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Back on July 19, I posted an item entitled "A Mother's Response To A Marine Recruiter."

Just the other day a young lady posted a longish comment taking "Mom" to task.

I don't often reply to the posted comments, even to gracious words of praise for my efforts, but I do read them, including those of others who mention me on their blogs. I always appreciate them, of course, and try to post links to their blogs as thank you's.

Anyway, since "Proud Recruit" took some time and effort to berate 'Mike's Mom,' I think she's deserving of a few comments by me in defense of 'Mom.'

Also gives me a chance to digress into some other related areas.

(Frankly, I think 'Mom's' letter is apocryphal. But it's nice to see one not obviously written by some Repuke in a basement, filled with distortion and treacle.)

Click the link to see the original post. Proud Recruit's letter and my reply follow:
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Michael's Mom,

I found your blog while doing a blog search pertaining to the United States Marine Corps.

Please allow me to better inform you on some of your information. First, I will agree that it is somewhat unreasonable for a person to be contacted for military recruitment at the age of 14, 15. However, the military does not contact them for no reason. Either they filled out a card, as your son did, or a friend referred them.

What really got to me, was when you said "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."

Madam, let me tell you a little about myself. This past year, I was able to graduate early. I had a full scholarship awaiting me. I turned down $38,000 in scholarships so that I could join my country's Armed Forces. I did not choose to do so because I am without resources OR incapable. If I desired, I have no doubt I could go to Harvard. I am not alone. Suddenly, many Ivy League graduates, many students at the top of their high school graduating class, have decided that there is something in life far more important than being viewed as successful by people that do not matter.


To me, knowing that I am doing something to achieve my full potential; doing something to ensure freedom for myself, my family, the rest of the world, and generations to come; I am being all that I can be.Yes, I am still going to college. Yes, I am going to be a lawyer someday--a JAG lawyer in the United States military.

Please do not make assumptions for things which you know little or nothing about. I am not one of a kind. Thankfully, there are thousands of others just like me.


Sincerely,

A Proud Recruit

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Dear Proud Recruit,

A small clarifying point - this is not Michael's Mom's blog, this is DN's blog. But perhaps you knew that.

Well, much like a dealer in a school yard who gives free drugs at first, this is the way folks who want others to get hooked on what they're selling do it. In return for filling out some personal information, this young man got a free water bottle, or some such. He was obviously not so terribly sophisticated as yet to understand that there is no free lunch in this life. He just thought it was an easy way to get something for nothing. Surely you remember what it was like to be 14, since it was only 4 short years ago when you were that age. I would like to think the Marines would weed out 14-year olds from their call lists, but, as you know, it's becoming increasingly difficult to make the monthly quota of enlistments. And if you fail to make your quota often enough, you soon find yourself in the desert, kicking in doors, dodging IED's and nervously shooting at anything that moves. So probably even a kid at least 3 years away is fair game nowadays.

OK, Mike's Mom was a little off on the age but not so much on the background. Here's a quote from this article:
http://www.therockinghamnews.com/news/11202005/news/74047.htm
"They are also young - average age 20 for men, and 21 for women - and almost all are high school graduates from lower- to middle-class backgrounds."

Thanks so much for detailing your bona fides. You may possibly be the exception which proves the rule.

I like to think 'Michael's Mom' would be happy to have you serve in her son's place. Cindy Sheehan and all the other Gold Star Mom's might also agree.

Hey, if it were another time and place, you could have been the one to take George W. Bush's slot in 'Nam. Or any of the other chickenhawks, most all of whom seem to be Republicans anxious to initiate, complete with a multitude of lies, an illegal, immoral invasion and occupation which is as far as it gets from "defending America," with the children of someone else, anyone else but theirs. And, most assuredly, anyone else but THEMSELVES.

BTW, I also have no doubt you could go to Harvard. Not to disparage you, but "W" went to Harvard. And Yale before that.

He tried to get into the University of Texas before that, but they wouldn't take him. Apparently not smart enough; he's certainly proved the wisdom of their turndown in years since. But Yale had to take him - that legacy thing, you know. All the profs well knew who his Poppy was. And the career danger they faced if they dared give Junior an F.

I'm intrigued by this comment you made: "...have decided that there is something in life far more important than being viewed as successful by people that do not matter." (Emphasis mine.) You see, this one sentence tells me all I really need to know about you. Let me guess: Your Dad's a military officer currently assigned to Fort Leonard Wood and a "lifer." He's had 18 years to indoctrinate you as to which career choice of yours would make him the happiest. And little girls do like to make their daddies happy.

I'm also guessing that either you or him, or both, consider anyone not in his status to be the "people that do not matter." The enlisted folks - the 'grunts.' The guys who came from parents with working class backgrounds. The ones who truly made America great, only to watch it now sliding into Third World status at the hands of greedy, neocon war-mongers and imperialists.

I see your goal is to be a JAG lawyer. Get ready for the thousands of lawyer jokes coming your way. Not to mention the jokes about kangaroo courts.

I also took note of your elitist, superior tone in reprimanding your elders about making what you consider assumptions for things which, given your remarkably long experience and wisdom at the ripe old age of 18, she would know "little or nothing about."

I've seen an example of your experience and wisdom by reading your blog and many of the links to sites you admire therein. I see you're heavily into Ollie North, the convicted liar, guilty of aiding and abetting obstruction of Congress, shredding and altering official documents, and accepting an illegal gratuity from Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord.

The same Lt. Col. who disgraced the Marine uniform he wore while illegally ignoring the laws of the Congress of the United States of America to carry out Reagan's illegal policies, which resulted in the killing of 10,000 Nicaraguans and Hondurans, never mind the illegal arms shipments to Iran. And Nicholas Sparks? I have trouble envisioning the crisp, no-nonsense Marine attorney you wish to be with the soppy, cliche-ridden, schmaltzy, simple-minded glop Sparks grinds out.

Gee, I wish I had been as smart as you when I enlisted, upon high school graduation at 17, asked for a combat job and duty in war-torn Korea. Neither of which I was given, thank God. I like to think now that wiser heads prevailed, but who knows, it may just have been the luck of the draw. The Korean "peace-keeping action" was yet another of the many to come "wars" NOT fought to defend America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. NOT fought for freedom, but for political and/or ideological expediency. Or oil. Wonder why the nationalists, posing as patriots, can't seem to understand this.

Have you heard the phrase: 'young and stupid?' It's mostly said by folks who, despite their "stupidity," managed to survive and often prosper into their seventies and beyond. We have the vision now to realize just how ignorant we were way back then.

May you attain that vision and wisdom someday.

I wonder if you will, since you seem to have taken the jingoistic TV commercial propaganda, and adopted it as your own: "I am being all that I can be." Puleeze...

You end by opining that there are thousands of others just like you. The neonazis, or neocons - same thing - certainly hope so. They need all the cannon fodder they can get for their imperialist goals.

And folks like you will take the place of my grandchildren, I pray... --DN

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# posted by DN @ 11/28/2005 09:22:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

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Fitzgerald Targets Rove Again

By Jason Leopold

t r u t h o u t Investigative Report
Monday 28 November 2005

Continuing his two-year-old investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a covert CIA agent, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will present evidence to a second grand jury this week that could lead to a criminal indictment being handed up against Karl Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, sources inside the investigation said over the weekend.
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During previous testimony before the grand jury, Rove said he first learned Plame Wilson's name from reporters - specifically, from Novak's column - and only after her name was published did he discuss Plame Wilson's CIA status with other journalists. That sequence of events, however, as described by Rove during his grand jury testimony, has turned out not to be true, and his reasons for not being forthcoming have not convinced Fitzgerald that Rove had a momentary lapse, according to sources.
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Fitzgerald will present evidence to the grand jury later this week, obtained from other witnesses who were interviewed by the Special Prosecutor or who testified, showing that Rove lied during the three times he testified under oath and that he made misleading statements to Justice Department and FBI investigators in an attempt to cover up his role in the leak when he was first interviewed about it in October 2003, the sources said.

The most serious charges Rove faces are making false statements to investigators and obstruction of justice, the sources said.
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However, according to the sources, two things are very clear: either Rove will agree to enter into a plea deal with Fitzgerald or he will be charged with a crime, but he will not be exonerated for the role he played in the leak, based on numerous internal conversations Fitzgerald has had with his staff. If Rove does agree to enter into a plea, Fitzgerald is not expected to discuss any aspect of his probe into Rove, because Rove may be called to testify as a prosecution witness against Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby was indicted last month on five counts of lying to investigators, perjury, and obstruction of justice related to his role in the leak.
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Moreover, a second high-ranking official in the Bush administration also faces the possibility of indictment for making false statements to investigators about his role in the leak: National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

Hadley had been interviewed in 2004 about his role in the leak and had vehemently denied speaking to reporters about Plame Wilson, the sources said. However, these sources have identified Hadley as sharing information about Plame Wilson with Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, whose stunning revelation two weeks ago - that he was the first journalist to learn of Plame Wilson's identity in mid-June 2003 and had kept that fact secret for two years - led Fitzgerald to return to a second grand jury.
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Rove had emailed Hadley following the conversation he had with Cooper in July 2003 regarding former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger to investigate allegations Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country...
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Earlier this month, the sources said, Fitzgerald received additional testimony from Rove's former personal assistant, Susan B. Ralston, who was also a special assistant to President Bush. Ralston said that Rove instructed her not to log a phone call Rove had with Cooper about Plame Wilson in July 2003.
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Ralston testified in August that Cooper's name was not noted in the call logs from Rove's office, those familiar with the case say, testifying that because Cooper's call was transferred to Rove's office from the White House switchboard it was not logged. If Cooper had called Rove's office directly, the call would have been logged, Ralston testified.

But sources say that Fitzgerald has obtained documentary evidence proving that that scenario does not jibe with other unrelated calls to Rove's office that were also transferred to his office by the switchboard but were logged.

As Rove's senior adviser, Ralston screened Rove's calls. Her additional testimony may help Fitzgerald prove that there were inconsistencies in Rove's account of his role in the leak and assess why he withheld a crucial fact from the prosecutor: that Rove had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper as well as Novak about Plame and confirmed that she was an undercover CIA agent.

On Sunday, Time magazine reported that another one of its reporters, Viveca Novak, who bears no relation to Robert Novak, is cooperating with Fitzgerald's probe and will give a deposition to Fitzgerald about a conversation she had with Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, in May 2004.
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Fill in the gaps by reading the whole story via the link...
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Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt

Frank Rich
The New York Times

November 27, 2005
http://www.pekingduck.org/

George W. Bush is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing."

Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.

The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.

The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."

The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.

What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.

Sooner or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.

No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.

"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.
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If you're poor and steal during a national crisis, you're a looter.
If you're rich and steal during a national crisis, you're a Republican.

Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!

Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/
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Will Texas get Kinky?

He's the Jewish cowboy turned thriller writer who's hoping his outrageous charm and up-beat policies will help him pull off the biggest upset in American politics since Arnie won California. Robert McCrum joins Kinky Friedman on the trail for Governor of TexasRobert McCrumSunday November 27, 2005

Observer
Kinky Friedman once wrote a song entitled 'They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Any More'. He is also the author of a series of comic mystery novels starring a detective named Kinky Friedman. During his forties (he is now 61), he was still living with his parents, a pet armadillo and a colony of hummingbirds.

A Texas Jew, Friedman claims he was 'born in a manger, died in the saddle and came back as a horny toad'. Now he is doing the most outrageous thing in his long, outrageous career: he's running as an independent for governor of Texas. In the Lone Star State, home of LBJ and the power base for three Bush presidencies, this almost passes for normal. In the Seventies, one gubernatorial contender, Stanley Adams, reportedly listed his occupation as 'alleged white-collar criminal'. Further back, in the Twenties, it was Ma Ferguson, the first woman to occupy the governor's mansion, who declared, during one of the state's perennial Hispanic language debates, that 'If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for Texans.' Ma Ferguson was a simple, God-fearing soul, but scarcely a match for Governor W Lee 'Pappy' O'Daniel, who campaigned for office on the 10 Commandments with the words, 'I don't know if I'll get elected, but boy, it sure has been good for the flour business.'

Friedman doesn't have a lot to say about flour, but he is the only candidate to have come out for gay marriage, casino gambling and compulsory prayer in schools. His campaign staff sell bumper stickers bearing the legend 'My Governor is a Jewish Cowboy'.

In Texas, old-world courtesy and Bible-based respectability rub alongside brash Dallas caricatures. This is the state where it is illegal to milk another man's cow; which once banned the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica because it contained a formula for home-brewed beer; but where the average ranch is smaller than 200 acres. For every big-hatted oilman there's a sober, independent-minded citizen worrying about education and prayer in schools.

Texas is part of Bush's America, supplying many of the young men getting killed in Iraq, and disdainfully apart from it. Friedman's campaign enjoys the informal support of Bill Clinton (a fan of his novels) and George W Bush (a fan of his music). In April 2002, during the so-called Council of War between Bush and Blair in Crawford, Texas, the conversation turned from Baghdad and Gaza to Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. According to Sir Christopher Meyer's gossipy memoirs, DC Confidential, Laura Bush cheerfully informed the dumbstruck British contingent that she was a fan of Friedman and his song 'Proud to be an Asshole from El Paso'. There is a chance - just a chance - that a year hence, during the mid-term elections, middle America will have become a good deal more familiar with Friedman's outrageous lyrics, and with his role as a national court jester.

'So why are you running?' asks talk-radio shock jock Don Imus. 'I need the closet space,' replies the candidate, standing defiantly by the Alamo. Swarthy and piratical, with crinkly, dyed-black hair, and often chomping on an unlit Montecristo cigar, Kinky claims to have just two outfits. In the week I spent on his campaign trail, I saw only one: a black cowboy hat, a black shirt, apparently cut from roofing felt, a long black 'preacher's coat', easifit blue jeans and brown boots. He stomps up to the microphone like a kid in oversize hand-me-downs.

Today, he's fundraising with the former champion wrestler and ex-governor of Minnesota, Jesse 'The Body' Ventura, on Willie Nelson's private golf course just outside Austin. While we wait for the event to get under way, Kinky instinctively repeats a Willie Nelson joke. 'This man says to his best friend, "I think my wife is dead." Best friend: "You think? Don't you know?" "Well," says the man. "The sex is the same, but there's an awful lot of dishes to wash."'

For the rest, click you-know-where...
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San Francisco Indymedia
Original article is at http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2005/06/1716256.php Print comments.

by Brendan Smith and Zeynep Toufe
Monday, Jun. 27, 2005 at 8:39 AM

We were dropping bombs then, and I saw bombing intensify," Goodrich explained to a hushed room. "All the documents coming out now, the Downing Street memo and others, confirm what I had witnessed in Iraq. The war had already begun while our leaders were telling us that they were going to try all diplomatic options first."

Istanbul, Turkey - Today in Istanbul the jury was taken aback by witness testimony from Iraqi war victims and a US Air Force veteran.

"Snipers hunt people in the streets. People attempting to go to health centers are shot at," testified Eman Kmammas, an Iraqi translator. "There are many crippled children. There are thousands of widows and orphans. There are no police for security and there are no courts. Even hospitals are occupied and bombed and burned."

Former US Air Force combat veteran Tim Goodrich stunned the jury by revealing his role in the "softening up" of Iraq months before the US declaration of war. "We were dropping bombs then, and I saw bombing intensify," Goodrich explained to a hushed room. "All the documents coming out now, the Downing Street memo and others, confirm what I had witnessed in Iraq. The war had already begun while our leaders were telling us that they were going to try all diplomatic options first."

This gripping but unsettling revelation came on the second day of proceedings at the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul, Turkey, which is collecting evidence of war crimes in Iraq.

Goodrich's testimony had just begun when a 75-foot banner prepared by the Iraqi delegation and composed of harrowing pictures of Iraqi child victims of the war was carried into the courtroom. In the presence of the father of one of the victims shown on the banner, Goodrich and others stood and a moment of silence spread through the room while the banner was carried through the hall. The teeming press contingent rushed to photograph the scene as some members of the audience cried.

While the first day of the trial had concentrated on moral and political issues, emotional testimony from Iraqi witnesses dominated the second day of proceedings. Fadil al Bedrani, an Iraqi journalist who survived the siege of Fallujah, told the audience that he watched as "20-25 persons were running barefoot when an American warplane bombed, killing and wounding them; only one elderly woman and 2 children stayed safe ... the doctors and the staff of the Fallujah hospital were detained; the warplanes bombed the alternative hospital in downtown ... and bombed the medicine warehouses in Nazzal area, killing 4 doctors, and 8 medical workers."

Dahr Jamail, an unembedded journalist who had been reporting from Iraq during the past year, narrated the story told to him by Ali Shalal Abbas from Baghdad. While detained at Abu Ghraib and tortured, Abbas was approached by two men, "one a foreigner and one a translator," who asked him who he was. "I said I'm a human being. They told me, 'We are going to cut your head off and send you to hell, we will take you to Guantánamo.'" Abbas questioned why only Saddam Hussein, who also had people tortured, was put on trial while the Americans were not.

The fate and the rights of the detainees remained a recurring theme at the Tribunal. Iraqi lawyer Amal Sawadi expressed her frustration at being stonewalled by occupation authorities who refused to tell her of the charges against her clients, if there was any evidence, and even if the person was under detention. "All of Iraq has become a vast prison," she sighed. "Is this what they call democracy?"

There was also ample discussion at the Tribunal - supported by nearly 200 non-governmental organizations ranging from Greenpeace to the Vietnam Veterans Against the War - of various forms of resistance. Goodrich, who refused to return to Iraq for an additional tour of duty, urged more soldiers to become conscientious objectors. And to those who questioned his anti-war activism, he responded, "Some people accuse us of being against the troops or unpatriotic, but we are the troops. How can I be unpatriotic by asking our soldiers to come back home alive?"

The Egyptian sociologist Samir Amin urged participants of the more than twenty tribunals held around the world over the last two years to begin a campaign under the slogan "US Come Home" in America and "US Go Home" in the rest of the world.

Eva Ensler, member of the WTI jury and American playwright most famous for her award-winning "Vagina Monologues," told reporters that both the UN and national governments had failed the Iraqi people and that "the people's movement across the world that rose up is an opportunity for the conscience of the world to be heard."

Iraqi and US military testimony was joined by former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations Denis Halliday, who argued that the Tribunal has an "obligation to demand full international prosecution of US/UK war leaders as war criminals involved in the destruction of Iraq, the lives of its people and their human rights and well being, through unlawful and unjustifiable armed invasion and military occupation."

For many Iraqis at the proceedings, the Tribunal offered an opportunity to seek justice. Hana Ibrahim, director of the Women's Cultural Center in Baghdad, maintained the WTI's "task in the world is to judge the war criminals, to warn the people of the world, and to leave a trace in history."

Hilal Kuey, spokesperson for the WTI in Istanbul and a lawyer, affirmed the legitimacy of the Tribunal: "We are a real court, if not an official one. Our witnesses are real, our evidence is real. International law has been blocked by guns, our aim is to help clear this blockade."


Brendan Smith is editor of the forthcoming book (with Jeremy Brecher and Jill Cutler) In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan/Holt 2005) and co-author of Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity (South End Press, 2002). Zeynep Toufe publishes the blog.

Sunday 26 June 2005 (reposted by Angie)

www.truthout.org/docs_2005/062705Z.shtml
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From sfgate.com

In Iraq, we are the new Hessians
- Pete McCloskey
Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Watching Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his generals defend their policies before a Senate committee recalls another brilliant and persuasive predecessor and his subordinates defending their policies in Vietnam. For six years, they spoke of "a light at the end of the tunnel," that we should stay the course, that "We can't just cut and run." After 58,000 American dead and 153,000 wounded, we finally learned that our confidence in those leaders was sadly misplaced.

Then, as now, we were trying to build a new democratic nation for which we had trained an army half again the size of that of their adversaries.
Then, as now, it was difficult for military leaders to speak out against a policy American soldiers and Marines were doing their best to carry out. Former Marine Commandant David Shoup, a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient for his valor in World War II, had the courage to say that the war was a terrible mistake, but was castigated for criticizing military decisions and leadership while Marines were fighting and dying.

Then, as now, Congress had been led into authorizing a war because of deception by a president. Then, it was a nonexistent attack on a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin. Now, it was nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and a nonexistent conspiracy between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. In both cases, an American president and secretary of defense sincerely believed that a war was in our best interests, and that initiating that war justified deceiving the American people.

Sadly, then and now, Marines and soldiers were dying and being maimed for life because leaders at the Pentagon and in the White House, many of whom had never experienced combat themselves, were confidently claiming that they were building a new democratic nation, that they could see victory on the horizon, and, deliberately or implicitly, that it was unpatriotic to suggest otherwise.

Today, it is argued that it would be premature to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis before we have trained an Iraqi army and police force capable of sustaining a "democratic" Iraqi government. But what Iraqi leader, put in power and maintained by the American military, can expect support from Iraqis in the future? No occupying power can become beloved while it destroys cities and neighborhoods to root out local insurgents. In Vietnam, we sought to win the minds and hearts of the people only to learn that this could not be done while destroying their villages and countryside. Does this not seem reasonably parallel to the situation we face in Iraq?

Now, as in the late 1960s and early 1970s, our leaders believe in and have staked their reputations on the principle that we can successfully occupy a country whose history, culture and religions are alien to ours. Have they forgotten our own sense of outrage when the British brought in the hated Hessians to put down our own insurgency back in 1776, the anniversary of which we will shortly celebrate? I suspect that the brave young men and women now fighting in Iraq would be the first to rebel against any foreign force occupying Texas, Kansas or California. No matter how many successful sweeps of insurgent strongholds and weapons caches or young Iraqis imprisoned, I doubt that American firepower can ever permanently overcome the rage for revenge on the part of young men who see us as the hated Hessians of our time.

So it seems proper for our best minds and statesmen to debate publicly the wisdom of continuing military occupation of Iraq until those whom we put and sustain in power feel that the Iraqi army and police are "ready." Who can be sure that such an army and police force will be loyal to whomever may happen to be elected, or that a brutal civil war is not a necessity of our blunders? It is wholly proper to suggest that our neocon civilian leadership has simply been dead wrong in its assumptions and conviction that American military power should be projected abroad in the manner we have pursued in Iraq. In no way should this be considered an unpatriotic debate.

Robert McNamara was fully as intelligent and persuasive as Rumsfeld.
(More --DN) Then, as now, most members of Congress had little military experience, and were extremely anxious that their sons not suffer. Is it any different today? I can identify no neocon leader who has served in a shooting war, or who indeed made any effort to so serve in the wars of his own youth.

Let us then not shy from a free, open and reasoned debate as to whether Americans should tell our leaders that it is time to commence an orderly withdrawal from our position as a military occupier of Iraq. As in Vietnam, we might consider the possibility that trying to insert American values and processes at the barrel of a gun may simply not be possible. The most terrible weaponry in history may not be able to overcome the historic desire of a people to be free of foreign domination. Iraq should be for the Iraqis, whatever they may try to resolve from the chaos we have created there.

Pete McCloskey, a farmer in Yolo County, was a Marine Reserve lieutenant colonel in 1967, the year he was elected to Congress from San Mateo County as the first Republican opposing the Vietnam War. During the Korean War, he was awarded the Navy Cross, Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.

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My Open Letter to George

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Cindy Sheehan

George,

My family is spending our 2nd Thanksgiving without Casey thanks to you and your lies. I am spending the day crying on a plane on my way to come to Crawford to again ask you for a meeting.

I had been to Crawford for three weeks in the summer and to DC several times asking for a meeting with you and now I am returning to our vacation home to once again try and meet with you. I don't know why you like Crawford so much, but I love it because of the Camp Casey Peace Community that arose during August this year when you wouldn't meet with me. When I arrived back here at the Peace House I felt a sense of coming home and belonging to something that is far greater than any of us: a community that is filled with love, acceptance and peace. Is this what you feel when you return frequently to Crawford? Also, the beautiful Texas sunset stirred memories of our days at Camp Casey when we would close our activities each day with former Marine Jeff Key playing taps among the crosses that honored our fallen. August was a miraculous time.

Since August, when I wanted to ask you the question: For what noble cause did you kill Casey and the others, over 200 more of our brave young men and women have been killed in the charade of Iraq. We can only guess how many innocent Iraqis have been slaughtered. You still have not answered my question. Many people in our country who have had sons or daughters killed, who have sons and daughters serving, and many concerned Americans want to know that answer to that question, also.

Also, since August we have discovered that American forces are using chemical weapons in Iraq . The Army admitted that white phosphorous was used as an offensive weapon against "enemy combatants." Oh really, George, since when did a weapon fired from a distance distinguish between enemies and innocents? Especially when it is so hard for soldiers on the ground to differentiate between enemies and innocents? It is hard for one to ignore if not look away from the grisly pictures of the burned citizens of Fallujah.

By the way, George, isn't the use of chemical weapons prohibited? Don't you always say that "Saddam is a bad man" for using chemical weapons on his own people? So is it okay for you to use chemical weapons in Iraq because the citizens of Iraq are not "your people?" Saddam should be on trial for killing so many innocent people. Bombing cities where innocent civilians live and using chemical weapons are war crimes. Does that make you an alleged war criminal? Move over, Saddam. There is a new bad guy in town.

George, for the sake of the Iraqi people, don't you think it is time to bring our military forces home from Iraq? It is time to stop hypocritically and callously killing them to spread your brand of freedom and democracy. You know the kind of freedom and democracy you like? Where no open dissent is allowed; no one is able to petition the government for redress of wrongs; where our emails can be read and our library reading materials checked up on and analyzed? Your kind of freedom and democracy smears brave patriots as cowards and traitors for daring to speak out against your murderous policies. A majority of Americans don't even want your brand of freedom and democracy. What makes you think the Iraqi people want it?

George, also for the sake of our wonderful, brave, and very young people who proudly wear the uniform of the USA: it is time to bring them home. They have done everything you have asked of them. They have also done things that make at least one quarter of them very sick in their hearts and souls. Some of them have been so needlessly and avoidably killed and some of them are coming home with pieces of them missing. For what George? What noble cause?

George, you had everything handed to you on a silver platter. I don't blame you for using your family influence to get out of serving in Vietnam. I don't blame anyone for trying to get out of that disastrous and totally evil war. What I do blame you for is killing my son in another disastrous and evil war. Casey had nothing handed to him on a silver platter. He was willing to serve his country and to even die to save his buddy's lives. You should be ashamed of yourself for exploiting Casey's honor and the honor of everyone in our armed forces of which the post of Commander in Chief was also handed to you on a silver platter. Ask your Vice President if he thinks that Casey may have had other "priorities" besides dying at 24. Ask your mama if her "beautiful mind" is bothered yet. Mine is.

Did you have the sacred luxury of having your two daughters at home with you today for Thanksgiving dinner? Did you proudly tease with them during the meal like my family used to do? Did you tell old funny family stories and laugh about old times? Did you, George? Our family did share a meal together and we tried to be merry, but you know what? It's not the same with a very valuable family member gone forever. Casey's premature death puts a damper on all of our days, but the holidays are especially hard.

Are you and Laura going to hit the sack tonight and toss and turn or stare out of the window worried that Jenna or Barbara may be killed in Iraq? Are you going to jump at every single ringing of the telephone, or hearts beating wildly run to every knock at the door; fearing the Angel of Death in an Army uniform? I didn't think so. Two soldiers were killed today in Iraq, George. I hope to God their families aren't just sitting down to enjoy their meal when the grim reapers come to tell them their holidays are ruined for ever. There is no good time for such horrendous news.

I ask you to again do the right thing.

Bring our troops home from Iraq. Don't kill others because your murderous policies have already killed so many. How many deaths do you think will be enough before Casey's is "justified?" 58,000? One was too many.

I will tell you what noble cause Casey died for, George: true and lasting peace. Please dignify all of the deaths by finally stopping the barbaric killing: before you ruin too many more holidays for way too many more people.

Cindy Sheehan
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...will fall on deaf ears. No one in the BFEE has a conscience, although we have hopes Poppy may yet develop one due to his association recently with President Clinton.

Hopefully before he gets himself killed jumping from a perfectly good airplane trying to prove he's a man and not the coward who hastily jumped from another airplane, in another time, leaving his crew behind to die. See here for Mr. Mierzejewski's eye-witness account. You'll have to wade through a lot of self-serving propaganda from hack Joe Hyams first... --DN

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Open Letter To George's Mama

Dear Barbara,

On April 04, 2004, your oldest child killed my oldest child, Casey Austin Sheehan.

Unlike your oldest child, my son was a marvelous person who joined the military to serve his country and to try and make the world a better place. Casey didn't want to go to Iraq, but he knew his duty. Your son went AWOL from a glamour unit. George couldn't even handle the Alabama Air National Guard. Casey joined the Army before your son became commander in chief. We all know that your son was thinking of invading Iraq as early as 1999. Casey was a dead man before George even became president and before he even joined the Army in May of 2000.

I raised Casey and my other children to use their words to solve problems and conflicts. I told my four children from the time that they were small that it is ALWAYS wrong to kick, bite, hit, scratch, pull hair, etc. If the smaller children couldn't find the words to solve their conflicts without violence, I always encouraged them to find a mediator like a parent, older sibling, or teacher to help them find the words.

Did you teach George to use his words and not his violence to solve problems? It doesn't appear so. Did you teach him that killing other people for profits and oil is ALWAYS wrong? Obviously you did not. I also used to wash my children's mouth out with soap on the rare occasion that they lied...did you do that to George? Can you do it now? He has lied and he is still lying. Saddam did not have WMD's or ties with al-Qaeda and the Downing Street Memos prove that your son knew this before he invaded Iraq.

On August 3rd, 2005, your son said that he killed my son and the other brave and honorable Americans for a "noble cause." Well, Barbara, mother to mother, that angered me. I don't consider invading and occupying another country that was proven not to be a threat to the USA is a noble cause. I don't think invading a country, killing its innocent citizens, and ruining the infrastructure to make your family and your family-friendly war profiteers rich is a noble cause.

So I went down to Crawford in August to ask your son what noble cause did he kill my son for. He wouldn't speak with me. I think that showed incredibly bad manners. Do you think a president, even if it is your son, should be so inaccessible to his employers? Especially one of his bosses whose life George has devastated so completely?

I have been to the White House several times since August to try and meet with George and I am going back to Crawford next week. Do you think you can call him and ask him to do the right thing and bring the troops home from this illegal and immoral war in Iraq that he carelessly started? I hear you are one of the few people he still talks to. He won't speak to his father, who knew the difficulties and impossibilities of going into Iraq and that's why he didn't go there in the 1st Gulf War. If you won't tell him to bring the troops home, can you at least urge him to meet with me?

You said this in 2003, a little over a year before my dear, sweet Casey was killed by your son's policies:

"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" (Good Morning America, March 18, 2003)

Now I have something to tell you, Barbara. I didn't want to hear about deaths or body bags either. On April 04, 2004, three Army officers came to my house to tell me that Casey was killed in Iraq. I fell on the floor screaming and begging the cruel Angel of Death to take me, too. But the Angel of Death that took my son is your son.

Casey came home in a flag draped coffin on April 10th. I used to have a beautiful mind, too. Now my mind is filled with images of seeing his beautiful body in his casket and memories of burying my brave and honest boy before his life really began. Casey's beautiful mind was ended by an insurgent's bullet to his brain, but your son might as well have pulled the trigger.

Besides encouraging your son to have some honesty and courage and to finally do the right thing, don't you think you owe me and every other Gold Star parent an apology for that cruel and careless remark you made?

Your son's amazingly ignorant, arrogant, and reckless policies in Iraq are responsible for so much sorrow and trouble in this world. Can you make him stop? Do it before more mothers' lives are needlessly and cruelly harmed. There have been too many worldwide already.

Sincerely,

Cindy Sheehan
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Go to Original
This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051212/scahill

Bush Wanted al Jazeera Gone and He Wanted It Then
By Jeremy Scahill
The Nation
12 December 2005 Issue

[posted online on November 23, 2005]

On November 22, Britain's Daily Mirror published a startling allegation: In an April 2004 White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush proposed bombing the Arab TV network Al Jazeera's international headquarters in Qatar. The report was based on a memo stamped "Top Secret" that had been leaked by a Cabinet official in Blair's government.

Was President Bush's alleged plot to bomb al Jazeera's international headquarters an "outlandish" accusation as the White House now claims? Or was it a deadly serious option on the table? Until a news organization or British official defies the Official Secrets Act and publishes the 5-page memo, we have no way of knowing. But what we do know is that at the time of Bush's April 16, 2004 White House meeting with Tony Blair, the Bush administration was in the throws of a very public, high-level temper tantrum directed against al Jazeera. The Bush-Blair summit took place at the peak of the first US siege of Fallujah and al Jazeera was once again there to witness the slaughter and the fierce resistance.

A day before Bush's meeting with Blair, Donald Rumsfeld slammed al Jazeera in distinctly undiplomatic terms:

Reporter: Can you definitively say that hundreds of women and children and innocent civilians have not been killed?

Sec. Rumsfeld: I can definitively say that what Al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.

Reporter: Do you have a civilian casualty count?

Sec. Rumsfeld: Of course not, we're not in the city. But you know what our forces do; they don't go around killing hundreds of civilians. That's just outrageous nonsense. It's disgraceful what that station is doing.

(I would recommend Rummy read some of the 'unofficial' reporting from folks on the ground in country to learn what they saw in Fallujah and elsewhere. Stop listening to the Pentagon 'cause they only listen to each other... --DN)

What al Jazeera was doing in Fallujah is exactly what it was doing when the US bombed its offices in Afghanistan in 2001 and when US forces killed al Jazeera's Baghdad correspondent, Tareq Ayoub, during the April 2003 occupation of Baghdad. Al Jazeera was witnessing and reporting on events Washington did not want the world to see.

The Fallujah offensive was one of the bloodiest assaults of the US occupation of Iraq. On April 5, 2004 US forces laid siege to city in a revenge attack sparked by the killing of 4 Blackwater mercenaries days earlier. When the US forces, led by the First Marine Expeditionary Force, attempted to take Fallujah on April 7, they faced fierce guerilla resistance. A US helicopter attacked a mosque, hitting the minaret and killing at least a dozen people. Within a week, some 600 Iraqis were dead, many of them women and children. By April 9, some 30 Marines had been killed and Fallujah had become a symbol of resistance against the occupation.

What was more devastating than the direct resistance US forces encountered in Fallujah was the effect the story of the defense and the slaughter of the innocents was having on the broader Iraqi population. A handful of un-embedded journalists, most prominently from al Jazeera, were providing the world with independent, eyewitness accounts. Al Jazeera's camera crew was also uploading video of the devastation for all the world, including Iraqis, to see. Inspired by the defense of Fallujah and outraged by the US onslaught, smaller uprisings broke out across Iraq, as members of the Iraqi police and army abandoned their posts, some joining the resistance.

Faced with a devastating public relations disaster, US officials did what they do best - they attacked the messenger. On April 11, with the un-embedded reporters exposing the reality of the siege of Fallujah, Senior military spokesperson Mark Kimmitt declared, "The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda, and that is lies." A few days later, on April 15, Rumsfeld echoed those remarks calling al Jazeera "vicious."

It was the very next day, according to the Daily Mirror, that Bush told Blair of his plan. "He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere," a source told The Mirror. "Blair replied that would cause a big problem. There's no doubt what Bush wanted to do - and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it."

To date, there has been no credible rejection of the Mirror's report from the White House or 10 Downing Street. Instead, the British government has activated its Official Secrets Act, threatening news organizations that publish any portion of the 5-page memo. Already, one British official has been accused of violating the act for allegedly passing it on to a member of parliament. Former British Defense Minister Peter Kilfoyle has called on Blair's government to release the memo. "It's frightening to think that such a powerful man as Bush can propose such cavalier actions," he said. "I hope the Prime Minister insists this memo be published. It gives an insight into the mindset of those who were the architects of war."

The Bush administration clearly blamed al Jazeera for undermining the first siege on Fallujah and fueling Iraqi public opinion and resistance against the US occupation. Given Washington's record of attacking al Jazeera both militarily and verbally, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the Bush administration could have simply decided that it was time to take them out. What is needed now is for a British newspaper or magazine to publish the memo for all the world to see and if they face legal action, they should be backed up by every major media organization in the world. If true, Bush's threat is a bold confirmation of what many journalists already believe: the Bush administration views us all as enemy combatants.

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute.
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...Bush hadn't indicated a desire to bomb PBS, especially when Bill Moyers was on the air, but I'll bet it was on his puny mind at some point. Here's some excerpts from... Aaah, hell, here's the whole thing:

(This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051205/nichoils)

Bush's War on the Press
by JOHN NICHOLS & ROBERT W. MCCHESNEY
[from the December 5, 2005 issue]

In his speech to last spring's National Media Reform Conference in St. Louis, Bill Moyers accused the Bush Administration not merely of attacking his highly regarded PBS program NOW but of declaring war on journalism itself. "We're seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age-old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable," explained Moyers. With the November resignation of Moyers's nemesis, Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) board chair Ken Tomlinson, amid charges of personal and political wrongdoing and a host of other recent developments, it becomes increasingly clear that this White House is doing battle with the journalistic underpinnings of democracy.

To be sure, every administration has tried to manipulate the nation's media system. Bill Clinton's wrongheaded support for the Telecommunications Act of 1996 cleared the way for George W. Bush's attempts to give media companies the power to create ever larger and more irresponsible monopolies. But with its unprecedented campaign to undermine and, where possible, eliminate independent journalism, the Bush Administration has demonstrated astonishing contempt for the Constitution and considerable fear of an informed public. Consider the bill of particulars:

§ Corrupting PBS. Tomlinson's tenure at the CPB, which annually distributes $400 million in federal funding to broadcast outlets, was characterized by an assault on the news operations of the Public Broadcasting Service in general, and Moyers in particular, for airing dissenting voices and preparing investigative reports on the Administration. His goal was clearly to fire a shot across the bow of all public stations so managers would shy away from the sort of investigative journalism that might expose Bush Administration malfeasance. On November 15, on the heels of Tomlinson's resignation, the CPB's inspector general issued a sixty-seven-page report documenting Tomlinson's repeated violations of the Public Broadcasting Act, CPB rules and the CPB code of ethics with his political meddling, though it stopped short of calling for prosecution, or of examining the link between Tomlinson's actions and White House directives.

§ Faking TV News. Under Bush Administration directives, at least twenty federal agencies have produced and distributed scores, perhaps hundreds, of "video news segments" out of a $254 million slush fund. These bogus and deceptive stories have been broadcast on TV stations nationwide without any acknowledgment that they were prepared by the government rather than local journalists. The segments--which trumpet Administration "successes," promote its controversial line on issues like Medicare reform and feature Americans "thanking" Bush--have been labeled "covert propaganda" by the Government Accountability Office.

§ Paying Off Pundits. The Administration has made under-the-table payments to at least three pundits to sing its praises, including Armstrong Williams, the conservative columnist who collected $240,000 from the Education Department and then cheered on the ill-conceived No Child Left Behind Act.

§ Turning Press Conferences Into Charades. Bush has all but avoided traditional press conferences, closing down a prime venue for holding the executive accountable. On those rare occasions when he deigned to meet reporters, presidential aides turned the press conferences into parodies by seating a friendly right-wing "journalist," former male escort Jeff Gannon, amid the reporters and then steering questions to him when tough issues arose. They have effectively silenced serious questioners, like veteran journalist Helen Thomas, by refusing to have the President or his aides call on reporters who challenge them. And they have established a hierarchy for journalists seeking interviews with Administration officials, which favors networks that give the White House favorable coverage--as the frequent appearances by Bush and Dick Cheney on Fox News programs will attest.

§ Gutting the Freedom of Information Act. As Eric Alterman detailed in a May 9 report in these pages, the Administration has scrapped enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act and has made it harder for reporters to do their jobs by refusing to cooperate with even the most basic requests for comment and data from government agencies. This is part of a broader clampdown on access to information that has made it virtually impossible for journalists to cover vast areas of government activity.

§ Obscuring the Iraq War. In addition to setting up a system for embedding reporters covering the war--which denied Americans a full picture of what was happening during the invasion--the Defense Department has denied access to basic information regarding the war, from accurate casualty counts to images of flag-draped coffins of US dead to the Abu Ghraib torture photos.

§ Pushing Media Monopoly. The Administration continues to make common cause with the most powerful broadcast corporations in an effort to rewrite ownership laws in a manner that favors dramatic new conglomeratization and monopoly control of information. The Administration's desired rules changes would strike a mortal blow to local journalism, as media "company towns" would be the order of the day. This cozy relationship between media owners and the White House (remember Viacom chair Sumner Redstone's 2004 declaration that re-electing Bush would be "good for Viacom"?) puts additional pressure on journalists who know that when they displease the Administration they also displease their bosses.

In his famous opinion in the 1945 Associated Press v. US case, Justice Hugo Black said that "the First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society." In other words, a free press is the sine qua non of the entire American Constitution and republican experiment.

The Bush Administration attack on the foundations of self-government demands a response of similar caliber. Under pressure from media-reform activists Congress has begun to push back, with a strong bipartisan vote in the Senate Commerce Committee to limit the ability of federal agencies to produce covert video news segments and to investigate Defense Department spending on propaganda initiatives. But until the Administration is held accountable by Congress for all its assaults on journalism, and until standards are developed to assure that such abuses will not be repeated by future administrations, freedom of the press will exist in name only, with all that suggests for our polity.

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Go to Original

Bush Targets al Jazeera?
CNN Head Should Get Job Back
By Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive
Wednesday 23 November 2005

Remember Eason Jordan, the CNN news chief who was forced to resign back in February because he dared to say, at a private conference, that the United States had killed about a dozen journalists in Iraq?

Well, he's looking a lot better today, one day after the Daily Mirror reported that George W. Bush wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera headquarters in Doha, the capital city of Qatar. "He was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair," the Daily Mirror said.

The paper said it had a new "top secret" Downing Street Memo that contains a transcript of the Bush-Blair conversation of April 16, 2004.
It has the ring of truth to it.

After all, Donald Rumsfeld has harped on Al Jazeera in none too subtle ways. "We are dealing with people who are willing to lie to the world to make their case," Rumsfeld said. (He's one to talk.) And he said Al Jazeera is "Johnny-on-the-spot a little too often for my taste."

The Daily Mirror story also has the ring of truth to it because the United States bombarded Al Jazeera's Baghdad office when the war started. Al Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub died in that assault.

"Journalists with Al Jazeera have complained of harassment and detention since their first un-embedded encounters with US troops," writes David Enders in the September issue of The Progressive. His article, "Reporters in the Cross Hairs," notes that Al Jazeera reporters have been detained at Abu Ghraib and "subjected to hooding, forced to stand naked, and abused with water."

That the US has killed journalists in Iraq is undeniable. The Committee to Protect Journalists notes that 13 journalists have fallen under US fire.
These facts don't get Eason Jordan his job back.

And they don't get us a President with any sort of moral compass.

That Bush would even contemplate bombing a news organization because he doesn't like its coverage shows just how maniacal this man has become.

Who is going to stop him the next time he comes up with another harebrained idea like that?

Hold on to your cowboy hats.
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As we said three years ago, if the AG thinks he's a bad guy, then charge him, give him a lawyer and a speedy trial (guaranteed by the constitution), and, if guilty, lock 'em up and throw away the key. But stop shredding all our rights in the name of the 'ism' du jour.

We're either the nation of laws, not men, that we've claimed ourselves to be, or we're no better than Al Qaeda ... --DN

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Go to Original

Torture Claims 'Forced US to Cut Terror Charges'
By Jamie Wilson
The Guardian UK
Friday 25 November 2005

Dirty bomb evidence came from al-Qaida leaders.

CIA worried case would expose prison network.

The Bush administration decided not to charge Jose Padilla with planning to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a US city because the (HEARSAY - DN) evidence (?) against him was extracted using torture on members of al-Qaida, it was claimed yesterday.

Mr. Padilla, A US CITIZEN who had been held for more than three years as an "enemy combatant" in a military prison in North Carolina, was indicted on Tuesday on the lesser charges of supporting terrorism abroad. After his arrest in 2002 the Brooklyn-born Muslim convert was also accused by the administration of planning to blow up apartment blocks in New York using natural gas.

The administration had used his case as evidence of the continued threat posed by al-Qaida inside America.

Yesterday's New York Times, quoting unnamed current and former government officials, said the main evidence of Mr. Padilla's involvement in the plots against US cities had come from two captured al-Qaida leaders, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, a leading al-Qaida recruiter. But the officials told the newspaper Mr. Padilla could not be charged with the bomb plots because neither of the al-Qaida leaders could be used as witnesses as they had been subjected to harsh questioning and could open up charges from defense lawyers that their earlier statements resulted from torture. Officials also feared that their testimony could expose classified information about the CIA prison system in which the men were thought to be held.

The CIA has never publicly acknowledged it is detaining Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Zubaydah. It is not known where they are being held. But it was reported last month the CIA was using secret detention centers in eastern Europe, possibly in Poland and Romania, for interrogations, thus beyond the reach of US law.

Internal reviews by the CIA have raised questions about the treatment and credibility of the two men. The New York Times said one review, completed in spring last year by the CIA inspector general, found that in the first months after his capture Mr. Mohammed had suffered excessive use of "water boarding", a technique involving near drowning which entails the detainee being strapped to a board and then submerged.

Announcing the charges against Mr. Padilla on Tuesday, the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, repeatedly refused to answer questions on why none of the allegations involving attacks on the US had been included.

To read the rest of the article, click the link...
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November 25, 2005
Arianna Huffington

READ MORE: Iraq, George W. Bush

Nov. 21 -- While we continue to uncover more and more about the lies and deceptions the Bush administration used to lead us to war in Iraq, let's not lose sight of the lies and deceptions that are being used to keep us there -- namely, the idea that we are sacrificing American lives in the name of spreading democracy, freedom, and human rights throughout the world.

For proof of how utterly insincere this claim is -- and how empty is George Bush's lofty rhetoric on the subject -- all you need to do is look at the kid glove treatment he gave the Chinese during his visit. Business and trade issues such as preventing movie pirating were clearly at the top of the president's agenda. Freedom, democracy, and human rights were reduced to throat clearing preliminaries. Hey, who has time to worry about dissidents being locked up when the new "Harry Potter" flick is being stolen?

"President Hu is a thoughtful fellow. He listened to what I had to say," Bush told reporters after his meeting with Hu. For his part, the thoughtful Chinese leader refused to allow any questions from the U.S. press throughout Bush's visit.

And the Chinese media did not cover the visit Bush made to a Protestant church. Maybe it's just as well. What would Chinese Christians have made of the president's claim that they were "worshiping in a way that is able to call upon the Almighty to help them through their lives"? Can somebody please tell me what that drivel is supposed to mean? Is it even possible to worship in a way that doesn't involve calling upon the Almighty to help you through your life? Isn't that kind of the definition of prayer?

So, what did Bush have to say during their meeting that Hu thoughtfully listened to? Apparently very little about China's ongoing human rights abuses and violations of religious freedom. For instance, according to yet another anonymous administration official, Bush only "alluded" to the list of imprisoned dissidents maintained by the U.S. government during his meeting with Hu. How do you "allude" to human rights abuses, anyway? Did Bush pull out a photo album from Abu Ghraib and say, "I'll show you mine if you show me yours"? Whatever "alluding" to means, it had such little impact on Hu that, unlike when Condi Rice visited China in March, the Chinese government didn't even feel compelled to release a single dissident.

But no matter. Bush went so far as to give Hu a pat on the back for his willingness to even say the words "human rights" and "democracy" out loud. "I thought," said the president, "it was very interesting in his comments that he talked about human rights." What exactly was "interesting" about Hu's bald-faced lie that "Notable and historic progress has been made in China's development of a democratic political system and human rights"? It's a statement not only refuted by the latest reports from Human Rights Watch but by the Secretary of State herself who earlier this month called China one of the worst violators of religious freedom in the world.

So why was the president so willing to give Hu a pass? Was it the announcement during the first night of the president's visit that China had agreed to buy 70 new 737 jets from Boeing? Perhaps that's what the president was "alluding" to when he said that Hu took democracy "on board in a very thoughtful manner." [emphasis mine]

Now contrast this stark human-rights-and-democracy-take-a-back-seat-to-business approach to the president's soaring rhetoric from his second inaugural address, when he announced "the calling of our time": "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world." (He obviously forgot to note the exceptions to this calling of our time):

"We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right." (I guess the choice becomes less clear when the U.S. has close to a $200 billion trade deficit with the oppressor in question, and when that oppressor has become the second largest holder of U.S. debt.)

"America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies." (But we do reserve the right to pretend that the bullies jailing these dissidents are "thoughtful fellows.")

"All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you." (Okay, we might ignore your oppression... but only until we put an end to this movie pirating thing.)

"Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country." (So hang in there, we'll get around to pushing for your release. Eventually).

The hollowness of Bush's human-rights-only-when-it's-convenient approach is made even more shameful when you remember how his supposed role model, Ronald Reagan, dealt with the issue of dissidents when he visited the Soviet Union in May 1988. He didn't "allude" to Soviet dissidents -- he met with them, face-to-face at the American ambassador's residence.

"While we press for human rights through diplomatic channels," Reagan told the gathering of 98 dissidents, "you press with your very lives, day in, day out, year after year, risking your jobs, your homes, your all."

But Bush didn't press. He pedaled. The Chinese media lavished much attention on an hour-long ride the president took with prospective members of the Chinese Olympic mountain biking team. Too bad he didn't turn the workout into a two-fer by leading the riders -- and the cameras -- on a tour of some of the human rights activists, journalists, and religious dissidents the Chinese government has locked away over the years.

For Bush, freedom isn't just another word for nothing left to lose... it's just another word to be used when it's politically expedient.

Bush's "calling of our time" clearly has plenty of exceptions for thoughtful thugs -- I mean, fellows.

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November 25, 2005

Jean Schmidt

Welcome back to the BuzzFlash.com GOP Hypocrite of the Week.

Okay, we could have easily picked Dick Cheney this week for basically calling decorated Marine combat veteran John Murtha a traitor. But Cheney is such a chronic sleaze bag and liar that it gets boring to keep dredging up his hypocrisy. It's like picking low hanging fruit.

So let's welcome Congresswoman Jean Schmidt to the infamous honor role of GOP hypocrisy.

Known by the nickname of "Mean Jean" in her southern Ohio district, (EXCERPT: " Back home in her suburban Cincinnati district, the Whistleblower, an online newsletter that tracks local politics, rushed out a special I-told-you-so issue calling the speech "vintage Jean Schmidt."
"We have said innumerable times that she would go to Washington and open her mouth and create an embarrassment," said Jim Schifrin, the newsletter's publisher. "She will say things that turn people off like nothing you've ever seen."
Among those seemingly turned off was Ms. Schmidt, who quickly asked that her words be withdrawn from the Congressional record, even as they made headlines worldwide."), Schmidt gained notoriety last week by calling Murtha, a fellow member of the House of representatives, a coward for recommending the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. She even had the audacity to quote from a former Marine Christian fundamentalist she said called her. (Who has since made his OWN denial that he ever said that to Fräulein, [oops, Hitler "married" her as the Russians were closing in on the bunker, so it's] Frau Eva Braun.. err.. uh.. I mean Ms. Schmidt - jeeze, I'm having trouble keeping all these Nazis straight... --DN)

Perhaps the former Marine was really 'Bush's Brain' Karl "I never put my butt on the line for this country" Rove. (Or as he was known in his former incarnation: 'Hitler's Brain' - Herr Martin Bormann.. --DN) Or perhaps it was from Dick "I got five deferments to keep me out of the Vietnam War" Cheney. Or maybe it was George W "Daddy got me into the National Guard" Bush.

Heck, it could have been any number of Bush Administration Chickenhawks. Never were so many who never served their country in combat....so eager to fight so many unending wars.

Schmidt claimed that she was sending a message that "cowards cut and run."

No, "Mean Jean," cowards get up in the House of Representatives and slander Americans who really DID serve their country, unlike the contemptibly craven fools in the GOP who avoided putting their lives on the line.

Next time you get the chance, "Mean Jean," ask your "leader" Dennis Hastert about his combat experience. It will be a short conversation.

Because she wouldn’t know sacrifice and honor if it splashed blood across her red, white and blue matching pants suit, Jean Schmidt is this week ’s BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week.

Remember our motto at BuzzFlash.com: So many Republican hypocrites, so little time.

Catch up with you soon.
* * *
And in an interesting but relevant side note, Schmidt just recently was elected (MAYBE - remember, this was Diebold Country, Ohio... --DN) to Congress when she narrowly beat Paul Hackett, a Marine reservist who advocated for getting our troops home now.

More on Schmidt:

"Who's the real coward -- Murtha or Schmidt?" Michael Stickings, TheModerateVoice.com

(Sorry for taking so many liberties with your story, BuzzFlash, but I'm weak and easily corrupted... --DN)
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Crying to the spirits 1908



As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I became civilized.

Chief Luther Standing Bear,

Oglala Sioux

I invariably experience mixed feelings toward Thanksgiving. We know that Native Americans observed these harvest celebrations throughout the year. On the other hand, I'm mindful of Jon Stewart's sardonic quip: ''I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my family over to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.''

Last Thanksgiving, members of my family paused at the graves of Native Americans in God's Acre cemetery in Bethlehem's historic district. It seemed an appropriate spot to ponder the land grab and mass explusion of the ''wild savage'' Native American Indian nations by the ''civilized'' European colonizers.

History records that after the English torched a Pequot village and killed men, women and children, the Protestant ultra fundamentalist, Cotton Mather, approvingly proclaimed, ''It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.'' And V.G. Kiernan recounts that in 1648, Dutch colonists initiated the practice of offering bounties for Delaware Indian scalps, women included.

Material gain always assumed a larger role than accorded in our national creation myths. John Steele Gordon tells us in his ''Empire of Wealth,'' ''The early Puritan merchants would often write, at the head of their ledgers, 'In the name of God and profits.' ''

In any event, we know that in short order the New England Indians were decimated or sold into slavery by the Puritans. In short order the Indian population of North America itself was reduced from 10 million (some recent estimates are considerably higher) to less than one million.

Albeit against their will, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Crazy Horse staffed our country's fledgling Department of Homeland Security. As the T-shirt featuring a picture of Indian warriors cleverly proclaims, ''Fighting Terrorism since 1492.''

Here a gentle pre-emptive note: I'm not ''another guilt-ridden liberal who hates America.'' Some whites always opposed both Indian genocide and slavery. Although largely absent from our history books, their heroic behavior against injustice is also part of America's legacy, the part we should gratefully celebrate. (See Tim Wise, ''Not Everyone Felt That Way,'' 9/14/05, ZNet Commentary.)

What about today? We're approaching a count of 2,100 coffins returning from Iraq. (Approached and, sadly, already left in the sandy dust... -DN) Once again, loved ones will experience the pain of permanently empty places at Thanksgiving dinners across our land. In Iraq, there have been about 35,000 funerals since the U.S. invasion in March, 2003.

Although centuries apart, I suspect there's more than a thread of continuity between Puritan colonization and the unspeakable violence visited on Iraqis. ''Welcome to Injun country,'' is the military greeting for new arrivals in Iraq. And this grotesque parallel was unwittingly highlighted by the Pentagon when it labeled an attack against Iraqi resistance fighters as ''Operation Plymouth Rock.'' Indian land then, Iraqi oil now. The First Americans understood that,

Only after the last tree has been cut down;

Only after the last fish has been caught;

Only after the last river has been poisoned;

Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten.

Cree Indian Prophecy

So, yes, on Thursday I'll acknowledge many current blessings and delight in spending time with family and friends. But none of this will be remotely associated with a storybook ''First Thanksgiving.''

I'll be grateful that more and more Americans oppose an immoral war based on a pack of lies; proud that in stark contrast to the government's despicable betrayal, our citizens manifested such magnificent solidarity, compassion, and love toward Katrina's victims.

Finally, I'll appreciate that recent events allow Americans to connect the dots among racism, war, social injustice and environmental degradation; grateful for what I sense is a rare defining moment for national renewal and a communion of commitment on behalf of fundamental social transformation. These are hardly insignificant gifts for which to offer a form of grace.

Gary Olson, Ph.D, is chair of the Political Science Department at Moravian College in Bethlehem. His e-mail address is olson@moravian.edu.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Anti-war protestor Hiram Myers, 74, of Edmond, Okla., is arrested by McLennan County Sheriffs after camping in a county ditch, Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005, in Crawford, Texas. A dozen war protesters were arrested Wednesday for setting up camp near President Bush's ranch in defiance of new local bans on roadside camping and parking. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/112405Z.shtml for Cindy's Thanksgiving message.
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...when I expressed the belief, several times w/documentation, that "we" were intentionally targeting certain journalists and news organizations. The circumstantial evidence was all about us. Including turning the tank turret around to fire on the hotel where news folks were billeted, and the two bombings of al Jazeera offices, etc.

"If we don't want to be thought of as Nazis, we should stop behaving like them." --DN

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
November 23rd, 2005 5:56 pm

Warning on Jazeera bombing report

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain has warned media organizations they are breaking the law if they publish details of a leaked document said to show U.S. President George W. Bush wanted to bomb Arabic television station Al Jazeera.

The government's top lawyer warned editors in a note after the Daily Mirror newspaper reported on Tuesday that a secret British government memo said British Prime Minister Tony Blair had talked Bush out of bombing the broadcaster in April last year.

Several British newspapers reported the attorney general's note on Wednesday and repeated the Mirror's allegations, which the White House said were "so outlandish" they did not merit a response. Blair's office declined to comment.

Al Jazeera, which has repeatedly denied U.S. accusations it sides with insurgents in Iraq, called on Britain and the United States to state quickly whether the report was accurate.

"If the report is correct then this would be both shocking and worrisome not only to Al Jazeera but to media organizations across the world," the Qatar-based station said in a statement.

The story would also be a shock for Qatar, a small Gulf state which cultivates good relations with Washington.

Reporters' rights groups called on the United States and Britain to promptly give clarification of the report.

"This is a very serious charge with grave implications for the safety of media professionals," said Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. "Refusing to address these reports in a substantive way only fuels suspicions."

Reporters Without Borders said: "We find it hard to believe that President Bush really discussed this possibility. This would be extremely serious and would constitute a major and unprecedented violation of the right to information.

"If this report turns out to be true, it offers a new insight into the motives of the U.S. forces, which have already bombed Al Jazeera offices twice, in Afghanistan and Iraq."

The Mirror said the memo came from Blair's Downing Street office and turned up in May last year at the local office of Tony Clarke, then a member of parliament for the town of Northampton. Clarke handed the document back to the government.

Leo O'Connor, who used to work for Clarke, and civil servant David Keogh were charged last Thursday under Britain's Official Secrets Act with making a "damaging disclosure of a document relating to international relations."
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11/19/05

Dear Mr. Bush:

I would like to extend my hand and invite you to join us, the mainstream American majority. We, the people -- that's the majority of the people -- share these majority opinions:

1. Going to war was a mistake -- a big mistake. (link)

2. You and your administration misled us into this war. (link)

3. We want the war ended and our troops brought home. (link)

4. We don't trust you. (link)

Now, I know this is a bitter pill to swallow. Iraq was going to be your great legacy. Now, it's just your legacy. It didn't have to end up this way.

This week, when Republicans and conservative Democrats started jumping ship, you lashed out at them. You thought the most damning thing you could say to them was that they were "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party." I mean, is that the best you can do to persuade them to stick with you -- compare them to me? You gotta come up with a better villain. For heaven's sakes, you had a hundred-plus million other Americans who think the same way I do -- and you could have picked on any one of them!

But hey, why not cut out the name-calling and the smearing and just do the obvious thing: Come join the majority! Be one of us, your fellow Americans! Is it really that hard? Is there really any other choice? George, take a walk on the wild side!

Your loyal representative from the majority,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
mmflint@aol.com
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Tomorrow's Big Three - Toyota, Honda and Nissan?? ... --DN

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Other Victim
For years, the Big Three staved off catastrophe by crushing auto parts manufacturers. Not anymore.
By Daniel Gross
Updated Monday, Nov. 21, 2005, at 5:02 PM ET

Today, General Motors announced a far-reaching restructuring plan to close nine plants and three service and parts facilities, cut 30,000 jobs, and reduce North American production capacity by 1 million vehicles a year. Last month GM cut a deal with the United Auto Workers to reduce health benefits, while the Wall Street Journal reported last Friday that Ford plans to cut about 4,000 salaried positions in the first quarter of 2006.

What's with the sudden sense of urgency? For years, GM and Ford hewed to a basic strategy: If they could just sell enough cars, all their structural problems would be solved. If they only regained lost market share, they could keep factories humming and provide their profitable financing arms with more business. But in recent weeks, there's been a change in direction. In GM's case, it could be that ancient and impatient activist investor Kirk Kerkorian, who owns about 10 percent of the company, is putting pressure on management.

But here's an alternative explanation. GM and the other U.S. auto manufacturers can no longer push their problems onto their suppliers. The Oct. 8 bankruptcy filing of Delphi, GM's main supplier, and the failure this year of several other parts makers, have put their biggest customers on notice.

The auto industry was once one of the great examples of vertical integration. Henry Ford's River Rouge plant, where raw materials were turned into autos with stunning efficiency, was the apotheosis of integration. Of course, different industrial eras call for different strategies. And in recent years, auto manufacturers have seen the wisdom of outsourcing the production of parts. Doing so allows companies to shop around for deals. So in 1999, GM spun off its parts unit as Delphi. Ford followed suit by spinning off Visteon in 2000. DaimlerChrysler likewise spun off portions of its parts-making capabilities.

These spin-offs started life with some advantages—they had solid relationships with giant car companies. But they also came into the world burdened by some handicaps. They inherited their former parent companies' legacy issues: excess capacity, pension commitments, and expensive unionized workforces. And even though the new companies were independent, they were somewhat captive. At Delphi, GM accounted for about 47 percent of revenues in the most recent quarter. In 2004, GM accounted for $15.4 billion of Delphi's $28.6 billion in revenues. And the bill from Delphi, which provides only a portion of GM's parts, ate up about 10 percent of GM's auto revenues for the year. In Visteon's most recent quarter, 64 percent of its sales went to Ford. Collins & Aikman, the second-largest auto parts company, did about one-third of its business with DaimlerChrysler and about three-quarters of it with the Big Three.

For the last several years, GM, Ford, and, to a lesser degree, DaimlerChrysler have been able to delay their day of reckoning by shifting their problems down the line to suppliers. They continually cajoled suppliers to deliver parts for less money—or else face the prospect of losing the business. In the early part of this decade, when a global slowdown led to sharp declines in commodity prices, the parts makers could deal with the pressure. But when prices for steel and oil—the main input for plastic—started to rise a few years ago, instead of compensating suppliers for higher costs, the automakers continued to demand lower prices. As the Detroit News notes, GM in 2003 kicked off a program to get suppliers to cut prices by 20 percent by 2005. For suppliers, raw materials can account for half of total costs. And when the price of oil, steel, and other metals like copper began to rise, the suppliers were out of luck.

When the parts makers appealed for help, the automakers generally told suppliers to stuff it, or threatened to move business elsewhere. After all, GM and Ford had their own problems. Since the fall of 2001, the Big Three were able to careen from discount gimmick to discount gimmick without destroying themselves—zero-percent financing, big rebates, extending employee discounts, and now free gas—only because the suppliers were choking on the cost of higher raw materials.

In August, Bo Andersson, GM's global supply chief, told Automotive News, "I see much more emotion in our supply base ... in the last two years than I've seen in my whole career." No wonder. Many of the biggest suppliers were dying. In February, Tower Automotive filed for bankruptcy. Collins & Aikman, the second-largest parts maker, was next to go in May. Then the largest parts maker, Delphi, went bust in October.
Why is this bad news for the Big Three? If the parts makers can't make it as independent businesses, then the Big Three must help fund their upkeep, one way or another. Companies in bankruptcy can reject existing contracts and ask the courts for relief. In July, Collins & Aikman got a customer financing agreement in which the end users (i.e., the Big Three plus Toyota, Honda, and Nissan) agreed to pay more for parts. On Oct. 1, Ford took back a big chunk of Visteon's operations onto its own books, including 23 facilities and 18,000 workers—a pre-emptive bailout. And Delphi, which continues to lose money, will certainly be asking GM and all its customers for help.

In a way, the long-overdue job-cutting efforts by Ford and GM are just another sign of indirect ravages of inflation, which we are routinely assured is under control. By cramming down their suppliers, the Big Three, and especially GM, spared themselves—and consumers—from dealing with higher costs for a few years. With nobody left to stiff, and with commodity costs still high, the big automakers must increasingly look inward. The only companies they can cram down now are their own.

- - - - - - - - -
Daniel Gross (http://www.danielgross.net/) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130797/
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Cheney's False Choices
David Corn
November 23, 2005
David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers). Read his blog at http://www.davidcorn.com.

When Vice President Dick Cheney spoke on Monday at the American Enterprise Institute—the conservative think tank that has provided the intellectual ammo for George W. Bush's war in Iraq—he signaled that the Bush campaign (that is, the White House) was retreating from its personal and mean-spirited attacks on Rep. John Murtha, the hawkish Democrat who days earlier had called for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. Let's have a real policy debate, Cheney said. After all, he explained:

...energetic debate on issues facing our country is more than just a sign of a healthy political system—it's also something I enjoy. It's one of the reasons I've stayed in this business. And I believe the feeling is probably the same for most of us in public life.

The previous day, Bush, too, throttled back on the rhetoric. In China, he told the traveling White House press corps that the Iraq debate:

...is a worthy debate, and I'm going to repeat something I've said before. People should feel comfortable about expressing their opinions about Iraq. I heard somebody say, well, maybe so-and-so is not patriotic because they disagree with my position. I totally reject that thought. This is not an issue of who's patriot and who's not patriotic. It's an issue of an honest, open debate about the way forward in Iraq.

Then why can't Bush and Cheney engage in this debate honestly? I'm not referring to their continuing attacks on critics who have argued that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war by hyping the intelligence on WMDs in Iraq and pushing Saddam Hussein's purported connection to Al Qaeda.

Bush and Cheney keep insisting that this sort of criticism is out of bounds—in Cheney's words, "dishonest and reprehensible"—without bothering to answer the well-founded charges. It's not surprising that they would fiercely attack such damaging criticism (which happens to reflect public opinion) with hot-blooded rhetoric not facts-based explanations. (I took apart Bush's assertion that his foes are rewriting history and provided details here.)

But they also seek to rig the debate over policy.
- - - - - - -
Read the rest by clicking the link...

But first... an excerpt from what's to come:

"Jack Murtha has taken a hard look at the dilemma at hand. He has concluded the potential benefits of further U.S. military intervention in Iraq do not justify the costs (American lives, hundreds of billions of dollars and stretching thin his much-loved U.S. military). Right or wrong, Murtha is not making stuff up. The same cannot be said for the folks running the war."
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Molly Ivins - Creators Syndicate

11.21.05 - AUSTIN, Texas --

We've had two nifty opportunities to study the Bush spin machine at work here lately, both offering such a neat schematic of how it's done one is tempted to applaud. Or something.

The first was the counter-offensive launched by President Bush on Veterans Day against those who have the nerve (!) to notice that the administration manipulated intelligence in order to justify an unnecessary war. Bush, indignation to the fore, righteously denounced his critics for "baseless attacks," "false charges" and "rewriting history" because they are "fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments."

That may be true, but it's also true that the Senate investigation did not look at whether the administration manipulated information once they got it. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence specifically refrained from looking at whether or not the administration manipulated pre-war intelligence. Got that? All it has done so far is look at the pre-war intelligence by the agencies. It has yet to do the second part of its job, looking at how that intelligence was used or misused.

The Republicans are trying to prevent the committee from doing just that, and Democratic leader Harry Reid is down to using procedural ploys to get around them.

The same failure is true of the "independent" Robb-Silberman commission, appointed to investigate the matter by Bush himself. Judge Laurence Silberman said, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry." In circumspect circles, the word used to describe Bush's argument is "disingenuous." Among normal people, it is called lying.

Among the things we didn't know before the war:

Check the link for the rest of Molly's usual excellent column...

URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=19917

...and to read all about the "Not only ignorant but stupid as well, Republican Bitch of the Day Award," click here... --DN ------ OK, see, this is why I often give you the whole article in my post. The damn link is dead already, as of 11:15am, 11/24/05 -- or earlier. Ahhhh - try this before Googling Schmidt:
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051122/NEWS01/511220352
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From Capitol Hill Blue

The Rant
A gutless, draft-dodging coward named Dick Cheney
By DOUG THOMPSON
Nov 22, 2005, 07:41

The last thing we need in the increasingly bitter Iraq debate is a gutless, draft-dodging coward like Dick Cheney criticizing those who did serve their country.

The Vice President, who used multiple deferments to avoid serving his country during the Vietnam conflict, jumped into the fray big time last week and again on Monday with an acrid broadside against those who properly question the President’s motives for dragging the country into the bloody dead-end called Iraq. (Cheney has said he "had other priorities in the '60s than military service." ... --DN)

“This is revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety,” Cheney said yesterday. “It has no place anywhere in American politics.”

Sorry Dickie boy, but it is you and your cronies at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who have “no place anywhere in American politics.” It is hypocrites like you, you shameless, cowardly son-of-a-bitch, who should be led from the White House in chains and locked away in some hellhole to rot for eternity.

American politics is cursed with chicken hawk politicians who do everything in their power to avoid serving their country and then vote to send other Americans to fight and die for their questionable wars. Bill Clinton used falsified documents to secure and keep his student deferments in place. (Whoops, first time I heard about "falsified." Something to check on. [Found no verification as yet] The difference with Bill, however, vis-a-vis the ReichWing scum, is that he openly opposed the war. The gutless scum, on the other hand, were cheerleaders - some of them literally... --DN)

Congress is littered with false patriots who avoided military service. And the biggest warmonger of them all, George W. Bush, needed daddy’s connections to ride out the war at home in the safety of the Texas Air National Guard "Champaign Unit" and couldn’t even complete that service. (uh... it's called "desertion" in time of war - why was he not tried and executed? --DN)

But Cheney’s hypocrisy goes even further because his tirade on Monday was aimed primarily at Congressman John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who did serve his country, spending 37 years in the Marines before retiring as a colonel from the reserves and earning a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts in Vietnam.

Click the link for more vitriol...

But before you go... Check out the hypocrisy here. Note that with extremely rare exception, the war-mongers love fighting wars - as long as the other guy is doing the actual fighting.

Then notice the "peace-niks," the guys who are castigated for wanting an end to war, are the guys who have actually experienced hostilities, or volunteered to go, or did not whine and arrange for deferment after deferment when it was their turn. And again, Clinton, and Ali, who was certainly no coward, stood up and said no to killing. Do I wish Bill had handled it a bit better? You bet. I'll bet now he does too. Among other things.

These are the guys sending people to war: (How come they're all Repukes?)

> * Dick Cheney: did not serve. Five deferments: 3 student, 1 marriage, 1 baby on the way. Note how he "coincidentally" micro-managed a couple of them.

> * Dennis Hastert: did not serve.

> * Tom Delay: did not serve.

> * Roy Blunt: did not serve.

> * Bill Frist: did not serve.

> * Mitch McConnell: did not serve.

> * Rick Santorum: did not serve.

> * Trent Lott: did not serve.

> * John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business.

> * Jeb Bush: did not serve.

> * Karl Rove: did not serve.

> * Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee." The man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism.

> * Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.

> * Vin Weber: did not serve.

> * Richard Perle: did not serve.

> * Douglas Feith: did not serve.

> * Eliot Abrams: did not serve.

> * Richard Shelby: did not serve.

> * Jon Kyl: did not serve.

> * Tim Hutchison: did not serve.

> * Christopher Cox: did not serve.

> * Newt Gingrich: did not serve.

> * Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as a flight instructor.

> * George W. Bush: failed to complete his six-year National Guard contract; got assigned to Alabama, where there is no record or remembrance of his ever showing up at Maxwell AFB - his assignment, so he could campaign for family friend running for U.S. Senate; failed to show up for required medical exam as soon as they started drug testing; disappeared from duty.

> * B-1 Bob Dornan: Consciously enlisted after fighting was over in Korea.

> * Phil Gramm: did not serve.

> * John McCain: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of > Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross. (The one shining star among all these turds in the punchbowl. Well, except for Rumsfeld - Since I too was a flight instructor way back when, guess I can cut the guy a little slack - but not much... --DN))

> * Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve.

> * John M. McHugh: did not serve.

> * JC Watts: did not serve.

> * Jack Kemp: did not serve. "Knee problem," although continued in NFL for 8 years. (!!!! - yikes!)

> * Dan Quayle: Journalism unit of the Indiana National Guard.

> * Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.

> * George Pataki: did not serve.

> * Spencer Abraham: did not serve.

> * John Engler: did not serve.

> * Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer.

> * Arnold Schwarzenegger: AWOL from Austrian army base.

> *Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non-combat role making movies.

> > Pundits & Preachers:

> * Sean Hannity: did not serve.

> * Rush Limbaugh: did not serve (4-F with a 'pilonidal > cyst.')

> * Bill O'Reilly: did not serve.

> * Michael Savage: did not serve.

> * George Will: did not serve.

> * Chris Matthews: did not serve.

> * Paul Gigot: did not serve.

> * Bill Bennett: did not serve.

> * Pat Buchanan: did not serve.

> * Bill Kristol: did not serve.

> * Kenneth Starr: did not serve.

> * Antonin Scalia: did not serve.

> * Clarence Thomas: did not serve.

> * Ralph Reed: did not serve.

> * Michael Medved: did not serve.

> * Charlie Daniels: did not serve.

> * Ted Nugent: did not serve. (He only shoots at things > that don't shoot back.)

DEMOCRATS who served:
> * Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
> * David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
> * Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
> * Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. > 1971 as an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.
> * Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam.
> * Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
> * John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V, 3 Purple Hearts.
> * Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea.
> * Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star,
several Purple Hearts, triple amputee, Vietnam.
> * Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-53.
> * Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.
> * Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91.
> * Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII; Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons.
> * Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars, and Soldier's Medal.
> * Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit.
> * Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.
> * Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V.
> * Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.
> * Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57.
> * Chuck Robb: Vietnam.
> * Howell Heflin: Silver Star.
> * George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.
> * Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferment at Oxford. Entered draft but received #311.
> * Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy.
> * Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953.
> * John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and Air Medal with 18 Clusters.
> * Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul Wallenberg.
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...and they laugh when we call it a dictatorship.

We are not laughing... --DN

EXCERPTS:

What a hypocritical spectacle the Bush administration and the Republican Party have made of America. They boast of "freedom and democracy" while they destroy habeas corpus and practice torture. Americans must recognize the Bush administration and the Republican Party for what they are. They are tyrants. They are bringing evil to the world and tyranny to America.
[...]
What has become of the American people that they permit the despicable practices of tyrants to be practiced in their name? The Bush administration is in violation of the US Constitution, the rule of law, the Geneva Convention, the Nuremberg Standard, and basic humanity. It is a gang of criminals. The Republican Party is so terrified of losing power that it supports a tyrannical administration that has brought shame not just to the Republican name but to all Americans.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
November 12, 2005

Power Über Alles

by Paul Craig Roberts

(Click here for an earlier companion piece by Mr. Roberts, and here for a short editorial. And here for a longer one.)

Perfidy loves company. George W. Bush instructed his British puppet, Prime Minister Tony Blair, to get moving on the detention issue so that he, Bush, would have company when he attacked the Constitution's guarantee of habeas corpus.

Habeas corpus prevents authorities from detaining a person indefinitely without charges; the guarantee of habeas corpus ensures that no one can imprison you without a trial.

The Bush administration wants the power to detain indefinitely anyone it declares to be an enemy combatant or a terrorist without presenting the detainee in court with charges. In England the power to arrest people and to hold them indefinitely without charges was taken away from kings centuries ago. Bush apparently thinks he is the reincarnation of an absolute monarch.

The puppet Blair set to work. He soon discovered that at most he could try to pass a law that permitted the British government to hold a detainee for 90 days, a far cry from Bush's desire for indefinite detention. Blair took what he called his "anti-terror" legislation to Parliament and was handed his first-ever defeat as Prime Minister.

The British Parliament knew enough history to realize that Blair's "anti-terror" legislation was in fact the opposite. Parliamentarians perceived Blair's proposal as a police state trick that could be used by an unscrupulous government to terrorize Her Majesty's subjects by the use of imprisonment without charges. The British Parliament refused to put up with such injustice. Eleven of Blair's former cabinet ministers joined in voting down the legislation.

That happened on Wednesday November 9.

On Thursday November 10, the Republican controlled US Senate voted 49 to 42 to overturn the US Supreme Court's 2004 ruling that permits Guantánamo detainees to challenge their detentions. How dare the US Supreme Court defend the US Constitution and the civil liberties of Americans when we have terrorists to fight, argued the Republican senators. What are civil liberties, the Republicans asked rhetorically, but legal tricks that allow criminals and terrorists to escape.

The Labour Party-dominated British Parliament will not allow 90 days detention without charges, but the Republican-controlled US Congress favors indefinite detention without charges of whomever Bush wants to detain.

Nothing more effectively undercuts the image that Bush paints of America as the land of freedom, liberty and democracy than the Republican Party's destruction of habeas corpus.

Habeas corpus is essential to political opposition and the rise and maintenance of democracy. Without habeas corpus, a government can simply detain its opponents. Nothing is more conducive to one party rule than the suspension of habeas corpus.

It is heartbreaking to watch the Republican Party overthrow the very foundation of democracy in the name of democracy. The name of Lindsey O. Graham, Republican senator from South Carolina, the sponsor of this evil legislation, will go down in infamy in the book of tyrants.
The next time Bush declares that "they (Muslims) hate us for our freedom and democracy," someone should ask him how there can be freedom and democracy without habeas corpus.

The Bush administration has also resurrected that second great feature of tyranny – torture. "We have the right to torture," say President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Attorney General Gonzales.

Read more by clicking the link...
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George Paine, patriot, wrote this back on May 4, 2003. Can you imagine how much angrier he must be by now? It's from his website warblogging.com. A blog he stopped writing a while back. He said he was taking a break.

We are all the poorer for his need for a break. We hope he's able to return sometime. Fortunately, we still have the archives.

BTW, has anyone seen or heard from George since he suspended the blog? Anyone? How about you guys over at the FBI? CIA? Der Fatherland Security? Reichssicherheitshauptamt? Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti?

I'm not going to do 'excerpts' on this one, although it's a long one, and then point you to the original. Sometimes I do that and sometimes I don't. My choice. Coupla' reasons:
1. Not all websites keep links to the material indefinitely.
2. I sometimes feel certain important articles warrant the continuity.
3. Maybe some folks don't have the time or patience to follow a link, especially those with slow dial-up connections.

I was very nicely reminded a while back by a reader in New Zealand that I should always do one or two paragraphs and then link to the original. She said that was the usual "Netiquette," because then the reader was forced to go to her website, which I suppose made her happier than just getting the publicity. This was after I linked her 3, count 'em, three times in the one post.

Well, I appreciate her courtesy, but screw Netiquette. I've seen other blogs done both ways and I don't have a problem with any of them. I'll be more than happy to listen to constructive criticism, and have, and have incorporated the good ones where I can. Bottom line, though, it's still my blog - until the fascists shut me down and drag me off - and I'll wash it as fast as I want. (Old Navy joke.)

OK - enough of my digressive, whining crap... on to the very excellent George Paine post:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Anger

I said a few days ago that I'm ashamed of President Bush. I said that I'm ashamed that he feels that the Constitution is something that can be shredded in wartime. I said that I'm ashamed that he engages in aggressive war in my name. That isn't the half of it.

I'm angry at my President. I'm terribly, terribly angry. I'm angry that he sends out INS and Homeland Security Department thugs to harass diners in South Asian restaurants in Times Square. I'm angry that these thugs don't even allow those Americans that they harass and detain to contact a lawyer.

I'm angry that Mike Hawash was forced to languish in solitary confinement as a farcical "material witness". I'm angry that Jose Padilla still languishes in a US Navy brig and is still forbidden from seeing an attorney, more than a year after his detention. (And STILL there... --DN)

I'm angry that I know, personally, people who have been touched by the massive domestic "security" apparatus constructed after September 11. They say that in South America everyone knows someone who's been "disappeared". I feel like things are getting that way here, too, except that not quite that many people are being "disappeared" yet — they're just being harassed. I'm absolutely livid at the thought that a student at the State University of New York was interrogated by the Secret Service after he wrote an editorial in a school newspaper asking Jesus to smite President Bush.

I'm furious, completely furious that a friend of mine was asked if he had a copy of Mein Kampf and the Unabomber's Manifesto as the Secret Service turned his apartment upside down. Do you realize that the Secret Service told him that his editorial was not "protected speech"?

I'm furious that a friend of a friend of mine was detained for almost a day in the bowels of the New York Federal Building after he was caught taking a picture of a surveillance camera. I'm furious that he, an American citizen, wasn't allowed to call an attorney, even as he was being interrogated by the FBI. I'm furious that it took a friendly FBI agent breaking the rules for him to contact the outside world and that the only reason he was released when he was released was because his boss happened to know the FBI agent who was interrogating him.

I'm absolutely livid that entire families have had their doors broken down and their homes searched and their patriarchs carted out in handcuffs on the word of some anonymous paid informant.

I can't believe that we live in a country where secret courts consider secret evidence when deciding whether or not to issue secret search warrants to secretly search people's homes and offices and plant listening and tracking devices. I'm livid that secret courts then rule that this behavior is perfectly acceptable because even though it "may violate" the Fourth Amendment, because it at least "comes close". I'm absolutely furious that Americans get detained for months on end in solitary confinement on the basis of secret evidence — without so much as the right to challenge their accuser in a court of law. Is this not the most basic, fundamental underpinning of Western jurisprudence?

I'm furious that our Attorney General would float legislation called the "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003" that, as I said several months ago would:

allow the Justice Department to name Warblogging — or a group that I belong to — a terrorist organization. Once they've done that they're free to break into my apartment at three in the morning and wake me up at gunpoint. They can take me to a military facility in North Carolina (or, even better, take me to Gitmo ) and tell a secret court that I have lost my citizenship by being a member of a terrorist organization. They can then try me in a secret military tribunal and sentence me to life in prison. All secretly. You'll never know about it. All you'll know is that Warblogging is no longer being updated. That's all you'll know. Me? I'll rot in a Navy brig for the rest of my life, at least until democracy is restored in this country. I never had an opportunity to convince others to no longer consent to this government. They snatched me before I could write my next article about civil liberties.

I'm absolutely, positively livid that even as the United States allies itself with terrorist dictatorships like Uzbekistan while the United States, the country I love, criticizes Canada because it "cares too much about liberties".

I can't imagine a country where the Director of Homeland Security (I'm sorry, but what kind of countries call themselves a "Homeland"? I remember the "Fatherland" and "Motherland"...) says that "Liberty is the most precious gift we offer to our citizens". Come on, Mr. Ridge, the government does not "give" us Liberty! We give ourselves Liberty! We hold these rights to be "self evident", Mr. Ridge! To say that you "give" us the right implies that you can also take it away! You are doing so, but I am here to tell you that I will not stand idly by as you do so!

I'm positively boiling that the White House wants to give the CIA and Department of Defense the right to subpoena records about ordinary Americans here in America. They actually want to give the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense the right to spy on Americans in America! Have these people never heard of Posse Comitatus? Have they not read the executive orders forbidding CIA domestic operations against Americans?

I'm furious, completely furious, that the FBI can subpoena records of my interactions with various companies without so much as a court order. I'm livid, absolutely livid, that the White House still wants to develop the Total Information Awareness program — a program designed to spy on every aspect of every American's life.

I'm beside myself that the United States has become a nation where the news media censors itself to the point of deleting news!

I can't imagine that we live in a country — our United States! — where people routinely e-mail me asking me if I feel safe writing what I say. I'm absolutely ashamed that members of my family have to ask me if I'm worried that the Government will come after me. I'm furious that my relatives, friends and readers ask if I'm worried of tax audits — or worse — as retaliation for what I write here on Warblogging.

I'm absolutely, positively furious that my government wants the right to declare me a "foreign power" and "terrorist" and arrest me based on "secret evidence". I can't believe that they then want the right to hold me in solitary confinement in a military prison for the rest of my life as an enemy of the state! They want the right to strip me of my citizenship at their say-so to accomplish this neatly, without the interference of such pesky things as habeas corpus!

I'm furious that my country — even as it oppresses and strangles its citizens and allies itself with evil dictatorships that torture and execute people for exercising their religious beliefs — engages in aggressive "wars of liberation". I'm furious that my armed forces open fire on demonstrators in a foreign country that has been placed under our imperial thumb. I'm furious that the Department of Defense announces that we will be establishing massive military bases in Iraq before even a provisional Iraqi government can be established to so much as rubber stamp such an arrangement.

I'm furious that my President appears on the USS Abraham Lincoln in a military uniform to address the troops and announce combat in Iraq "over". I challenge him to tell that to the people of Fallujah, who have been massacred in the streets of their city! That aside, I'm trying to think of the last time I saw a "president" in military uniform. I can think of three in particular: Saddam Hussein, Pervez Musharraf and Manuel Noriega.

I'm furious that my President told me and the rest of the world that Iraq had WMD and that we knew that for a fact but that now his minions tell us that we're unlikely to find WMD at any site "suspected of having them before the war." I'm furious that they told us they had evidence and intelligence, and some of us trusted them, but that their evidence and intelligence repeatedly failed to pan out when given to UN weapons inspectors and even "exploitation teams" of the US Army currently operating in Iraq.

I've been ranting for quite a while now. I'm angry. I'm very angry. Perhaps most of all I'm angry that President Bush plans to exploit the memory of September 11 by spending the month of September traveling between campaign events and memorial services for people who died on that fateful day. He's been exploiting that tragedy for all it's worth since it happened, and it doesn't just make me angry — it makes me cry.

I was in New York City when the World Trade Center was hit. I woke up to a friend telling me that one tower had collapsed, that the Pentagon was on fire and that there was a car bomb at the State Department. I woke up and smelled the stench of death. I inhaled people's ashes. I inhaled the ground up concrete and steel for weeks. I hacked up phlegm impregnated with the cremated remains of people I would never know for weeks upon weeks. I watched the second tower fall from a New York City roof. I spent weeks in Union Square mourning with my fellow New Yorkers. I spent months upon months upon months walking by photographs of the missing.

President Bush is exploiting our national grief. He is using our grief to oppress Americans in the worst way since Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act. He is using our grief to convince us to become "conquer monkeys" as Garry Trudeau put it. Now he plans to exploit September 11 to get himself reelected. And I think it will work. (Anyone remember what happened? I was curled up in the fetal position at the time... --DN)

We live in a country that no longer respects civil liberties or the rule of law. We live in a country where police officers say "Yes, we have every right. You are being held under the Patriot Act following suspicion under an internal Homeland Security investigation." We live in a country where they react to a request for an attorney like such:

When I asked to speak to a lawyer, the INS official informed me that I do have the right to a lawyer but I would have to be brought down to the station and await security clearance before being granted one. When I asked how long that would take, he replied with a coy smile: "Maybe a day, maybe a week, maybe a month."

We live in a country that celebrates Loyalty Day for God's sake!

We live in a country where the Internal Revenue Service announces a crackdown on poor families who may or may not be improperly claiming the benefit of the Earned Income Tax Credit even as they announce that they will be weakening investigations of corporate tax evaders due to budget issues.

I'm furious that the President that President (sic) Bush and his staff of neoconservatives most admire is Woodrow Wilson — the man who outlawed dissent with his Sedition Act of 1918 that outlawed:
Uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language intended to cause contempt, scorn, as regards the form of government of the United States or Constitution, or the flag or the uniform of the Army or Navy, urging any curtailment of the war with intent to hinder its prosecution; advocating, teaching, defending, or acts supporting or favoring the cause of any country at war with the United States, or opposing the cause of the United States.

What does this all add up to? I see only one pattern here: fascism.

Do you in the White House and in Congress hear me? How about you guys in the Department of Defense and the FBI? In the US Courts system? In the INS and in Homeland Security? I know you read Warblogging. I know you're reading this. What do you think of what I say here? Do you dare try to defend your policies, your lies and your oppression? I invite you to post comments! You've been lurkers for too long! Come forward, show yourselves, defend yourselves!

You should be ashamed of yourselves! Your actions cast a pall over this great nation. Your actions are forcing our founding fathers to turn over in the graves, over and over again. Your actions are a betrayal — a stab in the back. The great Americans who fought and died defending freedom in World War II — did they die in vain? Did they die on the beaches of Normandy and in the forests of the Bulge and in the streets of Nice only to see America turn against itself?

What can we do about it? I honestly don't know. I have three thoughts:
First, I think that it's possible that we can suddenly gain an awareness, as a country, as a nation, of what's happening and fight against it. We can fight against President Bush and his neoconservative cronies and throw him out of the White House in disgrace. This is, of course, my preferred scenario — but I don't think it's very realistic. (Oh, George, ye of little faith. Have you checked the polls lately? The Lilliputians seem to be waking up. Quick - bring the ropes! ... --DN)

Second, I think that we can continue on the road we're on until things get so bad that even the apolitical people living in Des Moines must wake up and take notice — that things will get so bad that, like in South America, everyone will know one of the "disappeared". Maybe at this point we will strike back as a nation and throw these crooks and oppressors out of the White House. (See comment above --DN)

The third possibility is that the productive, intelligent members of our society who recognize what's going on will pick up and move. I've already received e-mail from at least half a dozen Americans who have done just this — they're now living in various European countries, in Canada and in New Zealand.

I just can't imagine that this country that I love so much — precisely because I've always considered it free, because I've always thought it was "the worst country in the world except all the others" — is doing all of this. I feel like a German in 1934. What do I do? I don't know what to do, but I am determined not to stand idly by as the country I love is destroyed systematically by a power-mad pseudo-dictator.

I apologize that I haven't provided hypertext links throughout this rant — I wrote it relatively quickly and it would take me hours upon hours to go through and link everything that should be linked. Please make good use of Google, the Warblogging search engine and the comments feature of this site to share information about the subjects I've talked about.

Thank you for understanding.

Posted by George Paine Comments (266) TrackBack (15) From the "Democracy in America" Department as of 11:47 PM
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...and mine.

This is excerpted from Riverbend's Baghdad Burning blog ("Girl Blog from Iraq... let's talk war, politics and occupation.") One of the links over there on your left... --DN

Thursday, November 17, 2005
Conventional Terror...

It sat on my PC desktop for five days. The first day I read about it on the internet, on some site, my heart sank. White phosphorous in Falloojeh. I knew nothing about white phosphorous, of course, and a part of me didn’t want to know the details. I tried downloading the film four times and was almost relieved when I got disconnected all four times.

E. had heard about the film too and one of his friends S. finally brought it by on CD. He and E. shut themselves up in the room with the computer to watch the brief documentary. E. came out half an hour later looking pale- his lips tightened in a straight line, which is the way he looks when he’s pensive... thinking about something he'd rather not discuss.

“Hey- I want to see it too…” I half-heartedly called out after him, as he walked S. to the door.

“It’s on the desktop- but you really don’t want to see it.” E. said.

I avoided the computer for five days because every time I switched it on, the file would catch my eye and call out to me… now plaintively- begging to be watched, now angrily- condemning my indifference.

Except that it was never indifference… it was a sort of dread that sat deep in my stomach, making me feel like I had swallowed a dozen small stones. I didn’t want to see it because I knew it contained the images of the dead civilians I had in my head.

Few Iraqis ever doubted the American use of chemical weapons in Falloojeh. We’ve been hearing the terrifying stories of people burnt to the bone for well over a year now. I just didn’t want it confirmed.

I didn’t want it confirmed because confirming the atrocities that occurred in Falloojeh means verifying how really lost we are as Iraqis under American occupation and how incredibly useless the world is in general- the UN, Kofi Annan, humanitarian organizations, clerics, the Pope, journalists… you name it- we’ve lost faith in it.

I finally worked up enough courage to watch it and it has lived up to my worst fears. Watching it was almost an invasive experience, because I felt like someone had crawled into my mind and brought my nightmares to life. Image after image of men, women and children so burnt and scarred that the only way you could tell the males apart from the females, and the children apart from the adults, was by the clothes they are wearing… the clothes which were eerily intact- like each corpse had been burnt to the bone, and then dressed up lovingly in their everyday attire- the polka dot nightgown with a lace collar… the baby girl in her cotton pajamas- little earrings dangling from little ears.

Some of them look like they died almost peacefully, in their sleep… others look like they suffered a great deal- skin burnt completely black and falling away from scorched bones.

I imagine what it must have been like for some of them. They were probably huddled in their houses- some of them- tens of thousands of them- couldn’t leave the city. They didn’t have transport or they simply didn’t have a place to go. They sat in their homes, hoping that what people said about Americans was actually true- that in spite of their huge machines and endless weapons, they were human too.

And then the rain of bombs would begin… the wooooosh of the missiles as they fell and the sound of the explosion as it hit its target… and no matter how prepared you think you are for that explosion- it always makes you flinch. I imagine their children covering their ears and some of them crying, trying to cover up the mechanical sounds of war with their more human wails. I imagine that as the tanks got closer, and the planes got lower- the fear increased- and parents searched each other’s faces for a solution, for a way out of the horror. Some of them probably decided to wait it out in their homes, and others must have been desperate to get out- fearing the rain of concrete and steel and thinking their chances were better in the open air, than confined in the homes that could at any moment turn into their tombs.That’s what we were told before the Americans came- it’s safer to be outside of the house during an air strike than it is to be inside of the house. Inside of the house, a missile nearby would turn the windows into millions of little daggers and walls might come crashing down. In the garden, or even the street, you’d only have to worry about shrapnel and debris if the bomb was very close- but what were the chances of that?

That was before 2003… and certainly before Falloojeh.

That was before men, women and children left their homes only to be engulfed in a rain of fire.Last year I blogged about Falloojeh and said:“There is talk of the use of cluster bombs and other forbidden weaponry.”

I was immediately attacked with a barrage of emails from Americans telling me I was a liar and that there was no proof and that there was no way Americans would ever do something so appalling! I wonder how those same people justify this now. Are they shocked? Or do they tell themselves that Iraqis aren’t people? Or are they simply in denial?

The Pentagon spokesman recently said:"It's part of our conventional-weapons inventory and we use it like we use any other conventional weapon,"

This war has redefined ‘conventional’. It has taken atrocity to another level. Everything we learned before has become obsolete. ‘Conventional’ has become synonymous with horrifying. Conventional weapons are those that eat away the skin in a white blaze; conventional interrogation methods are like those practiced in Abu Ghraib and other occupation prisons…

Quite simply… conventional terror.

(posted by river @ 1:32 AM

Click the link for more from Iraq... unfiltered by Pentagon "spokespeople" ... --DN
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Katrina vanden Heuvel, the innovative editor of The Nation magazine, asked readers to come up with definitions that would expose the real meaning behind Republican pronouncements. Because if one thing is clear, the GOP Stepford message point bloviators speak in a coded language. Nothing really means what the words they utter traditionally mean; it's the wink and the nod that's behind the language that counts.

So, for instance, one can easily define the daily mission of White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's effort to "clarify" as the act of repeating "the same lie over and over again." Or is there a modicum of doubt that "pro-life" actually means the "valuing of life up until birth"? Heck, the readers of the Nation and vanden Heuvel wrote an actual Republican dictionary, it seems, not just a satire.

You might call it a GOP decoder. Who can dispute that for "Baby Doc" Bush conviction is defined as "making decisions before getting the facts and refusing to change your mind afterward"? BuzzFlash passed a mumbling man with some mental health problems the other day. It was a beautiful, sunny day and the gentleman kept insisting it was raining, even though there wasn't a cloud in sight. He had his story and he was sticking to it. Bush thinks that type of behavior is being manly and courageous. Actually, it just means that you need your meds.

There are the briefest of definitions (as in China, n., See Wal-Mart.) and longer ones like the three-parter for "Class Warfare": "1) Any attempt to raise the minimum age; 2) Any attempt to limit the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer plutocrats; and 3) Any attempt to proved affordable health care for the working poor." Of course, while virtually the entire sub rosa strategy of the GOP is class warfare, the Democrats generally run away from the phase as if it carried avian flu.

We especially liked definitions such as the one for a presidential press conference: "1) Extremely rare phenomenon -- see Haley's Comet; and 2) Opportunity for gay hustler to advertise his political services."

Vanden Heuvel includes a postscript to the Dictionary of Republicanisms, which she wrote shortly after the hurricane that shares her first name devastated New Orleans, as Bush ignored the incident.

She writes, "The failure to respond in a timely fashion as the disaster unfolded on national television was not the first time the Republican White House has mismanaged a crisis; it was the latest in a long line of failures. We simply can't afford to trust them any longer. As we drain and rebuild New Orleans, the time has come to drain the right wing's self-enriching agenda from American politics and rebuild our country into a place we can be proud of again."

Yes, we must marginalize the neoconservatives, n., or "Nerds with Napoleonic complexes."

Hear, hear!
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...we'd like to thank just some of those responsible:

1. The multinational corporations whose executives wear American flag lapel pins while outsourcing American citizen's careers to China, India, Guatemala and Bumf..k, Indonesia, etc., etc.

2. Those same corporations who rent a mailbox drop in the Bahamas, declare that as their corporate headquarters, and thus avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes to America.

3. Let's not forget the "people's representatives," mostly known as Republican Congressional Scum, who let the corporations write the bills which the reps present and bully into law through the House and Senate, dragging the occasional dumb Dem dunce along for the ride. It then gets signed by the Puppet Prez, amid smiles all around. Hey, this calls for champagne and multi-million dollar bonuses on top of their multi-million dollar salaries. Oh, and let's not forget the multi-million dollar "golden parachute" severence packages for a nice soft landing for all of them when they finally drive their companies into bankruptcy. And, of course, they get to dump their company's massive debt, including responsibility for pensions for the proletariat, canceling the contracts they made when they signed up the slaves... err.... 'employees,' 20 years ago, onto - guess who? Yep, that's right - us.

The ones who've paid taxes all along - no Bahamas bank loopholes for us.
Is there a lapel pin for traitors?

And another one for the stupid among us? The ones who keep voting for these scum, knowing (?) they're shooting themselves in their economic foot when they do?

Is it too late to stop all this and return Amerika to America? To care about others not like us? Yeah, sadly, it probably is.

There is a cycle to everything on Earth, including Earth itself. Economic theories come and go, as do societies and civilizations.

A time to sow, a time to reap. Reaping time for the hatred, interference, war-mongering, greed and imperialism we've sown on the rest of the planet is coming. The logical result for lack of thinking, forethought and wisdom, based largely on historical precepts, has come... --DN

On the other hand:

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...

Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...

Imagine no possessions,
I wonder if you can,
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.

Written by: John Lennon
© Bag productions inc.

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From today's NYT...

November 19, 2005

For a G.M. Family, the American Dream Vanishes

By DANNY HAKIM

FLINT, Mich. - Four generations of the Roy family relied on General Motors for their prosperity.

Over more than seven decades, the company's wages bought the Roys homes, cars and once-unimaginable comforts, while G.M.'s enviable medical and pension benefits have kept them secure in their retirements.

But the G.M. that was once an unassailable symbol of the nation's industrial might is a shadow of its former self, and the post-World War II promise of blue-collar factory work being a secure path to the American dream has faded with it.

After a long slide, it now looks like the end of an era. "General Motors, when I got in there, it was like I'd died and went to heaven," said Jerry Roy, 49 - who started at G.M. in 1977 and now works on an assembly line at a plant operated by Delphi, the bankrupt former G.M. parts unit that was spun off in 1999.

When Mr. Roy was hired at G.M., nearly three decades ago, his salary more than doubled from his job at a local supermarket. He traded in his five-year-old Buick for a new Chevy and since then he has done well enough to buy a pleasant house on a lake near Flint.

But now he faces the prospect of either losing his job or accepting a sharp pay cut. And for those coming after him, "it's just sad that it's ending, that it looks like this," he said. In his hometown, he added, "all these places that used to be factories are now just parking lots."

Read the rest by clicking the link...
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John Murtha can't beat back the smear machine alone. But together, ordinary Americans can ensure that Republicans pay a price for this disgraceful pattern of attacking our veterans.

Spread the word to people you know who will agree that Republicans should be ashamed of themselves.

Hi,
I want to tell you about John Murtha. He's a Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania. He’s also a combat veteran and retired Marine Corps colonel.

Murtha spent 37 years in Marine Corps, earned the Bronze Star, two purple hearts, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal. And for the last thirty years he’s been one of the most respected voices in Congress on military issues -- universally respected by Democrats, Republicans and military brass alike.

Until now.

Republicans have disgraced themselves by viciously attacking John Murtha with such disrespect that not only veterans, but every decent American should be angry.

What did Murtha, a decorated veteran, do to draw fire from a White House led by a president and vice president who evaded service in Vietnam? He questioned their management of the war in Iraq. Here's part of what he had to say:
---
"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of us. The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq, but it is time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region. ...

"For two and a half years, I have been concerned about the U.S. policy and the plan in Iraq. I have addressed my concerns with the Administration and the Pentagon and have spoken out in public about my concerns. The main reason for going to war has been discredited. ...

"I have been visiting our wounded troops at Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals almost every week since the beginning of the War. And what demoralizes them is going to war with not enough troops and equipment to make the transition to peace; the devastation caused by IEDs; being deployed to Iraq when their homes have been ravaged by hurricanes; being on their second or third deployment and leaving their families behind without a network of support.
---
Shameless Republicans immediately went on the attack. Dick Cheney, who has said that he had "other priorities" and collected 5 deferments while people like Murtha served in Vietnam, called Murtha’s comments "irresponsible" and regretted that "the president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone."

The White House spokesman, who has also never worn the uniform, pronounced himself "baffled" that Murtha wanted to "surrender to the terrorists". A Republican Congressman said Murtha and others "basically are giving aid and comfort to the enemy".

Shame on them. Every one of us -- right now -- needs to let Jack Murtha know that we respect his service, respect his leadership, and respect his right to speak the truth. This man has spent his life serving us. The very least each one of us can do is let him know that no matter what dishonorable smear campaign Republicans wage we will be there with him.

Send Congressman Murtha a note telling him that you will not be silent while he is attacked:

http://democrats.org/page/petition/shameonthem
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I watched our House of Representatives on C-SPAN last night.

I had to hit the 'info' button on the remote every once in a while to make sure I wasn't watching that British House of Commons Question Time show:
"Two words: Pure. Brilliance. You want reality TV and hard-hitting news wrapped in one? The British House of Commons has it all. While Tony Blair and other speakers argue issues of government, parliament members supposedly shout "Hear, Hear!" when they agree with something or "Shame!" when they don't, but it all sounds like drunken grunting. It's hilariously high-testosterone and sort of resembles a combination of sports and politics. I don't see why Congress doesn't conduct its sessions this way. If you haven't seen it before, check your local listings. Immediately." (From http://www.dailyfreepress.com/main.cfm)

As Taylor says, there sure was a lot o'hooten and a-hollerin.' I was amazed and amused.

Both Weldon and Murtha were terrific... --DN


TaylorMarsh.com
We Are Now England

"If you heard (soldiers and their families) reaching out and asking for a policy, a bi-partisan policy. When I introduced this resolution, I didn't introduce this resolution as a partisan resolution. I go by Arlington Cemetary every day, and the vice president criticizes Democrats? Let me tell you, those grave stones don't say Democrat or Republican, they say American." - Representative John Murtha (C-SPAN)

Hooting and hollering fills the room, as the passion rising up in the politicians explodes. Is this the American Congress? The American House?
Republicans speak. Then Democrats.
Then Duncan Hunter offers up his vets.
The Democrats offer up Jack Murtha. He's our soldier, no not the only one, especially since Terror Guy blew Iraq. But he's the patriot who is leading us in yet another battle. He says the estimated number of soldiers suffering from "battle fatigue" from the Iraq war is "50,000." I'd like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and the rest of Terror Guy's chickenhawks to think about that for a minute before they dare say a word about Democrats or 37-year decorated Marine vet Jack Murtha.
Reading from letters written by "Gold Star Parents", after their son had died, pleading to Murtha for... well, what could he do? They'd already lost their son.
Then Murtha talked about Captain Fishback coming to his office accusing Murtha of "complicity" because he wasn't speaking out about Abu Ghraib. At the time, neither Murtha nor the American public knew of Abu Ghraib. Capt. Fishback paid for his outspoken opinions, while people like WSJ's James Taranto go home to comfortable homes thinking of the next day's punch line aimed against people who actually served their country. I mean, really.
It was a rousing night in the House. Raucous. Rambunctious. We are now England, their Parliament much closer than the ocean that actually divides us. It is now our House.
I am proud of Jack Murtha. I am proud to support his resolution, which must be said, has no resemblance to the Republicans' Mickey Mouse, bogus offering. Terror Guy's team have nothing of consequence to offer, no plan, no ideas on Iraq, just destructive speech against a veteran in hopes they can save the boss.
We all won this week, all of us who know that our work is done in Iraq. All of us who know that our troops have done their jobs and then some. Saddam is no longer in power. The Iraqis are voting. In December they will choose a permanent government. All of these milestones victories. We have done all we can do. It's up to the Iraqis after the last vote this year. Because of Mr. Murtha we are all, regardless of party, one step closer. The debate has moved closer to closure because of Jack Murtha. Because of this Marine we will win this fight.
God bless John Murtha. I have never been prouder to be a Democrat. I have never been more ashamed that I ever voted Republican. (HT Sideshow and ThinkProgress)
Rep. John Murtha's Resolution appears below. Contrary to the Republicans plan that just offered up verbiage to gain political points. Murtha actually offered up a plan.
Whereas Congress and the American People have not been shown clear, measurable progress toward establishment of stable and improving security in Iraq or of a stable and improving economy in Iraq, both of which are essential to "promote the emergence of a democratic government";
Whereas additional stabilization in Iraq by U, S. military forces cannot be achieved without the deployment of hundreds of thousands of additional U S. troops, which in turn cannot be achieved without a military draft;
Whereas more than $277 billion has been appropriated by the United States Congress to prosecute U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan;
Whereas, as of the drafting of this resolution, 2,079 U.S. troops have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom;
Whereas U.S. forces have become the target of the insurgency,
Whereas, according to recent polls, over 80% of the Iraqi people want U.S. forces out of Iraq;
Whereas polls also indicate that 45% of the Iraqi people feel that the attacks on U.S. forces are justified;
Whereas, due to the foregoing, Congress finds it evident that continuing U.S. military action in Iraq is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the people of Iraq, or the Persian Gulf Region, which were cited in Public Law 107-243 as justification for undertaking such action;
Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That:
Section 1. The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.
Section 2. A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S Marines shall be deployed in the region.
Section 3. The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy.
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Nixon quote, November 17, 1973: "Well, I'm not a crook."

(On April 3, 1974, the White House announced that Nixon would pay $432,787.13 in back taxes plus interest after an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service and a congressional committee. Among Nixon's benefits to himself were improvements in his properties, supposedly necessary for his protection. These included a security ice maker, a security swimming pool heater, security club chairs and table lamps, security sofa and security pillows.)


Bush quote November 7, 2005: 'We Do Not Torture'


















http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=869_0_1_0_C
http://www.rotten.com/library/crime/prison/abu-ghraib/
http://mindprod.com/politics/iraqtortures.html#TORTURES
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,8542,1211872,00.html
http://ancapistan.typepad.com/photos/navy_seals_torturing_iraq/
Need we go on? ... --DN
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...and "OUR" exported "democracy" in action... --DN

EXCERPTS from:
Our Monsters In Iraq
Robert Dreyfuss
November 18, 2005:'

It is time to start waving the bloody shirt. There is no longer any doubt that the men that the United States has installed in power in Iraq are monsters. Not only that, but they are monsters armed, trained and supported by George W. Bush's administration. The very same Bush administration that defends torture of captives in the so-called War on Terrorism is using 150,000 U.S. troops to support a regime in Baghdad for which torture, assassination and other war crimes are routine.

So far, it appears that the facts are these: that Iraq's interior ministry, whose top officials, strike forces and police commando units (including the so-called Wolf Brigade) are controlled by paramilitary units from Shiite militias, maintained a medieval torture chamber; that inside that facility, hundreds of mostly Sunni Arab men were bestialized, with electric drills skewering their bones, with their skins flayed off, and more; that roving units of death-squad commandos are killing countless other Sunni Arab men in order to terrorize the Iraqi opposition.
[...]
...have charged that the Iraqi government has been running assassination teams. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have been killed already, including two attorneys for those accused in the kangaroo court set up to convict Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi government officials. The Post suggests that the prison uncovered in Baghdad was a "secret torture center run with the help of intelligence agents from neighboring Iran." Read that again: intelligence agents from Iran.
[...]
Make no mistake. The gangsters now running Iraq are our creatures.
Earlier this week, I was speaking with someone who was involved in the pre-2003 war planning effort vis-à-vis Iraq. As I mentioned in TPM Cafe , he told me that some of his colleagues realized that the New Iraq would probably be taken over not by Ahmed Chalabi, but by the Shiite fundamentalists. Those radical-right parties (along with the Kurds) were the real forces that took part in Chalabi's INC bloc. And the United States consciously supported the toppling of Saddam knowing that radical Shiites would be the chief beneficiaries. This was not an intelligence failure. We knew it. This was an explicit decision by the neocon-dominated cabal to replace Saddam with Shiite crazies. Now, we see that those crazies are running Saddam-like torture prisons where they use electric drills and flay the skin off Sunni captives.
[...]
The military in Iraq is scrambling to limit the damage from the stunning revelation about the men who are running Iraq today. We toppled Saddam—and in his place we've installed a hundred mini-Saddams.
-----
Click the link and read the whole sordid story from tompaine.com...
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George W. Bush Gives Me Hope
The astonishing collapse of the Bumbling One surely means healthy change is imminent, right?
- By Mark Morford,

SF Gate Columnist
Friday, November 18, 2005

Here's the good news: It really can't get much worse.

We cannot afford any more wars. The environment has been sold to the bone. The national spirit has been beaten like an Alaskan baby seal and the GOP has worked our last nerve, passed through the karmic blood-brain barrier, reached saturation to the point where even moderate Repubs and gobs of intelligent Christians are finally saying, Oh my God, what have we done, and how did it all go so wrong, and how much Prozac and wine and praying to a very disappointed Jesus will it take to fix it?

Which is why I'm here to tell you hope abounds. In fact, George W. Bush gives me hope. He gives me hope because he has led the country into a zone where the only way to go -- morally, spiritually, economically -- is up. Is out. He gives me hope because after it has all appeared so bleak and ugly and lost for so many years, it would now appear that all laws of karmic and poetic and moral justice still hold true. And how reassuring is that?

It is the eternal formula: When all is at its darkest, you cannot help but feel that some sort of transformational upswing must be just around the corner, one that maybe, just maybe contains the seeds of something resembling health and progress and revolution. Darkest before the dawn, baby, and don't you see the sky getting just a little bit lighter?

George W. Bush gives me hope. He gives hope because his narrow and myopic political ideology is right this minute being proved wildly unsound across the board, and his vicious leadership circle is revealing its true bloodstained colors and his party is crumbling at the center due to some of the worst policy decisions you will see in your lifetime.

Simply put, the collapse of BushCo represents the intrinsic unworkability of a war-hungry, thuggish ideology. It is the failure of the bully, the innate defect in any political philosophy that has at its heart dishonesty, and fiscal irresponsibility, and death.

Click the link for the rest of Mark's excellent article...
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a voice of reason in Texas
JOHN M. KELLEY

www.radiofreecorpus.com

Peace, class struggle and capitalism
Powerpoint presentation by John M. Kelley

Watch That Pea:
What the administration is doing while you’re watching Scooter & Sammy

It seems interesting to me that while all of the Democratic voices have gone gaga over the indictment of Scooter Libby and the nomination to the Supreme Court of Samuel Alito, the administration is continuing to tighten its control over the national economic/political process. On the one hand you have Democrats swooning about how this is the beginning of the end for Bush and how the white knight Fitzgerald is going to slay the Neo-Con dragon. They are ecstatic that a majority of the country now sees the war in Iraq as a tragic mistake. They feel that high gas prices, stagflation and the national deficit are winning allies from independents and moderate Republican circles every day. I saw a political cartoon today that implied Rove, Cheney and Bush were all on the run and had fled the country.

On the other hand they are gearing up for a fight over Judge Alito, even before it is clear whether there should be one. The Neo-Cons are promising the nuclear option if Alito’s nomination is filibustered, while some Democrats are already promising to shut down the Senate if they can’t win. Recent polls have given them hope that they will gain public support for a filibuster if Alito can be portrayed as clearly against Roe vs Wade. The Democrats can almost smell a house majority in the 2006 elections.

Hokum, they aren’t watching the pea. First let’s talk about the things that are being ignored that are significant and then this roll the Democrats think they are on.

Taxes

For starters the new budget bill proposes $70 billion in new tax breaks for the rich while cutting $10 billion in Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly and poor. A new tax code is being recommended that would tax labor more heavily then dividends or capital gains. In other words if you make money shoveling, you’ll pay a higher tax rate then the guy going by in the back of his chauffeured Rolls-Royce. The government just allowed approximately $300 billion in offshore earnings to enter the country under a special deal that only taxes it a rate of 5%. So the government won’t find itself in the embarrassing position of having to work out special deals for its campaign donors in the future, the new tax code recommends that corporations not pay any tax on money earned overseas. Even though most corporations never pay any real taxes, the corporate rate would be reduced to 31.5%, cheaper then they have ever been. Most would likely increase the payment of dividends which would be tax free to individual shareholders although not to most of the little folks who own stock through mutual funds and retirement vehicles, they would pay 15% on investments. Meanwhile the wealthy would pay a top capital gains tax on average, of 8.25%. Setting a cap on corporate deductions for health insurance premiums would encourage more and more companies to drop their plans as health care costs continue to outpace inflation and employers squeeze for more profit. In the place of a number of current deductions for healthcare, retirement and education would be three tax exempt savings accounts for individuals which you could put up to $20,000 a year into. Great, I always have an extra 20k that I don’t need lying around to salt away in a tax free account. In addition, the abolition of certain tax breaks like the deductions for state and local taxes will hurt the little guy a lot more then the rich. The loss of the property tax deduction would wipe out any interest deduction for most small homeowners as well as increase resistance to raising local taxes at a time when the feds have shifted more of the costs to local and state governments.

While doing away with the alternative minimum tax for individuals, which at least needs to be indexed, it would also do away with the alternative minimum tax on corporations which has been virtually ignored in the press.

Media Concentration and Control

In notable but unheralded telecommunications acquisitions, SBC acquired AT&T and Verizon purchased MCI, which will yield further consolidation and concentration of telecommunication/media control. The few anti-monopoly restrictions placed on them will all expire after a maximum of 30 months allowing them to raise rates, shut out competition and restrict competitive use of access.

Meanwhile over at the Corporation of Public Broadcasting Board of Directors, the new GOP fundraiser Chairperson and Kenneth Tomlinson replacement, Cheryl Halpern is fast turning public broadcasting into a pro government propaganda machine. She hired former co-chair of the Republican National Committee, Patricia de Stacy Harrison, as President. She in turn has brought along her old subordinates from the State Department Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy Division (read Ministry of Foreign Propaganda) to do their magic on the American people via public television and radio. They include Tom Igsitt, Vice President for Government Affairs; Mike Levy Vice President of Communications; and Helen Mobley, director of Corporate Communications and Planning. All three have extensive overseas propaganda experience.

The Continued Removal of Corporate Responsibility

The corporate owned congress continues to feed its contributors and give the bill to the American people. Having passed bills that relieve corporate accountability for fast food and guns they now want to help the pharmaceutical industry. Stating that limiting liability is the only way to get companies to produce avian flu vaccines, it is just a foot in the door to relieve them from any liability for future development of new pharmaceuticals. All of these laws tout personal responsibility while totally ignoring the constant marketing barrage people are subjected to, starting in childhood to buy their products, the valuing of profits before negative impacts or outright deceptive practices used to increase sales. I wonder if my heirs can sue if the weight loss medicine I am using causes me to become so depressed I shoot myself.

The Growth of the Police State

Right now the President and Vice President continue to argue for the right to torture people at their discretion. The President continues to hold American citizens in seclusion without charges, trial or access to a lawyer. He maintains that the government continues the need to secretly invade American homes, search them and not tell anyone until much later.

The man who advised the administration on how it could avoid war crimes prosecution is now the Attorney General and the head of the death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua is in charge of all intelligence, foreign and domestic in the United States.

We learn that in addition to people being picked up and sent to countries where they can be tortured by other governments, our own government is now maintaining secret prisons abroad where they presumably are exempt from any standard of civil rights or humane treatment. In Guantanamo, 21 prisoners who have been held almost four years without charges or trial are being subjected to forced feeding through nose tubes while strapped to beds so they can’t pull them out and choose death over their hopeless existence. Acts the Secretary of Defense calls “some people chose to go on diets for various reasons.”

Forget the battle over Chief Justice Roberts and nominee Alito’s views on abortion. That pales next to their well-documented beliefs in the supremacy of the corporation and the total faith in the dictatorial powers of the Presidency. These are the votes that can install the Divine Right of Kings and primogeniture succession in America. Add to that the international judgment that the United States ranks 22nd in its freedom of the press and you are looking at an increasingly closed society.

Last week the President states that his plan for dealing with the avian flu was to offer more liability protection and subsidies to pharmaceutical companies to gear up vaccination production. They at their humanitarian best said they didn’t think it would be worth it for a one-time disease. A projected 200 million people would die in a world wide pandemic. Anybody need another reason for a national healthcare program? Basically, the President said his goal was to get 20 million vaccines available for first responders including the military. If you include professional healthcare workers (7 million alone), medical support staff, firemen, police, military and their families that means the other 280 million people are on their own. One public health official put it this way (I paraphrase) “local governments will primarily be on their own. A pandemic could last from 1-3 years during which time many people would be out of work, have trouble obtaining food and other basic necessities. Hospitals would be overwhelmed with schools and stadiums being used as makeshift medical facilities. Morgues would not be able to handle the numbers of dead.” Estimates talk of deaths in the millions in the U.S. alone. The President's plan seems to be, put federal and National Guard troops around an infected area and let them ride it out.

Bush’s Alcoholic Mastery of Denial Will Not Surrender

What the Democrats don’t seem to understand is that by going to the wall on the Alito nomination they can only lose on all accounts. While both sides can fill their coffers for the 2006 elections and unify their bases by a full scale fight, a Democratic filibuster in the Senate followed by a Republican nuclear option is a self destructive strategy. Between the enmity that it will create with moderate Republicans and the filibuster gone, the Republican arm-twisting machine will move into full throttle before the next election occurs. The filibuster will be useless on every other issue that comes up.

Once used the nuclear option will push the Republican party past the point of no return. The Republicans will be faced with the prospect of a Democratic majority using it in revenge or insuring the Democrats never come to power again. Republicans will hammer them with it on every issue. The corporations, the religious right and the neo-con militarists will want to push through everything they can in case there is a public backlash against the House, and the party will want to limit the ability for Democrats to win and be willing to push through repressive changes in the Voting Rights Act before the next election. Moderates will be forced by the need for contributions and base solidification to march to the beat of the far right. It will be a scorched earth policy.

A better strategy would be to thoroughly expose all of Alito’s beliefs about abortion, executive power, corporate power and other views repugnant to the citizenry. Claim the moral high ground and vote as a party against him if that is what it takes to stake out a position to move forward from. There is still a majority to protect Roe vs Wade and we won’t be powerless to filibuster even more repugnant legislation that the administration surely will try to push through if the nuclear option is used. Having not used the filibuster on the supreme court nominee the Republicans will be hesitant to use the nuclear option on anything less.

Secondly, the Libby/Rove prosecution/investigation is likely to be obstructed for years (anybody remember Whitewater). Claims of Executive Privilege and Classified information will stall the investigation and trial to a crawl. Libby may finally go to jail, but certainly with a promise of a pardon on Bush’s last day in office which will be about the time he actually has to show up there and for Rove, the same. The Bush family has a history of being very forgiving of those who participated with them in crimes against the country. Even if Cheney resigns, possible but doubtful, Bush will probably stumble on to the end of his term alone, isolated and paranoid. That in and of itself is a scary scenario.Over at the U.N John Bolton is going full speed ahead to destroy any official world opposition to U.S. policy in that body. Bolton and Rice are fomenting expanding the Iraq war to Syria and have driven Iranian leaders backwards into a theocratic frenzy suggesting to them that they have nothing to lose by becoming more militant. The Iranians are angry, paranoid and threatened. Their reactions are unifying the world along cold war lines with the U.S. again dominating the discussion and direction.

Opposite of Bush’s promise, the Iranian hardliners have grown in power. They know a war with the United States involving Syria as well is their best chance of survival internally and would unite much of the Muslim world against the U.S. In response Bush has indicated a willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons. Even if used against buried military targets with limited loss of life and no collateral damage, it would outrage the world and explode the anger of a billion Muslims, many of whom would be willing to carry the terrorist war to America.The history of the Bush administration is when questioned refuse to answer, when caught, lie, when cornered get do something more extreme to change the subject, but never, never give up. Expanding the war to Syria and Iran, using massive bombing, nuking the Democrats in the Senate over abortion, pushing through a tax plan that favors corporations and the rich while further limiting their liability, expanding media consolidation and propaganda efforts while further crushing dissent are quite frankly all things that will gain support on the right among the radical theocratic, ideological and corporate bases.

Bush is most likely an untreated alcoholic who is either actively drinking or on a dry drunk. Alcoholics in this position resort to megalomania as long as they have the resources to maintain their illusion, and presidents have a lot of resources for self delusion at their disposal. When they become overwhelmed by the consequences of their actions they resort to blame, rage and destructive actions. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on the other hand are hard-core ideologues who are willing to sacrifice any number of people to execute their plans for world domination. Given this administration's willingness to ignore public opinion and forge on in spite of its mistakes, exposed lies and corruption, it is not a far stretch to imagine what kind of power it might try and seize in case of a national emergency like a flu pandemic. If you think the last two elections have been a farce, what about no election because of a pandemic, what about the suspension of congress and the prohibition of any public gathering enforced by the military. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but then again maybe anybody who believes this administration is on the run hasn’t been reading past the headlines.

John M. Kelley is a teacher, philosopher, writer, artist, political activist, singer of ballads, rebellious Irishman and agent for change who worries daily about the world he is leaving for his grandchildren. His blog is at www.mytown.ca/johnkelley

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A Must Read for Anyone Who Cares About Human Rights
October 13, 2005

Reviewer:
T. K. Sanders "tkensand" (Arizona) - See all my reviews

This book chillingly places the Bush Administration's torture policies in the proper historical perspective. The so-called war on terror is not the first time the U.S. has employed abduction, torture, and murder to further its political agenda. As Ms. Harbury thoroughly and unflinchingly reveals, throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the United States (directly and by proxy) abducted, tortured, murdered, and "disappeared" thousands of people in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, all in the name of fighting communism.

It is a history that American nationalists ignore or claim never really happened. It did happen and we are witnessing history repeated itself in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the various nations to which we ship detainees to be tortured. Anyone who cares about human rights should read this book. Anyone who does not care about human rights should also read this book, on the off chance that it may resuscitate his/her soul or conscience.

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly

When torture photos from Abu Ghraib became public in spring 2004, Americans reacted with revulsion: how could our military commit such horrible acts?

In fact, Harbury's well-documented volume reveals, American representatives abroad have been involved in torture for decades, much of it in Central America, where U.S. agents apparently encouraged the kidnapping, maltreatment and murder of left-wing fighters and their suspected sympathizers. Harbury's own husband became one of the Guatemalan victims-she described his fate in Searching for Everardo - and this new volume alludes to his story repeatedly. Its central chapter compiles testimony from Latin American torture survivors, making a case for U.S. involvement in "torture by proxy."

Harbury accompanies her evidence with passionate if unsurprising denunciations, calling torture not just inhumane and illegal but ineffective: since tortured suspects confess to anything, she says, their statements may be worth nothing.

Making use of her Harvard Law training, Harbury suggests legal avenues through which even federally sanctioned torturers may be held responsible. If her book holds few surprises for those who have followed these stories closely, its cases will certainly stoke the fires of outrage.

Radio host Amy Goodman, of Pacifica's Democracy Now program, contributes a foreword (not seen by PW).

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Book DescriptionJennifer Harbury"s investigation into torture began when her husband disappeared in Guatemala in 1992; she told the story of his torture and murder in Searching for Everardo. For over a decade since, Harbury has used her formidable legal, research, and organizing skills to press for the U.S. government"s disclosure of America"s involvement in harrowing abuses in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

A draft of this book had just been completed when the first photos from Abu Ghraib were published; tragically, many of Harbury"s deepest fears about America's own abuses were graphically confirmed by those horrific images.

This urgently needed book offers both well-documented evidence of the CIA's continuous involvement in torture tactics since the 1970s and moving personal testimony from many of the victims. Most important, Harbury provides solid, convincing arguments against the use of torture in any circumstances: not only because it is completely inconsistent with all the basic values Americans hold dear, but also because it has repeatedly proved to be ineffective: Again and again, "information" obtained through these gruesome tactics proves unreliable or false. Worse, the use of torture by U.S. client states, allies, and even by our own operatives, endangers our citizens and especially our troops deployed internationally.

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Labels: Abu Ghraib, Amy Goodman, Bush Administration Torture, Harbury

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By Marjorie Cohn t r u t h o u t Report
Wednesday 24 August 2005

I had been hesitant to speak out before because this Administration is so vindictive. But now I will ... Anybody who confronts this Administration or Rumsfeld or the Pentagon with a true assessment, they find themselves either out of a job, out of their positions, fired, relieved or chastised. Their career comes to an end. --

Janis Karpinski, interview with Marjorie Cohn, August 3, 2005

Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski was in charge of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq when the now famous torture photographs were taken in fall of 2003. She was reprimanded and demoted to Colonel for her failure to properly supervise the prison guards. Karpinski is the highest ranking officer to be sanctioned for the mistreatment of prisoners. On August 3, 2005, I interviewed Janis Karpinski. In the most comprehensive public statement she has made to date, Karpinski deconstructs the entire United States military operation in Iraq with some astonishing revelations.

When Karpinski got to Abu Ghraib, "there was a completely different story than what we were being told in the United States. It was out of control. There weren't enough soldiers. Nobody had the right equipment. They were driving around in unarmored vehicles, some of them without doors ... So, knowing that they were ill-equipped and ill-prepared, they pushed them out anyway, because those two three-stars wanted their fifteen minutes of fame, I suppose."

Karpinski said that General Shinseki briefed Rumsfeld that "he can't win this war, if they insist on invading Iraq, he can't win this war with less than 300,000 soldiers." Rumsfeld reportedly ordered Shinseki to go back and find a way to do this with 125,000 to 130,000, but Shinseki came back and said they couldn't do the job with that number. "What did Rumsfeld do?" Karpinski asked rhetorically. "If you can't agree with me, I'm going to find somebody who can. He made Shinseki a lame duck, for all practical purposes, and brought in Schoomaker. And Schoomaker got it. He said, 'Oh yes sir, we can do this with 125,000.'"

Karpinski says she did not know about the torture occurring in Cellblocks 1-A and 1-B at Abu Ghraib because it took place at night. She didn't live at Abu Ghraib, and nobody was permitted to travel at night due to the dangerous road conditions. The first she heard about the torture was on January 12, 2004. She was never allowed to speak to the people who had worked on the night shift. She "was told by Colonel Warren, the JAG officer for General Sanchez, that they weren't assigned to me, that they were not under my control, and I really had no right to see them."

When Karpinski inquired, "What's this about photographs?" the sergeant replied, "Ma'am, we've heard something about photographs, but I have no idea. Nobody has any details, and Ma'am, if anybody knows, nobody is talking." When Karpinski asked to see the log books, the sergeant told her that the Criminal Investigation Division had taken everything except for something on a pole outside the little office they were using.

"It was a memorandum signed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, authorizing a short list, maybe 6 or 8 techniques: use of dogs; stress positions; loud music; deprivation of food; keeping the lights on, those kinds of things," Karpinski said. "And then a handwritten message over to the side that appeared to be the same handwriting as the signature, and that signature was Secretary Rumsfeld's. And it said, 'Make sure this happens' with two exclamation points. And that was the only thing they had. Everything else had been confiscated."

Karpinski tried to get information, but "nobody knew anything, nobody - at least, that's what they were claiming. The Company Commander, Captain Reese, was tearful in my office and repeatedly told me he knew nothing about it, knew nothing about it," Karpinski said. But in a later plea bargain he entered into after the Taguba Report came out, "Captain Reese said that not only did he know about it, but he was told not to report it to his chain of command, and he was told that by Colonel Pappas. And he claimed that he saw General Sanchez out there on several occasions witnessing the torture of some of the security detainees."

The first time Karpinski got any clarification about the photographs was January 23, 2004. The criminal investigator, Colonel Marcelo, came into Karpinski's office and showed her the pictures. "When I saw the pictures I was floored," Karpinski said. "Really, the world was spinning out of control when I saw those pictures, because it was so far beyond and outside of what I imagined. I thought that maybe some soldiers had taken some pictures of prisoners behind barbed wire or in their cell or something like that. I couldn't imagine anything like what I saw in those photographs."

Marcelo told her, "Ma'am, I'm supposed to tell you after you see the photographs that General Sanchez wants to see you in his office." So Karpinski went over to see Sanchez. She said that "before I even saw the photographs, I was preparing words to say in a press conference - to be up front, to be honest about this, that an investigation is ongoing and there are some allegations of detainee abuse."

But Sanchez told Karpinski, "'No, absolutely not. You are not to discuss this with anyone.' And I should have known then," she said, "and I know that Sanchez was hopeful for a four-star promotion even then, in January of 2004. And I thought it had probably most to do with the election coming up in November 2004, and that this could really move the Administration out of the White House if it was exploited. So naively, I just thought, you know, they're going to let this investigation go and they're going to handle it the way it should be handled."

Karpinski said, however, "The truth has been uncovered, but it's been suffocated and it has not been released with the results of the investigation." She added, "McClellan and Rumsfeld can get up on their high horse and say that there've been no fewer than 15 investigations that were conducted. But every one of those investigations is under the control of the Secretary of Defense. And every one of those investigations is run and led by a person who can lose their job under Rumsfeld's fist."

"We're never going to know the truth until they do an independent commission or look into this independently," Karpinski maintains. "This is about instructions delivered with full authority and knowledge of the Secretary of Defense and probably Cheney. I don't know if the President was involved or not. I don't care. All I know is, those instructions were communicated from the Secretary of Defense's office, from the Pentagon, through Cambone, through Miller, to Abu Ghraib."

Karpinski describes what happened when General Geoffrey Miller arrived at Abu Ghraib: "The most pronounced difference was when Miller came to visit. He came right after Rumsfeld's visit ... And he said that he was going to use a template from Guantánamo Bay to 'Gitm-oize' the operations out at Abu Ghraib."

"These torture techniques were being implemented and used down at Guantánamo Bay and, of course, now we have lots of statements that say they were used in Afghanistan as well," Karpinski said. Although Miller has sworn he was just an "advisor," Miller told Karpinski he wanted Abu Ghraib. Karpinski replied, "Abu Ghraib is not mine to give to you. It belongs to Ambassador Bremer. It is going to be turned over to the Iraqis." Miller replied, "No it is not. I want that facility and Rick Sanchez said I can have any facility I want." Karpinski said, "Miller obviously had the full authority of somebody, you know, likely Cambone or Rumsfeld in Washington, DC."

Miller's representative, General Fast, turned the prison over to the Military Intelligence brigade for complete command and control, Karpinski said. "There was no coordination with me or Colonel Pappas. There was no discussion about chain of command."

Abu Ghraib housed primarily Iraqi criminals. Although many of the "security detainees" were kept at Abu Ghraib, most of the interrogations took place at a higher-value detention facility in Baghdad, according to Karpinski.

The Army discriminates against the reservists in general, and female officers in particular, Karpinski said. "It's really a good old boys' network," she said. "Come hell or high water, they're going to maintain the status quo." While she was made the scapegoat for the torture at Abu Ghraib, Karpinski said, no one above her in the chain of command has been reprimanded.

Karpinski reveals that there was "no sustainment plan" because "there were a lot of contractors - US contractors exclusively - who realized they could make a lot of money in Iraq." At the Coalition Provisional Authority, Karpinski "saw corruption like I've never seen before - millions of dollars just being pocketed by contractors. Everything was on a cash basis at that time," she said. "You take a request down - literally, you take a request to the Finance Office. If the Pay Officer recognized your face and you were asking for $450,000 to pay a contractor for work, they would pay you in cash: $450,000. Out of control."

Speaking about the war, Karpinski said, "Iraq was a huge country, and when you have people largely saying now, 'He may have been a dictator, but we were better under Saddam,' this Administration needs to take notice. And at some point you have to say, 'Stop the train, because it's completely derailed. How do we fix it?' But in an effort to do that, you have to admit that you made a few mistakes, and this Administration is not willing to admit any mistakes whatsoever."

Janis Karpinski is no longer in the military. She is writing a book that will be published by Miramax in November. In April, she received a form letter from the Chief of the Army Reserves, "warning me - warning me - about speaking about Abu Ghraib, and that everything was still under investigation." She then got "a letter saying that he understands that I'm writing a book and I should submit the transcript for review."

"And my lawyer responded simply by telling him that I was a private citizen and I don't fall under the same requirements, which he had to acknowledge, because that's true. I'm not ignorant, and I'm not going to reveal any classified information in anything I write," Karpinski said, "but I don't need to, because the truth is the truth, and it doesn't have to be classified. It is definitely staggering, but the truth is the truth."

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Janis Karpinski: Exclusive Interview
By Marjorie Cohn t r u t h o u t
Wednesday 03 August 2005

Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski was in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq when the infamous torture photographs were taken. She was reprimanded and demoted to Colonel for her failure to properly supervise the prison guards. Karpinski is the highest ranking officer to be sanctioned for the mistreatment of prisoners. This exclusive interview by t r u t h o u t writer Marjorie Cohn is the most comprehensive public statement Karpinski has made to date.

MC: General Karpinski, thank you for agreeing to talk to me today.

JK: I had been hesitant to speak out before because this Administration is so vindictive. But now I will.

Despite years of this pronouncement that it's an "army of one," we reservists were absolutely discriminated against. The people at the senior levels of the reserve components, the Chief of the Army Reserve, for example, a three-star, never made so much as one phone call, never exchanged one word with me in all of this. Twice, my lawyer requested a meeting with him face-to-face in Washington, DC, and he declined. He denied both of those requests.

It's really a good old boys' network. Come hell or high water, they're going to maintain the status quo. They all live by each other in Fort Myers, or near Fort Myers. I'm sure that they have these cigar-smoking sessions where they're all patting each other on the back that they got another female out of the way, before I was able to get higher up in the senior levels. But I always expected that reservists would find support from their own component, and not be tagged as bad apples. For myself, there was not any support whatsoever.

I just find it incredible that the system - the Pentagon and the Judicial System - can continue to keep those soldiers in jail when there are simply volumes of documents and information that is emerging, and continues to emerge, that says exactly what one, in particular, Graner, was saying all along: that he was ordered to do these things by the Military Intelligence people and the interrogators, the contract interrogators. And there's more and more information to support that. The recommendation was that General Miller from Gitmo be reprimanded and his four-star commander from SOUTHCOM said no, I don't agree with that.

MC: And General Geoffrey Miller was the one who was supposed to transplant those interrogation and torture techniques from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib?

JK: That's correct. There are sworn statements, not only from the interrogators and the FBI personnel down at Guantánamo Bay prior to even a thought of using Abu Ghraib for a prison location. These torture techniques were being implemented and used down at Guantánamo Bay and, of course, now we have lots of statements that say they were used in Afghanistan as well.

Click the link for the rest of a very interesting interview...

Labels: Abu Ghraib, Karpinski, torture

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I can hear Herr Goebbels, Ailes' (and Rove's) hero, saying: "If only we had had Television back then, everyone would be speaking Nazi now" ... --DN
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Fox in your backyard

Fox News Channel's political agenda is coming to a television station near you.

Roger Ailes, the architect behind the right-wing tilt of cable news, is now remaking 35 local television stations—broadcasting to nearly 40 percent of America’s homes—in Fox News Channel’s image.

Sign the petition: Don’t Fox with my local news

Media consolidation made Ailes’ takeover of local news possible. News Corp. already owns both a Fox and a UPN affiliate in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—the country’s three biggest markets—and other duopolies in six of the top 20 markets, including Dallas, Minneapolis and Washington.

Learn more about the "Fox Effect" on the media

Break up Big Media

Ailes plans to replace local news and information with the biased infotainment that’s become the hallmark of Fox News Channel. He has already moved oversight of the local station group from Los Angeles to Fox News headquarters in New York. He has flown in local news personalities for retraining on how to deliver the news Fox-style. (Read the Variety story on Ailes' plan).

News Corp.’s lobbyists are schmoozing officials in Washington to further loosen regulations that prohibit one company from owning even more local news outlets. Instead, we need to break up the big media conglomerates and get higher quality news and information in return for free use of the public's airwaves.

Now it’s time to keep News Corp. from turning local public airwaves into a mouthpiece for Fox News Channel.

Tell the FCC to convene local hearings on ownership

Join the debateIn the coming months, the Federal Communications Commission — the agency charged with regulating the number of TV stations one corporation can own — will reconsider media ownership limits.

The loosening of ownership caps would unleash a wave of media consolidation. At the local level, we could see a single firm own the majority of media — daily newspaper, TV and radio stations, cable TV systems. Such concentration not only violates the premise of a competitive marketplace, it makes a mockery of the notion of a free press enshrined in the Constitution. The implications are clear: Media conglomerates such as News Corp. would have the power to control political discourse in a manner never seen before.

Join thousands of Americans who are demanding a real public debate through FCC hearings across the nation. Click on the links below to learn more:
Who owns the media?
Media ownership issues
Media ownership rules
Town meetings on the Future of Media
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Ya know, Jimmy Carter was a born-again, evangelical Christian deeply devoted to his faith and his beliefs.

But somehow, he seemed able to understand our Constitution and, while remaining true to his faith, never let it interfere with his job as President.

How come Shrubbie can't manage to do that?

W compensates for tiny brain with huge skirt

Photo by Gerald Herbert/Associated Press via Wonkette.

Oops, almost forgot - Carter was and is, head and shoulders above, a much, much better human being than Stupid could ever dream of being... --DN

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Published on Wednesday, September 1, 2004 by the Free Press (Columbus, Ohio)

Gott Mit Uns: On Bush and Hitler's Rhetoric
by Bob Fitrakis

President Bush told Texas evangelist James Robinson that "I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can't explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen . . . I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it."

With 49.3% of New York City residents in a recent Zogby poll believing that some people in our government knew of the 911 attack in advance and allowed it to happen, the President as right-wing evangelical prophet is under siege in his Madison Square Garden bunker. Convention watchers should take careful note of the theocratic nationalist rhetoric at the Republican convention this week.

When was the last time a Western nation had a leader so obsessed with God and claiming God was on our side?

If you answered Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany, you're correct. Nothing can be more misleading than to categorize Hitler as a barbaric pagan or Godless totalitarian, like Stalin.

Both Bush and Hitler believe that they were chosen by God to lead their nations. With Hitler boldly proclaiming, before launching his doctrine of preventive war against all of Europe, that "I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany."

"I follow the path assigned to me by Providence with the instinctive sureness of a sleepwalker," Hitler said.

Hitler stated in February 1940, "But there is something else I believe, and that is that there is a God. . . . And this God again has blessed our efforts during the past 13 years." After the Iraqi invasion, Bush announced, "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did . . . ." Neither the similarity between Hitler and Bush's religious rhetoric nor the fact that the current President's grandfather was called "Hitler's Angel" by the New York Tribune for his financing of the Fuher's rise to power is lost on Europeans.

Pat Robertson called Bush "a prophet" and Ralph Reed claimed, after the 9/11 attack, God picked the President because "he knew George Bush had the ability to lead in this compelling way." Hitler told the German people in March 1936, "Providence withdrew its protection and our people fell, fell as scarcely any other people heretofore. In this deep misery we again learn to pray. . . . The mercy of the Lord slowly returns to us again. And in this hour we sink to our knees and beseech our almighty God that he may bless us, that He may give us the strength to carry on the struggle for the freedom, the future, the honor, and the peace of our people. So help us God."

At the beginning of Hitler's crusade on April 12, 1922, he spelled out his version of the warmongering Jesus: "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter." Randall Balmer in The Nation, noted that "Bush's God is the eye-for-an- eye God of the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation, the God of vengeance and retribution."

As Bush has invoked the cross of Jesus to simultaneously attack the Islamic and Arab world, Hitler also saw the value of exalting the cross while waging endless war: "To be sure, our Christian Cross should be the most exalted symbol of the struggle against the Jewish-Marxist-Bolshevik spirit.

Like Bush-ites, Hitler was fond of invoking the Ten Commandments as the foundation of Nazi Germany: "The Ten Commandments are a code of living to which there's no refutation. These precepts correspond to irrefragable needs of the human soul."

But if you ever wondered where Bush got his idea for so-called "faith-based initiatives" you need only consult Hitler's January 30, 1939 speech to the Reichstag. The Fuhrer begins, "Amongst the accusations which are directed against Germany in the so-called democracy is the charge that the National Socialist State is hostile to religion."

Hitler goes on to document how much "public monies derived from taxation through the organs of the State have been placed at the disposal of both churches [Protestant and Catholic]." Hitler gave nearly 1.8 billion Reichsmarks between 1933-1938 directly to the Christian churches. In 1938 alone, he bragged that the Nazis gave half a billion Reichsmarks from the national government and an additional 92 million Reichsmarks from the Nazi-controlled German states and parish associations.

Hitler made the intent of his faith-based initiative clear when he noted, "With a tenth of our budget for religion, we would thus have a Church devoted to the State and of unshakable loyalty. . . . the little sects, which receive only a few hundred thousand marks, are devoted to us body and soul."

Bush's assertion that "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job" brings to mind God as a dull-witted, cognitively-impaired nationalist unable to utter a simple declarative sentence who spends his time preaching "blessed are the warmongers and profit-makers."
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Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the Free Press (freepress.org), a political science professor, attorney and co-author with Harvey Wasserman of George W. Bush vs. the Superpower of Peace.
All content © 1970-2004 The Columbus Free Press
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...and if you want a litany of Cheney lies, just peruse this for a bit... --DN

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Wednesday, November 16, 2005 by John in DC - 11/16/2005 06:58:00 PM

UPDATE: Cong Henry Waxman has a document online detailing 51 times that Cheney misled the country about Iraq! (The Cheney stuff begins on page 26 of the document, which is actually page 32 of the pdf file.)

Oh this is rich. Cheney is the newest attack dog Bush is sending out to chastize Dems for calling Bush and company liars. The only problem? Cheney himself is one of the liars who repeatedly and intentionally misled the country in order to justify the war.

Do you remember the one where...

1. Cheney Claimed Iraq Was Providing WMD Training To Al-Qaeda Months After Source Recanted

or the one where...

2. Cheney claimed Saddam was harboring Al Qaeda? He wasn't.

or the one where...

3. Cheney claimed Saddam gave Al Qaeda bomb-making expertise and trained Al Qaeda terrorists how to use chemical and biological weapons? Saddam didn't.

or the one where...

4. On Sept 14, 2003 Cheney claimed, for the second time at least, that there was evidence suggesting Mohammad Atta visited the Iraqi embassy in the Czech Republic? He didn't, and Cheney knew the supposed evidence had already been debunked, yet repeated the charge on Tim Russert's show as a justification for the war.

With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack

or the one where...

5. Cheney said during the VP debates last October that he NEVER had publicly connected Iraq and 9/11. Of course, he did on Meet the Press a year before:

Cheney: "If we're successful in Iraq, if we can stand up a good representative government in Iraq, that secures the region so that it never again becomes a threat to its neighbors or to the United States, so it's not pursuing weapons of mass destruction, so that it's not a safe haven for terrorists, now we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

or the one where...

6. Cheney denied linking Atta to the Iraqis, when he did:June 17, 2004. Vice President Cheney talking to CNBC's Gloria Borger:

Borger: 'Well, let's go to Mohamed Atta for a minute, because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, 'pretty well confirmed.'

'Cheney: 'No, I never said that.'

Borger: 'Okay.'

Cheney: 'Never said that.'

Borger: 'I think that is . . . '

Cheney: 'Absolutely not. What I said was the Czech intelligence service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on April 9th of 2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down.'

On Dec. 9, 2001. Cheney talking to NBC's Tim Russert (this is perhaps the first time he made this lie):

Cheney: 'Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that -- it's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack. Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point, but that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue.'

Comments (87)
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...and a related article.
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You must believe that being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime - unless you're a millionaire right wing radio gasbag; then, it's an "illness" and requires prayer for "recovery".

You must believe that those born to privilege achieve success on their own, but that all of their customers are lazy and stupid.

You must believe that ethics are an inconvenience that only Democrats bother with, and that any way you raise money is okay, so long as you don't get caught.

You must believe that folks who work for their money should be taxed at a high rate, but those who get their money for nothing should be exempt from taxation.

You must believe that being "morally upright" means hating gays and liberals, and anyone else who doesn't hate gays and liberals.

You must believe that, to rid the country of crime, you must rid the world of people not like you.

You must agree that racking up huge amounts of debt and handing it off to future generations is worth the few thousand extra in tax breaks given to your wealthy "investors."

You must believe the US should pull out of the UN, at the same time you claim our highest national priority is to start a war to enforce UN resolutions. (...against Iraq, but continue to ignore the many resolutions against Israel, going back decades... --DN)

You must believe that the best person to represent the United States in the UN is someone who doesn't believe the UN should exist.

You must believe that government should stay out of people's financial lives, but should socially engineer any behaviors deemed "unacceptable."

That the government should stay out of our checkbooks, but feel perfectly at home in our bedrooms and doctor's offices.

You must believe that profitable pollution is perfectly ok, and that all science is bunk when it cuts into profits.

You must support prayer in schools, as long as no one prays to Allah or Buddha.

You must believe that rushing back to Washington to vote to keep a dead woman's tube in place is more important than helping thousands of people keep from drowning in a hurricane.

You must believe that nothing is more important than a fundraiser; not even black people drowning. No, especially black people drowning.

You must believe that no Republican is crooked, as long as he says the right thing and writes you a big enough check.

You must believe that "Standing Tall for America" means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India, and encouraging corporations headquartered here to move their address offshore to avoid taxes.

You must believe that, while a woman cannot be trusted with decisions about her own body, huge multi-national corporations can be trusted to make decisions affecting all mankind with no regulation whatsoever.

You must believe that Jesus loves you, but shares your hatred and distrust of the poor, homosexuals, and the Clintons.

You must hate the ACLU for representing people whose rights have been violated, and believe they owed it to the country to bail out Oliver North.

You must believe that the best way to show appreciation to the troops is to charge them to fly home for leave, serve plastic turkey and cut their VA benefits. (...and deny them proper equipment to help save their lives in combat... --DN)

You must be willing to believe that group sex and drug use are degenerate sins that can only be purged by running for office as a Republican.

You must think that keeping sex education and birth control out of schools is the wisest course, because without them, teenagers will never have sex.

You must think that the best way to fight terrorism is to alienate our allies and piss off the rest of the world at the same time we demand their cooperation and money.

You must believe that single-payer health care, in which everyone pays for and receives health insurance, would be a disaster compared to the current system, in which 40 million people are forbidden from paying into the system, but still receive emergency health care. You must also believe that insurance companies only care about giving you the best darn health care there is, damn the profit. You must also believe that providing health care to Iraqis is good policy, while providing it to Americans is a "Socialist plot."

You must believe that forcing bankrupt people to pay their bills is much more important than addressing how they got there in the first place. (like no health insurance - doh! ... --DN)

You must agree that the link between tobacco and cancer is "dubious," that claims of global warming are "junk science" and that creationism has a sound scientific basis that should be part of all school curricula.

You must believe that waging war with no security or exit strategy was good for Iraq.

You must agree that Saddam Hussein was a good guy when Reagan was sending him arms, a bad guy when he invaded Kuwait, a good guy again when Cheney did business with him at Halliburton, and then a bad guy again when Bush decided that a war in Iraq would be a very lucrative deal for his "investors."

You must believe that the Bill of Rights is absolute in the case of the Second Amendment, but negotiable with regard to the rest of the document.

You must agree that the adulterous affairs of Democrats require public embarrassment and impeachment, while those of Republicans are a private matter, and excusable because, well, "boys will be boys" (or girls).

You must ascribe to the notion that the Clintons' business deals were major breaches of the public trust, while the fact that Dick Cheney is still being paid by Halliburton, which is now getting billions of your tax dollars, is no big deal.

You must believe that everything that Democrats do should be public knowledge, but that the public has no right to know anything that Republicans do.

You must always deride a Democrat's changes of mind and philosophy as a "flip-flop," while referring to those of fellow Republicans as "growth."

You must openly support "state's rights," except when John Ashcroft wants to force local libraries to turn over their records or Tom DeLay wants to impose new districts because he doesn't like election results.

You must agree that the outcome of an election is always more
important than making sure everyone got to vote and that all votes were counted.

You must agree that income tax cuts for the rich are good for the economy, while payroll tax cuts for the working class are bad.

Furthermore, you must believe that making sure that the rich have a few extra dollars in their pockets is good for the economy, while raising the minimum wage is detrimental.

Then there's this guy, hero to Stupid (for one thing, comparable IQ's) and godfather of the modern Naz... err... I mean Republican Party... --DN:



Updated constantly...
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As some Republican once said, "...you can't fool ALL of the people all of the time"...
--DN

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
sent at your request from www.robertscheer.com
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
UPDATE - 11/17/2005:
Today, nationally recognized columnist Robert Scheer began a regular weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle. In two weeks, you can read Scheer and other prominent writers on http://www.truthdig.com/, a new Web magazine providing provocative content and in-depth coverage of current affairs.
Just a taste of what you’ll find on our site:
Digs — Articles representing the deepest dig for the truth
Ear to the Ground — Scheer’s column and his take on other issues in the news
Reports — Original articles and opinion pieces unique to truthdig.com
Uncovered — Dossiers of ongoing news subjects
Join us for the dig on Tuesday, November 29!
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The Big Lie Technique

At a time when approximately 57 percent of Americans polled believe that President Bush deceived them on the reasons for the war in Iraq, it does seem a bit redundant to deconstruct the president's recent speeches on that subject. Yet, to fail to do so would be to passively accept the Big Lie technique -- which is how we as a nation got into this horrible mess in the first place.

The basic claim of the president's desperate and strident attack on the war's critics this past week is that he was acting as a consensus president when intelligence information left him no choice but to invade Iraq as a preventive action to deter a terrorist attack on America. This is flatly wrong.

His rationalization for attacking Iraq, once accepted uncritically by most in Congress and the media easily intimidated by jingoism, now is known to be false. The bipartisan 9/11 commission selected by Bush concluded unanimously that there was no link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship, al Qaeda's sworn enemy. And a recently declassified 2002 document proves that Bush's "evidence" for this, available to top administration officials, was based on a single discredited witness.

Clearly on the defensive, Bush now sounds increasingly Nixonian as he basically calls the majority of the country traitors for noticing he tricked us.

"Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people," the president said at an Air Force base in Alaska. "Leaders in my administration and members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq, and reached the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a threat."

This is a manipulative distortion; saying Hussein was a threat -- to somebody, somewhere, in some context -- is not the same as endorsing a pre-emptive occupation of his country in a fantastically expensive and blatantly risky nation-building exercise. And the idea that individual senators and members of Congress had the same access to even a fraction of the raw intelligence as the president of the United States is just a lie on its face -- it is a simple matter of security clearances, which are not distributed equally.

It was enormously telling, in fact, that the only part of the Senate which did see the un-sanitized National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq -- the Republican-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee -- shockingly voted in the fall of 2002 against the simple authorization of force demanded by a Republican president. Panicked, the warmongers in the White House and Pentagon pressured CIA Director George Tenet to rush release to the entire Hill a very short "summary" of the careful NIE, which made Hussein seem incalculably more dangerous than the whole report indicated.

The Defense Intelligence Agency finally declassified its investigative report, DITSUM No. 044-02, within recent days. This smoking-gun document proves the Bush administration's key evidence for the apocryphal Osama bin Laden-Saddam Hussein alliance -- said by Bush to involve training in the use of weapons of mass destruction -- was built upon the testimony of a prisoner who, according to the DIA, was probably "intentionally misleading the debriefers."

Yet, despite the government having been informed of this by the Pentagon's intelligence agency in February 2002, Bush told the nation eight months later, on the eve of the Senate's vote to authorize the war, that "we've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases."

The false al Qaeda-Hussein link was the linchpin to Bush's argument that he could not delay the invasion until after the United Nations weapons inspectors completed their investigation in a matter of months. Perhaps, he feared not that those weapons would fall into the wrong hands but that they would not be found at all.

Boxed in by international sanctions, weapons inspectors, U.S. fighter jets patrolling two huge no-fly zones and powerful rivals on all his borders, Hussein in 2003 was decidedly not a threat to America. But the Bush White House wanted a war with Iraq, and it pulled out all the stops -- references to "a mushroom cloud" and calling Hussein an "ally" of al Qaeda -- to convince the rest of us it was necessary.

The White House believed the ends (occupying Iraq) justified the means (exaggerating the threat). We know now those ends have proved disastrous.

Oblivious to the grim irony, Bush proclaims his war without end in Iraq the central front in a new Cold War, never acknowledging that he has handed al Qaeda terrorists a new home base. Iran, his "Axis of Evil" member, now has its disciples in power in Iraq. Last week, top Bush administration officials welcomed to Washington Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, who previously was denounced for having allegedly passed U.S. secrets to his old supporters in Tehran and was elected to a top post in Iraq by campaigning on anti-U.S. slogans.

Under Bush's watch, we not only suffered the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks while he snoozed, but he has failed to capture the perpetrator of those attacks and has given al Qaeda a powerful base in Iraq from which to terrorize. And this is the guy who dares tell his critics they are weakening our country.

2005 copyright Robert Scheer
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The powerful Bush family has long treated average Americans as a pretty dim-witted bunch who need to be manipulated for their own good. But George W. Bush is now facing a political crisis because tens of millions of Americans are demanding to know whether Bush tricked the nation into a disastrous war in Iraq. Bush's latest response has been to accuse his enemies of trying to "rewrite the history," a tactic he knows quite well.

For the full story on how Bush and his family act like they own America's reality, go to Consortiumnews.com at http://www.consortiumnews.com .

If you want to help make sure that Consortiumnews.com is around next year to chronicle how accountability finally comes to the Bush family, please make a tax-deductible donation, either by credit cards at the Web site or by sending a check to Consortium for Independent Journalism (CIJ), Suite 102-231, 2200 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22201.

(Please forward this message to friends who might be interested. Thanks.)
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US used white phosphorus in Iraq
The Pentagon has confirmed that US troops used white phosphorus during last year's offensive in the northern Iraqi city of Falluja.

"It was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants," spokesman Lt Col Barry Venable told the BBC - though not against civilians, he said. (Yeah, right. We believe ya... --DN)

The US earlier denied it had been used in Falluja at all.

Col Venable denied that the substance - which can cause burning of the flesh - constituted a banned chemical weapon.
White phosphorus is an incendiary weapon, not a chemical weapon Col Barry Venable Pentagon spokesman
Washington is not a signatory of an international treaty restricting the use of white phosphorus devices.

Col Venable said a statement by the US state department that white phosphorus had not been used was based on "poor information".
The BBC's defence correspondent Paul Wood says having to retract its denial has been a public relations disaster for the US military.

'Incendiary'
The US-led assault on Falluja - a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency west of Baghdad - displaced most of the city's 300,000 population and left many of its buildings destroyed.
Col Venable told the BBC's PM radio programme that the US army used white phosphorus incendiary munitions "primarily as obscurants, for smokescreens or target marking in some cases".
"However it is an incendiary weapon and may be used against enemy combatants."

WHITE PHOSPHORUS
Spontaneously flammable chemical used for battlefield illumination
Contact with particles causes burning of skin and flesh
Use of incendiary weapons prohibited for attacking civilians (Protocol III of Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons)
Protocol III not signed by US
And he said it had been used in Falluja, but it was "conventional munition", not a chemical weapon.
It is not "outlawed or illegal", Col Venable said.
"When you have enemy forces that are in covered positions that your high explosive artillery rounds are not having an impact on and you wish to get them out of those positions, one technique is to fire a white phosphorus round or rounds into the position because the combined effects of the fire and smoke - and in some case the terror brought about by the explosion on the ground - will drive them out of the holes so that you can kill them with high explosives," he said.

'Particularly nasty'
White phosphorus is highly flammable and ignites on contact with oxygen. If the substance hits someone's body, it will burn until deprived of oxygen.
Globalsecurity.org, a defence website, says: "Phosphorus burns on the skin are deep and painful... These weapons are particularly nasty because white phosphorus continues to burn until it disappears... it could burn right down to the bone."
A spokesman at the UK Ministry of Defence said the use of white phosphorus was permitted in battle in cases where there were no civilians near the target area.
But Professor Paul Rodgers of the University of Bradford department of peace studies said white phosphorus could be considered a chemical weapon if deliberately aimed at civilians.
He told PM: "It is not counted under the chemical weapons convention in its normal use but, although it is a matter of legal niceties, it probably does fall into the category of chemical weapons if it is used for this kind of purpose directly against people."
When the Rai documentary revealing the use of white phosphorus in Iraq was broadcast on 8 November, it sparked fury among Italian anti-war protesters, who demonstrated outside the US embassy in Rome.

Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4440664.stmPublished: 2005/11/15 23:57:15 GMT© BBC MMV
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... Smirky's poll ratings are dropping faster than a 2,000 pound 'bunker buster' bomb. Stay out from under them.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.

Autumn of Discontent
The latest NEWSWEEK poll shows serious political trouble for President Bush.

J. Scott Applewhite / AP

• Newsweek Poll: Bush’s Numbers Are Down

95 blogs are discussing Poll: Bush Approval Ratings Drop to 36% right now. View All »


WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Marcus Mabry
Newsweek
Updated: 2:00 p.m. ET Nov. 12, 2000

Nov. 12, 2005 - In the wake of the bombings in Jordan by suspected followers of Iraq’s Al Qaeda chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the indictment of top White House aide I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby and the withdrawal of Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court, President George W. Bush is sinking deeper and deeper into political trouble, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll.

Only 36 percent of Americans approve of the job he is doing as president, and an astounding 68 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country—the highest in Bush’s presidency.

But that’s not the worst of it for the 43rd president of the United States, a leader who rode comfortably to reelection just a year ago. Half of all Americans now believe he’s not “honest and ethical.”
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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/248055_firstperson14.html

So you want details about who lied...

Monday, November 14, 2005
JAMES BRUNER
GUEST COLUMNIST

Marty McNett of Burlington (Letters, Wednesday) believes there is no proof that President Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so we should lay off claims that he did.

I refer McNett and anyone else who is laboring under that misconception to read "Iraq On The Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements On Iraq," prepared by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform -- Minority Staff Special Investigations Division, March 16, 2004.
http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdfs_108_2/pdfs_inves/pdf_admin_iraq_on_the_record_rep.pdf Also to this.
And this.
And here.
And how about this.
And even here.
And just for good measure.
Also, for a "history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies," see this from Harper's, 10/2003.
(All links added by... --DN)
And... if you think *I* have links, check this out.

This 36-page report goes into great detail about outright false and deceptive public statements by Bush (55 misleading statements), Vice President Dick Cheney (51), former Secretary of State Colin Powell (50), former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (29) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (52) on the subject. These 237 misleading statements were made in a variety of forums (53 interviews, 40 speeches, 26 news conferences and briefings, four written statements and articles and two appearances before Congress) beginning at least a year before the war began, and their frequency peaked at key decision-making points.

Here are a few excerpts: In October 2002, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research concluded in the National Intelligence Estimate that "the activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."

INR added: "Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, INR is unwilling to speculate that such an effort began soon after the departure of UN inspectors." The INR position was similar to the conclusions of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which concluded (in March 2003) that there was "no indication of resumed nuclear activities ... nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities."

These doubts and qualifications, however, were not communicated to the public. Instead, the five administration officials repeatedly made unequivocal comments about Iraq's nuclear program. For example, Bush said in October 2002 that "the regime has the scientists and facilities to build nuclear weapons and is seeking the materials required to do so." Several days later, Bush asserted Saddam Hussein "is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon."

Cheney made perhaps the single-most egregious statement about Iraq's nuclear capabilities, claiming: "We know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." He made this statement just three days before the war. He did not admit until Sept. 14, 2003, that his statement was wrong and that he "did misspeak."

Bush and others portrayed the threat of Saddam waging nuclear war against the United States or its allies as one of the most urgent reasons for pre-emptively attacking Iraq. Administration officials used evocative language and images. On the eve of congressional votes on the Iraq war resolution (Oct. 7, 2002), Bush stated: "Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

The words "mushroom cloud" echoed time and again in speech after speech by key members of the administration from that point on until the beginning of hostilities. If that isn't lying, I don't know what is.

James Bruner lives in Oak Harbor. He is a retired Air Force major and was a technical editor and writer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for 11 years.

© 1998-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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"IMPOSSIBLE TO DISMISS."
-Baltimore Sun

In his documentary feature, UNCOVERED: The War on Iraq, filmmaker Robert Greenwald chronicles the Bush Administration's determined quest to invade Iraq following the events of September 11, 2001. The film deconstructs the administration's case for war through interviews with U.S intelligence and defense officials, foreign service experts, and U.N. weapons inspectors -- including a former CIA director, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and even President Bush's Secretary of the Army. Their analyses and conclusions are sobering, and often disturbing, regardless of one's political affiliations.

Since this film was first released in November 2003 via thousands of house parties organized by MoveOn.org, the issues addressed have become well known, and the arguments made by the experts in the film have been proven. Most recently, by the Downing Street Memos.

This is an important film documenting exactly how the Bush administration hoodwinked the American people into supporting an unnecessary war. A war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and continues today.

Read why the director, Robert Greenwald, decided to make this film. See the timeline of the Bush Administration's justification for war, images and excerpts from the film, or the complete transcript (pdf).
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How many more instances of vote fraud and corruption do we need to show before the damn MSM gets off its knees and starts giving this proof wider dissemination? Sadly, probably not in my lifetime.

It's an old-fashioned bamboozling, folks. We stood for it in 2000, we stood for it in 2002, we stood for it in 2004, and we will surely stand for it in 2006 and 2008, ad infinitum.

We apparently think South American banana republics made excellent role models for our Republic... --DN

Brad Friedman Bio

11.13.2005
(37 comments )
READ MORE: Dick Cheney, George W. Bush

Is this the Election that will finally break the camel's back?

With so much going on, few have noticed the extraordinary outcome of last Tuesday's election in Ohio where the crooked state that brung you -- by hook and by crook -- a second term for George W. Bush may have turned in results so staggeringly impossible, that perhaps even the Mainstream Corporate Media (if only in Ohio?!) will have no choice but to look into it.

As usual, the Free Press' heroic Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are on the case. Their article on what happened on ballot issues 1 through 5 last week is A MUST READ for anybody who still gives the slightest damn about whatever democracy might be left in America.

I'll try to summarize here briefly. There were five initiatives on the ballot last week. Issue 1 was a controversial proposition for $2 billion in new state spending. The Christian Right was opposed (because some of the new funds might go to stem cell research), but otherwise, the Republican Governor Taft's Administration (he recently plead guilty to several counts of corruption) was pushing it hard alongside progressives in the state.

The Columbus Dispatch's pre-election polling, which Fritrakis and Wasserman describe as "uncannily accurate for decades", called the race correctly within 1% of the final result. The margin of error for the poll was +/- 2.5% with a 95% confidence interval. On Issue 1, the Dispatch poll was right on the money. They predicted 53% in favor, the final result was 54% in favor.

But then came Issues 2 through 5 put forward by < ahref="http://ReformOhioNow.org">ReformOhioNow.org -- a bi-partisan coalition pushing these four initiatives for Electoral Reform in the Buckeye State largely in response to their shameful '04 Election performance led by the extremely partisan Secretary of State (and Bush/Cheney '04 Co-Chair) J. Kenneth Blackwell.

On those four issues, which Blackwell and the Christian Right were against, the final results were impossibly different -- and we mean impossibly! -- from both the Dispatch's final polling before the election and all reasoned common-sense. Take a look:

ISSUE 1 ($2 Billion State Bond initiative)PRE-POLLING: 53% Yes, 27% No, 20% UndecidedFINAL RESULT: 54% Yes, 45% No

ISSUE 2 (Allow easier absentee balloting)PRE-POLLING: 59% Yes, 33% No, 9% UndecidedFINAL RESULT: 36% Yes, 63% No

ISSUE 3 (Revise campaign contribution limits)PRE-POLLING: 61% Yes, 25% No, 14% UndecidedFINAL RESULT: 33% Yes, 66% No

ISSUE 4 (Ind. Comm. to draw Congressional Districts)PRE-POLLING: 31% Yes, 45% No, 25% UndecidedFINAL RESULT: 30% Yes, 69% No

ISSUE 5 (Ind. Board instead of Sec. of State to oversee elections)PRE-POLLING: 41% Yes, 43% No, 16% UndecidedFINAL RESULT: 29% Yes, 70% No

Now, you tell us...What could possibly explain such unheard of differences between the Dispatch's poll and the final results?

Now, we'll tell you...This was the year that Ohio, under the encouragement and mandates of Blackwell, rolled out new Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines in 44 of its 88 counties...41 of them employeeing the same Diebold Touch-Screen Machines that California's Republican Sec. of State decertified in this state when 20% of them failed this summer in the largest test of its kind ever held.

Those would be the very same Electronic Voting Machines which a recent GAO Report (still unmentioned by a single wire-service or mainstream American newspaper) confirmed to be easily hackable.

Will the absurdly skewed results from last Tuesday's Ohio Election finally light a fire under the media -- either nationally or just in Ohio alone -- to look into what the hell is going on here?! We remain hopeful...if not optimistic.

The Free Press article is a must read, as mentioned, but we'll share their closing thoughts here on the possible reasons for the wildly unexplained discrepancy between the final polling and the final results which, as they posit, are due to either a completely inexplicable breakdown of the Dispatch's historically accurate polling methods wildly beyond the margin-of-error for all initiatives except Issue 1...or...somebody hacked that vote count:

If the latter is true, it can and will be done again, and we can forget forever about the state that has been essential to the election of every Republican presidential candidate since Lincoln.

And we can also, for all intents and purposes, forget about the future of American democracy.

Anybody in the Mainstream Media ready to give a damn yet?
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I have to give this one a "must read," although that phrase smacks of the never-ending forwards of half lies and flat-out lies and hoaxes/urban legends by clueless internet dabblers who believe anything a "conservative Republican" (oxymoron) sends them. Sorry -- is there anyone left whom I have not offended?

Then again, offending supporters of war-mongers and torture and lies and hypocrisies and rumors and hoaxes and jingoistic nationalism is the mission from MY God. Wake up, pay attention, and do something positive to help stop Amerika's slide into oblivion. Thank you... --DN

P.S. Am I allowed to vent on a Sunday? (I know if a couple of my bible-totin' neighbors had their way, I wouldn't be allowed to mow the lawn on Sunday, but that's another story of hypocrisy in action.) Or is that reserved for the "Christian" so-called leaders like Robertson and Falwell and Dobson and the rest of the Elmer Gantry wannabees -- the Peter Popoff's, the Jim Bakker's, the Jimmy Swaggart's, the Oral Robert's (and son) and the rest of the charlatans. (Yeah, and even the Graham's, father AND son, haven't escaped some "indiscretions." No wonder some folks never want to discuss politics and religion. Way too many embarrasing scandals. Gotta' love Google...

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Go to Original
By Frank Rich The New York Times
Sunday 13 November 2005

If it weren't tragic it would be a New Yorker cartoon. The president of the United States, in the final stop of his forlorn Latin America tour last week, told the world, "We do not torture." Even as he spoke, the administration's flagrant embrace of torture was as hard to escape as publicity for Anderson Cooper.

The vice president, not satisfied that the C.I.A. had already been implicated in four detainee deaths, was busy lobbying Congress to give the agency a green light to commit torture in the future. Dana Priest of The Washington Post, having first uncovered secret C.I.A. prisons two years ago, was uncovering new "black sites" in Eastern Europe, where ghost detainees are subjected to unknown interrogation methods redolent of the region's Stalinist past. Before heading south, Mr. Bush had been doing his own bit for torture by threatening to cast the first veto of his presidency if Congress didn't scrap a spending bill amendment, written by John McCain and passed 90 to 9 by the Senate, banning the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners.

So when you watch the president stand there with a straight face and say, "We do not torture" - a full year and a half after the first photos from Abu Ghraib - you have to wonder how we arrived at this ludicrous moment. The answer is not complicated. When people in power get away with telling bigger and bigger lies, they naturally think they can keep getting away with it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush and his cronies did. Not anymore.

The fallout from the Scooter Libby indictment reveals that the administration's credibility, having passed the tipping point with Katrina, is flat-lining. For two weeks, the White House's talking-point monkeys in the press and Congress had been dismissing Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation as much ado about nothing except politics and as an exoneration of everyone except Mr. Libby. Now the American people have rendered their verdict: they're not buying it. Last week two major polls came up with the identical finding, that roughly 8 in 10 Americans regard the leak case as a serious matter. One of the polls (The Wall Street Journal/NBC News) also found that 57 percent of Americans believe that Mr. Bush deliberately misled the country into war in Iraq and that only 33 percent now find him "honest and straightforward," down from 50 percent in January.

The Bush loyalists' push to discredit the Libby indictment failed because Americans don't see it as a stand-alone scandal but as the petri dish for a wider culture of lying that becomes more visible every day. The last-ditch argument rolled out by Mr. Bush on Veterans Day in his latest stay-the-course speech - that Democrats, too, endorsed dead-wrong W.M.D. intelligence - is more of the same. Sure, many Democrats (and others) did believe that Saddam had an arsenal before the war, but only the White House hyped selective evidence for nuclear weapons, the most ominous of all of Iraq's supposed W.M.D.'s, to whip up public fears of an imminent doomsday.

There was also an entire other set of lies in the administration's prewar propaganda blitzkrieg that had nothing to do with W.M.D.'s, African uranium or the Wilsons. To get the country to redirect its finite resources to wage war against Saddam Hussein rather than keep its focus on the war against radical Islamic terrorists, the White House had to cook up not only the fiction that Iraq was about to attack us, but also the fiction that Iraq had already attacked us, on 9/11. Thanks to the Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, who last weekend released a previously classified intelligence document, we now have conclusive evidence that the administration's disinformation campaign implying a link connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda and 9/11 was even more duplicitous and manipulative than its relentless flogging of nuclear Armageddon.

Senator Levin's smoking gun is a widely circulated Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002 that was probably seen by the National Security Council. It warned that a captured Qaeda terrorist in American custody was in all likelihood "intentionally misleading" interrogators when he claimed that Iraq had trained Qaeda members to use illicit weapons. The report also made the point that an Iraq-Qaeda collaboration was absurd on its face: "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements." But just like any other evidence that disputed the administration's fictional story lines, this intelligence was promptly disregarded.

So much so that eight months later - in October 2002, as the White House was officially rolling out its new war and Congress was on the eve of authorizing it - Mr. Bush gave a major address in Cincinnati intermingling the usual mushroom clouds with information from that discredited, "intentionally misleading" Qaeda informant. "We've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," he said. It was the most important, if hardly the only, example of repeated semantic sleights of hand that the administration used to conflate 9/11 with Iraq. Dick Cheney was fond of brandishing a nonexistent April 2001 "meeting" between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague long after Czech and American intelligence analysts had dismissed it.

The power of these lies was considerable. In a CBS News/New York Times poll released on Sept. 25, 2001, 60 percent of Americans thought Osama bin Laden had been the culprit in the attacks of two weeks earlier, either alone or in league with unnamed "others" or with the Taliban; only 6 percent thought bin Laden had collaborated with Saddam; and only 2 percent thought Saddam had been the sole instigator. By the time we invaded Iraq in 2003, however, CBS News found that 53 percent believed Saddam had been "personally involved" in 9/11; other polls showed that a similar percentage of Americans had even convinced themselves that the hijackers were Iraqis.

There is still much more to learn about our government's duplicity in the run-up to the war, just as there is much more to learn about what has gone on since, whether with torture or billions of Iraq reconstruction dollars. That is why the White House and its allies, having failed to discredit the Fitzgerald investigation, are now so desperate to slow or block every other inquiry. Exhibit A is the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, is proving a major farceur with his efforts to sidestep any serious investigation of White House prewar subterfuge. Last Sunday, the same day that newspapers reported Carl Levin's revelation about the "intentionally misleading" Qaeda informant, Senator Roberts could be found on "Face the Nation" saying he had found no evidence of "political manipulation or pressure" in the use of prewar intelligence.

His brazenness is not anomalous. After more than two years of looking into the forged documents used by the White House to help support its bogus claims of Saddam's Niger uranium, the F.B.I. ended its investigation without resolving the identity of the forgers. Last week, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reported that an investigation into the November 2003 death of an Abu Ghraib detainee, labeled a homicide by the U.S. government, has been, in the words of a lawyer familiar with the case, "lying kind of fallow." The Wall Street Journal similarly reported that 17 months after Condoleezza Rice promised a full investigation into Ahmad Chalabi's alleged leaking of American intelligence to Iran, F.B.I. investigators had yet to interview Mr. Chalabi - who was being welcomed in Washington last week as an honored guest by none other than Ms. Rice.

The Times, meanwhile, discovered that Mr. Libby had set up a legal defense fund to be underwritten by donors who don't have to be publicly disclosed but who may well have a vested interest in the direction of his defense. It's all too eerily reminiscent of the secret fund set up by Richard Nixon's personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, to pay the legal fees of Watergate defendants.

There's so much to stonewall at the White House that last week Scott McClellan was reduced to beating up on the octogenarian Helen Thomas. "You don't want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen," he said, "and I'm going to tell them the facts." Coming from the press secretary who vowed that neither Mr. Libby nor Karl Rove had any involvement in the C.I.A. leak, this scene was almost as funny as his boss's "We do not torture" charade.

Not that it matters now. The facts the American people are listening to at this point come not from an administration that they no longer find credible, but from the far more reality-based theater of war. The Qaeda suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman on 11/9, like the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London before them, speak louder than anything else of the price we are paying for the lies that diverted us from the war against the suicide bombers of 9/11 to the war in Iraq.
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Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (Hardcover)
by Jimmy Carter
BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

Often we forget that Jimmy Carter was our first "Born Again" president in modern times. But, he deeply disappointed the Stepford fundamentalists because he believed that the divine manifested itself in good deeds and caring, not in rigid, inflexible and harsh dogma. Many have criticized Carter for being a bit self-righteous, but few have challenged his integrity and decency -- characteristics sorely lacking in the Republican Party.

In this book, which we have not yet read, Carter apparently takes off the gloves and pummels the Bush Administration. That alone is cause to find it of interest. Carter always has been cautious in his criticism, because he's a religious, tolerant man who is forgiving of sin.

But the rogue, morally bankrupt, inept Bush Administration has apparently lit a fire in the man of faith from Plains, Georgia.

Here is what one recent newspaper article had to report on "Our Endangered Values":

Jimmy Carter, the former U.S. president and self-appointed emissary to the world, was explaining in that genteel drawl of his the "hesitation and trepidation" he felt about breaking the traditional taboo against an ex-president criticizing a sitting one.

Then he left his hesitation in the Georgia dust.

Outlining what he called a "profound and unprecedented change in basic American policies" under the Bush administration, Carter said the invasion of Iraq was a moral and political disaster, and has left the United States in more danger from terrorists than before.

Tax cuts for the wealthy and proposed spending cuts to social programs have demonstrated an "open and overt commitment to the rich at the expense of the poor," while the Bush administration has sacrificed the environment for business.

And the United States, which Carter said under his administration solidified its place as a world leader for human rights, is now a pariah in many countries, particularly in the Middle East, not a beacon of justice.

"I never dreamed years ago, in 2000 . . . that we would ever consider a legal authority for Americans to torture prisoners," he said.

Carter, 81, has a new book out, and he is making the rounds to promote it. Unlike his previous 19 books, which ranged from memoir to historical novel, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (Simon & Schuster, $25) is overtly political, and critical of Bush's foreign and domestic policies.

Carter, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is living proof that the radical right wing fundamentalists don't give a hoot about Christ. Otherwise, they would have embraced him and his presidency. Carter has learned that the agenda of the political evangelists is fear, power, bigotry and arrogance.

It's not a matter of God and moral values. For the Bush supporters, it's a matter of expediency and politics.

Carter may have made mistakes as President, but he never dragged the integrity of the United States Government through the gutter as the Busheviks have.

He's had enough, and now he's speaking up. The man from Plains has a thing or two to say about how the Bush Administration has degraded our nation.

Listen up.
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This from http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/?x
War Room
The president attacks his critics

We said it was coming, and here it is: On Veterans Day, George W. Bush is defending his administration's use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, not by rebutting the charges that have been made, but by attacking those who have made them.

In a speech in Pennsylvania today, the president accused his critics of making "baseless attacks," rewriting history and throwing out "false charges" that serve only to undercut the troops now serving in Iraq.

Although a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released this week showed that 57 percent of the American public now believes that the president deliberately misled the country about the case for war in Iraq, Bush marginalized those concerns as the wild charges of "some Democrats and anti-war critics." He said it's important to remember that "more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate who had access to the same intelligence voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power."

But of course, members of the House and Senate weren't privy to all of the same intelligence the White House was. As Kevin Drum wrote the other day, it's true that lots of people thought before the war that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. "The problem is . . . that there were also a fair number of people who had been skeptical about Iraqi WMD. INR, for example, thought the African uranium was bogus. DIA thought our prime witness for Iraqi-al-Qaida WMD collaboration was lying. The Air Force found the evidence on drones to be laughable. DOE didn't believe in the aluminum tubes. None of these dissents was acknowledged by the Bush administration."

How would the prewar debate have gone if everyone knew what the administration knew before the war started: that stories from an al-Qaida member about an Iraq connection had been called into question; that warnings Colin Powell delivered about mobile weapons labs weren't based on solid evidence; that claims about an Iraq-Niger had been debunked within the CIA before Bush made them; that pronouncements Condoleezza Rice made about aluminum tubes had been discredited before she spoke?

We weren't able to have that kind of debate before the war began because the administration kept any questions, any uncertainties, any second-guessing entirely to itself. As John Kerry said this afternoon, the White House "misled a nation into war by cherry-picking intelligence and stretching the truth beyond recognition."

At the prodding of Harry Reid and other Democrats, the Senate Intelligence Committee is finally examining the administration's representations before the war to see how they match up not just with the intelligence that supported them but also with the analysis that called them into question. That query comes too late for 2,062 Americans. It comes too late for those who hoped a different president, with a different course for the country, might be in the Oval Office today. As for this president? It doesn't seem to matter if the truth comes out at all. As his poll numbers plummet, as his party begins to look past him, he spends Veterans Day on a stage set in Pennsylvania, insisting that it doesn't matter that he was wrong about war because the people he fooled were wrong about it, too.
-- Tim Grieve

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And this from http://www.tvnewslies.org/html/iraq_nukes.html

WMDs? What WMDs? Iraq Nukes & bio/chem weapons were the reason we were given for invading Iraq. Well, the US has all the weapons it needs to destroy itself. All you have to do is blow up a local chemical plant or a nuclear reactor and you kill millions. We were told that the greatest threat to the US was Iraq, and we fell for this nonsense.

It is undisputed that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. However all the UNMOVIC inspectors, using the latest state of the art detection technology, had not found a trace of any current ongoing nuclear program in Iraq. The United States had to rely on forged evidence to get the world to believe them.

How America armed Iraq -
Under the successive presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the USA sold nuclear, chemical and biological weapons technology to Saddam Hussein. - In the early 1990s, UN inspectors told the US Senate committee on banking, housing and urban affairs – which oversees American export policy – that they had “identified many US-manufactured items exported pursuant of licences issued by the US department of commerce that were used to further Iraq’s chemical and nuclear weapons development and missile delivery system development programmes”.

Ronnie & Saddam -
It was just before Christmas 1983 that Donald Rumsfeld, then US presidential envoy to Iraq, slipped quietly into Baghdad to come face to face with the man who would become one of America’s greatest enemies within two decades. - The trip by the current US defence secretary, to pledge US support for Saddam Hussein, marked one of the lowest points of the entire Reagan presidency, and symbolically represents the real legacy of the “Great Communicator”. For Reagan was a president who allowed the US to secretly arm the Iraqi dictator with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), supported Iraq’s military expansion, turned a blind eye to Saddam using chemical weapons against Iran and thereby set in train the events that would lead to George W. Bush’s disastrous decision to invade the country in 2002.

False claims have been made regarding the aluminum tubes Iraq tried to acquire.

Bush has repeated these lies over and over, even in his State of the Union Address.
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Weapons failure - It now appears that the so-called "clear and present danger" of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) did not exist and that French and German critics were correctly skeptical of the U.S. argument for the use of force. TVNL asks: Are the networks going to issue apologies to the French and Germans? How about a few apologies to the UN and to Scott Ritter! How about a big apology for lying to America? Will the Capital serve French Fries again? Is Fox “News” going to finally shut up? HOW ABOUT APOLOGIZING TO HANS BLIX? ARE YOU LISTENING BRIT HUME???

Additional information on Iraq lies can be found here.

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A necessary war?
Not according to U.N. monitors--or to U.S. intelligence, which has watched the situation even more carefully.

By John Prados
May/June 2003
pp. 26-33 (vol. 59, no. 03) © 2003 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

For months the Bush administration treated the world to a series of lurid claims about the military threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. By far the most expansive description of the threat was made by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his speech before the U.N. Security Council on February 5. In a presentation replete with satellite photos and artists' conceptions, Powell argued that Iraq posed an ominous and urgent threat.

But was the Iraqi threat as imminent as advertised? And how did these versions of the Iraqi menace accord with what the public had previously been told? And what about the Iraqi threat required the rush to war?

Americans in particular need to consider what it all means. Despite administration assertions, the threat was by no means self-evident. Bush officials, except where it suited their interests, have discounted the findings of international inspectors who for most of a decade monitored Iraqi weapons programs.

And how different does the picture look if one focuses instead on the other authoritative source on Iraqi weapons issues--the U.S. intelligence community, which has followed Iraqi developments at least as keenly as U.N. monitoring teams?

Click this for more: http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj03prados

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Bush lied to Dems and withheld key information

by Rob Kall

http://www.opednews.com

The main talking point for the right wing, lately, has been that the Democrats who voted to give Bush permission to go to war knew the same thing as the president. That's a huge lie and they know it.

The Dems did NOT know what Bush knew, as Bush and his propagandists say.

The Dems who voted to give Bush the power to start a war knew what Bush told them. They knew what was filtered by the administration. That's hugely different than knowing the same thing.

It's such a blatantly simple lie it's hard to understand why each and every time a right wing pundit or spokesman utters the lie the news anchor or moderator doesn't get in his face and confront it.

"You mean the Democrats knew what the Bush administration told them, don't you?"

What the Democrats did not know was that the CIA and others had told the Bush administration that the information they were sharing with the Democrats was unreliable or just plain BAD information.

Maybe the Bush administration lied to the Republican Senators too. Maybe the Republican senators also trusted the Bush administration to be telling the truth. Maybe both the Democrats AND Republicans were deceived by the half truths the Bush administration told.

Now we know that the important information was not the details of the threat of WMDs. The important information was that the threats were unsubstantiated. We know that there was a boiler room in the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans, run by Cheney and Libby, where the threats were amplified and cooked into more than they really were. We know that the deceptions was systematic and intentional.

If the Republicans are not outraged, then they are part of the cover-up. It is time to start the process of impeaching Bush and Cheney. But we should wait, so the final removal of these lying war criminal traitors from office occurs after January, 2007, when the Republicans in the House and Senate have been removed through the election process, so Dennis Hastert is not the next in line to become president.
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Comments On This Page
The following comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.

Rove Back On the Job!
by Angellight. Submitted on 2005-11-12 10:15:48
Julie Washington says:

Well we can see that Rove is back on the job evidenced by the spin/lies Bush's speech contained at the Veteran's rally held in Pennsylvania Friday, November 11, 2005.
There is no way Congress had the same information that the WHIG group had and then WHIGs tried to get the CIA to go along with their 'truth/ version' of this faulty information. Nor did Congress see these forged documents.
Besides Congress was and is not privy to Bush's daily intelligence briefings.
We must not let this new lie stand!
Bio More by Angellight Email Angellight

What (some) Dems didn't know by mhenriday. Submitted on 2005-11-12 10:56:26
M Henri Day says:

That the Bush Administration was less than forthright with the US Congress regarding the reasons for going to war with Iraq is certainly correct. But it didn’t require super prescience to understand, even before the voting on the Iraq War Resolution of 10 October 2002 (http://www.yourcongress.com/viewarticle.asp?article_id=2686) that the Administration’s arguments were deeply flawed and that the Iraqi regime, after more than 11 years of rigorous sanctions and US and British bombings, hardly represented a military threat to any other nation, much less the United States. This is not a matter of 20/20 hindsight – 22 Democratic senators (and one Republican senator, Senator Chafee of Rhode Island, to his everlasting credit) voted against abdicating their responsibilities according to the US Constitution by giving Mr Bush the power to launch war on Iraq http://www.senate.gov/legislative/lis/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=107&session=2&vote=00237#position). There were, on the other hand, 29 Democratic Senators (note that the Democrats had a majority in the Chamber at the time) who authorized Mr Bush to make war in the name of the United States.
The roll call is as follows :Democrats NAYs --22 Akaka (D-HI)Bingaman (D-NM)Boxer (D-CA)Byrd (D-WV) Conrad (D-ND)Corzine (D-NJ)Dayton (D-MN)Durbin (D-IL)Feingold (D-WI)Graham (D-FL)Inouye (D-HI)Jeffords (I-VT)Kennedy (D-MA)Leahy (D-VT)Levin (D-MI)Mikulski (D-MD)Murray (D-WA)Reed (D-RI)Sarbanes (D-MD)Stabenow (D-MI)Wellstone (D-MN)Wyden (D-OR)
Democrats AYEs --29Baucus (D-MT)Bayh (D-IN)Biden (D-DE)Breaux (D-LA)Cantwell (D-WA)Carnahan (D-MO)Carper (D-DE)Cleland (D-GA)Clinton (D-NY)Daschle (D-SD)Dodd (D-CT)Dorgan (D-ND)Edwards (D-NC)Feinstein (D-CA)Harkin (D-IA)Hollings (D-SC)Johnson (D-SD)Kerry (D-MA)Kohl (D-WI)Landrieu (D-LA)Lieberman (D-CT)Lincoln (D-AR)Miller (D-GA)Nelson (D-FL)Nelson (D-NE)Reid (D-NV)Rockefeller (D-WV)Schumer (D-NY)Torricelli (D-NJ)
Voters might wish to ask themselves wherein lies the difference between those Democrats who voted in favour, and those who were opposed to the resolution. And they might wish to take those differences into account when it comes to voting for candidates in the 2006 and 2008 elections....
Bio More by mhenriday Email mhenriday

Deliberate Idiocy is a Very Convenient Thing by panurg. Submitted on 2005-11-12 12:47:51
Mark Sashine says:

My father said to me that an idiot is a system which in order to make a proper decision needs unlimited info.
Dems will not get away with it. They voted for war not because they were blindsided. They voted for war because they wanted it. They didn't care for the Iraqi people ( and they do not care now. Kerry in his speech promised to ' kill' even more). Those people in Congress, they are not politicians anymore. They are a political mob. As a mob they will support the Godfather even if they don't benefit from it. Bush didn'd have to prove anything to them. He just had to remind them that they were all crooks, corrupt and sleasy. That's what the GOP says now to them: you folks are like us, no better.
As for the American people, they bought it because the price was cheap. We voted those misearables in because they looked like us, spoke like us, thought like us. We didn't want any ' smarty pants' to represent us. We didn't want professionals. We didn't want intellectuals. We didn't want 'weak folks'. We wanted them.
Now eat your shit, folks. You've got what you wanted.
Bio More by panurg Email panurg
Link

...When Will This Senile Old Lunatic Shut UP?

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Evangelist says voters reject God

A US Christian evangelist has told a Pennsylvania town not to ask for God's help if disaster strikes after it voted against teaching intelligent design. (Used to be called "Creationism" ... --DN)

ID says life is too complex to have developed through evolution and an unseen power must have had a hand. (Yeah, lots of us can agree with the second part of that, while disagreeing with the "too complex" for evolution part. Evolution's a fact; Creationism's a belief. We just don't want the latter crammed down our believing throats by the "holier than thou" crowd. And especially when they want to use our tax dollars to do it. -DN)

On Tuesday, Dover voters ousted the local school board, which had tried to introduce the concept as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
Pat Robertson told his TV show that the town had turned its back on God.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Mr. Robertson said on The 700 Club.

'Call Darwin' (Never mind that - cancel my trip to Dover... just in case... --DN)

The founder of the conservative Christian Broadcasting Network and Christian Coalition has faced criticism for past provocative statements.

Last summer, he called for the assassination of Venezuelan Present Hugo Chavez, who is a vocal critic of President George W Bush.

Following his comments on Thursday, Mr Robertson issued a statement saying that he was simply trying to point out that "our spiritual actions have consequences". (If so many "spiritual actions," like, for instance, "prayers," had consequences, Katrina would have died in the Gulf. -DN)

"God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in His eye forever," Mr Robertson said. (Yes, yes we can, should we so choose. Read your Bible, Rev., especially the parts about forgiveness. It's only husksters in flesh, like you, who put limits on love and tolerance. -DN)

"If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them."

Supporters of intelligent design say the universe is so complex that a higher being must have created it.

Opponents say it is an attempt by conservatives to introduce religion into the school science curriculum.

Last month parents in Dover sued the school board, accusing it of introducing religion and creationism into schools, in breach of the US constitutional separation of church and state.

The case against the intelligent design policy was heard in a federal court case which ended last week.

A verdict is expected early next year.

Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4427144.stmPublished: 2005/11/11 06:25:53 GMT© BBC MMV
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That Warm Feeling
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t Perspective
Friday 11 November 2005

This may make me a bad person, but I get a warm feeling in the center of my soul when I watch right-wing maniacs freak out in frustration and lose their so-called minds. It just makes me smile.

Two examples of this came rolling down the mountain in the last day. When the citizens of Dover, PA, decided in the elections this past Tuesday to give the boot to a bunch of Intelligent Design golems who had boll-weeviled their way onto the school board, Mr. Robertson fell off the planet. "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover," saith Pat on his television show, "if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there."

If any of the good people in Dover are concerned about this, they should put their fears to rest. This condemnation came from the fellow who said Orlando would be obliterated by "earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor" for flying rainbow flags to mark the annual Gay Days celebration at Disney World in 1998. The last time I checked, Orlando remains unsmited by the wrath of God.

On the heels of Robertson's magically deranged denunciation of Dover came the ever-insane Bill O'Reilly, who decided the city of San Francisco needs to be destroyed. The citizens of that glorious city decided in last Tuesday's elections to ban military recruiting in public schools, and to ban handgun ownership in the city. "You want to be your own country?" frothed Bill. "Go right ahead. And if al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."

For the record, Coit Tower was erected to honor the firefighters who fought the flames unleashed upon San Francisco in the '06 quake. Not very nice, Billy-boy.

Why are these two men, along with their like-minded cadre of right-wing goofballs, having such bad hair days all of a sudden? It might have something to do with the turning of a number of worms in last Tuesday's elections. Beyond the epic victories of Mr. Kaine in Virginia and Mr. Corzine in New Jersey, beyond the utterly humiliating bag of defeat handed to the Governator in California, beyond the defeat of an anti-gay ballot initiative in Maine, there were these moments of glory, as reported by Mark Green in the Huffington Post:

In the 94th District legislative race in Missouri, Democrat Jane Bogetto stunned locals with a 58 percent victory, becoming the first Democrat to win the seat in 58 years. In Erie County, New York, Mark Polocarz, a young Kerry '04 activist, became the first Democrat to capture the county comptroller's race in 30 years, winning easily by 18 percentage points. In Suffolk County, New York, Democrat Kathleen Rice defeated 30-year incumbent Dennis Dillon for DA, and Brian Foley got elected town supervisor of Brookhaven, the country's largest township, after a 30-year reign. In St. Paul, Minnesota, Democratic mayor Randy Kelly lost 2-1 to another Democrat because Kelly had crossed party lines to endorse President Bush in 2004. In Corning, New York, Democrat Frank Coccho, a self-employed plumber, became the first Democratic mayor in 50 years.

The list goes on. To top all this off, the Bush administration is under withering assault from all directions. The nomination of Harriet Miers exploded in a blaze of disgrace, Scooter Libby and Tom DeLay are contemplating plea agreements to avoid prison time, the GOP budget talks have fallen apart after a revolt by party moderates, Patrick Fitzgerald is still crouched in the tall grass, and a vast majority of the country has come to the conclusion that the war in Iraq, indeed the entire term of Bush's tenure, has been an awful, bloody, wretched waste of time.
No wonder the cretins are going bananas. Like I said, it just gives me a warm feeling.
You wouldn't know the fortunes of these frauds are sinking like a stone in water had you listened to Mr. Bush's speech from Pennsylvania on Friday. According to George, everything's comin' up Millhouse. The march of freedom continues, he said, and Iraq is doing great. Someone should whisper this into the ears of the forty-two people who were breakfasting in a Baghdad restaurant on Thursday when it was bombed. They won't hear it, because they're dead, but it'd be nice for them to know that things are going so smoothly.

Read the rest at the link...
Link

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John Cusack Bio

11.11.2005
On Bush, the Dems, Jon Stewart, Hunter Thompson, Bill Moyers, and King (not Don) (70 comments )
READ MORE: Iraq, Dick Cheney, 2006, Harry Reid, George W. Bush

Murder is a crime. Uunless it is done...by a poooollliiicceeeman. Or an ariissssstoocrat -- Joe Strummer

Bush 2. How depressing, corrupt, unlawful and tragically absurd the administration's world view actually is...how low the moral bar has been lowered...and (though I know I'm capable of intellectually lazy notions of collective guilt) how complicit our silence as citizens is...Nixon, a true fiend, looks like a paragon of virtue next to the criminally incompetent robber barons now raiding the present and future.

But where are the Dems? American foreign policy is in chaos. We are now left in the surreal position of having to condemn American-sponsored torture as official policy while a deranged President Bush orders his staff to attend ethics briefings -- a "refresher course" -- from the White House counsel. The very idea of America is in chaos and this chaos has created a vacuum. One question for any Democrat: Who will have the balls to get us out of Iraq? If the Democrats don't step up and fill this vacuum, the Republicans will. They will take us out of Iraq. And then the Democrats will be left holding the bag -- first as the enablers who let the Republicans take us into an unnecessary and immoral war, and then as the whipping boys who stood by while the Republicans kept justifying what was clearly an unnecessary and immoral war. They were so worried about positioning themselves as hawks, not being seen as soft on terror and war, that they lost the capacity for outrage when the person responsible for a legal memo that denied the validity of the Geneva Conventions was appointed Attorney General. And it was downhill from there.

The Republicans, especially leading up to the 2006 elections, with the Bush administration crumbling, KNOW they have to find a way out of Iraq. So they will basically find a way to declare victory and do something that looks like a withdrawal, and the Democrats will be left as passive bystanders -- because they don't have the courage to suggest that people who lied to get us into war should not only not be in office, they should be in prison.

Last Tuesday, Harry Reid demonstrated wonderful signs of life. The question now is, are they going to build on this, or is it going to be an isolated episode that doesn't lead to a fundamental shift? Will enough Democrats now be willing to admit that voting to authorize the war was a mistake? Whether they were genuinely misled, they bought into it, or they were too cowardly to vote for what they believed was true, it was a mistake. Will they now have the courage to say, "This was wrong, and that we need to get our brave troops out of Iraq now." Are the Democrats going to offer an alternative plan to get us out of Iraq? Are they going to fill this vacuum created by the chaos in Iraq and a scandal-plagued administration in tatters, or are they going to wait for the Republicans to do it their way, reap the political dividends, and leave the Democrats sniping outside the palace gate?

All this makes me think of Jon Stewart, and the tricky position he finds himself in...I love the man. He is the most important media watchdog right now. As Bill Moyers said: "If Mark Twain were back today, he'd be at Comedy Central."

But I hope we're not putting too much pressure on Mr. Stewart. There should be a lot more like him, but right now he's all we've got. He's the vanguard. And therefore when Republicans, who were the ones who led us into this war, and the ones whom he's so rightly skewering every night, sit across the table from him -- there is some kind of unspoken message being given that they are not part of the problem, that they can wink and laugh with Jon and the things he is making fun of. That they are not them, when in fact, they are... And they are getting a free pass to sit next to someone who speaks truth to power. They get reflected hipness just by sitting across the table from him, and the irony is that they share a laugh over the same things that he rails against. As an example, look at the jokey appearances by Bill Kristol, or David Frum. These are not dutiful soldiers standing by their president (which would be bad enough), these are the intellectual architects of the the invasion. Bill Kristol, the editor of the neocon house organ The Weekly Standard, came on and could barely keep a straight face when he said that Bush was a good president. And as anyone knows, reflected hipness on these types of men is a truly ugly thing. I would suggest each Republican must face a press conference, or a gauntlet perhaps, of Daily Show correspondents...or at least Lewis Black.

Yes, there is a difference between the McCain/Hagel Repubs and the neo-con/White House Iraq Group lunatics.

Read more at the link...
Link

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Dear Subscribers to RobertScheer.com

Some of you may have read in the Los Angeles Times this morning that Robert Scheer's home paper for nearly 30 years has axed his very popular weekly column from that paper's op-ed pages without providing a single reason.

HOWEVER, THE COLUMN WILL CONTINUE TO BE WRITTEN AND PUBLISHED HERE AND ELSEWHERE EVERY WEEK. IT WILL KEEP SHOWING UP IN YOUR MAILBOX!

Here is Robert Scheer's own statement this morning on the situation:

"On Friday, I was fired as a columnist by the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, where I have worked for thirty years. The publisher, Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher."

The good news is that, thanks to the San Franciso Chronicle, The Nation and numerous web sites including HuffingtonPost.com, AlterNet.org, robertscheer.com and the forthcoming TruthDig.com, Scheer's weekly column on national and international issues will still be widely available, and will also be syndicated to other media outlets by Creators Syndicate.

The column will run in the Times for a few more weeks on Tuesdays, after which it will become a Wednesday column.

Here is the Times own article on the changes:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lat11nov11,0,808176.story?coll=la-tot-promo&track=morenews
Perhaps most disturbing is that the cancellation of Scheer's column in the Times after more than 12 years was clearly a political decision taken by the paper's new publishers, who recently took control of the paper's opinion page from its editors.

While the Times took the opportunity to push out controversial conservative cartoonist Michael Ramirez (and will not replace him with another cartoonist), the new cast of columnists they are bringing in is strongly tilted to the far right, led by Max Boot and Jonah Goldberg. None of the other new or retained columnists on the page can be said to hold down Scheer's spot as a passionate and contrarian progressive voice.

As always, we are grateful to you independent thinkers who have subscribed to receive the column in your inbox.

And thank goodness for the Internet!

Sincerely,
Christopher Scheer
[webmaster and son]

p.s. If you know folks who read Scheer in the LA Times, please forward them this note so they can find out how to continue to find and read the column after December.

...and this, from Arianna:

Arianna Huffington Bio

11.11.2005
The L.A. Times' Loss Is HuffPost's Gain (47 comments )

We are selfishly delighted that the Los Angeles Times has made the shortsighted decision to cancel Bob Scheer's column after 12 years. The L.A. Times' loss is our gain. Starting next Wednesday morning, loyal readers of Bob Scheer's weekly column will now find it at the top of the Huffington Post homepage.

And those HuffPost readers who are not Bob Scheer regulars are in for a treat. I've been sparring with Bob, both agreeing and disagreeing, for ten years on KCRW's Left, Right, and Center, and now look forward to having him as a regular on HuffPost and to the launch of TruthDig, his new current affairs webzine. For more, read what Bob Berger, Scheer's original editor, and Robert Greenwald have to say about this.
Link

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Note: As I'm typing this, Vice Traitor Cheney just laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. (11:03am EST)

Yeah, it's called irony, among other things.

The venal, lying, corrupt, corporateasskisser, hypocritical, chickenhawk bastard who got 5 (five) deferments when it came to his turn, "honored" an unknown person who died in the uniform of the United States military. That poor guy just started spinning.

Updated note #2 @ 11:55am EST:

Well, now Stupid is at the portable podium reading crap written for him.

With, as usual, the obligatory military-oriented background of hand-picked sheep who have neither conscience nor brains, otherwise they would not allow themselves to be the pawns they are.

I see the usual suspects which the Repukes like to pepper the background with. Females and minorities and an old not-rich guy, all of which the neoNazis innately despise, except for when they suit their purpose.

OK, gotta' turn off this litany of lies, the last of which I heard was: "Iraq is the central front in our war against terrorism."

Can someone remind him Iraq was pretty much minding its own business, under daily bombing siege, with no "terrorists" to speak of, least of all the fundamentalist al Qaeda, which was nowhere near Saddam's secular kingdom.

But they're there now - in spades - since neocon nitwits stirred up a monstrous hornet's nest. Stupid, stupid, stupid... --DN



Just like to take this occasion to commemorate and remember my fellow veterans for their service to the multinational corporations, especially Big Oil, over these many years. Freedom is not free.



I'd also like to thank our political, spiritual and government leaders who, when it came time for them to serve, decided they had other priorities. Folks like these: (sorry for the dupes - pun intended) ... --DN

http://www.symbolman.com/chickenhawks.html
http://www.toostupidtobepresident.com/shockwave/chickenhawks.htm
http://www.michaelmoore.com/books-films/dudewheresmycountry/chickenhawks/index.php
http://www.awolbush.com/whoserved.html
http://www.nhgazette.com/news/chickenhawks/chickenhawk_headquarters/
http://www.nhgazette.com/news/chickenhawks/politicans_platoon/
http://www.nhgazette.com/news/chickenhawks/barking_head_brigade/
http://www.nhgazette.com/news/chickenhawks/bureaucratic_battalion/
http://www.nhgazette.com/news/chickenhawks/chaplain_corps/
http://www.nhgazette.com/news/chickenhawks/propaganda_platoon/
http://www.nhgazette.com/news/chickenhawks/sui_generis/
http://www.nhgazette.com/news/chickenhawks/sui_generis/
http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/05/08/edi05061.html
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/5/31/17027/6181
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1013-22.htm
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/6/25/1630/27544
http://www.americanpolitics.com/20020408BakerGonzo.html
etc., etc.
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Honor our troops: Bring them home
Veterans Day is the day we set aside to honor all our brave service persons, past and present. Without question, all who have given their lives, or a part of their lives, deserve our gratitude and respect. As was the case in the Vietnam War, that doesn't require support of the war in which they fought. The war in Iraq was ill-advised and may even be deliberately based on manipulated intelligence.

Sending our troops into battle without adequate body armor and armored vehicles is not honoring our troops. Sneaking home the wounded and dead during the night, so we can pretend they don't exist, isn't honoring our troops. Is cutting veteran's benefits upon their return honoring them? Is closing VA hospitals honoring them? Is making soldiers fight for disability benefits and increasing their co-payments honoring them? Telling them that their post-traumatic stress disorder isn't war-related certainly isn't. These are the actions of the present administration which claims to honor the troops.

This Veterans Day let's really honor all of our troops. Let's work to bring them home and take care of them when they get here!

-- Dale Joan Freundlich, Spring Hill
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"There are seven sins in the world :
Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Knowledge without character
Commerce without morality
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice
Politics without principle."
Mahatma Gandhi
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Molly Ivins: What have we become?

By Molly Ivins
Published 2:15 am PST Thursday, November 10, 2005

Story appeared in Editorials section, Page B8
AUSTIN, Texas -- I can't get over this feeling of unreality, that I am actually sitting here writing about our country having a gulag of secret prisons in which it tortures people. I have loved America all my life, even though I have often disagreed with the government. But this seems to me so preposterous, so monstrous. My mind is a little bent and my heart is a little broken this morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Torture does not work. Ask the United States military. Ask the Israelis.
There seems to be some fantastic scenario floating around -- if Osama bin Laden had an atomic bomb hidden in a locker at Grand Central Station, and it was due to go off in 12 hours, and we had him in prison ...

I seem to have missed some important television program on this theme. I am told it was fiction, but it must have been really scary -- it certainly seems to have unbalanced the minds of some of our fellow citizens.

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

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

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

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

Why did we bother to beat the Soviet Union if we were just going to become it? Shame. Shame. Shame.
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Cheney: The Ultimate Anti-American

Earthside Comments: Really, what the hell is going on? In grade school we were taught that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the the United States were brilliant shining examples of great deeds that human beings could envision and accomplish. The history of the American revolution and the women and men who struggled to create a democratic republic was based on the profound idea "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ..." (Note that it doesn't say, just Americans, it says "ALL".) This is the foundation for the rule of law, that all people are equal before the law. The genius of our republic is that one man cannot by personal decree condemn another, period. The Revolutionary War was a battle against just such tyranny.

Therefore, to witness a vice president of this nation approving the use of torture and promoting the use of torture, to read reports of secret prisons and secret abductions without any due process whatsoever, should shake the souls of all true Americans. Yet that is exactly what Dick "Chickenhawk" Cheney is brazenly doing -- with the complete acquiesence of George W. Bush. It is difficult to imagine a clearer case of anti-Americanism. These two assault the very heart of this country's existence.

It is tragic then, that when Cheney made his plea before Republican U.S. Senators for CIA use of torture, that these people did not immediately demand his resignation. It only proves the moral and ethical corruption and radicalization of the establishment Republican Party.

It is left to us to demand that Cheney and his partner be removed from office. The two highest governmental offices in the land should be reserved for those who support the principles upon which our republic was founded -- and these two simply do not qualify.

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From http://www.becomethemedia.com/wordpress/?p=353 :

9 Senators Vote In Support Of Torture
Posted by nick under War

Yes, you read that right. While 90 Senators voted yesterday for an amendment to prohibit the cruel and inhumane punishment of U.S. detainees, 9 of them voted against it, arguing that the amendment is nonsense and unnecessary since the U.S. military does not have a system of systematic abuse of prisoners. (Yeah, and I'm 21 again... --DN)

The Senate defied the White House yesterday and voted to set new limits on interrogating detainees in Iraq and elsewhere, underscoring Congress’s growing concerns about reports of abuse of suspected terrorists and others in military custody.
(Besides, do we want "them" torturing our guys when they get 'em? Hello... Geneva Conventions, anyone? And hey, you put jumper cables on my nipples and start yankin' my toenails out, and I'll tell ya' any damn lie I can think of, jes' as fast as I can talk... --DN)

Forty-six Republicans joined 43 Democrats and one independent in voting to define and limit interrogation techniques that U.S. troops may use against terrorism suspects, the latest sign that alarm over treatment of prisoners in the Middle East and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is widespread in both parties. The White House had fought to prevent the restrictions, with Vice President Cheney visiting key Republicans in July and a spokesman yesterday repeating President Bush’s threat to veto the larger bill that the language is now attached to — a $440 billion military spending measure.

The nine senators who voted in support of torture are:

Wayne Allard - Colorado
Kit Bond - Missouri
Tom Coburn - Oklahoma
Thad Cochran - Mississippi
John Cornyn - Texas
James Inhofe - Oklahoma
Pat Roberts - Kansas
Jeff Sessions - Alabama
Ted Stevens - Alaska

Note: All Red State Repukian scummos, I think. Don't have my map handy. Alaska qualifies - it's filled with rednecks and other misfits. (Hey - I spent ten years there, what does that make me? Quiet, you guys in the peanut gallery... --DN)

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Link: Cheney's Office Accused of Fuelling Iraq Prisoner Abuse The Star/Associated Press

Link: Cheney Seeks CIA Exemption to Torture Ban Associated Press
Posted by Dave Chandler on Saturday, November 05, 2005 at 10:05 AM Permalink Comments (0) TrackBack (0)
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GOP view of court shows hypocrisy
By: Neeta Daga
Issue date: 11/10/05 Section: Opinions

For almost his entire presidency, President Bush has been governing as if given a mandate, despite winning (sic - DN) by one of the closest margins in electoral history.

The nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court may have been Bush's first attempt to unite the country as promised five years ago. Of course, Republicans would not accept a compromise - Miers was viciously attacked until she was forced to withdraw her name from being considered. While Democrats reserved judgment on Miers and were willing to give her a chance at the hearings, conservatives from all over the country criticized her so much that a Republican-controlled Senate would not be able to confirm her.

They were not criticizing her lack of judicial experience - most people were willing to look past that. What troubled the conservatives most was that Miers did not have a solidly conservative record to stand behind. Even though President Bush personally assured his base that Miers had a conservative judicial philosophy, she still did not stand a chance. These are the same Republicans that claim they do not have a litmus test for nominees. They clearly saw that Miers was not fully committed to overturning Roe v. Wade, and that was not going to cut it for them.

The people who killed Miers' nomination are also the same people who claim a person's religion should have no effect on the outcome of their confirmation. They constantly paint the Democrats as against religion. For example, when William Pryor was filibustered by Democrats for his extremist views, Republicans claimed it was because of Pryor's religion and that was not a legitimate reason to prevent someone from becoming a judge. Religion should play no part in deciding whether or not to confirm a judge. However, when Miers was struggling to gain support, Bush turned to Miers' religious beliefs to gain backing for her nomination. Touting her deep convictions and conservative church, Bush hoped to gain enough support for her so that she could at least make it to the Senate hearings. Apparently, Republicans can use a person's religious beliefs to prove their conservatism, but if Democrats attempt to bring religion into the field - that's out of line.

Read more at the link...
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ISRP JOURNAL
By Sean Mayfield
November 4, 2005

News from Argentina today reveals just how much resistance there is to the American Empire by the poor of this world. For those of you unfamiliar with what is going in Argentina, let me give you a little background. This week the resort city of Mar Del Plata, has played host to the Summit of the Americas. George Bush along with the heads of state of practically every Latin American nation have converged to discuss for the most part matters related to the economic future of the hemisphere. Bush and the American contingent have used the summit as a platform to revive the Free Trade of the America’s Treaty and to reinforce America’s neoliberal economic policies as related to Latin America.

Yet the environment, which has greeted Bush, has been hostile at every turn. From the outset Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez has pushed other Latin American leaders to turn away from US imperial policies and leadership. Ideological allies in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and even Cuba (who wasn’t invited to the summit) have also pushed to prevent the Summit from becoming yet another platform with which to further establish US hegemony over the hemisphere.

In addition to the political dance going on within the summit, tens of thousands of demonstrators have converged to protest the US, its foreign policies, its economic policies, and the catastrophic effects they have upon Latin America. As president of the US… George Bush has been a focal point of the demonstrators’ efforts… and today the demonstrations turned violent. Presently buildings are burning and riot police are preparing to disperse the protestors by any means before they get too close to the summit hall. With security forces that look like storm troopers brandishing truncheons, shotguns, and armed with tear gas preparing to push back a crowd growing out of control… there is great potential for bloodshed and loss of life.

A question to be asked is what has brought the people of Latin America to this point? Argentina was formerly one of the most prosperous nations in the world… yet these same people are now the ones who are out in the streets with their very lives at risk. What has made Hugo Chavez stand so boldly against the US? What has been the catalyst for the sweeping rejection of US leadership, which is taking place throughout Latin America?

The answer to this question is very telling… and the fact that American Christians do not see it is even more so. The people of Latin America are not rioting in the streets and preparing to defend themselves against the US because they are evil and the US is good. This has nothing to do with the supposed status of the United States as a Christian nation. The fact that George Bush is hated throughout the world is not a persecution of the man because he is a servant of Christ. In fact none of the backlash, which the US is currently experiencing in Latin America, the Middle East, or Asia is persecution or hatred based upon America’s faith, virtue, or righteousness as a Christian nation.

Latin America is rejecting the direction of George Bush and the United States because of the ruin, which has been brought to their lives by “God’s redeemer nation.” The US has ravaged the nations of Latin America for the profit of the US Elites. Mass murders, wars, revolutions, the raping of the environment, the ruination of national economies, and the privatization and subsequent failure of critical services have all been brought to the region via the hand of Uncle Sam.

To accomplish this Corporate America has used the US military, puppet regimes, paramilitaries, death squads, the CIA, and even US missionary organizations. Think about it for a moment… the people of Latin America are no less human than their US counterparts. They yearn for equality, justice, and opportunity no more or less than any other peoples throughout the world. They have not been swept away by communism, Satanism, Islamism, Atheism, Anarchism, or any other “ism”. They do not hate Christ nor do they hate the people of America.

What they do hate is oppression. What they despise are the ramifications of continuing to exist as the lowest of cogs in the US imperial machine. They want no part of the poverty, despair, and destruction, which the US has brought to them over the years. They have no illusions about what free trade, globalization, and US hegemony portend for their future and that of their children. They know a continuation of the present course sounds the death knell for the people of Latin America.

Yet American Christians refuse to see these things. They refuse to recognize the evil, which has been wrought in their name by the US elites. Those whom the Lord would willingly provide with “all understanding” have instead chosen to believe a lie. In doing so they have allowed the name of Jesus Christ to be attached to the plundering of the planet. They have aligned themselves with those who desire to “make merchandise” of the poor in this world. In this respect there will truly be “hell to pay”… on that day.

Read more at the link...
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Well, I see Saddam's lawyers are gettin' bada-binged faster than they can read the charges against their client.

Fuhgedaboudit - Saddam's fallen out of favor wit' America faster than Bush forgets what he had for breakfast.

His kangaroo court will be over before any mouthpiece of his gets a chance to say "Hey, hold on, he was America's favorite until the BFEE decided he was more of a liability than a connected guy." With plenty of supporting evidence.

Funny how capos we hire (usually through the CIA) and train and supply with WMD's suddenly become persona non grata, like Osama bin Forgotten, and that fella rotting away in a Miami cell - you remember, he used to run another country we illegally invaded and occupied for a while. (An' ya' say ya' don't believe we're an imperialist nation.) Not to mention a plethora of bad guys (hey, it takes one to know one) our administrations through the last 60 years or so have propped up with our tax dollars while we helped murder their citizens.

I'm certainly not going to be an apologist for Saddam, but has anyone noticed that while he's accused of killing some 30,000 to 500,000 depending upon who you talk to, our little coalition of the bribed and the intimidated has managed to knock off, mostly innocent women and children, in the neighborhood of 2 million, including the "sanctions" in place since 1991. All in the name of "stopping terrorism." Guess there are no mirrors in Stupid's White House.

I'll leave this for today with an excerpt from a Guardian article from April 29, 2002:

"America is no more interested in establishing democracy in Iraq than it is in preserving it in Venezuela. The crucial factors, in both cases, are that they are oil-rich, non-compliant states. Its talk of democracy and human rights, in this context, is yet more moral camouflage for yet another immoral war.

Lewis Libby, (where have we heard this neocon's name before... --DN) a senior adviser to the US defence secretary, says: "There is no basis in Iraq's past behaviour to have confidence in good faith efforts on their part to change their behaviour." Almost a century after the secession of Panama, the same can still be said of America. --Gary Younge

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Iraq Is Bush's Tar Baby
by Charley Reese

In commenting on Saddam Hussein's trial, President Bush should have steered away from the subject of international law. Under international law, Saddam is right – he's still the legal president of Iraq.

Don't misinterpret any of this as a defense of Saddam. He deserves to be hanged, shot, chopped into little pieces, etc. His abuses of the Iraqi people are too well-known to be repeated.

Nevertheless, it is important for us to keep our facts straight. Saddam was not overthrown by the Iraqi people. He was overthrown by the U.S. Army. Furthermore, the invasion of Iraq, which resulted in his overthrow, was, under international law, illegal as heck.

Iraq was not at war with us. Iraq had not invaded us or even threatened us. It had not attacked us. Furthermore, it was in compliance with United Nations resolutions. That's why President Bush could not persuade the U.N. Security Council to endorse his invasion. That's why practically the whole world opposed our invasion.

It would have been better if Saddam had been kept on ice until a permanent government was elected in Iraq and we were on the way out. No matter what we say, this trial will be viewed by many in the Muslim world as a show trial staged by the Americans through their puppets in order to justify America's invasion of Iraq. President Bush said publicly two years ago that Saddam should be hanged, so there is not much point in pretending that he's going to get a fair trial.

Americans are holding Saddam and his cohorts, and American lawyers trained the judges who will try him.

In fact, a fair trial could be embarrassing. When they try him for gassing the Kurds, his lawyers should certainly produce the U.S. Defense Department investigation that blamed the gassing on the Iranians. When he is tried for crushing the Shiite and Kurdish rebellions in 1991, his lawyers should point out that the U.S. government incited them to rebel and then stood by while Saddam's forces crushed them.

And, of course, they can point to American assistance given to Saddam's government through most of the 1980s.

Saddam's trial, coupled with the constitution just passed – though there are clouds concerning the vote – will probably aggravate the divisions in Iraq rather than heal them. As bad as he was when he had power, some Iraqis will inevitably take the position that while he is a blankety-blank, he is our blankety-blank, and Americans should butt out of Iraq's business.

At any rate, the president should not point to this trial as an example of international law. His administration has flouted international law too often. Saddam is not being tried by an international-war-crimes tribunal. He's being tried by an Iraqi court essentially set up under our direction.

One final point to remember is that the Iraqi people who hate Saddam are not asking for justice. They want revenge. They would like nothing more than for us to physically hand him over to the survivors of atrocities so they could tear him to pieces and drag his body parts through the streets. At the same time, the old Baathist remnants are demonstrating in favor of him and calling him a hero. International law is no more popular in Baghdad than it is in Washington, D.C.

It's too bad the Uncle Remus stories have been banned for political incorrectness. Somebody should have read the president the story of Br'er Rabbit and the tar baby. Like Br'er Rabbit, the president's anger caused him to strike out and kick Iraq, and now he's stuck fast, like the rabbit was stuck to the tar baby.

I don't remember who said it, but it is certainly true that it is always easier to go into a country than to get out of it.

October 18, 2005
Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.
© 2005 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Charley Reese Archives
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"Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
--Benjamin Franklin

The Bush Regime IS 'Big Brother'

Earthside Comments: There is no way that any self-respecting American patriot would approve of what the Bush regime is permitting under the so-called Patriot Act. This is the epitome of a totalitarian, central government monitoring the private lives of its citizens ... the kind of behavior once expected from the Committee for State Security, also know as the KGB in the Soviet Union.

Neither liberals, progressives, libertarians or traditional conservatives can defend this kind of Big Brother power to spy on people. This is an example of how Bush has used the bug-a-boo of 'national security' to emasculate the Bill of Rights. Couple this with Cheney's promotion of torture and you have a pretty clear picture of the kind of despots that are ensconced in the White House. Really, how can even real Republicans defend the neocon and Christofascist gang that advocate for these tyrannical measures?
(This is exactly what puzzles me. Just because "Pop-Pop" was a Republican when he voted for Ike, so too are you a Republican when you see what horrors have been done by the current crop of so-called "Republicans?" If you have any brains at all, or any compassion, or any common sense, why are you not screaming for the scalps of the BFEE and the neocons, who are besmirching America and Christ by their every move? Are you stupid? Yes, I'm talking to you. Do you see anyone else here? ... --DN)

It seems to us that only those who have been emotionally swept up into some strange kind of Bush cult-of-personality could continue to try and justify all the lying, fearmongering, warmongering, and power grabs.
Man, is it time for American patriots of all political leanings to revolt and force these thugs out of office. (I'm sure they mean peacefully, under appropriate means, such as the voting booth or impeachment... --DN)
--From earthside.com, 11/6/2005

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Go to Original
The FBI's Secret Scrutiny
By Barton Gellman
The Washington Post
Sunday 06 November 2005

In hunt for terrorists, bureau examines records of ordinary Americans.

The FBI came calling in Windsor, Conn., this summer with a document marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said.

Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian to surrender "all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person" who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away.

Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow.

Christian refused to hand over those records, and his employer, Library Connection Inc., filed suit for the right to protest the FBI demand in public. The Washington Post established their identities - still under seal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit - by comparing unsealed portions of the file with public records and information gleaned from people who had no knowledge of the FBI demand.

The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. "National security letters," created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents.

The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters - one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people - are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks - and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined.

National security letters offer a case study of the impact of the Patriot Act outside the spotlight of political debate. Drafted in haste after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the law's 132 pages wrought scores of changes in the landscape of intelligence and law enforcement. Many received far more attention than the amendments to a seemingly pedestrian power to review "transactional records." But few if any other provisions touch as many ordinary Americans without their knowledge.

Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau's new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Criticized for failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot, the bureau now casts a much wider net, using national security letters to generate leads as well as to pursue them. Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect - a single telephone call, for example - may attract the attention of investigators and subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns.

Read the rest at the link...
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Truth and Duty : The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power (Hardcover) by Mary Mapes

This was a book that reportedly was almost kept from publication because it reveals how the corporate media so cravenly accedes to the demands of the Bush Administration. In this case, we are talking about the "L'affaire" Dan Rather and the Bush National Guard memos.

Mary Mapes was the senior producer on the story that ended up with Dan Rather's untimely retirement from CBS -- and with Mapes being fired.

This should be a blockbuster book because it blows the lid off of the notion that the mainstream television news media is independent when it comes to the truth and the White House. What CBS was primarily concerned about was not whether Mapes and Rather had their story right or wrong; no, CBS was worried that the White House was coming down hard on them and that it might affect the financial prospects of CBS's parent company, Viacom.

Forget for the moment that everything in the disputed memos was true.

And forget that despite the source's changed stories about how he received the memo, the authenticity of the memos has never been actually disproven.

An orchestrated right wing Internet campaign, begun within moments of the CBS report -- and spearheaded by the mysterious "Buckhead" -- was designed to ignite the fires of the right wing media and political echo chamber. And it did.

There seems little doubt that Karl Rove and his minions had a hand to play in the Internet campaign to destroy Rather and muddy up the reputation of CBS, even though the facts contained in the memo were accurate.

Having been fired as a result of White House pressure (disguised as an internal CBS "investigation"), Mapes is free to chronicle -- as an insider -- how the major media takes its orders from the White House when push comes to shove. Reading the book, one can easily conclude that this was another Rovian set up job. It's got his modus operandi fingerprints all over it.

Like much of the Bush Administration, the truth is buried beneath slanderous assaults on character and integrity by the Rovian smear machine. His target was Dan Rather -- and Mapes just happened to be in the line of fire. Rove wanted another scalp to intimidate the already servile media even further into submission. And what could be a better trophy than Dan Rather's retirement announcement?

Rather stood by Mapes, but there was nothing he could do. The powers that be at CBS and Viacom knew which master they served: the Bush White House and not the truth.

This is a must-read book for anyone interested in a personal account of a corporate media that is no longer beholden to the public or the truth. It's a candid and chilling account from an accomplished professional broadcast veteran. It's the victim's perspective of the slash-and-burn media intimidation politics of the Bush Administration.

But the real victim is the American citizen, who no longer can trust the mainstream media. "Truth and Duty" is a personal testament to that fact.
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Got another e-mail bashing France and/or the French today. With particular reference as to how "we" saved their butts, so they should be licking our boots for eternity, etc., etc. You know the litany. Never mind that America has turned into Amerika since WWII. Especially since 12/13/2000, when the remnants of the Nazi Party hijacked the Republican Party.

Funny how they always seem to forget to mention how France saved our butts once upon a time. Like at Yorktown, when it really mattered to our Revolution. Like the money and arms and ships they provided to us when it really mattered. Like during the Revolution.

Excerpts:
HISTORICAL POINTS OF INTEREST
FRANCE & THE THIRTEEN BRITISH COLONIES 1776 - 1783
LA FAYETTE AND ROCHAMBEAU
In 1778, Louis XVI recognized the Independence of the 13 colonies and signed treaties. The United States was born.
Louis XVI sent over an expeditionary force to the USA and 6 million French pounds to George Washington. In 1781, the French forces beat the British at Yorktown in Virginia.
Remember Yorktown - The French-American alliance that once was -- and could be again.
At the tour's outset, our guide stressed that George Washington's troops would never have won this battle without the help and strong support of French soldiers, ships and weapons. The Marquis de Lafayette and Comte de Rochambeau - By Pierre Taminiaux
Names on Yorktown French Memorial
French financial contribution to the war of Independence :
3 million French pounds in 1778
6 million French pounds in 1781
Beaumarchais contributed 3 600 000 Francs worth of weapons, 800 000 F of which were reimbursed in 1836,
Cost of the French flottila : over 1 billion Francs

There's a lot of other points they forget to mention. Then again, how could they mention them. They appear to have been out to recess during history class.

Here's a short primer, just for them.

No, I sure don't expect they'll read anything which upsets their preconceived notions. Facts are too hard to swallow for those folks on the other side of the aisle.
- - -
LIBERATION OF PARIS
"As far as WWII goes, I remind him that Paris was freed in August 1944, thanks to the rebellion of Parisians and the French Free Forces (Leclercq's 2nd Division Blindee), while U.S. and British forces cautiously stayed away.
Probably they hoped the Germans would deal with the French Resistance fighters, which they never trusted because there were communists among them. This would also explain why they did not send weapons to the Vercors Plateau, which was under control of the partisans, making them unable to resist the massacre of 750 children, men and women of all ages (July 1944, after D-Day).
Yes, even the liberation of France by our friends had its dirty sides." - Laurent Lechifflart
- - -
Has France always been perfect? Of course not. Has America always been perfect? Guess that depends upon whom you listen to.

But it ill behooves us to throw stones.

THE TRAGIC NUMBERS OF WORLD WAR II CASUALTIES
These numbers show clearly the terrible toll of war inflicted upon these many countries. Millions of citizens of other countries died. This tragic part of our collective history deserves respect and understanding, not politicising and childish "humour".

Total deaths, U.S.S.R. : 18,000,000
Total deaths, France: 563,000
Total deaths, United Kingdom: 357,000
Total deaths, United States: 298,000

FRANCE AND THE USA, KOREAN WAR
During the Korean War, the French were part of the 2nd Infantry Division and fought with their American counterparts against the communist forces of North Korea. The French Battalion won three American Presidential Citations, five French Citations, two Korean Presidential Citations. The French Battalion was the most famous unit of the United Nations Forces in this war.

FRANCE AND THE USA, THE CUBAN CRISIS
Charles de Gaulle was the first to express support for Kennedy against Khrushchev at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

SEPTEMBER 11TH
"In August 2001, the United States had in its custody a man named Zacarias Moussaoui. We brushed aside warnings about this little-known person. He turned out to allegedly be the infamous 20th hijacker.
Had we listened to the warnings, Sept. 11 may have turned out differently. We'll never know. But we do know who provided us with those warnings. It was our friends in Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, or, in plain English, French intelligence. We were not listening then. Maybe we should be listening now".

And we didn't listen when France, among many, many others, advised against the Iraq war:

France Warns Iraq War Would Divide World
By NATHALIE SCHUCK
c The Associated Press
PARIS (AP) - In an impassioned appeal Wednesday, French Prime MinisterJean-Pierre Raffarin warned that waging war against Iraq now - without exhausting all peaceful means for disarming Saddam Hussein - would split the international community and "be perceived as precipitous and illegitimate.''
Addressing a debate on the Iraq crisis in the French parliament, Raffarin said France remains committed to continued and strengthened weapons inspections in Iraq.``A military intervention today, when all the chances for a peaceful solution have not been explored, would divide the international community,'' Raffarin said in a speech, which was applauded by lawmakers. "Let us make no mistake, it would be perceived as precipitous and illegitimate,'' he said.

Gee, I wonder who turned out to be right about that?

Grow up, Republicans - France is not our enemy. The French citizens are not our enemy.

The enemies of America's freedoms, liberties and rights are much closer. They're right here in Washington, D.C. They're commonly known as the "Bush Administration."

Do a little research. Talk to sane people, instead of each other. Pay attention. Crack a book once in awhile. Learn and grow.

Don't send me what you think is humorous, if what you think is humorous involves mean-spirited ignorance, bigotry and hatred... --DN

P.S. Does anyone not see the corollary between minorities rioting throughout France and the seething anger among American minorities?
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http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7546
October 7, 2005
Bush's Satanic Verses
He hears God – or does he?
by Justin Raimondo

George W. Bush was under orders from God to invade Iraq. That's what he told the Palestinians, according to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, who describes what transpired during his first meeting with the American president in June 2003.

According to Abbas, Bush told the Palestinian leaders:"God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

Unlike your typical secular liberal, I am not one to snark at any mention of a divine entity, be it Jehovah or Phoebus Apollo. Instead, I wonder: how does Bush know the voice he's hearing is God's? What if it's the Devil's? God, it seems to me, is the strong, silent type; it's the Other Guy who's a bit of a chatterbox, always whispering in people's ears, trying to get them to do cool-but-forbidden stuff, tempting and flattering them at the same time. If Bush is hearing voices in his head, then I fear we ought to be very worried, because it's either the delusions of a dry alcoholic, or something far more sinister. If Bush thinks God Almighty wants him to "stay the course," then that explains his imperviousness to facts, his fanatic certitude, when it comes to Iraq, and foreign policy in general.

His most recent speech, delivered in front of that most useless – and dangerous – of government agencies, the National Endowment for Democracy, exemplifies the sort of worrisome dogmatism that seems to animate him. It is worth trying to understand what, exactly, is going on here, if only because we want to know how and why we're being led to ruin and utter damnation.

Bush opens by conjuring the specter of 9/11, perhaps in the hope that fear and anger can still overcome reason and the likelihood of reassessing a foreign policy that reaped the whirlwind. The biggest terrorist attack in American history was a boon to the War Party, one that empowered them to unleash their armies on the world. That's why they constantly hark back to it, like the memory of first love. However, even someone who hears voices in his head cannot miss the point that the American people don't see the connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda: they don't believe Saddam Hussein plotted the 9/11 attacks, and they are coming to realize that you don't stick your hand inside a hornet's nest without expecting to get stung, perhaps quite badly. So it's time to bring out the big guns… A specter is haunting the world, says the president, the specter of "Islamofascism"! Aside from the laptop bombardiers of the "blogosphere," however, it's hard to know whom this is meant to thrill. Christopher Hitchens? Andrew Sullivan? He's already got them on his side. While American armies sweep through the Middle East, wreaking destruction and calling their blitzkrieg a "liberation," it isn't the dispersed networks of Islamic radicals who come across as "fascists." As red-state fascism fastens its grip on the president's followers, and the White House embraces a foreign policy that owes more to the Jacobins than the Jeffersonians, the only proper response to the president is: look who's talking!

Read more at the link...
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Not too happy with this guy's religious views, his often sensationalist website, his over-the-top style, including some sloppy editing, and his championing of the State of Israel, but he does have the picture on the lying, hypocritical misadministration. Plus, he's a vet and lives close to me. Can't be all bad... --DN :)

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Progressive News & Views (since 1982)

This was also reported on DemocracyNow during this morning's broadcast and I recommend everyone to go to their website and play the video. At least read the transcript.

This is horrible and it just tears up my gut as a former soldier, and today I don't have any patriotism left. How could I or anyone who knows the truth. It is shocking to me and still I find it almost unbelievable that so few know the truth.

Those of you here who know what is happening MUST make sure everyone you know also knows. Send them e-mail with links. Talk to them. Send them copies of articles or pointers to these things. Some journalists are talking about it. DemocracyNow is an excellent source of information.

Stop the madness. How is it so many do not care about the killing? It does make me sick to see these things and sometimes I think about throwing up my hands in disgust and giving up - but for over 40 years I haven't been able to stop and never will.

-------
P.S. From now on when there are comments posted using the forms at the end of the articles at http://pnews.org/archives/ unless it is right wing blather it will all be posted here (even when they disagree with me - and you know some here do (grin)) - Except I do not want to post speculation or supposition. Theories have to be backed up with enough information to make them probable and accusations should be backed up with first person citations. Please keep it accurate. I have to measure the accuracy and will sometimes err but when I do it will be in favor of staying correct.

I would not have posted something as outrageous as the info I posted yesterday about Scooter Libby's porn novel but it is true and verified by several sources. So is Lynn Chaney's novels (more than one) about lesbian sex and O'Reilly's novel written approvingly about
bestiality and pediphila. These right wingers are really sick and it is all confirmed. Incredible!

Hank
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Illustration by Nigel Holmes

Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon established a secret intelligence unit to build the case against Iraq. The unit's members -- many of whom were recruited from neoconservative think tanks, primarily the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century -- funneled faulty information up the chain of command, often all the way to the White House. By early 2002, the unit had been incorporated into the Defense Department's Office of Special Plans.


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November 7, 2005

* * *
Frankly, if the Bush administration was so fervent about what the Clinton administration had to say about Al Qaida, terrorism, Saddam Hussein, WMD’s, etc., etc., etc., then why the hell did they ignore it all, back when it could have done some good? Why did Condi Rice ignore Sandy Berger’s warnings, why did they discount Richard Clarke’s analysis, why did George Bush ignore the August the 6th PDB, why couldn’t they allow the weapons inspectors time to finish their job? Oh my God, you don’t think maybe, is it possible, gasp, was the ignorance intentional? And now that we’ve gotten to know George Bush and the Bush administration so well, gotten to know the lies, the cover-ups, the secrecy, the cronyism, the corruption, the intimidation, the bullying, the downright criminal acts, you can bet your bippy YES, I BELIEVE THEIR IGNORANCE WAS INTENTIONAL, because they knew they had to have a substantial reason to launch their plan to wage war in Iraq!
* * *
How much do you want to bet, Sen. Pat Roberts R-Kan. chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee won’t call Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, Retired, before the committee to testify about how the pre-Iraq war intelligence was manipulated? How much do you want to bet he really doesn’t want to know the truth about how the Bush administration lied in order to wage war in Iraq? And I’d be willing to bet, if left up to Pat Roberts, the odds that the American people will ever know the truth in its entirety are zip, nil, zero, kaput!
* * *
And some thought it wrong to call the Bush administration Fascists! We are moving ever closer to becoming ruled by those who would emulate Hitler and who seem to value Nazi ideals! As we watch freedom and democracy ebb further away, it is imperative we hold the leadership responsible for the misbegotten downright criminal acts they’ve committed in our name. Otherwise, there will be “Gitmo” camps established throughout America and there are those who will truly believe it is for the greater good.
* * *
© BuzzFlash.
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I say Libby
you say Libi
Let's call the whole thing off... --DN

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

...from www.robertscheer.com (LA Times)

Declassified document shows yet again how Bush abused facts to sell war.

November 8, 2005 -- Who in the White House knew about DITSUM No. 044-02 and when did they know it?

That's the newly declassified smoking-gun document, originally prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002 but ignored by President Bush. Its declassification this weekend blows another huge hole in Bush's claim that he was acting on the best intelligence available when he pitched the invasion of Iraq as a way to prevent an Al Qaeda terror attack using weapons of mass destruction.

The report demolished the credibility of the key Al Qaeda informant the administration relied on to make its claim that a working alliance existed between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It was circulated widely within the U.S. government a full eight months before Bush used the prisoner's lies to argue for an invasion of Iraq because "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."

Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi -- a Libyan captured in Pakistan in 2001 -- was probably "intentionally misleading the debriefers," the DIA report concluded in one of two paragraphs finally declassified at the request of Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and released by his office over the weekend. The report also said: "Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest."

He got that right. Folks in the highest places were very interested in claims along the lines Libi was peddling, even though they went against both logic and the preponderance of intelligence gathered to that point about possible collaboration between two enemies of the U.S. that were fundamentally at odds with each other. Al Qaeda was able to create a base in Iraq only after the U.S. overthrow of Hussein, not before. "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements," accurately noted the DIA.

Yet Bush used the informant's already discredited tall tale in his key Oct. 7, 2002, speech just before the Senate voted on whether to authorize the use of force in Iraq and again in two speeches in February, just ahead of the invasion.

Leading up to the war, Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to sell it to the United Nations, while Vice President Dick Cheney, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith repeated it breathlessly for homeland audiences. The con worked, and Americans came to believe the lie that Hussein was associated with the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Even CIA Director George Tenet publicly fell into line, ignoring his own agency's dissent that Libi would not have been in a position to know what he said he knew. In fact, Libi, according to the DIA, could not name any Iraqis involved, any chemical or biological material used or where the training allegedly occurred. In January 2004, the prisoner recanted his story, and the next month the CIA withdrew all intelligence reports based on his false information.

One by one, the exotic intelligence factoids Bush's researchers culled from raw intelligence data files to publicly bolster their claim of imminent threat -- the yellowcake uranium from Niger, the aluminum tubes for processing uranium, the Prague meeting with Mohamed Atta, the discredited Iraqi informants "Curveball" and Ahmad Chalabi -- have been exposed as previously known frauds.

When it came to selling an invasion of Iraq it had wanted to launch before 9/11, the Bush White House systematically ignored the best available intelligence from U.S. agencies or any other reliable source.

It should be remembered that while Bush and his gang were successfully scaring the wits out of us about the alleged Iraq-Al Qaeda alliance, U.N. weapons inspectors were on the ground in Iraq. Weapons inspectors Hans Blix and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei promised they could finish scouring the country if given a few more months. But instead, they were abruptly chased out by an invasion necessitated by what the president told us was a "unique and urgent threat."

Bush exploited the worldwide horror felt over the 9/11 attacks to justify the Iraq invasion. His outrageous claim, repeated over and over before and after he dragged the nation into an unnecessary war, was never supported by a single piece of credible evidence. The Bush defense of what is arguably the biggest lie ever put over on the American people is that everyone had gotten the intelligence wrong. Not so at the highest level of U.S. intelligence, as DITSUM No. 044-02 so clearly shows. How could the president not have known?

Copyright © 2005 Robert Scheer
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It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker. I began to think alone --"to relax," I told myself -- but I knew it wasn't true.

Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time. That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's. I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking,"What is it exactly we are doing here?"

One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job."

This gave me a lot to think about.

I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..." "I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"

"But Honey, surely it's not that serious."

"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"

"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently.
She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama. "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door. I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors... They didn't open. The library was closed.

To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night.

As I sank to the ground, clawing at the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye. "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked. You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster. Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker. I never miss a TA meeting.

At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting. I watch a lot more TV now. I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home.

Life just seemed... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

Today, I registered to vote Republican.

* * * * * * * *

(Found on the MSN Group:
Daily digest for Rush versus Reality, from frank)

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Nude Descending a Staircase
Marcel Duchamp, American, born France, 1887-1968
1912 - Oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art





Cartoon by Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star Tribune
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...and Maroon 5 and, believe it or not, Artie Garfunkel and last, but not yada yada, for the senior folk out there, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.)

http://my.execpc.com/~icicle/RAGDOLL.html

> > > > > > > > > > > > > >

Click the link below and let Georgie freefall like a rag doll until he gets stuck.
Then grab him with the cursor and smack him around till he's under a truck.
Speed up or slow down gravity with your left/right arrow keys.

http://www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/georgie.htm

Wouldn't it be a kick if it was really a genuine Haitian Voodoo doll, and he would feel real pain when we did it?
Like maybe one tenth the pain he's inflicted on our boys and girls and their moms and dads?
Or innocent Iraqis?
Or "detainees" at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo or, via our own Gulfstream V or various 737's, "rendered" to Jordan or Egypt or Syria, in violation of the UN Convention on Torture, not to mention "Christian" principles? So Bush can continue telling the lie that "we don't torture?" He did it again just yesterday.
(Or Katrina survivors with their noses up against the attic rafters waiting for him to finish his piece of McCain birthday cake?
Or his millionth fund-raising trip?
Or his bicycle ride?
Or his nap?

The mind boggles... --DN
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What's that, I already am? Thank you, thank you very much. Elvis is IN the building... --DN



Enemy of the State
From Capitol Hill Blue
An Enemy of The State
By DOUG THOMPSON
Nov 7, 2005, 08:14

According to a printout from a computer controlled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice, I am an enemy of the state.

The printout, shown to me recently by a friend who works for Justice, identifies me by a long, multi-digit number, lists my date of birth, place of birth, social security number and contains more than 100 pages documenting what the Bureau and the Bush Administration consider to be my threats to the security of the United States of America.

It lists where I sent to school, the name and address of the first wife that I had been told was dead but who is alive and well and living in Montana, background information on my current wife and details on my service to my country that I haven’t even revealed to my wife or my family.

Although the file finds no criminal activity by me or members of my immediate family, it remains open because I am a “person of interest” who has “written and promoted opinions that are contrary to the government of the United States of America.”

And it will remain active because the government of the United States, under the far-reaching provisions of the USA Patriot Act, can compile and retain such information on any American citizen. That act gives the FBI the authority to collect intimate details about anyone, even those not suspected of any wrongdoing.

My file begins on September 11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. A Marine guard standing post at the Navy Yard in Washington jotted down the license number of my Jeep Wrangler after I was spotted taking pictures of armed guards at the locked-down military facility.

That night, I found a card stuffed under my door from Agent John Ryan of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. I chuckled at the time because the lead character in Tom Clancy’s novels is named John P. Ryan.

I called Agent Ryan the next day. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing taking photos of a military facility. I explained that I was a journalist and taking pictures was what I did for a living. I directed him to a web site where he could find some of the photos I shot of the Navy Yard’s side gate on that day. He asked for additional information, including date of birth and social security number, which I provided, and then hung up.

I thought the matter was dead until a few weeks ago when an old friend from Washington called, said he was in the area, and suggested lunch. At lunch, he showed me the 100-plus pages of the file on me that grew out of that first encounter with Agent Ryan of NCIS.

“Much of this information was gathered through what we call ‘national security letters,’” he said. “It allows us to gather information from a variety of sources.”

A “national security letter” it turns out, can be issued by any FBI supervisor, without court order or judicial review, to compel libraries, banks, employers and other sources to turn over any and all information they have on American citizens.

The FBI issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year. When one is delivered to a bank, library, employer or other entity, the same federal law that authorizes such letters also prohibits your bank, employer or anyone else from telling you that they received such a letter and were forced to turn over all information on you.

According to my file, the banks where I have both business and checking accounts have been forced to turn over all records of my transactions, as have every company where I have a charge account or credit card.

They’ve perused my book borrowing habits from libraries in Arlington and Floyd Counties as well as studied what television shows I watch on the Tivos in my house. They know I belong to the National Rifle Association, the National Press Photographers Association and other professional groups. They know I attend meetings of Alcoholic Anonymous on a regular basis and the file notes that my “pattern of spending” shows no purchase of “alcohol-related products” since the file was opened in 2001.

In the past, when information collected on an American citizen failed to turn up any criminal activity, FBI policy called for such information to be destroyed.

But President George W. Bush in 2003 reversed that long-standing policy and ordered the bureau and other federal agencies to not only keep that information but place it in government databases that can be accessed by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.

In October, Bush also signed Executive Order 13388 which expands access to those databases to “appropriate private sector entities” although the order does not explain what those entities might be. In addition, the Bush Administration has successfully blocked legislation and legal actions that have tried to stop the expansion of spying and gathering of information on Americans.

FBI spokesmen defend the national security letters as a “necessary tool” on the so-called “war on terror.”

"Congress has given us this tool to obtain basic telephone data, basic banking data, basic credit reports," Valarie E. Caproni, the FBI general counsel, told The Washington Post. "The fact that a national security letter is a routine tool used, that doesn't bother me."

Obviously it doesn’t. Carponi signed at least one of the letters used to gather information for my file.

When I asked to keep the copy of the file, my friend said “no.” I promised to keep it and the source confidential.

“You can’t,” he said. “You can’t keep anything hidden. Your life is an open book with us and it will be to the day you die.”

After we left lunch and went our separate ways, I wondered how, if my life was under such scrutiny from Uncle Sam, he could meet me for lunch in a public restaurant and not be discovered? So the next day I went to a public phone in an out-of-the-way location and dialed his direct number.
It was disconnected. So I called the central number and asked to speak to him. The woman who answered the phone wanted my name and phone number so he could return the call. I hung up.

Then I drove home with one eye glued to the rearview mirror. Didn’t see anything suspicious but if I turn up missing one day, just forward my mail to General Delivery, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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...and anyone giving aid and comfort to the current misadministration is complicit by default... --DN

** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** Visit the Dahr Jamail Iraq website http://dahrjamailiraq.com **
** Website by http://jeffpflueger.com **

Dahr Jamail Interviewed by *Don Nash*, /Unknown News/

Nov. 4, 2005

*Q.* What does Iraq actually look like two and a half years after the U.S. invasion?

Most of Iraq is a disaster and in a state of complete chaos.
The security situation is more accurately described as a brutal, guerrilla war which spiraled out of control over a year ago. Attacks on US forces even now average over 70 per day, and are expected to increase in coming months.
The myth that the US military has control over any portion of Iraq is just that - a myth. Even the heavily fortified "Green Zone" is mortared on a regular basis. If one wishes to fly in or out of Baghdad International Airport, get ready for a spiral descent/take off... as this has been necessary for also over a year due to the inability of the military to safeguard the area around the airport. Like in Vietnam, planes will be shot down if they don't use the spiral method of taking off/landing.
The infrastructure is in shambles. For most of the western companies who were awarded the no-bid cost-plus contracts in Iraq, it's their dream contract -- guaranteed profits with no oversight. Companies like Bechtel (Halliburton subsidiary. --DN) have been paid out in full for their initial contract worth $680 million and awarded contracts totaling over $3.8 Billion, despite the fact that many of their projects in their initial contract were not even begun.
Meanwhile, Iraqis suffer and die from waterborne diseases; child malnutrition is worse than during the sanctions, and there is over 70%unemployment.

*Q.* How do the Iraqi people feel overall about the U.S. occupation?

According to *a recent poll* <http://www.unknownnews.org/0510281023Iraquispolled.html> commissioned by the British military, 82% of Iraqis want all occupation forces removed from their country, less than 1% feel occupation forces have improved security, and 45% openly admitted to feeling that attacks against US forces are justified. This is quite similar to what I've seen during my 8 months in Iraq as well, aside from the fact that I found a larger percentage (greater than 45%) of Iraqis in support of the Iraqi resistance.

*Q.* Is there anyway to know how many Iraqis are being held in detention by the U.S.?

No. But there is now a huge number of missing persons in Iraq (over100,000 according to two Iraq NGOs [non-government organizations] I know of), many of which are feared to be detained by the US. One NGO, Doctors for Iraq Society, estimates that there are 60,000 Iraqis in US military detention facilities in Iraq.

*Q.* What really happened in Fallujah and Ramadi?

During the November, 2004 siege of Fallujah, 60% of the city was completely destroyed. Most of the rest of it had moderate to severe damage done as well. Iraqi NGO's and medical workers in and around Fallujah estimate over 4000 dead, mostly civilians. To this day, over 50,000 residents of Fallujah remain displaced.
The US military used cluster bombs, depleted uranium munitions, and white phosphorous (a new form of napalm) during the siege, and appear to have used forms of chemical weapons as well. (All in direct contravention of the Geneva Accords. Then again, our esteemed Attorney General say the Accords are "quaint," and Bushie doesn't have to abide by them. It's called "making it up as you go along." --DN)
I have described Fallujah as a modern day Guernica, and prefer to call it a massacre rather than a siege. Fallujah is the model of Bush Administration foreign policy. There has been next to no reconstruction completed inside the city, as was promised by occupation authorities.

*Q.* Are there other towns in Iraq destroyed by the U.S. military that we haven’t heard about?

Many in the US may not have heard that Al-Qa'im, Kerabla, Najaf (from during the Muqtada al-Sadr intifadas), Haditha, Hit and parts of Baquba, Baghdad, Ramadi and Samarra have suffered large scale destruction by US military operations.

*Q.* Is Iraq already in civil war?

Yes, state-sponsored civil war. The US-backed puppet Iraqi government is using the Badr Army (Shia) and the Kurdish Peshmerga militia to battle a primarily Sunni resistance. Most ordinary Iraqis loath the idea of civil war, but fear the possibility of it occurring as the U.S.-backed tactic of divide and conquer moves forward in occupied Iraq.

*Q.* How do the Iraqi people feel about the American people?

Fortunately, most are quick to differentiate between the US government and American people. But unfortunately, in places like Fallujah, Haditha and Al-Qa'im where US operations have caused so much death and destruction, that distinction is being blurred and lost.

*Q.* Is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi alive?

Personally, I don't believe he is alive. I researched this heavily when I was last in Jordan, by visiting the city where Zarqawi is from (al-Zarqa), and after interviewing many of his neighbors and old friends found that most of them believe he was killed in Tora Bora, Afghanistan during the US bombing campaign which followed the events of 9/11.
Any claim that he is a leader of the Iraq resistance or leading a terror group in Iraq is, I believe, US state propaganda.

*Q.* Do the Iraqi people have any hope for a future?

Not much nowadays. Most who can afford it are leaving Iraq. Those who have little choice but to stay in Iraq can look forward to continued and increasing violence, no reconstruction, a fundamentalist state and an endless US occupation which was failed before it even began.

*Q.* Are the American people obligated to help the Iraqi people? And what could be done?

The American people are completely obliged to help the Iraqi people because it is the fault of the American people that the Bush cabal was allowed to invade Iraq. Any US citizen who is not doing everything in their power to end this illegal and immoral occupation as quickly as possible is complicit with the war crimes being committed in Iraq on a daily basis.

© by the author.
Thank you, Dahr Jamail.
http://www.unknownnews.org/
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By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 06 November 2005

It would be a compelling story," Patrick Fitzgerald said of the narrative Scooter Libby used to allegedly mislead investigators in the Valerie Wilson leak case, "if only it were true."

"Compelling" is higher praise than any Mr. Libby received for his one work of published fiction, a 1996 novel of "murder, passion and heart-stopping chases through the snow" called "The Apprentice." If you read the indictment, you'll see why he merits the critical upgrade. The intricate tale he told the F.B.I. and the grand jury - with its endlessly clever contradictions of his White House colleagues' testimony - is compelling even without the sex and the snow.

The medium is the message. This administration just loves to beguile us with a rollicking good story, truth be damned. The propagandistic fable exposed by the leak case - the apocalyptic imminence of Saddam's mushroom clouds - was only the first of its genre. Given that potboiler's huge success at selling the war, its authors couldn't resist providing sequels once we were in Iraq. As the American casualty toll surges past 2,000 and Veterans Day approaches, we need to remember and unmask those scenarios as well. Our troops and their families have too often made the ultimate sacrifice for the official fictions that have corrupted every stage of this war.

If there's a tragic example that can serve as representative of the rest, it is surely that of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals defensive back who famously volunteered for the Army in the spring after 9/11, giving up a $3.6 million N.F.L. contract extension. Tillman wanted to pay something back to his country by pursuing the enemy that actually attacked it, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Instead he was sent to fight a war in Iraq that he didn't see coming when he enlisted because the administration was still hatching it in secret. Only on a second tour of duty was he finally sent into Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, where, on April 22, 2004, he was killed. On April 30, an official Army press release announcing his Silver Star citation filled in vivid details of his last battle. Tillman, it said, was storming a hill to take out the enemy, even as he "personally provided suppressive fire with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon machine gun."

It would be a compelling story, if only it were true.

See the link for the rest of the truth regarding the mendacity of the Imperial Dictatorship... --DN
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...Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

Thanks, Barry...

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Drifting towards a Police State

by Mike Whitney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America is undergoing its greatest metamorphosis. It has been severed from its constitutional moorings and is drifting towards a police state. If Samuel Alito is appointed to the Supreme Court then Bush will be able to solidify his "unchecked" power as executive and 50 years of progressive legislation will be up for review. Everything from abortion to Miranda will be reconsidered through the hard-right lens of the new majority.

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


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