistic maneuvers by Roberts and others, in (of all places), - the Supreme Court.

One Citizen
Charleston, WV
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Bare Truths about the War, from a Small Paper

By Ned Stafford Published: June 15, 2005 10:30 AM ET

Read the following 225 words from a Tuesday news story in the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, and ask yourself: Would these honest, hard-hitting words appear in one of the major newspapers, such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post or USA Today?

The story, by the Herald-Leader’s Frank E. Lockwood, covers a local appearance by Cindy Sheehan, president of Gold Star Families for Peace, an organization whose membership includes relatives of more than 50 soldiers who died in Iraq.

Here are the 225 words:

“Cindy Sheehan of Vacaville, Calif., accused President Bush of lying to the nation about a war which has consumed tens of billions of dollars and claimed more than 1,700 American lives -- including the life of (her son) Army Specialist Casey Austin Sheehan. ...

“Sheehan ridiculed Bush for saying that it's ‘hard work’ comforting the widow of a soldier who's been killed in Iraq: ‘Hard work is seeing your son's murder on CNN one Sunday evening while you're enjoying the last supper you'll ever truly enjoy again. Hard work is having three military officers come to your house a few hours later to confirm the aforementioned murder of your son, your first-born, your kind and gentle sweet baby. Hard work is burying your child 46 days before his 25th birthday. Hard work is holding your other three children as they lower the body of their big (brother) into the ground. Hard work is not jumping in the grave with him and having the earth cover you both,’ she said ..."

’We're watching you very carefully and we're going to do everything in our power to have you impeached for misleading the American people,’ she said, quoting a letter she sent to the White House. ‘Beating a political stake in your black heart will be the fulfillment of my life ... ,’ she said, as the audience of 200 people cheered.”

You don’t need to be a liberal, an antiwar activist or a Pulitzer Prize winner to know that those two grafs reflect the sort of pure, unadulterated, hard-hitting journalism the Founding Fathers envisioned when they tacked freedom of the press at the very top of the Bill of Rights. The free flow of information is the lifeblood of a democracy. If newspapers begin to self-censor ugly truths from the news for fear that certain politicians and their supporters might be offended, then freedom of the press is not functioning as it should and democracy in America is at risk.

Some editors might argue that Sheehan is not newsworthy. But having lost a son in Iraq, she speaks with a special kind of authority. So to go back to the original question: Would those 225 words ever appear in The New York Times or the Washington Post or other national newspaper? Or can they only appear in the smaller papers, many of which currently seem to reflect more accurately the growing anger about this war in many parts of the country, as reflected in all the recent public opinion polls?

Let’s see how the big newspapers perform on Thursday when Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Democratic colleagues hold a hearing on the so-called Downing Street Memo. Sheehan is scheduled to testify, as are outspoken opponents of the Iraq war such as former ambassador Joe Wilson and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

How will the event be covered in Friday’s editions of the New York Times and Washington Post? Or will newspaper editors at those newspapers decide not to wield that most beautiful tool of democracy – the First Amendment – and run no story at all, as they appear to have done so often these last few years?

Ned Stafford
(letters@editorandpublisher.com) is a former reporter for the Omaha World-Herald and Kansas City Star. He currently freelances regularly for The Scientist, has written recently for The Lancet, Reuters and newsbytes.com, and has just completed a novel, "Internet Fever."
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http://www.lewrockwell.com/sheehan/sheehan10.html

Mom, Who Lost Son In Iraq, Talks About 'Disgusting' White House Private Meeting With Bush; Claims He Was Arrogant, 'Totally Detached From Humanity' And Didn't Even Know Her Name.

Founder of peace group to stop senseless murder of our children, Cindy Sheehan wants parents to 'wake up' to the illegal nature of the war and Bush's corrupt motives meriting impeachment. She tells parents to advise their children not to fight, saying it's better 'to spend a year in jail instead of an eternity in a coffin.'

July 5, 2005

Cindy Sheehan has already had her heart ripped into a million pieces by the illegal Iraqi war, losing the son she loved more than life itself only five days after he arrived in Baghdad in April 2004.

There is nothing more painful or more heart breaking than a parent losing a child.

And for Sheehan to lose her 24-year-old son, Casey, must have been like someone taking her very own heart and soul and, without warning, ripping them out and throwing them into the depths of hell.

No one should have to experience such pain, but the cold reality of war is that someone’s child dies and there are actual parents left living with the hopeless task of trying to cope with the pain.

And anyone with any semblance of a heart and soul knows a mother coping with such a loss needs all the help and understanding she can get.
Anyone with the slightest bit of compassion knows a kind word or a shoulder to cry on helps a mother, who experienced the ultimate loss, get through another day when every day feels like it could be the end of the world.

So when Sheehan received an invitation to meet privately with President Bush at the White House two months after her son died, the least she could have expected was a bit of compassion or a kind word coming from the heart.

But what she encountered was an arrogant man with eyes lacking the slightest bit of compassion, a President totally "detached from humanity" and a man who didn’t even bother to remember her son’s name when they were first introduced.

Instead of a kind gesture or a warm handshake, Sheehan said she immediately got a taste of Bush arrogance when he entered the room and "in a condescending tone and with a disgusting loud Texas accent," said: "Who we’all honorin’ here today?"

"His mouth kept moving, but there was nothing in his eyes or anything else about him that showed me he really cared or had any real compassion at all. This is a human being totally disconnected from humanity and reality. His eyes were empty, hollow shells and he was acting like I should be proud to just be in his presence when it was my son who died for his illegal war! It was one of the most disgusting experiences I ever had and it took me almost a year to even talk about it," said Sheehan in a telephone conversation from Washington D.C. where she was attending a July 4th anti-war rally.

Sheehan said the June 2004 private meeting with the President went from bad to worse to a nightmare when Bush acted like he didn’t even want to know her name. She said Bush kept referring to her as ‘Ma’ or ‘Mom’ while he "put on a phony act," saying things like ‘Mom, I can’t even imagine losing a loved one, a mother or a father or a sister or a brother.’

"The whole meeting was simply bizarre and disgusting, designed to intimidate instead of providing compassion. He didn’t even know our names," said Sheehan. "Finally I got so upset I just looked him in the eye, saying ‘I think you can imagine losing someone. You have two daughters. Imagine losing them?’ After I said that he just looked at me, looked at me with no feeling or caring in his eyes at all."

Sheehan said what really upset her about the meeting is that Bush appeared to become annoyed and even angry at her daughter Carley, 25, who also attended the White House get-together.

"My daughter said to him directly ‘I wish I could bring my loved one back’ and he said something like ‘so do we.’ Later she told me that after he made his remark he gave her one of the filthiest looks she had ever had gotten in her life.

"I just couldn’t believe this was happening. It was so surreal and bizarre. Later I met with some of the other 15 or 16 families who were at the White House the same day and, sure enough, they all felt the same way I did.

"It’s interesting that they put us each in separate rooms. I heard this was done to prevent any type of group outburst and since it’s easier to control a situation when people are separated. Looking back, all I can say is that the meeting with Bush was one of the most disgusting experiences in my life.

"And I even asked him: ‘Why did you even bother to bring us here when I didn’t vote for you and don’t support the illegal nature of your war?’ He said it wasn’t political but I know it was just another one of his lies, as he probably wanted to be able to say out on the political stump that he wasn’t afraid to meet with families who lost loved one’s in the war."

Although Sheehan was opposed to the illegal nature of the war from the outset, it wasn’t until January that she began to become politically active.

Besides speaking at rallies and becoming known in Washington for her outspoken criticism of Bush, Sheehan formed a group called Gold Star Families For Peace, joining together families who lost loved ones in an effort to expose the illegal nature of the war and to hasten the return of troops still fighting in Iraq.

Her involvement with the anti-war movement also led her recently to join forces with the After Downing Street movement, a civic, political and activist group seeking to open a Presidential impeachment inquiry based on the release of damaging British intelligence documents showing Bush doctored WMD intelligence reports to justify his war policy.

"Americans need to wake up and we need to put public pressure on our leaders to end this illegal war," said Sheehan, adding that if the public remains passive, recent statements by Donald Rumsfeld that the war may last another 12 years will come true. "We can’t let these people continue to murder our children and also continue murdering innocent Iraqi citizens, now totaling more than 100.000.

"This is an immoral war based on a false premise. Iraq was never an imminent threat and the Downing Street Memo proves Bush went to war for oil, greed and all the wrong reasons.

Commenting on Bush’s recent speech at Ft. Bragg intended to rally America behind an unpopular war, she said: "He never mentioned the WMD threat and repeatedly brought up 9/11 in an attempt to scare and frighten everyone again. People have characterized the speech in many ways, but if I had to pick a few words, I would say hypocritical, manipulative, condescending, meaningless drivel."

After the speech, Sheehan was unexpectedly invited on the CNN Larry King Show June 28, but expressed concern and outright anger over the fact she was only given 82 seconds to be "the token anti-war peace speaker" in an hour show which essentially contained a pro war message from all the other guests.

In a recent rebuttal article placed on the Internet, expressing her displeasure with some of the CNN guests and the short time given for her anti-war message, she wrote:

"My absolute favorite guest of the evening was Sen. John Warner, powerful chair of the Senate Armed (Disservices) Committee. Of course, he fell in lockstep behind his Führer (Bush) and praised the speech…. I sat in the Green Room with Sen. Warner's entourage. I wondered (even out loud) what price they have paid for our administration's misdeeds in Iraq. They all looked like happy, well-fed, well-dressed, well-educated, and well-hydrated Americans.…I sincerely doubt if any of them had a loved one ripped from their lives by a car bomb, IED, or bullet in an ambush.

"I spoke with John Warner after his interview and told him unless he was prepared to sacrifice even a good night's sleep over this senseless and criminal war, then he should work on ending it, not prolonging the carnage. He told me that I was "entitled to my opinion," but he would respectfully have to disagree with me. That was awfully Constitutional of him!

"I finally got to speak for my 82 seconds (all the time Larry King Live could spare for the peace message) about how this war is a catastrophe and how we should bring the troops home and quit forcing the Iraqi people to pay for our government's hubris and quit forcing innocent children to suffer so we can allegedly fight terrorism somewhere besides America. How absolutely racist and immoral is it to take America's battles to another land and make an entire country pay for the crimes of others? To me, this is blatant genocide.

"After my brief advocacy for peace, my position was refuted by another mom whose son was killed in Iraq in 2003, saying she "totally disagrees" with me and "feels sorry" for me.

"Well, you know what? I ache for her blindness and for the millions of ‘sheeple’ who have had the wool pulled over their eyes by this bunch of hypocritical, bad shepherds who are running a disastrous herd over the world. I have distressing news for the ‘Soccer Safety Moms’ and the ‘NASCAR Dads’ who are such ardent supporters of this administration and war: "Your grandchildren and children who will be entering Kindergarten this fall will be fighting George's endless war if he gets his way and is allowed to continue spreading the cancer of imperialism in the Middle-East.

"Think about it when you tuck your child into bed tonight."

http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen04222003.html
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excerpts from the book:

Terrorism And War
by Howard Zinn
Seven Stories Press, 2002

Note - written before the illegal bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq, so we can safely multiply some of Prof. Zinn's comments by a factor of ... pick one... --DN

p9 The continued expenditure of more than $300 billion for the military every year has absolutely no effect on the danger of terrorism. If we want real security, we will have to change our posture in the world - to stop being an intervening military power and to stop dominating the economies of other countries. According to a 1997 Defense Science Board report, "Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.

p10 You go to war because you want to do something fast. You use violence because you don't want to wait. You don't want to work conflicts out. You don't want to use your mind, your intelligence, your wit.

p11 In bombing Afghanistan, we are doing great harm. Some people have said that we're not killing that many people. The Pentagon says it doesn't know how many people we're killing. The truth is, they don't care. In fact, you can't believe the government.

p12 It's not right to respond to terrorism by terrorizing other people.

p14 I don't think it's hard to figure out why the United States is so concerned with the Middle East. You can answer that question with one word: oil. At the time of World War II, the U.S. government made the decision that it was going to be the major power controlling the oil resources of the Middle East.

p15 New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (before the Gulf War):
The United States has not sent troops to the Saudi desert to preserve democratic principles. The Saudi monarchy is a feudal regime that does not even allow women to drive cars. Surely it is not American policy to make the world safe for feudalism. This is about money, about protecting governments loyal to America and punishing those that are not and about who will set the price of oil.... Oil is the single most important commodity in the industrial world, and its assured supply at reasonable prices is considered essential for economic growth-not just in the United States but also in Western Europe, Japan and the world at large.

p16 To try to explain and understand terrorism is not to justify terrorism. But if you don't try to explain anything, you will never learn anything.

p17 There is a reservoir of possible terrorists among all those people in the world who have suffered as a result of U.S. foreign policy.

p17 We have our troops everywhere in the world. We have major military bases all over the world. We have naval vessels in every sea in the world.

p18 Imagine what that $350 billion that we spend every year on being a military superpower could do to help people, to combat AIDS, to feed people, to immunize people. We could use the great wealth that would be freed up by no longer being a military power to pay for free health care for all, affordable housing for all, and helping people in other parts of the world.

p18 A recent report by the World Health Organization calculated that for $101 billion a year in basic medical research and treatment, 8 million lives could be saved annually in the poorer countries of the world. Spending money on basic health would help in making us more secure. Bombing is not making us more secure.

p19 The infant mortality rate in the United States is one of the worst among advanced industrial countries.

p24 War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is to how to deal with evil, tyranny, and oppression without killing huge numbers of people.

p28 There is a precise division between who we bomb and who we don't bomb. The division has nothing to do with which countries may be harboring terrorists. The division has only to do with which countries we don't control yet. The countries that we control, like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, can harbor as many terrorists as they want. We will look elsewhere.
The advantage of [the] strategy of expanding the war and winning the "war on terrorism" is that it gives the government a perpetual war and a perpetual atmosphere of repression. And it generates perpetual profits for corporations. But it's going to make the world a far more unstable and dangerous place.

p29 People need to ask, "Do we want our children and our grandchildren to be living in a state of perpetual warfare, with more and more of the world becoming hostile to us, and with the United States responsible for more and more human casualties in the world?"

p37 The Bush administration is using the war as a cover for worsening the income gap in this country, while paying no attention to the problems of most of the American people, while enriching corporations. I think concentrating on the class issue, concentrating on the benefits being given to corporations, is critical.

p38 The left is in a position of continually opposing war after war after war, without getting at the root of the problem-which is the economic system under which we live, which needs war and makes war inevitable.

p39 Pastor Niemoller's famous statement about the Nazis because it's so applicable to the present situation: First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist-so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat-so I did nothing. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew-so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left who could stand up for me.

p40 Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor after visiting "ground zero" in New York
"We're likely to experience more restrictions on our personal freedom than has ever been the case in our country."

p40 According to Nancy Chang, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Bush administration's actions since September 11 "portend a wholesale suspension of civil liberties that will reach far beyond those who are involved in terrorist activities."
She says that a possible outcome of the USA PATRIOT Act is "the criminalization of legitimate political dissent" and warns that it "grants the executive branch unprecedented, and largely unchecked, surveillance powers, including the enhanced ability to track e-mail and Internet usage, conduct sneak-and-peak searches, obtain sensitive personal records, [and] monitor financial transactions."

p43 The Financial Times recently noted that the U.S. government spends only 0.1 percent of its national income on foreign aid. And not all of that foreign aid is humanitarian.

p44 From a long term point of view the security of the people of the United States depends on the health and well-being of the rest of the world.

p46 Attorney General John Ashcroft has said about people who oppose his repressive policies - Senate Judiciary Committee on December 6, 2001
"[T]o those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends."
[That's almost straight out of the constitutional definition of treason, which is punishable by death.]

p48 The Internal Security Act of 1950 authorized the actual setting up of concentration camps that would be used to incarcerate people who were threats to national security. Recall that Martin Luther King Jr. was seen as a threat to national security by the FBI and put on their "Reserve Index" of people who were "likely to furnish financial and other material aid to subversive associations and ideology."

p48 Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country, for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria.

p50 The United States has been involved in wars and military actions for a very long time. You can't tell the Native Americans we were a peaceful nation as we moved across the continent and engaged in hundreds of wars against the Indians. The United States engaged in at least twenty military interventions in the Caribbean in the first twenty years of the last century. And then from World War II through today, we've had an endless succession of wars and military interventions.
Just five years after the end of the most disastrous war in world history, after World War II, we are at war in Korea. And then almost immediately we are helping the French in Indochina, supplying 80 percent of their military equipment, and soon we are involved in Southeast Asia. We are bombing not only Vietnam but Cambodia and Laos.
In the 1950s, we are also involved in covert operations, overthrowing the governments of Iran and Guatemala. And almost as soon as we get involved in Vietnam, we are sending military troops into the Dominican Republic. In that period, we are also giving enormous amounts of aid to the government of Indonesia, helping the dictator Suharto carry on an internal war against the opposition, in the course of which several hundred thousand people are killed. Then the U.S. government, starting in 1975, provides critical support to Indonesia's brutal campaign to subdue the people of East Timor, in which hundreds of thousands of people are killed.
In the 1980s, when Reagan comes into office, we begin a covert war throughout Central America, in E1 Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and especially in Nicaragua, creating the counterrevolutionary force, the Contras, whom Reagan called "freedom fighters."
In 1978, even before the Russians were in Afghanistan, we are covertly sending arms to the rebel forces in Afghanistan, the mujahedeen. Some of these people turned out later to be the Taliban, the people who suddenly are our enemy. The national security adviser to Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, boasted that he knew U.S. aid would "induce a Soviet military intervention" in Afghanistan. In fact, this happened, provoking a war that lasted ten years. The war was devastating to the people of Afghanistan and left the country in ruins. The moment it was over, the United States immediately moved out. The people that we supported, the fundamentalists, took power in Afghanistan and established their regime.
Almost as soon as George Bush Sr. came into office, in 1989, he launched a war against Panama, which left perhaps several thousand dead. Two years later, we were at war in the Gulf, using the invasion of Kuwait as an excuse to intensify our military presence in that area and to station troops in Saudi Arabia, which then became one of the major offenses for Osama bin Laden and other Saudi Arabian nationalists. Then in the Clinton administration we were bombing Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Iraq again.

p52 ... since World War II, there has not been a more warlike nation in the world than the United States.

p53 If you forget history you will believe anything.

p53 If people knew some history, if teachers gave them history, if the media gave people history, if anyone with power over communications networks gave them some history, they might recognize in this rush to war the same subservience as we have seen in the past. When Bush went to Congress after September 11, everyone there acted as if there were no need to think and to ask questions about what we should do. They voted unanimously in the Senate and almost unanimously in the House of Representatives. There was only one dissenting vote. When I heard that, I thought that dissenting vote must have been Bernie Sanders, the Independent from Vermont, but it wasn't. It was Barbara Lee from California.
So, history can be useful. It can tell you something about government, about lies and deception. If people knew that history, they wouldn't just sit and listen to Bush and be impressed that he knows how to read.
If we don't know that history, we won't understand how much animosity we have engendered elsewhere in the world-not just in the Middle East but all over the world. (In its foreign policy, the United States has consigned several million people to their deaths and supported terrorist governments in various parts of the world, especially in Latin America and the Middle East. If we don't have any history, we'll live our lives believing what we're taught in school, that America is a beacon for democracy and freedom in the world. We'll think that we've been the Boy Scouts of the world, helping countries across the street.

p55 The government says it is determined to close terrorist camps, yet here in the United States the School of the Americas has trained people who have engaged in terrorism, trained people who then became organizers of death squads in Central America.

p55 The Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega went to the School of the Americas and then became an employee of the CIA; but then suddenly he becomes an enemy and a terrorist, so we go to war to capture him. But we probably won't go to war to get Kissinger anytime soon. The United States has consistently opposed the creation of an international war crimes tribunal because it could be used against people in the U.S. government and military. They are very explicit about it. In effect, the government is saying, "Yes, we have people who could be accused of having committed war crimes." The United States wants to find other people who have committed war crimes, but an American by definition cannot commit a war crime.

p56 [Henry] Kissinger wrote ... that the proposal to create an international court is a bad idea. Well, naturally it's a bad idea, because he would be one of the first people who would be up there on the witness stand trying to explain his support for death squads and repressive governments in Latin America, war crimes in Southeast Asia, and the apartheid South African government. It would be good to have an international war crimes trial that would be truly evenhanded in bringing up for prosecution people in all countries of the world who have engaged in and supported, or conspired to support, terrorism. But the U.S. government is clearly not interested in that.

p57 Phrases such as the one Bush used after September 11 - "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists"- are rather terrifying. It means that if you're not supporting the government, you're an enemy of the government. All of this produces a kind of hysteria, which leads to what I think can only be described as a lynch spirit... This idea that "you mustn't criticize your government and you must fall in line behind the president" is really a great danger to the very democracy that Bush claims we are defending by going to war.

p58 Dan Rather, the CBS news anchor, on the Late Show with David Letterman, said "George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions, and, you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where." This is the language you might hear in a totalitarian state, not in a democracy.

p59 Democracy isn't [about] falling in line behind the president. Democracy is for people to think independently, be skeptical of government, look around and try to find out what's going on. And if they find out that government is deceiving them, to speak out as loudly as they can. That's democracy.

p60 The attack on the World Trade Center was an immoral act of terrorism, the killing of civilians in Afghanistan and the driving of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in Afghanistan is an immoral act.

p61 While the press focuses on the anger of people who don't want to hear antiwar speeches, there is all this antiwar sentiment that is not reported.

p62 When people set an agenda and say, "We can only talk about this and we can't talk about that," they are very seriously limiting our freedom of speech. They are also creating a dangerous situation in which democracy no longer exists and there is no longer a free marketplace of opinion.

p62 The one thing that enables the authorities to deceive the public is to keep the public in a state of amnesia, to keep the public from thinking back to the history of war, the history of violence, the history of government deception, the history of media complicity and deception. If more people knew something about the history of government deception, of the lies that were told getting us into the Mexican War, the lies that were told getting us into the Spanish-American War, the lies that were told getting us into the war in the Philippines, the lies that were told getting us into World War I, the lies that were told again and again in Vietnam, the lies on the eve of the Gulf War, they would have questions about what they are hearing from the government and the media to justify this war.

p65 Journalist John Reed, who wrote about the Russian Revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World and who organized against World War I, wrote an essay in 1917 that seems like it could have been written today, if you just replace the phrase "European melee" with the word "Afghanistan." He wrote, "War means an ugly mob madness, crucifying the truth tellers, choking the artists, sidetracking reforms, revolutions and the working of social forces. Already in America those citizens who oppose the entrance of their country into the European melee are called 'traitors,' and those who protest against the curtailing of the meager rights of free speech are spoken of as 'dangerous lunatics."' We have a long tradition in this country of stifling dissent exactly at those moments when dissent is badly needed. Exactly when you need free speech-when the lives of the young people in the armed forces, the lives of people overseas who may be the victims of our armed actions, are at stake-that's when they say you should shut up. Exactly when you need debate and free expression most. So you have free speech for trivial issues, and not for life-and-death issues, and that's called democracy. No, we can't accept that.

p67 When the United States went into war [WWI], Congress passed the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act. The Espionage Act had very little to do with espionage., Instead it made it a crime, punishable by up to twenty years in prison, to say or print anything that would "willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States." The Sedition Act, which was an amendment to the Espionage Act, made it even a little more drastic. In fact, two thousand people were prosecuted under those acts and about a thousand went to prison. One of the people sent to jail for opposing World War I was the great socialist activist and speaker Eugene Debs. The magazine The Masses was put out of business, and an immense propaganda effort was undertaken to encourage Americans to look for subversives and traitors in their midst. The First Amendment of the Constitution says that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Did this stop the Supreme Court from jailing Debs and antiwar leaders? No, they decided that maybe there are times when you can't allow freedom of speech because there is a "clear and present danger." What was the clear and present danger that the Supreme Court was facing when they made that decision? People distributing leaflets on the streets of New York opposing the draft.

p76 Bush does not want the American people to know how their government works. Kids go to junior high school and they get textbooks with diagrams illustrating the structure of the U.S. government, with its "checks and balances." But that's not the real story, and if Bush has his way, we're not going to learn how governments really function.

p78 In his book Century of War, Gabriel Kolko writes, "Warfare after 1937 has increasingly eliminated the distinction between combatants and others...traumatizing more and more civilians and entire nations. "

p78 According to an article in the Boston Review, "up to 35 million people-90 percent civilians-have been killed in 170 wars since the end of World War II.

p78 During the Vietnam War, far more civilians died than military personnel. The same was true in the Korean War. Most Americans have no idea what we did in Korea, but Korea was really a preview of Vietnam, particularly in the use of napalm and the bombing of villages, which contributed to more than 2 million people dying, most of them civilians.

War is now largely a war against people who are not combatants.

p81 General Curtis LeMay about the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War: "We're going to bomb them back into the stone Ages."

p82 The claim that smart bombs and technology now enable pinpoint bombing is very much a fraud. They discovered after the Gulf War that 93 percent of the bombs turned out not to be so-called smart bombs and the "smart" bombs often missed their targets. Overall, 70 percent of our bombs missed their targets.

p84 The concealment of what we're doing to the population in Afghanistan is essential. Most people ... make a kind of common sense calculation, a moral calculation. And if they knew that we were killing large numbers of people, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, they would not take such a benign view of the Afghan war. They would not simply go along with their government. So, it becomes very important for the government to conceal the human effects of our bombing. And if you conceal that from the American population, then it's possible to understand why people would think we are not doing much harm.

p85 Victoria Clarke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said, "We take extraordinary care on the targeting process. Our targets are military. Our targets are al - Qaeda. That's what we are going after. There is unintended damage. There is collateral damage. Thus far, it has been extremely limited from what we have seen.

p86 General Colin Powell Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff during the Gulf War, when asked about the number of Iraqis killed"It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in."

p88 If civilians in fact become victims again and again, and it's predictable that they will, can that be called an accident? If the deaths of civilians are inevitable in bombing, it is not an accident. The people prosecuting this war are committing murder. They are engaging in terrorism.

p90 There is always a right side and a wrong side in war, and it is your side that is the right side. And once you have decided that you are on the right side, then anything goes. It does not matter what happens to anybody else.

p91 [Harry] Truman announced the bombing [of Hiroshima]"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."

p91 Lieutenant Colonel Dave Lapan at the Pentagon, who was asked about civilians killed in Afghanistan.
"Were civilians killed? Possibly. If they were killed, it was because they were in the vicinity of a military target."

p94 Eugene Debs wrote in a letter to the New York Sun in 1915
"If...the United States were to prove in good faith that it is opposed to the barbarism and butchery of war by issuing a proclamation of peace, and itself setting the example of disarmament to the nations of the world, its preparedness would be, not only in accordance with its vaunted ideals, but a thousand-fold greater guarantee to the respect of its neighbors and to its own security and peace than if it were loaded down with all the implements of death and destruction on earth.'

p96 The history of arms technology is that whenever you have a development in defensive technology, you soon have another development in offensive technology to overcome that.

p96 Missile defense is fundamentally a program to make profits for the corporations that are going to get the billions of dollars in contracts to build the system. This is an enormous theft from the American people. Remember the quote from Eisenhower. He said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

p97 Corporations that produce weapons make huge profits from these weapons of war and therefore are happy both to prepare for war and to engage in war. You prepare for war, you have all these government contracts, and make all this money, and then you engage in war and you use up all these products and you have to replace them.

p101 Mark Twain wrote an essay called "The War Prayer":
"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst."

p102 About six thousand Americans went to jail for refusing to fight in World War II.

p103 In Vietnam, the war lasted long enough for the American people to see behind the deceptions of the government and begin to learn about the atrocities being committed against the Vietnamese people.

p103 In 1966 about two-thirds of the American people supported the war, by 1969 about two-thirds opposed the war.

p103 With the Vietnam War we saw the first antiwar movement that became broad enough and strong enough to have an effect on governmental policy. And apparently the government learned something from that war. It learned that if it's going to conduct a war, it must finish it quickly, before an antiwar movement develops.

p113 There are thousands of things that are going on all the time that aren't reported in the mainstream press and aren't reported in the major media. There's evidence of an enormous amount of energy in towns and cities all over the country-energy of people who are doing things that are noble and helpful to other people. There are thousands of organizations in this country working on issues like racial equality, women's rights, environmental protection, antimilitarism. But the work they do doesn't appear on television.

p115 Whatever the Constitution says and whatever the statutes say, whoever holds the power in any given situation is going to determine whether the rights you have on paper are rights you have in fact. This is a very common situation in our society. People struggled to get their legal rights, they achieved their legal rights on paper. Then the reality of power and wealth comes into play, and those legal rights don't mean very much. You have to struggle to make them real.

p123
EXCERPTS OF THE GENEVA PROTOCOLS

"Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol 1)," June 8, 1977. From Chapter II, "Civilians and Civilian Population," Article 51, "Protection of the Civilian Population":
1. The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against dangers arising from military operations. To give effect to this protection, the following rules, which are additional to other applicable rules of international law, shall be observed in all circumstances.
2. The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence, the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population, are prohibited.
3. Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this Section, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.
4. Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:
(a) Those which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b) Those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) Those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.
5. Among others, the following types of attacks are to be considered as indiscriminate:
(a) An attack by bombardment by any methods or means which treats as a single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives located in a city, town, village or other area containing a similar concentration of civilians or civilian objects; and
(b) An attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.

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Hope. Still Springing Eternal... --DN

July 24, 2005
Eight Days in July
By FRANK RICH

PRESIDENT BUSH'S new Supreme Court nominee was a historic first after all: the first to be announced on TV dead center in prime time, smack in the cross hairs of "I Want to Be a Hilton." It was also one of the hastiest court announcements in memory, abruptly sprung a week ahead of the White House's original timetable. The agenda of this rushed showmanship - to change the subject in Washington - could not have been more naked. But the president would have had to nominate Bill Clinton to change this subject.

When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House's twisting of the intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its desperate efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard proved bare and the war went south - the story will not end until the war really is in its "last throes."

Only 36 hours after the John Roberts unveiling, The Washington Post nudged him aside to second position on its front page. Leading the paper instead was a scoop concerning a State Department memo circulated the week before the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife, the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame, in literally the loftiest reaches of the Bush administration - on Air Force One. The memo, The Post reported, marked the paragraph containing information about Ms. Plame with an S for secret. So much for the cover story that no one knew that her identity was covert.

But the scandal has metastasized so much at this point that the forgotten man Mr. Bush did not nominate to the Supreme Court is as much a window into the White House's panic and stonewalling as its haste to put forward the man he did. When the president decided not to replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why did he pick a white guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on the right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva Conventions).
It's Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this scandal that inspires real fear.

As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation. This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18½-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr. Gonzales was in the thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for 16 months.

Thus is Mr. Gonzales's Supreme Court aspiration the first White House casualty of this affair. It won't be the last. When you look at the early timeline of this case, rather than the latest investigatory scraps, two damning story lines emerge and both have legs.

The first: for half a year White House hands made the fatal mistake of thinking they could get away with trashing the Wilsons scot-free. They thought so because for nearly three months after the July 6, 2003, publication of Mr. Wilson's New York Times Op-Ed article and the outing of his wife in a Robert Novak column, there was no investigation at all. Once the unthreatening Ashcroft-controlled investigation began, there was another comfy three months.

Only after that did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel, take over and put the heat on. Only after that did investigators hustle to seek Air Force One phone logs and did Mr. Bush feel compelled to hire a private lawyer. But by then the conspirators, drunk with the hubris characteristic of this administration, had already been quite careless.

It was during that pre-Fitzgerald honeymoon that Scott McClellan declared that both Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, had personally told him they were "not involved in this" - neither leaking any classified information nor even telling any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A. Matt Cooper has now written in Time that it was through his "conversation with Rove" that he "learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A." Maybe it all depends on what the meaning of "telling," "involved" or "this" is. If these people were similarly cute with F.B.I. agents and the grand jury, they've got an obstruction-of-justice problem possibly more grave than the hard-to-prosecute original charge of knowingly outing a covert agent.

Most fertile - and apparently ground zero for Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation - is the period at the very outset when those plotting against Mr. Wilson felt safest of all: those eight days in July 2003 between the Wilson Op-Ed, which so infuriated the administration, and the retaliatory Novak column. It was during that long week, on a presidential trip to Africa, that Colin Powell was seen on Air Force One brandishing the classified State Department memo mentioning Valerie Plame, as first reported by The New York Times.

That memo may have been the genesis of an orchestrated assault on the Wilsons. That the administration was then cocky enough and enraged enough to go after its presumed enemies so systematically can be found in a similar, now forgotten attack that was hatched on July 15, the day after the publication of Mr. Novak's column portraying Mr. Wilson as a girlie man dependent on his wife for employment.

On that evening's broadcast of ABC's "World News Tonight," American soldiers in Falluja spoke angrily of how their tour of duty had been extended yet again, only a week after Donald Rumsfeld told them they were going home. Soon the Drudge Report announced that ABC's correspondent, Jeffrey Kofman, was gay. Matt Drudge told Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post at the time that "someone from the White House communications shop" had given him that information.

Mr. McClellan denied White House involvement with any Kofman revelation, a denial now worth as much as his denials of White House involvement with the trashing of the Wilsons. Identifying someone as gay isn't a crime in any event, but the "outing" of Mr. Kofman (who turned out to be openly gay) almost simultaneously with the outing of Ms. Plame points to a pervasive culture of revenge in the White House and offers a clue as to who might be driving it. As Joshua Green reported in detail in The Atlantic Monthly last year, a recurring feature of Mr. Rove's political campaigns throughout his career has been the questioning of an "opponent's sexual orientation." (Yeah, that's true. And if you follow the psychological theory, then Mr. Rove possibly is attempting to hide his own proclivities in this area by pointing fingers at everyone else. So perhaps it's time to start giving wider dissemination to all the 'rumors' which have been all over the place, except, of course, in the MSM: [--DN])
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=49&contentid=2401
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=2826
http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/7/2/165858/8036 - scroll down a bit to: "Also, a full investigation of Rove and the media, will of course come back to Jeff Gannon."
http://www.cultureandfamily.org/articledisplay.asp?id=428&department=CFI&categoryid=cfreport

The second narrative to be unearthed in the scandal's early timeline is the motive for this reckless vindictiveness against anyone questioning the war. On May 1, 2003, Mr. Bush celebrated "Mission Accomplished." On May 29, Mr. Bush announced that "we found the weapons of mass destruction." On July 2, as attacks increased on American troops, Mr. Bush dared the insurgents to "bring 'em on." But the mission was not accomplished, the weapons were not found and the enemy kept bringing 'em on. It was against this backdrop of mounting desperation on July 6 that Mr. Wilson went public with his incriminating claim that the most potent argument for the war in the first place, the administration's repeated intimations of nuclear Armageddon, involved twisted intelligence.

Mr. Wilson's charge had such force that just three days after its publication, Mr. Bush radically revised his language about W.M.D.'s. Saddam no longer had W.M.D.'s; he had a W.M.D. "program." Right after that George Tenet suddenly decided to release a Friday-evening statement saying that the 16 errant words about African uranium "should never have been included" in the January 2003 State of the Union address - even though those 16 words could and should have been retracted months earlier. By the next State of the Union, in January 2004, Mr. Bush would retreat completely, talking not about finding W.M.D.'s or even W.M.D. programs, but about "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

In July 2005, there are still no W.M.D.'s, and we're still waiting to hear the full story of how, in the words of the Downing Street memo, the intelligence was fixed to foretell all those imminent mushroom clouds in the run-up to war in Iraq. The two official investigations into America's prewar intelligence have both found that our intelligence was wrong, but neither has answered the question of how the administration used that wrong intelligence in selling the war. That issue was pointedly kept out of the charter of the Silberman-Robb commission; the Senate Intelligence Committee promised to get to it after the election but conspicuously has not.

The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn't have been a third-rate smear campaign against an obscure diplomat, a bungled cover-up and a scandal that - like the war itself - has no exit strategy that will not inflict pain.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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Joe Conason

The New York Observer
07.20.05

Right to protect sources wasn't designed to protect corrupt officials

WorkingForChange

EXCERPT:

Very few of the journalists rallying behind New York Times reporter Judith Miller seem thrilled about defending her, no matter how strongly they believe in shielding sources. While they may admire her guts in going to jail, their lack of enthusiasm for her case is understandable. She leaves much to be desired as a martyr for the First Amendment.

Based on both past performance and present circumstance, she actually symbolizes a terrible betrayal of the public trust by the national media.

And whatever she and her employers think they're achieving in defiance of the special counsel investigating the Valerie Wilson case, her conduct will inevitably diminish the reputation and power of the press.

Her coverage of Iraq and those still-missing weapons of mass destruction was marked by arrogance, incompetence and eagerness to advance the agenda of the Bush White House.

Those seem to be the hallmarks of her current misadventure as well.

Having written very bad stories that helped drive the country into war against a nonexistent threat, she is now creating very bad law for press freedom. Curiously, the sources she is protecting today are the same people who staged the war propaganda, in which she played her notorious starring role. Indeed, this entire fiasco began around the time that the original war-propaganda campaign began to disintegrate, about three months after the invasion of Iraq proved that the weapons of mass destruction advertised by the Bush administration (and certain pliable journalists) simply didn't exist.

For a time, Ms. Miller pretended to be finding those weapons in Iraq as an "embedded reporter" with a special Army unit, but that series didn't work out so well either.

Meanwhile, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV had dared to criticize some of the Bush administration's fabricated claims about the Iraqi nuclear program. Although they knew he was right, White House officials reacted by attempting to discredit and intimidate him. In their mindless rage, they revealed the identity of his wife, a dedicated C.I.A. officer who had joined the agency in college and worked a dangerous undercover post for years to prevent the proliferation of real nuclear weapons.

The cowardly Bush big shots whispered about Ms. Wilson "on double-super-secret background" to various Washington journalists. At the request of the C.I.A. and the Justice Department -- and at the urging of Times editorials as well -- the prosecutor is trying to discover whether anyone violated the law by exposing Ms. Wilson, or in the subsequent cover-up by the Bush White House.

While the Fitzgerald investigation has leaked very little over the past 18 months, it is clear that he has already obtained proof of the involvement of White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove -- in direct contradiction of earlier denials by the President's press secretary.

Every judge who has examined the prosecutor's reasons for summoning Ms. Miller to the grand jury has agreed that Mr. Fitzgerald is investigating serious crimes and needed her evidence.

read the rest of this article at http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=19375
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All contents copyright ©2005 G.B. Trudeau.
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2005 FAUX FAULKNER WINNER

The Administration and the Fury
If William Faulkner were writing on the Bush White House

By Sam Apple

Down the hall, under the chandelier, I could see them talking. They were walking toward me and Dick's face was white, and he stopped and gave a piece of paper to Rummy, and Rummy looked at the piece of paper and shook his head. He gave the paper back to Dick and Dick shook his head. They disappeared and then they were standing right next to me.

“Georgie's going to walk down to the Oval Office with me,” Dick said.

“I just hope you got him all good and ready this time,” Rummy said.

“Hush now,” Dick said. “This ain't no laughing matter. He know lot more than folks think.” Dick patted me on the back good and hard. “Come on now, Georgie,” Dick said. “Never mind you, Rummy.”

We walked down steps to the office. There were paintings of old people on the walls and the room was round like a circle and Condi was sitting on my desk. Her legs were crossed.

“Did you get him ready for the press conference?” Dick said.

“Don't you worry about him. He'll be ready,” Condi said. Condi stood up from the desk. Her legs were long and she smelled like the Xeroxed copies of the information packets they give me each day.

“Hello Georgie,” Condi said. “Did you come to see Condi?” Condi rubbed my hair and it tickled.

“Don't go messing up his hair,” Dick said. “He's got a press conference in a few minutes.”

Condi wiped some spit on her hand and patted down my hair. Her hand was soft and she smelled like Xerox copies coming right out of the machine. “He looks just fine,” Condi said.

Fine day, isn't it, Georgie, Daddy said. Daddy was pitching horseshoes. Horseshoes flew through the air and it was hot. Jeb looked at me. Stand back or one of his horseshoes is going to hit you and knock you down real good, Jeb said. Jeb threw the horseshoe and it went right over the stick and Daddy clapped. Run and get me that horseshoe, Georgie, Daddy said. I ran and picked up the horseshoe. The metal was hot in my hands, and I held it for a little bit and then I dropped it. I picked it up. It was hot in my hands and I started running away from Daddy and Jeb. Come back with that horseshoe, Daddy said. I was running as fast as I could. Jeb run after him and get me my horseshoe before he throws another one in the river, Daddy hollered. Jeb was chasing after me fast. Come back with that horseshoe, Georgie, Jeb hollered. But I was fast and I kept running until I got to the river. Don't you dare throw that horseshoe in the river, Jeb said. I threw the horseshoe in the river. Jeb fell on the ground. Jeb kicked and cried and then I cried.

“He needs his makeup,” Dick said.

“I'll do it,” Condi said. She put a little brush on my check and it tickled and I laughed.
Rummy walked into the room. “Jesus, what's he laughing about,” Rummy said.

“Don't you pay attention to him, Georgie,” Dick said. “They're going to be asking you all about Social Security. You just remember what we talked about.”

“He can't remember anything,” Rummy said.

I started to holler. Dick's face was red and he looked at Rummy. “I told you to hush up already,” Dick said. “Now look what you've gone and done.”

“Go and get him Saddam's gun,” Condi said. “You know how he likes to hold it.”

Dick went to my desk drawer and took out Saddam's gun. He gave it to me, and it was hot in my hands. Rummy pulled the gun away.

“Do you want him carrying a gun into the press conference?” Rummy said. “Can't you think any better than he can?”

I was hollering and Dick was turning red and then white and the room was tilted.

“You give him that gun back, right this minute,” Condi said. Rummy gave me Saddam's gun back and I held it my hands. It was hot like a horseshoe.

“You got the gun, now you stop that hollering,” Rummy said.

Condi patted me on the back. “It sure is hot in here,” she said. She fanned herself and took off her jacket. She smelled like perfume.


Sam Apple is a graduate of the creative nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University. His first book, Schlepping Through the Alps, was published in March 2005 by Ballantine Books. From 1998–2000, Apple edited New Voices, a national magazine for Jewish students. Apple’s freelance nonfiction work has appeared in a variety of publications including The New York Times, Slate.com, and the Forward. In 2004, Apple was a finalist for the Koret Award for Young Writers on Jewish Themes. In 2002, he won the Upload $1,500 first place award for short fiction. Apple is currently a contributing book editor at Nerve.com and at work on his second book.
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by Thom Hartmann

Political smears by right-wingers are nothing new. In the election of 1800, John Adams had a surrogate newspaper publisher write an article about "Dusky Sally," the half-sister of Thomas Jefferson's deceased wife, who was also one of the Jefferson family slaves. Jefferson succeeded in avoiding the issue, and his friends pointed out that it was merely about his personal life, not national security.

George W. Bush may not be so fortunate.

Today comes the revelation in The Wall Street Journal that "A key department memo discussing Joseph Wilson's Niger trip was classified 'Top Secret,' and the passage about his wife's CIA role was specially marked 'S/NF' -- not to be shared with any foreign intelligence agencies."

Perhaps even more damning are reports that the Top Secret-S/NF document was apparently first delivered to Air Force One when George W. Bush and Colin Powell (who had apparently requested it from analysts within the State Department) were flying to Africa in 2003.

Somehow - nobody knows at the moment - the information in this Top Secret-S/NF document (the identity of Joe Wilson's wife) then migrated from Air Force One to George W. Bush's assistant, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney's assistant, Scooter Libby. Rove and Libby then immediately began "dialing for dollars" - calling reporters with this juicy bit of Top Secret-N/SF information - in an attempt to politically assassinate Joe Wilson.

Which raises the question: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?"

It's unlikely that Colin Powell would have called Rove and Cheney (to give instructions to Libby) with the information in the memo - that was above his pay grade. Ditto for Ari Fleischer. And it's extremely doubtful that the pilots on the plane even knew about the explosive information they were carrying as they flew across the Atlantic.

Which leaves George W. Bush, as the only other person on that plane with the means, opportunity, and motive.

Thus, perhaps, the reports that Patrick Fitzgerald has now subpoenaed the phone logs of Air Force One.

Those of a certain age among us remember well the shocking moment when Nixon's lawyer, John Dean, confirmed to Congress that Nixon himself was involved in the Watergate scandal.

The urgency Bush brought to deciding on and releasing the name of John Roberts coincided relatively closely with a growing press awareness that the Sop Secret-S/NF memo with Plame's identity started it's long path to Bob Novak on Air Force One. Time - and an awakened press corps (and hopefully an awakened Congress) - will tell if Bush's own fingerprints are all over this treasonous act of political revenge.


Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show, and a morning progressive talk show on KPOJ in Portland, Oregon. http://www.thomhartmann.com/ His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," "We The People," "The Edison Gene", and "What Would Jefferson Do?"
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CHINA FLOATS, AMERICA SINKS

YUAN KICKS DOLLAR BUTT BY REJECTING "FREE MARKET"
Friday Jul 22, 2005
by Greg Palast

In case you haven't the least idea what the heck it means for China to "float" its currency, let me put it in the language we economists use: China's float don't mean squat.

Yet our President, a guy whose marks in Economics 101 are too embarrassing to publish here, ran out to hail the fact that buying Chinese money will now cost more dollars.

The White House line to the media, swallowed whole, is that by making Chinese money (yuan) more expensive to buy with dollars, Americans will buy fewer computers and toys from China -- and US employment will rise.

This will happen when we find Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Economics Lesson #1: You can't change the value of goods by changing the value of the currency on the price tag. As my comrade Art Laffer wrote me, "If cheap currency makes your products more competitive, all automobiles would be made in Russia." Driven a Lada lately?

Economics Lesson #2: Don't take economics lessons from George Bush. Or Milton Friedman. Or Thomas Friedman. What that means, class, is don't believe the big, hot pile of hype that China's zooming economy is the result of that Red nation's adopting free market economic policies.

If China is now a capitalist free-market state, then I'm Mariah Carey. China's economy has soared because it stubbornly refused the Free - and Friedman-Market mumbo-jumbo that government should stop controlling, owning and regulating the industry.

China's announcement that it would raise the cost of the yuan covered over a more important notice: China would bar foreign control of its steel sector. China's leaders have built a powerhouse steel industry larger than ours by directing the funding, output, location and ownership of all factories. And rather than "freeing" the industry through opening their borders to foreign competition, the Chinese, for steel and every other product, have shut their borders tight to foreigners except as it suits China's own industries.

China won't join NAFTA or CAFTA or any of those free-trade clubs. In China, Chinese industry comes first. And it's still, Mssrs. Friedman, the Peoples' republic. Those Wal-Mart fashion designs called, chillingly, "New Order," are made in factories owned by the PLA, the Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army.

In an interview just before he won the Nobel Prize in economics, Joe Stiglitz explained to me that China's huge financial surge -- a stunning 9.5% jump in GDP this year -- began with the government's funding and nurturing rural cooperatives, fledgling agricultural and industry protected behind high, high trade barriers.

It is true that China's growth got a boost from ending the bloodsoaked self-flagellating madness of Mao's Cultural Revolution. And China, when it chooses, makes use of markets and market pricing to distribute resources. The truth is, Chinese markets are as free as my kids: they can do whatever they want unless I say they can't.

Yes, China is adopting elements of "capitalism." And that's the ugly part: real estate speculation in Shanghai making millionaires of Communist party boss relatives and bank shenanigans worthy of a Neil Bush.

It is not the Guangdong skyscrapers and speculative bubble which allows China to sell us $162 billion more goods a year than we sell them. It is that China's government, by rejecting free-market fundamentalism, can easily conquer American markets where protection is now deemed passé.

And that is why the yuan has kicked the dollar's butt.

America's only response is to have Alan Greenspan push up real interest rates so we can buy back our own dollars the Chinese won in the export game. The domestic result: US wages drifting down to Mexican maquiladora levels.

Am I praising China? Forget about it. This is one evil dictatorship which jails union organizers and beats, shackles and tortures those who don't kowtow to the wishes of Chairman Rob -- Wal-Mart chief Robson Walton. (Funny how Mr. Bush never mentions the D-word, Democracy, to our Chinese suppliers.)

Class dismissed.



----------Greg Palast, winner of the Financial Times David Thomas Prize for his writings on regulation, is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read and watch his interview with Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz for BBC Television at www.GregPalast.com. Spread the word: Ask your local library to order a copy of the audio version of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, read by Ed Asner, Alec Baldwin, Jello Biafra, Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, Amy Goodman, Jim Hightower, Cynthia McKinney, Alexandra Paul, and Shiva Rose.
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For background, see:
Payback Time? •

Mr. Roberts' Neighborhood
By Marjorie Cohn - t r u t h o u t Perspective
Thursday 21 July 2005

Who leaked the name of John G. Roberts before Bush's official prime time revelation Tuesday night? My guess: Karl Rove. He had the most to gain from an early announcement. Rove knows the mainstream media has a very short attention span. What better way to deflect our attention away from Rove's crime in leaking the identity of a CIA operative than to leak a potentially contentious nomination for the High Court?

What we'll never know is whether, absent Rove's scandal, Bush would've nominated someone else. Other candidates would probably have drawn a virulent response from Democrats, who have taken a cautious but muted stance toward Roberts's nomination. Many talk of his scant paper trail; they call him a "stealth candidate." But Roberts's record is clear.

As a lawyer for the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and later for his corporate clients, Roberts displayed a consistent commitment to conservative doctrine. In both abortion cases he handled, he maintained a legal attack on reproductive rights. In one case, Roberts argued that Operation Rescue's routine - sometimes violent - blocking of clinics where abortions were performed constituted protected free speech.

In Rust v. Sullivan, Roberts co-authored a brief in support of regulations prohibiting family planning programs that received federal aid from providing any abortion counseling. In that brief, he wrote: "We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled ... The Court's conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion ... finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution."

During his Senate confirmation hearing for appointment to the Court of Appeals in 2003, Roberts changed his tune - apparently. When asked about his views on abortion, Roberts assured the senators, "Roe v. Wade is the settled law of the land. There's nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent." But his personal views wouldn't keep Roberts from unsettling Roe as the law of the land, consistent with his statement in Sullivan that there is no right to an abortion in the Constitution. Roberts would likely vote to overturn Roe v. Wade if presented with the opportunity as a Supreme Court justice.

Roberts has had other opportunities to demonstrate his partisanship. As a judge, he ruled against requiring Dick Cheney's energy task force to release its records to the public. He opposed protections in the Endangered Species Act. Displaying a clear conflict of interest, Roberts ruled against environmentalists seeking increased government regulation over copper smelters that emit toxic lead and arsenic pollutants; many of those smelters were owned by members of the National Mining Association. Just four years before, Roberts had filed a brief against citizens opposed to the coal industry's destructive mountaintop removal, on behalf of the same National Mining Association.

Last Friday, Roberts voted to support Bush's military commissions to try suspected terrorists, finding that the protections of the Geneva Conventions do not apply to anyone the administration believes is a member of al Qaeda. Bush established those commissions to deny the accused due process protections that are well-established in US and international law. Although he would probably recuse himself from this case if it reached the Supreme Court, Roberts is likely to walk in lockstep with the Bush administration in its "war on terror" and concomitant war on civil liberties in the years to come.

Roberts also showed his true colors when he argued for the expansion of religion in public schools, against a woman with carpal tunnel syndrome who was fired by Toyota, against federal affirmative action programs, and against a congressional effort to enable minorities to enforce the Voting Rights Act.

But Roberts is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. He was a member of "Lawyers for Bush-Cheney" and served as a legal advisor to Jeb Bush during the recount in the 2000 presidential campaign. He has donated to the political campaigns of several Republican candidates, including one senator on the Judiciary Committee that will vote on Roberts's nomination. He has spent most of his career as a corporate lawyer, and he comes to the Court with a partisan agenda.

At the end of the Supreme Court's 2000 term, Roberts told a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, "The conventional wisdom is that this is a conservative court. We have to take that more skeptically. On the three issues the public was most interested in - school prayer, abortion and Miranda rights - the conservatives lost on all." Sounds like wistful thinking.

It is incumbent upon the senators on the Judiciary Committee, and in the full Senate, to demand all pertinent records on Roberts from the Republican administrations in which he served. Senators must thoroughly interrogate Roberts about his views that could affect his lawmaking as a member of our highest court. They should ask him, for example, whether the Constitution has a right to privacy, and whether a woman's reproductive freedom is entitled to constitutional protection.

Roberts is not brash and outspoken. But he may well be the iron fist in the velvet glove. Having spent his entire professional career as a hired gun for the right-wing, Roberts is unlikely to betray his social and political constituency.

Those who think Roberts is a moderate who will generate little controversy need only notice the reactions of Bush's conservative religious backers. "The president is a man of his word," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a right-wing Christian organization. "He promised to nominate someone along the lines of a Scalia or a Thomas, and that is exactly what he has done." Operation Rescue President Troy Newman agrees. "We pray that Roberts will be swiftly confirmed," he announced.

It's payback time, and Bush has delivered.

And by the way, Bush is a president who insists he is firmly committed to diversity. There have been 109 justices on the Supreme Court. Roberts will be the 105th white male. He will replace the first woman ever to sit on the High Court. That leaves only one.
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I planned to show a photo of Mr. Rosen here. Unfortunately, I couldn't find one. So here's a picture of the other principal in the matter. Figured it would grind the teeth of the vast right-wing conspiracy. You're welcome... --DN

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Reliving History


By Michael Tomasky
Web Exclusive: 06.06.05

Though the event took place [almost two months] ago, it’s worth taking a moment to remark upon the May 27 acquittal of David Rosen, the fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign who’d been charged in a New Orleans federal court with hiding about $800,000 worth of costs for a gala Los Angeles event thrown for the then-first lady during her campaign.

Why is it worth remarking upon? For two reasons. First, in the weeks leading up to the jury’s decision, one could hear the galloping accelerando of wing-nut anticipation; FOX, for example, did more than a dozen segments devoted mostly or partly to Rosen’s fate in the three months leading up to the acquittal.

Walking point on this matter, of course, was Dick Morris. He wrote in his New York Post column nine days before the acquittal that the case against Rosen was “getting stronger, increasing the odds the aide will start cooperating with the government”; about a week earlier, he had appeared on a Hannity & Colmes segment -- titled “Are Hillary’s Presidential Chances Over?” -- outright accusing Clinton of having known about the underreporting of the event’s costs. I’d love to see the memos that were going around FOX during the trial planning the on-air party in
the event of conviction.

But ho! The party was canceled, and, thus, the second reason for pointing out Rosen’s acquittal: It’s not exactly as if everyone has. FOX, after all the buildup, has mentioned Rosen’s acquittal just twice, and both times as quickly and grudgingly as if being forced to report that global warming really did exist. MSNBC, which discussed Rosen five times in the months leading up to the acquittal, has not mentioned him since. (Most of those five were on Chris Matthews’ Hardball; gosh, do you think Matthews would have been silent on the matter if the jury had found the other way?) In addition, the viewers of NBC News and the listeners of National Public Radio, if each group relied only on that source for its view of world, would not know of Rosen’s acquittal, according to databases. And Matt Drudge, according to his archives, did not mention the acquittal.

Now watch over the course of the next week or two, as Ed Klein, known most recently for sniffing around the tombstone of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, unveils his new Hillary “book.” You’ll be reading a lot about Klein’s “Pulitzer Prize,” which refers to the bauble won by The New York Times Magazine for an article on toxic-shock syndrome that appeared while Klein was indeed its editor. I’d imagine you’ll be hearing far less about the plagiarism episode that took place under his tenure, when a young reporter named Christopher Jones fabricated scenes from purported travels with Khmer Rouge guerillas, stealing them from Andre Malraux, of all people (Alexander Cockburn -- at the time, he was a widely read press critic for The Village Voice, probably the most popular columnist in New York -- recognized the lifted passage).

Wanna bet that the cable shows will be a little more enthusiastic about Klein’s news than they were about Rosen’s?

But enough on that. My subject is not Hillary. My subject is history. The Klein book, like Morris’ recent Rewriting History, is produced in the first instance to damage Hillary Clinton in the short term. (Well, actually, point No. 1 is to make money; hurting Clinton is a close second.) But there is another reason these anti-Clinton tomes still appear with regularity, and liberals who criticize the Clintons from the left need to recognize it: The right knows that if its historical interpretation of Clintonism can prevail, liberalism as a project can be killed for decades. That is, if they can convince America over the next few crucial years (crucial because historical interpretations of Clintonism are just really beginning) that the Clinton era was not one of prosperity, peace, and a demonstration that government can deliver common goods but was, instead, one of corruption, turpitude, and a fat and happy people discarding moral values for the sake of higher mutual-fund values, they will have won an extremely important argument with serious long-term ramifications.

The past week should remind us just how seriously those on the right takes their historical interpretation -- and the outlandish things they’ll say to get their point across. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial on the legacy of Mark Felt was a jaw-dropper. What sort of audacity did it take for the Journal, of all organs, to write, “In their zeal to be the next Woodstein, many in the press have developed a ‘gotcha’ model of reporting that always assumes the worst about public officials”?

The Journal?!? I guess it’s not counting Vince Foster as a public official. What shameless, debauched people.

Also came Peggy Noonan on the same subject, directing our attention toward the same Cambodia that once figured into Ed Klein’s ignominy: “What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. ... Is it terrible when an American president lies and surrounds himself by dirty tricksters? Yes, it is. How about the butchering of children in the South China Sea. Is that worse? Yes. Infinitely, unforgettably and forever.”

La Margaret was trying to imply here that Felt, by ratting out Richard Nixon and assisting in his downfall, is partly responsible for “a cascade of catastrophic events,” including the rise of Pol Pot. Actually, she didn’t imply it. She said it.

Um, for the record. Nixon, that serious president, quite seriously and secretly bombed Cambodia in direct contravention of international law and the rules of war. This created a massive refugee crisis (in addition to creating a bunch of innocent, dead Cambodians).

The crisis was too much for the government of Lon Nol, a repressive and corrupt potentate whose repression and corruption were very much backed by Nixon and Gerald Ford. The heavy U.S. bombardment of the country, and Lon Nol’s collaboration with the United States, sent recruits running into Pol Pot’s arms; his forces had grown to number 700,000 men (10 percent of the entire population) by the time of his takeover in 1975. Neither Mark Felt nor Bob Woodward nor Carl Bernstein nor John Sirica had a thing to do with it.

Noonan presumably knows all about this, because the White House for which she scribbled, Ronald Reagan’s, backed the Khmer Rouge in the early 1980s, after the regime had completed its murderous rampage and the facts were well-known. This support -- which included voting to seat a Khmer Rouge official as Cambodia’s representative at the United Nations -- continued until 1985, when the administration finally changed course. The change came after a House foreign-affairs subcommittee -- in Democratic hands at the time, remember -- pushed for the change and voted to send aid to anti-Khmer Rouge forces.

That is the factual history. Thank goodness they haven’t yet managed to rewrite Watergate except in the pages of their own sheets. But they’re rewriting the 1990s, and they’re working overtime to ensure that they will control how the history of the current administration is written.

Young people who don’t care about Mark Felt should at least be moved, one hopes, to care that history remains history and is not subverted into propaganda. The future depends on it.

Michael Tomasky is the Prospect’s executive editor.
Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Michael Tomasky, "Reliving History", The American Prospect Online, Jun 6, 2005.
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Gen. Meyers and Bob McNamara still looking for that light... --DN
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The Fake Optimism of Washington's Warriors
By Norman Solomon - t r u t h o u t - Perspective
Wednesday 13 July 2005

In front of TV cameras, Pentagon officials do their best to make war sound wise and noble.

Most of all, they lie.

Sometimes they do it with bold assertions, other times with intentionally tangled syntax. But those who give the orders that consign young soldiers to participation in horror must assure the folks back home that all the carnage is under control. The officials strive to project an aura of calm about the unspeakable; they mumble clichés about grief that cannot touch it.

For the most powerful war-makers in Washington, the most dangerous potential enemies are the citizens of the United States who might insist on an end to taxpayer subsidies for mass slaughter. To forestall such a calamity, officials proclaim endlessly that the war's worst days have passed and the future looks increasingly bright for the ravaged land and for the freedom-loving invaders whose invasion has ravaged it.

And so, on Tuesday night, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff glibly responded to questions from Jim Lehrer on the PBS "NewsHour." And while the historic disrepute of the phrase "light at the end of the tunnel" precluded using it in the interview, Gen. Richard Myers was close to chirpy. Along the way, he tried to make the war in Iraq sound like an uplifting exercise in civic engagement, inevitably headed toward triumph.

The general was tap dancing in the footsteps of many who came before him - during another long war based on deception and the assumption that the USA must keep killing in order to be credible on the world stage.

When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara visited Vietnam for the first time, he came back and told the press that he'd seen "nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress in the future."

McNamara made that statement in May 1962.

More than four years later, in October 1966, McNamara held a news conference at Andrews Air Force Base after returning from a trip to Vietnam. Again he spoke with enthusiasm about the progress he'd seen there. But former Pentagon aide Daniel Ellsberg has recounted that McNamara made that presentation to the press "minutes after telling me that everything was much worse than the year before."

Of course the commander in chief is not to be outdone. He is, among his other duties, the commander of war lies. And so, as with George W. Bush today, Lyndon Johnson professed to be grandly optimistic when he proclaimed in early 1967: "Peace is more within our reach than at any time in this century."

Fifteen months ago, at a turning point when resistance to the occupation erupted with fury in a number of Iraqi cities, the response from American officials was to put happy-face stickers on the carnage. "We have isolated pockets where we are encountering problems," said Dan Senor, a spokesperson for the top US manipulator in Iraq, Paul Bremer. A week later, on April 13, 2004, President Bush declared: "It's not a popular uprising. Most of Iraq is relatively stable."

These kinds of statements may seem like mere pep talks or, in retrospect, miscalculations. But they're integral to the war-making process - continually speaking of light that's just over the horizon, while corpses pile up in grisly shadows alongside the lies that keep a war going on top of the lies that got it started.

On Tuesday night, host Jim Lehrer asked Gen. Myers: "Do you consider Iraq a success from your point of view?" The general replied: "I do now, I do. I mean I don't know why I said now. I do, absolutely; I think it's a success." A couple of minutes later he was exuding confidence about the future: "It's going to be a difficult fight, but we're going to be successful in this fight."

Washington's warriors insist that Iraq is not Vietnam. Any geographer would certainly agree. But imperial wars share similar characteristics - including the profound fact that the people who live in a country are more committed to it than the invaders are. This war can't be won for reasons that have everything to do with why it's wrong. The occupiers are on the lowest moral ground. No amount of fake optimism in Washington can change such realities in Iraq.

This article is adapted from Norman Solomon's new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
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This is an excellent statement on Judge Roberts from the IAC. Pass this on to all of your Democratic and "moderate" Republican Senators.

-----Original Message-----From: International Action Center
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 09:39
Subject: John G. Roberts Supreme Court Nomination
Statement from the International Action Center (IAC)
On the Nomination of John G. Roberts to the Supreme CourtJuly 19, 2005

Tonight, George W. Bush has signaled his intention to continue his all-out assault on women, working people, civil liberties and civil rights. It is vital that we examine the nomination of John G. Roberts, and ask how such a reactionary appointment could be made and, more importantly, how we can push back the Bush attack and what social and political forces can be mobilized in the struggle.

Judge John G. Roberts has built his career advancing the far-right agendas of the Reagan and Bush Administrations. He has worked to overturn abortion rights, blur the separation between church and state, undermine affirmative action, and advance a narrow right-wing interpretation of the Constitution. Roberts is a member of two prominent, right-wing legal organizations that advance a reactionary legal philosophy: the pro-corporate,anti-affirmative action, and anti-union Federalist Society; and the National Legal Center For The Public Interest, a legal research group funded by General Motors, Ford, Texaco, Exxon-Mobile, and Gulf, as well as right wing millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.

Women’s Rights
Immediately after President Bush announced his selection of Roberts, Operation Rescue, an organization founded to terrorize women, obstruct reproductive freedom, and shut down health clinics, issued a press release saying, “Operation Rescue supports this selection. Roberts has shown strong conservative credentials with indications that he will not uphold Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that decriminalized abortion.” The anti-choice homophobe Gary Bauer promptly issued a statement hailing Roberts as "a refreshing nominee who possesses an outstandingrecord of judicial accomplishment as well as a commitment to judicial restraint long missing from so many activist courts."

Roberts’ record makes it clear why he has gathered such enthusiasm from far-right religious fundamentalists. As Deputy Solicitor General, Roberts filed an amicus curiae brief in the National Organization of Women’s (NOW) case against OperationRescue — in support of Operation Rescue, and in support of individuals who illegally blocked access to clinics. As Deputy Solicitor General, Roberts argued in a brief before the Supreme Court that "we continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled. The Court’s conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion...finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution."

As a Deputy Solicitor General, Roberts co-wrote a Supreme Court brief in Rust v. Sullivan, which argued that the government could prohibit doctors in federally funded family planning programs from discussing abortions with their patients.

Workers Rights
Roberts was lead counsel for Toyota in Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Ky, Inc. v. Williams. This case involved a woman who was fired after she asked Toyota for accommodations to do her job after being diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. The court ruled that while this condition impaired her ability to work, it did not impair her ability to perform major life activities.

The Geneva Conventions
Roberts was part of the three-judge panel that last week upheld President Bush's military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, supporting the Bush Administration's assertion that the Geneva Conventions and other international law did not apply to detainees held there. Neal K.Katyal, a lead lawyer for one of the plaintiffs in this case and a Georgetown University law professor, called the decision "contrary to 200 years of constitutional law."

Civil Rights
After a Supreme Court decision effectively nullified certain sections of the Voting Rights Act, Roberts was involved in the Reagan administration's effort to prevent Congress from overturning the Supreme Court's action. Roberts also filed an amicus brief in Adarand v. Mineta in Oct. 2001, supporting a challenge to federal affirmative action programs.

The Environment
As a member of the Solicitor General's office, Mr. Roberts was the lead counsel for the United States in the Supreme Court case Lujan v.National Wildlife Federation, in which the government argued that private citizens could not sue the federal government for violations of environmental regulations. In his private practice, Roberts has also represented numerous large corporate interests opposing environmental controls. He submitted an amicus brief on behalf of the National Mining Association in the recent case Bragg v. West Virginia Coal Association.

Church & State
While working with the Solicitor General's office, Roberts co-wrote an amicus brief on behalf of the Bush administration, in which he argued that public high schools can include religious ceremonies in their graduation programs.

Our response:
Organize and Mobilize!
The only effective counter to Bush’s continued assault on working people, people of color, women, and on civil liberties and civil rights is to organize a massive opposition movement in the streets. We cannot look to politicians of either party to stop Bush—theDemocrats have been nearly unanimous in their support of the Bush agenda of endless war and repression, and they have confirmed some of the most backwards and reactionary judicial appointees. These next few months are critical in the struggle against the war abroad and the war at home. The Bush agenda is facing a genuine crisis—the illegal occupation of Iraq is clearly failing in the face of overwhelming popular resistance, military recruiting is declining, and opposition to the war is growing. What we do now can make adifference. Now is the time to build a massive movement of resistance, a movement that is broad because it includes, rather than excludes, the struggles of all oppressed communities.

In challenging the Bush agenda and mobilizing to defend our rights, it is important to recall how we have secured victories in the past. In a nation founded on slavery and indentured servitude, genocide against indigenous peoples, and oppression of women and working people, every advance was won because of the power of massive peoples’ mobilizations to assert and demand those rights. Regardless of which corporate party is in power, or which corporate lawyer is appointed to the Supreme Court, it is the people who ultimately make history. All of the most important victories for working people, for the civil rights struggle, for women, and for all oppressed communities were won because of organizing in the streets. Victories in the courts and legislatures merely reflected the reality that was created by the mass movements. It was resistance- theMontgomery bus boycott, the Stonewall rebellion, the Flint sit-ins for union rights, the massive marches for women's suffrage, and many other protests, marches, strikes and direct actions--that secured our rights, and it is in that spirit of resistance that we must continue to struggle.

The International Action CenterJuly 19, 2005
International Action CenterMark Hull-Richter, U.S. Citizen & PatriotU.S.A. - From democracy to kakistocracy in one fell coup.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0416-01.htmhttp://verifiedvoting.org/ http://blackboxvoting.org/__________________________________________________

Molly Ivins - Creators Syndicate

07.19.05 - AUSTIN -- Now it's getting funnier and funnier. There is an elephant in the living room and we're sitting around having a conversation about whether there's an elephant in the living room.

"I think there's an elephant in the living room."

"Well, there's a lot of elephant poop around, but that doesn't prove there's an elephant in the living room."

The entire Republican Party is shocked (!) anyone would think that Karl Rove (!!) would leak a story to damage a political opponent. Oh, the horror. And Karl has always been such a sweet guy. Just to give you an idea, one time Rove was displeased with the job done by a political advance man and said, "We will f--- him. Do you hear me? We will f--- him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f---ed him!" (From an article by Ron Suskind). And that was a guy who was on his side.

Attacking an opponent's wife is standard operating procedure for Rove.

Have Republicans actually convinced themselves that he wouldn't do such a thing? People, sometimes party loyalty asks too much.

Actually, we are missing the point here. The point being that Joseph Wilson is merely one of the many people who provided one of the by now innumerable pieces of evidence that this administration lied about why we went to war in Iraq. When former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill wrote that Bush planned to invade Iraq from the day he took office, the administration went after O'Neill. When Richard Clarke disclosed that the Bushies wanted to use Sept. 11 to go after Saddam Hussein from Sept. 12 on, they went after Clarke. They went after Gen. Zinni, they went after Gen. Shinseki and everyone else who opposed the folly or told the truth about it. After they got done lying about weapons of mass destruction and about connections to Al Qaeda, they switched to the stomach-churning pretense that we had done it all for democracy. Urp.

We suffer the worst attack on this country since Pearl Harbor, and the Bush administration sends the FBI after the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU exists to protect every citizen's rights as defined in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States. The ACLU works solely through the legal system: It does not advocate violence, terrorism or any other damn thing except the Bill of Rights. Since when is that extremist? Why in the name of heaven are we wasting the FBI's time on this idiocy? I don't pretend to be an expert on counter-terrorism, but if it were up to me, I wouldn't start looking for the violence-prone in pacifist groups either. Your pacifists, you see -- oh, just look it up.

I know that sludge-for-brains like Bill O'Reilly attack the ACLU for being "un-American," but when Bill O'Reilly's constitutional rights are violated, the ACLU will stand up for him just like they did for Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement conservatives and everyone else they've defended over the years. The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one person's rights, it can take away everyone's.

We are living in a time when our government is investigating an organization that stands for the highest and best American ideals. And claiming the mantle of patriotism while they are about it. This is cuckoo -- and such an idiotic waste of the FBI's time and the taxpayers' money that whoever thought up this idiocy should be fired yesterday.

But even that is superseded by what lies at the heart of Plamegate, and that is lying in order to get this country into war. If the Washington press corps had a memory bank longer than 10 minutes, they could have exposed this years ago: the lies so often directly contradict one another.

Before the war, the CIA was such a wussy organization it kept trying to downplay weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: After the war, it was all the CIA's fault, they had exaggerated the weapons of mass destruction.

And so on and so on.

The trouble with piling lies on top of lies is that we can't even agree on facts anymore. I read the right-wing commentators, and it's not that we're not on the same page -- we're not even in the same library. They read the Downing Street memos and convince themselves they don't mean what they say. I really don't understand: Is it that hard to admit you're wrong when you're wrong? Is it that hard to admit that the invasion of Iraq has been a disaster? Isn't it self-evident?

If you support someone politically, you are not required to believe they are perfect. Did I think Bill Clinton had a sleazy affair while he was president? Yes. I just didn't care. I didn't think it had anything to do with the way he was running the country. You can't dismiss this. You can't not care about lies and war. Not if you care about American soldiers.

(c) 2005 Creators Syndicate
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Has anyone noticed this mal-Administration does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and however it wants, irrespective of laws, treaties, rules, regulations, principles or morals?

I thought so; just about all of you. With the glaring exception of those clueless folks who helped them steal at least three of the recent "elections," by actually voting some of these scum into the House of Representatives.

The same House whose members have the responsibility to present Bills of Impeachment. Thank goodness we're all bombarding them with reminders to do just that. Keep those cards and letters coming, folks... --DN

http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.shtml http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ http://www.webslingerz.com/jhoffman/congress-email.html

...and hey, it couldn't hoit ta keep some pressure on these guys, too: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

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[UPDATE] Fitzgerald preparing indictments under the Espionage Act? http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00000793----000-.html

(From DailyKos.com):

by kant Sun Jul 10th, 2005 at 01:22:58 PDT
Update [2005-7-10 15:30:25 by kant]:

A question lifted from the comments: What are Fitzgerald's rights/limitations in accessing evidence from other FBI investigations in order to show a pattern of revelations, i.e. see the Agee provision in Kleiman's argument below?

Update [2005-7-10 7:42:42 by kant]:

I wonder if anyone in the White House Press Corps reads Kos? If so, could someone ask Scotty, if he thinks the Espionage Act applies to the Plame leak? It seems clear from the eight pages blacked out from Judge Tatel's concurrence, that Patrick Fitzgerald is working closely with the CIA to understand the true ramifications of the crime committed in the Plame case. Beyond the IIPA and perjury and obstruction of justice, wouldn't you think that if ever a case existed to use the Espionage Act... this is it?

From Lawrence O'Donnell to John Dean, to two of the Circuit Judges, it seems that those with experience in these matters believe we have something much more serious than "he said/he said."

Let's take a look (below the fold) and see why Espionage may well be the appropriate name for what has gone on here...

Diaries :: --> kant's diary :: ::

Summary...

Courtjester and TPM: Fitzgerald and CIA believe that Plame is part of an ongoing series of leaks severely damaging national security.

Lawrence O'Donnell: Judge Tatel's concurrence in Miller suggests that this is not about perjury... AND it is about a very serious crime.

Mark A. Kleiman: Judge Hogan thinks that the information [Judy Miller] was given and her potential use of it was a crime. (And I hope she rots in that Alexandria jail. Not only for this, but even more so for the way she was an Administration cheerleader for going into this illegal, immoral, completely unnecessary war against humanity in Iraq, via the front page of the New York Times, day after day after day. Let's give this Pulitzer Prize hack a special seat in Hell alongside Rove... --DN)

John Dean: Leaking classified information is a crime under the Espionage Act with no exceptions for good intentions.

Dec. 2003, MSNBC documentary evidence: Cheney's office, and Hannah specifically, was "a principal point of contact" with Chalabi's INC to receive and disseminate intelligence.

Feb. 2004, Richard Sale (UPI): FBI had "hard evidence" that Hannah and Libby were involved in the outing of Plame.

June 2004, USA Today reported that the FBI had begun interviews to determine who might have told Chalabi that the CIA had cracked Iranian codes - info which Chalabi passed on to Iran.

When you put all of this together, it sure feels like Espionage Act prosecutions are in the offing... Wouldn't you think?

Let's start with Courtjester and Josh Marshall...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/10/42259/4958

Dear EmailNation Subscriber,

George W. Bush says he doesn't like judges who legislate from the bench. So why, John Nichols asks in a new Online Beat posting, did he pick an over-the-top foe of abortion rights to replace Sandra Day O'Connor? Click below to read more on Roberts.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=7456

Roberts is a real in-your-face selection by the president, and the Dems' response remains to be seen. Fortunately this fight should energize some potentially large segments of society which would be affected by a Court that could threaten the future of legal abortions, affirmative action for minority groups, and other issues that many Americans have long taken for granted. Click below to see what's up with the opposition and how you can help.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/actnow?bid=4&pid=7318

And watch this space and TheNation online for continued reporting on Roberts and his upcoming confirmation battle.Downing Street Memo Events on July 23This Saturday is the three-year anniversary of the meeting at Ten Downing Street in London that was recorded in the now infamous minutes known as the "Downing Street Memo." Suggesting that the Bush Administration was intent on going to war with Iraq with or without intelligence on Saddam's WMD, the memo has given new impetus (and vindication) to antiwar critics of the invasion. To highlight these disclosures, AfterDowningStreet.org, a new coalition of veterans' groups and activist organizations, has organized hundreds of events, dramatic performances, house parties and study circles planned coast to coast. Click below for details.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/actnow?bid=4&pid=6706

Finally, check out http://www.thenation.com/ to post comments to our blogs, to view news-wire links updated twice each day, for info on nationwide activist campaigns, Nation History offerings and special weekly selections from The Nation magazine!

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From http://www.bushflash.com/index.html

The big news, at this hour, is the appointment of John Roberts.

As I told you, just a few days ago (read below), the whole Rove scandal was to just distract folks long enough to get their minds off of the Downing Street Memo, now, watch Rove, Bolton, DeLay and the DSM fade fast into the mist as the blogs, media, and PACS gear up for the ensuing fight.

The Bush policy towards their sinking fortunes is to just surpass each offense against the collective sensibilities of america with an even greater offense. This comic pretty much sums up what we're having to deal with, every day.

But I digress.

This John Roberts character- the more you look into his record, the more your skin crawls. He appeals to his fundamentalist taliban-style "christian" base- this guy is a wet dream for them- anti-abortion, anti-environment, and anti-affrimative action. He likes mercury and lead in drinking water, hates veterans, gets giddy over prayer in schools, just ADORES strip mining, and republican "pro life" policies (as detailed below- under "I'm pro-life!") You can check out his full record here.

Hell- he was Rupert Murdoch's attorney- can you get any better than that?

But this is what gets me- O'Connor was the "swing vote" in the social decisions handed down by the supremes. If this guy gets appointed, say goodbye to legal abortion- it's GONE. Say goodbye to affirmative action- it's GONE. Say goodbye to any last environmental decisions on the side of the people, at the expense of corporations- they're GONE. Say goodbye to gay rights- they're GONE. Say goodbye to minority rights- they're GONE. Say goodbye to women's rights (outside of those outlined by the King James translation of the new testament)- they're GONE. Say goodbye to health protections in the workplace- they're GONE. Say goodbye to the rights of veterans, petitioning the government for recompense of broken promises- they're GONE.

But here's the big question- will enough democrats roll over, and approve this joker? The simple, and unfortunate answer is: yes. We can count on the usual gang- Lieberman, Clinton (more on her, later), and a dozen or so will cross the aisle, to give Bush's nominee his seat- and that's the saddest thing of all.

John Roberts, at the age of 50, will sit on the court for at least 20 years- and who knows how far down the toilet we'll go, in those years.

The rest of the western world is already looking at our country as a cultural backwater. Over the next two decades, as they progress forward with the creation of a more equitable society, we'll become more and more of a laughing stock, in the eyes of the world. So long, the days of us being the crucible of ideals and egalitarianism- those days are fading fast, and will soon be forgotten. The illegitimately appointed Bush bowl has decided to hold us back, while the rest of the world marches forward, because, well- it's more important, in the eyes of their "christian" world-empire-building ideology, to make sure two men (or women) can't get married, than to ensure that every american has equal access to health insurance.

For more, see http://www.bushflash.com/index.html
AND -- this from the Alliance for Justice, in opposition to his nomination to the Fourth Circuit Court:
http://www.independentjudiciary.com/resources/docs/John_Roberts_Report.pdf

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July 9, 2005

Dear Sergeant Major:

I am responding to a recruitment letter you just sent to my son, Michael. I am somewhat uncomfortable about this letter in light of the fact that my son turned 15 years old barely two weeks ago.

Prior to receiving your letter, a Marine recruiter called our house and asked to speak to Michael. I'm not sure if that person was you, but I answered the phone, and when I found out that the caller was a Marine recruiter, I expressly told the caller that my son was not at all interested in the Marines and that I was appalled that a 14 year old (Michael's age at that time) was being targeted for military recruitment. The caller then said that he (meaning Michael) must have filled out a card or something requesting information. I apologized for that, as I did recall Michael telling me some weeks earlier that he filled out a card at a military recruitment information table at a mall or somewhere in order to get a free water bottle, or free give-away, and that he was encouraged to fill out a card giving his name and contact information. I then reiterated that my son was 14 and not at all a suitable recruitment target. The response I got was: "Well, he can enlist at 17, if a parent signs for him." I assured the caller, in so many words, that there was no fat chance of that happening!

And then, today, your letter arrives, in which you breathlessly state: "Good news! You'll soon be eligible to apply for enlistment in the Marine Corp. I'm preparing an information package . [and] will forward it to you when you turn 17." You end your letter with, "I hope that one day - in the near future - I'll be welcoming you to the Marine Corps."

For the record, let me repeat once more, what I said to the caller some weeks ago: My son is a minor, and he is not going to sign up with the Marines. Why you may ask? Number 1: He is not interested. Number 2: Over my dead body.

I suggest that you send your recruitment letters to George Bush's daughters, and how about Jeb's son and daughter while you're at it? Let's see, they are Americans, President Bush said there was no higher calling for a young American than to serve his or her country in the military. Perfect! You probably also have a rich pool of potential recruits amongst the sons, daughters and grandchildren of George Bush's top-ranking Republican administration officials! What an example that would be for the rest of the young citizens of America! You couldn't pay for better P.R. than that! Think of how the recruitment ranks would swell.

You and I both know that will not happen, nor will the sons and daughters of our esteemed elected officials, namely, the offspring of our congressional representatives and senators, sign up for military duty. No, the kids that are going over to Iraq -- let's see, I believe the average age of our soldiers is 19? - are usually the ones without the resources to go to college, tech school or have access to good paying jobs. In other words, they are not the sons and daughters of the privileged class.

I have a friend who is a nurse at a military hospital and she told me about the wounded coming back from Iraq. We don't see their pictures splashed on the front page of the newspaper, they aren't speaking on TV about what a wonderful privilege it was to serve their country and how they'd do it again if they had to. They are hidden from our sight. It is unbearably sad that these young men and women are being horribly maimed in the course of fighting for George Bush's lies. I wonder, how does George Bush sleep at night? Is he just unbelievably stupid, or is he merely bereft of feeling for anyone outside his own family? The man doesn't even have the decency to admit he made a terrible mistake and offer the people who lost their loved ones, and the poor wounded soldiers, as much as an apology. His arrogance should make us all very ashamed. Oh, and that business about if you don't support the war, you're not supporting the troops - excuse me, but I support the troops by not wanting them to be needlessly killed and wounded. It is not patriotic to wage war on a country that posed no direct threat to our country and put the sons and daughters of America in harm's way so carelessly and so dishonestly.

The Iraqi War (known as Bush's War to most Europeans) is a farce, it is illegal, it will never be won, and will never result in a democratic Iraq. (Does anyone, anyone, have the stomach any more for Bush's canned patriotic slogans and pathetic reassurances that we're "winning" the war?) All we can hope for is that other nations in the world will have pity and forgive our mistake and try to help put Iraq back together, if that's even possible, which I hope it is. Ironically, America will have to step aside and leave Iraq if some semblance of order has a chance of happening there at all.

As for George Bush's fate, he clearly ought to be impeached. Americans felt there was justification for sending troops into Afghanistan - but Iraq? I think the Downing Street memo explains the reasoning behind that disastrous decision. Even if one chooses to discount the Downing Street memo, there's evidence aplenty that Bush chose to ignore the facts in favor of an action that had nothing to do with bringing democracy to the Iraqi people and all to do with special interests, plus a little matter of unresolved business with Saddam, left over from his father's presidency. How dare George Bush tarnish the good names of democracy and freedom to sell this mess of a war.

No, neither of my sons will go off and fight for a war that George Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove cooked up. Neither of my sons will risk their lives so that rich Republicans can get richer, and their co-horts in the oil and defense industries, like Halliburton, can line their pockets with even more money pilfered at the expense of the rest of us well-meaning but way too naïve tax payers. Meanwhile, the poor get poorer, and the wretched of the world find even less to hope for.

You would do me a great courtesy to pass this letter on to your top commander as I understand that you are merely doing the job given to you, and that you mean no harm in your solicitation. But I do want those in positions of authority to understand that I do not want any more recruitment information sent to my son Michael, or to my other minor son either for that matter. I am not raising them to be sacrificed on the altar of George Bush's deceit, nor should anyone else give their children over to a man who would willingly cut their military benefits if it meant saving his rich cronies from paying higher taxes, while absconding from his own military service. (Yeah, yeah, I know, some of his key military records were "lost," and we are all supposed to pretend that he served when he said he did.) A wise leader should never ask others to make sacrifices that he himself would never make.

I know we can't bring back the `60's, but can we at least have some righteous indignation?

Sincerely,

Michael's Mom
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For background, see: Payback Time? • The Quaint Mr. Gonzales • Redefining Torture • Dear Mr. Gonzales •

No War Criminal for Supreme Court
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t Perspective
Wednesday 13 July 2005

No sooner had the ink dried on Sandra Day O'Connor's resignation letter than the right-wing evangelicals began shouting threats: Bush had better pick a justice who would decimate the right to abortion as we know it. And corporate lobbyists promised to fight hard for a justice who would insulate big business from punitive damages, and against state regulation to protect consumers and the environment.

But most of the post-O'Connor discussion about possible candidates has focused on the bona fides of Bush's Attorney General and confidant Alberto Gonzales, whom many describe as a "moderate." The religious conservatives find Gonzales unacceptable, since he refused to say that Roe v. Wade should be reversed when he sat on the Texas Supreme Court. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, however, thinks Gonzales is "qualified" to sit on the high court. Indeed, Reid chastised "the far right" for attacking Gonzales.

In their zeal to ensure that Bush does not choose a justice who would tip the court's balance away from allowing a woman to make decisions about her own body without governmental interference, many Democrats would apparently settle for a war criminal. In spite of opposition from the right and the left, Gonzales is expected to be confirmed easily, without the necessity of the nasty filibuster.

Several senators posed hard questions to Gonzales during his attorney general confirmation hearing. Ultimately, however, the Senate confirmed Gonzales 60-36, with 4 abstentions. Six Democrats voted to confirm Gonzales and 3 didn't cast votes. Curiously, Reid, who voted against Gonzales for attorney general, now finds him qualified to sit on the nation's highest court.

When Senator Richard Durbin asked Gonzales at his hearing, "Can US personnel legally engage in torture under any circumstances?", Gonzales failed to give a categorically negative answer. "I don't believe so," he testified, "but I'd want to get back to you on that." Gonzales surely knew that the Convention against Torture, which the United States has ratified, says, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture."
Gonzales is the very one who, as White House counsel, advised Bush that the President need not follow the law. The Geneva Conventions, which Gonzales called "quaint" and "obsolete," are ratified treaties, and thus part of United States law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

Gonzales also counseled Bush on how to avoid prosecution for war crimes under the federal War Crimes Act.

Gonzales commissioned the August 1, 2002, memorandum by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel that illegally redefined torture so narrowly that the pain caused by interrogation must include death, organ failure or serious impairment of body functions. Any treatment short of that would be allowed.

That memo remained in place until December 30, 2004, on the eve of Gonzales's attorney general confirmation hearing. In order to forestall tough questioning of Gonzales by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee about the August 2002 memo, the Justice Department issued a new memo, broadening the definition of torture.

Gonzales's advice to Bush led to the establishment of policies that set the stage for the torture and inhuman treatment of prisoners in US custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and secret CIA prisons throughout the world. Torture and inhuman treatment constitute war crimes under the federal War Crimes Statute. That law provides that one who commits a war crime "shall be fined under this title 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."

It is not necessary to personally conduct the torture in order to be liable under the War Crimes Statute. Under the well-established doctrine of "command responsibility," a superior who knew or should have known his inferiors would commit war crimes, but who failed to stop or prevent those acts, is just as responsible as those who committed the criminal acts. Gonzales knew or should have known the policies he advocated would result in the torture and inhuman treatment of prisoners in US custody.

Alberto Gonzales should not sit on the United States Supreme Court. He should be indicted and tried as a war criminal. (See The Gonzales Indictment.)

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Published on Tuesday, July 12, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times
CIA Leak Quotes

Some of the denials, other comments, at media briefings by White House spokesman Scott McClellan when asked by reporters whether President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, was involved in the leak of a CIA officer's identity:

Sept. 29, 2003
Q: You said this morning, quote, "The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved." How does he know that?
A: Well, I've made it very clear that it was a ridiculous suggestion in the first place. ... I've said that it's not true. ... And I have spoken with Karl Rove.
Q: It doesn't take much for the president to ask a senior official working for him, to just lay the question out for a few people and end this controversy today.
A: Do you have specific information to bring to our attention? ... Are we supposed to chase down every anonymous report in the newspaper? We'd spend all our time doing that."
Q: When you talked to Mr. Rove, did you discuss, "Did you ever have this information?"
A: I've made it very clear, he was not involved, that there's no truth to the suggestion that he was.
* __
Oct. 7, 2003
Q: You have said that you personally went to Scooter Libby (Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff), Karl Rove and Elliott Abrams (National Security Council official) to ask them if they were the leakers. Is that what happened? Why did you do that? And can you describe the conversations you had with them? What was the question you asked?
A: Unfortunately, in Washington, D.C., at a time like this there are a lot of rumors and innuendo. There are unsubstantiated accusations that are made. And that's exactly what happened in the case of these three individuals. They are good individuals. They are important members of our White House team. And that's why I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved. I had no doubt with that in the beginning, but I like to check my information to make sure it's accurate before I report back to you, and that's exactly what I did.
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Oct. 10, 2003
Q: Earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliot Abrams nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?
A: I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that's where it stands.
Q: So none of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?
A: They assured me that they were not involved in this.
Q: They were not involved in what?
A: The leaking of classified information.
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July 11, 2005:
Q: Do you want to retract your statement that Rove, Karl Rove, was not involved in the Valerie Plame expose?
A: I appreciate the question. This is an ongoing investigation at this point. The president directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation, and as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, that means we're not going to be commenting on it while it is ongoing.

Q: But Rove has apparently commented, through his lawyer, that he was definitely involved.
A: You're asking me to comment on an ongoing investigation.

Q: I'm saying, why did you stand there and say he was not involved?
A: Again, while there is an ongoing investigation, I'm not going to be commenting on it nor is ... .

Q: Any remorse?
A: Nor is the White House, because the president wanted us to cooperate fully with the investigation, and that's what we're doing.
© 2005 LA Times
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By Eugene Robinson
PostTuesday, July 12, 2005; A21

The Bush administration's relationship with the English language, I confess, just drives me up the wall. How can these people be so comically doofus with the language one minute and so brilliantly Orwellian the next?

President Bush's misadventures with the dictionary are legendary, and they're the gift that keeps on giving. Perhaps my favorite classic came while Bush was trying to sell his Social Security program in Upstate New York, and he uttered this timeless sentence: "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

The frightening thing is that we all understood what he meant. We even understood him when he made his recent assertion about the imprisoned evildoers at Guantanamo Bay, that they are "people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble." Before you could wonder where they were getting their hands on the screwdrivers and wrenches, he added, "That means not tell the truth."

No, it doesn't, Mr. President. But never mind.

Of course, the president's father waged his own battle against the tyranny of syntax and the dictatorship of grammar. His fumbles became a running gag on "Saturday Night Live" and even prompted gentle gibes from his peers: Once, the president of Uruguay welcomed George Bush the First to Montevideo and, as the two leaders stood together, the Uruguayan told reporters he would "answer any questions in my broken English, which is, of course, our common language here."

George W., however, makes his father sound like Seneca. He hasn't received the same kind of ribbing from other world leaders, but maybe they're afraid they might provoke an invasion or something.

Then there's Vice President Cheney, who suddenly has a different problem with the language: He's taken to blurting out things that just manifestly are not true.

The Iraq insurgency is in its "last throes''? In all the damage control that followed that little outburst, functionaries found it hard to come up with a defense that didn't begin, "What the vice president meant to say was . . ."

Undaunted, Cheney then described the life of the hundreds of prisoners being held at Guantanamo: "They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want." He made it sound better than most of the vacations I've paid good money for, although as a general rule I take a pass on constant interrogation and occasional abuse.

No, there's nothing sinister about Bush's fumbles, and, yes, Cheney does seem to genuinely believe the alternate reality he describes. But for an example of truly Orwellian doublespeak, consider the following:
"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

That is what Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, said to a group of New York conservatives last month, and I don't know how to describe it other than as a Big Lie that could have been ghostwritten by Big Brother. Rove is making an outrageous attempt to rewrite history. There was no "liberal" or "conservative" response to the Sept. 11 attacks; there was an American response. Liberals and conservatives alike died in those world-changing attacks; liberals and conservatives alike experienced the horror of that September morning and resolved to take action.

There was support across the political spectrum for Bush's decision to go into Afghanistan, destroy al Qaeda, and capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Karl Rove knows that, but he says otherwise.

A year later, yes, there was disagreement over whether the United States should invade Iraq. Many people, including many liberals, believed there was no evidence that Iraq had been involved in Sept. 11 or that it presented enough of a threat to the United States to divert attention from the hunt for bin Laden.

"Liberals" were right, in my view. But even if the "liberal" view had turned out to be wrong, Rove's charges still would be baseless and libelous. That's like saying that "conservatives" favor bombing abortion clinics, or that "conservatives" favor establishment of a state religion.

In his speech, Rove alternates his references to generic "liberals" with mentions of MoveOn.org, Michael Moore and Howard Dean, as if they represented a single view of the world; they don't. Since then, in explaining -- but not retracting -- his remarks, he has tossed in George Soros as well.

He uses the language skillfully, all right. It's just that he seems to be using it to compile his own growing list of Enemies of the People.

eugenerobinson@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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...that will hopefully bring Bush, et. al. down, as it brought Nixon down.

The Repugthugs thought President Clinton's cover-up of his affair would bring him down, which is what they intended as revenge for Tricky Dick's (no pun intended) humiliating resignation under threat of impeachment. Sorry, but "The People" saw through that little charade.

I believe - I fervently hope - the people are starting to see through the smoke and mirrors of this illegal administration, and will demand trials for these treasonous scum... --DN

PLAMEGATE
It's the Cover-Up

Now who's ridiculous? On October 1, 2003, during the "ongoing investigation" of the Valerie Plame leak scandal, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said it was a "ridiculous suggestion" that Rove was "involved in leaking classified information." Following the recent revelations that Rove identified the undercover CIA agent in an e-mail to a Time magazine reporter, McClellan refused to answer any questions about Rove. NBC White House news correspondent David Gregory exclaimed, "this is ridiculous" in response to McClellan's silence. The leaking scandal, similar to Watergate before it, demonstrates that the cover-up is sometimes worse than the crime.

WHITE HOUSE STONEWALL: McClellan noted 23 times yesterday that he could not comment because there was an "ongoing investigation." But McClellan has previously cited that same investigation and then gone on to answer the questions as they pertained to Rove. For example, on October 1, 2003, he said, "There's an investigation going on ... you brought up Karl's name. Let's be very clear. I thought -- I said it was a ridiculous suggestion, I said it's simply not true that he was involved in leaking classified information, and -- nor, did he condone that kind of activity." Similarly, on October 10, 2003, McClellan said, "I think it's important to keep in mind that this is an ongoing investigation." But he then added with regard to a question about Rove's involvement, "I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this."

MORE THAN A LEGAL MATTER, IT'S ABOUT CREDIBILITY: As the legal investigation continues and the grand jury pores over evidence, any determination that an individual has acted unlawfully is yet to be officially announced. What is clear is that the White House has plenty of explaining to do about their own cover-up. Yesterday, McClellan noted five times that it was the prosecutor's "preference" that the White House not comment on the ongoing investigation, clearly indicating that he could have answered the questions. Refusing to comment has never been a problem for the White House before. As the Washington Post reports today, "Asked about the matter on nine occasions over the years, Bush has said he welcomed the investigation, called the name disclosure 'a very serious matter,' and declared that the sooner investigators 'find out the truth, the better, as far as I'm concerned.'" The fact that the White House seems unwilling to even stand by bland assertions that the leak is a "serious matter" (which McClellan did not say yesterday) or that the White House wants to find out the "truth" (which also wasn't stated) indicates how this matter has become one of credibility for the Bush White House. The inability to stand behind those statements yields little confidence that Bush will hold to his pledge to fire anybody who leaked the agent's name.

THE COVER-UP CONTINUES: McClellan only sunk the White House's credibility further by choosing not to answer questions that he most certainly could have and should have. As Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said, "The lesson of history for George Bush and Karl Rove is that the best way to help themselves is to bring out all the facts, on their own, quickly." With so many outstanding questions lingering about the leak case, the White House has turned to crafty word games and carefully parsed statements to avoid any accountability on this issue. The White House, in attempting to turn conventional wisdom on its head by engaging in a cover-up rather than disclosing, is failing to learn from history and is now repeating it. The Associated Press notes today, "Even if Rove didn't violate the law, proof that he disclosed Plame's identity could damage his effectiveness in public life and tarnish the president for tolerating it."

SOME UNANSWERED QUESTIONS: Even though the White House isn't answering, there are still important questions to be asked. When President Bush and Chief of Staff Andrew Card elevated Rove to his position of deputy chief of staff earlier this year, did they know he had leaked this information? As Bush campaigned on security and character last year, did he know of Rove's involvement? Has Bush or Card never discussed the leak scandal with Rove, including the day the Cooper e-mail was revealed?
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July 10, 2005

By FRANK RICH
WHEN John Dean published his book "Worse Than Watergate" in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse "gates" thereafter. But it's hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate.

To start to see why, forget all the legalistic chatter about shield laws and turn instead to "The Secret Man," Bob Woodward's new memoir about life with Deep Throat. The book arrived in stores just as Judy Miller was jailed, as if by divine intervention to help illuminate her case.
Should a journalist protect a sleazy, possibly even criminal, source? Yes, sometimes, if the public is to get news of wrongdoing. Mark Felt was a turncoat with alternately impenetrable and self-interested motives who betrayed the F.B.I. and, in Mr. Woodward's words, "lied to his colleagues, friends and even his family." (Mr. Felt even lied in his own 1979 memoir.) Should a journalist break a promise of confidentiality after, let alone before, the story is over? "It is critical that confidential sources feel they would be protected for life," Mr. Woodward writes. "There needed to be a model out there where people could come forward or speak when contacted, knowing they would be protected. It was a matter of my work, a matter of honor."

That honorable model, which has now been demolished at Time, was a given in what seems like the halcyon Watergate era of "The Secret Man." Mr. Woodward and Carl Bernstein had confidence that The Washington Post's publisher, Katharine Graham, and editor, Ben Bradlee, would back them to the hilt, even though the Nixon White House demonized their reporting as inaccurate (as did some journalistic competitors) and threatened the licenses of television stations owned by the Post Company.

At Time, Norman Pearlstine - a member of the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists, no less - described his decision to turn over Matt Cooper's files to the feds as his own, made on the merits and without consulting any higher-ups at Time Warner. That's no doubt the truth, but a corporate mentality needn't be imposed by direct fiat; it's a virus that metastasizes in the bureaucratic bloodstream. I doubt anyone at Time Warner ever orders an editor to promote a schlocky Warner Brothers movie either. (Entertainment Weekly did two covers in one month on "The Matrix Reloaded.")

Time Warner seems to have far too much money on the table in Washington to exercise absolute editorial freedom when covering the government; at this moment it's awaiting an F.C.C. review of its joint acquisition (with Comcast) of the bankrupt cable company Adelphia. "Is this a journalistic company or an entertainment company?" David Halberstam asked after the Pearlstine decision. We have the answer now. What high-level source would risk talking to Time about governmental corruption after this cave-in? What top investigative reporter would choose to work there?

But the most important difference between the Bush and Nixon eras has less to do with the press than with the grave origins of the particular case that has sent Judy Miller to jail. This scandal didn't begin, as Watergate did, simply with dirty tricks and spying on the political opposition. It began with the sending of American men and women to war in Iraq.

Specifically, it began with the former ambassador Joseph Wilson's July 6, 2003, account on the Times Op-Ed page (and in concurrent broadcast appearances) of his 2002 C.I.A. mission to Africa to determine whether Saddam Hussein had struck a deal in Niger for uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons. Mr. Wilson concluded that there was no such deal, as my colleague Nicholas Kristof reported, without divulging Mr. Wilson's name, that spring. But the envoy's dramatic Op-Ed piece got everyone's attention: a government insider with firsthand knowledge had stepped out of the shadows of anonymity to expose the administration's game authoritatively on the record. He had made palpable what Bush critics increasingly suspected, writing that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Up until that point, the White House had consistently stuck by the 16 incendiary words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The administration had ignored all reports, not just Mr. Wilson's, that this information might well be bogus. But it still didn't retract Mr. Bush's fiction some five weeks after the State of the Union, when Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, announced that the uranium claim was based on fake documents. Instead, we marched on to war in Iraq days later. It was not until Mr. Wilson's public recounting of his African mission more than five months after the State of the Union that George Tenet at long last released a hasty statement (on a Friday evening, just after the Wilson Op-Ed piece) conceding that "these 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president."

The Niger uranium was hardly the only dubious evidence testifying to Saddam's supposed nuclear threat in the run-up to war. Judy Miller herself was one of two reporters responsible for a notoriously credulous front-page Times story about aluminum tubes that enabled the administration's propaganda campaign to trump up Saddam's W.M.D. arsenal. But red-hot uranium was sexy, and it was Mr. Wilson's flat refutation of it that drove administration officials to seek their revenge: they told the columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson had secured his (nonpaying) African mission through the nepotistic intervention of his wife, a covert C.I.A. officer whom they outed by name. The pettiness of this retribution shows just how successfully Mr. Wilson hit the administration's jugular: his revelation threatened the legitimacy of the war on which both the president's reputation and re-election campaign had been staked.

This was another variation on a Watergate theme. Charles Colson's hit men broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, seeking information to smear Mr. Ellsberg after he leaked the Pentagon Papers, the classified history of the Vietnam War, to The Times. But there was even greater incentive to smear Mr. Wilson than Mr. Ellsberg. Nixon compounded the Vietnam War but didn't start it. The war in Iraq, by contrast, is Mr. Bush's invention.

Again following the Watergate template, the Bush administration at first tried to bury the whole Wilson affair by investigating itself. Even when The Washington Post reported two months after Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed that "two top White House officials" had called at least six reporters, not just Mr. Novak, to destroy Mr. Wilson and his wife, the inquiry was kept safely within the John Ashcroft Justice Department, with the attorney general, according to a Times report, being briefed regularly on details of the investigation. If that rings a Watergate bell now, that's because on Thursday you may have read the obituary of L. Patrick Gray, Mark Felt's F.B.I. boss, who, in a similarly cozy conflict of interest, kept the Nixon White House abreast of the supposedly independent Watergate inquiry in its early going.

Political pressure didn't force Mr. Ashcroft to relinquish control of the Wilson investigation to a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, until Dec. 30, 2003, more than five months after Mr. Novak's column ran. Now 18 more months have passed, and no one knows what crime Mr. Fitzgerald is investigating. Is it the tricky-to-prosecute outing of Mr. Wilson's wife, the story Judy Miller never even wrote about? Or has Mr. Fitzgerald moved on to perjury and obstruction of justice possibly committed by those who tried to hide their roles in that outing? If so, it would mean the Bush administration was too arrogant to heed the most basic lesson of Watergate: the cover-up is worse than the crime.

"Mr. Fitzgerald made his bones prosecuting the mob," intoned the pro-Bush editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, "and doesn't seem to realize that this case isn't about organized crime." But that may be exactly what it is about to an ambitious prosecutor with his own career on the line. That the Bush administration would risk breaking the law with an act as self-destructive to American interests as revealing a C.I.A. officer's identity smacks of desperation. It makes you wonder just what else might have been done to suppress embarrassing election-season questions about the war that has mired us in Iraq even as the true perpetrators of 9/11 resurface in Madrid, London and who knows where else.

IN his original Op-Ed piece in The Times, published two years to the day before Judy Miller went to jail, Mr. Wilson noted that "more than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already," before concluding that "we have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons." As that death toll surges past 1,700, that sacred duty cannot be abandoned by a free press now.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

July 11, 2005
It Just Gets Worse
By BOB HERBERT

Back in March 2004 President Bush had a great time displaying what he felt was a hilarious set of photos showing him searching the Oval Office for the weapons of mass destruction that hadn't been found in Iraq. It was a spoof he performed at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association.

The photos showed the president peering behind curtains and looking under furniture for the missing weapons. Mr. Bush offered mock captions for the photos, saying, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere" and "Nope, no weapons over there ... maybe under here?"
If there's something funny about Mr. Bush's misbegotten war, I've yet to see it. The president deliberately led Americans traumatized by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, into the false belief that there was a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and that a pre-emptive invasion would make the United States less vulnerable to terrorism.

Close to 600 Americans had already died in Iraq when Mr. Bush was cracking up the audience with his tasteless photos at the glittering Washington gathering. The toll of Americans has now passed 1,750. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died. Scores of thousands of men, women and children have been horribly wounded. And there is no end in sight.

Last week's terror bombings in London should be seen as a reminder not just that Mr. Bush's war was a hideous diversion of focus and resources from the essential battle against terror, but that it has actually increased the danger of terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies.

The C.I.A. warned the administration in a classified report in May that Iraq - since the American invasion in 2003 - had become a training ground in which novice terrorists were schooled in assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other terror techniques. The report said Iraq could prove to be more effective than Afghanistan in the early days of Al Qaeda as a place to train terrorists who could then disperse to other parts of the world, including the United States.

Larry Johnson, a former C.I.A. analyst who served as deputy director of the State Department's counterterrorism office, said on National Public Radio last week: "You now in Iraq have a recruiting ground in which jihadists, people who previously were not willing to go out and embrace the vision of bin Laden and Al Qaeda, are now aligning themselves with elements that have declared allegiance to him. And in the course of that, they're learning how to build bombs. They're learning how to conduct military operations."

Has the president given any thought to leveling with the American people about how bad the situation has become? And is he even considering what for him would be the radical notion of soliciting the counsel of wise men and women who might give him a different perspective on war and terror than the Kool-Aid-drinking true believers who have brought us to this dreadful state of affairs? The true believers continue to argue that the proper strategy is to stay the current catastrophic course.

Americans are paying a fearful price for Mr. Bush's adventure in Iraq. In addition to the toll of dead and wounded, the war is costing about $5 billion a month. It has drained resources from critical needs here at home, including important antiterror initiatives that would improve the security of ports, transit systems and chemical plants.

The war has diminished the stature and weakened the credibility of the United Sates around the world. And it has delivered a body blow to the readiness of America's armed forces. Much of the military is now overdeployed, undertrained and overworked. Many of the troops are serving multiple tours in Iraq. No wonder potential recruits are staying away in droves.

Whatever one's views on the war, thoughtful Americans need to consider the damage it is doing to the United States, and the bitter anger that it has provoked among Muslims around the world. That anger is spreading like an unchecked fire in an incredibly vast field.

The immediate challenge to President Bush is to dispense with the destructive fantasies of the true believers in his administration and to begin to see America's current predicament clearly. New voices with new approaches and new ideas need to be heard. The hole we're in is deep enough. We need to stop digging.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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Seems logical to me... --DN

"When the Going gets Weird, the Weird turn Pro"

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Am I PC, or what? :)

Studs is, as far as I know, alive and sharp at 93. So he was ~91 when he wrote this... --DN

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In Bed with Bush

Studs Terkel, In These Times
October 30, 2003

Editor's Note: This article is part of a special In These Times issue on the media, in which In These Times editors and contributors examine the current progressive media strategy and suggest what's needed, what progressives can learn and what the future holds. To see the other articles in this issue, please visit the In These Times website.



Upton Sinclair self-published a book called "The Brass Check" in 1919, 13 years after "The Jungle." The brass check was the coin used in whorehouses. The customer went up to see the madam and he would pay his two bucks -- this was long before inflation -- and receive a brass check, which he would give to the girl.

And at the end of the day the girl would cash in all her brass checks and get half a buck apiece. So Upton Sinclair took the brass check, and made it a reference to the press in those days. The journalists were pretty much brass check artists, they were like the girls in the brothel. And how much of that has changed in the past century?

Think about the coverage of George Bush, especially after 9/11, when David Broder, a solid, centrist journalist, compared Bush to Abraham Lincoln. That gives you an idea of the nonsense we have to deal with these days. We’re not talking now about the right-wing pundits, of whom nothing much need be said, we’re talking about journalists like Broder who are considered part of the "liberal media," which is of course an obscene phrase because of the burlesque nature of it.

Another horrendous example of the media and its cravenness was the lack of attention paid to Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) in September 2002. Here we had a conservative Democratic senator making one of the most eloquent addresses attacking the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act and the Bush administration for endangering our civil liberties, and for violating the constitution. It was a fantastic speech. You would have thought it would make headlines. Here was the dean of the Senate speaking about dangers to our fundamental rights. And the fact that it got so little reportage says more than you want to know about the media.

The other aspect of media today is its triviality. Trivia and political thought have become one. We have a new Teflon girl, Oprah Winfrey, who had Arnold Schwarzenegger on as a guest while he was a candidate for governor. It was a kiss-kiss hour. I don’t know how many millions of women watch her program, but it seems that she would at least have his leading opponent, Cruz Bustamante, on. But no one questioned the idea of Oprah having Schwarzenegger on as a guest in the midst of a campaign without any rebuttal. This was a farce that could be designed only by W. C. Fields -- a recall election and the leading candidate being a muscle-headed muscle-man actor. It seems to me that trivia and hype and style have taken over debate.

At the same time I am not going to be overwhelmingly pessimistic. There is reason for optimism. "Hope Dies Last" (the name of my new book) is a phrase used by Jessie de la Cruz, who worked very closely with Cesar Chavez organizing the farm workers. She said that whenever times were bleak, they had a phrase, "la esperanza muere última -- hope dies last." Because what is the alternative? Despair. And with despair, all that is left is the head in the oven, or about 20 sleeping pills and a couple of martinis -- or in my case a dozen martinis.

Hope has always been the hallmark of dissenters. We know something happened on Sept. 11, 2001, but there is another day -- Feb. 15, 2003 -- what I call "almost liberation day," when 10 million people across the world acting for peace attended protests against Bush’s preemptive strike at Iraq. That hope continues as an undercurrent in the many, many community groups. The issue could be the environment as well as peace, or civil liberties under John Ashcroft. The question is: Can it be made active?

I must make a confession here. I am a fellow alumnus of John Ashcroft; we both attended the University of Chicago Law School. I was there about 30 years before he was, but he is much older than I am. I maintain John Ashcroft is at least 300 years old, because he is simply the reincarnation of the Reverend Samuel Parris we saw in Arthur Miller’s play "The Crucible." The subject was witchcraft. We were as afraid of witchcraft then as we are of terrorists today. Reverend Parris came into Salem, as the chief prosecutorial officer, like Ashcroft is now. He pointed to the young hysterical girls and said you are not with me if you challenge me, you are consorting with the devil -- with evil.

Fantasy is at work here. Miller’s play is at work here. W.C. Field’s scenario is at work here. And over and above it all is this question: What’s to be done?

One of the things that keeps people from doing what they know they should do for their own good is the national Alzheimer’s disease. There is no memory of the past. There is no yesterday. There was no Depression. There was no New Deal. There is no memory that when the free market, which is our religion, fell on its fanny, the free marketeers -- I call them free buccaneers -- pleaded with the government, "Please help us out. Please save us." And of course the New Deal and regulation did. Now the sons and grandsons and daughters and granddaughters of those whose asses were saved by the New Deal, by big government, are the ones who most condemn big government today. And they are getting away with it, because of the media.

The key is not simply to dissent, but to turn the country around. What’s to be done is to act. To act is to do, to do is to cast your ballot, and to do is also to ask: Who is representing what? Which leads to the Democratic primary race.

Of course my candidate, Dennis Kucinich, who I knew as the boy mayor of Cleveland, is the ideal candidate for president. But he has as much chance of being nominated as the Chicago Bears do of winning the Super Bowl. He has no money and he is not known. It comes to hype again. One out of 100 people know his name.

Name recognition is what he needs, so that the Democratic Leadership Council, a toady group that has steadily moved the party to the right, will be forced to give him time on the platform at the Democratic Party Convention; multi-millions would then be aware of his presence and his significance.

I suppose the best of the lot, if it is not Dennis Kucinich, would be Howard Dean, because he is at least challenging the Democratic Leadership Council, which is of course the albatross that is somehow still at the rudder of that sinking ship. Had the Democratic Party true leadership, Kucinich would be the candidate. And, of course, if he were nominated, he would win. In a debate with Bush there would be a knockout in the first round, there would be no competition. And this is the perfect time for that, except for the role of the media.

Fortunately, we have an alternative press. The effect of the alternative press is seemingly minor, but it has a ripple-in-the-water effect. You can tell that by reading the letters to the editor in the Chicago Tribune -- my barometer of what the public is thinking. But aside from alternative journals like In These Times and Bill Moyers and humorist Jon Stewart on television, Upton Sinclair’s brass checks are alive and well today.

Now is the time to act, and, thus, become what we were born to be -- thinking, active citizens of a democratic society.

Studs Terkel is a well-known author, whose most recent book is "Hope Dies Last."
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1565848373/qid=1121105905/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_ur_2/103-9551554-1331011?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
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One of you good folks (BK) sent a reference to www.zoominfo.com and invited us to type in our name and see what came up. I did and there were 34 references, none of them to the actual "me."

But one of them was to a fellow who wrote something which couldn't have better expressed my feelings if I had written it myself, which I didn't. I think he did a better job than I could do, so without further ado, here he is:


An open letter to our Congress by (the other "DN"), April 15, 2005

To the U.S. House of Representatives
To the U.S. Senate

Sirs:

You have sold our children and our grandchildren into servitude and slavery. You have gutted any hope they might have had for a future. Your irresponsible spending of monies that are not yet in our treasury is collusion on a staggering scale and it is wholesale back alley thievery.

You ignore the wounded voice of we the people. We are hobbled under the weight of your legislated burden.

You have closed the halls of the people’s government and you refuse to hear our voice but, you open wide the doors of Congress to the corporate and special interest lobbies. The corporate and special interest lobbies have access to your privileged ears and these henchmen bring those irresistible bags full of money. You listen to them and you allow them to write our legislation.You profess allegiance to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness yet, you interfere in a person’s right to some dignity in death.

You suckle on the teats of the religious demagogue. Those teats merely feed you more corrupting money. These false prophets know not God, these false prophets worship at the altar of tyranny and treason. Theirs is a religion of political expedience and the repression of all others.

You claim the politics of a “culture of life” yet, you mandate horrendous murder. You sanctify torture, atrocity, genocide, and you abrogate your moral authority.

Warmongering politicians come before you making false claims and you validate their desires for wanton slaughter. You don’t have the decency to ask for the proof to their claims of imminent threats and dangerous perils to America.

You allow war profiteering and illegal detentions of people that are not even accused of any crime. Where is the proof and where is the evidence? The final reports to Congress are now in the public domain and the administration’s claims are proven to be false.

You accept the President’s word that is empty, hollow, and void of reasonable rationale. You freely submit to treasonous treachery waged by an illegal President.

Our election process is fraudulent. The results are suspicious and you refuse to investigate the allegations of deception. The process is invalid. The people are fooled into believing that our elections are legitimate. The elections are crooked just enough to change the results and there lays the heinous nature of your subversion.

The members of our Congress are ethically wayward. You seem proud of bribery and scandal. Our Congress is on the take and you gut the rules of ethical procedure. The criminals aren’t held to account and it is appalling.

Religious extremists compel the majority leader of the Senate to dispense with the rules of proper parliamentary procedure. The extremists want federal judges that are in agreement with their narrow vision and interpretation of our Constitution. This is sedition and it is appalling on any level.

You pander to the rich and corporate elite. You squander our nation’s resources and national treasures. You allow our environment to be polluted, our food to be poisoned, and you allow corruption to taint our prescription medicines.

You have changed our federal bureaucracy and staffed it on every level with incompetent and compliant yes men. You have failed the American people and it is appalling, it is abhorrent, and it is reprehensible.

Your motivations and your machinations are transparent and are fueled by criminal greed. You embrace hypocrisy and you make a mockery of the American good and the American ideal.

We are a nation deeply divided and you play on those divisions for political gain. We the American people are creeping eerily close to civil war and that fault lays clearly with our Congress.

The Republicans have failed us and the Democrats have failed us. In the grand American political theory we are supposed to be better than that which divides us.

You offer us no leadership. You take that which is not yours. You expect that we the American people are supposed to simply allow you to be corrupt.

Do not ignore us any longer. Hear and address our grievances. If necessary, the functions of our government must cease while we make right the things that are wrong.

If America is truly the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, we must make this the national standard once again across our land.

Following in no particular order, are some items that could be considered and these items are by no means inclusive --

Make reparations to our Native Americans. Come to terms with the Native Nations. Free Leonard Peltier and allow him to go home to his people. The FBI will kindly stay out of this.

Charge Jose Padilla or release him.

Bring our troops home from Iraq. This atrocity has gone on long enough.

Give the Palestinian people what is rightfully theirs. Israel will have to learn to live with it.

Hold the Bush administration to account for their crimes. The same standard applies to Tom Delay.

Give the American people back our airwaves.

Religion has no place in our government, especially in our federal courts.

You cannot drill for oil in the Arctic Preserve.

Remove John Negroponte, Michael Chertoff, Alberto Gonzales, and sever the no bid contracts with Halliburton and Bechtel.

Make restitution to the Iraqi people and make these restitutions equitable and make them quick.

Make reparations to the descendants of American slaves.

There are a host of other issues that can keep for another day, this is just a start but it will do for now.

most sincerely yours,
(the other DN).
grandiosely speaking on behalf of the American people

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The Bush Crowd: "A Real Threat to Our Republic"
BREAKING: Statement of Joseph Wilson on the sentencing of New York Times Reporter Judith Miller

EXCERPT:

CLG: When all is said and done, do you see the Bush Administration as a run-of-the-mill Republican Administration, or do you see it as something different, something a bit more 'sinister?' A lot of us are of the opinion that the Bush 'regime' is illegitimate and we feel that Republicans stole the election for George W. Bush in 2000. And many people think that the Republicans stole Ohio and therefore the election for Bush in 2004. If you look at the independent research, statistics indicate a pattern of serious incongruities between exit polling and the official results in key states that used electronic voting. Do you care to comment?

JW: (Ambassador Wilson) This is a radical regime, not a Republican administration. It is the most oppressive crowd I have ever seen and is a real threat to our republic. While I am not an expert in elections I can see how people might believe the last two elections were stolen. The lesson for the Democrats is to stop rolling over and stand up for what you believe in. The Republicans believe the Democrats and the press are soft and can be pushed around and that is what they are doing. To the detriment of us all.
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By Lauran Neergaard

Exercise your brain. Nourish it well. And the earlier you start, the better. That's the best advice doctors can yet offer to ward off Alzheimer's disease.

There's no guarantee. But more and more research shows that some fairly simple steps can truly lower your risk of the deadly dementia.

Also, if Alzheimer's strikes anyway, people who have followed this advice tend to do better -- their brains withstand the attack longer before symptoms become obvious.

The goal: Build up what's called a "cognitive reserve."

"Cognitive reserve is not something you're born with," Dr. Yaakov Stern of Columbia University told a meeting of Alzheimer's researchers Monday. "It's something that changes, and can be modified over time." In fact, there's now enough research backing this theory that the Alzheimer's Association is offering free classes around the country to teach people -- of any age, but especially baby boomers -- just how to do it. They call it "maintain your brain."

"There is tremendous interest in making sure that by the time you're 80, your brain is there with you," explains California psychologist Elizabeth Edgerly, who leads the program.

A healthy brain weighs about 2 pounds, roughly the size of a cauliflower. Networks of blood vessels keep oxygen flowing to 100 billion brain cells.

Branch-like tentacles extend from the ends of those cells, the brain's own specialized wiring to communicate. Under a microscope, they look like bushy hairs. A healthy brain can continue to grow new neurons and rewire and adapt itself throughout old age -- and you want your brain to be as bushy as possible.

That growth starts in childhood, when parents read to tots, and depends heavily on getting lots of education. The less educated have double the risk of getting Alzheimer's decades later than people with a college education. "Likewise, people who are less educated and have a not-so-challenging job have three to four times the risk of getting Alzheimer's," Stern says.

If you're already 40, don't despair. What's the advice?

Your brain is like a muscle -- use it or lose it. Brain scans show that when people use their brains in unusual ways, more blood flows into different neural regions, and new connections form. Do a new type of puzzle, learn to play chess, take a foreign language class or solve a vexing problem at work. "Try to challenge your brain daily," Edgerly advises.

A healthy brain isn't just an intellectual one. Social stimulation is crucial, too. Don't sit in front of the television. People who are part of a group, whether it's a church or a book club, age healthier. Declining social interaction predicts declining cognitive function, new government research shows.

So do stress and anxiety. People who have what's called chronic distress -- extreme worriers -- are twice as likely to develop some form of dementia, reports Dr. Robert Wilson of Rush University Medical Center. Why? Autopsies show these people actually had fewer bush-like tentacles, or dendrites, linking their brain cells, meaning their brains were more vulnerable when disease struck.

It's not clear if someone can reverse a lifetime of worry and anxiety, but animal studies suggest exercise eases the effects of this kind of stress.

Getting physical is crucial also. Bad memory is linked to heart disease and diabetes, because clogged arteries slow blood flow in the brain. Elderly people who were less mentally and physically active in middle age are about three times as likely to get Alzheimer's as they gray. A study from Sweden found the obese are twice as likely to get Alzheimer's.

Go for the triple-whammy of something mentally, physically and socially stimulating all at once: Coach your child's ball team. Take a dance class. Strategize a round of golf.

And don't forget diet. The same foods that are heart-healthy are brain-healthy, so avoid artery-clogging saturated fat and try for omega-3 fatty acids, found in fish and nuts.

Eat dark-skinned fruits and vegetables, which are particularly high in brain-healthy vitamins E and C. Harvard researchers found eating dark green leafy vegetables like spinach improves cognitive function. Also, B vitamins and folic acid, found in cereals, breads and fruits like strawberries, are important for brain health.

Editor's note: Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press. Source: Associated Press. Powered by Yellowbrix.
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THOMAS OLIPHANT

America's vulnerable railways

By Thomas Oliphant July 10, 2005

WASHINGTON

FEW OUTSIDE the usual band of lobbyists and inside players noticed, but just three weeks ago, a Senate committee cut the budget for rail and mass transit security in this country by one-third.

This action by the Senate's appropriators, reducing next year's budget to $100 million from $150 million this year, might have made some sense if there were evidence that it would have no impact on security.

However, the opposite is the case and has been for more than three years of inexcusable neglect and conniving between the Bush administration and its corporate buddies.

In the wake of last week's horror in London, it's a reasonable assumption that politicians here will scramble to restore the money, but even if that happens this summer, it is only a drop in the bucket.

Two years ago, the American Public Transport Association surveyed its transit agency members and uncovered about $6 billion in unmet needs. They do not lust for high-tech toys, but they need surveillance cameras for trains and stations, radio communications equipment, technology to control access to sensitive locations and to locate moving trains instantly -- the infrastructure of rapid response and protection.

Instead, the evidence shows an airport-fixated domestic security system that has little relation to real threat. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, some $250 million has been spent on rail and transit security, compared to more than $18 billion on air.

Among the 50 percent of the 9/11 Commission's specific recommendations a year ago that Congress and Bush have yet to act upon was the sensible notion that there should be a national transportation security strategy based on known threats and dangers.

Instead, there appears to have been not only inaction and delay, but unholy alliances between industry and government to avoid taking measures to protect against potentially catastrophic terrorism that is not difficult to imagine.

The classic example, almost from the moment this country was attacked, was the politically hyper-active chemical industry, which used White House contacts to block stiff rules requiring security upgrades at some 100 plants around the country. But this corporate and government misbehavior continues to this day.

The replacement of Bush crony Tom Ridge by Michael Chertoff this year as secretary of homeland security produced commitments for change from the highly regarded former prosecutor and federal judge, but Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts has concluded after three years of frustrating labor that the talk and the action don't line up.

Markey has often been the lone voice, not only on chemical and nuclear plants but on the movement of ''extremely hazardous materials" -- chemicals that can kill when their vapors are inhaled or are highly explosive or flammable. He and Democratic Senator Joe Biden of Delaware have encountered nothing but industry and administration obstacles in their attempts to force a sensible approach to guarding against disasters that might make 9/11 pale by comparison.

Biden recently cited a study by the Naval Research Laboratory that estimated as many as 100,000 people in a densely populated area could die within 30 minutes if a single, 90-ton freight car carrying chlorine were punctured.

Against industry (shipping as well as manufacturing) opposition and Bush's indifference, Biden and Markey have pushed separate legislation ideas that would give the government authority to reroute shipments of these extremely dangerous substances around major metropolitan areas and to force other security improvements on the profit-crazed industry.

But the best metaphor for the sorry state of affairs in the transit and rail sectors is an obscure court case here, involving an ordinance passed by the District of Columbia City Council. The local government had the temerity to ban shipments of the most dangerous chemicals from certain zones around the nation's capital, something the Bush people should have been doing on their own.

So what is the response? The shipping people (led by rail giant CSX Transportation [and guess who CSX's Man in Washington might be? Yep, ex-Chairman & CEO of CSX, John W. Snow, now Sec. of the Treasury. It's always incestuous, folks, always... --DN]) backed by the administration, files a lawsuit here to block the law's enforcement. They lost in US district court, but rather than accept the result they are appealing. Meanwhile nothing is happening.

The events in London provide all the evidence we need that terrorism is alive and functioning internationally nearly four years after 9/11.

It might be helpful if the government showed the same resolve as the terrorists, but it hasn't.

Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

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Go to Original
True Patriots Act
By Richard A. Kaye
The Los Angeles Times

Sunday 03 July 2005

You shouldn't have to surrender your liberties to prove you love the red, white and blue.

Given today's war-on-terrorism rhetoric, it's no surprise that patriotism dominates U.S. political discussions. Some of the more controversial parts of the Patriot Act are up for renewal, and the House of Representatives, after questioning a handful of its provisions, has approved the document. The debate on the merits of the act invariably has focused on the keen divide between the value of civil liberties and the imperatives of national security. Liberals worry about the Orwellian nature of the Patriot Act, while conservatives stress the necessary sacrifices in personal freedom required in the age of terrorism.

But something vital has been lost in this debate - namely, the disturbingly limited way in which many public officials define patriotism. Exactly when and how did patriotic feeling get defined in such reactive, negative terms? Since when does being patriotic require not so much a commitment to positive ideals and actions but, rather, to gestures that encourage an atmosphere of fearful watchfulness, xenophobia and the surrender of our freedoms?

Defenders of the Patriot Act insist that patriotism entails giving up some individual privacy to guard against the possibility of a terrorist attack from within or without. But patriotism also concerns a love of privacy and free speech and, not least important, a spirited willingness to defend those ideals.

Patriotism consists of multiple, positive actions on behalf of the United States - registering voters, working in an AIDS hospice, volunteering at a disadvantaged school or raising questions about the Bush administration's full-throttle militarism. Almost no one today discusses the idea of national service that would require young people of different ethnicities and economic backgrounds to come together for community projects, not military ones. The most disturbing aspect of the New Patriotism is its suggestion that dissent about the war in Iraq - or even a simple questioning of progress there - is unpatriotic.

Patriotism was not always so jingoistically defined. As the Princeton political scientist Maurizio Viroli argues in "For Love of Country," it was once a positive public virtue. According to the civic republican tradition (a tradition that includes thinkers as diverse as Machiavelli and Rousseau), patriotism was love not so much of country but of its republican forms and their traditions.

In Viroli's account, the good patriot makes sacrifices, works hard to preserve republican values and participates in civic life. This version of patriotism emphasizes positive freedom - our ability to act on our own behalf for the sake of the freedom of the republic - as opposed to negative liberty - passively allowing the state to protect us and in the process rob us of our liberties. The patriot works aggressively to defend the freedoms that make a people a republic.

The specter of a passive citizenry surrendering its rights is sadly pertinent - as is the danger of not distinguishing between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism, in the tradition outlined by Viroli, is an activist, participatory ideal. By contrast, nationalism is largely symbolic, and at its worst mere spectacle. (Witness the attempt by Congress to draft a constitutional amendment criminalizing flag burning.)

American historians remind us of those more enlightened moments in our history when patriotic feeling entailed a range of populist causes. Gordon S. Wood and Bernard Bailyn have separately documented the ways in which the Founding Fathers drew on classical republican ideals as they forged the ideology of a new nation.

Michael Kazin distinguished between patriotic sentiment and nationalistic passion. In "The Populist Persuasion," he wrote, "[In the] late 1930s, under the aegis of the New Deal, institutional patriotism was flourishing: the opening of the Jefferson Memorial and the National Archives (displaying immaculately preserved copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) and WPA's sponsorship of historic guides and murals all connoted a sunny view of the American prospect."

We should reflect on these earlier traditions in American history. Although appeals to patriotism are almost always used for repressive purposes, a patriotic position should not be simply grounded in a citizen's reflexive acceptance of fear and surveillance. It is also an active involvement in civic life.

There is always a negative side to patriotism in wartime. But in the climate created by the various "wars" in which the United States is involved today, there is no positive side - no higher task or mission is offered to people for which they can make real sacrifices. Other than spy on our neighbors and wrap oneself in the flag, our government asks little from its citizenry (it even is letting its citizens pay less in taxes and declines to establish a military draft).

Generating a culture of nervous suspicion, the Patriot Act outlandishly distorts an American tradition of patriotic thinking and action.
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Richard A. Kaye is an associate professor of English at Hunter College.
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"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." -- Samuel Adams
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...It'll take an awful lot of us to hit 'em in the wallet until it hurts, but have I mentioned: Hope springs eternal?... --DN

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SkinTheFox.com

In 1996, Fox News began broadcasting extreme right propaganda labeled "fair and balanced" reporting.

Fox "News" today is little more than an advertising arm of the current White House administration. With a clear intent : disseminate false information to support a government administration that came to power under questionable circumstances; maintain a government administration that remains in power through more questionable circumstances; and disseminate false and misleading information to the American People to support that current [and questionable] government administration.

We, the American People, will no longer tolerate or support advertising or political propaganda in the guise of "news." We will no longer tolerate or accept the brainwashing of America. We will no longer tolerate or support any sponsor who financially supports or contributes to Fox News' continued and mis-labeled "journalistic" practices.

Everyone genuflect and say thank you Amanda. Amanda sat through hours of Fox News broadcasts to bring you this list of sponsors. We will be updating it regularly and featuring a sponsor of the week every week so stop back by. Meanwhile -- Current Fox News Sponsors :

• BMW THE BMW GROUP Munich, GERMANY contact online

• Black & Decker CONSUMER SERVICE CENTER BLACK & DECKER 626 Hanover Pike Hampstead, MD 21074 USA contact online

• Burlington Coat Factory BURLINGTON COAT FACTORY 1830 Route 130 Burlington,NJ 08016 contact online

• Celebrity Cruises CELEBRITY-CRUISES 1080 Caribbean Way Miami, FL 33132 contact online

• CheapTickets.com CHEAP TICKETS 7 Sylvan Way Parsippany, NJ 07054 contact online

• Cingular CINGULAR WIRELESS Glenridge Highlands Two 5565 Glenridge Connector Atlanta, GA 30342 email cingular

• Dannon DANNON CONSUMER RESPONSE CENTER P.O. Box 90296 Allentown, PA 18109-0296 contact online

• Ditech.com DITECH.COM3200 Park Center Drive, Suite 150 Costa Mesa, CA 92626 contact online

• Dodge DODGE CUSTOMER ASSISTANCE CENTER P.O. Box 21-8004 Auburn Hills, MI 48321-8004 contact online

• Enova ENOVA OIL c/o ADM KAO LLC 4666 Faries Parkway Decatur, IL 62526 contact online

• Fidelity Investments FIDELITY INVESTMENTS 82 Devonshire Street Boston, MA 02109-3614 contact online

• Hula Networks HULA NETWORKS 340 East Middlefield Rd. Mountain View, CA 94043 contact online

• Hyatt Gold HYATT CORPORATION 200 W Madison St, 30th Fl. Chicago, IL 60606-3413 contact online

• Infiniti INFINITI CONSUMER AFFAIRS P.O. Box 191Gardena, CA 90248 contact online

• Jeep JEEP DAIMLER CHRYSLER CUSTOMER ASSISTANCE CENTER P.O. Box 21-8004 Auburn Hills, MI 48321-8004 contact online

• Lending Tree LENDING TREE INC. PMB 008 15105-D John J Delaney Drive Charlotte, NC 28277 contact online

• Lexus LEXUS P.O. Box 2991 ‹ Mail Drop L202 Torrance, CA 90509-2991

• Lincoln-Mercury [Ford] LINCOLN-MERCURY P.O. Box 1304 Dearborn, MI 48121 contact online

• Mercedes-Benz MERCEDES-BENZ USA, LLC Customer Assistance Center 3 Paragon Drive Montvale, N.J. 07645

• Morgan Stanley MORGAN STANLEY HQ1585 Broadway, Floor 39 New York, NY 10036 contact online

• Napster.com NAPSTER.COM c/o ROXIO, INC. 455 El Camino Real Santa Clara, CA 95050 contact online

• Northwestern Mutual NORTHWESTERN MUTUAL LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY 720 East Wisconsin Avenue N08WC Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53202 contact online

• Office Depot OFFICE DEPOT, INC.2200 Old Germantown Road Delray Beach, FL 33445 contact online

• Progressive Insurance THE PROGRESSIVE CORPORATION 6300 Wilson Mills Road Mayfield Village, Ohio 44143 contact online

• Splenda SPLENDA c/o JOHNSON & JOHNSON One Johnson & Johnson Plaza New Brunswick, NJ 08933 contact online

• Target TARGET CORPORATION1000 Nicollet Mall Mineapolis, MN 55403 contact online

• Travelocity TRAVELOCITY 3150 Sabre Dr. Southlake, TX 76092 email travelocity

• Walmart WAL-MART STORES, INC.Bentonville, Arkansas 72716-8611 contact online

That is what we have so far. More to come. Meanwhile --
Write them. Tell them Americans will no longer tolerate companies that support false advertising and partisan politics disguised as "fair and unbiased reporting."

We have a SAMPLE LETTER in case you are wondering where to start.

We have a new boycott sponsor of the week each week in case fifty letters will wipe you out but one you can handle : BOYCOTT OF THE WEEK

We voted with our ballots in November and that did not work. We will vote with our pocketbooks and pens now.

THE NEWSLETTER : stay current on the boycott of the week :::SUBSCRIBE::: to the newsletter.

* updated 04.17.05


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Excerpt:

I was informed of this fact by Rush Limbaugh. And Thomas Sowell. And Ann Coulter. And Rich Lowry. And Bill O'Reilly. And William Safire. And Robert Novak. And William F. Buckley, Jr. And George Will. And John Gibson. And Michelle Malkin. And David Brooks. And Tony Snow. And Tony Blankely. And Fred Barnes. And Britt Hume. And Larry Kudlow. And Sean Hannity. And David Horowitz. And William Kristol. And Hugh Hewitt. And Oliver North. And Joe Scarborough. And Pat Buchanan. And John McLaughlin. And Cal Thomas. And Joe Klein. And James Kilpatrick. And Tucker Carlson. And Deroy Murdock. And Michael Savage. And Charles Krauthammer. And Stephen Moore. And Alan Keyes. And Gary Bauer. And Mort Kondracke. And Andrew Sullivan. And Nicholas von Hoffman. And Neil Cavuto. And Matt Drudge. And Mike Rosen. And Dave Kopel. And John Caldara.
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:(((((((((((

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0921-01.htm

Well, I see Dennis' eyeball, possibly the first Cat 4 to hit the Florida Panhandle, ever, is about to clobber Pensacola.
http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=Pensacola,+FL

While nothing we say can convey the frustration, anger and desperate emotional stress of those in the path of yet another looming disaster, we who sweated out four hurricanes in six weeks last year (also first ever) certainly have a ton of empathy and sympathy for them.

Dennis passed well offshore from us, so all we have is some wind, some rain, some flooding, but not in equal measure, of course, among neighborhoods. We are fortunate to have been able to have some Lexan, some accordion shutters, some storm panels and a garage door brace installed a couple of weeks ago, so we feel a lot more comfortable. Not bulletproof, but relieved.

And some anger - what else is new - over the richest nation in the world being able to give billions of our tax dollars to the richest among us, and billions more to repair a sovereign nation we destroyed in the first place - for no damn good reason, yet unable to provide health care or reasonable insurance rates to millions of those who, thanks to the Great God Capitalism, have wound up with the shorter end of the stick.

The Caste System, Holy Grail to Repukes, giveth to the top, and to Hell with the rest.

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July 10, 2005

Hurricane Dennis Nears, on a Familiar Path
By MICHAEL WILSON

PENSACOLA, Fla., July 9 - Residents braced for the coming hurricane on Saturday while stepping over piles of nearly year-old debris from the last one.

Tammie Muller, 45, filling plastic bags with sand from a playground, pointed to the spot a few yards away where the water finally stopped rising that day last September, and burst into tears without warning. Casey Durant, 4, had been wearing a shirt her family recently found among possessions from their house that was destroyed - but she took it off because it itched from the tiny particles of insulation.

On one boarded-up house, the before-and-after-and-before time warp was written out in three painted words on the plywood: "Ivan Go Away!"

Hurricane Ivan came and went away from Pensacola on Sept. 16, a Category 3 storm that killed 29 people here and destroyed or damaged thousands of homes and buildings. On Saturday, as Hurricane Dennis bore down an almost identical path as Hurricane Ivan's - gaining strength as it approached - weary Pensacola residents did their best to shore up again, both physically and mentally. Many said they would drive north Saturday evening, a few hours ahead of the storm's outer bands, while others - although clearly a minority in most of September's hardest-hit areas - said they would ride it out behind their familiar layers of wood and nails and sand.

Thousands of residents moved into shelters on Friday as the storm seemed to veer slightly to the west, toward an Alabama landfall. In that state, Gov. Bob Riley declared a mandatory evacuation for Mobile County, a measure not taken in recent memory.

Nerves are frayed.

"They're seeing the kinds of problems you normally see after the storm," said Paul Muller, a retired Pensacola police officer with plenty of friends still on the job. "People fighting over cutting in line at the gas station, or taking the last thing off the shelf."

Across town, Lois Whitley, 67, awoke to find most of the storm guards for her windows missing from the garage. "Eleven are missing," she said after calling the police. "Stealing from a widow."

At a news conference, Sheriff Ron McNesby of Escambia County, where Pensacola is located, urged residents of surrounding counties to "be patient" with the exodus. "Normally we have a hard time getting people to evacuate, but since our last hurricane, it's not a problem," he said.

There were more than 900 calls to 911 from low-lying areas during Hurricane Ivan, with deputies pulled off the street and unable to respond.

Of grave concern to the authorities here were the dangerous states of construction, preconstruction or demolition remaining in the low-lying coastal areas. There was less concern about vegetative debris, like trees, because most of the trees are gone. In the Grand Lagoon subdivision on the water, perhaps hardest hit by Hurricane Ivan with several deaths, piles of wood and broken cinderblocks at the curb carried the threat of transforming into dangerous missiles when Hurricane Dennis's high winds hit.

Passengers arriving in town by airplane could look out the windows and see streets dotted with telltale blue plastic tarps stretched across rooftops.

"Hell, it looks good here now," said Sheriff's Deputy Rick Durant, who lost a house in the Grand Lagoon area, recalling how he called his wife last September to tell her that not only their house, but most of the block, had been wiped out.

Dr. Jamie Covan, 43, a Pensacola dentist, looked at a debris pile, taller than him, beside his large, three-year-old beachside home in Grand Lagoon. "It took them a while to get their debris cleaned up," Dr. Covan said, referring to his neighbors; he wondering aloud whether it was now too late. During Hurricane Ivan, he and his wife threw their lawn furniture into the swimming pool. It was washed away anyway. He said he was confident in his home's state-of-the-art windows, certified to withstand gusts of 135 miles an hour.

Elsewhere, in working-class neighborhoods, there are no such windows, just sheets of wood. Robert Shumpert, 70, hammer in hand, looked over his shoulder at his brand new carport, which replaced the one Hurricane Ivan blew away. "We just finished it two days ago," Mr. Shumpert said. "I'm fixing to lose it again. We're not in as bad a shape as it might seem, but it's bad enough. You can't get anybody to come out here," he said, echoing complaints of a shortage of roofers after Hurricane Ivan.

Hal Peebles, 72, a retired Navy officer, lived in Grand Lagoon for 25 years until his home was washed off its foundation by Hurricane Ivan. "I know people who barely escaped with their lives," Mr. Peebles said, stopping to borrow a sheet of plywood from a former neighbor. "There are fewer of those after Ivan. If you didn't learn your lesson with Ivan, you're not going to."
He looked at the half-repaired and under-construction homes around him and said, "If this is a Category 4 or 5, all of this will be gone."

Ms. Muller said that she left town with her husband as Hurricane Ivan approached last year, and began to cry as she remembered coming home.

"When we left last time, this whole place was a mess," she said. "The whole city was just torn up. And then people started coming up dead. It was very scary."

South Florida was spared serious damage from Hurricane Dennis. In southern Miami-Dade County, gusting wind knocked out many of the traffic lights along U.S. Route 1, one of the main routes to and from the Florida Keys. Few cars were on the road early Saturday morning, and police cruisers were stationed at intersections where the traffic lights were out.

According to radio broadcasts, more than 100,000 homes in Miami-Dade County were without electricity. But most homes in the county still had power.

Weather reports had suggested that there was little probability that Miami and the rest of the east coast of Florida would get much of the force of Hurricane Dennis. Residents seemed to take the arrival of the storm in stride. They had either stocked up on batteries, water and other emergency supplies or concluded they would not need them. In drugstores in the southern part of Miami-Dade County there were plenty of batteries and no lines of customers stocking up.

Amy Halsey and her husband, Douglas, had scheduled a dinner party for Friday night in their home in Pinecrest and went right ahead as the local television station reported nonstop on the approaching hurricane. The lights in their dining room flickered and then went out about 10 p.m. Ms. Halsey simply struck matches and lit a row of candles in the center of her long table; there was not even a pause in conversation.

But in Pensacola, busy hands cut wood throughout the morning, and Hal Banks, 46, paused in his garage from his sawing and joked that Arizona was looking pretty good.

"A lot of us are just shell-shocked," Mr. Banks said. "The unwritten rule is that you get one hurricane season off, but
that hasn't happened."

Joseph B. Treaster contributed reporting from Miami-Dade County for this article.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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...we need to start putting some of the Bush thugs and crooks in prison.

Reminds me of the lawyer joke about what are 100 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? Answer: A good start.

Rove and Libby and Cheney would be a good start... --DN

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The following letter is being circulated By Rep. John Conyers Jr. to other House Democrats for signatures. The letter will be sent to the White House on Thursday July 7th.

07 July 2005

The President
The White House
Washington, DC

Dear Mr. President:

We write in order to urge that you require your Deputy White House Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, to either come forward immediately to explain his role in the Valerie Plame matter or to resign from your Administration.

Notwithstanding whether Mr. Rove intentionally violated the law in leaking information concerning former CIA operative Valerie Plame, we believe it is not tenable to maintain Mr. Rove as one of your most important advisors unless he is willing to explain his central role in using the power and authority of your Administration to disseminate information regarding Ms. Plame and to undermine her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

We now know that e-mails recently turned over by Time, Inc. between writer Matthew Cooper and Time editors reveal that one of Mr. Cooper's principal sources in the Plame matter was Mr. Rove. This has been confirmed by Newsweek and two lawyers representing witnesses involved in the investigation. Mr. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, also has confirmed that Mr. Rove was interviewed by Mr. Cooper in connection with a possible article about Ms. Plame three or four days before Robert Novak wrote a column outing Ms. Plame as a CIA operative.

We also know that Mr. Rove told Chris Matthews that Ambassador Wilson's wife and her undercover status were "fair game." A White House source also appears to have previously acknowledged that Mr. Rove contacted Mr. Matthews and other journalists, indicating that "it was reasonable to discuss who sent Wilson to Niger."

The above facts appear to be directly inconsistent with previous statements by you and representatives of your Administration concerning leaking in general and the Plame case in particular. For example, on September 30, 2003, you stated "there's just too many leaks [in Washington]. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is." You also stated "I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business." On October 10, 2003, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was asked if Mr. Rove or two other aides in your Administration had ever discussed the Plame matter with any reporter, and he stated he had spoken to Mr. Rove and the others and "they assured me that they were not involved in this."

Regardless of whether these actions violate the law - including specific laws against the disclosure of classified information as well as broader laws against obstruction of justice, the negligent distribution of defense information, and obligating reporting of press leaks to proper authorities - they seem to reveal a course of conduct designed to threaten and intimidate those who provide information critical of your Administration, such as Ambassador Wilson.

We hope you agree with us that such behavior should never be tolerated by any Administration. While it is acceptable for a private citizen to use every legal tool at his or her disposal to protect himself against legal liability, high-ranking members of your Administration who are involved in any effort to smear a private citizen or to disseminate information regarding a CIA operative should be expected to meet a far higher standard of ethical behavior and forthrightness. This is why we believe it is so important that Mr. Rove publicly and fully explain his role in this matter.

Sincerely,
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KARL ROVE: WORSE THAN OSAMA BIN LADEN
By Ted Rall
Tue Jul 5, 8:05 PM ET

NEW YORK--In war collaborators are more dangerous than enemy forces, for they betray with intimate knowledge in painful detail and demoralize by their cynical example. This explains why, at the end of occupations, the newly liberated exact vengeance upon their treasonous countrymen even though they allow foreign troops to conduct an orderly withdrawal.

If, as state-controlled media insists, there is such a creature as a Global War on Terrorism, our enemies are underground Islamist organizations allied with or ideologically similar to those that attacked us on 9/11. But who are the collaborators?

The right points to critics like Michael Moore, yours truly, and Ward Churchill, the Colorado professor who points out the gaping chasm between America's high-falooting rhetoric and its historical record.

But these bête noires are guilty only of the all-American actions of criticism and dissent, not to mention speaking uncomfortable truths to liars and deniers.

As far as we know, no one on what passes for the "left" (which would be the center-right anywhere else) has betrayed the United States in the GWOT. No anti-Bush progressive has made common cause with Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan or any other officially designated "terrorist" group. No American liberal has handed over classified information or worked to undermine the CIA.

But it now appears that Karl Rove, GOP golden boy, has done exactly that.

Last week Time magazine turned over its reporter's notes to a special prosecutor assigned to learn who told Republican columnist Bob Novak that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent.

The revelation, which effectively ended Plame's CIA career and may have endangered her life, followed her husband Joe Wilson's publication of a New York Times op-ed piece that embarrassed the Bush Administration by debunking its claims that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger.

Time's cowardly decision to break its promise to a confidential source has had one beneficial side effect: according to Newsweek, it indicates that Karl Rove himself made the call to Novak.

One might have expected Rove, the master White House political strategist who engineered Bush's 2000 coup d'état and post-9/11 permanent war public relations campaign, to have ordered a flunky underling to carry out this act of high treason.

But as the Arab saying goes, arrogance diminishes wisdom.

Rove, whose gaping maw recently vomited forth that Democrats didn't care about 9/11, is atypically silent. He did talk to the Time reporter but "never knowingly disclosed classified information," claims his attorney. But there's circumstantial evidence to go along with Time's leaked notes.

Ari Fleischer abruptly resigned as Bush's press secretary on May 16, 2003, about the same time the White House became aware of Ambassador Wilson's plans to go public. (Wilson's article appeared July 6.) Did Fleischer quit because he didn't want to act as spokesman for Rove's plan to betray CIA agent Plame?

Another interesting coincidence: Novak published his Plame column on July 14, Fleischer's last day on the job.

If Newsweek's report is accurate, Karl Rove is more morally repugnant and more anti-American than Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden, after all, has no affiliation with, and therefore no presumed loyalty to, the United States. Rove, on the other hand, is a U.S. citizen and, as deputy White House chief of staff, a high-ranking official of the U.S. government sworn to uphold and defend our nation, its laws and its interests.

Yet he sold out America just to get even with Joe Wilson.

Osama bin Laden, conversely, is loyal to his cause. He has never exposed an Al Qaeda agent's identity to the media.

"[Knowingly revealing Plame's name and undercover status to the media]...is a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and is punishable by as much as ten years in prison," notes the Washington Post.

Unmasking an intelligence agent during a time of war, however, surely rises to giving aid and comfort to America's enemies--treason.

Treason is punishable by execution under the United States Code.

How far up the White House food chain does the rot of treason go?

"Bush has always known how to keep Rove in his place," wrote Time in 2002 about a "symbiotic relationship" that dates to 1973.

This isn't some rogue "plumbers" operation.

Rove would never go it alone on a high-stakes action like Valerie Plame. It's a safe bet that other, higher-ranking figures in the Bush cabal--almost certainly Dick Cheney and possibly Bush himself--signed off before Rove called Novak.

For the sake of national security, those involved should be removed from office at once.

Rove and his collaborators should quickly resign and face prosecution for betraying their country, but given their sense of personal entitlement, impeachment is probably the best we can hope for. Congress, and all Americans, should place patriotism ahead of party loyalty.
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SACRED LIFEBOATS
Voting in America

"You'd think in an open democracy that the government - answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders - would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.You'd be wrong." - Thom Hartmann

Vote Fraud with Voting Machines without a paper trail.

This is almost too painful to bear, especially as it is ignored by our "watchdog" media. The discrepancy between the exit polls and media-reported results of the 2004 presential election happening by accident are close to 1 in a million. See article below.

Go to votergate.tv to see an investigative documentary 30-minute film uncovering the truth about new computer voting systems, which allow a few powerful corporations to record our votes in secret.

Some good news:
Go to VerifiedVoting.org for information on how voters across the country have successfully persuaded state governments to pass or propose legislation/regulations to require voter-verified paper ballots. 19 now have legislation/regulations requiring paper ballots, 2 await governor's signature and 16 have proposed but not yet enacted such laws.

Go to fairvote.org for a progress report on instant runoff voting (IRV) which is a hybrid form of democratic election in which voters rank candidates in order of preference. If nobody wins 40 percent, there is a run-off between the top two candidates. Each would get the votes of the people who ranked them second. This supports candidates who represent the choice of a majority of voters. It also accommodates voters having better choices and encourages winning candidates to reach out to more people.

Go to blackboxvoting.org, for news and information on the campaign to do away with record-less voting machines. They are a nonpartisan, nonprofit, 501c(3) organization, the official consumer protection group for elections and are funded by citizen donations.

Scientific Analysis Suggests Presidential Vote Counts May Have Been Altered

Group of University Professors Urges Investigation of 2004 Election

WASHINGTON - March 31, 2005. Officially, President Bush won November's election by 2.5%, yet exit polls showed Kerry winning by 3%. [1] According to a report to be released today by a group of university statisticians, the odds of a discrepancy this large between the national exit poll and election results (is simply not credible.)
In other words, by random chance alone, it could not have happened. But it did.

Two alternatives remain.

Either something was wrong with the exit polling, or something was wrong with the vote count.

Exit polls have been used to verify the integrity of elections in the Ukraine, in Latin America, in Germany, and elsewhere. Yet in November 2004, the U.S. exit poll discrepancy was much more than normal exit poll error (and similar to that of the invalid Ukraine election.)

In a recent survey of US members of the world's oldest and largest computer society, The Association for Computing Machinery, 95% opposed software driven un-auditable voting machines[3], of the type that now count at least 30% of U.S. votes. Today's electronic vote-counting machines are not required to include basic safeguards that would prevent and detect machine or human caused errors, be they innocent or deliberate. [4]

The consortium that conducted the presidential exit polls, Edison/Mitofsky, issued a report in January suggesting that the discrepancy between election results and exit polls occurred because Bush voters were more reticent than Kerry voters in response to pollsters.

The authors of this newly-released scientific study Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Poll Discrepancies consider this "reluctant Bush responder" hypothesis to be highly implausible, based on extensive analysis of Edison/Mitofsky's exit poll data.

They conclude, "The required pattern of exit poll participation by Kerry and Bush voters to satisfy the exit poll data defies empirical experience and common sense under any assumed scenario."

A state-by-state analysis of the discrepancy between exit polls and official election results shows highly improbable skewing of the election results, overwhelmingly biased towards the President.

The report concludes, "We believe that the absence of any statistically-plausible explanation for the discrepancy between Edison/Mitofsky's exit poll data and the official presidential vote tally is an unanswered question of vital national importance that needs thorough investigation."

Ph.D. statisticians in America who have seen this group's preliminary exit poll study have not refuted it. This new study is a much more comprehensive an analysis of the exit poll discrepancies.

Full report (PDF)
Executive Sumnmary (PDF)

In her site, Stop Bitching!, Pat Denino, a fiber artist from Ohio who detests coloring inside the lines, says:

At the conclusion of the study of the data, the authors of the March 31 report determined that there was a one-in-959,000 chance that the Mitofsky exit polls were wrong. So let's take a look at what we have here. That's damned close to saying there's a one in a million chance the polls were wrong.

I have a little exercise for you to try. Get a tube of lipstick and stand in front of your bathroom mirror. Write on the mirror, "There's one chance in a million that George Bush was honestly elected to be our president." Now read it and watch yourself reading it. What kind of expression do you see on your face? Look closely at yourself reading it. Look into your eyes, then through your eyes and into your heart. Read what you see there when confronted with reality. I'm not just asking this of the people who are pleased with the election outcome. I'm talking to everybody. At a deeper level than politics and partisanship, I'm talking about truth.



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...they're baaaaccck.

Wait... what's that noise? Is that a trumpet playing taps for the Posse Comitatus Act? And is that the Patriot Act I hear humming along, with a smile on its fascist funnyface?

Yet another camel's nose under the tent --DN

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
http://www.futuris.net/stasi/stasi.htm



Military Expands Homeland Efforts

Pentagon to Share Data With Civilian Agencies

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 6, 2005

A new Pentagon strategy for securing the U.S. homeland calls for expanded U.S. military activity not only in the air and sea -- where the armed forces have historically guarded approaches to the country -- but also on the ground and in other less traditional, potentially more problematic areas such as intelligence sharing with civilian law enforcement.

The strategy is outlined in a 40-page document, approved last month, that marks the Pentagon's first attempt since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to present a comprehensive plan for defending the U.S. homeland.

The document argues that a more "active, layered" defense is needed and says that U.S. forces must be ready to deal not just with a single terrorist strike but also with "multiple, simultaneous" attacks involving mass casualties.

The document does not ask for new legal authority to use military forces on U.S. soil, but it raises the likelihood that U.S. combat troops will take action in the event that civilian and National Guard forces are overwhelmed. At the same time, the document stresses that primary responsibility for domestic security continues to rest with civilian agencies.

"The role of the military within domestic American society, both by law and by history, has been carefully constrained, and there is nothing in our strategy that would move away from that historic principle," said Paul McHale, the Pentagon's assistant secretary for homeland defense.

Still, some of the provisions appear likely to draw concern from civil liberties groups that have warned against a growing military involvement in homeland missions and an erosion of long-established barriers to military surveillance and combat operations in the United States.

The document acknowledges, for instance, plans to team military intelligence analysts with civilian law enforcement to identify and track suspected terrorists. It also recognizes an expanded role for the National Guard in preparing to deal with the aftermath of terrorist attacks. And it asserts the president's authority to deploy ground combat forces on U.S. territory "to intercept and defeat threats."

"It's a mixed message," said Timothy H. Edgar, a national security specialist with the American Civil Liberties Union. "I do see language in the document acknowledging limits on military involvement, but that seems at odds with other parts of the document. They seem to be trying to have it both ways."

The document, titled "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support," was signed June 24 by acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England and is now a basis for organizing troops, developing weapons and assigning missions. It was released late last week without the sort of formal news conference or background briefing that often accompanies major defense policy statements.

McHale, in an interview, said the new strategy represents a major shift from a reactive mind-set that existed before the 2001 attacks. The emphasis since, he said, has been on pressing U.S. defenses outward to spot and eliminate threats before they reach U.S. territory.

"The strategy's implementation hinges on an active, layered defense in depth that is designed to defeat the most dangerous challenges early, at a safe distance, before they are allowed to mature," the document says.

The assumption of the need to prepare for multiple, simultaneous terrorist attacks, McHale explained, marks a change from previous planning scenarios that had envisioned single strikes. The change is based on what McHale called a "recurring pattern" of attacks around the world by al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Under the new strategy, U.S. air and naval forces will continue to improve efforts to scan and patrol approaches to the United States. Some of the moves began immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. But maritime efforts have lagged airspace measures, and even U.S. air defenses will require further improvementsto deal with potential attacks by low-flying cruise missiles and pilotless aircraft, the document notes.
The strategy draws a distinction between the "lead" role that the Pentagon intends to play in bolstering these long-established air and sea missions and the "support" role still envisioned for U.S. land operations.

Legal barriers to sending the armed forces into U.S. streets have existed for more than a century under the Posse Comitatus Act. Enacted in 1878, the law was prompted by the perceived misuse of federal troops after the Civil War to supervise elections in the former Confederate states. Over the years, the law has come to reflect a more general reluctance to involve the military in domestic law enforcement, although its provisions have been amended from time to time to allow some exceptions, including a military role in putting down insurrections, in assisting in drug interdiction work, and in providing equipment, training and advice.

Along with civil liberties groups, many senior Pentagon officials have tended to be wary of seeing troops operate on U.S. soil. Military commanders argue that their personnel are not specifically trained in domestic security, and they worry that homeland tasks could lead to serious political problems.
Still, the Pentagon has established new administrative structures in recent years in recognition of a growing military contribution to homeland defense. It set up the Northern Command in 2002 to oversee military operations in the United States. It created a new assistant secretary for homeland defense. And it designated a one-star general on the Joint Chiefs of Staff to work on the issue.

Additionally, the National Guard has been building small "civil support teams" to provide emergency assistance in the wake of a chemical, biological, nuclear or high-explosive attack. By the end of 2007, 55 of the 22-person teams are due -- at least one for each state and U.S. territory.

The new strategy notes that the Guard "is particularly well suited for civil support missions" because it is "forward deployed in 3,200 communities," exercises routinely with local law enforcement and is accustomed to dealing with communities in times of crisis. Indeed, Guard leaders have welcomed an expanded homeland security role.

But they have also argued for allowing the Guard to retain its overseas combat missions, concerned that a sole focus on civil support would undermine the Guard's ability to serve as a strategic reserve and to fight in future wars.

The new strategy calls for the development of larger sets of "modular reaction forces" to be staffed by the Guard for dealing with the aftermath of mass-casualty attacks. Officials said the composition of these forces is under discussion as part of this year's Quadrennial Defense Review, a Pentagon-wide reassessment of missions, weapons and forces.

But the homeland defense strategy also explicitly rejects the idea of dedicating these additional Guard forces to the civil support mission, saying they will remain "dual mission in nature."

In the area of intelligence, the strategy speaks of developing "a cadre" of Pentagon terrorism specialists and of deploying "a number of them" to "interagency centers" for homeland defense and counterterrorism -- a reference to new teaming arrangements with the FBI and other domestic law enforcement agencies. The document notes that this represents a significant departure from the Cold War when Pentagon analysts worked mostly with the State Department and the intelligence community to combat the Soviet Union.

"The move toward a domestic intelligence capability by the military is troubling," said Gene Healy, a senior editor at the Cato Institute, a nonprofit libertarian policy research group in Washington.

"The last time the military got heavily involved in domestic surveillance, during the Vietnam War era, military intelligence kept thousands of files on Americans guilty of nothing more than opposing the war," Healy said. "I don't think we want to go down that road again."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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This is what used to happen in totalitarion nations. You know - like Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Kapitalist Amerika... Sure hope it never comes to a home housing a Republican voter. Then again, not likely. How many poor folks with zero clout vote Repukian? That's right, only the ones whose votes for a Democrat turned out to be votes for a Repugthug after disappearing into the unverifiable black hole of the black box, owned and proprietarily programmed by guess who?... --DN
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=black+box+voting


July 5, 2005

By JOHN TIERNEY

PITTSBURGH — Two questions I'd like to ask candidates for Sandra Day O'Connor's job:

1. Does the Constitution forbid the government from seizing your home and giving it to someone else?

2. If you're not sure, would you be willing to tour Pittsburgh before taking this job?

Justice O'Connor had no problem with the first question. Noting that the Fifth Amendment allows property to be taken only for a "public use" like a road, she rejected arguments that it could be given to a developer just because the public could benefit from new jobs and tax revenues. By that logic, she argued in one of her last opinions, no one's home or business would be safe from anyone with a better use in mind for it.

But her side was outvoted, 5 to 4, by justices not inclined to be too literal about the Bill of Rights. They were pragmatists, arguing that land grabs like this had previously been allowed, which is quite right. And that's why I recommend a trip to my hometown to see the long-term effects.

Pittsburgh has been the great pioneer in eminent domain ever since its leaders razed 80 buildings in the 1950's near the riverfront park downtown. They replaced a bustling business district with Gateway Center, an array of bland corporate towers surrounded by the sort of empty plazas that are now considered hopelessly retrograde by urban planners trying to create street life.

At the time, though, the towers and plazas seemed wonderfully modern. Viewed from across the river, the new skyline was a panoramic advertisement for the Pittsburgh Renaissance, which became a national model and inspired Pittsburgh's leaders to go on finding better uses for private land, especially land occupied by blacks.

Bulldozers razed the Lower Hill District, the black neighborhood next to downtown that was famous for its jazz scene (and now famous mostly as a memory in August Wilson's plays). The city built a domed arena that was supposed to be part of a cultural "acropolis," but the rest of the project died. Today, having belatedly realized that downtown would benefit from people living nearby, the city is trying to entice them back to the Hill by building homes there.

In the 1960's, the bulldozers moved into East Liberty, until then the busiest shopping district outside downtown. Some of the leading businessmen there wanted to upgrade the neighborhood, so hundreds of small businesses and thousands of people were moved to make room for upscale apartment buildings, parking lots, housing projects, roads and a pedestrian mall.

I was working there in a drugstore whose owners cursed the project, and at first I thought they were just behind the times. But their worst fears were confirmed. The shopping district was destroyed. The drugstore closed, along with the department stores, movie theaters, office buildings and most other businesses.

You'd think a fiasco like that would have humbled Pittsburgh's planners, but they just went on. They kicked out a small company to give H. J. Heinz more room. Mayor Tom Murphy has attracted national attention for his grand designs - and fights - to replace thriving small businesses downtown and on the North Side with more upscale tenants.

The city managed to clear out shops and an office building to make room for a new Lazarus department store, built with $50 million in public funds, but Lazarus did not live up to its name. It has shut down and left a vacant building. Meanwhile, the city's finances are in ruins, and businesses and residents have been fleeing the high taxes required to pay off decades of urban renewal projects and corporate subsidies.

Yet the mayor still yearns for more acquisitions. He welcomed the Supreme Court decision, telling The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that eminent domain "is a great equalizer when you're having a conversation with people." Well, that's one way to describe the power to take people's property.

But I think a future Supreme Court justice would have a different view of eminent domain after touring Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, especially those that escaped urban renewal: the old-fashioned business districts with crowded sidewalks and the newly gentrified neighborhoods with renovated homes and converted warehouses. The future justice would quickly see what sets the success stories apart from Gateway Center and East Liberty. No politicians ever seized those homes and businesses for a "better use."

E-mail: tierney@nytimes.com

For Further Reading:
Private Property Rights, Institute for Justice.
Death by Wrecking Ball: Pittsburgh and the Politics of Eminent Domain by Bill Steigerwald, Reason Magazine, June 2000.
Witness to the Fifties: The Pittsburgh Photographic Library, 1950-53, edited by Constance B. Bchultz and Steven W. Plattner, narrative by Clarke M. Thomas, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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...and how they got to be in charge, and why they will continue to be in charge of our lives. And why I feel so strongly about them. And why I've left the Il Duce quote (maybe) up there so long.

Pitt's explanation reads better than any text you'll find in a classroom. As a matter of fact, you'd never find it in any corporate/state-controlled public school.

This is why July 4, 2005 bears little relationship to July 4, 1776.

Pitt mentions IG Farben. He didn't mention the Bush Family Evil Empire (BFEE) and its entanglement with Farben and the Nazis and how the Bush family fortune was provided by the Third Reich.

What's that? You scoff? Go to www.google.com and type "ig farben bush" (w/o the quotes) into the search bar. 26,200 hits. When you've had your fill of that, type in a new search for "bush nazi" -- again, as always, without the quotes. 2,260,000 hits. Interesting, huh? Still no regrets if you voted for these scum? Tsk, tsk... --DN

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How Corporations Became Living Entities with Full Rights and Privileges in the United States

The Supremacy of the Super-Citizen

By William Rivers Pitt

t r u t h o u t Perspective

Thursday 30 June 2005

"Unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations."
-- Andrew Jackson, farewell address, 04 March 1837

The document reads, "All men are created equal." When those words were first put to paper, of course, the literal meaning of the phrase did not match what was written. A more accurate sentence would have read, "All white land-owning men are created equal," but despite the inherent racism and misogyny buried in the original meaning, the words had magic and power enough to lay the groundwork for 200 years of progress.

The words as written became the basis for reform after reform, for the strengthening of the rights of minorities, women, and basically anyone who would be made subservient to anyone else. The struggle took a long time, and continues today with much remaining to do before that equality is truly achieved, but the strength of those words as written has been proven time and again to be more than a match for anyone who would stand on the neck of a fellow citizen.

That's what the billboard reads, anyway. That's the propaganda, the myth, the way we rock ourselves to sleep at night. The truth is significantly different, however, and is at the root of just about everything that has gone wrong with this great democratic experiment.

We are not all created equal, in fact. This inequality is not based on race, or sex, or religion, but upon the slow development of a body of laws that have created and empowered a breed of super-citizens which rule over every aspect of our lives, almost completely beyond the reach of justice. These super-citizens exist today under the familiar name "corporation."

But wait, a corporation is basically a company, right? A corporation is a non-living entity, a group of people endeavoring to make money in a business enterprise or non-profit organization, right? Wrong. A corporation is indeed a non-living entity, a group of people looking to make money. But thanks to a Supreme Court decision, corporations are also actual living entities in every legal sense of the word, with all rights and privileges of citizenship - and several more besides - intact.

A Short History of Corporations

The word "corporation" comes from the Latin "corpus," or "body." The Oxford English Dictionary defines "corporation" as "a group of people authorized to act as an individual." The history of corporations in America is intertwined with the story of the revolution that birthed this nation. British corporations in colonial America were rebelled against vigorously as representatives of the Crown, which they were.

Many of the principal actors in the American revolution, among them George Washington, wanted to throw off British rule because they felt their ability to conduct commerce freely was being disrupted. When 60 Boston residents hurled the tea into Boston Harbor in 1773, it was an attack specifically upon the economic power and supremacy of a corporation called the British East India Tea Company, which had been undercutting the profits of colonial merchants thanks to the passage of the Tea Acts.

After the revolution, and for a hundred years, the American people bore a deep distrust of the corporation, and corporations were regulated severely. Corporate charters were created by individual states, and those states had the power to revoke that charter if the corporation was deemed to be acting against the public good or had deviated from its charter. Corporations were not allowed to own other corporations, nor were they allowed to participate in the political process.

Very slowly over that 100 years, however, the power of the corporation began to grow. In the 1818 Supreme Court case "Dartmouth College v. Woodward," Daniel Webster, advocating for Dartmouth, argued passionately for the power of corporations in regards to property rights. The Court sided with Webster and corporate rights, stating: "The opinion of the Court, after mature deliberation, is that this corporate charter is a contract, the obligation of which cannot be impaired without violating the Constitution of the United States. This opinion appears to us to be equally supported by reason, and by the former decisions of this Court."

A good deal of hell was raised after this decision, with many citizens and state legislatures standing upon the right of a state to repeal or amend a corporate charter. Seven years later, however, another Supreme Court case buttressed the power of the corporation with their decision in "Society for the Preservation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts v. Town of Pawlet." The Society was seeking to protect its colonial-era property grants in Vermont, while Vermont was seeking to revoke those grants. The Court decided in favor of the Society, and explicitly extended the same protections to corporation-owned property as are enjoyed by property-owning natural persons.

Corporations in America began to become truly powerful with the rise of the railroads. Railroads were the lifeblood of the growing nation, carrying both agriculture and industry from one side of the country to the other. This was a highly profitable enterprise, and railroad corporations began to exert heavy influence on both state and federal leaders. Corporate attorneys boldly asserted the precedents set in the Dartmouth and Society Supreme Court decisions, demanding that corporations deserved to have at least some of the rights of natural persons. Meanwhile, attorneys loyal to the railroads began to rise through the ranks of the Judiciary, finally finding seats on the highest bench.

This process came to a final head in 1886, when the Supreme Court heard the case "Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad." Arguments over the rights of corporations as persons had been raging for decades, and Chief Justice Waite pounded home the nail: "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

"We are all of the opinion that it does."

The pertinent section of the Fourteenth Amendment reads, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Before the Santa Clara decision, this amendment applied only to living, breathing people. After Santa Clara, it applied also to massively wealthy corporations, groups of people authorized to act as individuals, but beyond the kinds of legal liabilities natural persons are subject to. The Santa Clara decision, and subsequent decisions affirming it, created the formidable distinction between the citizen and the super-citizen.

Both have purchasing power, both can give money to whomever or whatever they please, but the difference lies in the extent to which this can be done. A natural person can buy a house and give money to a politician. A wealthy corporation, on the other hand, can buy a thousand houses and give money to a thousand politicians. In other words, a corporation which enjoys the same rights as a natural person has a thousand times the power and influence of a natural person over the economics and politics of the country. That is a super-citizen.

Because these super-citizens can exert so much power, their rights have been dramatically extended over the years. In the 1950s, for example, corporations paid some 40% of the taxes in this country. They flexed their muscles and exerted their influence, and by 1980 were paying only 26% of the taxes in this country. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 slashed that payment to 8%.

The economic boon enjoyed by these super-citizens is augmented by the fact that regular citizens' tax dollars are used by the government to purchase goods and services from corporations involved in the production of weapons, petroleum, timber and agricultural products. Corporate perks like jets, elaborate headquarters, public relations firms, and executive retreats are all tax write-offs; the regular citizen, by contrast, pays for their perks with after-tax dollars. When a corporation screws up and destroys an ecosystem with a toxic spill, corporate liability shields protect them from financial and legal punishment, and the cost of the clean-up is borne by the tax dollars of the regular citizen.

Today, corporations control almost every aspect of what we see, hear, eat, wear and live. Every television news media organization is owned by a small handful of corporations, which use these news outlets to filter out information that might be damaging to the parent company. Agriculture in America is controlled by a small group of corporations. One cannot drive a car, rent a van, buy a house or deliver goods in a business transaction without purchasing insurance from a corporation. Getting sick in America has become a ruinously expensive experience because corporations now control even the smallest functions of the medical profession, and have turned the practice of health care into a for-profit industry.

The influence these super-citizens hold over local, state and national politics is the reason why so many privileges have been afforded to them. This influence has existed to one degree or another for decades. Yet it was another Supreme Court decision, handed down in 1976, that allowed these super-citizens to establish a strangle-hold on our politics and government institutions.

The Supremacy of the Super-Citizen

In 1976, the case "Buckley v. Valeo" came before the Supreme Court. Senator James Buckley, former Senator and Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, and several others had filed suit to challenge the constitutionality of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA) and the Presidential Election Campaign Fund Act. Among the defendants were Francis Valeo, Secretary of the Senate and ex officio member of the newly-created Federal Election Commission, as well as the Commission itself.

The final Supreme Court decision split a number of legal hairs. The decision upheld the constitutionality of limiting political contributions to candidates, and the disclosure and record-keeping requirements established by FECA. The aspects of FECA deemed unconstitutional, however, became the basis for the supremacy of the super-citizen. In short, the Court decided that limiting the amount of money a candidate could spend was a violation of the First Amendment. In other words, the spending of campaign money was equated with the right of free speech.

On the surface, the decision makes sense. Because so much of modern political campaigning involves television and radio advertisements, direct mailing of campaign literature, extensive travel and lodging and staff payrolls, and because all these things cost money, a limitation on campaign spending necessarily restricts the ability of a candidate to practice free speech in the political realm.

The danger, of course, was that corporations would take advantage of the new spending freedoms enjoyed by politicians and flood them with influence-creating cash. The Court attempted to address this concern by upholding the limits on contribution amounts, stating that these limitations were the "primary weapons against the reality or appearance of improper influence stemming from the dependence of candidates on large campaign contributions."

The Court's attempt to address this concern failed, in no small part because of the existence of so-called "soft money." Soft money was supposed to be cash given to political parties for "party-building activities" rather than for the direct support of candidates and campaigns. Soft money contributions were not subjected to limitations, allowing super-citizens to flood outrageous amounts of money into the process. Because the soft-money rules were so vague, and because soft money contributions were so huge, the money was invariably directed towards the support of individual candidates. The politicians became corporate entities, commodities bought and sold by the super-citizens.

The passage in 2002 of the Campaign Reform Act did little to cut into the massive influence in politics enjoyed by the super-citizens. The Campaign Reform Act made most soft money contributions illegal but created a loophole large enough to sail a British tea ship through, with the enshrinement of 527 groups as political entities. 527s are tax-exempt organizations created to influence the nomination, election, appointment or defeat of political candidates.

The soft money previously given to political parties goes now to these groups, and these groups enjoy umbilical connections to the parties and candidates they work in favor of. In other words, nothing really changed, and the influence of the super-citizens was undiminished. The Campaign Reform Act also raised the hard money contribution limit from $1,000 to $2,000, thus doubling the ability of super-citizens to exert direct financial influence upon candidates and office-holders.

Today, virtually every politician holding national office is financially beholden to a corporation. Beyond the favorable tax status for corporations established by these owned politicians, the effects of this ownership are felt by average citizens every day.

Foreign policy is all too often decided by corporate considerations, and these decisions often lead to war. The air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink is contaminated by pollutants that corporations are legally allowed to spew, thanks to the legislative protections created by corporate-owned politicians. Draconian sentencing rules created by legislators that incarcerate millions of Americans - think "The War on Drugs" specifically - have as much to do with the influence of the corporate-controlled prison industry as with anything else.

This list goes on and on. Super-citizens define our reality by controlling the information we receive via television, newspaper and radio. Super-citizens make sure that information casts them in a favorable light. Super-citizens pound us with advertising and thus maintain the fiction that spending money on products defines the nature of a person.

The best and brightest are drafted out of law school to work for corporate defense firms for six-figure salaries, thus ensuring that super-citizens enjoy a level of legal defense not available to anyone else. Many of these corporate attorneys graduate to the bench, where they extend the influence of super-citizens across all levels of the judicial branch.

More than anything else, however, super-citizens control the ways and means of government at every level. They bought it, they own it, and they make sure it does their bidding. The needs, requirements and best interests of the average citizen do not enter into the equation.

Created Equal

Arguments can be made that corporations are good for the economy and the country. They can get things done with a speed and efficiency not often found in the bureaucracies of government. When the country had to get itself ready to fight World War II, for one example, it was the industrial and manufacturing corporations that produced the means to achieve victory beyond anyone's expectations.

In the final analysis, however, the influence held by these entities is antithetical to the fundamental ideals of the nation. We are not all created equal, and within that inequality lies the potential for enormous evil. Consider the case of I.G. Farben, the industrial giant that was the financial core of the Nazi regime. Farben produced the gas used in the concentration camps, and made lucrative use of slave labor in the camps. Before the war, Farben worked hand-in-hand with a number of powerful American corporations, the most prominent of which was Standard Oil.

In the aftermath of World War II, the crimes committed by Farben were considered so enormous that many wanted the corporation to be utterly destroyed. Instead, Farben was split into several smaller entities, several of which still exist. Millions of Americans purchase aspirin from Bayer, a company that was once part of Farben. Commercials for BASF tell us that company makes the products we buy better, but do not tell us that BASF was once part of Farben. It speaks to the power enjoyed by corporations that Farben, the company that forced concentration camp laborers to manufacture the Zyklon-B used to exterminate them, and which was the backbone of Nazi financial power, was not destroyed out of hand once the war was over. Farben is still with us. Its charter has merely been changed.

Are all corporations on the moral level of I.G. Farben? Certainly not. Many corporations work for the public good, and many that work for their own enrichment do not necessarily undermine the country and its principles. But some do, and exist beyond punishment or account.

The potential for evil is certainly there when super-citizens exist above the law. When the New York Times reviewed the book The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, it observed that the story of Farben "Forces one to consider the possibility that when corporate evil reaches a certain status, it simply cannot be defeated."

In the end, the existence of incredibly powerful entities that enjoy the status of citizens demote the vast majority of average citizens to second-class status. If the ideals we hold sacred have any truth to them, if the myths we sleep by have any basis in reality, such a division is intolerable and must be changed. "All men are created equal" once excluded vast swaths of Americans from their basic rights. Battles were fought to change that. Today, a battle to realign the balance of power between the citizen and the super-citizen must also be fought. It must be won.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
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Subverting conservatism

by Gus diZerega, Ph.D

There is lots of variety among Conservatives, but if the word has any meaning at all, it emphasizes a distrust of radical change. Conservatives prefer building on traditions that have stood the test of time over social policies based on the speculations of individual minds, no matter how brilliant. In the absence of overwhelming need, big changes are too risky to try. Prudence is a conservative virtue because the future is unknown, but can be relied upon to bring new challenges and unexpected risks.

The Bush administration has repudiated every one of these conservative values. The Radical Right, which provides the majority of his key supporters and officials is worse.

Appointed President with over 500,000 fewer votes than Al Gore, a conservative president would have governed moderately. He would have taken small steps moving the country as a whole in the direction he deemed wise. Not George Bush. As a result, we have a country more deeply split than at any time since the civil war - which is not a good precedent.

Bush has given us enormous deficits, with no end in sight. The reasons for his economic policies continually change, but their content remains the same - reduce taxes on those best able to pay, regardless of its impact on the rest of the country. Government has grown enormously under his administration, putting the lie to his claims to favor smaller government. Its bills will fall due in the future, when Bush is out of office. But he is making our children pay so the rich of today do not.

Bush uses all this extra spending to reward private corporations that then contribute to him. He calls this "down sizing" and "contracting out" but in reality it means tax money turns into corporate profits. Some of that tax money comes back as political contributions, to keep their benefactor in office at taxpayer expense. For example, Bush will have no opponents for the (2004) Republican nomination, yet is expected to raise between $170-million and $200-million for his campaign -- more than all the money raised by Republican leaders Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Bush's father, and Bob Dole combined. (Actually, as it turned out, he raised $266 million. --DN) Contributions like that buy a lot of access, and it isn't access for average Americans. This is called machine politics.

See:www.globetechnology.com

There is all the difference in the world between reducing the size of government spending so more money is spent in the private sector, and increasing the size of government spending, but contracting out the work to private businesses, so that corporations receive the tax money rather than public employees. The chief difference is that corporations will then give millions to the incumbents who send them those lucrative contracts. Public bureaucracies were barred from doing this to prevent national machines such as Bush is building. Bush's strategy depends on heavy government spending benefiting corporations that then donate to him. He has no incentive to cut back or spend wisely. And he doesn't.

See:http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxingspending.html

Whether their policies are wise or foolish, liberals believe government can benefit the country as a whole. They tend to distribute spending in ways that reflect these values, while still rewarding their electoral base. Today's Radical Right Republicans, and the President, have no such conception of a public good. They use their power to tax to exploit states that do not support them for the benefit of those that do. When Democrats last controlled the House and wrote the 1995 budget, the average Democratic district got $35 million more than the average GOP district. By 2001, average federal spending in Republican districts was $612 million more than in Democratic districts. Kleptocracy in the name of "conservatism."

See:
montanaforum.org

Bush also repudiated almost 60 years of successful foreign policy alliances and 200 years of tradition to lay claim to the unilateral right to invade anyone he thinks may sometime in the future be a threat. Less than a year after we invaded Iraq the lack of wisdom in these claims is apparent to all who pay attention and don't have Alzheimer's. Our government is asking the UN and European powers we insulted and denigrated only a year ago to help save us from the consequences of incompetent leadership applying radical ideas in defiance of our traditions and experience.

Despite a total absence of public support, Bush has sought to eliminate environmental protections wholesale. For example, no other administration has happily adopted interpretations of environmental law that they admit will increase air pollution. Cities and states lose, corporate contributors gain. $200 million well spent. Bush did this over the objections of states adversely affected, which brings us to the conservative value of federalism.

The Bush administration has assaulted federalism wholesale, from increasing federal control (but not funding) of education, historically a local and state affair, to supporting taking away the states' authority to protect consumer privacy and regulate corporate misbehavior, explicitly giving them to Washington. Corporate profits again.

Attorney General Ashcroft has gone out of his way to require federal prosecutors to ask for death penalties in states where it is not applied. His attacks on states that have voted for medical marijuana are well known and vindictive. He is trying to use the federal government to take away licenses from Oregon physicians involved in physician-assisted suicide by suffering terminally ill people, a law supported in two statewide referendums. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist wants a constitutional amendment defining marriage as he thinks it should be. This is in response to moves in many states to define it differently.

Insofar as conservatives are sincere in their praise of morality, Bush's incessant lies ensure that their support of him amounts to enormous hypocrisy, or selective blindness. Whichever is the case, conservatives who claim Bush supports their values are betraying many of the principles they claim to honor.

But the Radical Right which underwrites Bush's policies is even worse.

Their control of the Republican Party and single minded pursuit of power has led them to undermine a major tradition that makes representative government work: that congressional seats are redistricted after every census, as the constitution requires, rather than at the pleasure of the party in power. With Bush's support, they have sought to make major changes in our judiciary with "stealth" nominees, after making it all but impossible for Democrats to appoint judges under the Clinton presidency. They have repudiated the basic constitutional principle of separation of church and state so the most sectarian, bigoted, and ignorant portion of our country can exercise power over the rest of us. And we pay taxes for that privilege.

Genuine conservatives have been shut out by the intolerant fanatics of the Radical Right, and the opportunistic liar who they have made their leader. They are busy trying to create a structure of rule and domination that would impress a Caesar.

Some genuine conservatives are beginning to grasp this. Bizarrely, they then argue the Bush administration is "too liberal." But those who seek power over all else are neither liberal nor conservative. They are simply morally and politically corrupt.

For their part, many Liberals are just beginning to wake up to the fact that Bush and the Radical Right constitute a new and dangerous threat to our country. Political debates between liberals and genuine conservatives will always be with us, because the world is complicated enough that, in my view, no ideology is adequate to grasp all we need to pay attention to. Conservatism by itself will prevent changes that are needed. For example, conservatives opposed civil rights legislation that most of them nowadays admit was needed. Liberals, left to themselves, can be too eager to change things. Leading to unwise laws and overly ambitious projects. Many of the urban renewal projects developed under Lyndon Johnson are now admitted to have done more damage than good, by disrupting neighborhoods and worsening the circumstances of the people they were supposed to help.

I pick these older examples because now fair-minded people on both sides agree that civil rights legislation was largely beneficial and urban renewal did lots of damage. So I can make my point without getting bogged down in policy debates. We need debate and political opposition. It is the lifeblood of a democracy.

While subverting conservatism, the Radical Right denies the very legitimacy of liberal views. The Radical Right's assault on liberal values particularly targets civil liberties, openness in government, and public values. The first two are foundations to free societies, and to the American principle that the people, and not the government, are sovereign. The third is fundamental to what makes us a people, and not a collection of isolated individuals.

The Bush administration's rapid expansion of governmental secrecy and equally rapid expansion of the government's power to obtain knowledge in detail about any citizen is completely outside the constitutional traditions of this country. This radical legislation was first passed with a sunset clause, automatically ending it after a few years. Now Ashcroft and Bush want to repeal the sunset provision, making it permanent.

The Bush administration has launched an extraordinary attack on the most basic American principle: the nature of our citizenship. We are citizens, regardless of our views. Government is our tool for self-governance. Never before has an American government claimed the power to hold citizens indefinitely in secrecy, without notification of the courts. Never before has an American government claimed it should have the right to deprive Americans of their citizenship, simply because the President says so. These claims better fit an emperor or dictator than a democratic leader.

Bush, Ashcroft, and others defend these abuses in the most un-American of political terms: "trust us." I doubt that it is possible for a more un-American statement to be uttered by a politician.

Both conservatives and liberals have emphasized that we should not trust those with great power. This is why we have a constitution. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789, "In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." He was hardly alone. For example, Benjamin Franklin observed in 1759, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Politicians as conservative as Dick Armey and Bob Barr have joined the ACLU due to their concern about where Bush and the Radical Right are taking us.

Liberals believe there are over arching community values that only governmental action can provide. These values cannot be reduced to dollars and cents. They are basic to a good life and responsible citizenship. This includes education and adequate health care for all, and protection for the poor, especially their children. Some liberals include more, some much more, but all include these.

The Radical Right denies this as well. Government should be strengthened insofar as its power to prosecute, incarcerate, and wage war is concerned. It should serve the interpretation of religion of those in power, and oppose everyone else's errors. It should also serve the interests of well connected corporations, such as Halliburton. But it has no particular responsibility to the citizens who make up this country - and whom supposedly it serves.

Clean air is less important than corporate profits. Citizen privacy is less important than corporate profits. Citizen access to public land is less important than corporate profits. Inexpensive public services are less important than corporate profits. Citizens' rights as consumers are less important than corporate profits. The list could go on because, other than their own power, nothing is more important than corporate profits, plenty of which then returns to them as political contributions.

Liberals' expansive view of public values opens them to the error of having too much trust in bureaucracies and too little trust in average citizens. But theirs is the mirror image of the conservative mistake of having too much trust in business and the status quo. That is why we need both liberals and genuine conservatives. Each helps provide a reality check on the other. Each represents a valid part of our traditions, a legitimate way to be a good American. The Radical Right attacks both, to the great danger for our country. It uses any tool or argument or label it can in its pursuit of power - the only value it really worships. Power over our pocketbooks, power over our souls, and power over the other peoples of our world.

Civility can return to American politics once conservatives and liberals realize they have more in common with one another than either do with the Radical Right. Liberals and conservatives will always disagree, and it is good that they do. But they disagree within a common worldview of constitutional government, respect for civil liberties, and the democratic process. Their feuds are family feuds. Family feuds can be pretty strong, but the family unites when outsiders enter in. This is why Armey and Barr joined the ACLU. It is time for the Radical Right, and its attack on American traditions and values in the name of "patriotism," to be seen for what it is.

Liberals have begun to grasp the nature of the radical right threat because they have been its chief targets so far. Conservatives have been slower to wake up because they were drawn in by the Radical Right's cynical use of their terminology, and initially thought its failure to follow through was simply because of the need for political compromise. But they will never follow through because they are not conservatives. Our country's future will be more secure when all Americans are aware of what is at stake: the end of politics as we have played that game for two centuries, replaced by a state financing its re-election by control over jobs and manipulation of media and electoral rules. It's not a pretty prospect.

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http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Index-DailyReads-Antiwar-ChickenhawkDatabase.htm
http://www.nhgazette.com/news/chickenhawks/
http://www.symbolman.com/chickenhawks.html
http://www.tbtmradio.com/geeklog/public_html/index.php
http://www.chickenhawkcards.com/
http://www.nhgazette.com/news/chickenhawks/chickenhawk_headquarters/ http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050711&s=blumenthal
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j080202.html
http://www.michaelmoore.com/books-films/dudewheresmycountry/chickenhawks/index.php
http://scroom.com/chickenhawkblues/

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DEFINITION OF SILENCE
by Mark Shields

What is the definition of silence? That would be Vice President Dick Cheney, House Majority Leader Tom Delay, R-Texas, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich getting together to swap war stories, or simply to reminisce about their military service.

Each of these distinguished political leaders -- all three enthusiastic backers of the U.S. war in Vietnam during their youth and forceful advocates of the U.S. war against Iraq in their later years -- had been, as young men, eligible for the nation's military draft, and yet none of them spent a day in uniform.

What brings this up is the news that the U.S. Army has, for four months in a row, failed to reach its recruiting goals. Recruitment for the Army Reserves and the National Guard, which between them constitute nearly half of U.S. troops now deployed in Iraq, are down, respectively, 21 percent and 24 percent.

Even the Marines, who had met their recruitment goals every month for 11 years, have failed to meet recent monthly enlistment quotas. Virtually all of the more than 1,700 Americans killed in Iraq belonged to one of these four service groups.

But the Bush-Cheney administration brims with ideas to address the manpower shortages. The Army has increased its College Fund for which soldiers can qualify from $50,000 to $70,000. Doubling the enlistment bonus for certain recruits from $20,000 to $40,000 has been proposed. The maximum enlistment age for the Army Reserve and the National Guard has been raised from 34 to 39. The Army has raised the maximum age to attend officers candidate school from 29 to 42. But the shortfall persists.

This is not the way it was supposed to work. A wise and just manpower policy is the foundation of our national defense. The all-volunteer army, it was agreed, was to be a peacetime operation. Any sustained military engagement would call for a resumption of the draft. The reasoning was direct: If the goals of the nation are worth fighting for, then we ought not to hesitate to ask all Americans to share equally in the obligation and the perils of that fighting.


War is hellish and hateful. But even more hateful is the hypocrite who endorses, encourages and champions war, while avoiding any personal involvement or risk for himself, his relatives or his friends. In 2005, the American establishment -- political, economic and journalistic -- has with only a handful of admirable exceptions no personal stake in the armed forces of the United States. The incontrovertible premise of the administration's war policy, for everyone except those who do serve and their loved ones, is that sacrifice is only for suckers. In George W. Bush's wartime, no inconvenience, let alone sacrifice, is asked of citizens, and patriotism is painless and can be profitable.

All of this brings to mind the heroic example of the late Paul H. Douglas, who served three memorable terms in the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from Illinois. Right after Pearl Harbor, Douglas, a Quaker who was already a professor at the University of Chicago and an elected Chicago alderman, enlisted as a private in the Marine Corps. He went through boot camp at Parris Island and fought in combat in Pacific landings at Peleliu and Okinawa. He was wounded so severely that he lost permanently the use of his right arm. He won the Bronze Star. Here is the kicker: When Paul Douglas enlisted in the Marines, he was 50 years old.

Now is the time for President George W. Bush to create by executive order the Paul Douglas Brigade, which would actively seek and welcome the enlistment into today's short-handed military the middle-age members of Congress, card-carrying journalists and captains of commerce who missed the chance to serve in their own youth -- because of their commitments to career or comfort -- and could now help prosecute the war they endorsed.

That single act could simultaneously cure the shortage of military manpower and deplete the surplus of civilian hypocrisy. Not a bad deal.

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(DeLay issued a statement asserting that) ..."the time will come for the men (judges) responsible for this to answer for their behavior." He later said in front of television cameras that he wants to "look at an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president." (From the Washington Post 4/2/05, regarding the Schiavo case)

Well, it seems he was right. That is, if he was talking about the Supreme Court and their hairbreath, birdbrain split decision regarding "eminent domain."

What a bunch of knuckleheads. But we knew that. Only this time our guys are the knuckleheads. And that's not what the cockroach killer was talking about back in April.

It's not often I agree with the rightwingnuts, because they can usually be counted on to come down on the wrong side of any issue, but this is one time I concur with the opinion of the likes of O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. Yikes, I think I just felt the cold breath of death upon my neck... --DN

What we're talking about is this excerpt from: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/3250774

"For the record: I do not view the court's decision as a win for the real estate industry. Instead, as a private developer, I take umbrage at how the decision shatters one of the fundamental cornerstones of our Constitution: individual property rights.
By substituting the term public purpose for the constitutional test of public use the court argued, as widely reported, that the city of New London, Conn., had a carefully considered development plan. By this reasoning, billboards, cemeteries, dumps, bars and massage parlors arguably serve a public purpose."

And this:

Washington, D.C.—Think your home is your castle? Or that the government can take your property only for a public use? Think again.

A report released today documents that in just the past five years the government has taken or threatened to take by force more than 10,000 homes, businesses, churches and private land not for a “public use”—such as a police station or post office—but for private economic development.

Among many examples, the report found that in the past five years, governments have:

Condemned a family’s home so that the manager of a planned new golf course could live in it;

Evicted four elderly siblings from their home of the last 60 years for a private industrial park;

Removed a woman in her 80s from her home of 55 years to expand a sewer plant, but actually gave her home to an auto dealership;

“Public Power, Private Gain” is the first nationwide report ever to document how often government takes private property only to hand it over to private developers.

For the rest of the story:
http://www.ij.org/include/media_functions.asp?path=/private_property/castle/4_22_03pr.html&cmd=print_friend

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A Person's Home Is the Government's Parcel

By MARTIN DYCKMAN, Times Columnist
Published July 3, 2005

TALLAHASSEE - The weekend our dog died, a woman came uninvited to our home in St. Petersburg with an offer she assumed we could not refuse.

The house wasn't for sale but she proposed to buy it.

She was a real estate broker who drove a Rolls-Royce and wore gold bracelets from her wrist to her elbow.

Her anonymous client, we were told, was a friend of Gary Sheffield's. (Plays for the hated Yankees, for you non-fans of baseball --DN) He wanted to buy and tear down all the houses on our block so that he could build one next door to Sheffield's egregious monument to bad taste. The "offer," which she treated more like a command, was contingent on agreement by all the owners.

And for the rest of this one:
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/07/03/Columns/A_person_s_home_is_th.shtml Martin Dyckman's e-mail address is dyckman@sptimes.com

And this:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/columnists/sfl-mayocol03jul03,0,6693034.column?page=1&coll=sfla-news-col
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Please check out the validity of these unending internet hoaxes and urban legends before you forward them on just because someone you know sent them to you. It just clogs up the internet and contributes to the lack of real knowledge which everyone outside of America attributes to us. Some reasons:
http://www.ragani.com/hoax.html

Also, you can get hurt by some of them. Beware the "phishers" out there. Messages you receive, seemingly from companies you know and perhaps deal with, asking you to 'update' your account, or some such pretense to entice you to give your account number, or your social security number, etc. It leads to identity theft, which I hope all of you have heard about by now. See here:
http://www.fastbytes.com/hoax_scam.html
http://www.antiphishing.org/
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,89096,00.html

This particular hoax, and it's a real old one, http://www.snopes.com/history/american/pricepaid.asp seemingly has as it's goal the enhancement of our Founders, and their followers, sacrifices. Many of them did sacrifice. And we should be appreciative of their efforts.

But do we have to inflate what they did by lying about them? Good works should stand on their own. Embellishing them only diminishes what they actually did, and tends to make the perpetrators look foolish.

OK, glad I got that off my chest. I've been fighting these things for darn near eight years now. Especially the flat-out nasty, lying ones, which are legion. Couldn't be any worse if they had been written in the basement at RNC headquarters. Many probably were. Other folks have fought for longer periods, I'm sure. But thanks for letting me vent.

And if ya' don't believe me about this not so nasty one, check these out:

http://www.dushkin.com/text-data/articles/30206/body.pdf

http://slate.msn.com/default.aspx?id=1005636

http://home.nycap.rr.com/elbrecht/signers/signerindex.html

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=225

And this one's written for the young folks, but... :
http://www.usda-army-ydp.org/clom/believe.pdf
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An' whattya wanna bet the liars get away with yet another lie? No takers -
I understand... --DN

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WASHINGTON (AFP) - E-mails surrendered by Time magazine to a grand jury probing the leak of a CIA agent's identity show that top White House aide Karl Rove was one of the sources, Newsweek magazine reported, citing two lawyers involved in the case.

Rove, who is
President George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff, was named as a source by two lawyers who asked not to be identified.

However, an attorney for Rove, Robert Luskin, told Newsweek that his client "never knowingly disclosed classified information" and that "he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA."

Time on Thursday reluctantly agreed to hand over the internal e-mails, which were largely correspondence between their editors and reporter Matt Cooper, along with his notes on reporting related to the case.
Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller have been ordered to testify before the grand jury or face prison. Both have indicated they would rather go to jail than reveal their sources to the grand jury investigating how CIA agent Valerie Plame's name was leaked to the media.
It is a federal crime to deliberately reveal the identity of an undercover CIA official. A special prosecutor was appointed to investigate the leak and began subpoenaing reporters to find the source.
In a case argued before the Supreme Court, attorneys for Miller and Cooper had argued that the US Constitution shields them from having to testify before grand jury, but the US high court on Monday refused to hear the case.
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...although I knew Rove was ultimately behind it. Just didn't figure "Bush's Brain" to be so stupid as to have talked directly to Cooper, or any of the other five.

Apparently, hopefully, I may have been wrong.

Waiting to see what the traitorous Turdblossom's 'plausible deniability' statement was. Gee, ya' think he was so enraged that Wilson had told the truth that he forgot to think one up? We can only hope. After the fact, though, now I imagine he'll use the word 'knowingly' in his defense. It would seem to be the only way out of a $50,000 fine and TEN YEARS IN PRISON! --DN
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0930-02.htm

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MSNBC Analyst Says Cooper Documents Reveal Karl Rove as Source in Plame Case
By E&P Staff Published: July 01, 2005 11:30 PM ET

NEW YORK Now that Time Inc. has turned over documents to federal court, presumably revealing who its reporter, Matt Cooper, identified as his source in the Valerie Plame/CIA case, speculation runs rampant on the name of that source, and what might happen to him or her. Tonight, on the syndicated McLaughlin Group political talk show, Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, claimed to know that name--and it is, according to him, top White House mastermind Karl Rove.

Here is the transcript of O'Donnell's remarks:"What we're going to go to now in the next stage, when Matt Cooper's e-mails, within Time Magazine, are handed over to the grand jury, the ultimate revelation, probably within the week of who his source is. "And I know I'm going to get pulled into the grand jury for saying this but the source of...for Matt Cooper was Karl Rove, and that will be revealed in this document dump that Time magazine's going to do with the grand jury."

Other panelists then joined in discussing whether, if true, this would suggest a perjury rap for Rove, if he told the grand jury he did not leak to Cooper. Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller, held in contempt for refusing to name sources, tried Friday to stay out of jail by arguing for home detention instead after Time Inc. surrendered its reporter's notes to a prosecutor. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said Friday that several unidentified Senate Republicans had placed a hold on a proposed resolution declaring support for Miller and Cooper.

"Cowards!'' Lautenberg said of the Republicans. "Under the rules, they have a right to refuse to reveal who they are. Sound familiar?''

Lautenberg's resolution is co-sponsored by Sens. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) It says no purpose is served by imprisoning Miller and Cooper and that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
O'Donnell on Ariana's Blog:

Lawrence O'Donnell Rove Blew CIA Agent's Cover
I revealed in yesterday's taping of the McLaughlin Group that Time magazine's emails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source. I have known this for months but didn't want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury.
McLaughlin is seen in some markets on Friday night, so some websites have picked it up, including Drudge, but I don't expect it to have much impact because McLaughlin is not considered a news show and it will be pre-empted in the big markets on Sunday because of tennis.
Since I revealed the big scoop, I have had it reconfirmed by yet another highly authoritative source. Too many people know this. It should break wide open this week. I know Newsweek is working on an 'It's Rove!' story and will probably break it tomorrow.Posted at 11:40 AM email this post to a friend permalink comments author bio
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Why is it the "new" United States of America (after WWII), steeped in the tradition and humane law of what used to be the best Constitution ever, can't seem to honor not only our own rules and laws, but the rules and laws of treaties to which we are a signatory?
http://www.hrea.org/learn/guides/ihl.html

And why do we refuse to become signatories to treaties which serve to protect human rights, among other matters, such as protecting the viability of the very planet upon which all life depends?
http://www.lossless-audio.com/usa/index16.php

EXCERPT:

1965
UN Resolution ( cached ) See also: 1

"This is further emphasized in UN Resolution 2131, the Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty, which argues not only that ' armed intervention is synonymous with aggression and, as such, is contrary to the basic principles on which peaceful international cooperation between States should be built' but also further that 'direct intervention, subversion and all forms of indirect intervention are contrary to these principles and, consequently, constitute a violation of the Charter of the United Nations'.

Since the creation of the UN, the US has forcefully intervened in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, El Salvador among others - without UN authorization, without aggression from any of the given countries, and without any of the given countries even posing a credible threat to the US. Additionally, it has covertly intervened in the affairs of countries too numerous to list, but including Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Guyana, Ghana, Congo, Iraq and Iran. Again, none of which posed any credible threat, let alone showed any aggression. All of these actions are thus violations of international law. Much of this site is devoted to the detailing of these actions and the disastrous effects they had on the countries involved."

I give up... how come?

Actually, if we've been paying attention, we know the reasons... --DN

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By Sabina Zawadzki
Fri Jul 1,11:46 AM ET

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The United States must close Guantanamo prison, where its treatment of some 500 terrorism suspects encourages hatred toward the West and bolsters Muslim membership of the al Qaeda network, a new report concludes.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation' in Europe
commissioned the report from its human rights representative, Belgian senate president Anne-Marie Lizin, and will vote next week whether to accept its findings.

"A generation of young Muslims, fed on the images of
Abu Ghraib and of the treatment reserved for the Guantanamo detainees and rumors about profanation of the Koran, will have filled the al Qaeda ranks and those of other extremist groups," said the report made public on Friday.

"The longer the detention is in the camps the more the hatred against the U.S. and the West becomes anchored in hearts and minds," it said.

"Being fully aware of the U.S. authorities' dilemma between national and world security and long procedures (sic - ?), we recommend terminating the Guantanamo detention facility by announcing a calendar of closure."

In June, the U.S. military described cases of mishandling of the Koran by U.S. personnel at Guantanamo naval base in Cuba, including splashing it with urine and kicking it. Muslims view the Koran as the literal word of God.

U.S. UNDER PRESSURE
The U.S. government, increasingly under pressure at home to close the prison down, has said it is key to protecting the country from further attacks. Last week it said it was addressing abuse claims and holding prison staff to account. (Once again, punish the little guys following orders [which in itself is contrary to treaty - but grist for another blog] and ignore the folks who created the situation in the first place. The fish always rots from the head down, folks. --DN)

The OSCE, consisting of 55 member nations from Europe, North America and the former Soviet republics, is an organization that aims to maintain security and flag conflicts and human rights issues in its region. The United States is a member. (emphasis added)

Guantanamo mostly holds prisoners scooped up in
Afghanistan during the U.S. offensive there in retaliation for the Sept. 11 al Qaeda attacks on the United States.

Human rights groups as well as institutions such as the European Parliament and the Council of Europe have criticized the United States for holding detainees there for indefinite periods and not assigning them "prisoner of war" status.

Instead, suspects are labeled "enemy combatants," something the new report called a legal nonentity under international law. If charged with crimes, they stand in front of a military tribunal which can demand capital punishment.

On Thursday, Lizin made news this week when she canceled a meeting in Brussels with the Iranian parliament speaker after the visitor, a strict observer of Islam, said he would not shake hands with the female senate president.

» Recommended Stories
Full Coverage: Guantanamo Detainees
News Stories
Long-Silent Detainees Talking at The Washington Post (reg. req'd) Jun 30
Guantánamo Thorny Issue for Democrats on Committee at The New York Times (reg. req'd) Jun 30
Witnesses Support Guantanamo at The Los Angeles Times (reg. req'd) Jun 30
Democrats see 'whitewash' of Guantanamo problems Reuters via Yahoo! News Jun 29
Feature Articles
A year later, ruling stalled for Guantanamo inmates at Philadelphia Inquirer (reg req'd) Jun 30
Wiki Reviews Guantanamo Docs at Wired News Jun 22
Opinion & Editorials
A sorry business at Baltimore Sun (reg. req'd) Jun 24
Time to act on Gitmo complaints at St. Petersburg Times Jun 23
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OK, so Durbin may have exaggerated to make a point. Like none of us have ever done that.

Gulags in the old U.S.S.R., having had more time, may have surpassed the numbers and even the rate of torturous acts that have been and are still being committed in our name, around the world, including, with a nod to the late Walter Winchell, all the ships at sea. http://sg.news.yahoo.com/050628/1/3t7ec.html

Sure hope "we" didn't get the idea from despicable examples like this:
http://www.angelfire.com/nm/bcmfofnm/hellships/hellships.html

Or, perhaps to a lesser degree (or not), this:
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR220082003?open&of=ENG-2M3

But, as I believe we should try to remember, it's not whether another entity has committed more acts, or worse acts, or committed them over a longer period of time. We need to remember that, given our supposed commitment to the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, various and numerous treaties, our professed love of life, freedom, liberty, justice and the rule of law, we are encumbered to remain the shining example of that which should be right amongst all the peoples of the planet. Because someone else is a worse violator of human rights doesn't make it OK for us to violate anyone's rights, for whatever supposed purpose. If we do, then how can we ever hope to hold ourselves as being the arbiters of what's right and decent? As Mom used to remind us: Just because that Stalin kid down the street jumps off a bridge, does that mean you have to jump too?

We, as a nation, are no longer the city upon the hill, as has been proven over and over since the end of formal hostilities in 1945. We have egregiously interfered with other sovereign nations, other elected officials, other citizens of other nations. All, when it comes right down to it, in the name of ostensibly knowing what's right for everyone, not just us. We never learn, and civilization is the poorer for it.

We should hope the hypocritical, so-called Conservative, so-called Coalition, so-called Republican Christian Right, which, in the opinion of many, is neither Christian nor right, would heed the words of, among many others, John Winthrope, before they continue to support and make apologies for the fascist cabal which has taken over the government of the United States of America:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/winthrop.htm

... --DN

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Surpassing the Gulag in Scale

Amnesty International, in its 2005 report, condemned Washington's violations of the Geneva Conventions: "The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law" (emphasis added, "Foreword," Amnesty International Report 2005).

The dramatic metaphor of "the gulag" used in Amnesty International's criticism stirred conservative opposition. Among its critics is David Bosco, a senior editor of Foreign Policy, who put the metaphor to an "equivalency test" and found it wanting ("Gulag v. Gitmo: Equivalency Test," New Republic, 3 Jun. 2005). Among other things, Bosco notes:
During a press conference on Tuesday, President Bush rejected the charge as "absurd." Amnesty has defended its use of the term. Below, a comparison of the two prison systems, with the aid of Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Gulag: A History.Individuals Detained:Gulag: Approximately 20 million passed through the Gulag. The population at any one time was generally around two million.

Guantánamo: 750 prisoners have passed through the camp. The current population is about 520. (Bosco, 3 Jun. 2005)

Bosco's "test" should be faulted for its literal-mindedness that fails to appreciate the fact that a hyperbole is not an assertion of "equivalency."Nevertheless, the gulag statistic mentioned above is useful, for it reminds us of prison statistics of the United States:
"Overall, corrections authorities incarcerated 2,212,475 prisoners at the end of 2003. . . . As of December 31, 2003, one in every 140 U.S. residents was confined in a state or federal prison or a local jail" (emphasis added, US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, "U.S. Prison Population Approaches 1.5 Million," 7. Nov. 2004).

"In 2003, 6.9 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole at yearend 2003 -- 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 32 adults" (emphasis added, US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Corrections Statistics").

"[A]ssuming that recent incarceration rates remain unchanged, an estimated 1 of every 20 persons (5%) can be expected to serve time in prison during their lifetime" (emphasis added, US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison").

"The reality is inescapable: America has become a nation of ex-cons. Thirteen million people have been convicted of a felony and spent some time locked up. That's almost 7 percent of U.S. adult residents. If all of these people were placed on an island together, that island would have a population larger than many countries, including Sweden, Bolivia, Senegal, Greece, or Somalia" (emphasis added, Tom Cochran, "Executive Director's Column" [dated 7 May 2004], U.S. Mayor Newspaper 71.9, 10 May 2004 -- see, also, Human Rights Watch, No Second Chance: People with Criminal Records Denied Access to Public Housing, 2004).

That's not counting foreigners whom Washington has detained in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere; rendered to other governments (that it regularly criticizes for human rights violations); summarily executed; or tortured to death.In terms of scale of incarceration, the US Prison-Industrial Complex -- even without Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, et al. -- has already surpassed the gulag in the Soviet Union.

posted by Yoshie : 4:19 PM : permalink : : 1 blogger comments :
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Comments:
The comparision in the New Republic article between the gulag and the U.S. jail in Cuba is wrong factually. The Gulag with the entire prison population of the U.S.S.R in any one year was around 1.5 million. Check out the work of J.Arch Geddes, a historian of the gulag who has access to the Kremlin archives. The rate of incaceration in the U.S.S.R at its height in the early 1950s was 1400 per 100,000. The U.S. is currently over 700 per 100,000. We as a nation are halfway to the gulag. Some U.S. states like Texas and Louisiana have had incaceration rates over 1,100 per 100,000. Some states I would argue are already nearly at the all time high rate of incarceration in the U.S.S.R. See the work of Penologist Nils Christie. However, we don't need to get to that level to have a more rational and humane criminal system.
# posted by Anonymous : 7:09 PM
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...as I did a few blogs ago (boy, are you guys lucky I don't pull a pop quiz on ya ev'ry once in a while...), here's a few excerpts from his site this past Tuesday (I know - a little late posting as usual. Besides not bein' easy bein' me, it ain't easy trying to have a life while doing this bloggin' stuff too.... Jez' kidding... --DN):

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Fake applause; speech numbers
by kos
Tue Jun 28th, 2005 at 18:24:22 PDT

AMERICAblog:
ABC's Terry Moran just reported that the only time Bush got applause was in the middle of his speech when a White House advance team member started clapping all on their own in order to cajole the soldiers into clapping, which they dutifully did.

So even the applause was fake. Ouch.
Meanwhile, Think Progress has been all over the speech tonight, including this bit of accounting:

References to "September 11?: 5
References to "weapons of mass destruction": 0
References to "freedom": 21
References to "exit strategy": 0
References to "Saddam Hussein": 2
References to "Osama Bin Laden": 2
References to "a mistake": 1 (setting a timetable for withdrawal)
References to "mission": 11
References to "mission accomplished": 0

Update: Apparently, Fox reported the 'fake applause' bit as well. Double ouch.
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Bush's 50-state approvals
by kos
Tue Jun 28th, 2005 at 18:19:53 PDT

SurveyUSA is kicking ass on these 50-state polls. The latest is Bush's approval ratings everywhere in our great country.
The bottom line, Bush is at 50 percent or above in only 11 states -- Utah (63), Nebraska (60), Wyoming (58), Idaho (56), Montana (56), Alabama (54), Alaska (53), North Dakota (52), Kansas (51), Kentucky (50), Mississippi (50), and Texas (50).

He's at 40 percent or lower in 14 states -- Ohio (40), Wisconsin (40), Maine (39), Massachusetts (39), Delaware (38), Nevada (38), New Jersey (38), Michigan (38), California (37), Connecticut (37), Illinois (37), New York (33), Rhode Island (33), and Vermont (32).

The weighted average (based on each state's percentage of the US population) is 43 approve, 53 disapprove.
Lots of Red States experiencing a rash of buyer's remorse.

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Reid response to Bush speech
by kos
Tue Jun 28th, 2005 at 17:47:45 PDT

Give 'em hell, Harry:
"Tonight's address offered the President an excellent opportunity to level with the American people about the current situation in Iraq, put forth a path for success, and provide the means to assess our progress. Unfortunately he fell short on all counts.

"There is a growing feeling among the American people that the President's Iraq policy is adrift, disconnected from the reality on the ground and in need of major mid-course corrections. "Staying the course," as the President advocates, is neither sustainable nor likely to lead to the success we all seek.

"The President's numerous references to September 11th did not provide a way forward in Iraq, they only served to remind the American people that our most dangerous enemy, namely Osama bin Laden, is still on the loose and Al Qaeda remains capable of doing this nation great harm nearly four years after it attacked America.

"Democrats stand united and committed to seeing that we achieve success in Iraq and provide our troops, their families, and our veterans everything they need and deserve for their sacrifices for our nation. The stakes are too high, and failure in Iraq cannot be an option. Success is only possible if the President significantly alters his current course. That requires the President to work with Congress and finally begin to speak openly and honestly with our troops and the American people about the difficult road ahead.

"Our troops and their families deserve no less."

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Another Bush speech thread
by Plutonium Page
Tue Jun 28th, 2005 at 17:40:47 PDT
The last one's getting a little long, so here's one for your fake applause.
Didn't Bush just make you feel so happy about Iraq?

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Prereleased Speech
by Hunter
Tue Jun 28th, 2005 at 16:18:20 PDT

More about the speech: Again from the looks of the prereleased excerpts, this one is going to be more of the same, but on steroids. I'm not at all convinced that this approach is going to work with anyone but the most hardcore of Bush loyalists. In fact, I think this one is going to be a colossal dud with the American public -- and perhaps seriously shake the resolve of many previously lukewarm war supporters.
For starters, the speech looks to rely heavily on pushing the notion that the Iraqi resistance consists entirely of foreign "terrorists". This makes Bush look completely divorced from reality. He doesn't even understand the nature of the resistance, after all this time? How are we going to win in Iraq, when the Bush Administration won't even acknowledge that it's Iraqis fighting us, not some nebulous "terrorists"?
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There's more... (139 comments, 398 words in story)
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Zarqawi
by Hunter
Tue Jun 28th, 2005 at 14:52:36 PDT

From the prereleased excerpts of Bush's speech:
"The terrorists can kill the innocent - but they cannot stop the advance of freedom. The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of September 11 ... if we abandon the Iraqi people to men like Zarqawi ... and if we yield the future of the Middle East to men like Bin Laden."
Ahem.
With Tuesday's attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq.
But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself -- but never pulled the trigger. [...]
Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi's operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.
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Random Excerpts:

Health care costs are only a part of GM's plight. The company has never fully recovered from the disastrous tenure of its former chairman, Roger Smith. (http://www.moviesforbusiness.com/guide12topic.asp) Smith was a strategic idiot and a first-class jerk but he never had to deal with the consequences of his follies.
(snip)

Wagoner and other desperate American auto company executives are ignoring the true nature of the problem -- Bush's refusal to even acknowledge, let alone do something -- about the catastrophic failure of our health care system.
(snip)

GM lost $1.1 billion in the first quarter and has plans to slash 25,000 manufacturing jobs. Many of the company's wounds are self-inflicted and the cultural arrogance among many GM executives still prevails in spite of their dismal performance.
(snip)

Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and New York Times columnist is a national treasure in explaining just how flawed the system is and how Americans pay considerably more and get substantially less than people in more enlightened countries do.
(snip)

In the United States, we are spending 13 percent of our gross national income on health care and yet in the Netherlands, where everyone is covered, they spend only 8.5 percent.
(snip)

Bush likes to help the automakers. His chief-of-staff, Andrew Card, is a former GM executive and auto industry lobbyist. GM's Wagoner, Ford's boss, William Ford Jr., and the cadre of martini-sipping auto executives from Detroit-area country clubs were and are all big Bush campaign contributors. Wagoner and Ford both publicly endorsed Bush tax cuts for the super rich. Both men are considerably enriched as a result of the raid on the U.S. Treasury that's produced record deficits working class Americans and their children are now stuck paying for. As a result, ironically, they will have less money to buy cars.
(snip)

The Busheviks like the Wal-Mart model for health care coverage. Provide as little as possible and, if you can, stick the taxpayers with the tab for uninsured workers and tack it on to the government deficit.

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Niagara Falls Reporter
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GM'S HEALTH-CARE SHAKEDOWN SHOWS SYSTEMIC FLAWS IN BUSH'S AMERICA

By Bill Gallagher
DETROIT -- General Motors and the United Autoworkers are on a collision course over health-care costs and the issue underscores the refusal of George W. Bush and the Republicans in Congress to do anything to fundamentally change our failed system. It also shows how gutless GM executives and the other suits in corporate America are in refusing even to discuss the issue in real terms.

What's good for America is good for Wal-Mart is the essential Bush policy on health care. The result is 45 million Americans with no health insurance at all, skyrocketing costs for workers fortunate enough to have insurance, large corporations and small businesses faced with "unsustainable" burdens in providing coverage for their workers and American enterprises severely weakened and stuck in a competitive disadvantage in the world marketplace.

Our fractured health care system is the most costly, inefficient and ineffective in the industrialized world. But Bush and the Republicans like it that way because it pumps obscene profits into the coffers of their core constituencies and campaign donors: drug companies, insurance companies and corporate health care providers.

GM has issued an ultimatum to the UAW to deliver health-care concessions by June 30 or else the automaker is threatening unilateral action, which will violate worker's contracts and is certain to set-off labor strife.

GM is in big trouble and Standard & Poor's has downgraded America's largest industrial corporation's debt to "junk bond" status. Ford also has serious problems and is in the same debt status pickle, but it does not have nearly the manufacturing capacity and labor force of the GM behemoth, and thus can more quickly adapt to changing circumstances. Daimler-Chrysler began significant restructuring in 2001 and is now churning out profits.

Health care costs are only a part of GM's plight. The company has never fully recovered from the disastrous tenure of its former chairman, Roger Smith. He went on a business acid trip and decided GM's future would be better as a computer and financial services company. The flashbacks alone still cause corporate hallucinations and Smith's legacy of failure still hasn't been entirely purged. Smith was a strategic idiot and a first-class jerk but he never had to deal with the consequences of his follies.
Now GM is spinning out of control. Its market share is way down with consumers shying away from gas-guzzling products. In the growing Chinese market, GM's herd of SUVs may not meet fuel efficiency standards there.

The company consistently opposes government efforts to limit air pollution and greenhouse emissions. This tactic works with the Busheviks and GM whores in the U.S. Congress, but in other parts of the world where the health threats of pollution are taken more seriously, the company's cars and trucks with their filth spewing tailpipes are way out of step.

The company is still the world's number one automaker, but just barely with Japan's Toyota braced to soon capture that distinction. There is little support in Washington for restricting imports, but a case can be made that foreign competitors -- with the help of their governments -- make it difficult for North American manufacturers to compete.

GM has too many nameplates and continues to make cars people don't want. GM -- more than any other automaker -- is addicted to costly incentives aimed at bribing reluctant consumers to buy unwanted products. The company hopes some new lines will help, but getting those products to market, start up costs and the time required to introduce them won't help the near-term bottom line that, for now, is hemorrhaging red ink.

GM lost $1.1 billion in the first quarter and has plans to slash 25,000 manufacturing jobs. Many of the company's wounds are self-inflicted and the cultural arrogance among many GM executives still prevails in spite of their dismal performance.

The company is spending $5.6 billion per year to pay for health insurance for its 1.1 million current and retired employees. That tacks on $1,500 to the cost of each GM car and truck rolling off the assembly line. Cutting those costs is a top corporate priority, although many other factors have much greater impact on GM's profitability.

The company is threatening to reduce health care benefits with or without the permission of the UAW. The union's present contract protecting those benefits doesn't expire until 2007, but GM is demanding concessions now.

Company Chairman Rick Wagoner says he wants to achieve the concessions "in cooperation with the UAW," but even with the union leadership on board, selling concessions to the membership will be difficult at best.

Wagoner and other desperate American auto company executives are ignoring the true nature of the problem -- Bush's refusal to even acknowledge, let alone do something -- about the catastrophic failure of our health care system.

Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and New York Times columnist is a national treasure in explaining just how flawed the system is and how Americans pay considerably more and get substantially less than people in more enlightened countries do.

Krugman is a prophet of reform and his fact driven analysis shows how we squander health care dollars on bureaucratic shuffling. He notes that "much of our health care spending is devoted to passing the buck: trying to get someone else to pay the bills."

Krugman cites a World Health Organization report that shows administrative costs in U.S. private health insurance companies eat up 15 percent of the money, "but only 4 percent of the budgets of public insurance companies, which consist mainly of Medicare and Medicaid."
Krugman also points to a "New England Journal of Medicine" estimate that found that "administrative costs took 31 cents out of every dollar the United States spent on health care, compared with only 17 cents in Canada" with its single payer system.

In the United States, we are spending 13 percent of our gross national income on health care and yet in the Netherlands, where everyone is covered, they spend only 8.5 percent.

The big auto companies with their older work forces, union contract obligations and large number of retired workers pay a huge price for the wasteful U.S. health care system.

Bush likes to help the automakers. His chief-of-staff, Andrew Card, is a former GM executive and auto industry lobbyist. GM's Wagoner, Ford's boss, William Ford Jr., and the cadre of martini-sipping auto executives from Detroit-area country clubs were and are all big Bush campaign contributors.

Wagoner and Ford both publicly endorsed Bush tax cuts for the super rich. Both men are considerably enriched as a result of the raid on the U.S. Treasury that's produced record deficits working class Americans and their children are now stuck paying for. As a result, ironically, they will have less money to buy cars.

Bush is more than willing to toss the auto industry the bones of lax fuel efficiency standards and permitting more dirty air emissions at the cost of public health. But he won't do a damn thing to change our catastrophically failed health care system, which is doing irreparable harm to the auto industry.

And no leading figure from the U.S. auto industry will say the bloody obvious: We need a national health care system to remain competitive in the world marketplace, and Bush is standing in the way of any discussion or consideration of that practical reality.

Instead, with GM leading the charge, they are going to try to take it out of the hides of the autoworkers that fought for decades to get decent health insurance benefits. As a nation, we should strive for all Americans to have the medical benefits UAW members have, not attempt to diminish the autoworkers' plans to some common denominator of poor and more costly coverage.

We recently experienced a little-noticed milestone in the North American auto industry that underlines what's wrong with our health care system. For more than 100 years, Michigan produced more cars than anywhere else. No longer. That distinction now belongs to the Province of Ontario and the Canadian national health care system is the primary reason for the shift of auto production there. The real Motor City these days is in Toronto.

U.S. auto executives know lower health care costs fuel the advantage of making cars in Canada, but they won't say that out loud for fear of offending the Busheviks or being labeled "socialists." The president of GM of Canada in 2002 did sign a joint letter with the president of the Canadian Auto Workers proclaiming, "It is vitally important that the publicly funded health care system be preserved and renewed."

Canada's system is far from perfect but it is a much more efficient and cost-effective way to provide health care than Bush's prescription-a tonic for corporate interests, but poisonous public policy.

The Canadian Auto Workers union estimates the health system there saves the automakers about $4 per hour per worker. Buzz Hargrove, the ever-so-smart and progressive president of the CAW, knows this and won't even think of concessions. He told the Detroit Free Press that in contract negotiations this summer, "We are not going to go backwards, not on wages, pensions or other matters. We go forward with talks and make progress for our workers." Hargrove also says unbridled imports pose as far more serious threat for Detroit's automakers. "Their problem is not health care. Their real problem is trade and falling market share. You aren't losing sales just because of some $1,500 per-vehicle health care cost. That's peanuts considering they put incentives on the hood to make up for that. It's about unfair trade," Hargrove said.

But GM is hellbent to cut health care costs and lay off workers. That means those of us who do work and have federal and state taxes deducted from our checks will be paying more because as Paul Krugman points out in our system, "Medical costs act as a tax on employment." GM reduces its head count but "the insurance premiums saved by firing workers are no saving at all to society as a whole: Somebody still ends up paying the bills," Krugman wisely observes.

Charles E. Wilson, the former GM chairman, took a little heat when President Dwight Eisenhower nominated him to become secretary of defense. At his Senate confirmation hearing old "Engine Charley" might have too closely linked the fates of his company and the nation. Often misquoted, what Wilson actually said was, "For years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." His views then were hardly sinister. And now, when it comes to health care costs, what's bad for the country is also bad for General Motors.

The Busheviks like the Wal-Mart model for health care coverage. Provide as little as possible and, if you can, stick the taxpayers with the tab for uninsured workers and tack it on to the government deficit.

In terms of sales, Wal-Mart replaced GM as the nation's biggest corporation a few years ago. But no one will ever compare Wal-Mart to "Generous Motors," GM's now dated nickname. Wal-Mart offers health insurance to fewer than half its employees. And the price of the coverage the workers must pay is so high, many of those eligible for the benefit simply can't afford it.

A United Food and Commercial Workers union study found that, "More than 60 percent of Wal-Mart's employees -- 600,000 people -- are forced to get health insurance from the government or through spouse's plans, or live without any health insurance."

The huge retailer notoriously shifts health care costs to other employers or the taxpayers. GM and every other business that does provide health insurance, along with every working American, subsidize Wal-Mart and the cheap, exploitative bastards who own the company.

More than 10,000 Wal-Mart employees in Tennessee are on the state's expanded Medicaid program. Wal-Mart workers in California rely on the state to provide $32 million annually in health-related services. In Georgia, more than 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees are enrolled in a state health insurance program for families living on incomes below the federal poverty levels. Doesn't Wal-Mart just make you proud to be an American?

The net worth of the Walton family, owners of Wal-Mart, is now pegged at $98 billion. Bush's tax cuts have made them even richer. Spending just 1 percent of the family wealth could provide every Wal-Mart employee with affordable health insurance.

The Bush annual deficit that covers for his tax cuts -- largely benefiting the wealthiest Americans -- is now pushing $500 billion. That number too is "unsustainable." But we'd get a much better bang for our deficit dollar spending it on national health care.

It is a far more fair way to spend that money. That way, every American could have the same health care coverage as the Walton family, the members of GM's board of directors, and, of course, George W. Bush and the members of Congress.


Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is mailto:gallaghernewsman@sbcglobal.net
Niagara Falls Reporter
www.niagarafallsreporter.com<