This Can't Be Happening!

December 29, 2005

Bush's Warrantless NSA Spying Jeopardizes National Security

The massive warrantless spying campaign against people living inside the U.S. which was authorized and ordered by President Bush and is only now coming to light has angered Americans across the political spectrum.

Now it appears that besides massively violating the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment protection against illegal search and seizure, this illegal spying may have put the U.S. at risk by undermining the prosecution of possible terror suspects.
By illegally snooping on people's email and phone conversations, without first making a showing to a judge of some probable cause for the monitoring, the administration has opened the door for defense attorneys to seek new trials for their clients based upon a claim of improperly obtained evidence. Other cases that have yet to be brought to trial may end up being thrown out on the same grounds.

"The infection of these cases by the NSA spying scandal raises the spying to a new level," says John Bonifaz, a constitutional law expert, founder of the organization AfterDowningStreet.org, and author of the book Warrior-King: The Case for Impeaching George W. Bush."

"What this means is that George Bush, by violating the rules on domestic surveillance by the NSA, has compromised national security," says Bonifaz. "This scandal effectively prevents the prosecution of people, some of whom may actually be culpable as terrorists."

Bonifaz, who on the eve of the Iraq war attempted to prevent the invasion by bringing a lawsuit on behalf of some active duty soldiers contending that the war was illegal, and who is currently running for Secretary of State for Massachusetts, says that a round of cases seeking to quash prosecutions and convictions based upon the illegal spying could develop into "the equivalent for Bush of Nixon's Watergate tapes."

He explains that as the public learns from public court proceedings just what the extent of the NSA domestic spying campaign has been, and how it has damaged legitimate prosecutions, and as higher courts begin to rule on the impact of and illegality of that campaign, there could be growing calls for impeachment on that issue alone.
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December 28, 2005

Media Stay in Chicken Mode

On Sunday night, Dec. 18, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a veteran of the Nixon and Clinton impeachments, filed censure bills in the House against both Bush and Cheney, and a third bill calling for a Senate Watergate Committee-style special committee to investigate the impeachable crimes of this White House.

Readers of the New York Times or regional papers like the Philadelphia Inquirer, neither of which had reported on this important new development in their papers on Monday, or even Thursday, or listeners to the main radio and TV news programs, might be excused for not knowing of Conyers' actions.

But while the press may be afraid to embarrass the president, the public clearly is getting fed up with the lies, the dictatorial actions, and the growing evidence of megalomania at the core of government.

Whatever the gutless editors of the nation's mass media may think, Conyers' bills, even if they don't get anywhere in the Republican-led House, represent another big step forward in an impeachment movement that may not come to fruition until next November.
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Imperial Bush?

In an interview last week, George McGovern, former US Senator from South Dakota, outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War and 1972 Democratic candidate for President, told me that President Bush’s announced new policy of pre-emptive war--his justification for invading Iraq--puts America in the same camp as Imperial Japan in 1942.

McGovern, who was a decorated bomber pilot in Europe during WWII, said, "You cannot just invade a country. That is clearly a violation of international law. The argument that you are going to invade another country because it might become a threat is exactly the one that the generals in Japan used to justify their attack on Pearl Harbor."

Unless I'm mistaken, Japanese generals were executed for that crime.
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December 23, 2005

Time to Dump Keller and Bush

The uproar over the spying on Americans' telephone and email communications that has followed publication of an expose by the New York Times, which has included the first calls in Congress for censure or impeachment, makes it clear that this is an issue that resonates across party lines.

Since the NY Times actually had this story for almost a year and held it at the request of the Bush administration, we can now assert, with reasonable confidence, that the nation's leading newspaper is to blame for Bush's second term. The 2004 election was so close in Ohio that had the Times acted with journalistic integrity and played the role it is supposed to play as a Fourth Estate monitor of government abuse, it seems almost certain the president would have been sunk by the ensuing scandal. As weak a candidate as he was, and as bad a campaign as he ran, John Kerry would have almost certainly been president today.

This is, of course, not the first time the NY Times has played politics by holding a story and covering up for Bush. Recall that a week before Election Day, the paper had in hand an investigative piece exposing how the president had been secretly wearing an electronic device during the three debates. Again the paper held back from publishing what it had. (For the details on that story, go to Extra!

The argument that time, as reported by the paper's own ombudsman, was that it was "too close" to the election. In other words, editor Bill Keller felt that publishing that story might "influence" the election unfairly.

But you can't make decisions like that as a journalist. Unless it's a matter of life-and-death, media organizations must publish what they know. Publishing the "Bush bulge" story might have--indeed should have--influenced the 2004 election outcome, but so did not publishing the story. Because Keller thought he knew best, the public was denied important information (that the president probably cheated in the three debates) and had to cast its votes in ignorance.

The same can now be said about Bush's unconstitutional and clearly illegal executive orders (30 of them) authorizing a massive electronic spying campaign to monitor the communications of law-abiding American citizens.

If anyone should be impeached at this point, it is the Times' Keller, who between the withheld NSA and bulgegate stories and the hyped Judith Miller WMD stories, has been functioning more as a media agent for the White House than as a legitimate journalist.

The Times needs to clean house. Keller should go.

And Bush should be impeached.
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December 22, 2005

The US Must be Crawling with Al Qaedans if That's What the NSA Spying Was About

It's pretty obvious what the Bush administration was doing with that National Security Administration spying program.

Look at the facts:

The NSA has this awesome computer technology that allows it to use written and spoken keywords to monitor all telephone and internet communications (though it has been barred under law from using that ability on domestic communications since 1978).

When it wants to conduct a specific monitoring campaign against a target, it has the Federal Intelligence Surveillence Act (FISA) courts to turn to to seek a secret warrant--a process that is extremely fast, and if that's not fast enough, the attorney general can tap without a warrant for 72 hours, and then obtain one retroactively.

Add to this the fact that the FISA courts last year rejected exactly none of the nearly 2000 monitoring requests made by the government, and that it has only rejected such requests five times in its entire history, and you have a situation that should have made the most wire-tapping-obsessed fanatic happy.

And yet, Bush wasn't happy. We now learn (courtesy of a belated report in the New York Times which was withheld from publication for almost a year), that he instead issued a secret executive order to authorize the NSA, or elements within the NSA, to go outside that FISA warrant process to monitor domestic communications 18000 times over the past four years.

According to the Bush Administration and the head of the NSA, all those extra-legal taps were aimed at Al Qaeda suspects (the administration argument is that the Congressional authorization in September 2001 for the President to use force to pursue Al Qaeda gave him the authority he needed to justify the executive order on NSA warrantless domestic spying).

Does anyone really believe there are thousands of legitimate Al Qaeda targets to monitor in the U.S.? If so, just who is left for the U.S. to allegedly be hunting in Afghanistan? The entire Al Qaeda terrorist apparatus, and probably Hamas and the Red Army Faction, must have moved stateside to come up with those kinds of numbers!

No. History has made it all too obvious what has actually been going on: It’s Cointelpro all over again.

The administration saw that remarkable NSA monitoring apparatus just sitting there, and just couldn’t keep its prying hands off it. It has been using that equipment to monitor those same peace and anti-war groups that the ACLU has recently discovered it was infiltrating. The Rove political machine has no doubt also been using the NSA equipment for Nixonian Watergate-like monitoring of the political opposition (such as it is).

And who knows? With the kind of equipment that is in the hands of the NSA, maybe they’ve figured out ways to get into those Diebold voting machines, too.

The mind reels at the possibilities of an NSA run amok and in the hands of the Bush-Cheney cabal. No wonder one FISA judge has resigned in disgust.

The president and his backers are saying there’s nothing illegal here. After all, the president asked his appointed attorneys, including Attorney General Alberto “torture-is- just-fine” Gonzales, for an opinion, and they all said it was quite legal--just like Abu Ghraib.

By that standard, Bush might just as well ask his legal eagles if it's Constitutional for him to put sarin gas in the Capitol air ducts during a joint session of Congress, kill off the legislature, and rule by edict. If they say it passes muster, then by Bush’s Constitutional logic, he can just go ahead and do it.

Either that or we should insist that the subverting of the NSA for domestic, warrantless spying was an unconstitutional act of major proportions and call for the president's impeachment.
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December 20, 2005

White House, FBI Lied to 9-11 Commission About 9-11

This article appeared first as a special report in the December 20 issue of Counterpunch magazine

One of the more puzzling mysteries of 9-11 is what ever happened to the flight recorders of the two planes that hit the World Trade Center towers. Now it appears that they may not be missing at all.

Counterpunch has learned that the FBI has them.

Flight recorders (commonly known as black boxes, though these days they are generally bright orange) are required on all passenger planes. There are always two--a flight data recorder that keeps track of a plane's speed, altitude, course and maneuvers, and a cockpit voice recorder which keeps a continuous record of the last 30 minutes of conversation inside a plane's cockpit. These devices are constructed to be extremely durable, and are installed in a plane's tail section, where they are least likely suffer damaged on impact. They are designed to withstand up to 30 minutes of 1800-degree heat (more than they would have faced in the twin towers crashes), and to survive a crash at full speed into the ground.

All four of the devices were recovered from the two planes that hit the Pentagon and that crashed in rural Pennsylvania. In the case of American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon, the FBI reports that the flight data recorder survived and had recoverable information, but the voice recorder was allegedly too damaged to provide any record. In the case of United Airlines Flight 93, which hit the ground at 500 mph in Pennsylvania, the situation was reversed: the voice recorder survived but the flight data box was allegedly damaged beyond recovery.

But the FBI states, and also reported to the 9-11 Commission, that none of the recording devices from the two planes that hit the World Trade Center were ever recovered.

There has always been some skepticism about this assertion, particularly as two N.Y. City firefighters, Mike Bellone and Nicholas De Masi, claimed in 2004 that they had found three of the four boxes, and that Federal agents took them and told the two men not to mention having found them. (The FBI denies the whole story.) Moreover, these devices are almost always located after crashes, even if not in useable condition (and the cleanup of the World Trade Center was meticulous, with even tiny bone fragments and bits of human tissue being discovered so that almost all the victims were ultimately identified). As Ted Lopatkiewicz, director of public affairs at the National Transportation Safety Agency which has the job of analyzing the boxes' data, says, "It's very unusual not to find a recorder after a crash, although it's also very unusual to have jets flying into buildings."

Now there is stronger evidence that something is amiss than simply the alleged non-recovery of all four of those boxes. A source at the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that has the task of deciphering the date from the black boxes retrieved from crash sites--including those that are being handled as crimes and fall under the jurisdiction of the FBI--says the boxes were in fact recovered and were analyzed by the NTSB.

"Off the record, we had the boxes," the source says. "You'd have to get the official word from the FBI as to where they are, but we worked on them here."

The official word from the NTSB is that the WTC crash site black boxes never turned up. "No recorders were recovered from the World Trade Center," says the NTSB's Lopatkiewicz. "At least none were delivered to us by the FBI." He adds that the agency has "always had a good relationship" with the FBI and that in all prior crime-related crashes or flight incidents, they have brought the boxes to the NTSB for analysis.

For its part, the FBI is still denying everything, though with curious bit of linguistic wiggle room. "To the best of my knowledge, the flight recording devices from the World Trade Center crashes were never recovered. At least we never had them," says FBI spokesman Stephen Kodak.

What the apparent existence of the black boxes in government hands means is unclear.

If the information in those boxes is recoverable, or if, as is likely, it has been recovered already, it could give crucial evidence regarding the skill of the hijacker/pilots, perhaps of their strategy, of whether they were getting outside help in guiding them to their targets, of how fast they were flying and a host of other things.

Why would the main intelligence and law enforcement arm of the U.S. government want to hide from the public not just the available information about the two hijacked flights that provided the motivation and justification for the nation's "War on Terror" and for its two wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, but even the fact that it has the devices which could contain that information? Conspiracy theories abound, with some claiming the planes were actually pilotless military aircraft, or that they had little or nothing to do with the building collapses. The easiest way to quash such rumors and such fevered thinking would be openness.

Instead we have the opposite: a dark secrecy that invites many questions regarding the potentially embarrassing or perhaps even sinister information that might be on those tapes.
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December 17, 2005

It's More Than Just NSA Spying

Now that we know that President Bush, through the misuse of secret executive orders, authorized the super-secret National Security Agency to monitor domestic phone and Internet communications without any involvement of the courts, it's time to recall Admiral Poindexter and his Total Information Awareness project.

Recall that Poindexter, a convicted Iran-Contra felon until he had his conviction overturned on a technicality, had been appointed by Bush to develop a program using Pentagon and NSA supercomputers to monitor all communications and financial transactions in the country.

TIA was officially dumped when word of it leaked out, particularly because of the unsavory history of the man put in charge of it.

But it bears mentioning that in fact, much of the hardware and software for realizing Poindexter's dark dream already exists. Carnivore--a software program that allows the Feds to scan all Internet communications for certain key words--is already in operation. American companies, in fact, have been honing these skills in products they have developed to help China monitor its Internet and phone systems. Don't think those fearsome capabilities have gone unnoticed in the White House.

Without calling it TIA, our government too has begun massively snooping on Americans’ private communications.

This is where Bush's so-called "War on Terror" has been taking us.

Every inch of the way, as new steps towards totalitarian control are proposed or introduced--things like John Ashcroft's Operation TIPS citizen spy scheme, Poindexter's TIA, a national ID card, or a chip in everyone’s passport--a cry has gone up from the public, left and right, and the administration has publicly backed off.

But then after the furor dies down, they've gone ahead and done it in another, quieter way--a smaller version of TIPS, uniform state drivers licenses that will be a national ID in all but name, and a supposedly less invasive chip in new passports, etc.

The reality is that Bush and Cheney, and all too many of the yes-men and yes-women in Congress, view the Bill of Rights as--to quote our chief executive--"just a goddamned piece of paper."

These people have no respect for the concept of civil liberties. No respect for privacy. No respect for the rule of law.

What they respect, and what they want is total control.

There is still time to stop this march to dictatorship.

Some members of Congress, sensing the public's unease, are starting to make a fuss. They'll do more if the American public starts to really get angry at what is being done to traditional American freedoms by the White House gang, but only if we all start making it clear that we've had enough.

The terrorism threat is a sham.

9-11 happened not because the U.S. was a free society, but because the people in charge were either asleep, didn't want to be bothered, or, more sinisterly, actually wanted for some "Pearl Harbor-like event" to happen.

The real threat to America and to Americans is not some radical religious zealot with a bomb, but a gang of power-hungry politicians bent on making their control in Washington permanent.

That threat will be defeated not by giving up our freedoms, but by defending them all, fiercely and without compromise.
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December 14, 2005

Secret Government is the Problem

The common problem not confronted but lying behind many of the biggest crises plagueing America these days is secret government, yet instead of addressing this fundamental issue, Congress and the media are just nibbling around the edges.

Take torture. The Bush administration is committed to the concept that if you want to fight wars and terrorists, you need to torture people when you capture them.

A fondness for torture is a kind of sickness, and it's a long discredited tactic that tough-minded but far smarter people than Bush and Cheney long ago realized was counterproductive, because tortured people just say what their tormentors want to hear, in order to get the torture to stop, leading to mistakes, wrong detours, and worse.

But the real problem with torture is that it's illegal, both in the U.S. and internationally, and yet the government, and particularly our president and vice president still think it is acceptable policy.

The same thing can be said about CIA subversion. The U.S. has been busy fomenting coups in Venezuela and Haiti, and is probably hard at work preparing another one in Bolivia pending the outcome of the election there which is likely to put another Chavista in power in South America. That's illegal, but the government is doing it anyhow.
The illegalities, particularly in this administration, are really too numerous to enumerate, including the "disappearing" of many legal immigrants picked up by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the arrest without trial of American citizens, the establishment of secret prison gulags in nations around the globe--with or without their own governments' knowledge and permission--the use of outlawed weapons in wars that have been entered into without Congressional approval, the attacking of targets in nations with whom we are not even at war, the kidnapping of people in other countries by U.S. intelligence agents, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

And how about that $40-billion secret budget for spy agencies, about which we know nothing (even the budget total itself is known only because of a slip of the tongue), and over which we have no control at all? That represents an amount larger than most departments of the federal government.

Now, wasn't this supposed to be a democracy that we have here in America?

Whether or not we agree with the hard-assed policies of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld junta, shouldn't we all, as American citizens, and as members of the elected Congress of the United States, be both outraged and terrified at the secret actions and policies being conducted by our government?

The very notion of a free and democratic society is facing serious threat today because we have a government that feels free to act in secret, and a people and a Congress that just ignore what is being done secretly in our name...and all to often to us.

Unless we demand an end to all this secrecy, the American experiment will soon end in disaster.

Benjamin Franklin had it right:

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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Decembrer 11, 2005

Just a #@%*& Piece of Paper!

So according to a report by Doug Thompson, editor of the journal Capital Hill Blue, three stalwart Republican congress members who had gone to see President Bush the lesser in his White House digs to advise against passage of the new version of the oxymoronically named USA PATRIOT Act were treated to an angry shout of "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face! It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"

This coming from a man who twice swore on the Bible he claims to live by that he would "uphold and defend the Constitution."

This from a man who said that he would make "strict adherence to the Constitution" the key requirement for his nominees to the US Supreme Court.

What a sad joke this buffoon in the White House has proven to be.

What a dangerous buffoon, too.

For after his initial outburst, the president had some more choice words to his loyal, if worried, Congressional colleagues. When one of them warned that his push for more police state powers in new version of the ham-fisted legislation that Congress initially passed in the wake of the 9-11 attacks might alienate some of his conservative backers, the president shouted, "I don't give a goddamn: I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way."

Here's a real danger.

The role of commander-in-chief is expressly explained in the Constitution as referring to the president's position as top officer of the nation's military. That is an important provision, because it is essential that a civilian have final control over even the highest general if a democracy is to survive. But the title commander-in-chief has no relevance with respect to the rest of society. The president, according to the Constitution, is not commander-in-chief of the Congress, or of the administration, or of you or me. He's just the president, and in three more years, or whenever he's impeached, he'll be gone.

Unless, of course, the Constitution is "just a goddamned piece of paper."

Then all bets are off.
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December 9

With Clinton it was the meaning of the word "is"; with Condi Rice and the Bush thugs, it's the meaning of the word "torture"

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is touring European capitals trying to calm panicked European leaders about the U.S. tactic of secretly detaining and then shuttling captured alleged "terrorists" off to a gulag of secret bases to be tortured and perhaps disappeared.

What she is saying has to be carefully examined and parsed to get to the truth, because this is an adminstration of skilled and congenital liars, the secretary herself among them.

On the matter of torture, what Rice said is that the U.S. does not torture prisoners. That might sound pretty unequivocable, but you have to go back to Rice's January confirmation hearing in the US Senate. There, under questioning by Senator John Kerry (D-MA), she refused to characterize what unquestionably had been done to captured Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison as "torture."

In other words, the U.S. may use dogs on inmates, may leave them stripped in cold cells, may rape them, may perform fake executions, etc., may confine them in stress positions for hours or days, and that's not torture. So no, the US does not torture people.

As for rendition--the practice of sending captives to other countries like Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan or elsewhere that torture is known to be commonplace--Rice said that while rendition itself is practiced (how could she deny the 300 or more CIA plane flights?), "the US does not fly people to other countries to be tortured."

The sleight of hand here should be obvious. If the US flies people to other countries for other reasons--say for example to question them, or to remove them from the jurisdiction of US courts--and they are then tortured while there, it would not be rendition for the porpose of torture. If, in other words, the purpose of the rendition was not torture, but rather something else, then that's okay, and the secretary is technically not lying.

But that depends on what your definition of the word "is" is, and of the word "lying" is...
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December 7, 2005
Big Break in Mumia Abu-Jamal's Case

In a startling new development, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia has agreed to hear arguments on three claims by Pennsylvania death-row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal that his 1982 trial and state appeal were tainted by constitutional violations.

Any one of those three claims, if upheld by the three-judge panel, could lead to a new trial for one of America's most famous and long-standing death row prisoners, a Philadelphia-based journalist and former Black Panther activist who was convicted of the 1981 shooting murder of a white Philadelphia police officer.

The decision came as a surprise because the appellate court was only required to consider an appeal from the defense on a single guilt-phase issue--the claim that the prosecution had illegally removed qualified jurors from the case on the basis of race. That claim, while rejected in 2001 by Federal District Court Judge William Yohn, had been certified by the judge for appeal to the Third Circuit. Appellate courts do not have to even accept arguments from defense attorneys on claims that have not been certified for appeal by a lower court, so the fact that the judges agreed to accept the other two claims is a major victory for the defense.

The two additional claims are that:

1. The prosecutor, Joe McGill, improperly sought to weaken any sense of responsibility and accountability among jurors considering the case, and undermined the constitutional requirement of "beyond a reasonable doubt," when he told them in his final summation that they need not worry overmuch about voting for conviction since Abu-Jamal would have "appeal after appeal," and

2. The judge in the case, the late Albert Sabo, who also sat at the 1995 Post- Conviction Relief Act hearing, where determinations of fact, and crucial new evidence, were presented (or where the defense attempted, unsuccessfully to present it), was biased against the defense.

Abu-Jamal's claim of racial bias in jury selection is well documented. In his habeas appeal to the Federal District Court, his then attorneys, Leonard Weinglass and Daniel Williams, submitted four academic studies of jury selection practices by both the Philadelphia district attorney's office and of assistant DA McGill, himself. Both demonstrated clearly that the DA's office under then DA Ed Rendell, and McGill in the murder trials he prosecuted, rejected roughly three out of four potential black jurors who had already agreed that they could vote for capital punishment. This was a rate of peremptory rejection of qualified jurors three times higher than for potential white jurors, and is prima facie evidence of illegal racial bias. But Judge Yohn, in a serious judicial error of both fact and judgment, rejected all that evidence. As I exposed in my book on the case (Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Common Courage Press, 2003), Yohn had confused the studies, and incorrectly assumed that they did not cover the time period of Jamal’s trial, when in fact the studies even included Jamal's trial in their data sets. If the appellate court looks at that same evidence, the judges would be hard-pressed to find it fair, in a city 44 percent black, that the jury selection process in Abu-Jamal’s trial resulted in his having just two black jurors ruling on his guilt and sentence.

Equally compelling is the claim that McGill's summation was unconstitutional. As I wrote in Killing Time: Right from the outset, McGill tried to convince the jury that, far from following the dictum "innocent until proven guilty," and making sure that they didn't convict an innocent man, they should be careful not to free a suspect who might well be guilty. Such an argument risked providing grounds for a successful overturning of the verdict. Appellate courts, including the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania (in a case, ironically, involving McGill saying the same words), had already held that telling a jury in a summation that their verdict would not be final was grounds for a mistrial. In defiance of that ruling, McGill probably calculated that the politics of this case--a black radical convicted of killing a white police officer--would make such a reversal unlikely. The calculation would prove to be correct, as we will see later. He went ahead and tried the tactic again, telling them, "…If your decision of course were to acquit, to allow the Defendant to walk out, that is fine. There is nothing I can do and there is nothing that the judge or anyone could do that would affect that in any way. If you find the Defendant guilty of course, there would be appeal after appeal and perhaps there could be a reversal of the case, or whatever, so that may not be final."

It could still be that my political analysis back then will prove correct, and that after hearing the defense's argument on the claim, the Third Circuit judges will reject it, but they if they did, they'd be going against earlier precedents where such statements have been made by prosecutors in the same circuit.

Finally on the judicial bias claim, there are so many examples of Sabo's bias, particularly at the PCRA hearing, where he was the one making the rulings regarding the validity of evidence, and the admission of new evidence, that the appellate judges' decision in favor of the defense claim of bias should be clear. Again, though, there is bound to be enormous political pressure brought on the court not to support the claim.

After a lengthy delay, the Third Circuit has put Abu-Jamal's appeal on a "fast track," setting January 17 as the date for the defense to file its brief on the three claims. At that point, according to a lawyer for the Third Circuit court, the DA would have 30 days to respond and to file its own brief on the sentencing claim, after which the defense would have another 30 days to respond. The DA would have a final 14 days to file a final brief responding to the defense's last arguments to the court. At that point, the Appeals Court judges (who do not get identified publicly until 10 days before a hearing on the case, or a decision), would decide whether to hold a public hearing on the case, or simply decide based upon the submitted briefs.

There are a number of possible outcomes in the Third Circuit. The worst-case scenario for Abu-Jamal would be for the appellate court to reverse Judge Yohn's ruling on the death sentence, and to reject all the guilt-phase claims, which would put him back on track for execution.

On the guilt-phase claims, there are a number of things that could happen. If the jury- selection race-bias claim, called a Batson claim, is upheld, the court could order a new trial or could, as is more likely given Yohn's errors, send the case back to Judge Yohn for reconsideration based upon the evidence he had wrongly dismissed as irrelevant. Yohn could then order a new trial if he found evidence of race-based selection of jurors.

The claim of prosecutorial error in the summation to the jury could also lead to an order for a new trial, though again another option would be to send the matter back to Yohn's court for a rehearing.

Finally, the judicial bias claim, because it involved the PCRA hearing in 1995, not the 1982 trial itself, might not lead to a new trial but rather to a new or reopened state court PCRA hearing. There the defense would likely have the opportunity to bring back key trial witnesses as well as call new witnesses. That, in turn, would give the defense new avenues of appeal, in both state and federal courts, and possibly another chance for a new trial.

Robert Bryan, who took over Abu-Jamal's case as lead attorney over a year ago after several years of chaos and divisiveness in his defense following his firing of Weinglass and Williams, and his hiring of two death-penalty novices, Marlene Kamish and Elliott Grossman, was clearly elated about Tuesday’s Third Circuit decision to hear arguments on three claims. He said, "Today we achieved a great victory in the campaign to win a new trial and the eventual freedom of Mumia."

Bryan said all three claims "are of enormous constitutional significance and go to the very essence of Mumia's right to a fair trial, due process of law, and equal protection of the law under the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution."

Asked for comment on the Third Circuit's decision to the three defense claims, a DA's office spokeswoman on Wednesday initially said, “We haven't heard about their decision yet." Later that morning, she called back and said, "We have no comment."

On Thursday, Hugh Burns, the assistant D.A. handling the Abu-Jamal case appeal for the district attorney, told the Philadelphia Daily News that the appellate court's decision was a "major blow."
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December 5, 2005

What American Democracy, Exactly, Are we Exporting?

Back in November 1991, when I was teaching journalism to a group of Chinese graduate students at the Fudan University Graduate School of Journalism in Shanghai as a Fulbright Scholar, I had an opportunity to show my class democracy at work. I had just received a ballot for the town election in my home back in Spencer, a small community in upstate New York.

The students were excited when I came to class carrying my ballot envelope.

It was only two years after the Tiananmen Square protests, which had also had their reflection in student demonstrations in Shanghai. Some of my students, undergraduates in 1989, had actually been on Tiananmen Square the night the tanks had come in and the shooting started. Others had commandeered buses and buildings in Shanghai in support of their comrades in Beijing. They had all been calling for just the democracy that I was holding in my hand.

I opened the envelope and pulled out the paper ballot, and passed it around the class.

There were bewildered looks from students as the long paper strip was handed around.

I hadn't looked at it yet, so I wasn't sure what the confusion was all about.

Finally, one student asked me, "Where are the choices? It seems as if each office only has one candidate to select."

I went over an examined the ballot. Sure enough, for nearly every office, except for tax collector (Spencer had just had a scandal with the incumbent tax collector arrested for embezzlement in the theft of several thousand dollars' worth of residents' tax payment checks), there was only one candidate, invariably a Republican.

I explained that in many parts of the country--upstate New York, which is almost entirely Republican territory, is an example--the voter registration is so overwhelmingly one party that no one from the opposing party bothers to run. The opposition party in such regions often cannot find anyone willing to waste time being a candidate.

"But that's just like our elections," said one disappointed student.

It was, I confess, an embarrassing moment.

In fact, the situation is all too common in the United States of America. And it is actually worse than it looks. In many political races, the opposition candidate or candidates are really not serious opponents. They run, knowing that they have no chance of winning, but just out of either a sense of civic duty, or perhaps to raise issues and to try and force the inevitable victor to address them.

In Congress, we are told that of 435 seats in the House of Representatives, only some 27, or at best 30--well less than 10 percent--are "competitive." The rest of the seats are in districts that have been so carefully gerrymandered that opposition is futile. (Only recently, House whip-in-exile Tom Delay engineered a corrupt redistricting in Texas that predictably added seven new Republicans to the House by simply running new district lines through black or Latino neighborhoods to divide up their votes and create safe, white Republican districts.)

Given that polls consistently show most Americans believe Congress is full of corrupt and self-serving crooks and charlatans, what this says about American citizens is that they are for the most part so unthinking, so gullible, so lazy or so resigned, that they can simply be counted on to either not vote or to vote for the incumbent that their votes are already known before they're cast.

The reason third parties have so little success in US elections is not just that the system is constitutionally constructed to block them; it's that the electorate is too lazy to listen to their arguments, or to consider their candidates. In much of the country, citizens don't even listen to the main so-called opposition candidates. They don't even pay attention to the incumbents that they put in office before.

Democracy in the U.S., at least as described in high school civics books, does not exist today. We only go through the motions, and indeed, in elections like the coming off-year congressional election that will put all 435 House Seats and a third of the Senate's 100 seats up for grabs, it will be amazing if more than a third of eligible voters even go to the polls. Only half of them bother to go even in presidential election years.

Of course, it's always possible that a failing economy and a disastrous war in Iraq could change this grim prospect by angering people enough that they will reverse the rot and go out and vote for a change, but the odds are against this happening.

Especially if it rains on election day.

And we're supposed to be introducing democracy to Iraq and the Middle East.
==============================

December 2, 2005

In Iraq, a Sudden Rush for the Exits

The growing opposition to the war in Iraq here in the US, and the growing strength and success of the various resistance groups fighting against the US occupation in Iraq, have put the Bush Administration in a serious bind, not just at home but in Iraq itself.

Here in the US, of course, there's the problem of trying to go from "stay the course" and condemning anyone who talks about pulling troops out of Iraq as a traitor, to the political imperative of pulling significant numbers of troops out and getting casualties way down before next November's congressional elections 11 months hence. That's going to be a tough one even for Karl Rove to manage.

For one thing, progressive Democratic candidates--and the smell of blood dripping out under the White House door is encouraging more progressives to run and more Democrats running to act more like progressives--are going to pound on the issue of the president's "flip flop" on Iraq, as well as all those wasted lives on his hands and the $300-billion damage bill. For another, there's no easy way to cut back on troop strength in Iraq without risking higher casualties along the way. Fewer troops on the ground, for example, will mean fewer people to guard convoys, check out suspected roadside bomb sites, etc.

Any military expert will tell you that retreats are among the hardest maneuvers to conduct safely.

Meanwhile, there is the problem of military morale. It was relatively easy to get the troops all fired up and ready to kill and be killed during the invasion of Iraq. Officers drummed it into the heads of the grunts that they were getting revenge for what Al Qaeda had done to America. It was a lie--Saddam Hussein and Iraqis in general had had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks--but with nobody to rebut the propaganda, it worked pretty well. Later, there was "overthrowing Saddam" and "building democracy." Those rallying cries didn't work so well, and as months turned into years, and hundreds of deaths and thousands of casualties turned into thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of injuries, morale plummeted.

But think what will happen now, once soldiers understand that they are being asked to gradually--ever so gradually--retreat from Iraq, leaving the place in a complete mess, handing the government over to militias, thugs and religious fanatics, all the while being hit with sniper fire, IEDs, mortars and rocket propelled grenades. This will be like Vietnam in 1970, when troops knew it was over and they were being asked to fight and die for nothing except Nixon's re-election. Now it's Bush’s and Cheney's and Rumsfeld's asses that soldiers are being asked to shield with their bodies.

Anyone want to make any predictions about morale and fighting spirit over the next year?

It won't help matters--and does give some indication about how our troops must be feeling themselves--that our allies have already gotten the message and are starting to say "enough." Ukraine and Bulgaria, with a combined 1250 troops in Iraq, this week announced plans to pack up and call it quits by mid-month. They're not ready to sacrifice any more soldiers for a doomed US venture. That's nearly 1 percent of the "allied" forces in Iraq.

Predictably, there are rumblings from the other major US coalition allies: Britain, Italy, Japan, Poland, South Korea and Australia, all of whose voters are opposed to their governments' participation in the Iraq War anyway. As an AP article notes, if those countries pull out all or many of their troops, "more than half of the non-American forces in Iraq could be gone by next summer."

This kind of thing tends to have a snowball effect, too. The end result is likely to be a rush for the exits, which could end up looking a lot like the one on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon 30 years ago.
==========================

December 1, 2005

When Your Ostensible Ally Says That Blowing Up Your Troops Shouldn't Be Called Terrorism, It's Time to Head Home

If anything should have Americans of all political stripes calling for an immediate return of all US troops from Iraq, it would be the Iraqi summit conference in Egypt earlier this week, hosted by Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, at which it was decided that attacking and blowing up US, British and other occupation troops should not be called "terrorism," but rather "acts of resistance."

That's pretty shocking, wouldn't you say?

And yet, there has been nothing but silence from the right-wing yak shows, little in the mainstream media, and nothing from the White House.

And how about the "support our troops" crowd? So far, not a word.

And what about the "noble mission" for which over 2100 American soldiers have so far died--the one Bush keeps citing as a reason to keep on sending more soldiers over to die?

Turns out our troops aren't being killed by terrorists, as President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been saying, but by noble Iraqi resistance fighters. Take it from the Iraqi leaders who we have installed as Iraq's puppet government.

According to them, it's only terrorism if you blow up other Iraqi citizens. Blowing up Americans or Brits is okay. It's even patriotic, apparently.

Man, if I was an American soldier in Iraq right now, I'd be ready to pack it up. I mean, doing your duty is understandable to a point, but this is getting ridiculous.

What I want to know is, where's the outrage?

I want to hear now from some of the parents of active-duty troops in Iraq who were trashing Cindy Sheehan for saying not one more mother's son should die in Iraq, now that they know how much the Iraqis want their sons and daughters over there.
===============================

November 29, 2005

Where Have All the Bush/Cheney Bumberstickers Gone?

Has anyone seen a car with one of those 2004 "Bush/Cheney" bumper stickers on it lately? It's been days since I've noticed one.

My community, which is about 50 percent Republican, used to be full of them, mostly pasted on the backs of hulking SUVs and brightly colored Hummers.

Suddenly, I’m just not seeing the things anymore. I suppose it's possible that they all just fell off, but then why am I still seeing Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers? Did Democrats use better glue?

No, I suspect something else is at work: buyers' remorse, or maybe shame.

At this point, it must be a little embarrassing to have a sticker on your car broadcasting the fact that you voted for those two clowns.

The Zogby poll conducted between Oct. 29 and Nov. 2 found that even among Republicans, 29 percent say that they think Bush should be impeached if he lied about the reasons for going to war against Iraq. The percentage can only have risen since then, as more evidence comes out that there’s no reason for the "if."

It's too early to predict how this tectonic shift in political attitudes will play out in the November congressional races across the country, but I’m guessing that my neighborhood is not that different from much of the red and purple parts of America, and that there are going to be a lot more contested House and even Senate races than people were expecting a few months back.

Iraq seems to be going predictably from bad to worse for the military and the administration. The Shiite-led government that Bush and his Neocon advisers placed their bets on is slaughtering Sunnis, who are certain to strike back. Everyone’s getting increasingly pissed at the US occupiers, and if the Pentagon follows through on the Bush/Rumsfeld plan to cut back on ground troops by increasing use of air power, with the resulting increase in "collateral damage" deaths of civilians, America's popularity in Iraq will only decline over the next year, while Moktada Sadr's rises.

Meanwhile, the Bush voodoo economic program of massive tax cuts for the rich and massive spending on the military is finally starting to tell. The US economy is slowing, housing prices are slumping, jobs are going south and abroad and, in a sign that inflation is nigh, the price of gold today spiked above $500 per ounce.

What’s missing from this picture?

Oh yeah. The Democrats. They've made a few feeble moves in Congress--enough to remind Republicans that they’re there--but so far, they haven't even decided whether to block the appointment of Judge Sam Alito to the Supreme Court.

I'm still waiting for somebody on the left side of the aisle to toss an impeachment or at least a censor resolution into the hopper in the House, just to kick-start some discussion of the president’s crimes and abuses of power. Maybe they could start with Cheney, whose popularity is even lower than the president's.

If they did that, they might even find some people starting to put "Vote Democrat" stickers on their Volvos and minivans again.
=========================

November 22, 2005

Pentagon Lies About Phosphorus Bombing in Fallujah

Whether white phosphorus bombs--what American troops call "Willie Pete"--is a chemical weapon or an incendiary weapon, may not seem like a very important distinction to a casual observer. After all, what it does--burn flesh on contact and eat right down to the bone causing severe pain and, depending on what it eats through, death--is as cruel and vicious as any poison gas.

But it does matter to the Pentagon, and to the mainstream media that is covering the growing scandal of US military use of phosphorus bombs in the assault on Fallujah (and probably elsewhere in the Iraq War/Occupation).

Pentagon, State Department and White House officials, after first denying that phosphorus was used at all in Fallujah, when caught in their lie, finally admitted using the weapon, but insisted that it was only used against troops, not civilians (a lie), and that it is not a chemical weapon. The New York Times, which finally reported on the scandal on Monday, three separate times noted that phosphorus is an incendiary weapon, not a chemical weapon.

Why the fuss? Well, recall that the Bush/Cheney adminstration made use ad nauseum of how Saddam Hussein "used chemical weapons against his own people."

So how would it look if the bombs we are using against Iraqis were also chemical weapons?

It turns out, though, that what the Pentagon calls "chemical" arms depends on who's using them.

Gabriele Zamparini, the filmmaker who first exposed the use of WP in Fallujah, has uncovered a Pentagon document, formerly classified, from 1995 that calls phosphorus bombs "chemical weapons," which he reported on his website, The Cat’s Dream. A full copy of the incriminating document has been posted on a Russina-based site, Mirror on the World.

Titled “Possible Use of Phosphorous Chemical," the document says:

IRAQ HAS POSSIBLY EMPLOYED PHOSPHOROUS CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST THE KURDISH POPULATION IN AREAS ALONG THE IRAQI-TURKISH-IRANIAN BORDERS. […]

IN LATE FEBRUARY 1991, FOLLOWING THE COALITION FORCES’ OVERWHELMING VICTORY OVER IRAQ, KURDISH REBELS STEPPED UP THEIR STRUGGLE AGAINST IRAQI FORCES IN NORTHERN IRAQ. DURING THE BRUTAL CRACKDOWN THAT FOLLOWED THE KURDISH UPRISING, IRAQI FORCES LOYAL TO PRESIDENT SADDAM ((HUSSEIN)) MAY HAVE POSSIBLY USED WHITE PHOSPHOROUS (WP) CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST KURDISH REBELS AND THE POPULACE IN ERBIL (GEOCOORD:3412N/04401E) (VICINITY OF IRANIAN BORDER) AND DOHUK (GEOCOORD:3652N/04301E) (VICINITY OF IRAQI BORDER) PROVINCES, IRAQ.

So let's go with chemical arms as we continue to look at this latest war crime by the U.S. against the people of Iraq.

Yet another impeachable crime--this time a crime against humanity--by the dynamic duo occupying the White House.

And whiile we're on the matter of Pentagon lies regarding phosphorus bomb use, let's look at another Pentagon claim: that there's nothing illegal about the weapon.

In fact, an instruction manual used by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, tells senior officers it is against the "laws of war" to fire the incendiary weapon at human targets. This document, first disclosed by the UK Independent, reports that the Army manual "makes clear that white phosphorus can be used to produce a smoke screen, but that 'It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP [white phosphorous] against personnel targets.'"

So besides being a war crime, this is also a US crime.

In all of this, it needs to be recalled that the US fall-back claim that it "only" used phosphorus bombs against insurgents has to be held up against the reality that the US military, in Iraq in general and in the Fallujah assault in particular, considers all Iraqi males of "combat age" (read that 12 or 14 and up) to be the enemy under Pentagon "rules of engagement." In Fallujah, it was widely reported that the US, after encircling the city in preparation for its assault, refused to allow such Iraqi males to leave the doomed city and left them to their fate as the assault began (a war crime, since under the rules of war anyone, inclulding combatants, must be allowed to surrender and leave the field of battle)--an assault that included the use of phosphorus bombs.

Even so, Iraqi government sources say 5-6000 civilians were killed in the US attack on Fallujah a year ago. That's a terrible toll, but in fact, the real figure is surely higher and will never be known. Hospitals were deliberately bombed at the outset (yet another war crime), and others were occupied by US troops. Bodies of the dead were bulldozed away after the battle ended as well, and many were in any event so thoroughly destroyed--and left to roaming dogs--as to never be recoverable or identifiable.

Such is this "noble effort" of our commander-in-chief.

And...

We're Supposed to Be Surprised?

The latest leaked document in the UK shows Brit PM Tony Blair had to step in back in April 2004 to prevent crazed Commander-in-Chief Bush from yet another multiple war crime--this time a bomb attack on the press headquarters of Al-Jazeera in the territory of US ally Qatar.

It seems Bush the Great and Terrible was so upset at the coverage of his Iraq invasion by Al Jezeera--the only news organization that was not cowed by the Pentagon and that had dared to report the famous "other side" of the war--that he decided to bomb not only the organization's headquarters in Doha, but other offices too.

The memo, disclosed by the UK newspaper The Mirror (where is the US media?) reports that Blair sagely pointed out that such an attack would cause an explosion across the Middle East and probably the Muslim world, and Bush backed down.

Sort of.

This memo does put the US bombing of Al-Jazerra's bureau in Baghdad, which killed several staffers, and the U.S. tank attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad where the international press corps was staying during the invasion, which killed a Spanish cameraman, as well as a series of U.S military slayings of other journalists, a number of them from Al-Jazeera, in a new light.

Bush may have been afraid to act against Al-Jazeera offices in Qatar without Blair's approval, but he would have had far fewer compunctions inside Iraq, where the US military is calling all the shots.

Bombing anything inside a country when you are not at war is a crime. So is deliberately bombing a civilian operation, anywhere, anytime. In fact, the proper word for what Bush was contemplating, and for what he likely approved inside Iraq, is a word Bush himself is fond of saying: "terror."

I suggest waterboarding the guy until he squeals.
============================

November 21, 2005

Update: Government Lies About Not Targeting Civilians in Fallujah

Now that the Iraqi government has been forced to investigate the US military's use of phosphorus incindiary bombs in the assault on Fallujah, it is important to note how slippery the Pentagon is being about its claim not to have used this dreadful weapon against "civilians." As I wrote during the assault (see the November 13 article on the 2004 Archive page of my website) two years ago, before the assault began on this city of 300,000, the US military ringed the doomed city. Civilians were ordered to leave, but US troops turned back all men and boys of "fighting age,"--a term that was not defined, but that reportedly was set at 14!

So in other words, all adult and adolescent males in the city of Fallujah were considered by the US military to be "insurgents," not "civilians." Ergo, if they were bombed with phosphorus weapons, it wasn't a case of bombing civilians.

Just so are war crimes committed.

Shake and Bake: Who would Jesus burn?

What kind of country is this?

Not only does America use grotesque weapons in its "War of Liberation"--in this case white phosphorus bombs that are as nasty as anything Saddam Hussein could have dreamt up, with the ability to eat their way into a body and liquefy flesh--but our shameless leaders, when caught in the act, try to lie their way out of their own atrocious behavior. (It hardly matters when it comes to a weapon like this whether you call it a chemical weapon or an incindiary weapon. The point is that instead of just killing an enemy, it tortures the victim, and like poison gas, it can't be targeted precisely, making civilian casualties almost inevitable.)

When an Italian documentary producer released a film exposing this war crime committed in the course of the destruction of Fallujah, the honchos at the Pentagon and the White House lied through their teeth, claiming that the scenes of cascading phosphorus bombs blanketing the city, incinerating fighters and civilians alike, which were depicted clearly in the film, were just flares being used for night lighting.

But the Italian journalists, who had done their homework, rebutted those lies with Pentagon after-action reports that detailed the deliberate use of the phosphorus weapons--both bombs and mortars, all clearly manufactured for the purpose of incineration, not illumination.

Now the fall-back limited hang-out excuse from the Pentagon is that okay, the military did use phosphorus bombs, but only on military targets, not civilians. Check out the photos of raining phosphorus when you read the word "target".

This latest war crime dwarfs the earlier reports of officially sanctioned torture.

Countless civilians--including women and children--were cruelly burned to death (whether incidentally or in a deliberate attempt to terrorize scarcely matters) in the most agonizing of ways. Enemy fighters were killed through the use of weapons that have been outlawed by the civilized world--a world that America can not claim to be a part of. (Note: even Pentagon training manuals say phosphorus should not be used against people, only to create smokescreens or to burn things.)

American troops even have a term for the barbaric technique -- "Shake and Bake"--clear evidence that this was no one-off affair, but rather was something more routine.

No wonder journalists have been barred from Fallujah, except when safely embedded and under the control of U.S. military units. No wonder there were reports of whole blocks being bulldozed clear of soil and hosed down after the fighting ended. No wonder the U.S. took control of hospitals in the area and barred the media. No wonder the U.S. military avoided doing body counts.

The U.S. now stands unequivocally condemned as an outlaw terror nation.

The only bright spot in this horror show is that President Bush, our strutting, god-communing commander-in-chief, will now end his career (hopefully sooner than anticipated) confined to the U.S., lest he be arrested and tried in a cage like Saddam for the crime of using illegal weapons against civilians in Iraq.

What a grand irony that would be.

Breaking Update: More Pathetic Excuses

Still squirming at the exposure of its WMD war crime in Fallujah, the Pentagon late Wednesday came up with two more rationales for its use of phosphorus bombs. The first: it's just another part of the "conventional" arsenal. The second: armies have all used this weapon for a century.

Let's examine these excuses. First of all, phosphorus is no conventional weapon. It is a incindiary weapon that kills slowly and painfully by burning its way into the body, making it as insidious as any poison gas weapon (precisely why the Pentagon initially denied its use in Fallujah). Additionally, the phosphorus remaining on the ground, and many of the phosphorus compounds left after the stuff burns, can still cause death and injury and in some cases is highly toxic itself. Second, there are lots of horrible weapons that have been used routinely by armies over the past century. Phosphorus is one. Others are mustard gas, chlorine gas, and various germ weapons. Common usage in the past is no justification for continued use of such barbaric weaponry. Heck, killing POWs was accepted practice long ago, too, as well as rape and pillage following conquest. Now those are war crimes.

Let's just face it. If a terrorist were to unleash a phosphorus bomb in a U.S. city, our president and defense secretary would be calling it a WMD, and that is exactly what phosphorus is.

One other point: When phosphorus was used in the 20th century, it was for the most part used on battlefields agaiinst soldiers. Bad enough, but this is a case where phosphorus was used in an urban setting full of civilians. The gruesome and criminal results were predictable.

Incidentally, the Pentagon and State Department should get their stories straight. Rumsfeld's guys are saying phosphorus bombs are just part of the standard arsenal of "conventional" weapons, but only a day before, on Nov. 15, US Ambassador to Britain Robert H Tuttle told the UK paper The Independent, "US forces participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom continue to use appropriate lawful, conventional weapons against legitimate targets. US forces do not use napalm or white phosphorus as weapons."

Uh-huh. Let's tell it to the judge...
================================

November 16, 2005

Troop Cuts by 12/15? What a Line of Bull. It's Stealth Escalation

The Pentagon can only get away with calling the idea of cutting back the level of troops in Iraq from the current 155,000 to "just" 138,000 because of the total lack of historical context that prevails in today's mainstream newsrooms.

138,000 was the level of troops the US had in Iraq until a few months ago, when the level of attacks on them rose to such an extent that the Pentagon decided it had to add troops, using the looming Dec. 15 elections as a pretext. At that time, they said the increase was temporary, and that the level would be brought back down after the elections were over.

Now they are acting as if the drawdown following Dec. 15--if it actually happens--will be a reduction in troop levels, when in fact it would be no such thing--just a return to "normal" strength.

Equally likely is that the Pentagon knows it will not be able to reduce troop levels after Dec. 15, and is trying to set the stage for keeping the current level, as if making a temporary rise in numbers permanent weren't actually an increase.

We've been through this before, because that's actually what happened last year at this time, when the troop levels were raised on the pretext of the interim government voting and constitution voting. Each escalation was presented as a temporary measure designed to help combat election-linked terror attacks, but each was actually a move to boost troop strength as the situation continues to deteriorate for the U.S. occupation.

Now they're at it again.

The truth: things keep getting worse in Iraq, not better, and the only way to get our troops out of there will be by giving up, admitting that it's a lost cause, and bringing them all home.

If the media don't remember the past, they won't know enough to let readers and viewers know the truth about the present.
===================================

November 15, 2005

Not Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose: It's the Whole Ball of Wax

It's remarkable how fragile the freedoms that we celebrate as our fundamental American heritage have become during these five dark years of the Bush administration and of a supine Democratic opposition.

In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, we've witnessed the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, which has authorized all sorts of new police intrusions into our lives, including intrusions that are initiated without even the need for a judge’s approval, we have seen the expansion of secret national security courts, arrest and detention of US citizens without charge and without recourse to the courts, we've seen officially sanctioned "disappearances" reminiscent of the worst abuses of Latin American fascist dictators, we've seen authorization from the White House of torture (even including the abuse of children, like a young boy held for over three years in Guantanamo who has been tortured and denied adequate medical care), and we've seen national leaders in both the White House and Congress equate dissent with lack of patriotism and even treason.

Now, perhaps with good reason, but with a shocking lack of anger or sadness, we have the chair of the September 11 Commission, former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, predicting that if there is another act of terror on US territory, "the consequences…would be catastrophic…for our liberties."

I would not disagree with his grim prediction, but it should not pass without comment that this reflects rather poorly on the robustness of American democracy as it embarks on its third century of existence. It reflects rather poorly on us, the citizenry, too, who seem to both Kean and me to be ready to trade our shiny birthright of freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly, along with the right to a fair trial and a secure home, for the cheap dross of an empty police-state promise of security.

And how absurd and pathetic this all is.

No terrorist, no matter how fanatic, and no matter how well equipped with high-tech weaponry, can destroy the world's most powerful nation. Even a dirty nuclear explosive device, or for that matter a stolen nuclear bomb, could do no more than what our own detached and incompetent president managed to do already in New Orleans, i.e. destroy a major American metropolis overnight. It would be a horrible thing to have lower Manhattan or the Chicago Loop blown up or made uninhabitable, but let's get a grip here. Losing a city does not mean losing a country. We've already demonstrated that.

Losing New Orleans, in fact, has arguably given the US economy a needed boost. Jobs are going begging along the Gulf Coast, construction companies and suppliers of building equipment and supplies are booming. Reconstruction, as anyone in Japan or Germany can tell you, is great business.

Why is it accepted that such a human tragedy as a major terror attack would mean a surrender of American democracy?

Are we as a nation really such a bunch of wimps?

Apparently, to judge by the national reaction to the attack on the World Trade Center, and the televised threats from one wacky turban-headed scion of a Saudi construction magnate and Bush family business partner, the answer is yes.

Make a threat or grab control of a couple of airplanes, and we Americans are ready to tear up our Bill of Rights and throw it in your face. “Take that, you big bully!”

I’m still waiting for some national leader to stand up and say that American freedom is not that cheap, and that having survived the mortal threats of civil war, world war and depression, it will not be sacrificed in the name of fighting a motley bunch of terrorists.

So far, nobody's saying that, but whoever makes that pledge convincingly will get my vote.
==========================

November 9, 2005

Must-See Documentary: The US Chemical-Weapon Massacre in Fallujah

It has long been suspected that the U.S. military committed massive war crimes in its massive assault and destruction of the 300,000-population city of Fallujah in 2004.

The Bush Administration and the Pentagon have tried to keep the lid on that story by barriing reporters from entering the city freely, by confiscating tapes made by reporters, by deporting reporters who step out of line, and by a campaign of denial--for example of the charge that White Phosphorus ("Whitey Pete" to the troops) or Napalm or toxic gasses were used.

Now a courageous Italian filmmaker has provided documentary proof that in fact the U.S. used banned weapons of mass destruction, notably white phosphorus bombs and other munitions, against not just the fighters defending the city, but against its civilian population.

This film which is available in English and in Italian, is must viewing for all Americans.
============================

November 7, 2005

What Country Was He Talking About?

You have to wonder whether President Bush just thinks we Americans are stupid, or whether he is so out of touch with reality that he isn't aware of what he's saying.

In Latin America, trying to sell his American imperialist snake-oil to a group of nations whose leaders, and especially whose people, were skeptical to hostile, Bush argued for the American model, instead of the neo-socialist approach being taken and advocated by the wildly popular Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

That latter approach, the president said, "seeks to roll back the democratic progress of the past two decades by playing to fear, pitting neighbor against neighbor, and blaming others for their own failures to provide for their people."

Now at the moment, it would be hard to find any failures in Venezuela, where Chavez has been using his country’s windfall revenues from oil to fund schools, to help displaced and unemployed workers take over shuttered factories and run them as co-ops, and to bring in doctors from Cuba to bring health care to the country’s poor.

Chavez, incidentally, has survived a most likely U.S. -orchestrated coup, and has been elected twice by wide margins, in elections that were monitored by international observers (including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter) and declared to have been fair.

As for the U.S., it would seem to me much closer to what Bush was describing.

Certainly the Bush administration's introduction of arrest and indefinite detention without charge or recourse to an attorney or the courts, his authorization of torture, his ramming through Congress of laws granting new police powers, and his two presidential campaigns' successful efforts to subvert the election process, notably in Florida and Ohio, have "rolled back the democratic progress" in the U.S. His declaration of a so-called war on terror and his Homeland Security Department's blatantly political use of terror alerts to divert public attention from his failures and various political crises have played to fear. His effort to introduce a neighborhood spy program (Operation TIPS), and his administration’s support for ethnically, racially and religiously-based arrests and round-ups of alleged "terror" suspects has "pitted neighbor against neighbor." Finally, if his response to the Katrina disaster in New Orleans wasn't a case of "blaming others" for his own failure to provide for his people, I don’t know what was,

His comment was no doubt met with laughter and derision in Argentina, Brazil and other Latin American countries.

Sadly, it was simply reported without comment in this nation’s excuse for a news media.
==================================

Novermber 4, 2005

Flash! A Majority of Americans Now Favors Impeachment

Impeachment of the president has gone mainstream.

An astonishing 53 percent of Americans in a new poll released today by Zogby International now support impeachment of President George W. Bush if it can be shown that he lied to get the US into a war with Iraq.

Equally stunning, the poll, which was commissioned by the organization After Downing Street, shows that even among so-called independents, support for impeachment is 50 percent, and among Republicans, it has reached 29 percent or more than one in four.

The poll, which surveyed 1200 people across the country during the Oct. 29-November 2 period, shows a marked rise in support for impeachment in recent months.

In late June, Zogby, a non-partisan survey organization, polled using the same question, and found 42 percent of the public in favor of impeachment of the president.

Less than a month ago, Ipsos Public Affairs also polled on impeachment and found 50 percent in favor.

John Zogby confesses to having been “surprised” at the latest result, calling the 19 percent shift in favor of impeachment over four months’ time “remarkable” and “much higher than I expected.”

The numbers have to be worrisome to an increasingly embattled White House. After all, it suggests that a higher proportion of the American public now favors impeachment than voted for him, even using the official vote totals from the scandal-plagued 2004 election.

The numbers will give new urgency and energy to several grass-roots organizations, including Democrats.com, Democracy Rising, and Not In Our Name, which are all pressing for impeachment to be an issue in the 2006 congressional campaign.

In fact, Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, in announcing the latest Zogby results, also announced formation of an impeachment campaign fund, Impeach PAC, which he said hopes will quickly raise $100,000 via the Internet to be parceled out to those congressional candidates who promise to support an immediate simultaneous impeachment of President Bush and vice President Dick Cheney for lying in the runup to the Iraq War.

The latest Zogby poll shows support for impeachment being the majority position in all parts of the US except for the South and in all age groups except for those 65 and older, only 42 percent of whom supported having Congress oust the president.

Clearly, the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the mounting US death toll in Iraq which has now passed the 2000 mark, and a string of corruption scandals and poor decisions (notably the Katrina response) has Americans ready to contemplate forcibly ousting the president from office before his term is up.

So far, not one Democratic member of Congress has announced plans to enter a bill of impeachment in the House.
============================

November 4, 2005

A Shock and Awe Campaign Against American Workers

The class struggle, so carefully blacked out by our American media, is becoming an all-out battle for survival for American workers.

Over the past few years, major Fortune 500 company after major Fortune 500 company has been using the nation’s bankruptcy laws to bail out of decades-old pension promises to employees, to weasel out of labor contracts, and to push down wages to 1950s levels.

Northwest, United, US Air, Delta, Polaroid, and now giant Delphi Corp., and before long perhaps one of the major auto companies, have been using bankruptcy as a tool to beat down workers and to escape promises made. In some cases, as with the bankruptcy of Polaroid, the companies have actually mimicked Enron and stolen workers money (at Polaroid, workers were asked, and in some cases required to invest their money in company stock, which then became worthless in the ensuing bankruptcy).

The real villains in this battle are not the companies, which after all are just doing what corporations always do. (Though going back on pension promises, many of which were the result of deals where workers agreed to forgo pay increases in return for keeping their pensions funded, is the kind of double dealing that most people would condemn in their personal affairs.) Rather, the villains are the House and Senate, which have written the nation’s bankruptcy laws so that workers are at the bottom of the list of creditors who have a claim on corporate assets when a company is ruled to be insolvent.

At the top of the list: The IRS followed by the banks and other lenders and investors. Workers who poured their sweat and their lives into companies don't count as much as bankers who just sat in plush offices on Wall Street and investors who bought bonds issued by the companies.

The bankruptcy tactic--and it is just a tactic because most of these companies were and are not really unable to pay their debts--is now seen by corporate strategists not as a way of restructuring debt payments, which is what it was originally meant to be, but purely and simply as a way of sabotaging workers and slipping out of agreements made years before.

If this assault is allowed to stand, the union movement will be killed off in no time. Union contracts won't be worth the cost of the paper they are written on. Then the attack on workers will really go into high gear.

Ironically, at the same time that Congress has made it increasingly easy for corporations to weasel out of their pension and labor contract obligations through bankruptcy, it has made it harder for those workers and for all Americans, to escape their own crushing debts through bankruptcy. Under the recently enacted personal bankruptcy law, most people will now be unable to have their debts forgiven, but will be instead placed into a kind of 19th-century style debt peonage in which they will be given a schedule of payments they’ll have to meet to escape of bankruptcy. Houses will no longer be protected from creditors.

So just as workers are seeing their jobs lost or their incomes halved courtesy of the corporate bankruptcy laws, they will also find themselves being bankrupted themselves and losing their homes and futures.

One would hope that this atrocity, almost universally supported by Republicans and by the Bush administration, but enacted with the open support of more than half of the Democrats in Congress, would lead to a revolution at the polls next November, now that its grim results are starting to be seen. But with most of the media ignoring the story, or failing to make it clear that the blame lies not with the courts, which just administer the law, or with greedy corporate managers, but with the Congress, which made the law, it's not clear that this will happen. Few Americans know that the bankruptcy courts have their hands tied in these cases; a sympathetic judge cannot put worker pensions at the top of the creditors list even if she wants to.

American workers need to wake up. The labor movement, such as it is these days, needs to make reforming the corporate bankruptcy laws so that workers come first, before bankers and investors, and the personal bankruptcy law so that people on hard times can escape their debts and get a new start, and so that they don’t get thrown out on the street, a sine qua non of support for any candidate for Congress.

This is war, and no quarter can be given.
==========================

November 2, 2005

Time for Escrowed Campaign Contributions

While we're talking impeachment, how about this for an idea that might stiffen the rubber spines of allegedly progressive congressional Democrats?

Escrowed contributions.

Instead of giving money to outfits like MoveOn or, god forbid, the Democratic Party, that say they will distribute your cash to worthy candidates, insist that you'll only give your funds to an escrowed account that would be held back until a candidate signed on to a set of hard-and-fast positions.

What might the conditions be that would let your cash be distributed? How about these:

* Support for an impeachment resolution in the House

* US troops out of Iraq, now

* Repeal of the USA PATRIOT Act

* Support for a nationalized healthcare system with universal coverage

* Repeal of Bush's tax breaks for the wealthy

* A Commitment to the right of workers to unionize without interference from employers and laws to make labor law violations carry triple damages

* Support for a woman's right to choose whether to have a child

Have more conditions? Hey, it's your money, set your terms, but don't just give your money away any more.

=================================

October 31, 2005

Where Are the Congressional Calls for Impeachment?>

There is little doubt that the even if the Bush administration doesn't go down in flames, it will go down in history as one of, if not the most incompetent, corrupt and dangerous presidencies in the history of the republic.

The question is, with crimes so colossal, why isn't there a public demand for his impeachment?

In fact, there is a powerful and growing popular sentiment for impeachment--we just don't hear about it. The Zogby organization, the only polling outfit to have posed the question to date, found last June that 42 percent of Americans felt Bush should be impeached if he lied about the war (a much larger percentage believe he lied). That, of course, was before the mainstream media began finally reporting, as a result of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of Plamegate, on the disinformation campaign for war against Iraq directed by Vice President Dick Cheney and the White House Iraq Group. It was also before Bush himself was found to have been in on the cover-up of the outing of Valerie Plame by Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and presidential advisor Karl Rove. It was also before the US death toll in Iraq topped 2000.

Significantly, it was also before Bush's callous and inept performance following the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, which has driven his approval rating down to the size of his hard-core conservative base.

It's a safe bet that the percentage in favor of impeachment of this liar and joke of a president today would be a lot higher than Zogby found it to be in June--a figure, incidentally, which is higher than it ever was during the entire impeachment saga of President Bill Clinton in 1998/9, when the issue was, not an illegal war but an adulterous blow job.

The question now is why Congressional Democrats aren't calling for Cheney's and Bush's impeachment. So far, not one member of the minority party in Senate or House has made that call. Not one Democratic member of the House has tried to introduce a bill of impeachment in the House.

The argument being made by even more progressive members of Congress like Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) is that there is no way, with a Republican majority in both houses, that impeachment could happen, and that pursuing that goal would simply make them look like "radicals."

Being radical, however, is exactly what is called for today, and fear of that appellation is why the Democratic Party is on such a sustained losing streak.

I remember back in the late 1960s, when I used to have hair (long), hitchhiking and sometimes driving cross-country through the vast Midwest, West and Southeast, and seeing big billboards calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Those signs, funded by right-wing Republican groups, seemed Quixotic at the time. With Democrats firmly in control of both houses of Congress, there wasn't a chance in hell of Justice Warren's getting put in the dock. But that seemingly pointless campaign had a tremendous impact on rallying conservatives to the Republican cause, and contributed mightily to the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972, and to the election of Ronald Reagan a decade later.

An impeachment campaign aimed at Bush could have the same impact, only much faster. With the interminable war in Iraq getting worse and worse and less and less popular, with the economy wobbly, and with state and local governments struggling because of federal cutbacks in all kinds of programs from education to Medicaid, impeachment could become a campaign rallying cry in the 2006 off-year Congressional elections, when every member of the House and every third member of the Senate must face the voters.

It is time for progressives in the House to forget about propriety, to forget about calculation, and to remember what being a progressive is supposed to mean. The spirit of Paul Wellstone, the late and sorely missed senator from Minnesota, who would surely be calling for Bush's head today, needs to be resurrected in the House Progressive Caucus, if it is to continue using that name.

I for one will be pushing this argument in a book on impeaching Bush which I am currently working on, with Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights, for St. Martin's Press, (due out this spring).

Fitzgerald's investigation is a welcome blow against the creeping fascism of this most deceitful, manipulative and corrupt regime, but a special prosecutor can only go so far. Progressive forces need to focus now on wresting back the initiative and drumming Republicans out of House and Senate in 2006--no easy task.

A good start would be a concerted impeachment campaign, aimed at tying down the Bush administration with hearings and investigations so it can do no more damage to nation and globe.
==========================

Octobedr 28, 2005

Look Who's Suddenly Insisting on Presumption of Innocence and Right to a Fair Trial

When President Bush was confronted by reporters as he left the White House for Camp David following the announcement of the five indictments of, and the resignation of Vice President Dick Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, he offered up a lame comment, which at the same time exposed him as a grotesque hypocrite.

` "In our system," he said, "each individual is presumed innocent and entitled to due process and a fair trial."

Sure. That's what will happen with Scooter, and with Karl Rove if he gets indicted when the other shoe drops.

But what about Jose Padilla? This U.S. citizen, picked up at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport back in 2001, has been held in a military brig without charge, without access to an attorney, and in solitary confinement without any contact with family members for four years because President Bush has claimed the right, on his sole authority, to declare any American citizen to be an "enemy combatant" and to revoke their Constitutional rights and rights of citizenship.

No formal charges have been filed against Padilla. Instead, the Justice Department has just made unsupported statements claiming first that he was planning to build and detonate a dirty-nuke bomb, then dropping that and claiming that he planned to blow up gas lines in apartment buildings. Since Padilla is unable to contest these charges--or really even to know what the charges are or who has been testifying against him--no one can know their veracity.

In this case there is presumption of guilt, no due process, and no trial whatsoever.

The same thing was been done to another American-born citizens, Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was ultimately stripped of his birthright and deported to his parent's homeland, Saudi Arabia, after the government had to admit that it didn't have the evidence to try him as a terrorist. (The weakness of the President's case in revoking Hamdi's citizenship rights and his right to the fair trial Bush so ardently insists on as Libby's right, is that the government has said it's willing to allow Hamdi to return to the U.S. with his family to visit Disneyworld.)

And what, for that matter, about the thousands of Muslim residents in America who have been rounded up and deported over the last few years without even a hearing, often on charges of minor traffic or visa violations which they were not given a chance to contest in court?

Clearly Bush does not really believe that everyone in America has a right to the presumption of innocence and to a fair trial--only people in his administration who are charged with serious crimes.

But as the noose starts to tighten on this administration for its lies in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and for its many other crimes, from initiating a war on a country that posed no threat to the U.S. to subverting the electoral system and violating the Geneva Convention against torture, it is understandable that this President is suddenly invoking the very Constitution and Bill of Rights he has been trashing for the last five years.
============================

October 25, 2005

A Presidential Milestone: 2000 US Dead in Iraq

I doubt that the president will memorialize the occasion, but today, October 25, his war in Iraq took its 2000th US soldier.

Numbers like that, with lots of zeroes, have symbolic value, but it's important to remember that each of those dead soldiers had a life and a family--parents, spouses, lovers, kids and friends--and all are bereft and diminished. And for what?

The "noble cause" which the president says they died for? It would appear to be a chaotic former country where bombs are blowing people up at a rate of 20 or more a day, which is descending into civil war, and where what passes for a government in the making looks to be a Shiite theocracy where women will be second-class citizens, non-Shias will be marginalized, and democracy will be a joke.

Actually, the next number that will soon be reached may have even more symbolic resonance for Americans: That will be when Bush's war in Iraq reaches 2261 US dead, matching the number who died in the twin bombings of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. At that point, the president will have managed to kill as many American soldiers as the hijackers killed people in those two buildings--a remarkable achievement really, and well worth noting.

Meanwhile, those who are interested in joining a vigil against the Iraq War tomorrow, on Wednesday evening, can go to MoveOn.org to locate an event nearby.

==========================

October 24, 2005

Revoke Judith Miller's Pulitzer Prize

Now that the New York Times’ own ombudsman has weighed in with a scathing critique of Judith Miller’s lies and deceptions about her WMD and Al Qaeda reporting, including a recommendation that the paper not allow her back in its newsroom, it’s time to call for an independent investigation into her much trumpeted Pulitzer Prize, which she won jointly in 2002 with several other Times reporters for her articles in 2001 about Al Qaeda.

Clearly, Miller was no independent journalist looking for truth in her incarnation as “Ms. Run Amok,” pushing the Bush Administration line for war with Iraq in the post 9/11 run-up to the invasion of that country. Her breathless and terrifying stories claiming that Saddam Hussein was sitting on masses of WMDs--biological and chemical weapons and perhaps even nuclear bombs--and that his regime was tight with Osama Bin Laden and his merry band of bombers and terrorists--were at best single-sourced propaganda, and at worst deliberate fabrications.

Not that this is new information. As early as August 2003, Alex Cockburn, in Counterpunch, laid out the ongoing scandal of Miller’s and the Times’ war-mongering reporting in detail, showing how disinformation about WMDs and Al Qaeda was routinely passed off as fact, and how promised verification was never forthcoming. It’s just taken the Times over two years to finally admit (at least some of) what was going on.

As a 2004 article in Salon magazine explained her modus operandi, Miller would go to Iraq con-man and convicted embezzler Ahmad Chalabi, who would give her his latest wild fabrications about WMDs and Al Qaeda links, Chalabi would also go to the White House with the same information, which would be assimilated by the White House Iraq Group, a war marketing enterprise set up and run by Andrew Card and Karl Rove, and then Miller, who knew all this, would go to WHIG for “confirmation” of the information she’d gotten from Chalabi, which she would then portray, to Timeseditors and readers, as “confirmed” by White House sources.

It was all very neat.

And all extremely costly in terms of blood (the Iraqi death toll is over 100,000 and the U.S. military death toll is about to pass the 200 mark) and taxpayer money (in excess of $300 billion and counting).

As Russ Baker put it in the Nation, “I am convinced there would not have been a war (against Iraq) without Judy Miller.”

The case for challenging and calling for the revocation of Miller’s Pulitzer--and also of her Emmy and Dupont awards for stories on WMDs and Al Qaeda in Times television specials--is that once one discovers a reporter is a fraud and a liar, it raises questions about their earlier work, which should be gone over with a fine-toothed comb for signs of the same pattern of behavior.

Her Pulitzer, after all, was for a series of articles she and several other Times reporters wrote about Al Qaeda right after 9/11, and likely represent the earliest examples of her Chalabi deception campaign and her embed with the White House Iraq Group.

Challenging Miller’s Pulitzer wouldn’t be the first time a Times reporter’s Pulitzer Prize has been called into question.

Right wingers have long been calling for the revocation of a Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to Times Russia correspondent Walter Duranty, who has been accused posthumously of having been too credulous in his coverage of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and of soft-pedaling the 1930s famine that killed millions of Ukrainian and Russian peasants.

Duranty’s work, as a result of the calls for his head, was subjected to an investigation by historian Mark Van Hagen, who concluded that the articles which won the reporter his prize were “dull and largely uncritical recitations of Soviet sources.” So what would an independent historian looking at Miller’s 2001-2004 oeuvre say? Not, perhaps, that they her pieces were dull, for they were designed to terrify, but surely that they were “largely uncritical recitations of White House sources.”

If Duranty, who at least mentioned the problems Soviet citizens were facing under Stalin’s rule, can be considered credulous and one-sided in his Russian reports, what is one to say about Miller, who has been little more than a mouthpiece for the neo-con cabal running Middle East policy for the Bush administration?

Click here to call on the Pulitzer Committee to investigate Judy Miller’s prize.

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October 22, 2005

Dean, Clinton, Casey and Democratic Abortion Hypocrisy

The pathetic pandering of various Democratic Party leaders, like Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton, to the anti-abortion fanatics represents the nadir of principle and integrity of a party that keeps demonstrating why it deserves to die.

I have nothing against a guy like Pennsylvania Democratic Senate hopeful Bob Casey, a Catholic, saying he is opposed to abortion. That alone should not disqualify him or anyone from being a Democrat or even a progressive. But he needs to go beyond that to explain how a sincere belief on his part will impact on his job as a legislator. Because anyone who would act to restrict a woman’s access to a safe, legal abortion must concede that the result of such restriction will be a massive surge in unsafe, illegal, and even self-induced abortions. That is, the rates of abortions in societies where abortions are legal and in societies where they are illegal are almost identical, but in one case women live and in the other they die or are maimed for life.

The same can be said for such outrages as parental notification laws. It may sound logical to say that a minor girl should have to tell a parent before undergoing a medical procedure as risky as an abortion, but the reality is that many teenagers would rather die (and well might) before admitting to their parents that they had messed up and gotten pregnant. As well, all too many pregnant girls are victims of rape or even of incest, and are afraid to go to a parent who may even be the perpetrator or the spouse of the perpetrator, for permission. Parental notification laws won’t stop abortions—they’ll just drive girls to risk death getting them illegally.

That’s what makes the new “anti-abortion-friendly” positions of weasels like Dean and Clinton so obscene. They know all this stuff, but don’t have the courage to state the obvious and take a stand. It’s also what makes Democratic candidates like Casey so flawed.

Any self-proclaimed progressive or Democrat who opposes abortion must begin by acknowledging that abortions are going to occur no matter what the law is, and by conceding that the only legitimate way to reduce abortions is to make sex education and contraception wide-spread and easily accessible to all, including juveniles. Beyond that, such people must be committed to a continued protection not only of the absolute legal right to abortion, but also to the state’s willingness to pay for the procedure just as for any other needed medical procedure for those who cannot afford it.

The bottom line is that to ban or even to restrict abortions, or public funding for abortions is simply to condemn some women to death and injury.

It’s all about pandering to the religious right, not about the so-called “sanctity of life.”

That kind of hypocrisy should be left to the Republicans and the fundamentalists--Who of Course Have the Champ of Moral Cowards and Connivers in Harriet Miers, a woman who claims she can't discuss her views on abortion and Roe v Wade, but who we now learn advocated as far back as 1989 not only passage of a Constitutional ban on abortion, but a ban on abortions in Texas, once the Supreme Court permits states to do so.

What a fine profile in courage this model presidential sycophant turns out to be!
==================================

October 21, 2005

Judith Miller, the Armstrong Miller of WMD

As the Plamegate scandal grows, it now appears that Judy Miller’s role was something akin to that of Armstrong Williams, the “journalist” who was hired by the White House and Department of Education to write articles selling the administration’s No Child Left Behind school “reform” scam.

Miller’s job, it appears, was to use her journalistic role to peddle a war in Iraq. Miller may not have gotten dirty dollars the way Williams did, but she didn’t need that. She was paid differently. With a book out on Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, the more she was out there pushing the WMD scare story, the more books she sold. Then too, there was the notoriety she gained by being known as the N.Y. Times expert on WMD. At the heart of the story, Miller was a sought-after guest on news networks like CNN and Fox.

Of course, there is one big difference between Williams and Miller. William's shilling for the White House just helped to damage the education of millions of kids. Miller's shilling helped lead to the slaughter of 100,000 Iraqis, many of them children, and to the needless deaths of some 2000 American soldiers.

It was all a very clever disinformation campaign--the kind that the U.S. has gotten very skilled at conducting over the years in other countries--only now it was targeting Americans. Using the Times as the vehicle for this campaign of lies was brilliant. The Times has long been kind of America’s Pravda, setting out the officially sanctioned story line for the news of the day.

As I saw over and over in my early days as a daily newspaper reporter at several small and medium-sized daily newspapers around the country, editors at their daily news meetings would always check the New York Times news wire to see what that paper was running as its lead national and international stories. Almost invariably, those would also be the lead national and international stories in the local paper.

Equally insidious, the N.Y. Times’ take on a story has a major influence on the take local papers have on stories done by their own staff. If you were working on a national story, or some angle on a national story, editors would fret if it didn’t jibe with what the Times was saying.

And so it went with the WMD fraud.

If the N.Y. Times, in articles by Miller, was reporting breathlessly about Hussein’s having vast stocks of poison gas, germ and nuclear weapons, all ready to be delivered to the U.S. any day on pilotless drone airplanes, that was good enough for most of the rest of the nation’s media. And if any reporters elsewhere had sources who were questioning this view, they had an almost insurmountable task trying to convince their editors that they were right and the Times was wrong.

Little wonder the majority of Americans initially supported Bush’s war against Iraq, and that even today, a significant percentage of Americans still believe the lie that Hussein had WMDs and even nuclear weapons.

Miller did so many things a real journalist should not do that it’s incredible—which raises questions about the role of the paper’s senior management, some of whom must have known how compromised she was as a reporter. She had a security clearance from the Pentagon, which barred her from discussing her sources with her main editors, and gave the government control over what she published. Senior management at the Times knew about this and accepted the idea of government control over their reporter. She reportedly was known as a “charter member” of the White House Iraq Group, a disinformation unit established in 2002 by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card to “market” an invasion of Iraq to the American public. She even falsely identified a source, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, to cover his and her tracks.

Incredibly, the Times has not fired Miller for her transgressions, or even publicly condemned her. This suggests that she has her bosses by the short hairs, with information that they were in on her scam, which she could go public with. (Poor Jason Blair—he was working without a net at his petty deceptions, and just got the axe.)

It’s hard to imagine where the current investigation by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will go at this point. If he chooses to pursue more than just the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, and goes after the WHIG effort to promote a war of aggression, we could see Miller back in the crosshairs, which would be entertaining and instructive. On the other hand, if he were to do that, or to indict the vice president, it is equally possible that Bush could precipitate a national political crisis by ordering Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to fire Fitzgerald.
==============================

October 17, 2005

"Ms. Run Amok" Judith Miller Goes Down in Plames

I cannot remember having as entertaining a time reading the New York Times as I did this past Sunday reading the page one story on Judith Miller and her self-imposed jail time.

Really, the three reporters assigned to report on her release from jail, where she was being held for contempt for failing to reveal her source and what had been said to her regarding CIA agent Valerie Plame, and on her own account of her four-hour grand jury questioning, published the same day, handled their difficult task brilliantly.

Without outright calling their co-worker a liar and a shill for the Bush administration's war marketing campaign, they left almost no doubt in the reader's mind not only that this was in fact what she was, but that the Times’ senior management and many of her colleagues at the paper thought exactly the same thing.

At her less-than-triumphal return to the newsroom, they reported, after she gave a little speech calling her 85-day jail stay and her release by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald "a victory for press freedom," there was "restrained applause."

Several reporters actually criticized Miller on the record for the story, a rare breach of collegiality that shows clearly in just how low esteem this war-mongering hack is held at her own place of work. Even more delicious, when Miller, who never did write a piece about former ambassador Joseph Wilson and Plame, asserted to the reporters writing the article about her that she had “made a strong suggestion to my editor” to run such a piece but had been “told no,” they didn't take her at her word. Instead, they went to Jill Abramson, the Washington bureau chief at that time, who countered that Miller had never made such a suggestion for a story.

Ouch!

Miller’s own first-person account of her "ordeal," which she had promised would be exhaustive, was simply laughable--and full of blanks. She said that when questioned before the grand jury, and to this day, she "couldn’t remember" why the name “Valerie Flame” appeared in the notebook she had used in her interviews with Vice President Dick Cheney's aid Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Nor could this Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist remember who had told her the name "Valerie Wilson," which also appeared in the same notebook at another point. Equally funny was Miller's continued effort to explain why she just couldn't accept Libby’s attorney's assertion to her that she was free to reveal his identity and the content of his conversations with her to the prosecutor. She couldn't do that, she insisted, unless she spoke in person with Libby and was sure he wasn't being "coerced." As though Libby's leaks, which were part of an administration campaign to smear Wilson, hadn't been approved by higher-ups. As though, in other words, her source was some kind of whistleblower in need of protection from his bosses.

But I guess my favorite part of Sunday's read was where Miller said she was planning to take a vacation, after which she said she hoped "to return to the newsroom."

The truth? It will be truly astonishing if Miller, who once referred to herself as Ms. Run Amok, because "I can do whatever I want," ends up back in the newsroom of the New York Times following her "sabbatical." My suspicion is that her leave is a graceful way for the Times to sack a reporter who has embarrassed the publication.

I think the paper is making a mistake, though. A publication so lacking in humor (the Times famously has no comics section), really needs a humor column, and Miller has shown herself to be very good at making readers laugh.
===========================

October 15, 2005

Impeachment: Clinton and Bush and the Polls

Here's a fascinating bit of news: More people today want to see President Bush impeached than wanted Clinton impeached on the eve of the House's vote on his impeachment.

According to a poll by Ipsos Public Affairs, just released by the group Afterdowningstreet.org, 50 percent of the American public now would like to see the House impeach Bush if it were found that he had lied about the reasons for going to war in Iraq (if?).

Compare that to December 17, 1998, only days before Clinton's impeachment by the House of Representatives, when an AP poll found that only 36 percent of the American public wanted to see the president impeached.

Clearly Americans view the flawed invasion of Iraq and other actions by the Bush administration, like the placing of business cronies in high places, the bankrupting of the federal government, and the failure to come to the rescue of an American city as far more serious than Clinton's sex romp and the lying about it that followed. And there's plenty more bad news to come for Bush, beginning with likely indictments in the Plame outing affair.

So, is the campaign by After Downing Street and other organizations to seek Bush's impeachment just tilting at windmills? It certainly isn't likely to happen with the current Republican domination of the House, but if public anger against Bush continues to grow, that could all change in November 2006, when all House seats are up for reelection.

The latest poll suggests we may have an entertaining 2006 and 2007.
==============================

October 13, 2005

The Real Problem with an American Pandemic
When it comes to a Bird Flu pandemic, the problem that America faces is not immunizations, though there needs to be a crash program to get one ready and stockpiled. Nor is it whether or not to use the military to run quarantines, though most health experts agree this is a really stupid idea (no surprise there--it was Bush's), because quarantines only really work if the people trust the ones in charge, and having the military fencing people in would only lead to mass efforts to sneak through the line.

The real problem is that the public health system in the U.S. is almost non-existent.

Think about it. There is no system of primary care for the 45 million Americans who have no health insurance. Even those with Medicaid have only the most limited access to primary physicians and end up having to use emergency rooms at hospitals for most of their care because ordinary doctors won’t accept Medicaid.

Given this sorry fact, and the reality that decades of conservative governments--Republican and Democrat--in Washington have gutted funding for health clinics in urban communities, what are poor people going to do when they get the flu? Most will ignore the early symptoms and go on with their lives as best they can.

If they are the working poor, they will continue to go to work, because most lower-paying employers don’t offer sick leave, and people need money for food and rent.

All this means massive exposure of those on the transit system and at work to early stage flu--which is when the disease is most contagious. It also means massive exposure to the rest of us, since many of those low-wage workers work in the service industry, handling our food, our clothes, our mail, etc.

The only solution to this disaster-waiting-to-happen is for the Bush administration and the Congress to immediately start a crash program to re-establish the network of primary care health clinics that were common in medically underserved urban and rural areas in the late 1960s. While they’re at it, they should pass a bill mandating a policy of 5-10 paid sick days for all employers, large and small. Sure, the Chamber of Commerce will howl bloody murder, but everyone, even rank capitalists, needs to realize that if people are afraid, or are unable to afford to stay home when they’re "feeling puny," we’re all at risk.

For that matter, even ignoring the humanitarian and personal threat issues and just using Republican/DLC cost-benefit logic, the cost of an epidemic, in terms of lost economic growth, medical costs, increased taxes, etc., which will reportedly be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, will be at least an order of magnitude and more likely several orders of magnitude greater than the cost of providing primary healthcare for all Americans, and granting everyone sick leave.

For that matter, if Bush really wanted to protect America (and not just have an army of occupation in the U.S. to play Commander-in Chief with), he would shut down the War on Iraq, bring the troops home, and put the military medical corps to work in our cities.

If it's important to rebuild the dikes around New Orleans to prevent the next flood, it sure is important to rebuild these medical "dikes" in our cities to prevent the next viral tsunami that is sure to strike sooner or later.
===========================

October 10, 2005

No Lie Left Untried: Recruiting in the Schools

When it comes to a reputation for selling snake oil, surely the army recruiter has long been right down there in the muck with the used car salesman and the patent medicine huckster. It's common knowledge that the promises made by recruiters about postings and future positions and training are worthless, and that once someone signs on as a recruit, her or his fate is at the whim of the military. That said, recruiters these days, desperate to fill the pipeline to Iraq's slaughterhouse with new bodies, are resorting to an interesting new spiel this days.

Word comes in from students in the Philadelphia area that recruiters at area high schools are warning them to enlist now, when they can pick the type of service they'd like to do, "because there’s a draft coming next year and then you’ll have no choice."

It's an interesting come-on because the White House and Pentagon keep saying that there are no plans for a draft.

Granted, two years ago they began a crash program at the Selective Service System to rebuild the local and regional draft boards, which had been allowed to languish for years with seats going unfilled, and which are essential to a functioning system of conscription. And granted that this year was the worst year for enlistments and reenlistments for all branches of the uniformed services since Vietnam, with even the Marines failing to reach their quota, and with the army raising its maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42.

Still, a draft would be a bitter pill for elected officials in 2006, especially with the entire House up for re-election and with support for the war in Iraq now in the toilet.

So we’re left with two alternatives: either the recruiters know something that the rest of us and our elected political leadership in Congress don't know, or there is no draft coming next year and the recruiters are using lies to scare young kids into signing on the dotted line.

If it's the former, it's time for our representatives to hold hearings to find out what's up. If it's the latter, schools should be banning the recruiters from high school campuses and from college information fairs, just as they would if an unaccredited school were lying and saying it offers an accredited degree. Lying recruiters have no place in a school, even if the “No Child Left Behind” law mandates that schools provide the names, addresses and home phone numbers of all high school juniors and seniors to recruiters.

While they’re at it, schools should all get their act together and provide every student aged 16 and up with an opt-out form as provided by law, so that they or their parent(s) can return it and have that child’s contact information kept from recruiters.

A growing grassroots movement of students and parents is resulting in more and more students turning in such forms. The principal’s office in my school district of Upper Dublin, PA, reports that this year a significant number of the junior and senior class have turned in the opt-out forms that were sent out as part of a back-to-school school information packet last August. In Montclair, NJ, 94 percent of the junior and senior class reportedly opted out this year, giving recruiters a pretty small group to harangue.

For information about protecting your child from these deceitful and threatening recruiters of cannon-fodder for Bush’s Iraq War, contact the American Friends Service Committee’s National Youth and Militarism Movement office. (Their website has an opt-out form that can be downloaded and printed out, to be turned in to your local high school or school board.)
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October 9, 2005

The Real Danger of the Miers' Nomination

Liberal critics of Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to a Supreme Court slot, as well as Christian conservative critics, are missing the forest for the abortion rights tree. While it is true that Miers' position on Roe v. Wade is not known (though she seems solidly anti-abortion), the real point is that in Miers, Bush has bridged the central conflict of his administration and of the broader Republican Party.

The dilemma for Bush and the Republican Party is that it is really composed of two very different groups--corporations and their owners and managers and the advocates of unfettered economic expansion on the one side, and religious fundamentalists on the other.

In John Roberts, Bush found one bridge candidate--an ardent freemarketeer and conservative Catholic who covered both camps pretty well. In Miers, he has found another--a born-again Christian and a corporate attorney with a pretty sleazy background of supporting corruption and abuse.

Instead of focusing on the narrow question of Miers' positon on abortion rights (an issue which in the end is going to have to be defended in the electoral arena anyhow), the public and members of Congress should be looking at her views on corporate power and state power. That's where this nominee is particularly dangerous.

With no history of constitutional jurisprudence, Miers is truly a tabula rasa when it comes to these critical national issues. And her history as an "attack dog" for Bush during his years as governor and president do not bode well for the country's future.

Even religious conservatives, who are also skeptical about corporate power, should worry about this woman.
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October 6, 2005

Evolution or Intelligent Design? Bird Flu to Human Flu

Even as the new "Scopes Trial" over evolution vs. "intelligent design" is underway in Dover, PA, the proof that those who disparage Darwin are hypocrites and charlatans is right in front of us.

The Creationist-in-Chief, in his latest press conference, expressed concern that the Bird Flu virus could evolve into a strain capable of being transmitted from human to human, instead of just from bird to bird or bird to human. If so, he warned, it could lead to up to 2 million deaths in the U.S. alone. Accordingly, he is proposing using the military to quarantine areas of outbreaks. His backers in the Republican-led Congress just slid $3.9 billion into the latest military funding bill to cover epidemic preparedness in case the Bird Flu evolves into a human flu.

What was that? The flu virus "evolves"?

H-m-m-m-m. I wonder what else evolves? Life on earth, perhaps?

Are we saying that viruses evolve, but not bacteria? Or that only simple organisms evolve, but not complex animals? I wonder where one draws the line?

Let's be honest here. If we're dealing with intelligent design--an intelligence surely way beyond our own pathetic efforts at reason and logic--then why worry about Bird Flu? Why blow nearly $4 billion (money that could more profitably fund a month of God's work killing the Iraqi heathen) on military preparedness for an epidemic? If the bird Flu virus starts suddenly infecting humans, it must be the Maker's intention, and who are we to try to interfere? The proper recourse would be to pray, not pay.

If evolution is just so much bunk from the academy, why worry about it. It ain't gonna happen.

There's no such thing as evolution, right?
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October 4, 2005

Free-Market Idiocy and Easy Money in the Big Easy

The real idiocy of conservative free-market theory is being put on display in New Orleans.

At last count, the administration and the Republican Congress have pledged to throw $200 billion into New Orleans to "rebuild" the city. The money will allegedly go to all sorts of private enterprise projects designed to rebuild infrastructure, rebuild schools and hospitals, repair sewer systems, etc.

Meanwhile, however, several hundred thousand poor New Orleans residents who were flooded out of their city and who lost everything, are scattered across the whole country, where they now live on handouts, or welfare if they can get it. Most have little prospect of finding work.

In New Orleans itself, the city, desperate for workers to restore services, is laying off 3000 workers because, with no tax base, it is de facto bankrupt.

Now it should be obvious to anyone with a lick of sense that the logical thing for the federal government to do right now is to get those people who lost their jobs and their homes in New Orleans back into the city and at work restoring their storied metropolis to life. It should be equally obvious that you can't rebuild a city that is bankrupt and laying off its workforce, so clearly there should be a subsidy to the local government in lieu of lost property taxes, which could cover the rehiring of city workers.

The amount of money it would take to do all this would be far, far less than the $200 billion Bush and Congress are talking about spending, but it would do much more than all their money will. Consider this: Hiring 100,000 people full-time for a year at $10/hour would cost $2 billion dollars--just one percent of Bush’s princely promise. Hire them for the next five years, and you’ve still only spent $10 billion. Hiring back 3000 city workers, even at $50,000 a year per worker, would be $150 million, or $750 million over the next five years. Even if you throw in the cost of the materials that will be needed to clean and /or rebuild the housing in the city, we’re still talking single-digit billions of dollars. This is all chump change to a federal government that is spending at least $5 billion a month on the war in Iraq and that is talking about spending $200 billion on New Orleans.

Meanwhile, with a federal project based upon hiring the displaced citizens of New Orleans, we’d be eliminating all the welfare payouts to the evacuees, as well as a good deal of the Medicaid payments that the federal government will end up repaying the states for.

What New Orleans really needs, in other words, is a kind of combination TVA/Citizens Conservation Corps-type program—a federal project to build Dutch-style levees that will withstand a Category 5 hurricane, to rebuild the whole city for everyone who wants to return, and to do it to the maximum extent possible with local labor.

This is all so obvious it shouldn’t even need saying. And yet…

It’s not what’s happening, and nobody, including the brain-dead and soulless Democrats, is calling for it.

For the Republicans in power, ideology trumps logic. The last thing they want to see is government doing something successfully.

Much better to let the evacuees stagnate and suffer and become a burden on already strapped host communities across the nation, while pumping ungodly sums of money into the coffers of well-connected companies like Halliburton, Flour, Bechtel, etc., which will pretend to be rebuilding New Orleans.

For the Democrats too, big federal projects that involve actually giving needed jobs to people are anathema. Too much like the old New Deal for modern tastes.

In the end, the losers will be the American taxpayer, who will have subsidized one of the greatest public heists of all time, and the people of New Orleans, who for the most part will no longer be able to return to, or perhaps even recognize their city when Bush, Congress and their corporate cronies get through with the place.
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October 3, 2005

Slaughter by the Book--America in Iraq

The US military has decided that although American troops killed Knight-Ridder reporter Yasser Salihee on June 24 in Baghdad, no one needs to be punished, because the sniper who shot him in the head as he drove to get gas for his car to take his daughter to a swimming pool had followed the Pentagon's "rules of engagement."

But that's the problem, isn't it?

Those "rules of engagement" that are being used by US occupation forces in Iraq have led to the deaths of at least 13 journalists--an astonishing toll of slaughter. And these same "rules" have led to tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths in the same manner--deaths we don't even hear about.

The number of journalists killed has led Reuter's global managing editor, David Schlessinger, to write to Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Sen. John Warner (R-VA), saying that the US military in Iraq is "out of control." A total of 66 journalists have died so far, including three from Reuters.

What's needed aren't more investigations--though clearly there should be an investigation of every civilian death, and of every reporter's death. What's needed are new "rules of engagement" that don't lead to the slaughter of innocents.

Better yet, let's bring these uniformed "heroes" home right now before they kill again with official sanction.

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October 2, 2005

TheBloody Face of Colonialism and of State Terror --US Style

The Bush administration, which has already made a joke of Americans' birthright by imprisoning American citizen Jose Padilla for four years and running without charge, has now irrevocably destroyed America's image in Latin America by reintroducing official death squads in the American colony of Puerto Rico.

On the sacred Puerto Rican anniversary of the 1868 uprising called the Grito de Lares against Spanish colonial rule, over 100 heavily armed FBI agents, backed by helicopters and heavy weapons, surrounded the home of Puerto Rican militant nationalist Filiberto Ojeda Rios, 72, and his wife, who were home alone, and killed him with a single sniper bullet to the upper chest. Ojeda Rios, who was not mortally wounded by the shot, and who reportedly posed no threat to federal agents at any time, was left to bleed slowly to death as the agents barred entry to rescuers for 20 hours. (The Justice Dept. initially tried to claim agents responded to fire from Ojeda Rios, but later reports from his wife, a neighbor and others suggest that the aging rebel, who limps and uses a pacemaker, offered no resistance. The presence of multiple sharpshooters among the FBI assault team adds to suspicions about the agency's "self-defense" claim.)

Ojeda Rios gained notoriety in the U.S.--and a measure of fame and respect in Puerto Rico--as head of the Macheteros, a militant pro-independence group that succesfully robbed a Wells Fargo armored truck depot in Connecticut in 1983. After several years in hiding, he was caught and tried in federal court in Puerto Rico on attempted murder charges (involving the wounding of a federal agent) , but was acquitted by a jury that accepted his argument that the shooting had been an act of self-defense against U.S. government agents' aggression. While out on bond awaiting trial on the robbery charge, he cut off his monitoring anklet and went underground. Tried in absentia on that charge he received a 55-year sentence--the reason agents were still pursuing him.

The senseless and brutal assassination of Ojeda Rios, and the way the whole operation was conducted, with no warning to local law enforcement authorities and no effort to peacefully arrest him, should serve notice on all Americans (for remember, Puerto Ricans are all full U.S. citizens by birth) that this Bush administration is ready to resort even to death squads to enforce its will and to intimidate the public.

As with all such repression, this effort is doomed to failure. The response in Puerto Rico has been immediate, with all parties, including the usually docile pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party, and the pro-statehood party, condemning the murder, and the universities closing down for a day of mourning.

Many mainland Americans could be excused for missing the significance of this ugly event, which received very little news coverage. (Although New York is the largest Puerto Rican city in the world, the NY Times gave the story less than half a column on an inside page.)

But we ignore this act of state terror at our own peril. Who will be the next target of the "Justice" Department's official death squads?

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September 30, 2005

Judith Miller's Strange Voluntary 85-Day Lock-Up

Judith Miller really must have a lot of embarrassing things to hide.

She has portrayed herself as a noble journalist going to jail to protect her source's identity, and to uphold a journalistic principle.

The only problem is, her source didn't need protection. The source, VP Dick Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, says he told her quite clearly a year ago that she was free to discuss him and their conversation with Justice Department Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who is leading a federal grand jury investigation into the disclosure of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity.

That is to say, Miller had no reason to refuse to testify, to face a contempt charge, and to go to jail.

Miller claims she "wasn’t sure" that Libby’s releasing her from their confidentiality agreement was sincere or freely given. She "fretted" that the poor fellow (one of the most powerful and influential men in Washington) might have been coerced by his bosses, Cheney and Bush.

But Libby, through his attorney, insists he was not coerced and that he made that clear to Miller a year ago.

This all seems passing strange, doesn't it? The woman just did 85 days in the can on a civil contempt of court rap because she allegedly didn't believe that her source was being honest with her when he said she was free to talk about their conversations with the prosecutor?

Curiously though, Miller is not one to give much thought to the veracity of what her sources are telling her. After all, she certainly never questioned the sincerity of her sources, like Ahmad Chalabi (and Libby), when they were spilling their lies in her ear regarding uranium yellow cake purchases and biological weapons labs and poison gas hoards in Iraq. She took them at their word without even bothering to go to other sources to check them out, writing breathless and inaccurate scare stories that her employer, the NY Times, has subsequently had to apologize to readers for.

Maybe she's belatedly decided that these guys can't be trusted to tell the truth?

There has been speculation for some time that Miller, who never did write a story about the Plame case, but who had been a willing propagandist for the Bush administration's pre-Iraq War campaign of scare tactics regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's hands, and for the cynical "hunt" for those mythical WMDs in the early days of the war and occupation, was actually more a source or at least conveyor of the Plame outing story than a reporter of it.

If so, that would make her bizarre voluntary incarceration in the federal lock-up much more understandable. It would be embarrassing, and damaging to her reputation if it turned out she was behind the Plame outing to the media, or if she had helped White House sources to spread the word to the media.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall of U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald’s deposition room.

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September 29, 2005

What Opposition Party?

Iraq War going to hell, with U.S casualties approaching 2000 dead and 25,000 wounded, at a cost of $200 billion and rising.

Poverty in America on the rise in a period of supposed economic growth.

Republican Party a cesspool of corruption.

White House being investigated for outing undercover CIA agent.

Abortion rights under serious threat and civil liberties on the chopping block, with the Supreme Court being packed with right-wing judges.

New Orleans, just drying out from disastrous flood, being raped by White House-linked corporate pirates and scam artists.

Budget deficit topping half trillion dollars.

Gas and heating oil crisis looming, while oil companies reap record profits.

Bush poll numbers hit historic low as even some Republicans abandon him as an incompetent.

Oh yeah—all this and global warming and the end of human life as we know it.

Man, if you were an opposition politician looking to make a run for Congress next years, or for president in 2008, this would be a magical time.

But where’s the opposition?

The media tell us that the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 are Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Bill Richardson and maybe John Kerry.

What all these people have in common is their deafening silence on all the issues of importance facing Americans and America.

Not one dared show her or his face at the record demonstration against the Iraq War held in front of the White House last weekend.

None has spoken out on the Republican corruption scandals.

None has called for a public program to hire all the displaced of New Orleans to put them to work rebuilding the destroyed city. Instead, they are allowing Bush and the Republican Congress, with the acquiescence of Louisiana’s corrupt local Democratic Party, to bring in speculators and the same profiteers who have been sucking up the reconstruction money in Iraq.

None has offered a plan to attack the U.S. deficit and the hollowing out of the American economy.

None of these “leading opposition candidates” has even taken any kind of strong stand on global warming—for example calling for a tax surcharge on low-mileage cars and trucks and strict limits on carbon emissions by power plants plus a crash program to develop alternative energy sources.

The truth is that when it comes to the Democratic Party, the purported opposition party, there is no there there. It no longer exists.

You’d think the sorry experience of the last two presidential campaigns, where two Democratic candidates, Al Gore and John Kerry, ran spineless, uninspired campaigns that managed to avoid taking a progressive stand on any critical issue of the day, and predictably went down to defeat, dragging Democrats in Congress down with them, would have been a lesson: political cowardice and wedge issue pandering has no future.

Yet here we are five years into the Bush presidency, with Republicans imploding on their own greed and ineptness, and the Democrats are still afraid of their shadows.

Unless someone comes forward soon with an inspired progressive agenda, it’s probably time to let the Democratic Party go the way of the Whigs.

Simply letting the Republicans flounder will not win a single election, much less the race for the White House.

It used to be said that pulling the lever for a third party candidate was wasting your vote. These days, voting for a Democrat is wasting a vote.

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September 27, 2005

Reversing Posse Comitatus Means Iraq Here at Home

George Bush has become a classic Johnny One Note: If there's a problem, call out the troops.

That, of course, was his response to 9/11.

It was his belated response to the flooding of New Orleans too, you may recall. The first thing the president did when he finally left off his vacation and returned from his fund-raising event, was to get M-16-armed troops (and, apparently, Blackwater mercenaries with even heavier weaponry) into the city to start shooting to kill people who were desperately trying to survive.

Now, confronted with the lowest public support figures of his (or almost any) presidency, this singularly detached and inept president is proposing that Congress repeal the 127-year-old Posse Comitatus Act so that the Pentagon can send active duty troops into domestic crisis zones without even so much as an executive order.

Presumably the folks who came up with this horrible idea (it's got Karl Rove’s greasy fingerprints all over it), figure that this plays to Bush's "strength"--the carefully tended myth that this drug-and–alcohol addled Vietnam-era National Guard AWOL somehow knows how to be tough and to use military "assets".

Lord knows where this idea gets its legs. He certainly hasn't displayed any particular military leadership skills in his handling of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, which surely will become (like Hitler's decisions not to invade Britain and to invade Russia) classic case studies in what not to do in military schools from the Virginia Military Institute to West Point for decades to come. But be that as it may, we should be doubly concerned about this very bad idea.

First of all, why would anyone want people who were trained to shoot off everything they've got in a 360-degree radius whenever they sense danger being sent into American neighborhoods to rescue people or to restore order? American troops have been firing off an average of 90,000 rounds of ammunition per soldier in Iraq, and at best they've killed maybe a few thousand insurgents (that would be one insurgent per 250 U.S. soldiers, or looked at another way, one insurgent per 22.5 million shells). Clearly these guys are not good at shooting enemies. What they have been pretty good at, unfortunately, is killing innocents. Hey, nobody’s counting (the U.S. occupation authorities won’t let anyone count), but the estimates for civilian deaths in Iraq caused largely by American forces range somewhere between 25,000 and 125,000--most likely the latter.

Are these the kind of guys you want coming into your neighborhood when you have a flood or a tornado?

I think not.

Then there's the matter of our basic rights.

Remember those? No illegal search and seizure. No billeting of troops in homes. Freedom of speech and assembly. All those sacred Constitutionally-protected rights went down the toilet when Bush's troops rolled into New Orleans. And that is what we can expect to see become routinized if this latest Bush/Rove scheme gets the nod from Congress.

Beyond that, one thing that has distinguished the U.S. from much of the rest of the world, and that has helped to preserve what democracy we have in this country, is that the army has remained very professional and removed from politics. There has not been a military coup in the U.S. since the country's founding, and many military leaders thankfully have a strong distaste for involving the uniformed forces in that kind of thing.

That said, during the Nixon and Reagan administrations, there were well-documented plans developed (with names like Operation Garden Plot, and Rex Alpha) for establishing martial law in the nation, or in parts of the nation--something that it appears has also been going on in the bowels of the White House and the Pentagon during this president's two terms.

The Posse Comitatus Act makes establishing military rule much harder to do. It gives those military officers who might want to resist martial law orders something to hang on to.

That bar to using the armed forces domestically should not be lightly tossed out just because of one example of incompetence by the White House and Homeland Security.
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Sept. 25, 2005

It Isn't Size That Matters; It's the Message

100,000? (DC police, AP) 250,000? (my unscientific count) 300,000? (organizers) 500,000? (Truthout’s William Pitt and CNN).

Really, who cares how many marched and rallied in Washington on Saturday?

The important thing is that huge numbers of people of all ages, races, and walks of life, from all over the country--more people than the right could hope to entice to any event, even if it paid them--converged on the White House to condemn the War on the people of Iraq, and to condemn administration whose domestic policies are destroying the country.

As a conservatively dressed middle-aged woman from Buffalo, NY, riding the Metro back to her hotel, said, explaining why she had trekked all the way down to the nation’s capital with a friend to join the protest, “I just got tired of sitting around the house being angry all the time.”

If the presidential election last November left a lot of progressives and anti-war Americans in a funk of debilitating doom and gloom, the remarkable phenomenon of Cindy Sheehan’s vigil in Crawford, Texas, which culminated in this mass movement to confront the White House over the Iraq War, was the antidote, and a sure sign that people are over their depression and ready to renew the struggle.

Clearly the disaster in New Orleans gives this movement an extra shot in the arm. The most widely heard and popular slogan at the march was a takeoff on an iconic line from the ‘60s: “Make levees, not war!”

The Saturday march was important in another way, too. It marked an end to the petty bickering between various groups on the left over what stance to take on the war. The two main sponsors of the event, A.N.S.W.E.R. and United for Justice and Peace , have been at odds for the past three years over positions on Israel and Palestine and other touchy topics, with A.N.S.W.E.R. being supportive of the Iraqi resistance, while UJP has limited itself to calling for an end to the U.S. invasion and occupation. For this march, they put their differences aside and liked up around Sheehan’s unambiguous call: “Bring the Troops Home Now!”

Even more cautious groups allied with the Democratic Party, notably MoveOn, while timidly declining to sponsor the demonstration and carefully noting their “disagreements” with A.N.S.W.E.R., offered their help in calling for a massive rally. MoveOn gave details about the march and rally schedule on its widely read website and in mass emails, as did Progressive Democrats, who were well-represented on the march.

One big change, readily apparent at this march, was that there was much greater participation by younger people than at earlier anti-Iraq War marches, which had looked more like reunions of veterans of the 1960s marches. Masses of college-age students carried home-made signs saying things like “Campus, not combat!” while others, including high-schoolers, carried signs condemning the lies of army recruiters. There may be no conscription yet, but clearly the young are seeing that this war of choice is being fought by them and their age cohort, who are being lured or forced into the military by an economy that is leaving them with few other choices.

The other big development, spearheaded by Sheehan and Celeste Zappala and their Gold Star Families for Peace organization, and by groups like Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War and more recently by Iraq Veterans Against the War, has been the huge role being played by those either in the military or out of it or by their families. While VVAW was an important part of the anti-war effort during the campaign against the Indochina War, soldiers and veterans in that movement were never at the head of the campaign. In today’s anti-war movement, they are its heart and soul.

It remains to be seen how the movement will build from this point. The phenomenon of Cindy Sheehan has clearly not run its course. With the war going from bad to disastrous, with the US death toll approaching 2000, with gas and heating oil prices soaring, and with the Bush administration becoming a national laughing stock, the focus will now surely be the off-year Congressional elections that are just over a year away.
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September 23, 2005

Liberators or Occupiers--Just Look Who's Calling the Shots

Just what kind of ally is the US and its Coalition of the Willing or Sort of Willing?

First, imagine if you will that the U.S., unable to get enough troops into New Orleans to handle the post-Katrina rescue and security situation, had invited in German or maybe Venezuelan troops (actually on offer from Hugo Chavez). Imagine then that those foreign troops had begun busting into people’s homes to haul them out of town, had begun shooting people they considered to be lawbreakers, and had conducted aerial bombardments of neighborhoods deemed too dangerous to go into. Imagine that U.S. authorities called for a halt to such activities, only to be told by the foreign forces’ generals that they were going to continue with their aggressive tactics to keep their own casualties down.

Got the picture? Well, you’ve just pictured today’s Iraq and Afghanistan.

In theory, both countries are "sovereign" nations that have asked the U.S. military, which installed their governments in power, to stay on and defeat local insurgencies.

Note that this would imply that the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan are the bosses, with the U.S.-led military forces in each country playing a supporting role.

And yet in both Iraq and Afghanistan, we have the governments complaining about the way those military forces are operating.

In Afghanistan, President Hamed Karzai has told the U.S. military that he doesn't think they need to or ought to be conducting aerial strikes against Taliban forces. Nor does he want them to continue the standard practice of busting into houses in the dead of night to conduct search-and-destroy, or search-and-arrest operations. One can understand the president's frustration. The air strikes have led to some truly dreadful tragedies, in which whole families, including women and small children, have been killed, and the busting down of doors and the rousting of families from their homes creates more enemies than it captures.

Yet the response of the U.S. military, allegedly an invited "guest" of the Afghan regime, has been dismissive. U.S. military policy is heavily dependent upon air power, which is seen by the Pentagon and the White House as a way of minimizing U.S. casualties--a key goal for domestic political reasons--while smashing into homes is a way of creating an atmosphere of terror and fear--a second key goal that seeks to scare locals into not supporting the insurgency.

In Iraq, the situation is similar. The Iraqi government says it must have the final say before US air strikes or assaults on towns and villages, but the U.S. military ignores the demand, knowing that the Iraqi government is permeated with insurgent sympathizers who could tip insurgents' hands to every planned attack.

In the south, in majority-Shiite Basra, the police are so dominated by anti-occupation Muktada Al Sadr militia forces, that British forces there had to attack and destroy a police station with a light tank to release two British soldiers who had been arrested by local police.

The U.S. military's casual dismissal of government authority in Iraq and Afghanistan makes it clear that the governments in both countries are not what they claim to be--sovereign authorities--but rather are puppets of the U.S. It is also clear that the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq, far from being playing the stated role of "liberator," is an occupation army.

It is a hopeless position, with insurgencies growing rapidly in both countries. The stronger those insurgencies become, the more aggressive the U.S. military will have to become, and the bigger the disconnect will become between the illusion of local government “sovereignty” and the reality of U.S. occupation. At some point, reality will intervene, and the U.S. will be forece to withdraw from both countries in humiliating defeat.
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September 22, 2005

Price Fixing? Of Course There's Oil Price Fixing

There is so much propaganda, faith-based economic theorizing and simple ignorance and naiveté surrounding the question of soaring gasoline and oil prices in this country!

For heaven’s sake, of course there is collusion, monopolistic behavior and price fixing in the oil industry.

Start with the OPEC, that gang of producers, largely in the thrall of the major oil companies, which sets production quotas for most of the major oil producing nations.

Then move to the large companies. There used to be seven. Now there are far fewer mega companies, thanks to mergers like Exxon/Mobil and BP/Amoco.

But even those few companies aren’t really functioning as independent, competitive enterprises. Because refineries, offshore drilling platforms and pipelines are gigantic multi-billion-dollar capital projects--a typical refinery can cost upwards of $5 billion to construct--most are joint projects involving several oil companies, while others lease the use of them. In such a situation, all those elements of a business which are normally closely-held trade secrets important to maintaining competitive advantage--inventories, crude reserves, pricing, production rates, relative mix of heating oil, low and high-octane gasoline, etc.--are common knowledge.

It’s not like a typical business--say automobiles or television sets--where companies keep those kinds of numbers secret or, if they collude, have to do it by meeting in secret and agreeing on higher prices. The executives of the oil industry never have to get together, whether over a game of golf or in a back office. They know all about each other's operations without ever talking. Collusion, not competition, is a way of life in this industry.

There is simply no way to use a competitive model to explain what happened to gasoline prices after the Katrina storm hit New Orleans. At best, 10 percent of production was shut down, according to reports. That’s 10 percent of 1/4 of U.S. demand--a tiny amount. Even if it were 10 percent of total demand because of reduced import ability at the Louisiana port, we're talking about 10 percent, while gas prices rose 25-35 percent and even more in some areas. Not often mentioned in the same articles on this phenomenon was the fact that the world price of oil actually fell by almost 10 percent over the same period.

When the world oil price rises, I notice, as I'm sure most readers also notice, that the price at the pump is up the next day--sometimes the same day that a report comes out. Yet oil from places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait takes month to go from the wellhead to retail gas stations in the U.S. Even oil from Venezuela takes weeks to become gas at the station in the U.S. What other product do you know of where the retail price in stores jumps immediately when the price of raw materials that goes into it goes up? Does bread go up at the store the day that wheat prices kick up on the Chicago Merc? Does candy in the story go up when the price of sugar rises on the Comex? Of course not! Just gasoline and home heating oil. So if more expensive crude oil doesn't actually physically get to the pump for months, and the price at the pump goes up immediately, who’s pocketing that money in the meantime? Hint: It's not your local gas station owner. Just check out the stock prices of the oil companies, and you’ll have the correct answer.

In a competitive model, the kind Milton Friedman likes to celebrate, companies like Sunoco and Exxon would keep their retail prices as low as possible until costs forced them to raise prices--something that simply doesn’t happen. Indeed, it's a one-way arrangement. When the per barrel price of crude falls, the price at the pump hangs at its high level, sometimes for weeks, but if crude goes up, so does the pump price. Consumers can't shop for bargains because all gas stations behave the same way. For the most part, though, it's not the stations that are doing this--many of them aren't even independent businesses, but are owned by the major companies--but rather the oil companies themselves. The money that results from this collusive, monopolistic behavior, in other words, is accruing to the oil companies and their stockholders.

The beauty of this arrangement, from the oil industry’s perspective, is that nobody can be fined or jailed for it. Under U.S. anti-trust law, it's not illegal to have collusive results. The government would have to prove collusive behavior, and as long as the oil executives don't actually sit in a room or a teleconference, and expressly conspire to collude on raising prices or cutting production, it simply cannot be done.

If Congress and the White House were serious about combating price rigging and coordinated production slowdowns, they would be changing the anti-trust laws so that the objective existence of anti-competitive pricing and production alone would be illegal, not just deliberate conspiring to fix prices. A simple step would be just to make all the competitive information regarding production and pricing of oil and oil products, all the way from wellhead to pump, public. After all, if the oil companies all know everything about each other's internal pricing and production, there’s no justification for keeping that information from the public. Instead we have the opposite situation of course: secret meetings by our oil-industry-subsidized vice president and executives of the oil industry, where real collusive decisions were made.

Oil and energy are too crucial to the economy and to people's daily lives to allow them to remain the private domain of oil company executives and the oilmen--Bush and Cheney to name two--who run this blood-and-oil administration.

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September 20, 2005

Sinking News Ships: It's Not the Rats That Will Be Leaving

Today brings news that at least three major metropolitan dailys, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as the Boston Globe, plan to slash their payrolls in an effort to stay profitable even as their readership continues to flee.

One can always hope that in making these cuts--4% a the Times and 16% at the Inquirer, and whatever the planned figure is at the Globe--they will move to improve the publications by cashiering the laziest, least principled journalists and the ones who have spent their days sucking up to the wealthy and the powerful.

Alas, this much to be desired result seems wildly unlikely. First of all, all three publications will first offer voluntary buyouts to employees, to get people to agree on their own to quit.

While that could lead to some salutary departures of some of the highly paid senior staff who have long since ceased being real journalists, the likelihood is that many of the three publications' better reporters and editors, seeing the grim handwriting on the wall of a dying enterprise, will take the opportunity to grab a big severance check and move on to better venues, leaving the papers worse even than before. That’s something that, in the case of the Inquirer, is hard to imagine, and that in the case of the Times, requires some effort (I can’t speak for the Globe, as I don’t read it often, though I know it, too, is a shadow of its earlier self).

The real joke is that cutting staff is not going to save any of these sinking garbage skows. The Times has become such a sad joke--still calling itself the nations's "paper of record," with that silly motto "All the news that's fit to print," but routinely failing to cover the important news of the day (to see some of what the Times has missed, check out this year's 25 most important ignored stories at Project Censored). The Inquirer, meanwhile, actually made a conscious decision a few years back to reduce its coverage of the city of Philadelphia, its home, in favor of doing puffy stories from bureaus in the burbs. The hope was that by offering the supposedly more conservative denizens of suburbia "news-lite" features about their communities, the once famous muckraking journal would gain readership where the moneyed classes lived. Knight-Ridder management cynically decided that the largely minority and poor dwellers of the gritty city that is Philadelphia, and their magnificently corrupt city government, weren't worth the effort, since advertizers don't really care about those readers anyway. In the end, the effort has been a predictable disaster: the Inquirer offers little news of significance concerning the city, and little news anyone cares about concerning the suburbs, so readership is down everywhere.

The new personnel cuts will only make these journalistic embarrassments even worse and even less critical to the daily life of the people in their circulation areas, which will lead to a predictable further decline in circulation and to future cuts in personnel. Nor are these likely to be the only papers making such a move. With most newspapers now in corporate clutches, and with the managers of the media conglomerates demanding unattainable profits, the downward spiral of jobs and the abdication of any sense of journalistic mission will only accelerate in newspapers across the nation.
=================================

September 19, 2005

The Real Story: Germans Reject Thatcherism and Being US Puppet

The real story of the German election, which has not been accurately reported in the American corporate media, is that the left won.

The combined tallies of the ruling Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) of Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder, its coalition partner the Green Party, and a new leftist party, the Left Party, composed of the former Communist Party of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and breakaway leftists from the SPD, add up to almost 52 percent of the vote, and represent a majority of the Bundestag, the German parliament.

But Schroeder and the SPD, who like Tony Blair and the British Labour Party, have moved decisively away from the SPD's socialist roots and traditions, are vowing not to cut a deal with the Left Party, which of course, would be able to demand significant concessions (and important cabinet posts) from the SPD on things like continued funding of social programs, protection of unions and union jobs, and the like in return for its participation in the government.

Absent such an agreement with the Left Party, Schroeder, to cobble together a working parliamentary majority, would have to hang onto his current pact with the Greens and cut a deal with the economically conservative Free Democratic Party. The latter deal would pull the coalition much farther to the right than even the main SPD membership wants. There is also the risk that the Greens would refuse to join such a coalition, leaving the SPD still without a governing majority.

In the end, absent selling his party’s soul to the FDP (which would likely lead to further SPD defections to the Left Party), Schroeder’s only real choices are to accept a coalition that includes the Left Party, or to agree to a secondary role in a so-called “grand coalition” with the Conservative Union of his opponent, Angela Merkel, who has been described as a German Margaret Thatcher, hell-bent on dragging Germany and Germans away from the welfare state and into an American-style society where the rich get to keep their money and losers are left by the wayside to fend for themselves.

The reality shown in the election results is that a majority of Germans don’t want to see such a disaster foisted upon them, but you wouldn’t know that from following the American press, which was rooting for a big Merkel win, characterized typically in pre-election reports as representing a victory of reaction but for “reform.”

Schroeder himself, and his shriveled SPD, have clearly taken a deserved drubbing, but not because they have been pursuing a socialist political model. It is defections to the left, in the form of the Left Party, that forced the chancellor to call early elections, and that have left him without a governing majority to stay in power.

Germans, despite 11 percent unemployment, are not clamoring for Thatcherism. Indeed, Merkel’s CDU, with 35.2 percent of the vote, suffered one of its worst electoral showings, garnering only .9 percent more votes and 3 more seats than Schroeder’s own discredited and fractured SPD.

The newly formed Left Party, in its first national election foray, garnered 8.7 percent of the vote, out-polling the Green Party—not a bad showing when one considers how many Left Party sympathizers must have held their noses and voted for Schroeder and the SPD, fearing that polls predicting a decisive Merkel win might have been correct.

The U.S. media seem unwilling to admit that a country as economically well off, and as socially and politically conservative, as Germany, might have a majority that favors socialist or progressive solutions to economic and social problems, and might reject a candidate as sympathetic to American political views and American foreign policy as Merkel and the CDU, but that is the real message of the German election.

Whatever the outcome of intraparty negotiations to form a new government, it is clear that a majority of Germans still want a government that protects workers, protects the elderly, and that controls corporate power, and that maintains a foreign policy independent of the U.S.
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September 17, 2005

Bush's Blue Light Special

Three cheers for Maureen Dowd for exposing the sham of President’ Bush's Jackson Square speech to the nation announcing his "recovery plan" for New Orleans, and a big fat raspberry for the electronic media--including Dowd’s own New York Times--for failing to mention it in their "hard-news" coverage of the speech.

I knew it as soon as I saw the color-coordinated president standing there on screen in front of a beautifully lit cathedral façade in a city that was still all dark: this was a made-for-TV fake. But Dowd nailed it.

For those who missed it, Bush, dressed in a pressed, blue, open-collar dress shirt (certainly not "badly-tailored" this time as it allegedly was during the debates!), was backed by a professionally blue-light-bathed St. Louis Cathedral. What Dowd pointed out in her 9/17 column, was that the lighting was flown in by the White House advance team, along with generators (most of New Orleans is still under water and without power). To spare the American public from seeing the depressingly darkened ghost town of the surrounding mostly empty French Quarter, the Bush advance team also flew in military camouflage netting, which was strung up behind the president to block out all buildings but the cathedral.

As Dowd pointed out, the setting, on TV screens, resembled nothing so much as the Disney Sleeping Beauty Castle--an appropriate metaphor for the whole Bush presidency, with its focus on imagery, stagecraft and hocus-pocus.

What boggles the mind is how our national media have become so inured to this kind of manipulation that most reporters don't even bother to mention it--or if they do, most editors cut it, considering it to be either non-news or evidence of bias. Viewers and readers are left in the dark about the way they are being deceived by the lighting.

Really, how hard would it have been for a print reporter, writing about the speech, to mention the Herculean effort that went into setting up the stage for the president's address? (The Times did mention the charade in a reporters notebook filed by White House scribe Elisabeth Bumiller, but the information should have appeared in the page-one hard-news report on the address.) How hard would it have been for a TV reporter to have the camera crew cut to some of the scenes of blacked-out buildings behind the netting, or to the generators roaring away to provide the artful backlighting? After all, given the incredible ineptness and unconscionable callousness displayed by the White House in getting rescuers to the scene of the flood, it is surely relevant to show how efficient the same White House's PR operation can be at getting crucial equipment like lights and generators into the battered city when it's a matter not of lives, but of the president's image.

At this point, I'd be interested in hearing what happened to those generators. Having schlepped them all the way into the ravaged city, did the White House donate them to the relief effort, or did they just pack them up and fly them out again, the way they did with the fake "relief supplies" that were set up for a staged earlier visit by the president to flood victims in Mississippi (a bit of information that was also left out of American coverage but reported by a German TV reporter)?

My own guess is that this fakery is all of a piece with a much larger sham. Just as the White House is faking the backdrops in the president's public appearances, most of his major public initiatives are also just smoke and mirrors. No Child Left Behind was a classic of the genre, as were early promises of federal aid to New York City after 9-11.

It should come as no surprise when the latest promises for major federal support for the rebuilding of New Orleans turn out to be hollow, too.

After all, having thoroughly blown the budget on the $300-billion-and-counting Iraq War, the president really has no money to offer. He's already said that there will be no rescinding of the mammoth tax giveaways to the rich and corporations to fund the rebuilding program, which could cost as much as $200 billion. In fact, he's still pushing for more tax cuts. And much of the money for rebuilding the drowned city, the president says, will have to come from cuts in other federal programs (read poverty programs), which means that what one hand gives to New Orleans--one of the poorest cities in America--will be taken away from its residents by the other. Note, for example, a planned 13-percent increase in Medicare outlays by individual recipients.

What Dowd showed us in her excellent column was a Potemkin president. What the president announced in his carefully staged address from New Orleans was a Potemkin recovery program.

==============================

Frances Newton, Executed in TX, 9/14/2005
newton.jpg
A victim of the newsmedia's obsession with Katrina

September 15, 2005

Katrina Victim: Frances Newton RIP

Frances Newton died Wednesday for Bush's sins.

The 40-year-old black woman, executed by the death-obsessed state of Texas last night following a rejection by the US Supreme Court of her attorneys' last-ditch appeal, and after the state's craven and bloodthirsty "pardons and parole" board refused to recommend a stay to Gov. Rick Perry, hardly merited mention in the nation's media, which are now awash in stories about Bush's disaster in New Orleans. (The story got a 79-word shirt-tail report on page 25 of the New York Times, tucked under a larger story about the House changing rules for hate crimes and child molesters, and next to a story about Hurricane Ophelia.)

Those who are looking for an example of an innocent person's being executed by the state may well find it in the case of this unfortunate woman, who almost certainly was not guilty of killing her husband and child as charged by the state of Texas.

Her guilt was always hard to fathom, with the prosecution claiming that, after killing her alleged victims, Newton somehow left the scene, disposed of the gun, and returned only 30 minutes later with not a trace of blood on her body or clothes, which were all dry--a good trick, as OJ Simpson could attest, given the amount of blood at the scene.

Newton insisted on her innocence of the crime right up to her death, and offered an alternative theory--that her husband and 7-year-old had been killed over a debt to a drug dealer--a theory that her notoriously inept and subsequently suspended attorney Ronald Mock never bothered to investigate. Newton claimed she had removed a gun from the house after hearing her husband and his brother talking about "some trouble," and she thought it better to get the weapon out of the house.

The trial was rife with improprieties and prosecutorial misconduct--the most egregious of which was that investigators had recovered not one but three identical .25 cal. pistols during their investigation of the case, while the prosecution pretended there had been only one pistol recovered and improperly hid information about the other two from the defense. It was also rife with the standard neglect and incompetence we've come to expect from underpaid, unmotivated and incompetent public defenders provided to poor and black defendants in such cases--Mock never even brought in Newton's dead husband's parents, who had volunteered to testify on her behalf, and who have steadfastly opposed her execution!

Ironically, when there was more attention being paid to the case back in December 2004, Gov. Perry granted a 120-day stay from execution because of evidentiary questions in the case that raised some doubt about her guilt. Yet the matter of the multiple guns and the outrageous hiding of important exculpatory evidence from defense--which raised much more serious questions about her guilt and about the fairness of her trial--came up subsequent to that stay. In other words, doubts about Newton's guilt were much greater the day she was executed than they were last year when Perry granted a stay.

So what was different between December '04 and September '05? The lack of public and media attention to the case.

Katrina and the disastrous Bush response to the deadly flooding of New Orleans simply trumped the story of the first execution of a black woman since the Civil War.

Of course, Newton also got less media attention all along because of her race. The execution of an admitted female killer, Karla Faye Tucker, by Texas only seven years ago, was page-one news for weeks leading up to her execution. What was different? Certainly not the depravity of the crime, as her bloodthirstiness was stunning. The real difference was her race--Tucker was white--and the fact that Tucker had “found God” while on death row.

So, in a sense one could say Newton is yet another victim of Hurricane Katrina, though given her race and class, it is quite likely she would have died anyway had the hurricane never hit the Gulf Coast. She is, however, clearly also another notch for chief executioner George Bush. It was while he was governor that her shameful trial unfolded. It was on his watch as governor that her initial efforts to win a new trial were rejected, it was a state pardons and parole board that still bears the marks of Bush's appointments that rejected her plea for her life, and it was in Bush's shadow as the former Governor Death that her latest effort to win a stay or a pardon from Bush's successor, Gov. Perry, that she finally had her date with a lethal injection.

It is now time for death penalty opponents and the team of appellate defenders who fought for Newton’s life to redouble their efforts to prove her innocence, and to once and for all demonstrate the monstrosity of the sick, racist death penalty in not just Texas but the entire United States.

Meanwhile, it should be noted that Judge John Roberts continues to imply in his testimony at the Senate hearing considering his nomination for Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court that he thinks condemned prisoners like Newton have been been given too many chances to challenge their convictions, and that the march to the death chamber needs to be faster,

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September 10, 2005

Temporary Compassion While the Cameras are Rolling

The Republican Congress (and their conservative Democratic quislings) have decided to show a little compassion for the victims of Bush Administration incompetence and nature's revenge by including a waiver in the bankruptcy bill to exempt them from losing their shirts along with their houses. They've also decided to postpone cuts in Medicaid, so as not to gut what little public healthcare remains in Louisiana during this crisis.

Notice, though, that they're only doing this for the tragic victims who are filling prime time TV screens. They aren't cancelling the bankruptcy bill, which is a conservative and banker's wet dream long in coming. And they aren't cancelling plans for slashing Medicaid...just postponing them.

This isn't compassion. This is covering your ass while people are upset about a national tragedy.

After all, why would the person whose house was destoyed by a tornado, or an overflowing creek, or who lost a job because her or his company had decided to move operations to Mexico or China, be any less deserving of bankruptcy protection than someone who was made homeless and/or jobless by a hurrican with a given name? Why should a poor person in New York City or Tonopah, Nevada without resources or insurance have to endure cuts in Medicaid assistance while a victim of the winds and flooding form Katrina in New Orleans or Mississippi is given such help? There is no reason, of course. It's all about the politicians looking good while the reporters in the corporate media temporarily pay attention to the suffering in the midst of American plenty.

Once this crisis has passed, as it eventually will, and once the media have moved on to the next celebrity scandal, these political shysters and image mavens will be back to screwing the poor and the working class again in the interests of their corporate patrons. When nobody's looking at the suffering that is caused by Congress's actions, the bankruptcy bill will put hundreds of thousands of unfortunate families into permanent peonage, and the Medicaid cuts will consign millions to third-rate or no medical care.

Unless we start demanding better news coverage, and unless we vote the bastards out next year.

Meanwhile, here's a scary thought:

According to a recent poll, one in five Americans, or 20 percent of the adult population, believes that the sun revolves around the earth. Meanwhile, at latest count, only 38 percent of the American public supports President bush. Assuming--and I think this is a reasonable assumption to make--that all of those who believe the biblical notion of geocentricism vote Republican, this would mean that more than half of bush the lesser's backers--52. 7 percent to be exact--don't even know that the earth orbits the sun. The most powerful nation on earth, that is to say, is being run, if that word can be properly applied here, by a bunch of total yahoos, and a fair number of them are in policy-making positions in Washington these days. Now don't you feel better?

No wonder they've made such a hash of it in Louisiana.

==============================

September 8, 2005

Katrina's Silver Lining

If there is any silver lining to the smoke-laced cloud that is hanging over the toxic cesspool and mass graveyard that used to be New Orleans, it is the just desserts that are coming to the millions of people who put the Bush Administration and the lunatic right in power in Washington.

Sure, the poor are getting clobbered in New Orleans and across the breadth of the Gulf coast, and sure, we are all in for it now, progressives and political Neanderthals alike, as the economy stumbles and oil prices soar. But I still take keen satisfaction in watching as the gullible idiots who voted for a movement that promised them little token tax cuts and smaller government have to face the consequences of their selfish actions.

In a few short months, Bush's years of neglect of conservation, combined with his callous disregard for the security of New Orleans, will cost Americans more in heating and gasoline bills than all the tax breaks they have received and hoped to receive over the full eight years of the Bush presidency. The destruction of the port of New Orleans will end up sending food prices on an inflationary spiral even as the economy is likely to slip into recession. Perhaps most deliciously of all, the inflation in energy and food prices that will result from New Orleans' decimation, combined with the massive increase in the government budget deficit its rebuilding will entail, ensures that the Federal Reserve will have to continue raising interest rates, thus popping the housing bubble that has so enriched homeowning, mostly Republican, voters. (The biggest inflation in housing has occurred in wealthy Republican Sunbelt regions of Florida and California, and in the high-end, mostly Republican neighborhoods of major cities like Boston, New York and San Francisco.)

All of this was predictable. You couldn't have known that it would be New Orleans that would be the keystone whose removal would crumble the right-wing edifice. It could have been the War in Iraq, which promises to get worse and worse. It could have been the long-predicted Big One in California, or the still looming Bird Flu epidemic. In the end it was a moderately big hurricane and a dead city that did the trick. But the groundwork for disaster was laid over the last few decades by a mass of middle-class people who somehow believed (with a fervor akin to that of fundamentalists who believe the earth is flat and was formed in seven days) that it would be a great idea to put into federal office people whose fundamental ideological view is that government doesn't work, does everything (except making war and convicting and executing the right people) badly, and should be made as small and weak as possible.

Yet with such governmental nihilists in power, how could the outcome in New Orleans have been other than an epic disaster? Would these people have hired teachers for their schools who didn't believe kids could learn? Would they have gone to doctors when they were sick, who professed a belief that medicine was a joke? Would they have hired a contractor to build their home who said that engineering and architecture were for sissies?

The Bush/Republican approach to disaster relief is to stay on vacation (Bush and Cheney), go shopping (Secretary of State Condi Rice), let the locals handle it (FEMA Director Michael Brown), stay in Washington and insist everything is fine (Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff), and then to call on people to make contributions to the Salvation Army and Rev. Pat Robertson’s “charity” slush fund. Republicans gutted the Federal Emergency Management Agency, slashed funding to states and local governments for basic police and fire services, shipped off existing first responder personnel (who generally join National Guard units because it makes sense, and because they pick up some extra cash) to Iraq, where they were never meant to be. Then they appointed a dim-witted political hack to head it all up, and they put him under a Homeland Security secretary whose prior management experience was ordering around a couple of court clerks and a court stenographer, and who has displayed his grasp of the current crisis facing his department by declaring that Louisiana is a city. (If America were Japan, the streets of downtown Washington today would be slippery with the gore of legions of leaders and department heads, from the president on down, committing ritual harikiri. Sadly, our leaders don't do such things; they just blame subordinates or others.)

One has to hope that this debacle--the unprecedented loss of an important American city and the slaughter of 10,000 or more innocent people through incompetence and malicious neglect—and the ensuing financial pain it will inflict on the whole American public, including the me-first lot that put the whole conservative rat pack in Washington, will lead to a rebirth of rational self-interest and perhaps even of a social conscience in the American body politic.

Seeing fellow Americans going through the hell they have been enduring in New Orleans has to make some of the less cold-hearted of Republican and swing voters realize the evil that their own chosen leaders have wrought. Meanwhile, self-interest is likely to make even the empathy-challenged see the wrong-headedness of handing government over to those who deny its importance, or who simply use government as a tool for enriching themselves and their cronies.

Am I right? The polls showing Bush and the Republican congress now sinking below 34% in public support say yes.

And the real financial pain of New Orleans’ destruction has not yet begun to bite.

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September 2, 2005

Profiteering on Disaster: The Real Looters Wear Pinstripes

In a crisis, there are always those who will obscenely take advantage of the situation for personal gain.

I'm not talking here about the looters in New Orleans, as ugly and mean as some of their actions have been.

I am talking about the oil industry.

The evidence is clear:

Ten percent of American oil production is off line because of Hurricane Katrina. That has led to a nominal increase in the per-barrel world price of oil, since 10 percent of U.S. production represents only a single-digit portion of world demand. Yet gasoline prices in the US have soared, from about $2..40 per gallon before the hurricane hit to over $3.00 a gallon now nationwide—a jump of 25 percent.

Local gas station owners say that they have to raise their prices immediately because they only keep a few days’ supply on hand and need to have the cash to pay for the next delivery, which will be priced at the new higher wholesale rate. I am inclined to believe that, if their new price is only around 20-25 percent higher than before.

But clearly, somewhere between the oil coming out of the ground or into a port terminal, and those retail pumps, some businesses are cleaning up at the expense of the public.

Read that: the oil companies are gouging and profiteering on disaster.

All you need to do is look at the stock pages. Haliburton, the oil services company, is up from 28.69 to 62 over the year. Exxon/Mobil is up from 45.09 to 64.37 over the year. Sunoco is up from 30.26 a year ago to 73.22. The list goes on and on.

Back in World War II, there was an agency--led by a man named Harry Truman--which aggressively prosecuted companies that tried to profiteer on the war. Now profiteering on war, and on national tragedy it seems, is simply seen in Washington as good business, to be rewarded by investors.

Americans are now paying the price for handing all branches of the government over to one party. Even with the Democratic Party little more than an opposition in name only, if it had been in charge of even one of the two houses of Congress, you can bet that the dynamics of competitive politics would have led to hearings into price gouging and disaster profiteering, but with Republicans in charge in both chambers, the odds of that happening are zero. Likewise, with free-market zealots being appointed by President Bush in droves to the federal bench, don’t expect any relief in the courts.

The impact of the oil companies' incredible greed will be profound. It's not just that they are picking our pockets at a time of national crisis; their short-term profiteering is likely to send the national economy into a tailspin as higher oil prices stunt consumer spending and push up all energy costs.

So far, the media coverage has focused on the actions of individual looters in the destroyed city of New Orleans. To the extent that gas prices have received attention, the focus has been at the retail end.

Nobody's talking about the middlemen, and especially about the giant corporations that are really raking it in.

When you think about it though, you have to say that the cold, calculating effort by some corporate executives to take advantage of a national tragedy is far more vile and reprehensible than the actions of desperate or even criminally opportunistic individuals in a city that was essentially abandoned for days by federal authorities.

The inaction of the Bush Administration and of the Republican Congress to challenge, or at least investigate, this outrage is equally disgusting.

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September 1, 2005

Baghdad in the Big Easy

There is a pattern starting to develop here in the way the Bush administration deals with urban crises.

Look at New Orleans and at Baghdad.

In both cases, you had a city that was facing imminent destruction--from a record-breaking hurricane in one case, and a well-planned mass bombing attack and invasion in the other.

In both cases, it was clear, and experts were warning, that there would be total destruction of the infrastructure and a need for a well-organized recovery program or the cities would descend into chaos and anarchy, with massive loss of life.

In both cases, the administration did nothing.

And in both cases, the cities did in fact descend into an orgy of anarchy, looting and needless and avoidable death.

We know the record in Baghdad. The Bush administration had American troops stand idly by as Iraqis--both forces from the defeated regime of the deposed Saddam Hussein and ordinary citizens--looted museums, stores, government buildings and schools, only taking steps to restore a semblance of order after even the electrical outlets had been removed from classroom walls.

Now look at the record in New Orleans.

With meteorologists and climatologists warning for several years that a warming ocean was making hurricanes stronger, and that it was only a matter of time before a dike-busting category 5 hurricane would clobber New Orleans, and with emergency preparedness experts and Army Corps of Engineers experts warning the dikes were weak and inadequate, the Bush administration first overruled development regulations that were designed to protect the wetlands south of the city that for centuries worked to blunt the storm surge of these typhoons. Then it proceeded to cut the federal funding for dike repair and improvement on the levies that hold the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain out of the city, most of which is 10-20 feet below sea level. To make matters worse, the White House didn't only divert dike funding to its Iraq War; it also diverted a third of Louisiana's National Guard troops, as well as almost all their amphibious vehicles, which would have proved invaluable at getting into the flooded area to rescue victims quickly, to the Iraqi desert. Finally, just as Bush ignored the 9/11 attack warnings and then dithered about reacting to those attacks, just he and his administration dithered around and did nothing during the chaos in post-bombing Baghdad, he waited crucial days before responding to the New Orleans crisis, actually flying off from his vacation in Crawford, Texas to a political rally in California before heading back to Washington and making a symbolic fly-by of the stricken city.

Not to justify the orgy of looting that has swept the ruined city of New Orleans, but just what did federal officials expect to happen? Fully 20 percent of the city's poorest population, mostly black, was left to fend for itself by emergency management officials.

These were people with no cars and no money for a bus out of town. Had the government reacted to the approach of Katrina with a massive caravan of military trucks, all these people, and the patients in the city's charity hospitals, too, could have been safely evacuated. Food could have been stockpiled out of the city at military bases and other assembly points to care for the evacuees.

Instead, they were all left to their own devices.

With no food and no water, and no rescue in site, the survivors in New Orleans did what anyone would do under those circumstances: the went to the local markets, which were flooded and closed, their food about to rot or rust away anyhow, and helped themselves.

Is that looting, or is that taking the initiative and surviving? (At the AP, apparently, it depends upon what race you are. One AP photo, of a black man wading through waste-deep water with a garbage bag full of food, described him as having "looted a grocery store." Another AP photo, of two whites wading through waste-deep water carrying similar bags, referred to them as "gathering food from a flooded grocery store.")

There are conspiracy theorists who speculate that the Bush administration and the Pentagon deliberately allowed Baghdad to descend into chaos, in hopes that this would thoroughly demoralize the Iraqis and make their subjugation under a government of occupation that much easier.

Perhaps this latest case of federal detachment and delayed response was also intentional—a way of having a Democratic bastion in the South self-destruct.

If so, it would be as gross a miscalculation as was the abandonment of Baghdad. But unlike Baghdad, and the War in Iraq, which have had little direct, obvious impact on the lives of ordinary Americans (unless they were are that minority who have relatives in the armed services), the crisis in New Orleans will affect us all quite dramatically. With Americans now paying well over $3/gallon for gas and heating oil, posing the threat of a new economic recession because of those higher energy prices, and with one of America's grandest cities destroyed and uninhabitable well into 2006, Hurricane Katrina could prove to be President Bush's Waterloo.
==============================

August 31, 2005

Bush and the Democrats: The Real Disaster

The destruction of New Orleans--a catastrophe far worse than anything Osama Bin Laden could hope to wreak, considering the number of deaths, the closing down of a major U.S. port city for months, the destruction of an urban environment that will take years to repair, and the devastating disruption of one-fourth of the nation's oil production, which is likely to initiate a national recession--gives final proof of the stupidity and criminality of the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq and of the bankruptcy of the Democratic so-called oppositon.

First there is the diversion of economic resources that saw New Orleans shortchanged on programs designed to harden the city for the inevitable arrival of super-strong, global-warming-fed hurricanes. The demands of the $200-billion+ war in Iraq caused already-budged funds for levy strengthening and raising to be withdrawn an diverted.

Then too, there is the gutting of the National Guard, which is mostly over in Iraq, leaving Louisiana and Mississippi, the two hardest-hit states, scrambling for first-response personal--a problem that is compounded by the common practice of having police, fire and emergency rescue personnel supplement their salaries by joining the Guard.

How stupid is it that we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on programs that are supposedly designed to deter or interdict terrorists--a nearly hopeless endeavor, given the ease with which terrorists can just figure out new ways around each new program.

Not, however, if all the government's resources are being diverted to war.

It is high time that the American public recognize that even if they don't have a relative at risk in Iraq, even if they don't personally feel the impact of that war in any obvious way, the whole nation is being put at risk by Bush's Iraq folly.

The best way to protect America and its people would be for the U.S. to become aggressively involved in combating the global warming that ensures that hurricanes like Katrina will become not the exception but the norm. The best way to defend American interests is to end the hollowing out of the economy that inevitably accompanies a war costing a fifth of a trillian dollars, and to invest in infrastructure improvement, education and the general welfare.

The Democrats should be all over this one, but don't hold your breath. That sorry bunch of moral cowards--Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Lieberman among them-- voted for the Iraq War and they have uttered scarcely a peep at the gutting of the domestic Guard units, instead calling for more troops to be sent over to Iraq. (Louisianans and Mississippians should be grateful their words were not heeded or there'd be nobody home to help!)

The only answer is for the public to demand that the National Guard be recalled for domestic duties, where they belong, and for the war to be ended, immediately.

Bad as it is, New Orleans is just a warning of future disasters sure to come. Heck, the hurricane season isn't even half over, and the ocean that produces them is getting hotter and hotter.

For my money, Osama couldn't have wished for a better ally in his campaign against the U.S. than President George "Bring `Em On" Bush.
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August 26, 2005

Another Mother for War

There was something truly repulsive about the way Bush and his handlers latched onto poor Tammy Pruett, the Idaho mother whose husband and four sons have already served or are still serving in Iraq.

I have no doubt but that this woman, despite all the smiles and cheering at the rally at which she received the presidential peck on the cheek, spends lonely nights wondering darkly what is happening to her three sons (her husband and one son are back from their tours). Any parent would, knowing their children were living in a shooting gallery and were the targets.

It was a travesty for Bush, as a way of striking back at the powerful anti-war protest by Cindy Sheehan and the other Gold Star Mothers who have lost loved ones, to parade this particular mother before the media and to quote her as having said that "…if something happens to one of the boys, they would leave this world doing what they believe, what they think is right for our country."

Maybe Pruett really said those words, though Bush's record with quotes is pretty god-awful. That quote, to me though, sounded awfully scripted. It reeked of Rove-speak, for really, what parent would knowingly contemplate the possible loss of a child and speak of it in even remotely positive terms. Most parents would not even dare utter the thought, for fear it might come true.

Besides, even if she did say something like that, there is a fundamental difference between Pruett, who has not lost a child or a husband in Iraq, and Sheehan or Gold Star co-founder Celeste Zappala, who each lost a son in that war. For Pruett, the idea of losing a child is still basically just an idea.

For Sheehan, Zappala and several thousand other grieving parents and siblings, it is a terrible reality.

And only when it becomes a real loss does the question really become asked in earnest: What did this young person die for?

That, after all, is the question Cindy Sheehan wants answered. She's not asking for President Bush's sympathy or for the Presidential Kiss, though that is how much of the media are portraying her quest. She wants a presidential answer. Why did her son, and all those other sons and daughters, have to die? What great cause did they give their lives for? What justification is there for her inconsolable loss?

And to that, the president has no answer—at least no satisfactory answer.

It is not saving the world from Weapons of Mass Destruction. Celeste Zappala's son was in a unit of troops who were protecting and working with the Survey Group that was "searching" for those WMDs. In fact, as she notes, face tight with anger, the president had already been before the Washington press corps performing a skit that had him looking under chairs and tables making fun of the whole WMD effort several weeks before her son was killed. Zappala's son by that point was, she says, only engaged in a charade designed to keep the illusion going that there was a serious search still undereway. Put another way, her son died in a PR campaign designed to make the president look good in an election year.

It is not bringing democracy to Iraq. At best, his war will produce some variant of an Islamic religious state, at worst a region of warring tribes.

So far, the best Bush can offer is that more soldiers should die so that those who've died already will not have died in vain. That's some answer. It's probably what the last lemmings say as they rush for the sea. At least it has the virtue of being endlessly applicable (you can say it after the first soldier dies, and after the 100,000th dies), but that's the most you can say for it.

To date, Pruett has been lucky. Her men have survived, and some have even made it home in one piece. For her and their sakes, I hope that's the way they'll all come home, but I suspect should she suffer the kind of loss that Sheehan and Zappala have suffered, the Bush White House will have a harder time getting her up there on a stage shilling for the war.
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August 18, 2005

Something Has Happened

It's not just Cindy Sheehan.

Something has happened in the country in the last few weeks.

Suddenly the deaths of Americans in Iraq are being recognized and talked about.

You could tell here in Philadelphia when the local TV news programs featured lengthy stories on the funeral plans of the half dozen National Guard troops who were killed recently.

You could tell too by a new attitude among the local reporters themselves.

All four of the broadcast network affiliates, including the local Fox station, sent reporters out to cover the August 17 candlelight vigil in support of Sheehan. All chose to send their crews to a church in Philadelphia's integrated Germantown section, where a Methodist church had announced a vigil as part of the MoveOn/True Majority-organized nationwide event.

Hosting that gathering was Celeste Zappala, who lost a son in Iraq in April, 2004 (the same month Sheehan's son Casey was killed), and who is a co-founder with Sheehan of Gold Star Families for Peace.

When the reporters from the network affiliates interviewed her, and heard her speak movingly about the losses being suffered not just by her but by families across the nation because of a war based upon lies for which so many reasons have been given and then debunked or rejected, there were tears in some of their eyes.

There were no hard-edged, cynical questions about motives or politics.

Something has happened.

The stories that ran late that evening, juxtaposed appropriately next to reports on the funerals and on the latest devastating bombing of a bus depot and a hospital in Baghdad that killed 43, were sober and respectful. No references to "`60s graybeards." No effort to scare up some small bunch of counterdemonstrators for "balance."

The national media may still be more timid about stories critical of the administration. Most seemed to think crying Jewish fanatics being forced by Israeli troops to give back land they had stolen from Palestinians in Gaza were more newsworthy than an aroused American public turning against an American war and its Commander in Chief.

The N.Y. Times buried its story on the nationwide vigil on an inside page, as did the Philadelphia Inquirer locally, leaving it to USA Today to give the story the page one prominence it deserved based upon simple news value.

That was why the local coverage was so important all around the country. Closer to the ground, away from the self-important editors of the national media, who seem to have trouble realizing they aren't part of the government, editors and reporters are picking up the groundswell of opposition to the war that is building with every new coffin unloaded at McGuire AFB.

You could see it in the street-hardened white Philly cop who, as he drove slowly down the cobblestoned Germantown Avenue pathway between the two rows of hundreds of candle-holding vigil-goers, made a peace sign with his fingers.

N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich may have jumped the gun and oversimplified when he wrote last week that someone needs to tell the president the war is over. It's certainly far from over. But its days are clearly numbered.
==============================

August 15, 2005

For Journalists on the Left, the Mix is Not Propitious

As a Philadelphia-based journalist, I have written about many issues that affect this fifth largest metropolitan region in the nation. For national publications.

I have written what many reviewers have called the definitive book on the biggest death penalty case in the state, the Mumia Abu-Jamal case (Killing Time, Common Courage, 2004). I have written myriad columns and op-ed articles on issues such as the Iraq War, the so-called "war" on terror, civil liberties threats, etc.--for national publications.

I make no claim to scrivener stardom, but I've done my share of investigative pieces that have appeared in national publications--and that have even been cited locally in Philadelphia.

What I have never managed to do is get an op-ed submission published in my hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Not for lack of trying, mind you. I've sent in many submissions over the years. And certainly not for lack of quality. I've had many a good piece passed over by the Inquirer (hardly a paragon of stylistic excellence) that has won approval in other publications.

I’ve often wondered why, even after having my book, Killing Time, favorably reviewed in the Inquirer, I have been so unsuccessful with the paper's opinion page.

But I finally got my answer. It came from the opinion page editor, John Timpane, whom I called recently to ask about the fate of my latest submission, an op-ed piece about the state legislature's recent passage of a resolution authorizing a legislative inquisition of liberals on the state's public university campuses. Mr. Timpane allowed that the piece was "well written" and addressed "an important issue." But he said that unfortunately his "mix was not propitious" for the foreseeable future.

I puzzled over that phrase for a while after hanging up.

I had, in my 32 years as a journalist, certainly never been told this before.

Then I realized what he meant. The paper, which runs opinion pieces from the far right (Charles Krauthammer) to the center (Matthew Miller), had recently made one of its rare forays to the left, with a piece by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. That column, sort of like a dash of cayenne in a soufflé, was enough to put poor Mr. Timpane off of left-leaning columns for as far into the future as he could imagine.

His mix was not propitious for another article from the left.

I’ve since learned from an Inquirer staffer that "mix" is a common term among the paper's senior editors, to the dismay of those hoary reporters who still hold to the old notion of truth-telling that once was a staple of the profession. Editors at the Inquirer reportedly discuss the "mix" of story topics that will be assigned, or that are to run in the next day's edition. They are referring, apparently, not to the matter of what is the right proportion of local, national and international news, the right ratio of sports, opinion, lifestyle, culture--these are basically predetermined by the size of various sections of the paper, and by the various news holes, and rarely change much. What they are referring to, I'm told, is the mix of political content of the news stories.

Only recently, at an editorial session, the matter of Cindy Sheehan and her remarkable campaign to meet with President Bush came up, and the news editor was heard to fret, "How can we cover this story without appearing biased?" The comment raised howls of protest from some staffers present, but it points out the news managers' thinking clearly enough.

As one staffer grouses, "I used to think news stories were decided on their own merits. If it was news, you ran it. Now a story, no matter how good, has to be considered in the context of other stories the paper is running. It's a question of the mix."

This new crabbed concept of what a newspaper is willing, or dares, to present to its readers is, I'm certain, not unique to the Inquirer, though among major metropolitan dailies, this once a proud standard-bearer of muck-raking journalism, today stands apart for its shabbiness and timidity. The mix--the day's paper taken in its entirety--must now adhere to a comfortable standard of centrist conformity, so as not to offend any group of readers (or at least any group of well-heeled readers). If there is an article critical of the president's Social Security plan, there has to be another article that presents the president in a favorable light, or that embarrasses his political rivals. If there is an article about things going badly in Iraq, there needs to be another in a more positive vein, or at least some other brighter foreign report.

This same kind of thinking about "mix" has long been common in television newsrooms, where "balance" has been a fetish for decades. But I know that in my days as a daily newspaper reporter, which ended in the late '70s, the term "mix" never came up. Stories were assigned and run, and given their placement in the paper and on the page based upon their intrinsic importance, not on how they fit politically with the rest of the issue. There might have been concerns expressed about the "balance" in an individual story, but I never heard anyone talk about "balancing" one story against another.

The joke of course is that there really is no "mix" at the Inquirer, which has purged genuine left-wing views from its pages, including its opinion pages, almost totally. As for its news pages, when a story as compelling as Cindy Sheehan's one-woman campaign to challenge a president and commander-in-chief can produce such editorial angst, the situation is no better. (And it is fear we're talking about here. After all, there would be no such discussion about "mix" were the paper about to run a story about a staged presidential appearance.)

The truly sad thing is that while the Inquirer may be a particularly noxious example of this pathetic decline in journalistic standards, most of the rest of the corporate media are not far behind.

When it comes to our mainstream sources of genuine information about what is going on in our communities, our states, our nation and the world, the mix is not propitious. Nor do I expect to be seeing my byline on the Inquirer opinion page any time soon. The politics are not propitious either.
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August 11, 2005

Bush Policy: Making the World Safer...For Nukes

The Bush administration has dug itself--and all of us---into an incredible hole when it comes to Iran. It is also doing its level best to move the nuclear doomsday clock to midnight.

First we have our war-mongering president blustering scarcely veiled threats about possible military action against Iran and its nuclear facilities--threats which the Iranians always knew to be bluffs, given that they have spread out their facilities and hardened them underground, and given how overstretched the U.S. military already is in Iraq.

Then we have the threats to seek sanctions from the U.N.--an institution which the same Bush administration has consistently trashed, lied to, underfunded and ignored for five years--and to which we have now dispatched a tarnished ambassador whose open animosity and disdain for the international organization is well known.

Finally, we have the Iranians themselves, victims of decades of abuse, manipulation, destabilization and proxy warmaking--not to mention having one of their passenger jets blown out of the air--by the U.S. This is a country that, finally on its own independent feet, and feeling feisty thanks to a flood of petrodollars and petroeuros coming in at a rate of $65/barrel. This is not a nation that is likely to listen to any orders -- or threats--emanating from Washington.

Whatever the flaws of the 1970 antiproliferation treaty, this administration in Washington has single-handedly destroyed the last hope of preventing the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons by establishing, and loudly promoting, the notion that America, as the world’s only "superpower," has the right to unilaterally invade or attack any nation on the globe on whatever pretext it wants to trump up, not to mention by calling for the development and deployment of nuclear "bunker-busting" weapons designed for use on Third World battlefields. (Bush and his gang should watch the "Spiderman" movie, with its message: With great power comes great responsibility, not omnipotence)

Iran has watched as North Korea, with nuclear weapons already built, has thumbed its nose at the U.S. It has watched as Pakistan, which perhaps more than any other nation, has contributed to the growth and invincibility of Al Qaeda, but which also has nuclear weapons, has remained on friendly terms with the U.S, even receiving supersonic fighter-bombers capable of delivering its nuclear weapons. It has watched India, which also has the bomb, take delivery from the U.S. of bomb-capable fighter-bombers while steadily improving trade relations with America. And of course it has watched neighboring Iraq, which didn't have the bomb, be invaded and torn apart by American military forces.

It has also, over the years, seen Grenada and Panama, Nicaragua and Haiti invaded, their governments overthrown and their leaders overthrown, killed or jailed at the hands of U.S. forces acting unilaterally or by proxy. It has seen an attempted coup in Venezuela with the clear fingerprints of U.S. direction. It has watched Cuba being strangled by a U.S. decades-long embargo--an act of war.

None of these victimized countries has the bomb, of course.

So tell me: If you were an Iranian government official—or even an ordinary Iraqi citizen—looking at all this, wouldn't you want the bomb, too?

On its face, it appears clear that countries that have the bomb have little to fear from the U.S., while countries that don't have it are in grave danger of being invaded, subverted, embargoed or in some other way threatened or bullied by America.

Given that the world is awash in nuclear material and given that most countries have or can hire scientists and technicians with the know-how to fashion it into bombs, current U.S. policy seems purely perverse. It is perfectly designed to promote the spread of nuclear weapons, and not surprisingly that is precisely what is happening.

If things don't change, and quickly, I predict we'll soon see a nuclear-armed Middle East, Far East, and Latin America. Even Africa, with its more limited resources, may not be far behind. Certainly Egypt, South Africa and Nigeria have the technical wherewithal and the resources to develop or buy a bomb. And of course, besides the almost inevitable regional nuclear wars that would then occur, the more nukes there are out there, the more likely one will fall into the hands of some group, or even some aggrieved small nation, that will decide to ship one to a U.S. port and detonate it to make a point.

Think about this the next time our Commander in Chief talks about how he's making America safer.

August 10, 2005

Terrorist Nation V: 50,000 Hiroshimas

US forces have fired or dropped over 3000 tons of depleted uranium or DU, primarily on the cities and town of Iraq.

Soldiers and military experts say that as each year goes by, the Pentagon keeps adding to the number of weapons that it uses DU in. Not only is it used for armor on Abrams tanks and other weapons systems; it is also used in bombs, shells, mines and anti-personnel bomblets. Even M-16 shells and pistol shells are now being made of this by-product of the nuclear industry.

According to Japanese physicist, Professor Yagasaki from the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, who spoke at the World Conference on Depleted Uranium Weapons held in Hamburg last October, the radioactivity released by all the exploded DU ordinance in Iraq is the equivalent of more than 40,000 Nagasaki -sized bombs.

The Pentagon and the White House don't want to talk about this. In fact, they're so frightened of the likely repercussions that they are reportedly refusing to test returning soldiers who ask to be tested for DU contamination.

The US has also blocked UN environmental scientists from entering "sovereign" Iraq territory to test for environmental DU contamination.

Of course, this massive war crime against the Iraqi people, which is also poisoning a generation of American soldiers, will eventually be exposed, just as the Agent Orange defoliant attrocity in Vietnam was ultimately exposed. But for now delay and coverup are the watchwords.

The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible crimes, but at least they involved attacks on a deadly enemy against whom the U.S. was engaged in a life-and-death struggle. The nuking of Iraq is happening in the context of what the administration is calling a war of "liberation."

In Vietnam, we "burned villages in order to save them." Now, it seems, we have upped the ante. We are poisoning an entire nation in order to "save it."
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August 6, 2005

War of the Words IV:

Who's a Terrorist?

Saturday, Aug. 6, is the 60th anniversary of the dawn of the nuclear age--the day that America deliberately targeted and incinerated the non-military city of Hiroshima in as pure an act of mass terror as mankind has ever committed. This attrocity was followed days later with a second mass terrorism act--the incineration of the city of Nagasaki. Those two bombs killed several hundred thousand innocent civilian men, women and children and condemned tens of thousands of others, including many yet unborn, to live tortured and painfully abbreviated lives.

This same nation, and its allies, committed similar attrocities that year in the fire bombings of Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden and Darmstadt (the latter two cities had no military importance, but were simply displays of military power--what today is called "Shock and Awe").

It is appropriate that we should reflect on these earlier genocidal crimes (which even Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and Gen. Curtis LeMay condemned as unnecessary) committed by our own nation as Washingon pushes ahead with George Bush's War on Iraq and his "War" on Terror.

25,000 civilian Iraqis have been documented as killed in this war, mostly by US forces. The figure is probably really more than four times that high, and continues to mount as American troops employ their high-tech weapons engineered to kill indiscriminately--anti-personnel bombs that look like toys and that lie around for years, depleted uranium shells that spew out radioactive dust, gunships that can obliterate several acres in seconds, high-powered bullets that kill even when they hit an arm or a leg, landmines, new stickier napalm. The list goes on and on, all financed by our tax dollars.

It has been quite accurately stated that the only difference between a terrorist cell and an army is that the army has tanks and planes to deliver its bombs, while the terrorist has to use a backpack.

We'd all do well to ponder this as we commemorate the dropping of the first nuclear weapon.

The war we are fighting has again made us a terrorist nation. There is no denying this reality.
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August 4, 2005

Craven Cowardly Editors Still Covering Up Bush Bulge

Pasadena residents didn't get to read about the exploits of local celebrity Dr. Robert Nelson, who, besides being a Jet Propulsion Lab photo analyst who helped present those dramatic photos of Saturn's rings and moons, also gave the lie to White House claims that the bulge seen on Bush's back during the presidential debates was "just a wrinkle." They didn't get to read Nelson's account of how his photo analysis of Bush's jacket--a story that would have increased speculation that the president was wearing a hearing device during the debates--almost made it into the New York Times before being killed by top editor Bill Keller (Extra!, 1-2/05).

They didn't read all this in their local daily, the Pasadena Star-News because senior editors at that paper killed the story on Saturday, April 30, right before publication in the Sunday edition--apparently for political, not journalistic, reasons.

The Star-News is the oldest holding of MediaNews Group, a newspaper and television station chain owned and run by William Dean Singleton, one of the US's more conservative media moguls. Singleton was singled out by Editor & Publisher (1/26/04) as one of several newspaper chain owners who contributed money to the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign last year. MediaNews Group also owns the Denver Post, the L.A. Daily News (a paper I once produced surplus value for), and most recently the Detroit News.

What role, if any, Singleton and his politics had in the killing of Star-News reporter Gary Scott's story on Nelson and the Bush bulge is unclear. What is known is that the story was filed, edited and set to run, that a photographer had been assigned and had taken pictures of Nelson at home with his photo analysis equipment, and that it was killed at the last minute.

Several sources confirm that the story was axed--and immediately wiped from the paper's computer system--on orders of Star-News executive editor Talmadge Campbell, who oversees the operations of the Star-News and two other papers, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Whittier Daily News, from an office in San Gabriel. Sources say that Campbell, a former Texan and outspoken Bush supporter, does not normally get involved in day-to-day decisions like what features run--or don't run--in the Pasadena paper.

Star-News editor Larry Wilson described Scott as a "fantastic" reporter. Asked if it was true that Scott's story was killed for political reasons by Campbell, Wilson did not offer a denial, saying only that the Star-News, "like most good newspapers, will not discuss stories that had been in production unless they appear in the paper."

Executive editor Campbell confirmed that he killed Scott's Nelson story, but he declined to give an explanation for what he conceded was a rare interference in the paper's daily operation. "It's entirely an internal matter. It doesn't involve anyone in New York, Mother Jones or you especially," he told This Can't Be Happening!.

Said an obviously frustrated Nelson, "The scientific community last November produced very credible evidence suggesting the president may have been cheating in the debates. Responsible reporters at the New York Times and the Star-News have attempted to report this news to their readers but their efforts were quashed by upper management. The founders of this nation understood the importance of an informed public, but given what has just happened, one is tempted to ask: Does the term `free press' apply only to those who can afford to own one?"
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This story appeared first in the current issue (July/August 2005) of Extra!, the media criticism journal of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (www.fair.org).

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August 3, 2005

What's Left? The Freedom to Dream?

The continued packing of federal courts at all levels with judges who have a pinched view of civil liberties--particularly First Amendment freedoms--is getting considerable public and media attention, but a perhaps even more serous attack on basic freedom is going largely unnoticed: the growing tyranny of the workplace.

Just this past June, the National Labor Relations Board, a federal body which oversees and regulates the relationship between employers and employees, and which after five years of Republican rule in Washington is now stacked with conservative pro-management Bush appointees, voted 2-1 to uphold a private company's policy barring its workers from "fraternizing" even off duty, whether during coffee breaks or after hours at home.

The company, a security firm called Guardsmark, had established a rule barring its employees from fraternizing "on duty or off duty…or becoming overly friendly with the client's employees or with co-employees."

The union, a local of the Service Employees International Union (one of the four big unions to recently split off from the AFL-CIO), had filed an unfair labor practice complaint against the company with the NLRB, claiming the new rule threatened workers' right under the National Labor Relations Act to "self-organization, to form, join or assist labor organizations…and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection."

As the organization American Rights at Work notes in a report on this ruling, such a ban "inevitably chills collective action of any sort."

Since most employees can be fired from their jobs with no reason given, American Rights at Work says the new rule "gives employers the green light to invade our privacy and chip away at our most basic rights in the workplace."

It has long been the case that America's much-touted freedoms of speech, assembly, press, privacy and from warrantless search and seizure largely end at the factory gate or the office lobby, this new ruling extends corporate power over the individual to areas where it had largely been absent before: workers' off-time.

Now the feudalism of the workplace has expanded to cast its dark pall over the behavior of workers who have already punched out for the day.

No more ranting about the boss at the bar after work. Maybe even no more blowing off steam to a spouse back home, if the spouse should happen to work for the same employer.

You have to wonder when American workers will finally just get fed up with this corporate Big Brotherism.

It used to be that the problem was Americans only had free speech for the eight hours a day they were asleep and the eight hours they were commuting or at home. Now it may be that freedom is reserved for just the eight hours that we're asleep.
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July 28, 2005

AFL-CIO Split is an Opportunity, not a Tragedy

When media bloviators get excited about a story, you can generally figure that there's not really much to it, and so it is with the much-covered split in the AFL-CIO.

To read and watch the breathless the accounts in the newsmedia, you'd think that the Democratic Party had just been sundered into a liberal and socialist wing, or that the president had just fired his brain.

Many columnists and headline writers got it completely wrong, referring to the AFL-CIO as a "union." They got it wrong too, when they almost universally described the split in the trade federation body as a major blow to the Democratic Party, which relies on strong and largely unquestioning financial and volunteer support from unions to be competitive with the Republican Party in elections.

The reality is much different.

The AFL-CIO is simply a hollow superstructure, a member organization to which no worker but rather the union organizations themselves belong, and to which they pay substantial contributions based upon membership size.

The split itself, while billed as a dispute over strategy--whether to mandate that member unions devote more resources to organizing or to go on squandering huge sums on Democratic Party candidates--is really more a battle of egos, with ambitious leaders of the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and several other smaller unions wanting more say and more power in the AFL-CIO than they've been able to get under President John Sweeney.

The truth is that the individual member unions, both within the AFL-CIO and outside the organization, will continue to blindly provide funding and volunteer support to Democratic Party candidate--maybe even more than before if the result of the split is to force the bloated AFL-CIO bureaucracy to trim down, freeing up more union resources for political activities.

Unions will continue to act in solidarity during strikes and boycott actions--at least to the extent that they ever did so in the past--whether or not they are under the umbrella of the AFL-CIO.

There might be some increase in raiding--the stealing of members from one union by another--since this is barred by the AFL-CIO among its members, but this could be a good thing. If workers are dissatisfied with the union they belong to, having an alternative union to switch to could have a salutary effect on the lazy, self-serving leaderships at some unions, who have been content to collect dues while doing little to protect the interests of their members.

In fact, the break-up of the AFL-CIO has to be deemed a good thing. It will shake up an organization that has become an ossified self-perpetuating bureaucracy, devoid of new ideas and thoroughly in bed with a pro-corporate and largely anti-worker Democratic Party.

Even if the breakaway unions are no different from those that have so far chosen to stay in the AFL-CIO, the mere fact that they are outside now could encourage rank-and-filers to start pushing new blood and new ideas up the ladder. The break-up could also encourage more radical or creative unionist activists within the AFL-CIO to push for change at a time that the hierarchy is feeling weakened and vulnerable.

Maybe too, some unions, free of the dead hand of the AFL-CIO, will start demanding more in the way of concrete support from politicians before they hand over their members' hard-earned money.

The passage by the rump AFL-CIO of an anti-war resolution, however watered down, is a good sign. Never before has the AFL-CIO taken such a position while the country was at war. Clearly a weakened leadership felt it had to respond to a broad sentiment among rank-and-file workers that the Bush War in Iraq is a disaster. I'm willing to bet that without the split, that resolution would never have gone through.

So as Joe Hill once said, on the eve of his state murder, "Don't mourn, organize!"

This split is no tragedy. It is a great opportunity for real trade unionists to get the movement back on track as a genuine oppositional organization defending and advancing workers' rights and our quality of life.

The author is a founding member of the National Writers Union (UAW), which is still affiliated with the AFL-CIO.
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July 25, 2005

Marvelous Marvin, the Man Who Seems to Be in All the Right Places

Let me say right from the get go that I'm not a conspiracy theorist by nature. As a journalist I like to see the facts line up solidly before I go with an accusation.

At the same time, I also subscribe to Noam Chomsky's approach of looking at how the media and government deal with similar situations and issues when they involve the right and the left.

And on that basis, I have to marvel at how the corporate media, and the various government and quasi-government bodies that investigated or are investigating 9-11, have ignored curious things involving the Bush family.

The one that has me in shock right now is the information dug up and actually published (in the Prince George's Journal of Prince George, MD, and in Common Dreams) way back on Feb. 4, 2003, reporting that George Bush's obscure youngest brother Marvin (did you know he had a younger brother named Marvin?), was on the board of directors of a company called Securacom (now changed to Stratesec) that was responsible for providing "electronic security" to the World Trade Center right up to 9/11/2001.

The company, according to author, Margie Burns, is backed by the Kuwait-American Corp., an investment firm with links to the Bush family.

Burns wrote back in 2003 that Securacom also had a contract to maintain electronic security systems at Dulles Airport, and that it "handled some security for United Airlines in the 1990s," though she notes that this work was completed prior to Marvin Bush's joining the board in 1998.

Now all this may be purely innocent coincidence. The Bush family is composed of a bunch of money-grubbing people who use every opportunity to convert government appointments into lucrative business opportunities for themselves and other members of the family.

That said, just imagine if it had been President Clinton in the White House on Sept. 11, 2001, and if it was his brother who had been on the board of a company that had handled the electronic security for those towers! My god, the press and the right-wing attack machine would have been all over it in a moment and non-stop. There would have been demands for congressional investigations, a special prosecutor, impeachment proceedings and who knows what.

But in this case? There apparently hasn't even been anyone looking into this on a cursory basis at the 9-11 commission or the Justice Department. And as for the U.S. media?

Not one article or news story.

Seems to me, we ought to be calling news editors and members of congress to demand that someone start at least asking a few questions about this guy Marvin, and about Securicom/Stratexec, and its Kuwaiti investor.

At a minimum, could the company have leaked, even inadvertently, information to those seeking to attack the buildings which might have helped them plan their attack, or maximize the damage and the carnage?

Could terrorist operatives have infiltrated WTC security by infiltrating the company via the Kuwait connection?

Again, I have no clue about any of this, but if government agencies think it's productive and important to go around randomly arresting thousands of greencard holders and other imigrants and deporting them or holding them incommunicado merely on the basis that they are Arab or Muslim, if they think that it's appropriate to shut down local Islamic charity organizations simply because they may have donated some money to relief activities in certain Muslim countries, surely they should be interested in finding out just what Marvin Bush's company did and who was involved in it at the World Trade Center and at Dulles airport and United Airlines.

Marvin and his activities ought, surely, to be subjected to at least a tenth of the investigative attention that Clinton's family and friends were subjected to on matters of far less consequence.

If not, you have to start getting that creepy feeling that something's not right.

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July 20, 2005

No Mourning for "No Regrets" Westy

News that General William Westmoreland, who oversaw the escalation of the catastrophic Indochina War from 1964 through `68--a pointless and criminal war that cost 58,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives--died at the age of 91 with "no regrets" about the conflict had me fantasizing about some special circle of hell reserved for military leaders.

Aren't these medal-bedecked generals, who spend their days being pampered in sumptuous offices in the Pentagon, and squired around in limos and helicopters, incredible? They aren't bothered at all by the chewing up of human beings on their orders--as stupid or venal as those orders might be.

There are plenty like Westy in today's Pentagon--men who are thinking plenty about their careers, but not much about the men and women who are being destroyed on their orders in Iraq.

;"We don’t do body counts," say both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks, of the 25-125,000 Iraqis who have been killed as a result of America's invasion, to name just two of the Westmoreland clones in today's Pentagon. (It was Westmoreland who famously said the war was hard in Vietnam because "they" didn't have the same "concern about human life" that "we" did!)

Or take depleted uranium weapons. Like the toxic Agent Orange that Westmoreland dumped all over the Southeast Asian countryside in a criminal attempt to destroy the livelihood of the peasants of South Vietnam who were helping the Viet Cong--a tactic which led to the death and maiming of countless Vietnamese, living and yet unborn, and of thousands of his own men and their offspring, DU weapons are now favorite weapon in the arsenal of the current generals and admirals. They care not a whit that the resulting dust is poisoning a nation, as well as their own army, and that it promises nightmarish birth defects in the families of returning veterans.

They too will likely pass on having "no regrets" about the horrific slaughter they are now wreaking in Iraq.

The least we can do when a conscience-challenged military war criminal like Gen. Westmoreland passes on is memorialize his atrocities for him.
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July 18, 2005
Time to Get Back to Where We Once Belonged

Being of a contrarian nature, I'm going to tread a bit off the beaten path and tackle the scare tactics that are being pushed by both politician and the ever-rapacious Wall Street regarding Baby Boomers and retirement. >br>

The claim is that Social Security is not going to be there for us future geezers, and that we, like the proverbial grasshopper, have squandered our resources enjoying life and will now have to pay for it with a miserable old age of poverty and struggle--or at least with 10 harsh years of intense enforced saving.

First of all, let's put to rest the premises.

Whatever the Liar-in Chief is saying on the stump, Social Security will be there for those who will start hitting retirement age in 2011, and it will be there for all those who follow them. The reason is simple: We Boomers are so numerous and so versed in the politics of protest (even if it has been a while) that we will make benefits be whatever we think the need to be when it's our turn to collect. It may well be that in the end this will wind up costing the next generation--our kids, I might point out--a bit more in taxes. But who among them is likely to begrudge their elders a decent retirement? And who among them would want to be responsible for us financially all on their own? (As often as younger people have been quoted complaining about the amount of their SS taxes, have you ever heard anyone complain about their parents' Social Security check being too large?)

Second, most of us didn’t "squander" our earnings. Most of us, in fact, have been living through a period of speed-up and payroll squeeze the likes of which has not been seen since the Great Depression. When I was a child in the 1950s, one parent (usually the father) was typically able to earn a decent living for a middle-class family. By the late1970s, when most of us Boomers were starting our families, thanks to the Federal Reserve and corporate-dominated government policies that gutted protection for labor organizing (and to a somnolent, complicit and pro-war trade union movement more concerned with preserving leaders' perks than with organizing and fighting for genuine progressive politics), inflation was allowed to outstrip wage gains. By the 1980s, it took two working parents just to make ends meet in most middle-class families.

Since then, things have only gotten worse, with most middle and working-class families now sinking deeply into debt just to finance the basics.

The good news is that all this need not mean the poorhouse for the '60s generation. Nor do we have to start scrimping on ourselves and our nearly grown kids to stave off disaster, as all the bank and brokerage ads keep warning as they try to hustle us for our money.

All we need to do is go back to thinking collectively, the way we used to do so easily back in the day.

Remember those collective housing arrangements, those ad-hoc "communes," those free-wheeling living arrangements we used to enjoy when we were younger, before we bought into the American Fantasy of the house, yard, two-cars and personal swing set?

It's time to reject the atomization of society that has been pushed on us by Madison Avenue, and to get back to those happier, more communal days.

Forget nursing homes! We need communes! By pooling our resources--our meager savings, our vehicles, our Social Security checks, and our diminished but surely complementary abilities and skills--we can live well on far less than what the slick money managers at Citibank or American Express claim we will need.

By returning to collective thinking, rejoining food coops, planting gardens in community plots, sharing cars and rides, etc., etc., we might also reconnect with our political past, when we stood shoulder to shoulder against the American war machine, against racism, against sexism, and for a better, more progressive, more humane world.

As a generation, we may have lost our way, but our mistake is reversible. If we return to what we once had, if we pick up where we left off, we might even start to turn this rapidly decaying, anti-human, and increasingly fearful, selfish, intolerant and undemocratic nation around, and make it a livable place for our kids and our grandchildren.
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July 13, 2005
No More Moral Relativism: The U.S. is a Terrorist State

Let's just bag the Bush/Blair baloney, okay?

Sure the attack in London was an outrage. It was an outrage whether it was the work of four alienated second-generation British-Pakistani young men acting on their own, or of four foot soldiers of Al Qaeda.

Get angry, sure. But let's not get all self-righteous about it.

When George Bush or his poodle Tony Blair act all indignant about this "attack on innocents," we need to remember that the U.S. and Britain are terrorist states in their own right, and on a much grander scale.
Electronic Iraq, written by one William Van Wagenen. This well-documented and footnoted article quotes from the original planning document for "Shock and Awe," developed by the U.S. National Defense University in 1996 and adopted by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as policy well before the start of the war, called for using aerial bombardment and other military resources for "controlling, affecting, and breaking the will of the adversary to resist." The approach goes on to call for attacking "means of communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure," with deliberate violence designed to be "all encompassing" in scope. (This strategy--particularly as it targets food and water--it should be noted, is on its face a war crime.)

Luckily for Iraqis, the Pentagon in the end did not fully apply the strategy as laid out in "Shock and Awe" (a phrase which, incidentally, is a pretty good synonym for "terrorize"). As Wagenen points out, the plan was to occupy and run Iraq after the defeat of Saddam, and so it was felt that the power grid, water system, etc., should not be destroyed. But clearly some elements of the strategy for intimidating the people of Iraq were adopted.

Wagenen, for example, writes in his article that on a visit last month to Baghdad, he was taken by a taxi driver to three government-owned shopping malls in the city, each of which had been completely devastated by U.S. bombs in the opening days of the attack. He says he was told that other street markets were similarly hit. One of these malls he visited, the Rashid Market in downtown Baghdad, was bombed with such precision that "no other buildings next to it, including a mosque, seemed to be harmed."

This, dear reader, is deliberate terrorism, pure and simple.

It might seem odd, if you are one of those who buy into the Bush rhetoric that America was "liberating" Iraqis from a brutal regime.

After all, how exactly are you "liberating" people if you bomb their markets and malls and deliberately seek to terrorize them with a Shock and Awe campaign that, in the words of a Pentagon official quoted by CBS News on the eve of the invasion, will mean "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad"?

The answer, of course, is that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was not and is not about liberation; it's about conquest and creation of, if not a colony, then a client state.

This is the invasion which our "heroic" soldiers are today being asked to continue to defend with their weapons and their lives.

And make no mistake: Shock and Awe is continuing. The leveling of Fallujah, once a city of 300,000, was just another chapter. Many smaller such levelings of towns and villages are going on now.

The Nazis in World War II had a tactic, especially popular on the Eastern Front, of leveling any town or neighborhood where partisans were active. It's a tactic that the Israeli Army has been officially using against Palestinians for years.

American forces did the same thing in Vietnam, and they're doing it now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Whatever they call it at the Pentagon or in the White House War Room, the real name for such a tactic is terror.

And it's being done in our name.
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July 11, 2005

Double Duty, Single Check

I saw the future in Roseburg, Oregon on Saturday, and it was not pretty.

Driving to the Portland airport on the way back from a too short vacation on the southern Oregon coast, we stopped for some provisions at a local chain supermarket called Food for Less.

The name sounded promising, though the prices turned out to be unremarkable.

In fact, they should have called the store Slave for Less, because that's where the place really stood out.

Nothing seemed unusual as the cashier began ringing through some of my items. But then she abruptly disappeared. Suddenly she was over at the adjacent cash register, running through items for another customer at that station.

I stood there puzzled but patient, and a couple minutes later she dashed back to the register and began scanning through my remaining items.

"What happened?" I asked. "Did the other cashier go on break and leave the line of customers stranded?"

"There is no other cashier," the harried woman answered. "I handle both registers."

I looked again at the layout and realized it was a little different from the traditional supermarket setup. There were two conveyor belts for groceries, each with its own cash register, but they were set up side by side, one with the register on the left, one with the register on the right, with an aisle running between them so the cashier could move back and forth unimpeded.

"You mean you're doing two people's jobs?" I asked, incredulous. "I hope you're getting two people's salaries!"

"Hah!" she laughed bitterly. "I wish."

"How do you do it?" I asked her, still trying to recover from my shock.

"I've been doing it for three years," she said. "At first I used to get dizzy, turning back and forth, but I've gotten used to it."

"You need a union," I suggested.

"I guess so," she said with a sigh.

I'm still trying to imagine what twisted executive came up with this revolutionary idea of putting two conveyor belts side by side with only one employee to handle both runs.

Talk about a speed up.

Talk about controlling labor costs.

Of course, speed-ups that make workers do more for the same pay are old hat. Truck drivers long ago started having to pull two trailers instead of one. But aside from the increased safety risk, they weren't actually being asked to do twice the driving work--just to haul twice as much. This is something new--doing two people's jobs for one person's pay. Sam Walton certainly has nothing on Food for Less's managers. Even Frederick W. Taylor, the founder of so-called scientific management, must be tipping his hat from the grave to this genius of exploitation excess.

How long can it be before this idea starts rippling through the economy? Imagine the possibilities!

Workers in Michigan or Tennessee could be putting parts on car bodies two at a time--just place their work stations between two assemblylines, instead of alongside one line.

Construction cranes could be designed with two derricks, so one operator could hoist two loads at the same time.

Nor does this kind of innovation have to be limited to blue-collar activities.

Nurses could cover two floors instead of just one. Just set up a dedicated elevator at nursing stations so that they could easily hop from the surgery floor to the ob-gyn floor and back without long detours down the hallway.

Teachers could do double-duty, too. Just let them work out curricula that would allow them to give students a task to work on, and then run across the hall to another classroom, where they could teach another class. You'd have eliminated half your faculty salary costs (a videocam in each room, with a monitor in the opposite room, would allow the teacher to keep an eye on students in the room without a teacher).

Is this a great country or what?

Just wait until Thomas "Flat-Earth" Friedman hears about this.

Who says America can'' be competitive in the new global economy!
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July 8, 2005

Payback: The Horrors Done in Our Name Have a Price

The London bombings hit home to me. Only two weeks ago, my wife was in the Kings Cross station while on a visit to that city.

It's easy, and natural, to be upset at the images of carnage in the U.K. What people need to remember now, however, is that what happened in London, and what could just as easily happen in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, is a direct and predictable result of what the U.S. is doing in Iraq.

We recoil at the vicious, random killing of innocent men, women and children when they are our own, or our friends, but where is the outrage at the uncounted mass of innocent men, women and children who have been killed by the American invasion of Iraq, and the invasion of Afghanistan? In both places, thanks to military policies that stress the use of massive firepower, aerial bombardment and gunships in the name of keeping US casualties at a minimum, the toll of civilians is actually significantly higher than the number of actual enemy fighters killed by American forces.

Our leaders call this cruel calculus "collateral damage" but in truth, with this kind of military strategy, one would have to say the killing of an enemy soldier is more appropriately called the collateral damage.

And when a country opts to attack civilian targets as a policy, as our government has done, it must expect the same in return.

Flying out to Oregon last week, I sat next to a man who travels the country working on repairing railroad track. He said he has a brother who is a Marine tank commander in Iraq, now on his second tour of duty. I asked him how it was over there, and he shook his head sadly. "My brother went over there all gung-ho," he said. "Now, he's just bitter. He says it's not a war; it's a slaughter. He says that the people he and his fellows end up killing are mostly just civilians and he hates the whole thing."

If Americans were to hear this story more often, if our corporate media were to show us daily the civilian victims of American military actions in the same graphic detail that they are showing us the British victims of Al Qaeda terrorist actions, we would likely recoil at the horrors being inflicted in our name and might demand a halt to it.

Instead, we are offered sanitized reports on the war which focus mostly on the American casualties. We turn away from the true horrors of war and let the military do what it does, and try not to think about it too hard about the consequences.

So get ready folks. If the American people are willing to turn a blind eye to the horrors that our government is deliberately inflicting on Iraqis and Afghanis, we need to face the fact that we too will be attacked, not just our soldiers.
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