This Can't Be Happening!

December 23, 2006
Are Bush and Cheney Planning Early Attack on Iran?

Back on October 9, I wrote in The Nation that it looked like the Bush-Cheney gang, worried about the November election, was gearing up for an unprovoked attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, with a carrier strike group led by the USS Eisenhower being ordered to depart a month early from Norfolk, VA to join the already-on-station USS Enterprise. That article was based on reports from angry sailors based on the Eisenhower who had leaked word of their mission.

There was, thankfully, no attack on Iran before Election Day, but it is starting to look like I may have been right about the plan after all, but wrong about the timing.

As the threat of a catastrophic US election-eve attack on Iran started to look increasingly likely, reports began to trickle out of the Pentagon that the generals and admirals were protesting. They knew that the US military is stretched to the limit in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that a war with Iran would be a disaster of historic proportions. To bolster their blocking efforts, the Iraq Study Group, headed by Republican fixer and former Secretary of State (under Bush Pere) James Baker, which had been slated to release its report on what to do about Iraq in January, 2007, pushed forward its report. Baker, together with co-chair Lee Hamilton, went prematurely public with the group’s conclusion that the Iraq war was a failure, and that the US should be trying to negotiate with Iran, not attack that country.

That joint effort appeared to have blocked Bush and Cheney’s war plan, but the reprieve may have only been temporary.

It now appears that the idea of attacking Iran is again moving forward. The Eisenhower strike force, armed with some 800 Tomahawk cruise missiles as well as a fleet of strike aircraft, and already on station in the Arabian Sea for over a month and a half, has moved into the Persian Gulf. A second carrier group, led by the USS Stennis, is set to start steaming toward the Gulf, too, from its base in Washington. Already in position are three expeditionary strike groups and an amphibious warship, all suitable for landing Marines on Iranian beaches. On December 20, the The New York Times, citing Pentagon sources, reported that both Britain and the U.S. are moving additional naval forces into the region "in a display of military resolve toward Iran that will come as the United Nations continues to debate possible sanctions against the country." (We’ve all seen what "displays of force" by the Bush administration actually turn out to be. Besides, to my mind, the most clear sign that Bush and Cheney are going to war with Iran is that the US and the British have sent over minesweepers to the Gulf. Now what would they need minesweepers for except war with Iran? Afghanistan is not near the Gulf and the Taliban is in any case land-locked. Likewise, the U.S. is supposedly on friendly terms with Iraq's government, and the insurgents have no Navy, and precious little coastline to operate from. Iran, on the other hand, could be expected to do a lot of mining of the Gulf if attacked.)

The idea of hitting Iran may make sense from the Bush-Cheney bunker, where the only consideration is not what's good for the country, but what's good for Bush and Cheney. After all, if you’re losing your war in Iraq, and if you have hit bottom politically at home (Bush's ppublic support ratings are now down in the 20s, where Nixon's were just before his resignation, and Cheney's numbers have been in the teens for months), and if the public is clamoring for an end to it all--and maybe for your heads, too--expanding the conflict and putting the nation on a full war footing can look like an attractive even if desperate gambit.

From the nation's point of view, of course, an attack on Iran would be an unmitigated disaster. There are no more troops that the U.S. could throw into battle (the Pentagon is scrambling just to find another 20,000 or so bodies that Bush wants to throw into the Iraq quagmire), so an attack would have to be basically that--an attack.

Certainly the forces the Navy is assembling in the Persian Gulf, together with the B-52s and B-1s and B-2s available at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and at bases in other countries in the region, are capable of destroying most of Iran's nuclear facilities, as well as its military infrastructure. But in terms of conquering territory, the most the U.S. could hope to do would be to perhaps hold a beachhead on the Straits of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf links to the Arabian Sea. And even that would be a bloody challenge.

There is no way the U.S. could hope to conquer Iran.

Nor would the Iranian people rise up and overthrow their theocratic leaders--the same neoconservative fantasy that Bush war-mongers promised ahead of the Iraq invasion, and which they are re-cycling now to justify an attack on Iran. In fact, an attack on Iran, far from sparking a rebellion against the government there, would crush the new wave of reform that was evidenced in last week's local elections in Iran, which dealt a blow to the country’s hardliners. Iran is a proud nation with a history reaching back thousands of years. If attacked, its people can be counted on to rally around their current rulers, and its war-hardened soldiers can be counted on to fight to the death to defend their country.

Moreover, while its military may be no match for America's, Iran has many asymmetrical options for retaliation. As the key player in Iraq, with close links to Iraq's Shia factions, Iran's military has trained and armed the Badr Brigades--the largest and best-armed faction in Iraq, and one which to date has stayed out of the fighting against US forces. Iran is also close to the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al Sadr, and could unleash his fanatical troops too, against US forces in Iraq. If this happens, count on American casualty rates leaping to or even surpassing Korea or Vietnam-era levels overnight.

Additionally, Iraq's intelligence services have connections with Shia groups in Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries, and can be expected to quickly organize cells to strike at economic and US military targets there.

More seriously, of course, an attack on Iran will jack the price of oil to levels never seen before. Even if the US managed to militarily control the Straits of Hormuz, Iran's hundreds of stockpiled anti-ship missiles, which are buried in bunkers all along the Persian Gulf, would cause insurance rates to soar so high that no tanker could afford to sail that route, effectively cutting off over one quarter of the world’s oil supply. Virtually all of the oil produced in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and the Arab Emirates would be trapped in the ground. As well, the network of pipelines that bring oil from wellheads to refineries and to storage and pier facilities would be virtually indefensible against Iran-inspired sapper attacks.

Oil industry analysts have talked of oil leaping in price to $200 a barrel or more in the event of a US war with Iran, and given how panicked this country got when oil reached $80 a barrel recently, there's no need to go into detail explaining what $200/barrel oil would do to the U.S. economy--or to the global economy.

Of course, the biggest issue is that attacking Iran would be yet another war crime by this craven administration. No one can argue that Iran poses an imminent threat to anyone, least of all to the U.S.--the only legitimate grounds under the U.N. Charter and the Nuremburg Charter, to which the U.S. is a signatory, for initiating a war. Attacking a country that poses no such threat is defined as the most heinous of war crimes: a Crime Against Peace.

If Bush and Cheney perpetrate this crime, the Congress should initiate immediate impeachment proceedings and should simultaneously pass legislation terminating funding for the war. The important thing now is for the American people to register their opposition to this war before it happens. Call your senators and your representative and let them know you don’t want it to happen, and you want impeachment if it does. And add your name to the petition against war. Also mark down January 27 in your calendar, for the big march and rally against war and for impeachment in Washington, D.C. (to be followed by two days of lobbying Congress on Jan. 28-29.

Finally, send this story to everyone you know, and urge them to do the same. At this point, with Democrats still cowering in their offices, only the American people can stop this madness.
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December 20, 2006

Sell-Out Dems Walk into a Bush Trap on Iraq

The Democratic Party and its feckless leaders in Congress are about to fall into a trap. The trap is being sprung by President Bush and his too clever brain trust, but the sad fact is that it was actually laid by the Democrats themselves.

Taking over the Congress on a wave of popular revulsion at the twin catastrophes in Iraq and Afghanistan, Democrats could have issued immediate calls for an end to those wars, a return of the troops, and investigations into the criminal causes of those costly fiascos. They could have initiated efforts to halt funding for further war and foreign occupation. Of course, taking such stands and actions would have opened them to charges of being "soft on terror," but the public clearly isn't buying that crap any more. With a little courage and leadership they could have handled it, and come out winners.

Instead, they took what they thought was the easy road, condemning not the criminal policies themselves, but only the administration's handling of the wars. This led some to call not for an end to the wars, but for more troops.

Now, Bush has called their bluff by proposing just that: more troops for Iraq (the so-called "surge" option), and a major expansion of the army over the longer term--the better to allow the president to invade other countries even as the nation is already mired in two losing wars.

And what are the Democrats in Congress going to do? Devoid of any principles, their chance to demand an end to reckless imperialist military adventures squandered, they are likely to fall in line and vote to fund both an escalation of the Iraq War and an expansion of the military.

It's a double win for Bush. He gets the funding for more war right through the end of his second term of office, allowing him to hand the Iraq quagmire to the next president, making it someone else's job to take the blame for the eventually unavoidable loss. And he gets a bigger defense budget and more troops to play with--perhaps as much as a 10 percent increase in total combat troops.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the allegedly liberal, allegedly anti-war incoming speaker of the House, and incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry "send-in-the-cavalry" Reid can kiss their much touted "First 100 Hours" progressive agenda goodbye. With all the new money that will have to be thrown into the Pentagon sinkhole, there won't be a dime for domestic spending.

The Pentagon budgeters claim deceptively that every increase of 10,000 new troops adds another $1.5 billion in defense costs, which makes a 50,000 increase in troop strength sound like a manageable $7.5 billion extra--a drop in the bucket of a $500-billion defense budget. But this figure is grossly misleading. First of all it doesn't include the back-end costs of pensions, benefits and support costs, and the interest on the debt, which taken together at least double the figure to over $15 billion a year. But more importantly, it doesn't factor in the costs when those extra troops are actually sent into battle, where the costs of support, equipment, equipment replacement, medical and long-term care can explode. And make no mistake, the purpose of adding troops to the U.S. active-duty roster is to use them for further war-mongering and further imperial adventurism.

Singer John Fogerty had it right: this is déjà vu all over again.

When President Lyndon Johnson saw that the Vietnam War was being lost, he over-rode the best advice he was getting that the war was a lost cause, and escalated the fighting with a massive infusion of troops and an expansion of the U.S. military. The only result was more killing of Vietnamese and Laotians, and more dying of American troops. President Nixon did the same thing. Instead of ending the war when he took over the presidency in 1968 as promised in his campaign, he upped the ante again, increasing the fighting so that the casualties during his five years of the war nearly matched the number under Johnson when there were more soldiers there, doubling the number of Southeast Asians killed to over two million, expanding the war illegally into Cambodia, before the U.S. finally had to admit defeat.

"Surge" is the new escalation, and we're set to repeat this tragedy, with Democrats (the new "sucker"), who had a chance to call a halt to the nonsense, instead stupidly joining the mad charge.

The end result of this betrayal of the electorate, which has made it clear it wants an end to the Iraq War, will be a collapse of the Democrats in 2008, with the party losing both houses of Congress and probably the White House too. It will be a richly deserved collapse.

While the hour is late, there is yet a slim chance for the public to rescue the Democrats from this course of political suicide and the nation from disaster. If masses of committed people from all walks of life take to the streets on January 27, when United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and Impeach for Change are planning a major demonstration against war and against the crimes of the Bush administration, maybe enough Democrats in Congress will realize the intensity of public opposition to further pointless mayhem and slaughter in the Middle East, and will realize the only option is to pull the plug on the president’s imperialist megalomania--and to initiate impeachment hearings against the president.

I realize counting on Democrats to do the right thing, even in their own self-interest, is a thin reed on which to rest hopes for a return to national sanity, but we need to grasp it.
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December 19, 2006

Sinister Cabal Takes Over Washington

A sinister cabal of secret agents has infiltrated the U.S. government, working ceaselessly and tirelessly with one goal: to undermine Constitutional government, engineer economic collapse, and foment internecine conflict between races, regions and religions.

Working out in broad daylight, these agents have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams over the past half decade, and appear close to achieving most of their goals.

It is not clear whom it is they are working for, but that hardly matters. What matters is that the American nation today, such as it is, is almost unrecognizable.

The broad freedoms that once made the U.S. the envy of the world have been largely cancelled. The right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty has been scrapped. Now people are presumed guilty upon arrest, with hundreds of thousands in prison only because they had no decent lawyer to defend them. The right to be charged, to face one’s accuser, and to a fair trial by a jury of one's peers is gone. Now people may be held indefinitely without charge, are prevented from knowing who said what against them, and don't get a trial, much less a jury of peers. Freedom of speech is largely gone, except for what people say privately to one another--about where it is in the People's Republic of China. The mass media have fallen under the sway of government pressures and are effectively closed to opinions and voices that lie outside of what is deemed "acceptable discourse." Meanwhile most means of communication are being secretly monitored, making people afraid to say or write anything critical of government policy.

The government has ceased to be even remotely democratic. The presidency has become a dictatorship, where the chief executive can ignore at will court orders and even acts passed by the Congress, which doesn't raise any objection to being so ignored. The courts have been filled with sycophants who cater to the needs of dictatorship. Elections are held, but the results, tightly controlled, are ignored if by some chance the public manages to vote in people who are outside of the conspiracy.

In Congress, so-called "leaders" keep a tight rein on legislation and on the powers of committees, to ensure that any freethinking politicians who might happen to slip into office, are neutered and unable to press any efforts at opening up government or acceding to the popular will.

The military is increasingly being injected into civil life, as the president is given blanket authority to call up National Guard troops over the objections of state governors, and to send active duty troops into any part of the country on his own whim, in effect declaring martial law for anything from a hurricane to a flu outbreak.

Meanwhile, the economy is being hollowed out, with taxes being virtually eliminated for the wealthy, millions of jobs exported, vast, incalculable budget deficits run up, and import barriers eliminated.

How has this wrecking campaign been accomplished with scarcely a word of protest from the American public?

The trick was to conduct the subversion out in the open.

Back in the mid-20th Century, the International Communist movement attempted to subvert the U.S., but its efforts were a laughable failure. The few spies it was able to recruit and secrete into positions of power were easily detectable, even if it meant false accusations against some whose only crime was being too liberal, and those fifth columnists who did get into government or the military never made it to a level where they could inflict any real damage.

This time, however, the enemies of America have managed to insert their agents of destruction into the pinnacles of power--the presidency, the Supreme Court, and the leadership of both parties of the Congress.

By appealing to Americans' worst fears and worst instincts, these agents have managed to actually get themselves voted into power, and now they are using that power to destroy the nation, sending our youth off into pointless wars, wasting astronomical sums of taxpayer dollars on useless military hardware, most of which doesn't work and most of which will never be used, ripping apart legislation that in prior decades had sought to protect workers’ rights, the environment, etc., and gutting funds for education, infrastructure, and basic human needs like food, healthcare and retirement.

Now it appears that nothing short of a revolution will be able to oust them.

What's going to make it difficult to organize that revolution is the fact that the enemy behind this massive subversion is not some evil party or some country across the ocean. It is ourselves.

By succumbing to fear, by listening to the words of poison poured in our ears by racists and religious zealots, by refusing to do the hard work of citizenship, reading and educating ourselves about the real issues facing us as a nation and as a human race, by our selfish desire to have the easy life for ourselves while ignoring or even exacerbating the plight of others both at home and abroad, we have mindlessly turned over the wheels of government to a small group of truly evil and misanthropic people bent on absolute power for its own sake.

At some point we all may wake up and realize what we have lost, but by then it may be too late.

Still, we have to start somewhere.

I suggest that starting point is rejecting the politics of fear and hate, and ending the War in Iraq.

Americans made it clear in November that we want that war ended. Now we need to force the subversives and quislings who are passing themselves off as Congressional leaders--the Nancy Pelosi's, the Harry Reid's and the Rahm Emanuel’'s of the Democratic Party--to act not in their interest but in ours.

Not one more penny for the war.

Once we win that one, we can move on to insisting that they challenge the number one Manchurian candidate in Washington, President George W. Bush.
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December 16, 2006

Innocents Abroad: US Cracks Down on Guantanamo Detainees--Most of Whom Aren't Terrorists

The U.S. is holding hundreds of innocent people at its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Military authorities at Guantanamo have decided to tighten the screws on detainees because it has been determined that the U.S. has been too kind and accommodating to them.

If you find those two sentences jarring and contradictory, you’re not alone, yet both were leading news items in today's newspapers. The first appeared in a page one story in of the Philadelphia Inquirer by Associated Press reporter Andrew O. Selsky, which said most of the detainees are innocent of any crime. The second was a page one story in the New York Times by reporter Tim Golden, who reported on a harsh crackdown on Guantanamo detainees, including removal of common eating privileges, inmate soccer games, and incentives for good behavior by prisoners.

Selsky, who traced what happened to 245 of some 360 Guantanamo detainees released by the U.S., found that 205 of them, upon arriving in their countries of origin, were immediately released, after their home governments determined that they were, after all, not dangerous terrorists. According to Selsky, all 83 Afghan captives sent back to Afghanistan were freed after the government there determined that most had simply been turned over to American forces because of "tribal or personal rivalries" and to collect ransoms being offered by US forces.

Pakistan released 67 of 70 Pakistani captives returned to that country after it was determined they too were "innocent."

All 29 detainees repatriated to Britain, Spain, Germany, Russia, Australia, Turkey, Denmark, Bahrain and the Maldives, were freed within hours of being sent home by the U.S., which had delivered them bound hand and food as "dangerous terrorists."

Selsky's report is a damning indictment of the U.S. operation at Guantanamo, and makes a joke of U.S. claims that the people it is holding indefinitely and without trial on the naval base there are the "worst of the worst," and are, in the words of Pentagon officials, "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth." Golden, meanwhile, reports that these remaining prisoners face much harsher conditions in the future than they have been enduring to date. In recent months, the prisoners had been benefiting from a program of incentives that gave them steady improvements in living conditions in return for good behavior. Now three quarters of them are being moved to maximum-security cells.

Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr., commander of the compound, told Golden that in his view all the captives are dangerous. He is quoted as saying, "They’re all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants," and concluding, "I don’t think there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist."

Golden notes dryly, without comment, that 100 of those 420 prisoners still subject to Adm. Harris's tender mercies have actually been cleared by the military for transfer or release, but are being held while the State Department tries to arr'nge for their repatriation, and that shortly after Harris’s comment, 15 detainees were sent back to Saudi Arabia, where the government immediately released them to their families.

So what the hell is going on here?

One hint is provided by looking at the abusive treatment of Jose Padilla, the so-called "dirty bomber" that the U.S. held without charge in solitary confinement at a military brig in South Carolina for three and a half years before conceding that it had no evidence to charge him with any major crime (he's now facing a charge of providing money to a charity that may have links to Al Qaeda, but even that case appears weak). During his base confinement, Padilla was kept in a dark cell, unable to contact a lawyer or family member. When he was removed for a trip to the dentist, he was fitted with soundproof earmuffs and his eyes were covered by blackout goggles, rendering him entirely sensory deprived. Though he was completely docile and posed no threat, he was shackled hand and foot as well, despite the presence of four guards armed with M-16 weapons. Padilla, an American citizen by birth, is now said to have lost his mind and is unable to even understand why he is in captivity.

It seems clear from Padilla's over-the-top abusive treatment, and the increasingly harsh treatment that is being applied to captives at Guantanamo, that the Pentagon and the Bush administration are not genuinely trying to protect America from anything, but have simply devolved into a bunch of deliberate, pathological sadists, who are desperately trying to break and destroy several hundred people who never should have been captured in the first place.

The goal may be to try and get these men to break and admit to manufactured charges that could retroactively justify their illegal detainment. Thanks to the military tribunal bill that the outgoing Republican Congress, with the help of treacherous and cowardly Democrats, passed as one of their final wretched actions, they could then be executed, or just held incommunicado until death or dementia renders them no longer threats to the administration's reputation.

Whatever the government's motives for this ongoing horror, Americans need to wake up and recognize that Guantanamo and the so-called "War on Terror" have made America--and every one of us Americans--guilty of the most obscene of war crimes.

There will inevitably come a day of reckoning--a day when we will all be called to account for our collective crime.

Let us at least be able to say then that we spoke out against what is being done in our name.
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December 15, 2006

Democratic Control of the Senate is a Double-Edged Sword

Let’s stop all the heavy breathing.

While Republican vultures hover shamelessly over the hospital where Sen. Tim Johnson, the South Dakota Democrat remains in critical condition following emergency brain surgery, progressives are in a lather worrying that if Johnson doesn't recover, or if he dies, South Dakota's Republican governor would appoint a Republican to finish out his term, handing control of the U.S. Senate back to the just ousted Republican Party.

There were fears of the same possible outcome back in early November, when pseudo-Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT), defeated in an August primary for his party's nomination, succeeded in winning re-election running as an independent. It was feared--and to some extent is still feared--that Lieberman could jump over to the GOP in January, handing Republicans control of the Senate. Lieberman has played this fear like a virtuoso violinist, wresting a promise that he will chair the Homeland Security Committee in the 110th Congress if he stays in the party fold.

Progressives should take a deep breath and relax, though. The truth is, all this angst is really just about Democratic Senators looking to maintain their own newfound power and their own marketability to the big donors who they hope will fill their campaign coffers. If they lose control of the Senate, and don't get to chair all those committees and subcommittees, they don't get the big bucks.

But from a policy standpoint, it matters little whether Republicans or Democrats control the Senate--at least these days. In fact, not to wish ill to Sen. Johnson, but we might be better off if the Democrats ended up back in the role of opposition.

Consider:

With a majority of one, and a Republican president, the Senate cannot hope to pass any kind of significant legislation. If Senate Democrats somehow managed to pass something like a minimum wage bill on their own, it would just get vetoed by the president. Of course, they could try to win over enough liberal Republicans to pass veto-proof legislation, but then, they could do that whether they were in the majority or the minority.

A Democratic-run Senate could do investigations of course, but given the infamous timidity of the party's Senate leadership, it seems unlikely that they will do anything substantial in that regard anyhow. And besides, the House, where the Democratic majority is more solid, can handle the investigation business better.

In control of the Senate, Democrats will simply open themselves to charges, in the 2008 campaign, of being obstructionist and negative, because they won't be able to accomplish anything of substance. In opposition, they would be in a powerful position, with 50 votes, to block any bad Republican legislation or bad nominations to judgeships or government offices, but because they would be in the position of opposition party, no one would blame them for being obstructionist--opposition and obstruction would be their official role.

More important, in the role of opposition party, Democratic Senators would be freer to be themselves. There would be far less pressure from corporate interests to temper their views and to move to the center or to the right than they are getting now as the ruling party.

The point is, it's one thing to have a majority of one in the legislature when your president is of the same party, but it's another when you have a one-vote majority and the president is from the other party. In the latter case, the opposition party, despite being in control, is incapable of accomplishing anything over the president's opposition, and thus the pressure to compromise becomes almost irresistible. And Democrats, with little in the way of ideological grounding, have long been all too ready to compromise away important issues and principles and to play footsie with the president. Just look at them signing on to a continued war in Iraq, with even more troops. Look at them refusing to defend habeas corpus and to oppose torture. Look at them calling for even bigger defense budgets. Look at them signing on to the NSA's warrantless spying operation. (Incidentally, Sen. Johnson himself has been quite the backer of Republican positions, voting for the Republican budget in 1998, supporting a flag-desecration amendment to the Constitution, voting in support of eased restrictions on cell phone tapping, voting in favor of tightening consumer bankruptcy laws, and voting to expand the death penalty and to limit habeas rights of death penalty prisoners. Johnson has been one of Bush's most ardent backers of the Iraq war among Democrats, and has been a big recipient of funds from Parsons Corp., one of the biggest corporate war profiteers in Iraq after Halliburton. )

We’re not going to see Democratic Senators taking principled stands on progressive issues until they know that they are stuck in the role of opposition party.

So let’s wish Sen. Johnson a speedy recovery, but progressives needn’t fret if he has to step down.

We might be better off that way.
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December 11, 2006

Torture, Impeachment and a Vietnam Veteran's Tears

The true horror of what President Bush--and the Republican-led 109th Congress--have done to all of us American citizens by authorizing torture in our names came clear during a talk I was giving on impeachment to a group organized by the New Jersey chapter of Progressive Democrats of America.

I had been reciting the growing list of Bush crimes against the Constitution and the laws of the land and had gotten to the issue of torture. At that point Bruce Tornari, a large guy sitting in the back of the room proudly wearing a baseball hat emblazoned with the words "Third Marine Division" and "Vietnam Veterans Against the War," offered up the comment that he had witnessed torture in Vietnam.

Tornari, who had been a Marine rifleman began to tell us how his four-man unit had captured a North Vietnamese soldier who had been heading towards his unit. They had turned him over to a unit of South Vietnamese troops that was attached to them, and were stationed that night in a foxhole position about 100 yards away from the South Vietnamese (ARVN) troops holding the prisoner. He said that night the ARVN soldiers began torturing the captive. As he spoke, his voice cracked and he began sobbing. It was hard for him to get out the rest of his story, but he managed to say, word by painful word, that he had heard the screaming all through that night, and that he still "cannot get those screams" out of his head, some 35 years later.

At that point he got up and, using two canes, hobbled out of the room to hide his embarrassment at his tears. He needn't have bothered; everyone else in the room had wet cheeks at that point anyway.

It was a powerful lesson, for those of us who have not been there, of the horror of torture.

I can't count how many times I have read comments, or even heard them in person, from jingoistic Americans who have said they aren't bothered at all by the idea of American troops or CIA agents torturing "terrorists" or other captives. They typically will say that the victims of the torture are evil people intent on killing Americans, and so who cares?

In fact, however, aside from the fact that torture is illegal under international law, and that it is illegal in the U.S. as a signatory of the Geneva Conventions, since the torture is being conducted upon captives who have never had their cases examined to determine if they are indeed terrorists or legitimate combatants or just innocents picked up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it is inevitable that many of those who are being tortured with the president's approval and in our names are simply innocents. Some of those innocents have died at the hands of their tormentors. Others have been driven insane.

What this still haunted veteran demonstrated, by opening a window into his experiences and the demons of war that still plague him, is a dose of reality--an honest look at what torture really is.

Some advocates of impeachment argue that the case against George Bush should focus on those crimes and abuses of power--like his use of signing statements to render inoperative over 850 acts of Congress or his illegal, warrantless spying on thousands of American citizens--which are likely to win Republican and independent as well as Democratic support. I agree that this is a good strategy, but I think we simply cannot allow crimes like the authorization and encouragement of torture to go unchallenged.

Some Democrats, like Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) have been active supporters of many of Bush's crimes, including the advocacy of torture. Others have cowered, afraid of being branded "soft on terrorism," and have been unwilling to challenge the president. Such timidity and such complicity are no longer possible.

With Democrats in charge of both houses of Congress after January 3, a failure to put an immediate halt to torture, and a failure to impeach the president for his ongoing crime of promoting and approving a policy of torture, would make Democrats as a party fully guilty of the crime along with the president. It would also make us, the voters who put those Democrats into office, accomplices to the crime.

Furthermore, with most Americans now recognizing the war in Iraq to have been a disaster based upon lies and political expediency, and with many recognizing that the so-called "war" on terror itself has been a fraud, no member of Congress need fear such reckless accusations as “supporter of terrorists” or “lack of patriotism,” or whatever. The majority of Americans now recognize these charges as the garbage that they are, and as acts of desperation by those whose time has passed.

Torture has no place in American military policy. As the Vietnam vet at my impeachment event Sunday told us, torture hurts not just those who are tortured, but those who are the torturers, it makes the enemy fight more desperately, and in the end it can be turned on our own captured soldiers in a horrible tit-for-tat.

It must be ended immediately, and those who promoted it must be called to account.

A German prosecutor is currently drawing up an indictment for torture against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for his role in promoting torture, because U.S. prosecutors have refused to do so. The ACLU has filed a civil suit in federal court accusing Rumsfeld of torture, on behalf of some of Rumsfeld’s victims. Indictments and civil suits for torture should also be filed against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney.

But more importantly, now it is Congress’s turn, for the ringleader of this monstrous crime--the President--is protected from indictment as long as he remains in office.

It is, after all, Rumsfeld's boss, Commander in Chief George W. Bush, who is ultimately responsible for the torture policy that has blackened America's name.

He must be impeached for this crime, whether or not Republicans will join in doing so.

As Tornari put it to me later, after he had recovered his composure, "Bush has made torture his policy in his war on terrorism. But no one, not even our war criminal president, deserves to be tortured. By sanctioning torture, the United States has lost any moral authority that we might have had at one time. We are now a country of thugs."

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December 7, 2006

A Congress of Whores and Pipsqueaks

How pathetic can it get?

140,000 American troops are stuck in the mess that a lying and endlessly deceitful president has made in Iraq, over half a million innocent Iraqis have been killed since the politically-motivated 2003 US invasion, a group of very Establishment, middle-of-the-road politicians of both parties has declared the war an unmitigated disaster and called for a pullout of troops, the president has nixed their call for withdrawal and regional negotiations, and what is Congress doing about it?

The House just voted by an overwhelming 368-31 (that’s only 36 abstentions), not to impeach the president, not to cut off funding for the war, not even to endorse the findings of the Iraq Study Group, but…to condemn the naming of a street in France after Pennsylvania death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal!

This craven rush to line up and be counted in the condemnation of a man who has never had a fair trial to establish his guilt in the 1981 shooting death of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was joined in even by most liberal Democrats in the House. It was primarily only black members of Congress who had the courage to vote no on the resolution that was submitted by--get this!--Michael Fitzpatrick, a lame-duck Republican loser from the Philadelphia area (Fitzpatrick was defeated by Democrat Patrick Murphy).

Ironically, as this group of political hucksters and moral cowards were trampling each other to cast their votes of allegedly righteous condemnation at the naming of a minor street in France, Abu-Jamal’s case was heading for a dramatic hearing in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, where judges with a better understanding of law and constitution had recently agreed to hear three separate arguments by Abu-Jamal on claims that his 1982 trial had been unconstitutionally compromised--among them that the prosecutor told jurors they didn’t need to worry about proof of guilt being "beyond a reasonable doubt" because there would be "appeal after appeal," that the same prosecutor deliberately removed 11 qualified black jurors from the jury pool because of their race despite their having confirmed they could vote for a death penalty, and that the trial judge had been overheard, on the first day of the trial, telling his clerk that he would "help them fry the nigger."

So where is the indignation of these leaders when it comes to a president who lied to them repeatedly about alleged grave and looming threats posed by non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about non-existent "links" between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and terror leader Osama Bin Laden? About a fraudulent allegation that Saddam was trying to buy uranium ore from Niger?

Where is the righteous indignation over the deliberate exposing by Bush and Cheney of the identity of a key undercover CIA agent whose outing destroyed a U.S. intelligence network monitoring weapons activities in Iran, and almost certainly led to the suffering and deaths of some of her sources in Iran and elsewhere?

Where is the outrage over Bush's flagrant violation of the law in having the National Security Agency spy on Americans without first obtaining a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court?

Where is the outrage about the president's assertion of the right to ignore acts (850 and counting) passed by the Congress?

Where is the righteous indignation over this president's authorization of torture of U.S. captives in Iraq, Afghanistan, kidnapped from around the globe, and even picked up here in the U.S.--American citizens included?

Where is the disgust at word that Commander in Chief Bush oversaw the detention in Guantanamo of children from Afghanistan as young as seven and eight years old--some of whom remain in detention there to this day (and one of whom committed suicide last June after spending his teenage years in detention).

Where is the outrage that this president allowed some 2000 Americans to die in stagnant, toxic water in New Orleans while he played around on vacation in Texas?

Maybe more relevant to the current resolution, where is the outrage over military policies under Commander in Chief Bush that have made the killing of Iraqi boys as young as 12 part of the "rules of engagement," that permit the collective punishment of entire towns and cities--most famously the flattened city of Fallujah--and that permit the use of banned weapons like napalm and white phosphorus, and the use of horrific, indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction, such as cluster bombs?

Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the incoming speaker of a new Democratic-run House, has called for a new civility and bi-partisanship in Congress, but it seems her idea of civility and bi-partisanship is signing on to rabid, lame-duck, right-wing Republican resolutions, while ducking the heavy responsibility of calling a criminal president to account for his six-year assault on the Constitution, and for dragging the nation into a pointless, bloody and costly war.

Luckily for Abu-Jamal, his long battle for a fair trial will be fought not in the wretched and soiled halls of Congress, where any concern for justice and defense of constitutional rights and freedoms long ago vanished, but in an appellate courtroom, where some vestige of such lofty concerns may yet exist.

Unluckily for the rest of us, who thought we were taking a stand for freedom, the Constitution, and a restoration of national sanity when we voted last month, the struggle to revive the Bill of Rights and the concept of tripartite government, and to impeach a president run amok with mad dreams of imperial power, will have to be fought in those wretched, soiled halls--and in the streets.

Our task is to convince a bunch of political whores that they must act like the founding fathers intended, and as their oaths of office require, or the 110th Congress will be their last.
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Postscript

I'm just thinking: why are these worthies in Congress so worked up about the naming of a street in France after a convicted killer? We have parks named after the genocidal killer Gen. Armstrong Custer, hundreds of streets named after the genocidal killer Chris Columbus, a once popular Country&Western song about convicted mass killer of 22 women and babies Lt. William Calley (who was pardoned after serving less than three months!). We have yet to see anyone doing serious time for murders of Iraqis and Afghanis following torture by American troops. Heck, from the looks of things, honoring killers is as American as apple pie.

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December 6, 2006

Third Circuit Court to Hear Abu-Jamal Case; Prosecutor Admits He Had No `True Defense'

It's been 25 years now since Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot dead in a Center City, Philadelphia red-light district. Since then, Faulkner has become a rallying point for the nation's death penalty advocates. It's been 25 years, too, since the man convicted of killing Faulkner, Philadelphia radio journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, was arrested for the crime at the scene. Since July 1982, Abu-Jamal has been in solitary confinement on Philadelphia's death row, from which lonely spot he has become a world-famous prison journalist, and a rallying point for those opposed to capital punishment.

The debates over Abu-Jamal's guilt or innocence have raged now for an astonishing quarter of a century, through the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Battles have raged, too, within the loose-knit group of people who have backed Abu-Jamal, between those who argue that he is an innocent man, a political prisoner condemned for his politics, and those who simply argue that he never received a fair trial. Politicians at the local, state and even federal level, many without any real knowledge about this complex case, have prostituted themselves by pressing for Abu-Jamal's execution, while others, sometimes equally ignorant of the facts, have lionized him and honored him with honorary citizenships and street names.

Whatever one's views on this case, however, the reality is that it for the first time in 25 years, Abu-Jamal is finally going to get a chance in the second highest court in the land to make the case that his 1982 trial was fatally tainted by unconstitutional error, judicial bias, race-based jury selection and prosecutorial misconduct. The reality also is that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which will be hearing arguments on Abu-Jamal's appeal early next year (barring any unanticipated delays), could conceivably end up ordering a new trial for Abu-Jamal--a trial that, because of better defense counsel, a changed political climate, shifting demographics, the deaths of some witnesses, and the likelihood of new defense witnesses, would most likely end up setting him free, or having him released for time served. At the same time, the same three-judge panel hearing this appeal will also be considering a counter appeal by the Philadelphia District Attorney's office, which seeks to overturn a lower Federal District Court decision which five years ago tossed out Abu-Jamal's death sentence. So at the same time that the Third Circuit could end up giving Abu-Jamal a new chance to prove his innocence, or at least to leave prison a free man, it could ironically also end up sending him back onto death row and to a date with the needle.

Let's look at the DA's appeal first, since it's fairly simple.

In 2001, Judge William Yohn, a former Montgomery County state judge appointed to the federal bench by the first President Bush, found that Abu-Jamal's death sentence had been constitutionally tainted. He ruled that the instructions of the trial judge, the late Albert Sabo, and the jury polling form used by Sabo, were both confusing and could have led jurors to mistakenly assume that they could not consider any mitigating circumstances (which might argue against a death sentence) unless all 12 members of the jury agreed that such a mitigating factor existed. In fact, as Judge Yohn noted in his decision, the law allows any one juror who finds such a mitigating factor (for example, being a devoted father to a young child, or having a difficult childhood) to consider that factor in deciding whether or not to vote for a death penalty. Since the law requires a unanimous vote for death in order for a capital sentence to be imposed, this means that any one juror should be able to take execution off the table if she or he thinks there is a sufficiently mitigating factor.

If the DA can convince at least two of the three appellate judges that Yohn was wrong in his ruling, Abu-Jamal would be put back on death row, with his only remaining hope of avoiding execution being the US Supreme Court--or a reversal of his conviction itself. Even if the Third Circuit panel supports Yohn's overturning of the death sentence, however, Abu-Jamal could still end up facing execution. This is because once an Appeals Court decision is rendered, the DA will have 180 days to decide whether to seek a new trial on the sentence alone. If that were to happen, a new jury would have to be impaneled to hear arguments for and against execution, with the alternative being life in prison without possibility of parole.

Yohn's vacating of Abu-Jamal's death sentence was well-reasoned, and it seems unlikely that the higher court would reverse it, but this case has been full of surprises from the start--with most of them going against Abu-Jamal--so it cannot be ruled out.

Meanwhile, however, this past year there was a surprise ruling by the Third Circuit that went Abu-Jamal's way and that improved his chances of winning a new trial by 200 percent. That surprise came in the form of an announcement that Abu-Jamal would be allowed to add two additional grounds for appeal of his conviction to the one, which Judge Yohn had already certified for appeal.

Under existing law and federal court rules, a capital defendant is only guaranteed the right to appeal to the federal appellate court a ruling that a lower federal district judge has "certified" for appeal. Petitions to consider other issues may be made to appellate judges, but those appeals judges have no obligation to grant a hearing on them. In Abu-Jamal's case, Judge Yohn rejected all 20 of his appeals of his conviction. But on one of those claims--the argument that his jury had been systematically stripped of qualified black jurors by the prosecutor's use of peremptory challenges (challenges for which no reason has to be given)--the judge seemed troubled enough by the evidence presented that he certified an appeal to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

Abu-Jamal's appellate attorney, Robert R. Bryan of San Francisco, went ahead and pursued several other rejected grounds for appeal, though, and was rewarded last December with a decision by the Third Circuit to hear appeals arguments on two other grounds. One of these was the claim that prosecutor Joseph McGill, near the trial's end during his summation to the jury, had improperly led jurors to believe they needn't worry about the possibility of wrongfully convicting the defendant. Turning the basic requirement that jurors may only convict if they feel a case has been proven "beyond a reasonable doubt," McGill instead urged Abu-Jamal's jury to go ahead and vote guilty because their verdict would not be the last word. McGill, a veteran prosecutor who clearly knew what he was doing, improperly assured them, without any objection from the judge, that there would be "appeal after appeal" of their verdict, which he argued therefore "may not be final."

Federal courts have generally found unconstitutional such attempts to remove jurors' sense of responsibility for the gravity of their decision. It is hard to imagine how fair-minded appellate judges could allow such a blatant undermining of the law to stand, and yet, there have been many examples of appeals courts doing just this, and the Abu-Jamal case is a very politically charged issue.

The other ground for appeal which the Third Circuit invited an appeal filing on was the charge that Judge Sabo had been unconstitutionally biased against the defendant both at the original trial and during the 1995 post-conviction relief act (PCRA) hearing. A few years back, Abu-Jamal's defense team discovered a court stenographer, Terri Maurer Carter, who said that in the opening days of Abu-Jamal's trial, she, in the company of her own judge, Richard Klein (currently a state Superior Court Judge), had overheard Sabo say he would "help them fry the nigger." The alleged incident reportedly occurred at the end of the day as Sabo was exiting the courtroom along with his court clerk through the private "robing room" exit, just as Judge Klein, then a civil court judge who was planning to borrow Sabo's courtroom for evening hearings, and his stenographer, were entering the room.

Common Pleas Judge Pamela Dembe, in 2001, ruled that it wouldn't matter if Sabo had uttered those words, "since this was a jury trial." Hers was a bizarre decision, since even if jurors, not judges, render the verdict, judges clearly do make critical decisions about the admissibility of evidence, about the questions that may be asked of witnesses, and about how trials are to be conducted, and it's common sense that a biased judge could easily skew a trial against a defendant. But in any event, in a PCRA hearing, where there is no jury, it is the judge alone who determines whether new evidence is significant, what questioning will be allowed of witnesses, and what subpoenas will be issued on behalf of the defendant. Sabo's astonishing one-sidedness at that hearing was so blatant that it led the Philadelphia Inquirer to editorialize at the time: "The behavior of the judge in the case was disturbing the first time around--and in hearings last week he did not give the impression…of fair-mindedness. Instead, he gave the impression…of undue haste and hostility toward the defense’s case."

Should at least two of the three appeals court judges considering this argument find evidence of unconstitutional judicial bias, it would not lead to an overturning of Abu-Jamal's conviction, but rather would more likely lead to a new round of evidentiary hearings before a federal judge--most likely Judge Yohn. At such a hearing, Abu-Jamal would likely be given a chance to recall and re-question witnesses whose testimony had either been disallowed or interfered with by Judge Sabo. Abu-Jamal would probably also be able to call new witnesses who have been discovered more recently, whose testimony might undermine some of the earlier prosecution witnesses in the case. It is possible there could also be recantations from some key prosecution trial witnesses. (For example, there were reports back in 1995 that one of the prosecution's key eye-witnesses to the Faulkner shooting, the cab driver Robert Chobert, had recanted his trial testimony. In court, he had testified that his cab was parked directly behind Faulkner's parked squad car, making him a direct witness to the shooting. Now, he instead had allegedly told an investigator for the defenst that he had been parked on another street, facing away from the incident. Sabo had prevented this damaging line of questioning by the defense at the PCRA.) Clearly such a federal court evidentiary hearing could pave the way for the ordering of a new trial.

The third avenue of appeal of Abu-Jamal's conviction--the one certified for appeal by Judge Yohn in 2001--is perhaps his best shot at an overturning of his conviction. This is the claim of racial bias in jury selection--an issue that even the current conservative Supreme Court has been very sensitive to.

In Abu-Jamal's case, it is clear from the record that prosecutor McGill used 11 of his allotted 15 "peremptory" challenges to remove from consideration 11 black jurors who had met the standard of agreeing that they could vote for a death penalty. (In capital cases, jurors must be questioned by defense and prosecution, or by the judge, and any juror who states that she or he could never vote for a death sentence may be summarily dismissed "for cause," since such a juror, if impaneled, would be able to veto any death sentence.) In the end, when jury selection was completed, Abu-Jamal wound up with just three black and nine white jurors (ultimately reduced to two blacks when one black juror was removed by the judge under questionable circumstances, to be replaced by a white juror). This in a city that was 44 percent black, and in a case that involved the slaying of a white police officer by a black defendant, making race a critical issue. While McGill has insisted that his reasons for rejecting all those qualified black jurors had nothing to do with their race, in fact both his own record and the record of the prosecutor's office under then DA Ed Rendell (now Pennsylvania's governor), suggest otherwise.

Consider that between 1977 and 1986, McGill used peremptory challenges to strike 74 percent of qualified African-American jurors from trials he prosecuted, compared to only 25 percent of whites. Consider further that under DA Rendell, the Philadelphia prosecutor's office overall, over the same eight-year period, struck black jurors 58 percent of the time, while striking white jurors only 22 percent of the time. This is on its face damning evidence of a systematic policy of illegal race-based jury selection on the part of both McGill and of the DA's office. Moreover, under existing Supreme Court precedent, a defendant, to prove unconstitutional race-based jury selection, does not even need to prove that there is a pattern of discrimination--only that there is evidence that race was a factor in his specific trial. McGill's line of questioning during jury selection for this trial makes it evident that such was likely the case. For example, black jurors who were dismissed, not "for cause" but peremptorily, were frequently asked by McGill if they had "listened to black radio," while white jurors were never asked such a question. At one point, McGill also interrupted Judge Sabo to observe that a black judge had entered the courtroom and seated himself on the side of the visitor's seating area where Abu-Jamal’s supporters were. McGill said to the judge, "If the court pleases, the two black jurors may know him." Since it was just as likely that the ten white jurors might have known Judge Calvin Wilson, this was clear evidence that McGill saw black jurors as being fundamentally different from white jurors."

Judge Sabo, it should be noted, studiously ignored McGill's outburst--perhaps aware of how damaging it could be.

Although the above statistical evidence was submitted to Judge Yohn by Abu-Jamal's defense team, the judge never even considered it, because he confused and conflated several studies submitted by the defense, and incorrectly concluded that neither the McGill jury statistics nor the Rendell jury statistics covered the period of Abu-Jamal's trial. Because Yohn rejected that evidence out of hand, he did not bother to review other evidence of race-based jury selection specific to the trial. Yet in fact, not only did the period of both those studies cover the period of Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial; his trial was in fact a part of those statistics.

Should at least two of the three judges hearing the Third Circuit appeal conclude that there was an attempt at racial exclusion underlying McGill's peremptory challenges, they could appropriately order a new trial for Abu-Jamal. An alternative would be for the Third Circuit to send the issue back to Judge Yohn, with instructions that he reconsider, based upon all of the evidence submitted by the defense. Given that evidence, there is a very good chance that in the end, Abu-Jamal could get a new trial, with a jury that, in today's Philadelphia, would likely have four to six African-American jurors on it instead of only two.

It seems clear that the coming hearing of Abu-Jamal's appeal before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, at which there will be oral arguments presented by both sides, will be dramatic and possibly explosive. And since any decision by the appeals court will lead, at a minimum, to a whole new round of appeals, while some could lead to new hearings or to a new trial, or penalty trial, it seems equally clear that this 25-year-old death penalty case will be around for some time to come, as will the man who has spent those 25 years--including the last five during which his sentence has technically been lifted--in solitary confinement on Pennsylvania's grim supeer-max death row. (The Philadelphia DA, in an act of petty vindictiveness, asked the federal court not to move Abu-Jamal off death row to a general prison population as long as the appeal of his vacated death penalty was still pending.)

Meanwhile, those who continue to lobby tirelessly for Abu-Jamal's execution--especially Faulkner's widow Maureen and the Pennsylvania Fraternal Order of Police, as well as Governor Rendell himself--should take note of an astonishing statement made by Abu-Jamal prosecutor McGill in a December 3 article in the Inquirer. McGill, now retired and a private attorney, who had assured me in an interview for my book on the case (Killing Time), that it had been "the strongest case" he’d ever handled, told the Inquirer reporter that Abu-Jamal "could have been convicted of a lesser offense" had he waged a "true defense."

It is well known that the Philadelphia District Attorney's office has had a long history, stretching back at least to Rendell's two terms as DA, of deliberately overcharging defendants in hopes of winning plea bargains, and of deliberately seeking the death penalty even when it is inappropriate, in order to be able to "death qualify" and screen out jurors who are opposed to capital punishment (many academic studies have documented that pro-execution jurors tend to be more pro-prosecution and more inclined to convict than jurors who object philosophically or on religious grounds to capital punishment). Indeed many jurisdictions in Pennsylvania consider this tactic--still practiced under DA Lynne Abraham--to be unethical.

McGill's statement suggests that this tactic may have been applied in Abu-Jamal's case. It is also an admission by McGill that Abu-Jamal never had a "true defense."

Now I know McGill claims that this is because Abu-Jamal himself screwed up by insisting on being able to defend himself, but the truth is more complicated. In fact, Abu-Jamal had hired an attorney, Anthony Jackson, whom he thought was up to the task, but who in fact had never handled a death penalty case, and who moreover had a drug habit (he was subsequently disbarred for financial improprieties, allegedly related to drugs). When Jackson began messing up, Abu-Jamal tried to get rid of him, but was barred from doing so by Judge Sabo, who seemed to relish the discord that he was encouraging between the defendant and his counsel. What Abu-Jamal ended up with was the worst of all possible worlds: an incompetent defense counsel, but no right to represent himself either.

In America, the right to a fair trial is sacred. Is this the kind of situation--a defendant who did not have a "true defense"--one that anybody, including McGill, would want to see lead to a man's conviction and execution?
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December 1, 2006

Fighting the Iraq War...At Home

I had just gotten to the gym yesterday, and had started on the treadmill, when a barrel-chested young former marine recently returned from a second tour in Iraq walked past. Looking at my shirt, which sports the slogan "No US War on Iraq" on the front, and a peace sign on the back, surrounded with the number of U.S. dead in the war, he stopped and said coldly, "If I see you here again in that shirt, I'll tear it off you myself."

Momentarily taken aback, I looked him in the eye and said, "This is a free country, buddy, and if you touch me or my shirt, I'll have you charged with assault."

As he stormed off, I reminded him that America isn't Iraq, and that here being stronger doesn't mean you automatically get your way. I added that he was insulting all of those who died in Iraq thinking they were defending American freedoms. He didn't turn around.

I started my jogging again, but then found myself getting increasingly pissed off. Who did this guy think he was making threats like that?

I went out and informed the YMCA's executive director of what had happened and said I wanted this guy informed that he couldn't go around threatening people who didn’t agree with him. Although she was reluctant, she followed me back into the weight room.

I went up to the guy, who now was doing arm curls with two 50-lb dumbbells, and said. "You messed up my run. Now I'm going to mess up your exercise routine. I pay for a membership to be able to come here and work out in peace. There is no rule barring the wearing of political statements on shirts, and I wear what I feel like wearing here. If you want to criticize me, my politics or my shirt, that's fine, but you are not allowed to make threats and if you do, you are going to have to leave."

The director backed me up, albeit limply, agreeing that threats were not allowed.

The guy finally grimaced and said, "Okay, I'm sorry."

As I went back to my treadmill, four people in the room came up and thanked me for taking a stand.

Mulling over what had happened, I realized that this guy, who had fought in the bloody US assault Fallujah in late 2004--a pointless massacre that featured the use of prohibited weapons like napalm and white phosphorus, and that leveled one of Iraq's largest cities, with the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians--was really reflecting the frustration of the loser,

Less than a month ago, American voters cast out the Republican leadership in Congress in what was primarily a protest against the war in Iraq. Polls are showing that two thirds of Americans now see the Iraq invasion as a giant mistake, and want exactly what my shirt calls for: an end to the war. Back in 2003, and even 2004, American troops in Iraq were seen almost universally as heroes. Now, like the soldiers of the Vietnam era, they are being deliberately forgotten--an embarrassing reminder to those who once supported the war of the idiocy of that mission (just try finding any of those once ubiquitous yellow ribbon magnets). Reports of rapes, torture and murder by American troops in Iraq haven't helped things.

The would-be bully in the gym has seen his status plummet from hero to, at best, victim.

Clearly, it's not fair to blame the troops--or him--for what's happening. He and tens of thousands like him were sent into Iraq on a lie, told by their commanding officers and by their commander in chief that they were going into Iraq as "payback" for 9-11--even though the 9-11 attackers included not one Iraqi, and even though there was never any link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. They were given inadequate equipment, inadequate body armor, insufficient troops, and an assignment--pacifying and establishing democracy in a tribal nation--that was clearly a fools' errand. And they have been left to kill, and to be maimed and killed themselves, in that quagmire now for nearly four years simply to protect the president from having to say he messed up.

Having said that, we are also starting to see the human and social cost of the horrors of that war. People like this former Marine are damaged goods--returned to the U.S. with chips on their shoulders and with an anachronistic militaristic mindset that says the guy with the gun gets to make the rules.

I'm reminded of a similar experience I had back in the late 1960s, when I participated in an event called "Vietnam Summer." Back then, with the Vietnam War going downhill for the U.S., I volunteered as part of a national campaign to go door-to-door in my neighborhood handing out literature about the war and talking about it with people. I knocked at one door of a ranch house down the street a ways from my home. A woman I didn't know answered the door. When I told her why I was there, and handed her a flier, she looked at me funny, and said with some irony in her voice, "Honey, there's someone here to see you."

A big crew-cut man 10 years older than me came to the door and asked what I wanted. I repeated my spiel to him and gave him a flier too. He glanced at it, his face contorted with anger, and said, "Just a second." He walked into the house and returned holding an unexploded mortar round. It was painted red, had a hammer-and-sickle logo, and a set of brass fins. He said, “You see this? It's a Viet Cong mortar. The only reason I'm here talking to you is because it didn't go off when it landed next to me! Some of my buddies weren't so lucky. Now scram before I lose my temper and ram this into your head!"

I split in a hurry! But years later, my father said that the guy, retired from the army, mentioned the incident to him and apologized, saying, "I should not have done that. I was angry at the time, but your son was doing the right thing. The war was wrong from the start."

I don't know what horrors this young man lived through, though I overheard him telling one shocked woman in the gym that his time in Iraq represented "the best years of my life." I do know that what U.S. forces did in Fallujah in late 2004 was a collective war crime, with captured and wounded enemy fighters shown on camera being executed point-blank, residential neighborhoods leveled by bombs and tank fire, innocent men and even boys illegally barred from fleeing the scene of battle, fleeing civilians shot as they swam for safety across the river carrying white flags, and hospitals attacked. The entire assault on Fallujah, for that matter, was a case of collective punishment--something outlawed since World War II as a war crime. No one who participated in that mass atrocity could walk away unimpaired in some way.

The most positive thing I can bring away from this encounter is the recognition that the anger and frustration expressed by this ex-Marine is a sign that the American war in Iraq has truly been lost. Back in late 2003, I wrote a piece about this same shirt, which I bought and began wearing on the day of the Iraq invasion. I had observed that when I first wore it in March 2003, it mostly elicited angry denunciations and hand gestures from people caught up in the blind jingoism of the moment, but that by late September, just six months into the war, the majority of people who saw the shirt had positive comments. Over the years, as the war has become even more of a disaster, the shirt, despite becoming pretty seedy looking from long use, has become increasingly popular, with people now asking where they can buy one like it.

I view this veteran's belligerent response to my shirt and its message as just a corollary of this changed political environment. As the "cause" for which he gave up several years of his young life--and in the name of which he almost certainly lost friends and comrades--goes down the drain, to be remembered as one of America's historic policy disasters and one of its few military defeats, he is reacting in the way he has been trained: by threatening violence.

In that, he is reflecting the mentality of the current administration, both in its failed approach to international affairs, and in its hostile attitude towards American freedoms.
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November 30, 2006

Doomed by Politics, and by Ourselves

Are current political systems--our own and others around the world--fundamentally incapable of dealing with the biggest crisis facing mankind, indeed facing life on earth?

The current farce underway in the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices are considering whether or not the federal Environmental Protection Agency has the authority and the mandate to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, is a case in point. The claim being made by the Bush administration, and seemingly backed by at least four conservative members of the court, is that it does not, because the plaintiffs in the case--12 states that are concerned about global warming's effects--cannot show specific damages traceable to controllable emissions such as those from cars and power plants.

Aside from the absurdity of this claim, which is akin to the Bush administration's even more specious argument that global warming cannot be definitively attributed to man-made causes, it does illustrate why nothing is being done to stop the looming disaster of global warming.

Simply put, the problem of the globe heating, the polar icecaps melting, the seas rising and of the desertification of most of the inhabited globe, remains so remote (these things are decades, or perhaps even a century away), and the required remedies called for are so radical, disruptive and urgent (ending reliance on internal combustion engines, shifting away from established suburban living patterns, halting the rape of rainforests and other virgin woodlands), that no court, no legislature, and no national leader has the courage to demand action. Even Al Gore, in his film "An Inconvenient Truth," refuses to call for any drastic measures that would really have an impact, claiming improbably instead that trivial measures like buying hybrid cars or turning down thermostats will do the trick.

The American government clearly can function in a crisis. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, and the Pacific fleet crippled, the nation was quickly shifted to a war footing, and within two years was pushing the Nazi and Imperial war machines back. Even world governments in general, democratic and authoritarian, have demonstrated that they can respond, not just to military threats, but to an environmental crisis. Consider the discovery that the Freon used in aerosol cans and cooling systems, were destroying the earth’s protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere. Once the link was made clear, nations around the world banned the used of the material and substitutes were found, so that that particular crisis has already become to wane.

Yet global warming is something different. Not only is the phenomenon much more complex and slower in developing than the ozone holes that were found to be growing at the poles, not only is the relationship between specific human activities and global warming harder to define than was the relationship between Freon use and ozone depletion. More importantly, while shifting away from Freon use was not a major financial burden for anyone, the remedy for global warming represents a threat to the entire world economic system, and to the economic systems of most nations of the world.

It might seem strange that in a democracy, ordinary people would prefer to go about their lives in a way that threatens the very survival of their children or certainly of their grandchildren, rather than seriously inconvenience themselves in an effort to protect their progeny, but that is what we see happening.

Moreover, political systems, including our own, are structured so as to dissuade anyone in politics from advocating the needed revolutionary changes.

Any presidential candidate who called for elimination of the gasoline engine, or who called for eliminating the federal subsidy for road construction and repair (a move that would kill off the suburbs), would be doomed in the early party primaries. It's hard to imagine any representative or senator proposing such legislation, either, and for the same reason. Our capitalist system, which is based upon the premise of endless economic expansion, will not abide any measures that would crimp corporate profits or reduce consumption, and the corporations that fund our political campaigns and that own the major media that cover them would act promptly to squelch any such talk.

Nor are autocrats, like the leaders of China and Russia, in any better position to save humanity from itself. Their very survival in power depends upon delivering ever better standards of living to their people, even as they destroy their own countries, and the globe, in the process.

Clearly this is not a crisis that will be solved by politicians and leaders. If humans are to survive, it will be because we, the ordinary people, grasped the magnitude of the threat, and forced the necessary changes to happen ourselves.

Can we do that?

We did it with the Vietnam War, where the public finally forced an unwilling political system to walk away and admit defeat. But the enemy then was the military industrial complex, and the cost to ourselves was nothing.

With global warming, we would be calling not just for a derailing of the corporate profit engine, but for our own sacrifice and discomfort. If we mandated the end of the automotive era, we'd be undermining not just the shareholders of the oil and automotive industries, but the value of our own suburban homes, which would no longer be in commuting distance to our jobs. If we shut down coal-fired power plants, we'd be forced by enormously higher electric rates to get rid of most of our lights, to turn down our thermostats dramatically, and to live with pantries instead of oversized refrigerators. We would, of course, also be putting many of the companies where we work out of business. To make matters worse, we'd be doing all this before any of us is really feeling the effects of global warming itself in any serious, recognizable way.

So this is the challenge: Can we, as a people, can we as a species, see beyond our own immediate short-term self-interest, and make the wrenching political, economic and social changes that would be required to prevent the destruction of our planet?

I am pessimistic.

As things stand, we have a ignorant president who openly scoffs at the whole idea of global warming, and who is actively working to block even small efforts to combat it (Bush, a creature of the energy industry, is the one who is having the EPA challenge the effort to limit carbon dioxide emissions of cars), and we aren't even calling him to account.

As individuals, we know not to pull rafters off the roof to make a fire, because the house will fall in. We know we have to cut down dead trees in the yard before they fall on the house--even if we have to spend some of the kids' college fund to do it. We know we have to get our kids vaccinated so they won't get polio. So far, however, as citizens, we are content to put the rafters in the fireplace, we’re killing all the trees in the yard, and we're letting the whole planet run a fever without doing anything about it.
======================

November 21, 2006

Congress Should Immediately Terminate the 2001 AUMF

Forget Nancy Pelosi's "100 Hours" agenda for the new Democratic Congress.

The first thing Democrats need to do when they walk into the Senate and House chambers this January is to vote out a joint resolution repealing the September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which was the authorization for the U.S. attack Al Qaeda forces and the Taliban government of Afghanistan.

That AUMF has been used, wholly inappropriately and wantonly, by President Bush as the justification for his assault on the US Constitution, for his willful violation of laws domestic and international, and for his unconstitutional usurpation of legislative and judicial power.

The president has claimed that the AUMF, far from simply being an authorization to go to war against Afghanistan and against the Al Qaeda organization there, was an open-ended authorization for him to initiate an unending "War on Terror," which he has subsequently claimed has no boundaries, and will be fought around the globe and within the U.S.

Bush has further claimed, without a shred of Constitutional authority, that this AUMF makes him commander in chief in that never-ending global conflict, and that as commander in chief, he is not bound by either law or Constitution. It is this spurious and sweeping claim of dictatorial power that the president has used to justify his signing statements, which he has used to render inoperative in whole or in part some 850 or more acts passed by Congress since 9-11. It is this same claim that the president has used to justify his deliberate violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—a felony and violation of the Fourth Amendment.

It is likewise this AUMF that he has used to justify his authorization of torture, kidnapping and detention without charge, his refusal to answer legitimate requests for information from Congress and the 9-11 commission, and his ignoring of direct orders from the federal courts.

All of these actions by the president are manifestly unconstitutional, and cry out for his impeachment. (The Constitution clearly defines and limits the president’s commander in chief role to simply making him the senior officer of the military, not a generalissimo. Furthermore, as Barbara Olshanski and I explain in our book The Case for Impeachment, the AUMF never gave Bush any authority at all to conduct war inside the U.S. In fact, Tom Daschle, who as a Democratic Senator from South Dakota was the Senate Majority Leader at the time the AUMF was passed, specifically denied a last-minute request from the White House to have the words "in the United States" inserted into the wording of the resolution authorization.)

Bush should be impeached for all of his abuses of power, as well as for many other crimes, such as his deception in leading the nation into an illegal war against Iraq. But clearly, it will take time for a growing mass movement to pressure a timid Democratic leadership into taking their oath of office seriously and initiating impeachment proceedings.

Meanwhile, Congress can pull the rug out from under this usurper right away by simply revoking the September AUMF. The situation is akin to a teenager who has been given a car and then drives around banging it up and ruining it. At some point, the parents have got to take away the keys.

There is no justification for the continuation of the 2001 AUMF. Afghanistan is no longer a war. The U.S. is simply contributing military assets to a NATO action in that country at the request of the elected government in Kabul. Such an action requires no AUMF. Meanwhile, the prevention of terror is clearly an intelligence and police issue, not a war. It too does not require an AUMF.

A simple majority vote of House and Senate would put the U.S. Constitution back in place, and would restore the balance of power between executive, legislative and judicial branches.

Then Congress can get to work on investigating the crimes and abuses of this administration, and to passing progressive legislation without fear of further unconstitutional signing statements and further presidential law-breaking.

So how about it Rep. Pelosi and Senator Reid? Are you ready to uphold and defend the Constitution? Are you ready to take the president's keys away?
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November 16, 2006

Let Lieberman Go; He's an Albatross

If the Democratic Party were a real opposition party--a party of principle filled with fighters--I'd say maintaining control of the Senate, even with by a margin of a single, fragile vote, would be important and valuable.

But that's not what we have.

The Democratic Party, particularly the actual elected congressional delegation and the leadership of the party in the two houses, is so washed out, so gutless, so calculating, and so self-serving, that it hardly rates as a second party.

Because of this, the role of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, recently re-elected by the voters of Connecticut while running as an independent after losing his own party's nomination to an upstart anti-war candidate, Ned Lamont, is dangerous in the extreme.

Lieberman, who won re-election by stealing the votes of Connecticut's Republicans from the GOP's official candidate (Lieberman only won about a third of the Democratic vote), has been a closet Republican for years. He was a Republican in all but name when he ran as Al Gore's vice presidential partner in 2000, and since helping that campaign go down in flames has been one of George Bush's most stalwart supporters in Congress.

Let's look at the Lieberman record:

Absolute and wholly uncritical support for Israel's right-wing governments and for Israel's most incendiary and repressive policies towards the Palestinians.

Wholehearted support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and for continuing U.S. military involvement in that unmitigated disaster.

Full support for Bush's criminal policies of torture, kidnapping and stripping away of Americans' historic right to habeas corpus.

Full support for the Patriot Act and its even worse offspring, Patriot II.

Advocate, along with Lynn Cheney, of government intrusion into universities, and of the undermining of academic freedom, in the name of rooting out alleged "traitors" on university campuses who might have the temerity to question the official story on 9-11, or to challenge the so-called War on Terror.

Support, even, for former Attorney General John Ashcroft's mad plan for 20 million citizen spies in an Operation TIPS to spy on their neighbors.

Having Lieberman on your side in a narrowly-divided Democratic Senate is like having a nest of termites on a wooden ship.

As the crucial 51st vote that gives Democrats majority control of the Senate, Lieberman is able to hold the entire party hostage to his and Bush’s crazy, right-wing, war-mongering and Constitution-shredding agenda. Absent any fighting spirit and any real principles, the Democratic Party leadership will give Lieberman everything he wants over the next two years, just to keep him on board and themselves in power.

It's a bad bargain.

America, and the Democratic Party, would be far better off if Democrats in the Senate gave Lieberman his marching orders: either support the party caucus on issues like the war, civil liberties and challenging Bush's unconstitutional abuses of power, or forget getting any key committee assignments. If he doesn’t like it, he can come out of the closet and become an honest Republican.

So what if that means the Republicans take control of the Senate? They still won't be able to pass any legislation, with Democrats in control of the House. They still won't be able to overturn Democratic fillibusters. And in any event, a Democratic House and Senate won't be able to pass any progressive legislation in the next two years anyhow, with Bush in the White House, casting vetos and issuing his signing statements.

Lieberman in the GOP will be a nobody--a welterweight from a tiny state, out of touch with his own voters. He will be toast in his next election, when no Democrats will vote for him.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party will be cut free of one particularly noxious albatross.
===========================

November 14, 2006

Credit Ned Lamont with Democrats' Antiwar Position

Ned Lamont may have lost his race for Senate to incumbent war-backer and civil rights trasher Joseph Lieberman in Connecticut, but his Quixotic effort to unseat one of Bush's staunchest backers in the Senate was no failure.

At his concession speech on the evening of Nov. 7, Lamont said he felt his stunning Democratic primary victory in August was the event that pushed the Democratic Party and its candidates for Congress to begin taking a more explicitly anti-war position in the fall campaign.

I think Lamont is absolutely correct.

Before he knocked Lieberman off the ballot in Connecticut, Democrats across the country were for the most part running from Iraq as fast as they could, and were being rightly hectored by Republicans who kept asking "where's your Iraq policy?"

For the most part, the Democrats, when they answered at all, only offered up the lame suggestion that Bush had badly managed the post-invasion occupation.

By making his campaign against Lieberman a frontal attack on the whole idea of the war--by saying Iraq never should have been invaded in the first place, and that the U.S. should get out as quickly as possible--and by proving that his was a winning position, even in a major military-industrial state, Lamont changed the national terms of political debate.

Almost overnight, Democrats began taking stronger positions against the war, and almost overnight, Democrats began to advance in the polls.

What became apparent was that the American public was just waiting for someone to take a stand for peace and an end to the Iraq conflict.

The Democratic Congressional delegation, which is still clogged with the limp, soggy leaders who have spent years learning how to avoid taking a stand on anything more controversial or compelling than stem cell research, is still trying to avoid the reality of Lamont's lesson in political courage.

They should wake up. The message of Lamont's campaign, and of the fall election results, is that it's time to hit the gas, not the brakes.

It was Lamont's anti-war primary campaign that kicked the national Democratic congressional campaign into gear. For that he should be thanked.
=====================

November 2, 2006

Kerry and Bush: The Joke's on Us

There are so many things to say about the John Kerry gaffe, it's hard to know where to start.

Just the idea of President Bush’s scolding Kerry and telling him that "words are important" is beyond belief. This, after all, is the guy who for five years has been warning Americans about various "nookular" threats facing us. A guy who has his every utterance scripted for him and yet still manages to screw up his lines with regularity. A guy who had to have a cueing device hidden in his ear canal during his debates with that selfsame Kerry, so he'd avoid just standing at the lectern and saying "duh" in response to questions.

But let's not stop there. Kerry himself was right in character. He clearly didn't write his own joke, and was too slow-witted to get the joke he was supposed to deliver, which reportedly was that if students didn't work and study hard might end up someday being ignorant incurious leaders like President Bush, and getting the country into another mess like Iraq. It wasn't much of a joke, but by bunging it up, Kerry revealed his Boston Brahman snobbishness, saying instead that if students didn't study hard, they'd end up in Iraq--the clear implication being that he thinks that the US troops fighting and dying in Iraq are there because they’re uneducated.

Kerry, the candidate who voted for the war but opposes the war, who voted for funding for the war and voted against it, is now trying to say that the joke he told is not the joke that was written for him, but that's not going to work. He certainly should have understood instantly what he was saying when he said it, and realized how smarmy it was. What we're left with is the unavoidable conclusion that Kerry doesn't know anything about what he's saying when he says it. Like Bush, he's just reading a script, and like Bush, he's bungling it badly.

That said, Republicans should be taking no pleasure in this. While it's always fun to see a stuffed-shirt like Kerry get exposed and humiliated, the president is in no position to mock.

Besides, there is the reality that most of the men and women fighting and dying for the US in the deserts and urban jungles of Iraq and Afghanistan are there, not because they are stupid or intellectually lazy, as Kerry said, but because they were too poor to pay for their college or to have their parents pay for their college the way Bush's and Kerry's parents did for them. They're there because Bush and his Republican Congress have for six years slashed federal aid for higher education, driving students into ROTC programs, where they became easy pickings for Bush's wars upon graduation. They're also there because people like Bush and Kerry have conspired to encourage American firms to ship well-paying jobs overseas, leaving students with little but retail clerical work and waitering to help them pay their bills.

As for the active duty troops fighting alongside them, while some may just be patriotic kids from military families who wanted a little excitement, and some may be sadists with a passion for killing, torture and fancy weaponry, most are there because there were no other jobs available. They're not stupid, John. But neither are they happy to be there, George. They're there because both of you have betrayed them in the name of "globalization."

In the end, the joke's really on us, because ever since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, we Americans have accepted uncritically the idea that our political leaders will be simply animated noisemakers for transmitting the carefully scripted "talking points," sound bites, polemics and yes, even jokes written for them by a backroom group of political strategists--all presented as though they were coming from the brains of the people doing the talking.

We get the government, and the politicians, we deserve.

Let’s at least be thankful for the laughs they give us, inadvertently.
=======================

October 25, 2006

Forget Her "Pledge," She Took an Oath: Why Pelosi is Wrong on Impeachment

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in an interview with Lesley Stahl of CBS News, said impeachment would be "off the table" if Democrats take over the House of Representatives in November, calling it a "waste of time."

She couldn't be more wrong, and most Americans know it.

While Pelosi was responding to a loaded question from Stahl, who couched impeachment in terms of Democrats' supposed desire to seek revenge if they retake Congress, Pelosi, who would become majority leader in a Democratic House, bought into Stahl's argument, saying that she'd be "satisfied" to see the president and vice president spending the remaining two years of their second term as "lame ducks."

What Stahl should have asked Pelosi was whether she thought that President Bush had violated the law and the Constitution, and whether she believed he has committed impeachable offenses.

The answer to that is clearly yes.

Rep. Pelosi must know most of the president's crimes are not partisan at all. They are crimes against Americans of all stripes, and against liberty and the Constitution.

Just take the president's order to the National Security Administration to spy on Americans without first seeking a warrant. A federal judge in Detroit has already found that the president violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--a felony--and the Fourth Amendment. That is an impeachable act, and one which Democrats and Republicans alike would punish if they understood the the implications of what the president has done. Given that the secret FISA court has only rejected a handful of warrant requests out of over 70,000 made since 1978, the only reason Bush could have decided to violate the law is that he is doing something so outrageous he knew the hand-picked, top-security-cleared FISA judges would have rejected it out of hand.

Or take the signing statements. This president has used so-called "signing statements" to render inoperative over 800 laws or parts of laws passed by Congress, claiming that he has the authority to do so because he is a commander in chief in time of war (the so-called "War" on Terror). Rep. Pelosi claims that if she becomes House leader, Democrats will want to pursue a positive, progressive political agenda, yet this will be clearly impossible if the president is allowed to simply continue issuing signing statements invalidating any laws passed by a Democratic Congress. Signing statements cannot be overridden, and if Democrats were to attempt to pass legislation outlawing them, Bush could veto that legislation--or render it inoperative with another signing statement. The only way to stop this unconstitutional usurpation of the founding principle of tripartite government is to impeach the president for blatant abuse of power.

This too, is an issue that Republicans and Democrats should agree on, for if this president is permitted to ignore laws passed by the Congress, then subsequent presidents (perhaps a President Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama?) could also do it, citing the continuing "War" on Terror, and the Bush precedent.

Does Nancy Pelosi believe that the president's lies and deceptions and the conspiracy by his administration to trick the nation into a disastrous invasion of Iraq is not grounds for impeachment? Nearly 3000 Americans have died as a result of that deceit, and nearly 40,000 have suffered grievous wounds, while the US military has been stretched to the breaking point, leaving the country unable to respond to genuine threats. Surely the author of this ongoing national nightmare must be punished, so that future presidents will not attempt to do the same thing.

These are only some of this administration's crimes. Others include:

* Bush's role in attacking, and then covering up the attack on former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame--a crime that was committed to discredit Wilson and discourage reporters from probing more deeply into his revelation that the documents used to claim Iraq was trying to buy uranium ore from Niger were obvious forgeries, and into who was behind those forgeries in the first place.

* Bush's authorization of torture as a policy for captives in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the nebulous, endless and borderless "War" on Terror. The president, in an act of desperation, has gotten the currently Republican Congress to ram through a bill granting retroactive immunity to all those, including himself, who authorized or engaged in torture, but this should not deter a Democratic Congress from seeking impeachment for an action that remains a violation of international law, that places American troops at greater risk, and that has destroyed America's image around the globe.

* Bush's criminally negligent handling of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

* The rot of corruption in the administration, highlighted by the Abramoff lobbying scandals, which clearly reach right into the Oval Office, despite the president’s initial lie that he didn’t know Jack Abramoff.

* Bush's refusal to testify under oath and on the record before the 9-11 Commission, and his refusal to provide officials and documents demanded by the commission regarding what the administration knew before the attacks and how it responded to what it knew. This obstructionism by the White House has been called close to an act of treason by former Sen. Bob Graham, who until the end of 2002 was the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and who has said if he were currently in the House would be the subject of a bill of impeachment.

Rep. Pelosi may think Americans don't want impeachment, but, like many Democratic leaders, ' simply out of touch. Indeed, the congresswoman will find a resolution on impeachment on her own ballot when she goes home to San Francisco to vote this November (a resolution that is likely to pass handily). Meanwhile, a new Newsweek magazine poll finds that fully 51 percent of all Americans believe that the president should be impeached--more than half of them saying this should be a priority. That same poll finds that 20 percent of Republicans think the president should be impeached, with one in four of those saying it should be a priority for the next Congress.

These are astonishing figures when you consider that support for impeachment of President Bill Clinton never got higher than 36 percent, even at the height of his impeachment process.

Maybe Rep. Pelosi should start listening to the voters, instead of to her campaign strategists.

More importantly, she and other Democratic—and Republican--members of the House should recall that oath they took when they assumed office, which commits them to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

The Constitution these days is under relentless assault by an enemy in the White House. Defending it is not a "waste of time" Ms. Pelosi; it is your sworn duty.
====================

October 24, 2006

Let's March in January: An Impeachment Call to Action!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

NOTE: Subsequent to the writing of this column, Impeachfor Change.org has called for an impeachment rally on January 27, to coincide with United for Peace and Justice's Washington demonstration against the Iraq War. Plans call for delivery of a massive petition for impeachment (being gathered now) to be delivered to Congress.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that, barring some incredible act of criminal cynicism such as the bombardment of Iran by the president, the Democrats are going to take over the House of Representatives.

That being the case, I propose that it's time all those patriots and lovers of liberty, all those who oppose the administration's mad imperial military policies, all those who recognize the so-called War on Terror for what it is--a War on America, all those whose stomachs turned at the sight of the fatal drowning of New Orleans, all those who are outraged at a president who claims the right to violate laws at will, to ignore acts of Congress and to snub rulings of the Supreme Court, all those who are sick of seeing their government function like a whorehouse for corporate Johns, all those who are angry at having a government that tortures and kidnaps people, including children, in our name, all those who know that there are dark secrets about 9-11 being buried by traitors in the White House, all those who despair at seeing the Bill of Rights ripped out of the Constitution article by article, begin a mass campaign to make impeachment of President Bush item one on the agenda of the next Congress.

I propose that the anti-war and impeachment movements combine forces and organize a massive petition campaign to obtain five million signatures calling on the Congress to initiate impeachment hearings on President Bush’s Constitutional high crimes, misdemeanors, treason and bribery, and that this petition be delivered to the future Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the future chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). Delivery of this document could be made on January 20, 2007, on the sixth anniversary of Bush’s benighted first inauguration. If the grassroots campaign organizations that have mobilized for the election turn to gathering signatures off their same voter lists right after Election Day, it shouldn’t be hard to get at least that many signatures. (There are already a number of groups, like Veterans for Peace, collecting signatures. These efforts can all be coordinated.)

I propose that this petition then be carried by demonstrators in a reverse "Un-Inauguration Impeachment March" that could assemble at the White House and proceed down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol steps (retracing the impeachment march Bush tried to make before his entourage started to face heckling and eggs). There, a set of proposed articles of impeachment could be formally read out, perhaps by members of Congress who would later be submitting them as formal impeachment bills to the House Judiciary Committee.

We are going to need something like this because the Democratic leadership--most notably Pelosi, but including the likes of Democratic House Campaign Committee Chair Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) and many of those in the Democratic Leadership Council--are publicly stating that they will try to block any impeachment bills.

Although it is clear from many national polls that more Americans today want this criminal president and usurper impeached than ever wanted either Clinton or Nixon impeached, these craven and cowardly “leaders” seem to think they will be punished by the Republicans if they attempt it. This is nonsense. It is the Republicans who have been dismantling Congress as a functioning branch of government, who are out of touch and who are now being rejected by the public. The public is not turning to the Democrats because it wants them to be pleasant and collegial in Washington. People are turning to the Democrats because they are sick and tired of the crooks, the charlatans, the megalomaniacs and the crackpots who have been running the country and the Constitution into the ground and sending our kids into pointless, endless wars. People want resolute action from the Democrats, not pussyfooting.

Pelosi is so out of it when it comes to her constituency, that she seems not to realize that the very ballot that has her listed as a candidate this November in her San Francisco congressional district includes a referendum on impeachment, which is likely to pass.

Instead of goading Pelosi into making pledges not to impeach, as mainstream reporters have been doing, someone should ask her and other Democrats who are ducking the issue whether or not they believe the president has been violating the Constitution and undermining freedoms and the separation of powers. If they answer yes, then they should be asked why they don’t feel obligated to take action in defense of liberty and the Constitution.

These weak-kneed sissies are worse than simply political cowards--they are violators of their own oaths of office, which commit them to upholding and defending the Constitution of the United States--a document which even they have to admit is under grave attack by this president and his co-conspirators. If Pelosi&Co. will not stand up and defend that document and the institution of Congress that Bush has so defiled with his signing statements, We the People must make them do it.

The first step, of course, is to throw out the Republican majority in Congress.

Then we have to turn our political sights and our righteous rage on the Democrats who, through their decade of habitual cowering, have enabled and are now protecting this criminal regime from the aggressive investigation that it so richly deserves.

Impeachment in 2007!

Let’s march!
===============================

October 17, 2006

Time to Change Some Key Terms in the News to Recognize Reality

The real truth about the Bush administration's plans for Iraq are slowly coming out. Now we learn that the military is looking at keeping 130,000 or 140,000 troops in that country--or what's left of a country--for at least another four years. That's why they've been building permanent bases there for the past few years.

This ugly reality should force us to reconsider some of the terminology we journalists have been using to describe what's happening.

In the old days Iraq would have been called a colony, but we don’t use words like that now, because we long ago concluded colonies were a bad thing and an anachronism. But the reality of Bush's Iraq is that it is a colony. It has a government that exists to serve the interests of the United States, and that depends entirely on the U.S. financially, militarily and politically. When the Bush administration or the Pentagon want to do something in Iraq, they don't ask the government in Baghdad for permission; they just do it. The farce about "handing over sovereignty" to the Iraqi government never passed the laugh test. So let's just recognize reality and start calling Iraq an American colony.

And that brings us to another word that needs changing. We clearly need to replace the name ascribed to those whose ideology got us into this situation in the first place: the Neoconservatives.

Since it's obvious that underneath all the deceptive rhetoric about "spreading democracy" at the point of a gun that what people like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Condi Rice really wanted all along was to establish an American colony in the middle of the Middle East, we're talking about people whose thinking is anything but "neo." These are folks who are still mentally living in the 19th Century, back when it was believed that great countries were defined as those that owned other nations, held them in positions of abject servitude and submission as colonies, and ripped off their resources at will.

We have over the past century come to understand that colonialism, besides being an ultimate kind of racist oppression, ultimately destroys the colonial power. Since colonial subjects inevitably resist their oppressors, the colonizer is forced to maintain costly military forces in its far-flung colonies, draining its domestic treasury, wasting the lives of its young, and distorting its own development.

We are in fact witnessing this situation today in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. has had to borrow close to half a trillion dollars to finance wars to repress smoldering rebellions. Those wars have been chewing up all the available combat forces of the most powerful nation on earth for five years now, with no end in sight.

It's time to call the ideologues who have concocted this disaster what they are: not Neocons, but Colonialists, or perhaps Paleocolonialists.

Now let's look too at the names of our two parties, which are long overdue for for upating.

The Republican Party took its name back when its members were advocating republican government, which is defined as a government where supreme power resides in the people who are empowered to vote, and where the leader is elected, not a monarch or dictator. Today, Republicans stand for a maximally intrusive central government that acts primarily in the interest of those at the top of the economic food chain. It is a party of the rich, a party that favors state religion, and a militarization of society with strict limits on behavior and stern punishment for dissent. Today's Republican Party also unquestioningly supports the morphing of the president into a dictator, with executive, judicial and legislative powers all subsumed within his office. The party, in practice, has also been working hard to disenfranchise large segments of the electorate by imposing obstacles to voting such as photo IDs, limited access to voting machines in poor areas, and adoption of electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail for possible recounts. There is a word for such a party, readily available. It is Proto-Fascist.

As for the Democratic Party, it has long ago forsaken its nominal etymological roots as a "party of the people" to become a party beholden to corporate power. While it still tolerates a degree of dissent, and claims to support the interests of working people, its leadership is far more concerned about catering to large corporate interests, and being financially backed by those interests. It might best be described as more or less classically conservative, so let's call it the Tory Party.

Now we're ready to understand the news of the day. Just make these insertions and substitutions as you read about what's going on. See how much clearer the news seems once you've done this!

Here's a sample of how it works, from today's news, courtesy of the Associated Press, as appearing in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Iraq's (colonial) government indefinitely postponed a much anticipated national reconciliation conference yesterday, as a two-day spree of sectarian revenge killings and (rebel) bombings left at least 86 Iraqis dead.

Meanwhile, a militant network that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq announced in a video that it had established an Islamic state in six provinces, a propaganda push in its drive to force the withdrawal of U.S. (colonial) forces and topple the American-backed Iraqi government.

Similarly, an election story might read as follows, this time courtesy of the Oct. 11 issue of USA Today:

At a time when many (Proto-Fascist-run) states are instituting new (more restrictive and burdensome) requirements for voter registration and identification, a preliminary report to the US Election Assistance Commission has found little evidence of the type of polling-place fraud those measures (claim to be) seek(ing) to stop.

USA Today obtained the report from the commission four months after it was delivered by two consultants hired to write it. The commission has not distributed it publicly.

At least 11 states have approved new rules for independent voter-registration drives or requirements that voters produce specific forms of photo ID at polling places. Several of those laws have been blocked in court, most recently in Arizona last week. The (Proto-Fascist led) House of Representatives last month approved a photo-ID law, now pending in the (Proto-Fascist-led) Senate.
========================

October 16, 2006

Bush's Middle East Strategy, and Presidency, Lie in Ruins as Republicans Scurry Away

Well, so much for Iraqi "sovereignty." So much too for "staying the course" and for "fighting the terrorists there so we won't have to fight them here." And while we're at it, so much for all the young Americans who've tragically given their lives or their bodies and health in the interest of advancing President Bush's criminal political agenda.

We saw the true nature of Iraqi "sovereignty" when it was disclosed that a worried Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki earlier this week made an anxious phone call to Bush to ask whether rumors he had been hearing were true that Bush was planning on replacing him. The call made it clear that Maliki knows he serves in his role solely at the pleasure of the American president. In saner, more honest times, the media would refer to such a situation as colonial, but our lapdog media just plays the game and talks about Iraq as if it were a sovereign nation.

Maliki also asked the president if it was true that the U.S. was planning on pulling the plug on the Iraq occupation. The president reportedly reassured his worried puppet that he was not going to undercut him, and was not about to withdraw US troops, but if I were Maliki, I'd heed the lesson of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was assured of US backing even as the CIA was making arrangements to have him assassinated and replaced by another thug.

As for "staying the course," this president who has spent the last four years accusing congressional opponents of the war and advocates of a quick withdrawal of treason and cowardice, of being "cut-and-run" Democrats, is being advised by Republican fixer James Baker that he should either cut and run, withdrawing US forces from Iraq and recognizing the obvious failure of his grand imperialist scheme, or he should invite those two Axes of Evil, Iran and Syria, to come in and pacify the place.

Imagine that! Weren't we just hearing about how those two countries were terrorist states, and how Iran is such a threat to America that it should be attacked and massively bombed?

With luck, Baker may force this crazed president, who is so spooked at the prospect of a Democratic takeover of Congress in November that he appears to be gearing up to invade Iran before Election Day, to call off the dogs of war and instead start making nice to the imams.

It may just be that Republicans, and the corporate elite to whom they answer, all of whom have been giving Bush, Rove and Cheney everything those power-made fascist wannabes have asked for two long terms, are realizing that they are now at risk of losing it all. The Iraq War is moving inexorably to a point where the U.S. will either have to voluntarily retreat or be driven out. Meanwhile, it is clear that an attack on Iran, while it might possibly lead to a quick jingoistic boost in support for the president that could save him from a Democratic Congress, would cause such a global economic disaster and such a military catastrophe for the U.S. over the longer run that Republicans could be destroyed as a political party for years to come.

There really are no good answers for Republicans at this point--only less bad ones.

Any possible outcome of the Iraq situation is going to leave most sentient Americans asking why 3000 young Americans had to die there, and for those who don't get it right away, the 25,000 maimed survivors, along with the tens of thousands more who bear the psychological scars of that pointless criminal venture, will be around for a long time to remind us of how we were deceived. So too will Osama Bin Laden, whom Bush never really seriously went after at all, despite his feigned Texas posse rhetoric.

If Democrats succeed in winning control of Congress, as appears increasingly likely, Republicans will have to begin thinking about how to survive the fallout of this historic fiasco. It seems inevitable--and we are starting to see the signs of this--that the strategy will be to blame Bush and Cheney. This offers us the entertaining prospect of the lamest of lame ducks, or perhaps goats, for the next two years.

Of course, a large number of cowardly Democrats share the blame for Bush administration crimes. They too need to pay for their complicity. Unfortunately, there is no good way to punish these quislings and cowards on Election Day, since abstaining or voting against them just benefits Republicans, and ousting Republicans from control of Congress is critical. But the next two years, following Nov. 7, must be a time of political payback. Not only do we need to impeach the president. As well, challenges need to be organized against every sell-out Democrat who does not make amends by fighting hard over the next two years to restore respect for constitutional government and the Bill of Rights, as well as for international law.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Connecticut have a unique opportunity to fire a warning shot in that battle by supporting Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont and ousting incumbent faux-Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman, who for Bush's two terms has served as a Republican Trojan Horse inside the Democratic caucus. Democrats around the country can help in this effort by sending money to the Lamont campaign, and by volunteering to make calls on his behalf.
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October 15, 2006

Time for Truth and Consequences

The Bush administration, losing the war in Iraq, has come with a "new" strategy: setting a timetable for Iraq's puppet regime and its fledgling army to "stand up" to the task of running the country so that the U.S. military can "stand down."

If you think this brilliant "new" plan sounds remarkably like the one proposed earlier this year by many Democrats, who were accused at that time of "cutting and running" for proposing just such a withdrawal timetable, you're right.

` It also sounds like yet another one of those Bush/Rove scams that are pulled out at each election to trick gullible voters into thinking the president is actually going to do something dramatic when he is really just talking. The truth is this plan is no more serious than Bush's early announcement of a plan to send Americans to the moon and on to Mars.

That plan, of course, was a joke from the start. The president didn’t offer any money for a Moon or Mars project, and never had any intention of doing so. It was just more of the same at NASA, blowing money on the giant white elephant in the sky called the International Space Station. And of course, we don't hear anything about Mars anymore.

The new Iraq plan being touted by the administration, which notably involves doing nothing for a year, and then calls for a phased drawdown of U.S. troops over subsequent years, basically just shoves off any significant change in Iraq until after Bush is safely out of office and is holed up somewhere in Paraguay, behind a barricade of defense lawyers.

On its face, this "new" plan also would require remarkable cooperation and forbearance on the part of the Iraqi resistance, which has shown no inclination to ease up on its attacks on U.S. forces and on Iraq's puppet regime, and which moreover has no incentive to ease up, since it is the resistance's increasing success at attacking and killing Americans that is driving the administration to talk about withdrawal.

What we actually have here is an election gambit: if the administration tells the voters that it is changing course and making plans to get out of the quagmire in Iraq, maybe at least some voters will reward them by voting for embattled Republican congressional candidates.

But it is in fact all just a scam. Saying that the government of Prime Minister Nauri Kamal al-Maliki must start effectively cracking down on sectarian killings, must clean up its police forces and get them to stop behaving like gangsters and death squads, and must turn its joke of an army into a dedicated fighting force that will stand up to the forces of rebellion and revolution arrayed against it and the U.S. military is not going to make it happen. After all, that's supposedly what the Iraqi government has been trying to do now for two years, right? And the situation has not improved at all. In fact the situation in Iraq for the government has gotten noticeably worse. Why anyone would think that giving this pathetic colonial regime some kind of a "timetable" for doing those things would make them accomplish something that they have been congenitally unable to accomplish to date is beyond me.

But then, that's not the point.

Like most of what this administration offers up in the run-up to national elections, this is all about appearances, not about substance.

This is an admistration that knows all about fooling some of the people some of the time.

What Karl Rove long ago figured out is that it doesn't matter that you can't fool all of the people all the time, or even some of the people all of the time. All you have to do is fool some of them enough of the time to get through an election cycle with a narrow win. Then people move on to other concerns and forget what you promised. By the time the next election cycle rolls around, you can come up with some new promises and fool some of them again.

It's a question whether the scam will work this time, though.

People seem to be waking up to the reality that there is a serious disaster in Iraq, that it is not going to be solved by continuing to slaughter Iraqis and by continuing to let American kids get chewed up and sent hom in boxes or with parts of their bodies missing.

People seem to be waking up to the fact that "staying the course" is just another way of not having to say, "We're sorry, but we f***ed up."

What we all need to be doing now is demanding some answers from this administration and its enablers in Congress:

* Why hasn’t the US been demanding action from the Iraqi government for the past two years?

* Why did some 2000 Americans have to die over that period of time, if all we are doing is something we could have done two years ago?

* Why are Democrats "cut and runners" for proposing a phased withdrawal, but Republicans are not "cut and runners" for proposing the same thing?

* If the success of this plan involves negotiating with the insurgents and giving them--including the Baathists we supposedly overthrew in 2003--a role in the future Iraq, doesn't that mean we lost the war after all?

If not, then why weren't we negotiating with them a long time ago?

If so, then what did the other several hundred Americans die for in the early days of the invasion and occupation?

If the US has been "stupid and arrogant" in its Iraq policies, as administration sources are finally admitting, just who are the stupid and arrogant people we are talking about here?

If those "stupid and arrogant" people are the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense and the national security adviser/secretary of state, what is to be the consequence of their stupiditdy and arrogance--particularly given that this stupidity and arrogance has cause the deaths of as many as 600,000 innocent Iraqi civilians and 3000 Americans? Enough of the game playing.

It's time for a little truth and consequences in America.
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October 11, 2006

US Troops Have Killed 126-238,000 Civilian Iraqis

A just released study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, published in the current issue of the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, reports that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has led to the deaths of between 426,000 and 794,000 Iraqis. This is a substantial increase over the 100,000 dead that the same research group found through 2004, based upon a smaller survey, and it represents an astonishing 2.5 percent of the country's total population.

The grim if controversial news was widely--though not universally--reported in the U.S. media, but many news organizations failed to report the most disturbing finding of the study, which was that 31 percent of those killed were acatually slain by U.S. and "coalition" forces (actually by U.S. forces, since most of the other foreign forces working with the U.S., with the exception of the British, have not played combat roles, and even the British have largely operated in the south where fighting has been much less severe.

That means, if the Lancet study's figures are accurate, that U.S. forces have, since the March 19, 2003 invasion, killed between 132,000 and 246,000 Iraqis. It should be recalled that the Pentagon has estimated that the insurgency numbers perhaps 20-40,000 individuals, and they have only succeeded in killing a fraction of them. Assuming generously that the military has succeeded in killing maybe a quarter of the enemy fighters, that would be 10,000 people at most, leaving the U.S. civilian death toll at 122,000-236,000. The Christian Science Monitor, no radical rag, once did a survey and found that U.S. forces were killing civilians in Iraq at a rate of 30 for every enemy fighter slain. At that rate, it would appear, if the peer-reviewed Lancet study is correct, that the U.S. invasion and occupation forces have killed between 127,000 and 238,000 civilians. At least a third and perhaps a half of those killed, various studies of Iraqi casualties have made clear, have been children.

This is the grand war of liberation and democracy that our bloodstained president hails as his legacy!

This is the war that we are told is making America safer.

Just to put things in a little perspective, the Iraqis killed at the hands of our "heroes" in uniform on orders of this great commander in chief, according to the Lancet would represent about one percent of the Iraqi population of 24 million. If a comparable number of Americans were being killed in a war, it would be as if we had lost between 1 million and 1.9 million people! Imagine Americans referring to any army that did such a thing as a "liberator"! Anyone who thinks that we are making friends this way in Iraq has to be an idiot.

Even granting that the methodology of the study can be challenged, it boggles my mind how the U.S. share of this alleged slaughter could have been kept out of the report offered in the New York Times or USA Today. (The Times did run some small pie charts that showed in a dark shade the share of deaths caused by U.S. forces, but because no numbers or percentages were provided, and because no such figures appeared in the accompanying story, the impact was greatly diminished.) Even NPR, in its 10/11 story on the Lancet figures, tiptoed around the issue of how many of the dead died at the hands of American forces, and the 31 percent figure in the study never made it onto the air, not did any totals. Somehow the idea that a lot of people have died in the wake of the U.S. invasion is okay, but not the idea that people were actually shot dead, bombed, burned or run over by our guys. A notable exception to this apparently politically-motivated squeamishness was the Washington Post, which did mention the 31-percent figure in its piece on the study, though well down in the story.

What made the Times article, which ran on an inside page, particularly offensive, was a page-one story that ran on the same day, headlined "3rd Iraq Death Has One town Shaken to Core." This piece looked in detail about how the deaths in Iraq of three servicemen from the New York hamlet of Highland, had caused such widespread grief and anguish in a small American town. How on earth could editors give that story--excellent and poignant as it was in its own right--such prominence while burying a report about the wholesale slaughter of a people by U.S. forces? Don't the editors realize that every one of those Iraqi deaths was producing the same kind of grief and anger in towns and villages across Iraq?

Americans still haven't grasped the horror that American troops are inflicting upon the Iraqi people, and hiding these numbers--and the American military's direct responsibility for nearly a third of them--is an example of why.

The Bush administration has carefully seen to it that Americans will not see the evidence of American deaths and injuries. Coffins are flown in to Dover Airbase, a closed military compound in Delaware, at night. The administration has also blacked out Iraqi deaths by refusing to provide body counts from U.S. military actions, and by preventing reporters from operating in Iraq unescorted.

The Lancet study has burst that veil of secrecy, at least partially, though the U.S. media continues to cooperate for the most part, it appears, in keeping the ugliest truth--the U.S. civilian casualty rate in Iraq--out of their reports. If you want that kind of information, you have to go to the Lancet report itself or to the British newspapers, like The Guardian, which have it stated clearly.
======================

October 10, 2006

The Crime of Treason and the Treasonous Crime of Silence

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Bush administration is planning another unprovoked war, this time against Iran--a country nearly three times the size of Iraq, with a long history, a strong sense of national identity and nationalism, and a well-equipped and well-trained army.

Such a war would be first and foremost a war crime of the first magnitude--a Crime Against Peace under the Nuremburg Charter, to which the U.S. is a signatory.

It would also be an unmitigated disaster. With U.S. forces demonstrably stretched to the limit in the losing battles of Iraq and Afghanistan, there simply are no land forces to spare. Iran on the other hand, has ready-made allies in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq--the Shi'ia populations, and in Iraq's case the Shi'ia militias--well equipped with Iranian-supplied weaponry, which will turn on U.S. forces with a vengeance if given the signal by the Imams in Iran. Hard-pressed U.S. troops in Iraq, who have largely been battling Sunni forces while the Badr militia and the Sadr militia for the most part watched from the sidelines and even helped out against their Sunni rivals, would suddenly find themselves being targeted by those far more numerous Shi'ia fighters.

Shi'ia supporters of Iran in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain would also likely spring into action, unleashing sapper units that would attack U.S. interests and also oil facilities, pipelines and wellheads.

Iran itself, well stocked with mines and with modern anti-ship missiles of Chinese and Russian design, could be expected to wreak havoc on oil tankers, if any dared to sail the Gulf, and possibly on American naval vessels, too. The resulting insecurity would likely bring an effective halt to oil shipments from either Iran or from the "friendly" countries on the other side of the Gulf—Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia--with disastrous effects on oil prices and ultimately on the global economy, which would grind to a halt. (What insurer would cover an oil tanker in the Gulf during wartime?)

All this is patently obvious, and yet we know from various reports, including my own in the Nation, that the plans have been drawn up, that the details are being refined, and that key weapons systems are being moved into place for that invasion.

Skeptics are saying it's impossible--the president and his cronies are not crazy, whatever else they may be, so why would they do something that would inevitably be a disaster, militarily, politically and economically?

The answer is that Bush and his gang don't care. They are focused laser-like on one thing--retaining control of the Congress. And the only thing, at this point, that has a chance of salvaging Republican control of the House, and perhaps even the Senate, is yet another war.

The other thing skeptics say is that Bush would first have to obtain Congressional approval for an attack, as he did in the case of Afghanistan and (sort of) in the case of Iraq.

But while most legal scholars would agree that this is the case, the sad truth is that Bush, in his megalomania (and with the backing of his thuggish attorney general) thinks he doesn't need any approval. In his twisted view of things, an attack on Iran would be just another battle in the ongoing so-called "War" on Terror. Bush made this clear when, in the course of his U.N. address last month, he referred to the leaders of Iran as "supporters of terror." That terminology was no accident.

Bush, for five years now, has argued that the original Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) approved by the Congress in October 2001 to give the go-ahead for a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, was actually an authorization for an endless war on terror which would have no front, which would occur everywhere, around the globe and inside the U.S., and which would give him special powers as a commander in chief allowing him to ignore both Congress and the Judiciary. There is no justification for this claim to be found in the Constitution, and the Supreme Court has already debunked the commander in chief claim, but that doesn't matter to Bush.

The only way this disaster can be halted at this point would be for Congress to convene and to vote a resolution declaring that the 2001 AUMF was no longer in effect. Congress could--and should--also vote a resolution opposing an attack on Iran. At a minimum, this would give the generals and admirals, who reportedly are unhappy about the idea of an Iran War, a basis for opposing the president's mad scheme.

An attack on Iran at this point, in my view, should be seen as an act of treason. Given the nation's precarious position in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and now, with North Korea exploding a nuclear device, on the Korean peninsula, launching another full-scale war against a country that poses no immediate threat has to be seen as a deliberate attempt to weaken and destroy the United States of America. No amount of propaganda at this point can obscure the reality that this is an act of pure, cynical politics, at the expense of countless American and Iranian lives. Its closest parallel would be Hitler's unprovoked attack on Poland in 1939. If it happens, the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the attorney general, and the national security advisor, should all be tried for treason and war crimes, and hung on a gallows erected in the rear of the Capitol, in clear view of the Washington and Lincoln monuments, with copies of the Constitution tacked to their breasts.

Meanwhile, what can be said of the Democrats, the supposed party of opposition?

So far, despite increasingly clear evidence that this dreadful war is being set in motion (we have reports that U.S. Special Forces teams are already operating in Iran, which is an act of war), not a single voice has been raised demanding answers to what is going on.

The cowardice and complicity of this ragtag bunch of self-interested, self-perpetuating benchwarmers is close to treason in itself. Didn’t they all take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States? Don’t they have a patriotic duty to stand up and defend the country and its people against this self-destructive act?

As far as I’m concerned, if this war happens, and the calamity that so obviously will result does follow, the leaders of the Democrats in Congress should be marched right up on that scaffolding alongside Bush and his cronies.
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October 9, 2006

BREAKING NEWS: Eisenhower Carrier Group Sails for Iran Coast

The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Eisenhower and its accompanying strike force of cruiser, destroyer and attack submarine slipped their moorings and headed off for the Persian Gulf region on Oct. 3, as I had predicted in a piece in The Nation magazine a few weeks back.

The Eisenhower strike force, according to my sources, is scheduled to arrive in the vicinity of Iran around October 21, at the same time as a second flotilla of minesweepers and other ships.

This build-up of naval power around the coast of Iran, according to some military sources, is in preparation for an air attack on Iran that would target not just Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities, but its entire military command and control system.

While such an attack could be expected to unleash a wave of military violence all over Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and elsewhere against American forces and interests and against oil wells, pipelines and loading vacilities, as well as a mining of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, with a resulting skyrocketing of global oil prices, the real goal of this new war by the U.S. would be ensuring Republican control of the House and Senate.

It seems increasingly clear that the Republican Party is going to lose its grip on the House of Representatives, and that it may even lose control of the Senate, barring some dramatic October Surprise by the president. So far, the surprises have been working against Republicans, with the Foley sex scandal, the evidence that Abramoff's bribery reached right into the inner sanctum of the White House, and the deteriorating U.S. position in Iraq.

With the number of House seats reportedly "in play" now rising from 15 to 30 and now 50, President Bush is looking at the possibility of a blow out Nov. 7 that could see him facing a Democratic Congress bent on revenge for five six years of systematic abuse.

Bush has committed a long string of impeachable crimes against the Constitution, the Republic and the American people--everything from lying to the Congress and the 9-11 Commission, obstructing an investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, abuse of power, violation of federal laws like the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, dereliction of duty and criminal negligence, and war crimes. He can expect a Democratic Congress to call him to account for at least some of these crimes, whatever House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) may say today.

This means that the worse things look for Republican chances in November, the greater the likelihood that a desperate President Bush will order a disastrous attack on Iran--one that would have the country enter into a third, even worse, war even as it is currently busy losing two others. But Bush and his gang of cronies don't care about initiating a disaster. They're focussed on the disaster that will hit them if they don't turn around the November election. Sacrificing the country or its young men and women in uniform, or the lives of innocent Iranians, is not a concern, any more than it was when Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq.

Clearly such a war would be an act of madness, and yet we know that the plans, already drawn up, are being updated and fine-tuned now by generals and admirals whose twisted sense of patriotism has them giving primary loyalty to a demented commander in chief instead of to the Constitutional and the people of the United States, to both of which they swore an oath to protect.

I hope I am wrong about all this, but the sailing of the Eisenhower, which had been pushed forward recently by about a month by the Pentagon for clearly political reasons, makes me think I'm right. A key will be what happens with the Enterprise carrier strike force, which has already been on station in the Arabian Sea for six months, where it has been launching air strikes against Afghanistan and Iraq targets. Ordinarily, such deployments last six months and then the carrier group returns to base for resupply and for R&R for the crew. If the Enterprise is held over for a longer deployment, after the arrival of the Eisenhower, we will know that something serious is planned.

Meanwhile, journalist Larisa Alexandrovna, in the online publication Raw Story, reports that top military leaders are already engaging in "branches and sequels" planning for an Iran attack, which her sources tell her is the kind of planning that is done "after an initial plan has been decided upon."

What is deeply troubling here is the total silence on the part of the Democratic Party opposition. Not one Democrat in Congress, and as far as I know, not one Democratic candidate for Congress--not even anti-war insurgent Ned Lamont in Connecticut, has demanded an answer from Bush and the Pentagon for the obvious military buildup around Iran, or about published reports that the U.S. already has special forces in side Iran backing the terrorist organization MEK, and selecting targets for U.S. bombardment.

If and when the U.S. attacks Iran, leading to a predicable--if temporar--rallying around the flag by the American public, and to an upset win by incumbent Republican congressional candidates, Democrats will have only themselves to blame for the debacle.

But it will be the American people--and especially the people of Iran--who will be the victims of this treacherous deed and this treasonous failure of will.
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October 9, 2006

Free Linda Greenhouse! Free the Press!

A few months into my first job as a newspaper reporter, covering the politics of three small Connecticut River Valley towns for the Middletown Press, I wrote what remains one of the best things I've ever written, but I never got credit for it. It was Christmas, December 1972, and Nixon had just unleashed an armada of B-52s to carpet-bomb North Vietnam, bombing hospitals, river dikes and residential neighborhoods. I was so outraged I wrote an editorial condemning the action as a war crime and fired it off by telex from my bureau office to my editor. The next day, my essay appeared as the lead editorial of the newspaper.

Luckily for me, my editor, the late, great Russell "Derry" D’Oench, who had been kind of lackluster in his criticism of the war to that point, agreed with my sentiment. More importantly, while my prose in that piece was impassioned and my attack on President Nixon fervent, he never came and lectured to me about my personal politics or questioned my daily reporting.

Not so the management of the New York Times, which has lambasted veteran Supreme Court veteran Linda Greenhouse for a talk she gave to fellow Harvard alumni in which she condemned the Bush administration for creating "law-free zones" in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and elsewhere around the world, and for "assaulting women's reproductive freedom" and "hijacking public policy" in the name of "religious fundamentalism." The paper, we learn, has an "ethical guideline" saying that news staffers who appear on radio and TV "should avoid expressing views that go beyond what they would be allowed to say in the paper." (Never mind that Greenhouse wasn’t speaking for broadcast, but at a private event at her alma mater.)

The Times ombudsman, Byron Calame, supports the newspaper in criticizing Greenhouse, writing in his Sunday column, "The Public Editor," that it "seems clear" that she "stepped across that line."

Nothing infuriates me more, as a veteran newspaper reporter, than this repressive notion that reporters must not have personal politics or personal views, or that if they do have them, they must keep them strictly to themselves.

The ideal reporter, it would seem in this pinched view of things, would be either an ignorant and insensitive boob without an opinion in her or his head, or else a robotic stenographer who simply transcribes what various sources tell her or him, giving equal weight to heartfelt truths and devious falsehoods. Either option is a recipe for disaster in terms of the role of the Fourth Estate, which is supposed to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," in the words of pioneer journalist Finley Peter Dunne.

What it boils down to is image over substance. The truth is that the Times knows its reporters—and its editors and publishers--all have personal political views, often strongly held, but it doesn't want its readers to know this. It, and every news organization like it, is actually perpetrating a massive fraud on the public, pretenting that its staffmembers have no personal politics.

This is of course nonsense, and most people who give it a moment's thought know it.

So why the charade?

I would argue that most likely the real reason is fear.

Linda Greenhouse, I'm almost certain, would not have been taken to the woodshed by her bosses if she had, in her Harvard speech, decried the lack of patriotism evidenced by those who protest the war in Iraq even as our soldiers are dying there, or if she had complained of a lack of spiritual values on the part of of our governing class--in other words, if she had said exactly the opposite of that which she was criticized for saying.

Let's be honest here: it was the fact that she was criticizing the government from the left that made her a target of criticism.

And the New York Times is not alone. CNN dumped one of its best reporters, Peter Arnett, largely because he was too public in his critiques and reportorial exposés of U.S. militarism. The San Francisco Chronicle fired a columnist whose specialty was writing about technology, because he had publicly demonstrated against the Iraq War on his own time. The ranks of reporters and editors who have lost their jobs, or been shifted off of beats, because of taking political positions in their private lives that are to the left of mainstream are legion. Yet one would be hard-pressed to find reporters and editors who had lost their jobs or their beats because of expressing personal political views that are to the right--for example in support of American imperialist adventures, mindless patriotism, unfettered free market capitalism, faith-based public policy, etc.

Our corporate news media are basically afraid to be seen as institutional critics of power and the established political concensus, and yet that is precisely the role that the Constitution, in singling them out for special attention and privilege in the First Amendment, expects them to play. They cannot play the role of independent watchdog and critic if they insist on neutering their staffs. And they insult and do a disservice to their readers and viewers when they try to pretend that those staffs are devoid of political views.

Journalists, if they are doing their jobs, need to dig deeply and understand the issues and the political forces that are at work in society and in the world. In doing that--in digging for the truth--it would be incredible if they did not arrive at some personal opinions as to who was honest and well-meaning and who was dishonest and conniving. It would be incredible if they did not develop opinions as to what policies were good for society or for the world, and which were destructive.

The job of those journalists then is to present what they know with integrity and fairness. That's a tough challenge but it can be done. It won't be done, however, by reporters who are incapable of feeling, thinking for themselves, and forming their own views.

How then, is the public helped by taking those journalists who have the intelligence and good horse-sense to see or to find the truth, that they must keep that discovery to themselves? Far better, I'd say, to let reporters, on their own time, say what they think, and then let the reader or viewer make her or his own judgement as to the veracity of what those reporters tell them on the job.

My answer to the Times and to ombudsman Calame is: Free Linda Greenhouse! Free the Press!
====================

Counter-terror operatives "cover" a Philly demo
counterterrorspies.jpg
Philadelphia Police spies work for the counter-terror unit. Story below. (Photo by Chris Augustin)

October 6, 2006

Police Spying in the Birthplace of the 1st Amendment

"This is the 21st Century. Get with it, man!"

This past Thursday I was invited by the group World Can't Wait to talk about impeachment and Bush's preparations for war against Iran at a Philadelphia rally--part of the group's Oct. 5 "Drive Out the Bush Regime" campaign of 170 such rallies around the country. Assembled on the mall in front of the Rizzo Municipal Offices building in central Philadelphia in front of me were some 300 people, mostly young, and all well-behaved, if high spirited.

While I was talking about the Bush administration's impeachable crimes against the American people and the Constitution--in particularly the ramming through Congress of a bill that, for the first time since American patriots drove the British out of the 13 colonies, authorizes indefinite detainment without charge and imprisonment of American citizens without the right to a trial--I noticed two men in sunglasses with a high-quality video camera and a high-quality still camera with telephoto lense filming the assembled crowd.

After I spoke, I walked over to the two men and asked what station they were with. I was pretty certain they were police, despite their total lack of identification, because normally news organizations plaster their cameras with their station call letters and these cameras had no such identification on them. When I pressed them, both men turned their cameras directly on me, from just two feet away, filming me as I denounced their intimidation.

"You should be ashamed of yourselves," I said, as young people around me looked on in surprise. "This rally has a police permit, and all the people here are legally exercising their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly."

The two men remained silent, and continued to grimly film and photograph me as I spoke. I began telling everyone around me who the men were and what they were doing, and some of the young people began to pester the officers themselves.

I later saw a member of the Philadelphia Police Department’s Civil Affairs Unit, a Captain William Fisher, who unlike the camera detail, was clearly identified as a police officer by both a card pinned to his shirt, and by a prominent armband saying: Philadelphia Police Department.

Asked why the men were filming the crowd, he responded briskly, "This is a free country. This is a public space. You’re free to be here, and they're free to come too and to take your picture."

I allowed as this was true, technically, but that clearly there was an element of intimidation involved when police come and film the faces of everyone who comes to an event that is about criticizing the government.

"Oh, you’re so `70s," he said, looking at my gray beard and balding head. "This is the 21st Century. Get with it, man."

Indeed, he's right.

It is the 21st Century.

When I was a newspaper reporter in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, it was discovered that the Los Angeles Police Department was sending unmarked police officers like these armed with video cameras to press conferences at places like the Los Angeles Press Club, where they were setting up and filming certain events as part of a campaign of keeping tabs on activist groups.

This revelation caused a sensation, with front-page articles in the Los Angeles Times, and inquiries into the practice by irate members of the Los Angeles City Council. In the end, the police were forced to back down and cease the practice, at least for a time.

Now, here in Philadelphia, birthplace of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, this trampling of the freedom of assembly and speech seems to merit no attention at all in the local mainstream media. When I called the Inquirer's police reporter, Barbara Boyer, to alert her to what had happened, her response was "Well, I could take your picture on the sidewalk, too, if I wanted. It's not illegal."

Apparently the Philadelphia Police Department and most of the local media think that it's appropriate for police to film people who are exercising their Constitutional rights, and that this is what we do in "21st Century America." To me, though, this seems more like 1930s Germany, or 21st-Century China.

Inspector Robert Tucker, who heads the counter-terrorism task force of the Philadelphia Police Department, confirmed in a phone conversation the next day that the two men with the cameras were working for him. He apologized for their lack of identification, and for their unwillingness to identify themselves, promising that at future public events, they and others doing that kind of work would wear prominent identification showing they were with the police. But he insisted that their work was appropriate.

"At events like these, there are usually anarchists who show up," he argued, "and they're the ones that sometimes end up breaking glass and causing problems." (It's an argument that might justify video cams on every street corner of Philly, since crime is everywhere.) He said that by filming the whole group, it would be possible to identify those people later if there were incidents. Asked why the officers were videotaping the entire crowd--and the speakers like myself who were clearly identifiable anyhow--he offered no answer. Tucker claimed that the tapes and photos made at the event would ordinarily not be retained, but would be "taped over at the next event" unless there were an incident involving an arrest, but he also noted that the department does maintain files on "some people."

What makes this whole thing feel particularly creepy is the anti-terrorism bill just passed by a Congress of supine Republicans and cowardly Democrats, which gives the president the authority, on his own, to call anyone an “unlawful combatant,” or a supporter of terrorism, and to lock them away in a military brig with no right to a trial or even a lawyer. When you put this police surveillance in that context, it becomes intimidating indeed. Especially since the Philadelphia Police counter-terrorism unit is an integral part of the federal joint counter-terrorism strike force, making it easy for such film materials to migrate over into federal hands.

It seems to me it's time to get back not to the 1970s, but to the 1770s, when Americans knew what was happening to them, and stood up and said, “No more!”
=======================

October 3, 2006

The Real Foley Scandal is Much Bigger than Foley

It's a sad commentary on the state of American democracy, on the instincts of the American citizenry, and on the standards and judgement of the American newsmedia that the unsavory advances of a pathetic Forida congressman can have the nation in high dudgeon, while the ramming through of a patently illegal piece of legislation undermining a crucial 13th century civil liberty (habeas corpus), and the Fourth and Eithth Amendments of the constitution, and the secret planning for an illegal and catastrophic attack on Iran, both merit almost no complaint or mention.

Far be it from me to complain if Rep. Mark Foley's sexual obsession with teenage boys ends up sinking Republican hopes for hanging onto the House and Senate. But how sad that it would be if it is this, and the coverup of his crimes by the Republican leadership, that undoes the Bush administration, when its real crimes are of such grandeur and seriousness?

How are we to compare seeking to screw an underage youth with totally screwing the Constitution? How are we to compare secret email solicitations with a secret plot to attack a nation of 62 million that poses no immediate threat to the U.S.?

How are we to compare the Republican Party's cover-up of a member's efforts to corrupt young pages with the same party's conspiracy to cover up the Bush administration's ineptness and possible foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks, and of the campaign of lies and misinformation it used to drum up hysteria for an illegal and totally unwarranted invasion of Iraq?

How are we to compare the media feeding frenzy over the Foley scandal with the profound silence about Bush's Iran invasion planning, and with the deliberate brownout about information regarding a growing popular movement to impeach the president for his crimes?

And finally, how to we to compare the public revulsion over Foley's indescretions with the widespread acceptance or, or even support for abuse of American captives in the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, and the so-called "War" on Terror, which has included rape, sodemy, sexual humiliation and torture of all kinds, and murder--especially when it is known that the vast majority of those captives were either guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or of simply being honest fighters for their respective countries, deserving of decent treatment under the Geneva Convention, and of a fair hearing into the propriety of their detention?

What kind of nation have we become?

At least the Foley saga makes it clear why the farcical impeachment of Bill Clinton for his extramarital escapade moved forward through the House to a Senate trial, while George Bush, whose crimes far exceed those of any president before him, including Richard Nixon, and place the whole American experiment in jeopardy, has not even faced censure, much less a bill of impeachment.

Democratic Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid should be ashamed of themselves for leaping so boldly to the attack over Foley's crime and the Republican leadership's cover-up, while continuing to assert that there will be no effort to impeach the president for his own crimes even if they manage, with Foley's assistance, to wrest control of the House November 8.

The American media should be ashamed of themselves for wallowing in swill, when there is a cancer in the White House that is attacking the very foundations of the nation.

The American public should be ashamed for its sheer inanity and inattention to the responsibilities of citizenship.
=========================

October 1, 2006

Vote Democratic, But Always Carry a Toothbrush

I've decided to start carrying a toothbrush.

Incredibly, we’ve reached that point in America where, thanks to a bunch of spineless traitors in Congress (Republicans and Democrats), it is only a matter of time before the state begins rounding up people like me and whisking us off to dark cells without telling anyone.

Congress, with almost no discussion, has just approved a law ostensibly about authorizing military tribunals for alleged terrorists which actually went way beyond that bad enough end run on the Constitution, to include giving the president the congressional sanction to torture captives and, as well, the power to snatch up any American citizen and declare her or him to be an “unlawful combatant,” devoid of Constitutional rights.

Such a victim of presidential whim or pique could be shuttled off to a gulag anywhere in the world, or to Guantanamo Bay, or to a military installation somewhere in the U.S. (Or perhaps to that mysterious concentration camp reportedly being constructed in secret somewhere in the U.S. by Kellogg, Brown & Root, the subsidiary of VP Cheney's company, Haliburton.) Nobody, not even family members, would have to be notified of this capture and detention. No lawyer would be called.

This, sad to say, is America today, courtesy of your elected representatives, a majority of whom have violated their oaths of office to uphold and defend the Constitution. Our nation has become a place that the revolutionists of 1776 would easily recognize, not as the country they brought into being, but rather as a reprise of the tyrannical colonial British rule that they struggled to break free from.

Under the guidelines President Bush is using for the made-up term "unlawful combatant," anyone who is said to be giving aid to terrorists (a very slippery term itself, which has been used to describe everyone from a lone bomber to the elected presidents of Iran and Venezuela) could be subjected to secret, indefinite detention without charge, and to torture as well.

Such "aid" could be an innocent donation of money to a charity that, unknown to the donor, turned out to somehow be providing funds to an organization associated with a terrorist organization. A Christian charity that donates some of its funds to an Iranian state orphanage might easily if inadvertently fit that bill. Writing an article critical of the Bush administration's hoked up "war" on terror (like this one here), could qualify the author for arrest, too. Certainly a piece I wrote for The Nation magazine's online edition last week, disclosing that the Bush administration had pushed forward deployment to the Iran Theater of an aircraft carrier battle group by a month in preparation for a probable attack on Iran before Election Day could pass the terrorist-aid test.

Likewise a report by Time Magazine reporters the same week revealing that Navy personnel had received "prepare to deploy" orders to be ready to sail a fleet of minesweepers to the Persian Gulf on October 1, also in preparation for war against Iran.

Once Bush begins really using his new gift from Congress of dictatorial powers of arrest without charge and detention without trial, the brigs of the country's military bases will begin to fill with journalists, anti-war activists and little old ladies who gave to the wrong charity.

Make no mistake. This is going to happen unless this catastrophic sell-out bill passed into law by Congress is repealed or declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, because history has made it crystal clear that powers made available are powers used.

The less popular this president becomes--and he deservedly ranks right down there with the most unpopular leaders of all time--the more desperate he will be, particularly because he has already committed so many offenses against this nation and against the Constitution that his impeachment by a Democratic Congress is increasingly probable.

We are at a critical moment in American history.

With the passage of the new anti-terrorism bill, Election Day on November 7 could well be the last chance for the American people to reassert their faith in the Constitution that our Founding Fathers and the blood of tens of thousands of revolutionary soldiers provided us with over 200 years ago.

It is, at this point, imperative that the voters of this country think strategically, forget petty ideological differences and intellectual debates over whether or not the Democratic Party can ever be reformed, and simply vote for the Democrat in every election district. Even the cowardly Democrats who supported the terror bill must be returned to office, I'm afraid (we can deal with them later).

The key is to gain a Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress, and to remove the rubber stamp Republican Party from control.

As nauseating as it may be to find one's self voting for the likes of Texas Rep. Chet Edwards or Illinois Rep. Melissa Bean (two of 34 Democratic representatives who joined Republicans in voting for the terrorism bill), it is nonetheless crucial that both be re-elected so that Democrats can add at least 15 seats to their total in the House and take over control of that institution. Ditto in the Senate. A Bob Casey may be pro-Iraq War and anti-abortion, but if he is not elected to replace Sen. Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, there is no chance Democrats will retake control of the U.S. Senate in November.

Now I know the idea of voting for Democrats--especially Democrats who have voted wrong on the war, wrong on torture, wrong on giving the president dictatorial powers--is both sickening and seemingly contradictory for those who feel the party has consistently betrayed its own constituency, but with this last law we've crossed a Rubicon. We are in a police state when there is no longer habeas corpus and when even the Congress is saying that the president and the "Justice" Department can start locking people up in military prisons without the right to bring the case to a court. Heck, at this rate, after November, we may not even have another election. That makes voting for Third Party candidates kind of pointless, doesn't it? Basically, I'd say we've got a shot this November at stopping the coup, and we need to grab it. It might not work, but I'm betting most of those Democrats who shamelessly voted yes on the terrorism bill did it because they thought they needed to vote that way to win this election. They may be wrong (and I may be wrong), but the simple equation is--vote your conscience in those districts, and the Republicans keep in control in Congress and the police state grows in strength; ignore your conscience, vote for lame Democrats, and the Republicans lose Congress and we have at least a chance of stopping this march to totalitarianism. It's really that simple.

Certainly a Democratic Congressional victory on Election Day will not herald a return to some 1960s liberal America, or even a Clintonian pseudo-liberal era, much less to a new New Deal, and nobody should be under such an illusion. But it would be a major defeat for the Bush dictatorship, as a Democratic Congress could be expected to begin seriously investigating Bush administration crimes, could start to undo the creeping coup that has been eroding American democracy and long-held democratic freedoms, and could protect us from being saddled with yet another pro-authoritarian Supreme Court justice. (For that to happen, given the lame nature of the Democratic Party, will require a powerful mass movement through the course of the next two years, after Election Day.)

Meanwhile, just in case, I'm carrying that toothbrush. I care too much about the health of my gums and about keeping my teeth to want to lose them to a period of military detention.
==========================

September 26, 2006

Horowitz Trounced in Bloomsberg, PA

Bloomsburg, PA--David Horowitz, the former wacky-left editor of Ramparts magazine turned wacky right smear-monger and foundation pimp, came to Bloomsburg University in rural central Pennsylvania to pick up a $7000 check and spout lies and misinformation in a debate with local college philosophy professor Kurt Smith.

Horowitz never strayed more than 30 feet from his well coiffed bodyguard (the smartly dressed goon even hung out on the stage of the auditorium within view of the audience throughout the debate, perhaps fearing that Smith might charge from his lectern to make a point physically, or that unruly student radicals might rush the stage). Horowitz must have called ahead to local police, warning of an imagined plot against him, too, since he was also accompanied everywhere by three members of the uniformed local constabulary.

The debate was decidedly one-sided, with Horowitz offering one misstatement of fact after another, and Smith batting them down with the dispatch of a seasoned squash player.

At the start of the debate, Smith explained to the assembled audience of mostly Bloomsburg U. students that Horowitz, during the several years since the American invasion of Iraq, has been following the lead of the right-wing American Council of Trustees and Alumni, attacking academia for alleged left-wing bias. Under the leadership of disgraced Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman and Dick Cheney consort Lynn Cheney, ACTA since 9-11 has been hounding liberal academics, accusing them of being disloyal—indeed of being the only segment of American society to be "unpatriotic."

Smith explained that in Pennsylvania, where the Republican-led legislature last spring impaneled a committee to investigate alleged liberal bias on state college campuses, Horowitz had come and testified, citing alleged cases of student abuse--all of which proved to be bogus. Smith then declared that Horowitz's proposed "Academic Bill of Rights" (ABoR), which in some versions would give students the right to sue their professors for allegedly political grading or for speaking outside of their formal field of study, was nothing but "politics pure and simple--it's about seeking a place for right-wing propaganda" in the university.

Horowitz attempted to deny that he was seeking to punish liberal faculty, claiming his proposed bill had "no teeth." He insisted that he had "nothing against" liberal professors and in no way sought to single anyone out.

This claim, however, was belied by the table in the lobby piled high with his latest book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a libel-filled compendium of factual errors and innuendo (even the title is erroneous--there are only 100 dangerous professors listed, while a study by Media Matters found that for 54 of the hundred named, Horowitz's only "evidence" was things the dangerous academics had said or written outside of class!) passing itself off as scholarship. Even Horowitz has admitted his book, like those that have preceded it, is mistake-ridden--a problem he shucks off responsibility for by blaming it on the 30 student researchers he hired to assemble the material.

During the debate, Horowitz attributed the failure of the Pennsylvania legislative ABoR committee to recommend any action (the Republican-run committee, after months of hearings, concluded that there was no evidence of a “liberal bias” problem or of professorial “indoctrination” of students on the state’s campuses), to "sabotage" by the Democratic co-chair of the committee, State Assemblyman Lawrence Curry, a professor of history in Philadelphia. Curry, he charged, had repeatedly denounced the hearings as "McCarthyite." In fact, the soft-spoken Curry never made such a statement at the hearings, and only gently insisted that Horowitz and the ABoR resolution sponsor, Assemblyman Gibson “Gib” Armstrong, supply facts to back their fevered charges—which neither ever did. (Armstrong, midway through those hearings, was defeated in a Republican primary in his re-election bid as outraged local voters punished him and other legislators who had illegally voted themselves a substantial raise during their current term, awarding themselves in "non-itemized expense reimbursements" to get around a constitutional requirement that raises could only apply to subsequent terms of office.) At the end of the hearings, one committee member commented in frustration, "I always used to hate going fishing and coming home with nothing. This hearing feels a bit like that."

So far, no state has passed any legislation along the lines of Horowitz's proposed bill, though 15 state legislatures have held hearings on the idea--hearings which usually disclose that there is no problem to be fixed. Horowitz's real reason for singling out Rep. Curry as a villain is that Curry, during a televised hearing at Temple University last spring, exposed one of Horowitz’s most outrageous "examples" of liberal professorial abuse and lack of adequate patriotism as a fabrication and a fraud, and had the right-wing propagandist reduced to an incoherent sputtering. This particular "example" of liberal indoctrination was a supposed biology professor at a Pennsylvania university who gave his class a showing of Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 911." As Curry said, it never happened.

Horowitz tried the same tactic again in the Bloomburg U. debate, this time using an already discredited "example": the alleged case of a student, Kelly Keehan, purportedly an opponent of abortion who was said to have been "forced" by a woman's studies professor at Penn State to chant "abortion, abortion, abortion!" until she was in tears. At a Pennsylvania legislative hearing, Horowitz had declined to even name the school at which this alleged incident occurred. He subsequently claimed it was at Penn State. But in last week's debate, Smith observed that no such student has ever come forward with a complaint, no such incident was ever reported as having occurred at Penn State, and that in all probability, the incident never happened.

Horowitz plowed on, ignoring this second devastating attack on his credibility (apparently following the lesson of President Bush and Vice President Cheney that if you tell a lie often enough it becomes the accepted truth), by asking for a show of hands of those students who had heard a professor at Bloomsburg criticize the Iraq War. A few dozen raised their hands, but Smith and students in the hall claim they didn't recognize those who did, suggesting that perhaps they had been part of Horowitz's entourage. Smith responded by asking how many in the hall had heard a professor speak favorably about the war. The number of hands that went up was more than double the prior question's response.

Horowitz asserted, without providing any evidence to back his claim, that liberal professors are indoctrinating students, telling them that America is bad, that criminals are just rebels against an unjust society, etc. But Smith said, "We held hearings in Pennsylvania, and not a single case came forward to show indoctrination of students by professors. Where’s the bogyman?"

Smith won boisterous applause for insisting that university classrooms are not public spaces where all speakers have equal rights. In the classroom, he asserted, there is a natural asymmetry, as a consequence of the professor's "experience and credentials." In a dig that caused Horowitz to visibly stiffen, Smith said, "You only have a master’s degree in English, have never sat on a hiring committee, and never taught, and yet you are expressing expertise about higher education." He concluded, turning to the audience, "Mr. Horowitz should follow his own advice about professors sticking to their subject areas. Since he has no experience in higher education, he should not offer to solve higher education’s problems. He's feigning to be an academic."

Horowitz pointedly refused to shake Smith's hand in the Green Room before the event began, even when invited to do so by the university president, who was moderating the event.

At the end of the reception that followed the debate, the table piled with his latest book offered the dismal image of stacks of thick unsold volumes. Few if any had been bought. With no need to sit and sign books, Horowitz ascended the stairs towards the refreshment table, surrounded by the local police, his personal bodyguard, and a phalanx of younger people, mostly young white men in suits who bore little resemblance to students.
===========================

September 25, 2006

Bush War III: Going to War to Save his Hide

War talk is in the air again, and because of the looming November election, it has to be taken extra seriously.

The latest to warn about a Bush War III is former Democratic senator and one-time presidential aspirant Gary Hart, long an expert on national security issues, who says that targeting drones and special forces targeting specialists are already operating over and inside Iran, sizing up and locating as many as 400 targets for U.S. cruise missiles and bombers. This is in anticipation of an aerial strike which my own research suggests could come as early as late October (See "War Signals" in The Nation online.

Of course, this could all be bluster--a Karl Rove-designed strategy to get the public all worked up they way they used to do with color-coded terror alerts until that strategy wore out its effectiveness through overuse. But the actual sending of Special Forces units into harm's way in Iran, and the preparation of Navy battle groups for deployment to the Iran Theater, make it more probable that an actual attack is in the offing. Word that regular military units are being prepared for third tours to the region, that the administration is changing the guidelines to make possible longer call-ups of National Guard units for longer and more frequent overseas tours of active duty, and that units in Iraq are being given stop-loss orders to delay their return home also suggest something major is brewing. Otherwise logic would lead to the expectation that the administration would be announcing a reduction in troop levels in Iraq before Election Day.

Ordinarily one would say that the real sign of an imminent attack would be a convening of Congress to consider a use of force authorization, or perhaps an attempt in the United Nations to win endorsement for an attack from the UN Security Council, but clearly this is not happening. And for good reason. Bush would never succeed in winning Security Council approval for a military action against Iran, particularly after embarrassing and insulting the council members by the massive lying that he did the last time he sought such a vote--for an attack on Iraq--in 2003. Nor would he likely be given the go-ahead by Congress this time around, with all of the House and a third of the Senate facing re-election on November 7 by an electorate that has grown weary of war, angry at a half trillion dollars wasted, and sick at heart about the thousands of flag-draped coffins and broken GIs returning home, with nothing to show for it all but two dysfunctional, war-torn former countries in the Middle East.

The problem is that Bush, who has trashed the Constitution to the point that it is now little more than a historical artifact, doesn't think he needs approval from the UN or even from the Congress to embark on his most dangerous, bloody and immoral war yet.

According to this confirmed White House criminal (he has been found guilty by the US Supreme Court of violating the US War Crimes Statutes and by a Federal District Court of violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment), he has the power as "commander in chief in time of war" to act in violation of both Constitution and law, as he sees fit.

The "war" in question is the so-called "War on Terror." The title Commander in Chief derives from the wording of Article II of the Constitution, in which the Founding Fathers said that a president would simultaneously be the top general of the military. Bush claims, with the backing of his "mob attorney," Alberto Gonzales, the head of what used to be known quaintly as the Justice Department, that when Congress, in the wake of the 9-11 attacks in 2001, voted an Authorization for the Use of Military Force against Al Qaeda--a measure that was meant to give the go-ahead for an attack on Osama Bin Laden and his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan--it was also giving him the power to act as Commander-in-Chief in a war on terror that would have no end and that would extend anywhere and everywhere in the world and within the borders of the U.S.

He claims, in other words, that the October 2001 Congressional AUMF effectively made him a generalissimo, a dictator, for as long as there were terrorists foreign or domestic trying to harm Americans or American interests.

We need only note how Bush, in his address at the UN General Assembly last week, was careful to describe the leaders of Iran as "supporters of terror." It was a carefully chosen construct which meant he is asserting his right to attack them as part of that phony "war" on terror, based upon the long-outdated and grossly misrepresented 2001 AUMF.

Unless the American people and their ostensible representatives in Congress act quickly to make it clear that the 2001 AUMF does not apply to an attack on Iran, and that it did not make the president a dictator with the power to make war at will, I’m betting that we'll be at war with Iran before Election Day.

Let's be clear. This has nothing to do with a threat to America. Even by the most generous of interpretations of administration-hyped "evidence" about Iran's alleged nuclear weapons development efforts, Iran could not have a nuclear weapon for four years or more (with some estimates saying ten to 15 years). That's plenty of time to mount a successful diplomatic campaign to block it.

No, incredibly this is all about an election. To put the matter bluntly, we have a president who is willing to put tens of thousands of American soldiers' lives at risk, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iranian lives at risk, simply to avoid having the Congress fall into the hands of the Democratic Party.

Why would Bush be willing to do such a thing, against the advice of his generals, against the wishes of the American people, and against all logic and decency?

Clearly he is afraid--afraid that a Democratic Congress will finally start calling him to account for his accumulated crimes against the nation and the American People. That's why he is desperately trying to get the Republican-led Congress--while it still can--to pass legislation retroactively exonerating him and his subordinates for their criminal violations of law and Constitution. That's why he is racing around the country raising money for candidates--even including liberal Republicans whose positions he abhors.

At this point, all this president cares about is saving his own sorry hide.

It's a disheartening spectacle, but hardly surprising for a man who worked so hard and shamelessly to protect that same pampered hide during the Vietnam War by joining the National Guard and then checking a box saying he would not be available for overseas assignment.

He must not be allowed to get away with this ultimate crime of a war for personal gain.
=======================

September 18, 2006

On Constitution Day: Talk of Impeachment and Rumors of War

The talk on the the weekend of Sept. 16-17 at Camp Democracy in the shadow of the Washington Monument on the National Mall was of impeaching the president--and of looming war with Iran.

I spoke on the morning of Sept. 17, along with John Nichols of the Nation, David Green of Hofstra, former federal prosecutor and author Elizabeth de la Vega, and long time anti-war activist Marcus Raskin. Later, in the afternoon, a second group of people spoke on the same topic, including veteran former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, Jennifer van Bergen (who first exposed Bush's secret "signing statements"), Michael Avery, president of the National Lawyers Guild, and former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman (D-NY).

It was Holtzman who stole the show, with the former member of the House impeachment panel that drew up impeachment articles against Richard Nixon noting that one of those three articles was for spying on American citizens. Holtzman, who has a new book out on impeachment herself (The Impeachment of George W. Bush,), said that when she and the other's on that committee--Democrats and Republicans alike--unanimously voted out those articles, which led to Nixon's resignation from office, "I thought we had protected the Constitution for generations to come."

And yet, scarcely one generation later, the threat of presidential abuse of power is back, inclulding the same crime of illegal spying--this time more seriously than before.

Holtzmen observed that when Nixon was ordered by the Supreme Court to produce the tape recordings that the government had learned had been made in the Oval Office, after some hesitation, he agreed, and his fate was sealed. This time, she suggested ominously, Bush and his gang might decide to ignore orders from the Supreme Court.

That, everyone agrees, would be the moment when tyranny--the very thing that the Founding Fathers feared most, and that was their motive in including an impeachment clause in the Constitution--would be upon us.

As the NLG's Mike Avery noted, at that point, the only remaining recourses for the American People would be impeachment, or Thomas Jefferson's other remedy: "revolution."

Speaking of arms, Ray McGovern announced at the session the electrifying, if not wholly unexpected news that Naval officers had notified his organization of former intelligence officers aboutr secret orders that had gone out for a Naval battle group to set sail immediately for the Persian Gulf, with a planned ETA off the coast of Iran of Oct. 21--less than three weeks before Election Day. (McGovern, before he resigned in disgust during the Bush first term of office, had been in charge of threat assessment at the CIA.)

"It would appear," one well-connected Washington source informed me after hearing about the Naval maneuvers, "that the Bush administration's internal polling is telling them that they are in serious trouble in November and that they are getting desperate."

Maybe so. If Bush and his gang cannot get all their crimes retroactively approved by the current compliant Republican Congress, he and Cheney, fearing impeachment and war crimes prosecution, may have decided to go with a "Hail Mary" strategy--an aerial bombardment of Iran's nuclear facilities just before Election Day designed to rally Americans once more around the already abased and abused Flag.

This time, though, such a desperate, jingoistic strategy may not work. In fact, if such an act of unprovoked war leads Iran to unleash Shi'ia militias in Iraq against American forces, it will lead to an exponential increase in American casualties at a time that Americans are massively turning against that war.

The potential for an attack on Iran to become a new Tet is probably as great or greater than the likelihood of its rallying the public around an already widely discredited president and war.

Crucial in determining which way things would go is how Democrats respond to news of a new war in the offing. If they run true to form and start cheering for more war, they will have nailed the coffin shut on the Democratic Party as a functioning political organization. If they finally stand up against this abuse of American power and say no to yet another Bush war, the end to this nightmare could be in sight.

And which way the Democrats react will depend on what the American people do between now and any new Bush war.

As McGovern said darkly, "We have only seven weeks to act to stop this from happening."
-----------------

Impeachment Talk: What Are the Democrats Afraid Of?
NOTE: I gave a version of this speech on Sunday morning at Camp Democracy, on the National Block, just over a block from the White House.

If the Democratic Party manages to gain at least 15 seats in the House of Representatives this November, the party's leadership, and its leaders in the House, will face a crisis.

Almost certainly, and in short order, some member--perhaps a newly elected first-term Democrat full of spit and vinegar--will introduce a bill of impeachment, which will go straight to a House Judiciary Committee chaired by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).

Rep. Conyers, who has a new book out, The Constitution in Crisis, that lays out in detail many of this president’s impeachable crimes and Constitutional transgressions, will unquestionably want to hold impeachment hearings on that bill, and any others that would likely follow it (there are currently 39 members of a House “impeachment caucus” iinclluding Conyers).

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who would be the Speaker of a Democratic House, has vowed that if Democrats win the lower house of Congress, "impeachment will be off the table." She and other Democratic heavyweights like Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), head of the Democratic House Campaign Committee, seem to think that impeachment is a bad strategy. They recall the Republican attempt to impeach President Bill Clinton, and how that backfired and led to seat losses for the GOP in the following election.

But Republicans were simply out to get President Clinton. They didn't have a case of high crimes or misdemeanors to work with, only a lie about a sexual liaison with an intern, and impeaching on that petty charge understandably angered many voters (besides, Republicans did pretty well two years later!).

Democratic leaders have it all wrong when they see Bush's impeachment as just a replay of the Clinton impeachment farce, though. Perhaps they've been listening too long and too fearfully to Bush's Rasputin, Karl Rove, who has been pouring his poison into their ears, warning that campaigning in 2006 on a platform of impeaching President Bush would play into Republican hands by "energizing the Republican base." After all, what about energizing the Democratic base, and the independent base, which calling for impeachment would surely do, given the president’s sagging popularity and mounting public anger over the Iraq quagmire?

More importantly, though, is the fact that any impeachment effort against this president would involve, not petty malfeasance or illicit sex with interns, but major issues involving the very survival of the Constitution and of tripartite government.

Campaigning Democrats should be telling voters this fall that this president lied the country into a pointless, costly war. They should be telling voters he has weakened the nation and strengthened its enemies by condoning torture. Perhaps more importantly, though, since people will argue those points, they should be saying how President Bush has undermined the Founding Fathers' basic conception of three co-equal branches of government that check and balance each other. President Bush has for five years now claimed that as “commander in chief” in a “war” on terror, he has the power to ignore laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and even key parts of the Constitution like the First, Fourth and Sixth Amendments. He has claimed that as "commander in chief" he has the power with the stroke of a pen to invalidate all or parts of laws passed by Congress--over 850 of them, in fact. He has claimed that as "commander in chief" he has the power to arbitrarily deny prisoner of war protections to people captured by U.S. forces anywhere in the world. (The Supreme Court has shot down his "commander in chief" claim with respect to POWs, and by inference, for all the other actions of the president too, and a federal judge has said Bush violated FISA--a felony.)

On the matter of the so-called signing statements alone, Democrats in Congress have no alternative but to impeach the president, unless they want to render themselves vestigial. It wouldn't matter what progressive legislative agenda a Democratic House (or even a Democratic House and Senate) might pass; if the president could still issue signing statements invalidating such legislation without a veto, they would be unable to enact anything the president didn’t want. Even Republicans should be worried about this one, since the next president, elected in 2008, (who might well be a Democrat and even the dreaded Hillary!), could simply cite Bush and continue the practice of signing statements to ignore acts of Congress.

It's not just that this is a winning campaign strategy. It is also important for Democrats to be talking impeachment because that's the only way that the corporate media, which are ignoring or scoffing at the idea of impeachment, will report on the seriousness of the threat to the country posed by Bush's assault on the Constitution. It's also a matter of being honest with the voters.

What is Rep. Pelosi thinking? Of course Democrats will impeach this president if they win control of the House.

Besides, their oaths of office mandate that they must. High Crimes and Misdemeanors aplenty have been and are being committed by President Bush and his administration, along with treason and bribery, and the only right thing to do at this point is to hold impeachment hearings to determine what was done and to mete out the appropriate penalty: impeachment.
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September 14, 2006

Bush Push in Congress a Sign of Fear and Weakness

The Bush administration's full-court press against the Constitution is on, with the president getting closer to Senate, and possibly full Congressional approval of his warrantless spying program by the National Security Agency, and with a lobbying campaign on to get his program for kangaroo courts and life-time detention without trial for terror "war" detainees approved by Congress.

It's staggering to see this happening after a federal court just ruled that NSA spying without a show of probable cause is a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment, and after the US Supreme Court just ruled that Bush was in violation of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of POWs for refusing to treat the detainees at Guantanamo in accordance with US and International Law.

One might think this to be a case of a powerful president just steamrolling the courts and the Congress, but I think it is not a sign of strength, but rather the desperate act of a man who sees impeachment in his future, and who is acting while he can to try to cover up a few of his crimes.

For while the list of this president's crimes against the Constitution, the Republic and the People of the United States is long and ugly, the truth is that the two areas where he is the most vulnerable to impeachment are precisely the two that he is working so hard now to make go away: the warrantless NSA spying program and the abuse of the detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

This is because the president has already been found, in the first instance by a federal district court judge, and in the second by the full Supreme Court, to be a criminal (if you violate the law, you are by definition a criminal). It's just that as president he cannot simply be indicted and put on trial. That's why we have impeachment.

Bush and his legal adviser, the ethically and morally challenged Attorney General Alberto Golzales, who heads what is still officially called the "Justice" Department, but which has become more of an Enabling Department at this point, both know that if the House of Representatives is captured by the Democrats in November (only 15 seats need to change hands), there almost certainly will be impeachment hearings against the president. They know too that even Republican control of the Senate is at risk, which would make changing laws in his favor impossible.

This means that if they want to change the laws so that the president's crimes against the Constitution can be retroactively made legal, the sleight-of-hand needs to be completed in the next eight weeks, while the Republicans are firmly in charge of both houses of Congress.

Democrats are foolishly allowing this to happen, afraid to look "weak on terror," the charge that was leveled against them in the 2002 and 2204 campaigns. Their strategy, if it even deserves such a weighty characterization, is to lie low, and let Republicans debate among themselves the merits of letting the president spy on Americans at will without first clearing it with a judge, and of letting him institute detention without trial, and trial without the right to face one's accuser and to know the evidence being used to convict.

These are both terrible precedents to be setting, and Republicans and Democrats in Congress all know it. Hundreds of thousands of American patriots have died defending the Bill of Rights, and here we see a craven president, a lock-step Republican Congress and a cowardly Democratic opposition colluding to trash three of those treasured amendments in a flurry of pre-election activity.

The good news is that it probably won't work.

Even if the president succeeds in twisting enough arms to win approval for his kangaroo court at Guantanamo, it will not erase the fact that for five years he has held captives (including children as young as 7!) from the War in Afghanistan and from his program of kidnapping people all around the world in detention without recourse to a legitimate tribunal, and without protection from torture and abuse, all in violation of not only the Geneva Conventions, but of U.S. criminal law. Even if he succeeds in getting the law changed to allow him to spy on Americans without a warrant, Congress has no power to waive the Fourth Amendment, which requires probable cause before the government can seize property and monitor communications.

Furthermore, there is that huge list of other crimes, ranging from the president's refusal to provide information demanded by Congress and by the 9-11 Commission regarding what the administration knew and did before and during the 9-11 attacks, to his lying about the reasons for invading Iraq and his willful invalidating of over 850 laws or parts of laws passed by Congress (the signing statements).

That said, the Democratic Party is making a huge and historic mistake by urging Congressional Democrats to sit on their hands while Republicans debate these crucial issues, and by having campaigning candidates for Congress duck the issue of President Bush’s impeachable crimes. First of all, it is insulting the intelligence of the American voter for Democrats to pretend, as does House minority leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), that impeachment will be “off the table” if Democrats retake the House in November. Of course Democrats will hold impeachment hearings in November; they will have to, if only to challenge the president’s claim that he can ignore acts of Congress by issuing “signing statements.”

Second, it is simply stupid politics. For over a year, the Democratic leadership has been flailing around trying to find a rallying cry that could energize and excite the Democratic base to increase voter turnout this November. So far this effort has been a dismal failure. Unable to take a stand on Iraq, they have turned to their usual grab-bag of failed “wedge” mini-issues--stem cell research, education funding, gas prices and the like—all to little effect. And yet here’s impeachment is staring them in the face. An overwhelming majority of Democrats want this president impeached—for the Iraq War, for defiling the constitution, for messing up in New Orleans, for authorizing torture, and for being a dolt. Polls suggest that a majority of all voters and a sizeable chunk of Republican voters agree, if for different reasons (many genuine conservatives are aghast at the president’s trashing of the constitution).

Why don’t Democrats just try standing up for a change and make “Impeach the president!” their campaign slogan for the fall? Heck, they could even appropriate Neal Young’s song “Let’s impeach the President” as a campaign anthem.

While I don’t expect to see that happen—Democratic leaders are too afraid of their own shadows—the good news is that Bush has screwed things up so badly, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and here at home, that it may not matter. The Democrats may win back Congress by default. And then I think Bush has it right. He will face impeachment because as cowardly as the Democrats may be, they will have no choice but to do the right thing.
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September 12, 2006

Mourning 9-11? This President?

Who are they kidding?

The New York Times, in lead article on Monday headlined (on the jump) “Bush Mourns 9-11 at Ground Zero,” reported that a “visibly moved” president laid a wreath Sunday at the memorial in the hole that is what’s left of the World Trade Center, saying, “Laura and I approach tomorrow with a heavy heart.”

I’m sorry, but there’s no way this disaster of a president, this serial trasher of the Constitution, this slaughterer of 100,000 innocent Iraqis, this waster of nearly 30,000 American lives (the dead and the maimed victims in uniform of his pointless invasion of Iraq), was mourning anything. My guess is that he thanks god every day of his sorry administration for the events of 9-11, which rescued his presidency from history’s toilet.

Remember, on September 10, 2001, George Bush was being widely written off as a failed president. His poll numbers were falling faster than Enron stock, he was becoming a national joke for the number of days he spent vacationing, and his political strategist, Karl Rove, was in a tizzy trying to figure out an angle to salvage things.

Then came those hijacked planes, and the smoking ruins on Wall Street and at the Pentagon, and suddenly Bush had it made. He really didn’t have to do anything. The country needed a leader to rally around, and Bush, with the help of his trusty speechwriters, gave them that leader by default.

Karl Rove, his strategy dilemma solved, made Bush’s administration 9-11 24/7. It was “War on Terror” time in America. In short order, the U.S. was at war in Afghanistan, with B-52s and B-2s carpet bombing one of the poorest countries in the world, the USA PATRIOT Act was stripping Americans of their two-centuries old birthright of free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from government spying, the right to a speedy trial by a jury of peers, the right to an attorney, the right to face their accusers, and any Democrats who expressed concerns about the direction the country was going were labeled cowards and “supporters of the terrorists.”

And then there was the invasion of Iraq—something Bush and Cheney had dreamed of doing since before they took office, but had not figured out how to get the country to buy into.

On September 11, 2001, it all fell into place for this intellectually deficient and morally stunted man who in 2000 actually lost the election for president, but who found himself in the White House anyhow, thanks to the conniving of five unprincipled Supreme Court Justices willing to place loyalty to party ahead of loyalty to the People and the Constitution.

I’ll be generous and assume that Bush is serious when he says he is a religious guy and that his God talks to him, but I’ll bet you anything that when little he talks back to Big Him, as he did when he prayed Sunday at New York’s St. Paul’s Chapel and Monday at the National Cathedral, he offers fervent thanks for that terrible day.

Without it, he would not have had a Republican majority in the Congress in 2002, and without it, he would not have been returned to the White House in 2004.

Bush didn’t even have the grace to wait until the day of the fifth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks had ended to go from fake mourning mode into attack mode, once again appropriating the tragic deaths of over 2900 Americans to launch into a defense of his indefensible and disastrous war in Iraq, which his own generals say is going to hell. Nor did he wait until the day had passed to return to attacking Democrats.

In an address to the nation broadcast nationally at 9 pm on 9-11 (which the Times curiously headlined “Bush urges unity in a continuing war” in a report the next day), Bush attacked those calling for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Said Bush, “…the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out the terrorists would leave us alone. They will not leave us alone.”

Never mind that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, as even the President has been forced to admit, and as the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee has belatedly confirmed.

Fortunately, this fake “war on terror” that the president has wrapped himself up in, is starting to wear thin with the American public, as is his increasingly strained effort to link the fiasco in Iraq with that other fake war.

That may explain the sincere look of serious reflection on the normally twisted cynical face of Vice President Dick Cheney during a moment of silence at a Monday ceremony at the Pentagon. The Vice President, who like Bush surely hasn’t been genuinely mourning 9-11, may well have been brooding over the train wreck that this administration is becoming, in large part because of Cheney's own mad obsession with military adventurism and presidential power grabbing.

Both he and Bush may even have been praying on Monday that the next anniversary of the 9-11 attacks doesn’t see them both in the dock being impeached for their crimes.
==============================

September 11, 2006

Commemorating 9-11 by Impeaching the President

The commemorations of 9-11 are being polluted by participation of President Bush and other administration officials who for five years have shamelessly used the deaths of 3000 people as an excuse for an unremitting assault on the Constitution and for a brutal and illegal war on the innocent and long-suffering people of Iraq.

If we really want to commemorate that terrible day in 2001, we need to focus on the five-year crime spree against the Constitution and the American people that began almost immediately as the buildings fell, and that today has the American Republic teetering on the brink of a totalitarian future. Because it is clear that Bush and his advisors, far from acting to unite the country and protect it from attack, used that horrible tragedy half a decade ago as an excuse to terrorize Congress and the American public, and as an excuse to set the nation on a permanent war footing, so as to aggrandize unchecked power and to usurp the powers of the Congress and the Courts, thus converting the presidency into a dictatorship.

We know the Bush team had their sights set on an invasion of Iraq from even before the president took his first oath of office. The ousted Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, a member from the outset of the White House National Security Council, has reported that at the first meeting of that body, several days into the first Bush term and long before the 9-11 attacks, the focus was on how to maneuver the U.S. into a war against Iraq. "Find me a way to do this," O’Neill quotes our draft-dodging president as saying.

Within days of the attacks, the White House had cobbled together a massive document composed of hundreds of police-state measures submitted to Congress by police and right-wing legislators, and summarily rejected, over the years and cynically called it the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act. Barbara Olshansky, my co-author on our new book The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, May 2006), and deputy director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says that many of the pages of the initial draft of that nightmarish legislation still had the old bill numbers of the rejected legislation that they had begun life as. Passed without discussion or debate, the new law effectively gutted the First, Fourth and Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution's Bill of Rights. But that was just the start.

In attacking Afghanistan and the Al Qaeda organization operating there, the president appropriately sought, and was granted by Congress, an Authorization for the Use of Force. But he has subsequently interpreted that authorization to pursue terrorism in Afghanistan and other jurisdictions around the world to mean he had been given the permanent title of commander in chief in a "war on terror" that has no conceivable end, and no boundaries (it includes the domestic U.S. in his view), and that this title authorizes him to override acts of Congress, orders of the Courts, the rules of government laid out in the U.S. Constitution, and international treaties and laws adopted by the U.S.

In short order, the president ignored Congress' passage of a funding bill for the war in Afghanistan, and called off the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden, illegally shifting troops and personnel in that country away to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other areas around Iraq, in preparation for an invasion of that country.

While Bin Laden was left free and continue his deadly plotting, a secret conspiracy was then organized by the Bush Administration, which included creation of an alternative intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, in the Pentagon, and a propaganda arm, the White House Iraq Group, all with the goal of manufacturing and pushing into the media fake evidence designed to frighten Congress and the American public into supporting war against Iraq. The OSP used lies and bogus "defectors" provided by the CIA-created Iraqi National Congress to gin up horror stories of germ weapons and chemical weapons programs, and even of a nonexistent nuclear-weapons program by Saddam Hussein. One of the most elaborate hoaxes involved the use of forged documents purporting to be signed agreements by the government of the African state of Niger to provide 400 tons of uranium ore to Iraq. These documents originated in Italy, where stationary and seals stolen from the Niger Embassy in Rome were used to give them a look of authenticity, but the forgers, apparently linked to the Italian intelligence service SISMI, were slipshod and signed the names of officials no longer in office in Niger. When the forgeries were easily spotted by U.S. intelligence experts, key members of the OSP, allegedly working together with Iran-Contra conspirator Michael Ledeen and notorious arms dealer and con-artist ManucherGorbanifar, as well as with the heads of Italian intelligence and defense, allegedly concocted a black-op scheme to recycle those forged documents through British intelligence, presenting them as "new" evidence of Hussein's nuclear ambitions.

It was this scheme that Vice President Dick Cheney and then National Security Director Condi Rice were mendaciously citing when they referred ominously to a mushroom cloud threat in the fall of 2002, and that Bush lyingly referred to in his 2003 State of the Union message, when he said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The administration's lies that launched the country into a war in Iraq were just that. Lies and a conspiracy against the public and against peace which have cost the lives of over 2700 American troops and of over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children. Even the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee has now admitted that the administration's claims, like one linking Hussein to Al Qaeda, were bogus--but they did the trick all the same, and the country continues to pay the price, in blood and money.

Bush also used his delliberately inflated "commander in chief" title to justify his decision to exempt hundreds of people captured in Afghanistan, and hundreds of others kidnapped from all over the world, and held in Guantanamo Bay's detention center, from the protections of the Geneva Convention. The Supreme Court recently ruled that this decision was a violation not only of the Geneva Convention, but of the U.S. Criminal Code, which adopted the Third Geneva Convention on Treatment of POWs as a part of U.S. law in 1996. The president, that is to say, has already been declared to be a criminal by the highest court in the land. (I should note that some of the "terrorists" held for five years at Guantanamo were kids, some as young as seven and eight, at the time of their "capture"--a violation of the Geneva Accords. One of these children, brought to Guantanamo at age 12 from Afghanistan, was one of the three captives who committed suicide last June in despair at ever being released. Compounding the horror, the government had determined several weeks earlier, that the boy had been wrongly accused and had scheduled for him for release just three days after the day of his suicide. But government officials didn’t bother to tell him. Though his attorney was told of his pending release, the government barred the attorney from contacting him.)

A lower federal court has also found the president to have criminally violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution for authorizing National Security Agency spying on the communications of tens of thousands of Americans without first seeking a warrant from the secret FISA Court.

When the Supreme Court slapped down the president's claim to have special powers as commander in chief, it effectively pulled the plug on his argument justifying other criminal abuses of power, including his refusal to provide information demanded by congressional committees and the bi-partisan 9-11 Commission, and his use of "signing statements" to invalidate all or part of over 850 laws enacted by Congress. The same court ruling undermines the president's claim that as commander in chief he has the power to declare any American to be an enemy combatant, subject to arrest without charge and detention without the right of habeas corpus access to the courts, and the power to authorize the use of torture against such individuals, or against other captured in the bogus "war" on terror.

The problem is that while the Supreme Court has made this determination regarding the president's criminal behavior, the president is constitutionally invulnerable to prosecution, even from war crimes, while in office. The only recourse is impeachment, which is the power to remove an elected president or any other federal official, and which belongs solely to the Congress.

Because both houses of Congress, and most importantly, the House of Representatives, are currently controlled by the Republican Party, which is in league with the president, there will be no impeachment of the president until at least this November.

At that point, however, if Democrats manage to gain the necessary 15 seats to gain a majority in the House, impeachment becomes not only a possibility, but a duty and a necessity.

It simply cannot be allowed for a president to commit the broad array of crimes against the Constitution and the People of the United States that President Bush has already committed, and for there to be no effort to impeach him. To allow that travesty to happen would not only be an affront to the memory of the Founding Fathers (and of those who died on 9-11, in whose names most of these crimes have so cynically been committed). It would also condemn us to a future in which subsequent presidents of both parties could commit the same crimes with impunity, citing the Bush presidency as a precedent.

Take just one crime--the use of signing statements to invalidate acts of Congress. If a Democratic Congress were not to impeach on this issue, and were to allow the president to continue with this abuse of his power, not one significant piece of Democratic legislation could pass into law without the president doctoring it to fit his own political needs and views. Moreover, a future president--say Hillary Clinton or Russ Feingold--could use the same tactic to invalidate laws passed by some future Republican Congress.

There are less than two months remaining before the November congressional election, at which all members of the House and a third of the members of the Senate must face the voters. The American people owe it to themselves, to the founders, to the victims of 9-11 and to all the American soldiers who have died over the years fighting to defend America and the Constitution, to ensure that: 1) Democrats are given control of the House of Representatives, and 2) their own representative, whether Democrat or Republican, understands that this president is a serial Constitutional criminal who must be brought to justice.

That will be the best commemoration of 9-11: That we Americans finally stood up as citizens of a great republic and demanded that our country survive not just the threat of terror from without, but the even more serious threat of tyranny from within.
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September 6, 2006

No Sign of Casey, Santorum in Drag; It Must be Labor Day!

Labor Day in Philadelphia was full of strange happenings and non-happenings.

My perspective on this was the annual Labor Day Parade in Philly--a joyous and well-attended event that seems to get bigger each year even as the union movement (and workers' wages) keep shrinking.

Lurking on the sidelines of the event, as unions members were assembling for the two-mile march along the Delaware River--was Senator Rick Santorum. This enemy of the working person was easy to spot as the interloper he was by the crisp new bluer-than-blue denim jacket and spanking new jeans that he was wearing. He must have had an aide rush out to the GAP or to Macy's to get him some "workers' duds" so he could look the part of an average guy. I kept waiting for him to turn around so I could see the paper brand label and the price tag still stapled to the back pocket.

The thing is, Santorum looked so out of place without his starchy blue suit and tie on that nobody seemed to even notice him standing off to the side and kibbitzing with a TV cameraman--probably from the local Fox station.

Say this for the job-exporting, war-mongering, birth-control-banning junior senator from Pennsylvania, though: even if he was dressed in drag, at least he showed up at the march.

That can't be said of his opponent, Democrat Bob Casey. Although there were some people at the march supporting Casey's campaign by wearing shirts that said, without a shred of evidence, "Bob Casey, Friend of the Working Man," Casey himself apparently had better things to do than come and talk and march with his "friends" at Pennsylvania's premiere Labor Day event.

The Pennsylvania senate election is in fact a truly depressing affair. The incumbent, Santorum, is one of the most right-wing nut-cases in the Senate--a man who believes women belong in the home and men belong in Iraq, or Iran--and so naturally, he's also number three in the Senate leadership, and a presidential wannabe for 2008. His campaign features calls for war with Iran, unquestioning support for the president's war in Iraq and the overturning of Roe v Wade, but more than that, a ban on access to birth control.

He's despicable, true enough, but then Pennsylvania progressives look at the Democratic "alternative" and see Casey, who also supports the war in Iraq, refuses to join his own state colleague, Rep. John Murtha, in calling for a pull-out from that disaster, and who not only wants a reversal of Roe v. Wade, but actually volunteered that had he been a senator, he would have supported the Bush nomination of right-wing judge Sam Alito to the Supreme Court. Some friend of the working man! Alito, in his decisions as a federal judge and appeals court judge, consistently ruled against workers and for management whenever such cases came before him.

The state Democratic Party has been laboring mightily, with Casey's blessing, to keep off the November ballot a Green Party senate candidate, Carl Romanelli, who enthusiastically supports working people's issues, opposes the war, and supports women's right to safe abortions on demand. (Santorum's people openly helped the Green Party candidate to collect ballot signatures, hoping his candidacy would siphon away Democratic votes from anti-abortionist Casey.) As it turns out, Casey and Rendell chose to be in Pittsburgh where they attended a funeral for the former mayor.

It was a poor decision, as both candidates need to win big in Philadelphia if they are to win in November, and in the case of Casey, who has no passionate support in the city, it will likely all come down to whether he has enthusiastic labor support. He might have gotten that had he come and given a rousing speech of solidarity. Instead he chose a funeral. It might be a symbolic decision, since Casey’s political positions represent the death of liberal Democratic ideals in Pennsylvania. If he manages to blow it and loses his race, it would also be the death of liberal Democratic hopes of unseating Senator Troglodyte.

But the Senate race isn't the only weird one in Pennsylvania. There's also the governor's race. Here we have incumbent Democrat Ed Rendell facing Republican former Steeler football player Lynn Swann.

The race has Rendell, a fairly popular governor, sweating because although Swann is a Republican, he is also an Afro-American, and as such, is likely to cut into Rendell's usually solid African-American vote in Philadelphia and other cities--a critical factor in his victory four years ago. Swann's pro-ball background could also appeal to some of this football-crazed state's white working-class fans.

So you might have thought the former mayor of Philadelphia would have made a point of stopping to give a pep talk to and maybe march (wearing an Eagle's T-shirt perhaps) along with the workers of his home city, but not big Ed. He apparently had better things to do on Labor Day. Rendell also has better things to do than helping to elect Casey, the man sharing the top of the ticket with him this year. The Governor, ever the loyal party comrade, has declined to pick sides in that race, saying, "Santorum's been a good Senator for the state."

Right. Tell that to the families of the Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers killed in a pointless war in Iraq.

At least Swann, who also skipped the march, had his people there handing out helium-filled balloons emblazoned with his name. (Then again, maybe the rotund Rendell didn't think balloons were the image he wanted to project.)

When you come right down to it, there was an amazing paucity of elected officials at the Labor Day Parade in Philadelphia. There was the mayor, but then, he's not running for anything. If anything, he's running from the corruption that has been like the swamp around a bayou cabin, leaking into his office from all sides.

In the end, it seems likely Rendell will eke out a victory against Swann and that Casey will somehow sneak past Santorum in November, continuing the illusion that Pennsylvania is a so-called blue state. But don't be fooled. The state's Democrats, who are busy ignoring the plight of African-Americans and workers, while cozying up to big corporate sponsors in the healthcare, chemical, oil, communications and utilities industries, are committing political suicide in this state.
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September 4, 2006

America at War: Killing People in Order to Save Them

Here's a headline you won’t see in your local paper:

"U.S. Accused of Using Cluster Weapons Against Civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan"

We all saw the headline about the State Department investigating Israel’s use of US-made cluster weapons in Lebanon, because they had been dropping these deadly and indiscriminate munitions in civilian areas of southern Lebanon, with the prospect of killing large numbers of non-combatants including children. This allegedly violated restrictions placed by the U.S. on how the weapons could be used by the Israeli Defense Force.

It turns out, though, that there are no such restrictions on how these same munitions can be--and are being--used by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to a number of sources including military documents and reports from organizations like Human Rights Watch, the U.S., which has refused to sign an international treaty that outlaws cluster weapons, does not even restrict the use of cluster weapons in urban or populated areas. Army and Air force generals have blocked efforts to ban cluster weapons where there are large numbers of civilians present, claiming such a restriction would just lead enemy combatants to locate themselves among civilians.

Well, duh!

Their argument could pretty much be used to oppose restrictions on any kind of weapon in civilian areas. And guess what? That pretty much is the way the U.S. wages war: The hell with civilians! If they happen to be in the way when we drop our bombs, so much the worse for them.

In fact, back in early 2003, when the Australian government agreed to send some troops to join Bush's "Coalition of the Willing" in Iraq, it first had first to assure the troops and the people of Australia that Australian soldiers would not participate in American actions that involved the laying of mines or the use of cluster weapons.

Shock and Awe, the initial aerial bombardment of Baghdad and other cities of Iraq at the start of the U.S. invasion, reportedly led to tens of thousands of civilian casualties, and one reason was the heavy and indiscriminate use of cluster weapons, which disperse hundreds of little fragmentation bombs over a wide area, many of which explode when a person disturbs them. The Christian Science Monitor, which investigated civilian deaths in the first year of the Iraq War, found that the U.S. was killing Iraqi civilians at the astonishing rate of 30 for every enemy fighter. That's a civilian slaughter that would have made even Hitler's SS envious. One reason for this high "collateral damage" kill rate was almost certainly the use of cluster weapons, some of which spread hundreds of their little bomblets over a 20-acre area, with between 5-30 percent of these secondary weapons failing to explode on impact.

There are a number of reports suggesting that the U.S. used cluster weapons extensively later on in carpet bombings that preceded assaults on Al-Qiam, Ramadi, Tal Afar and of course Fallujah, all cities where the civilian casualties were horrific.

So where is the outcry against this criminal U.S. use of cluster weapons? Most Americans don't even know about it. The media have largely blacked the story out. The Pentagon won't talk about it. When Agence France Presse back in April 2003 ran photos of US cluster weapons stockpiled for use in Iraq, no major media outlet in the US picked them up. The only report on cluster weapons at the time in Amnerica came from CNN reporter Peter Arnett. But of course, the Iraqis and the Afghanis know all about it.

It seems particularly inappropriate for the U.S. to be using such munitions in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, where we are supposedly there to help the people of the country against alleged “terrorist” forces within their borders. Killing the people of the country you are "helping" would seem to be operating at cross-purposes. But it does explain why every time there is some "mistake" reported, where the U.S. bombs a wedding or an innocent town square, the death toll is so astoundingly high.

It also helps explain why the resistance forces in both countries seem to keep getting stronger, even as we keep killing them at a prodigious rate. Cluster weapons, besides killing lots of civilians, also inevitably make lots of enemies.
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August 30, 2006

Exposing the Lies and a Black-Op:
Armitage is the Leaker, Not the Story

Now that Dick Armitage has admitted to being the initial source of right-wing columnist Robert Novak's news story outing Valerie Plame as a covert CIA agent and wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, it's important to remember what this story is really all about.

The mainstream media has focused on the scandal as a whodunit, all about White House leaks and journalists' unidentified sources, but the real issue has largely been left unaddressed, namely: Why did the White House go to such extraordinary and criminal lengths to try to attack and discredit Wilson, a career diplomat?

To answer that question we have to go back to 2002 and the march to war in Iraq, and to 2003, when the Bush administration was starting to take the heat for its evident failure to find any "weapons of mass destruction" in the defeated land of Iraq, and for the fiasco of the occupation, which was becoming obvious.

As I wrote in Barbara Olshansky's and my book, The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, May 2006):

"…the Bush-Cheney administration, which had its sights set on Baghdad and `regime change’ from the day it took office, was by 2002 well on the way to invading Iraq, and was only looking for ways, to borrow from the Downing Street memo, to `fix the facts' so as to win public support for war. The game plan was to make Saddam Hussein look scary to Americans, and what better way to scare people than to say that this bloody dictator was trying to get The Bomb?"

This propaganda goal was accomplished with the help of a crude forgery of documents which were presented as solid evidence of such an effort. The documents--supposedly signed letters of intent to ship 400 tons of uranium ore from Niger in Africa to Iraq, bearing the signature of Niger's mining minister--had initially been provided to the White House by the sycophantic and obliging Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and his chief of intelligence, Nicolo Pollari, back in October 2001. The documents were immediately spotted by the CIA and the State Department's own intelligence office as forgeries--the minister whose signature appeared on the sale documents had been out of office for years by the time of the signing date.

This is where the plot thickens, though. A team of investigative reporters in Italy, working for the respected newspaper La Repubblica, learned that a group of people, allegedly including Michael Ledeen, Defense Department Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, Defense Intelligence Agency Middle East analyst Larry Franklin, Pentagon Office of Special Plans member Harold Rhode and convicted bank swindler and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, met secretly in Rome. Also present, reportedly, were Pollari and the head of the Italian Department of Defense. The La Repubblica reporters, led by investigative reporter Carlo Bonini, claim that it was at this unusual meeting that a plan was hatched to recycle and launder the bogus and discredited Niger documents through British intelligence, so that they would come back to the White House as "new evidence" of Hussein's nuclear ambitions.

Ledeen, who was deeply involved in similar scheming during the infamous Reagan-era Iran arms-for-hostages stinger missile deal, which had been used to raise secret funds for the CIA-backed Contras who were invading Nicaragua, doesn't deny that meeting, but has denied any involvement in the Niger scam. But the involvement of Feith (an architect of the whole Neocon scheme to invade Iraq and overthrow Hussein), of Franklin, who later pleaded guilty to passing classified information to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and especially of Rhode, who was working in OSP, the Pentagon office Cheney and Rumsfeld created specifically to gin up "evidence" to justify an Iraq invasion, makes this meeting suspicious in the extreme.

On its face, it would appear that this high-powered Rome meeting was the start of a so-called "black op," designed to create false evidence for the purpose of deceiving the U.S. media, the Congress and the American public into believing that America was at risk of a nuclear attack from Iraq.

And it worked. In his January 29, 2003 State of the Union address, with war fever growing, Bush declared to the assembled members of Congress and a watching nation, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

This, to most Americans, was the clincher. Never mind that it takes years for a non-nuclear nation to go from buying uranium ore to producing a bomb. The president was saying that was Saddam's evil plan. But the president, when he said that, was lying through his teeth, since the British government's "evidence," he knew, was the same set of forged documents that had been discredited two years earlier by his own intelligence people. The president knew it wasn't new, and it wasn't true.

This is where Wilson and Plame come in.

Back in 2002, with the White House continuing to shamelessly promote the bogus Niger uranium purchase story, the CIA reportedly decided it needed to get better information. Plame, whose responsibility at the Agency was nuclear proliferation, apparently suggested to the CIA director of operations that her husband, who had served in Africa and had good relations with officials in Niger, including the minister of mines, be sent over there to investigate.

Wilson was dispatched, and returned reporting confidently that there was no uranium there to sell (it had all been sold to Japanese and European customers), and that any documents purporting such a sale "would not be authentic."

Wilson's report went the rounds in the CIA, and that might have been the end of it, but the White House, and especially Vice President Cheney and the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, had other ideas. Talk of Saddam's uranium purchases and nuclear ambitions began cropping up in administration speeches in August, 2002, with both then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Bush himself referring darkly to a "mushroom cloud" threatening America, and ultimately with Bush's reference to the forged documents in early 2003.

Wilson grew frustrated with the administration's lies and deceit, and ultimately went public in 2003 with what he knew, first in May to Congress and then on July 6 in an opinion article in the New York Times.

Having a lowly former ambassador undermine a statement by the president might well annoy any White House, but the attack that ensued, which appears to have been orchestrated by the White House and the Vice President, was so virulent, involving the criminal outing of Plame and the jeopardizing of all her contacts and her critical work on nuclear proliferation, including in countries like Iran, that clearly more was involved than just administration pique.

The real concern, I suspect, was the possible discovery of who was behind the document forgeries, and of a black-op scheme to recycle them through British intelligence.

It appears that the investigation into the Plame outing scandal, which is being conducted by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, has been successfully obstructed by the White House, and, unless Fitzgerald has some surprise in store, will be limited to the prosecution of Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on a charge of perjury and obstruction.

We cannot expect Fitzgerald to get to the bottom of this scandal, which goes to the heart of a criminal war that has killed 2600, Americans and 100,000-plus Iraqis. Nor, sadly, does it seem we can count on the mainstream media, which continues to treat the story as being all about leaks and Valerie Plame.

Only an impeachment hearing can do the job. At such a hearing, the House Judiciary Committee would not face the same hurdles regarding whom it would call to testify, what questions it could ask, and what documents it could demand to see as does a prosecutor operating under the rules of a federal court.
======================

August 28, 2006

War? What War

As co-author of The Case for Impeachment, the most common question I get besides "Why hasn't Bush been impeached yet?" comes from critics, who ask some variant (usually laced with profanities) of: "How can you criticize the president when the country's at war?"

It's understandable that people might ask such a thing, given that we have some 140,000 American troops fighting in Iraq, and another 10,000 or so in Afghanistan, but the truth is that these conflicts aren't what people have in mind (most people don't even think about those wars). They're talking about the so-called "War on Terror."

Let's first dispense with the Iraq "war" and the Afghanistan "war." Neither of these is really a war. The first ended when Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled, in April of 2003--back when Bush told us "major combat" had ended. Today, Iraq has an elected government, they tell us, and the U.S. is there at that government's request, to help police the place. Sure, some Americans are continuing to die, but you can't call it a war, or even an occupation. Not when you've been invited there by the local government.

The same is true of Afghanistan, where the Taliban were defeated way back in 2002. Again there is now an elected government there, and NATO forces, not US forces, at the invitation of that government, are conducting operations against the overthrown government of the Taliban. No way you can call that a war either, any more than the U.S. efforts in Bosnia and Kosovo were a war.

As for the "War" on Terror, the confusion seems to date back to the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson, deeply involved in a genuine war in Indochina, decided to divert public attention with a second "war"--this one on poverty.

That "war" wasn't much more successful than the Indochina War. The Vietnamese won their war in 1975, and poverty won its "war" almost without firing a shot.

The main legacy of Johnson's "war" on poverty, really, was not on poverty, but on political language. It lead directly to the subsequent Nixon/Carter/Reagan/Clinton "war" on drugs.

That inaccurately titled policy initiative had nothing to do with a war, but everything to do with expanding police power and police tactics within the U.S., and with filling prisons with people who didn't belong there.

In that regard, the "war" on drugs was a model for Bush's subsequent "war" on terror. Claiming that hordes of dark-skinned "Islamofascist" terrorists are out to destroy America, Bush and his cronies, following the 9-11 attacks, declared "war" on the terrorists.

But a strange "war" this has been. First they attacked Afghanistan, reportedly to go after the alleged author of those attacks, Osama Bin Ladin and his Al Qaeda hordes. But then, with Osama reportedly surrounded, Bush pulled his troops out and attacked Iraq, a bankrupt third-world state which had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks and which posed no threat to the U.S. Several hundred thousand US troops, and a handful of troops from a coalition of the "willing" were dispatched to Iraq where they have remained since, while the pursuit of Bin Ladin has languished and, by some accounts, been called off altogether.

But as for the "war" on terror? It's going strong, but all along it's been all about not military, but police activity. In Europe, alleged terror cells have been efficiently infiltrated and busted. In Britain, there was the bust of a cell which succeeded in blowing up some buses and subway cars and another bust of an alleged plot to blow up multiple airliners. In the U.S., there have been...well, not much in the way of productive busts of terror actions, but certainly a lot of police activity.

Thousands of people of Islamic faith, or of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin, including American citizens, have been rounded up on the flimsiest of excuses, and jailed without charge, often to later be deported--sometimes to the very countries they were given asylum from earlier. An unknown number have been secretly kidnapped and "renditioned" to third nations to be tortured in secret gulags, before being warehoused indefinitely at Guantanamo's detention and torture center. Massive spying by the high-tech National Security Agency on hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Americans, all without benefit of a court order, has been ordered by the president, in violation of law and Constitution.

A so-called "USA PATRIOT" Act was pushed through Congress undermining the Bill of Rights, due process and the right to privacy.

The CIA and Defense Department Intelligence Agency, and other secret police organizations have been unleashed against the public.

And critics of all this are publicly denounced and threatened by government officials and political leaders including the president as being "traitors" and "aids to terrorists."

This is what Bush's phoney "War on Terror" is about in reality. Not a war, but an excuse for a police state. He has even claimed that this fake "war" makes him "commander in chief" and since the so-called war is global, taking place everywhere including within the U.S., he claims that gives him the power of a generalissimo both internationally and here at home--the power to declare anyone he wants, including you and me, an "enemy combatant" without rights of any kind, the power to ignore the courts, the power to ignore laws passed by Congress, and even the power to ignore the Constitution itself.

It's important to understand this. Those who somehow believe that America's survival as a nation is really threatened by terrorists, and that thus the president needs absolute power need to ask themselves: How many terrorists do there have to be out there trying to harm America or American interests for me to call this a "war" and to toss out the Constitution? Is 10,000 a good number? 1000? 100? 10?

Because let's face it: With America not only the most powerful military power on earth (our military budget exceeds that of all other nations combined), there will always be some people who feel aggrieved enough or angry enough at something to want to take violant action.

So do these critics want a permanent state of war because some terrorists want to hijack a plane, bomb a building, or try to bomb some city? Heck, Bush destroyed a city all by himself a year ago.

Are 10 terrorists enough of a threat that we should suspend the Constitution and let the president be a dictator? Should we hold out for 1000? And should we count in that number "terrorists" like the bozos who were arrested in Miami, who were supposedly planning to take down the Sears Tower in Chicago but didn't even know where it was? Or the seven and eight-year olds who were captured in Afghanistan and shipped off to Camp Iguana in Guantanamo?

Let's get real here. There is no "war" on terror. Just a war on the American people and on our Constitution.

And we know who the enemies of America are: Not a bunch of loony fanatics in turbans, but rather people in hand-tailored $6,000 suits in Washington, eager to turn a two-centuries-old experiment in democracy into a one-party police state.

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August 25, 2006

Antipersonnel Weapons: Israel's Crime, or America's?

The U.S. State Department, we hear, is investigating Israel's use of U.S.-produced and U.S.-supplied anti-personnel weapons against civilian populations in Lebanon. It seems UN and Human Rights investigators have found nearly 300 sites where unexploded examples of these horrific weapons of mass destruction have turned up, many of them with their "Made in USA" labels intact. (Isn't it amazing how we can't make shoes or TVs in America anymore, but we can make fancy bomblets and even win export contracts...)

The N.Y. Times even ran a color map displaying the wide area of southern Lebanon where the U.S.-built howitzer shells, bombs and rocket warheads fired by the Israeli Defense Force have landed.

This is an atrocity. I spent some time in Laos, in 1995, and saw children under the age of 10 missing arms and legs, or blind, because they'd run into stray or buried anti-personnel "bombies" (as they call them there), a deadly legacy of the U.S. secret air war against that country that had ended more than two decades earlier. That's what makes these nasty weapons particularly reprehensible: like mines, they kill soldiers and civilians alike, and like mines they keep killing long after a conflict has ended.

But as disgusting as this story is, and as terrible as the IDF's--and Hezzbollah's--use of such weaponry designed to maim may be, for us in the United States the real question should be not what Israel is doing, but rather why is our country making these weapons in the first place? And why haven't we seen maps in our media showing where these weapons were used in Afghanistan and Iraq, in our own name?

Because make no mistake: the U.S. military used and continues to use antipersonnel shells, bombs and rockets in both those places in quantities that dwarf their use by Israel in Lebanon.

There were isolated reports about anti-personnel ordnance being used in urban settings like Baghdad during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Some were even parachuted down to the ground, so that they could explode later, when someone passes by--thus further clouding the matter of who actually gets killed (and increasing the likelihood that the victims would be inquisitive children). There were also a number of reports that anti-personnel ordnance was used in quantity during the assault on the city of Fallujah in 2004. But as far as I can tell, no mainstream media outlet has done a systematic investigation or report on how widespread U.S. use of anti-personnel weapons has been and is now in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor have I seen any report that looks at the actual rules controlling the use of those weapons by U.S. forces.

Reportedly, the State Department is investigating Israel's use of anti-personnel weapons because of reports that the IDF violated a secret agreement not to use them against civilian targets. Israel's response reportedly is that it only used them against Hezzbollah missile launching sites, but then they note that since Hezzbollah was allegedly launching its missiles from locations in residential neighborhoods, this means that the weapons were in fact being used where civilians were concentrated.

Is this the way the U.S. military uses these same weapons, too? The few reports I recall seeing suggest this is the case. Certainly if our forces dropped anti-personnel weapons into cities like Fallujah and Baghdad, as reports indicated at the time, then they were putting large numbers of civilians in harm's way.

It seems the height of hypocrisy for the State Department to be investigating Israel for doing just what the U.S. does with these ugly weapons.

It also seems hypocritical for the U.S. media to be devoting so much time and ink to reporting so breathlessly on the IDF's use of American anti-personnel weapons and on Hezzbollah's use of a primitive version of the same thing, while largely ignoring our own military's much wider use of them.
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August 19, 2006

Bush is Two Times a Criminal

For the second time in two months, a federal court has ruled that the president is in violation of the Constitution. This time it's a federal court in Detroit that has ruled that President Bush has violated the Fourth Amendment against illegal search and seizure for his order to the National Security Agency to monitor the phone and Internet messages of Americans without bothering to obtain a court order based upon probable cause.

The first time, it was the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in late June that the president had violated the Constitution by asserting he had the power to ignore the Third Geneva Convention on Treatment of Prisoners of War—a treaty formally signed into law by the U.S. and made an integral part of the U.S. Criminal Code.

The important thing about these two rulings--and it is a point that the squeamish mainstream media have shied away from mentioning--is that they both are declaring the president to be a criminal. That is, he has been found in the first case to be in criminal violation of the Constitution, as well as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, and in the second, he has been found to be in violation of U.S. and International Law.

Note that when someone has committed a felony--say a bank robbery or a case of assault and battery or of murder--and when a court has found that person to be guilty of the crime in question, that person is from that moment hence considered a criminal. The case may be appealed to a higher court, but in the meantime, judgment has been rendered, and a penalty assigned.

In Bush's case, the highest court in the land has reached its verdict in the War Crimes case involving Bush's claim that as Commander in Chief he had the power to ignore both law and Constitution and declare captives in the so-called war on terror and in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to be excluded from the protections of the Geneva convention. The justices, by a margin of 5-3, declared that his claim was bogus. He has no power to ignore the Constitution, whether in wartime or peacetime. The clear result of that ruling is that the president is a war criminal.

The latest federal court decision, in a case brought by the ACLU, has reached the same conclusion, and on the same grounds. The president has been claiming that as commander in chief, he has the right to ignore both the FISA law passed by Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. And a federal judge has again found that his claim is bogus. The president, the judge has declared, is bound by the Constitution to follow the letter of the law, and has criminally failed to do so.

Now there has been no penalty established in either of these crimes, serious as they are, because under the Constitution, the president cannot be convicted or punished by a court unless he is first impeached and removed from office, but the facts of his serial criminal behavior has been established.

It is important to point out, as Barbara Olshansky and I have done in our book The Case for Impeachment, that impeachment is not, primarily, about actual criminal acts by a president. The Founders, when they included impeachment as a remedy for removing elected officials, including the president, from office, were clear that they were primarily concerned about political crimes, which may or may not be literally against the law. Such crimes, it is clear, referred to actions that threatened the political system--for example abuse of power, or lying to Congress or to the American people. At the same time, it is also clear that the Founders saw impeachment as an appropriate measure when a president actually breaks the law, if the violation is so serious as to threaten the political system or the welfare of the American people. So even if a higher court later overturned the Detroit federal court’s decision, Congress could still determine that the president had committed a political crime against the Constitution in authorizing warrantless domestic spying, and could impeach him.

What Bush and his administration have done in both of these cases falls clearly into that category. By claiming to be above the law and even above the Constitution, the president has in both the NSA spying case and in the Geneva Conventions case, claimed the power of an absolute despot. He has asserted that in time of war--including a so-called “war” on terror which clearly has nothing to do with an actual war--he operates without any checks and balances or any oversight.

He has twisted the role of commander in chief, which the Founders included in the powers of the presidency solely to insure that there would be a civilian responsible to the citizenry above any general, into the role of a generalissimo--a military ruler in charge of the entire nation.

The lock-step Republicans and spineless Democrats in Congress have not challenged this coup by lexicographical manipulation, but the judicial branch has thrown down the gantlet.

Now it is time for the People of the United States to follow up this action.

In November, all the members of the House of Representatives are up for election, along with one-third of the Senate.

For the sake of the future of Constitutional government and for the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution, it is essential that the American people wake up and replace in November all those members of Congress who have allowed this presidential dictatorship to develop unchecked.

The courts have spoken: this president is a criminal on multiple counts. Now the process moves to our elected representatives in Washington. No member of Congress who is unwilling to hold Bush and his accomplices to account and initiate impeachment proceedings against him for his crimes and violations of the Constitution should be returned to office in November.

Some critics have argued that impeachment is an unnecessary diversion from the task of government, since Bush will be gone in 2008 anyway. These people miss the point that leaving this president's crimes and constitutional affronts unchallenged and unpunished would enshrine his transgressions in the mantle of precedent, allowing the next president and her or his successors to pick up wherever Bush leaves off.

To do that would be to sign the death warrant for American democracy.
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August 11, 2006

Middle East Cluster %#!*

It's positively touching and heartwarming to read that the U.S. State Department is trying to put a hold of sorts on delivery to Israel of already approved M-26 artillery rockets tipped with cluster weapons designed for wide-area mass killing.

The Israeli government had asked the U.S. for quick delivery of these grotesque weapons of mass destruction for use against Hezzbollah rocket sites in southern Lebanon, and the Pentagon was ready to do so, but then the State Department, concerned about the probability of massive civilian casualties, got in the way.

This might sound like an outbreak of humanitarianism and respect for the international rules of war, which prohibit cluster weapons, except for the fact that the U.S. has made extensive use of this same weapon in Iraq, and no doubt in Afghanistan too. In fact, the high civilian death and casualty rate in the Iraq invasion and occupation can in good part be attributed to U.S. use of cluster weapons, which include not just this particular missile, but large bombs dropped by plane, and cannon shells, too.

So why the sudden concern by the U.S.--or at least elements of the U.S. government--with a weapon that is an integral and popular part of the Pentagon arsenal, and that has seen considerable use in ongoing U.S. wars?

The answer, I believe, is that unlike in Iraq, where the results of U.S. butchery and war crimes are largely blacked out because of a combination of strict Pentagon controls over what embedded reporters get to see and a security situation that keeps non-embedded reporters confined to the Green Zone in Baghdad, in Lebanon, reporters have a largely free run of the battle zone, and are seeing and reporting on the results of Israeli attacks, and of the IDF's US-supplied munitions.

That kind of thing makes for nasty PR in the Arab and Islamic world, and also here at home in the U.S.

Not that the U.S. media has been doing much of a job of reporting on this stuff (did anyone hear any mention of the M-26 rocket during three years of the Iraq War?). We've heard plenty about how those missiles that Hezzbollah has been lobbing into Israel have warheads stuffed with ball bearings, the better to kill people with. But we haven't been told that many of Israel's munitions, courtesy of its U.S. armory, are loaded with things that are much more scientifically designed to kill and maim--little flechettes that spin and slash as they spray out from an exploding warhead or bomb or shell, tearing their way through soft tissue in a way meant to cause maximum damage.

Way back in the 1960s and 1970s, clever American scientists working on defense contracts were busy devising ways not just to make napalm stickier, but to make anti-personnel weapons much more gruesome. And they succeeded.

The trouble is, no one has figured out how to make such anti-personnel weapons work just against enemy troops. That would be bad enough, given rules of war that say maiming should not be a goal of warfare (hence the ban on such things as flechettes, white phosphorus and gas as weapons). But anti-personnel weapons also actually tend to do more harm to civilians than to soldiers. Why? Well, soldiers have head protection where civilians generally don't. Soldiers may even have body armor, which civilians don't. And soldiers are often protected in bunkers, while civilians may just be walking around when a bomb or shell hits.

To make things worse, the little bomblets that are packed into such warheads often don't go off right away. Many just sit around on the ground--often bright-colored and certainly strange looking--where they prove to be irresistable curiosities for inquisitive children. There are plenty of young kids today in Laos with missing arms, legs and eyes who are testimony to the long-lasting damage that such weapons can do (that war ended in 1975, more than three decades ago, and continues to kill and maim).

The U.S. should not provide Israel with this dreadful rocket. Asking the IDF to "be careful" when it uses it, as the State Department is proposing, is a sick joke. The U.S. should stop providing the other cluster weapons it has already been shipping for Israeli planes to drop and for Israeli cannons to fire.

Those weapons should be removed from the U.S. arsenal altogether. Their production should be halted for all time.

And they should be added to a growing list of war crimes charges that should be levelled at this administration, which has slaughtered well over 100,000 innocent men, women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan.
=====================

August 10, 2006

War Crimes in Lebanon

I was just reading an account of the Jewish armed uprising in defense of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, an astounding story of heroism in the face of almost certain death, as people armed with little more than pistols and home-made bombs held out for a month against the most powerful army on earth.

It is also a tale full of horrifying acts of a kind of ruthlessness and coldness that are hard to understand outside of the context of the fighting of that time: a 12-year-old boy who had ratted to his Nazi captors about Jewish insurgent bunkers who was summarily pushed out of a top floor building window by a Jewish fighter so he can’t do it again, Nazi captives who were simply executed, wounded comrades who were left behind to burn to death because rescuing them was too dangerous, fighters who hid themselves in crowds of civilians and then begin firing at Nazi troops, inevitably leading to the deaths of civilians in the resulting crossfire.

One thing that struck me as I was reading of the tales of incredible derring-do by the trapped Jewish ghetto fighters was how similar their desperate actions were to those of some of the Hezzbollah fighters in Southern Lebanon, and some of the Palestinian fighters in Gaza today.

I don't want to imply by this that Israel is Nazi Germany, or that the IDF is the German SS. That is not true. Firstly, the Israeli government, however brutal its behavior in Gaza and Lebanon, is not seeking the wholesale extermination of a race. Secondly, Hezzbollah is not simply an innocent victim, as were the Jews of Poland.

That said, there is a ruthlessness in the Israeli assaults in Gaza and particularly in Lebanon that goes far beyond what is acceptable in war. Aid organizations have been warned that there will be no safety guarantees for relief convoys. Civilians carrying food and medical supplies from Syria and within Lebanon have been deliberately attacked with bombs and rockets. U.N. observers have been deliberately targeted and killed. Civilians are being killed in such disproportionate numbers, and with such evident lack of concern on the part of the IDF, that one can only assume there is a deliberate policy of terror in place. All these things are war crimes. And as for the charge that Hezzbollah fighters are hiding among civilians and firing rockets from civilian dwellings--this is simply what guerillas do in a war against a militarily superior enemy. It doesn't justify Israel's bloody all-out war response.

Embattled Polish Jewish fighters, as I mentioned earlier, did much the same thing in their struggle against the SS.

There simply is no parallelism here. Hezzbollah is indeed randomly firing poorly aimed missiles and small rockets into Israel, where some strike military targets but most hit civilians, because Hezzbollah is a guerilla army, with no airforce. Israel, however, has free run over the skies of Lebanon, an unopposed airforce, observation drones and smart bombs. It has the technical ability to target--or not target--whatever it wants, and yet it is killing vastly more civilians, on a quantitative and a soldier:civilian ratio basis, than is Hezzbollah.

None of this diminishes the crimes of Hezzbollah, but certainly Israel's crimes are much greater. There simply can be no justification for bombing civilian targets, relief convoys and vehicles, or fleeing refugees heading away from the conflict.

The final tragedy is that when all of this bloodshed is over, it will be the Hezzbollah fighters who will emerge the heroes across the Arab and broader Islamic world. This is a war that Israel cannot win. The IDF may succeed, through massive and indiscriminate use of force against the people of southern Lebanon, in pushing Hezzbollah back from Israel's northern border for a time, but Hezzbollah, by fighting with the same tenacity as the ZOB in the Warsaw Ghetto, will win in the end, gaining political strength in Lebanon through its fighters' sacrifices, and ultimately, of course, returning to the lands in the south that so many of its fighters are currently giving their lives defending.

And the losers, as in all wars, will be the people--the civilian dead in Lebanon and in Israel, who must pay the price for the glory of leaders in what is really a stupid tribal conflict.
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August 9, 2006

A Roar from the Rank and File

It would be easy to make too little of Ned Lamont's defeat of three-term incumbent Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman in Connecticut’s Aug. 8 primary.

We on the left are always quick to point out the limitations of American electoral democracy, and sure, Ned Lamont, a millionaire cable TV entrepreneur and child of privilege is no Che Guevara or even Eugene Debs. Clearly his 52-48 primary victory over Sen. Lieberman is no political revolution.

But whatever one might say about the fine points of Ned Lamont's political positions, or about his class background, the people who voted in Connecticut's Democratic primary did accomplish something remarkable. Several things really. First of all, in a cynical age where people don’t think anything they do matters, they came out to vote—in record numbers. According to election officials, the turnout for this campaign was well above 50 percent—about what one expects for a presidential race these days, and double the norm for an off-year primary election, where 25 percent turnout is considered impressive. People cared about this vote, and they felt that their vote mattered.

And they are right. It will. Because the Democratic Party leadership is deathly afraid of that kind of uncontrolled turnout.

In a historic outpouring of passion those voters, whose numbers included a wave of new participants (there was a 10-percent jump in party enrollment in the days just before the primary), denied their party's nomination to a three-term incumbent Senator--one who has enormous power, both through his seniority in the Senate, and because he has over the last five years ingratiated himself to the ruling Republican Party in Washington, D.C., which has returned the favor by helping him to delivery the kosher bacon to his state as if he were a GOP member. In America's corrupted polity, delivering the bacon is about all that counts in most elections, and it's a primary reason incumbents keep getting re-elected even though voters know they are in hock to corporate interests and have little or no interest in really helping them. At least an incumbent--particularly one with seniority--can bring her or his state construction projects, defense projects, highway funds, etc.

And Senator Lieberman always did that, even as he was primarily catering to the interests of the state's key war, insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

So why did Connecticut's Democrats turn out in record numbers and reject him as their candidate for the November election?

Because Lieberman represented several things that those voters are sick of: the war in Iraq, the Republican assault on civil liberties and civil rights, and a cowardly policy of avoidance and accommodation on the part of the Democratic Party leadership. Lieberman has been an enthusiastic supporter of Bush's Iraq invasion, an enthusiastic backer of the Patriot Act and other Bush assaults on the Constitution, an endorser of the tactic of questioning the patriotism of those who might challenge the president, a supporter even, of former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s crazy, fascistic Operation TIPS plan to create 20 million American spies monitoring their neighbors.

Connecticut's Democratic voters--never a particularly radical group historically--showed that they want a candidate who forthrightly opposes the Iraq War, who proudly defends civil liberties and the Constitution, and who is willing to confront Republicans, directly and unapologetically.

That might seem like a small thing. After all, it would seem to be the least that an opposition party should be doing, given the grotesque, criminal record of the Republican Bush administration and the Republican-led Congress. And yet those voters have done more than that.

For years, Democratic Party leaders, including Lieberman, the party's vice presidential candidate in 2000, have taken it for granted that they could ignore the demands of the party's progressive left wing. Those voters, these leaders have assumed, will always come along in the end and support the corrupt, conservative and sell-out candidates we present them with at election time, because they won't want a Republican to win.

Now Connecticut's Democrats, and upstart candidate Ned Lamont, have thrown a major wrench into that calculus of complicity.

Democratic leaders nationwide now have to confront the reality that a majority of rank and file voters are sick and tired of "wedge issues" like stem cell research or "school vouchers," sick and tired of carefully crafted non-positions like Hillary Clinton's on the war or abortion rights, and sick and tired of cowardly compromises like Lieberman's deal to avoid a filibuster on nominations of right-wing appellate judges. They want a party that will take progressive stands and fight for them, and that will front candidates who will challenge Republicans. (It will be interesting to see what kind of a bump Lamont’s win will give to grossly underfunded Jonathan Tasini's anti-war primary challenge to Hillary Clinton in neighboring New York.)

And first and foremost, Connecticut's Democrats have shown a stunned Democratic leadership that they want their party to take an unambiguous stand for an end to Bush's disastrous and criminal war in Iraq.

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Dave Lindorff, is a native of Connecticut, where he also began his journalism career as a reporter at the Middletown Press.
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August 3, 2006

It's Time to Build a Wall and Keep the Rabble Out, Damn It!

Clearly it is time to build a wall along our southern border. Something has to be done after all.

We have a country and a culture hundreds of years in the making, and we can't just let millions on millions of poorly educated, impoverished people who speak funny English pouring in illegally, taking away our jobs and becoming a burden on our schools and our hospitals. And we certainly don't want them bringing their lawless ways into our towns and cities.

Okay, we know that they have big problems—-massive unemployment, played out farms, chronic drought and inadequate water, non-competitive businesses, incredible pollution and environmental degradation, and those terrible storms that keep striking their populous coastal regions.

But face it, most of their problems are of their own making. In the end, it's largely their own fault their country is in such a mess--and do we want them bringing their high-crime, low-morality, and poor-working-habits culture into our society?

Look at the record. They have an abundance of natural resources-—oil, iron, uranium, and natural gas--but they’ve allowed a corrupt ruling elite to pilfer and destroy everything. The ruling party just steals elections and long ago turned the government into little more than a tool of the rich and the corporations.

They could have turned to science and technology to help them, but the corrupt central government has defunded their schools, leaving the majority of the population ill equipped to do anything.

Still, while we can sympathize with these people's plight (and certainly we should send aid), we cannot simply let hordes of them just slip across our historically open border. We have laws and a legal immigration process, and they should avail themselves of that. Meanwhile, our overstretched border patrol officers try their best to stop illegal entry, but how can they be expected to police hundreds and hundreds of miles of rugged terrain? It is a hopeless task.

The only answer is a wall.

After all, the Americans themselves resorted to the same thing back in 2006, because of all the Mexicans fleeing to their own country.

Now that global warming has turned most of the United States into a dust bowl, now that some of that country’s major cities-—Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Houston, New Orleans and Baltimore--have joined Atlantis, and now that corrupt one-party authoritarian rule and the greed of the ruling elite has destroyed the American economy, desperate Americans are trying to flee to Canada's cooler climes.

We Canadians can't allow that to happen.

Let's get to work on that wall, eh?
=====================

July 31, 2006

Making America Safe...For Dictatorship

As is often the case, John Stewart, in making a joke on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," managed to capture the truth that the news media are missing.

In this case it was an interview with Senator John McCain (R-AZ). While Sen. McCain, now a staunch Bush backer, was talking about steps the government was allegedly taking to protect the homeland, Stewart interjected, "How much safer can we afford to be, Senator?"

In fact, the reality seems to be that for five years since the 9-11 attacks, the Bush administration has been putting the U.S. increasingly at risk.

The attack on Al Qaeda, which morphed into a full-scale war of "regime change" in the country of Afghanistan, and which ended up dropping its purported raison d'etre--the capture or killing of Osama bin Ladin--was a fraud and a sideshow from the outset. The country was ravaged by aerial attacks, and then the same warlords who had been pillaging and terrorizing that country for years, and running a massive opium operation, were left in power or even aided in assuming power. Bin Ladin was allowed to escape, and the ousted Taliban organization was allowed to reorganize and rebuild its forces.

The invasion of Iraq, on manifestly false grounds, has destroyed a country and left it exactly the kind of "failed state" that Afghanistan was said to have been in 2001--a lawless and violent region open to all kinds of terrorist activities that can be directed against the U.S. and against Americans.

The blank check and unlimited provision of weapons of war, including cluster bombs and phosphorus bombs, by the U.S. to Israel in its ruthless, bloody invasion of Lebanon, has linked America and Americans to the criminal slaughter of hundreds of innocent Lebanese, including children and babies, as has the Bush administration’s obstruction of efforts to engineer a cease-fire in that conflict.

Indeed, Bush foreign policy seems over this period to have been calculated to alienate as many countries and people as possible. It is a policy characterized by supreme arrogance, a focus on military activity over negotiation, and support of dictators large and small, while at the same time conducting what from the start was characterized as a "crusade" against Islam.

At home, the strategy has been to bankrupt local communities by cutting federal support for everything from police and fire departments to roads and schools, while failing to fund the most basic elements of national defense--port facilities, airports--and refusing to insist on safety reforms at vulnerable facilities like refineries and chemical plants. (The National Guard, which was conceived and established as a kind of lineal descendant of the colonial era militias, has been shipped off to fight in Iraq, leaving the country largely undefended, whether against natural disaster or foreign attack.)

Meanwhile, the public and Congress have been cowed into frightened silence by the administration’s initiation of what it calls a “war on terror,” a permanent state of “war” that it has used as a justification for canceling or weakening traditional Constitutionally protected liberties and rights, and for intimidating would-be political opponents from speaking out, for fear of their being called unpatriotic or even treasonous. The American public, uniquely united after 9-11, has been sharply divided into bitter warring camps--those who support the administration and its many wars, and those who oppose it.

If some diabolical anti-American mastermind had been trying, behind the scenes, to destroy this nation by secretly installing in the White House and Pentagon agents who would deliberately sink the ship of state, he or she couldn’t have come up with a subversive wrecking crew more adept at the job than the Bush administration. The nation is being bankrupted by tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy and by a pointless, and endless trillion-dollar war. At the same time blood enemies are being produced with every bomb dropped, every innocent victim kidnapped and locked away in America’s gulag, every child shot at a roadblock.

Clearly, though, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et al, are not the secret agents of some malevolent foreign enemy of America. Nor is their vile reign of terror around the globe and their gutting of the Constitution here at home, simply a matter of stupid policy-making. They are, rather, home-grown enemies of American democracy, bent on subverting the country to their own ends of unbridled power.

Their goal in all this is not the stated one of "spreading democracy" at the point of a gun--a clearly ridiculous notion in any case. Rather, the goal is destroying democracy here at home, in order to establish a one-party dictatorship.

From this perspective, it is clear that far from trying to "protect the homeland," the Bush administration is happy to weaken American defenses, as it has been doing, and to manufacture enemies--whether states like Iran and Syria, or stateless organizations like Al Qaeda and Hezzbolah. The more the better. Far from trying to prevent another 9-11, one senses that this administration would like nothing better than for there to be another strike against Americans before the coming congressional elections--a second "new Pearl Harbor" as it were--to justify a full-scale crackdown on dissent, opposition, and independent thought.

George Orwell long ago imagined a world deliberately kept in a perpetual state of war, where the citizenry would accept totalitarian rule in the name of patriotism and security. We are now entering such a state. The yellow "support the troops" ribbons mindlessly pasted on the trunks and rear doors of half the cars, vans and SUVs in America are testimony to a sheep-like acceptance of the official administration line that war is good and in America's interest. I saw one such ribbon today that was particularly credulous. It read: “Remember 9-11. Support our Troops.” This despite the fact that our troops are not fighting anyone who remotely had anything to do with 9-11.

We are not far from that Orwellian condition.

The answer to John Stewart's question is clear: We can't afford to be any "safer."
==========================

July 29, 2006

Abu-Jamal Appeals Case Update: Arguments Filed in Third Circuit

The appeal of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Philadelphia-based African-American journalist who has spent a quarter of a century on Pennsylvania’s death row after being convicted of killing a white Philadelphia police officer, is finally moving into its critical phase, in the federal Court of Appeals.

Attorney Robert R. Bryan of San Francisco, a veteran capital appeals lawyer who took over Abu-Jamal's defense in 2003, filed a brief on July 20 in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, laying out three arguments for overturning Abu-Jamal's murder conviction. The brief also argues for upholding a December 2001 decision by a lower Federal Court that overturned Abu-Jamal's death sentence--a decision that has been appealed to the Third Circuit by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office.

Bryan lays out three claims, all of which which challenge Abu-Jamal’s conviction for the 1981 shooting death of Officer Daniel Faulkner.

First, he makes the indisputable point that prosecutor Joseph McGill, in his summation to the jury at trial, "unconstitutionally diminished the jury's role, misled the jury, undermined the reliability of the guilt-innocence determination, and sabotaged the right to the presumption of innocence and not to be convicted unless proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" by telling the jury that they didn't need to worry about maybe being wrong about voting "guilty" because the defendant would have "appeal after appeal" and so a guilty verdict "may not be final."

As Bryan writes in his brief, "By saying [that the jury decision] would not be final and telling the jury that a guilty verdict would be reviewed in `appeal after appeal,' the prosecutor incorrectly advised the jury that their role and responsibility was less than it was." This, he argues, "deprived Mr. Abu-Jamal of his right to trial by jury because unlike the jury guaranteed by the Constitution, his jury was told that they were not the final fact-finders." As he notes, "The presumption of innocence and the requirment of proof beyond a reasonable doubt are grounded upon the idea that doubts should be resolved in favor of the accused and acquittal."

Abu-Jamal's second line of appeal deals with the claim of racial bias by the prosecutor in the selection of the jury. The US Supreme Court has long established that if a prosecutor purposefully uses peremptory challenges to eliminate from the jury persons of a particular race, that is in itself adequate reason for overturning the conviction. In making the argument that such illegal activity occurred, Bryan shows that of 39 jurors considered by the prosecution, 15 were struck, and that of those 15, at least 10 (and probably 11) were black. Looked at another way, prosecutor McGill struck 71 percent of the blacks he had an opportunity to reject, but just 20 percent of the whites. Bryan writes, "This racial disparity is the type of `pattern' that supports a prima facie case" of race discrimination.

Bryan cites a study (improperly rejected as evidence by the federal district court in 2001) of Philadelphia prosecutors' racial jury selection practices between 1981 and 1997. That study, by Prof. David Baldus (which resulted in the overturning of another murder conviction in Pennsylvania), found that during that 17-year period, which included Abu-Jamal's own 1982 trial, prosecutors struck 51 percent of black jurors and only 26 percent of white jurors—a damning record of unconstitutional racial bias. Furthermore, Bryan notes that even after Abu-Jamal's trial, the district attorney's office was using a training tape that taught new prosecutors how to remove blacks from jurors and to avoid getting caught practicing racial discrimination. (The trick, the tape said, was to keep contemporary notes and to write down some non-racial reason for each peremptory strike of a black juror, to be offered as explanation should a Batson challenge ever be brought on appeal.)

Bryan argues that since prosecutor McGill has never been required to offer a non-racial explanation for his apparent race-based jury selection in Abu-Jamal's trial, the Appeals Court should either overturn the conviction or, at a minimum, order an evidentiary hearing in federal court at which the prosecutor, now retired, would have to make a case that his 10 peremptory strikes of black jurors were all for reasons other than race.

Finally, Abu-Jamal and his attorney argue that bias on the part of the trial judge, Albert Sabo, who was overheard saying, after the first day of jury selectin, that he was going to help the prosecution "fry the nigger," denied Abu-Jamal a chance for a fair trial. Bryan notes that Judge Sabo, who oversaw the highest number of death sentences of any judge in the nation (31, all but 2 of them black), had a long record of racial bias. As Bryan writes of the 1995 Post Conviction Relief Act hearing on Abu-Jamal’s case which Sabo also presided over, "The hostility and bias of Judge Sabo could not have been more apparent. Journalists, both local and national, publicized the rank unfairness of the proceedings. The leading paper in Philadelphia observed: `The behavior of the judge was disturbing the first time around—and in hearings last week he did not give the impression to those in the courtroom of fair-mindedness. Instead, he gave the impression, damaging in the extreme, of undue haste and hostility toward the defense’s case.'"

Bryan concedes that under federal habeas statutes, federal courts may not remand cases to state courts for evidentiary hearings. But having demonstrated that Judge Sabo, who acted as the supposedly impartial "fact finder" in the PCRA hearing, was clearly biased, he writes that the appropriate remedy would be for a federal district court to re-examine the original facts presented at trial, and the new evidence presented during the 1995 PCRA directly--as well as evidence and witnesses which Sabo refused to allow--ignoring Sabo's earlier findings of fact.

Should the three-judge appellate court hearing Abu-Jamal's appeal support either of the first two claims of constitutional violations in his original trial, Abu-Jamal could find himself facing a new trial. Alternatively, in the jury bias claim, Abu-Jamal and his attorney have proposed the remedy of a new hearing in federal district court, probably before the same judge, William Yohn, who earlier rejected both claims, but who overturned Abu-Jamal's death sentence.
Judge Yohn had denied Abu-Jamal's claims concerning the prosecutor's "appeal after appeal" summation statement and concerning evidence of Judge Sabo's bias, which meant the Third Circuit Court had no obligation to hear either issue, but the higher court late last year over-ruled Yohn and certified both issues for appeal. It seems clear that at least two of the three judges assigned to Abu-Jamal's appeal case thought that there was some merit to the two additional claims. Yohn also rejected the claim regarding racial bias in jury selection, but did certify it for appeal to the Third Circuit.

Back in 2001, Judge Yohn overturned Abu-Jamal’s death sentence. Yohn's carefully worded explanation for his ruling overturning that conviction explained that Abu-Jamal’s penalty-phase verdict form and instructions, which were provided to the jurors to fill out, were flawed documents that, combined with Judge Sabo's flawed instructions, improperly led jurors to believe that unless all 12 of them agreed on a mitigating circumstance that might argue against a death penalty, they could not consider that circumstance in their deliberations. In fact, unanimity of the jury is only required for aggravating circumstances--those that argue in favor of a death penalty. Mitigating circumstances can be considered by any individual juror--an crucial difference since a death sentence must be reached unanimously. Thus if one juror finds a mitigating circumstance--for example that a defendant is a dedicated father to a young child--that one juror could decide to vote against death. Since the jury form's wording and the instructions from the judge both implied that unanimity was required before a mitigating circumstance could be considered, Judge Yohn held that the sentence was void.

The district attorney has appealed this ruling, hoping to have the death penalty reinstated by the Third Circuit. The DA's office, which for decades, and under several different district attorneys, has been obsessed with getting Abu-Jamal injected with lethal chemicals, makes the nit-picking claim that Abu-Jamal's habeas appeal of his sentence was flawed because it only mentioned the third page of the jury form, not the form in its entirety, so that Judge Yohn should not have considered problems in the whole form--only the third page. Bryan makes short work of this argument--which would have his client executed on a technicality--by noting that the habeas appeal in question specifically refers at least once to the form "in its totality."

Both sides in the case will now have an opportunity to respond to the filings of the other side, meaning that the case is unlikely to go to a hearing until fall at the soonest. In the meantime, thanks to a motion by the district attorney, Abu-Jamal, who has insisted on his innocence in the murder of Officer Faulkner, remains in solitary confinement on death row, despite his death sentence having been lifted five years ago.

It is worth pointing out that as the Bush administration has been trashing civil liberties and the Constitution, revoking the fundamental Common Law tradition of habeas corpus (the right to bring one’s detention to a court for a ruling on its legality), and the right to a fair trial before an impartial jury of one's peers, Abu-Jamal's case has become an increasingly important part of the struggle to defend those rights for all Americans.
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Dave Lindorff is author of "Killing Time: An Investigation Into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal" (Common Courage Press, 2003). See elsewhere on this site for information, reviews, and to purchase book.
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July 28, 2006

Is bush Trying to Dodge the Gallows?

Could George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and maybe Alberto Gonzales all end up sucking poison gas?

That, apparently, is a concern now being taken seriously by Attorney General Gonzales, who is quietly working with senior White House officials and friendly members of Congress to do what murderous dictators in Chile, Argentina and other bloodthirsty regimes have done as their future in office began to look uncertain: pass laws exempting them from prosecution for murder.

At issue is a growing legal threat of the president and other top administration officials facing prosecution for violations of the U.S. War Crimes statutes, which since 1996 have made violation of Geneva Conventions adopted by the U.S. violations of American law, too.

Gonzales knows the seriousness of this threat. As he warned the president, in a January, 25, 2002 "Memorandum to the President" (published in full in the appendix of Barbara Olshansky’s and my new book, The Case for Impeachment), "It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section [the US War Crimes law]." In another part of that same memo, Gonzales notes that the statute "prohibits the commission of a `war crime'" by any U.S. official, with a war crime being defined as "any grave breach of" the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War or of the Geneva Convention's Article 3. That article extends protection to combatants in other than official wars or formal armies. Gonzales, in that memo, also pointedly notes that the punishments for such violations, under U.S. law, in the event that mistreated captives die in custody, "include the death penalty."

What has the White House, and Bush's mob attorney, Gonzales, worried is the decision last month by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamden v. Rumsfeld, which expressly established that the president has "violated" the Geneva Convention's Article 3 by arbitrarily deciding that captives in the so-called War on Terror and in Afghanistan, and held in Guantanamo, would not be considered POWs, and would not be accorded protection from torture or access to the courts as required under the Geneva Convention. This determination by a 5-3 majority of the US Supreme Court could easily provide the basis for the very "unwarranted" prosecution Gonzales warned about.

Of course, the president could not be indicted for this offense while in office. The Constitution provides a protection against that. But he could be indicted once his term ends. Meanwhile, other administration personnel, including the vice president, have no such protection against indictment even while in office.

The very fact that Gonzales, according to a report in today’s Washington Post, has been "quietly approaching" Republican members of Congress about passing legislation exempting Americans involved in the "terrorism fight" from war crimes prosecution suggests how worried Bush and his subordinates really are.

It's interesting how this has become the tactic of choice for the criminals in the White House. When Bush was caught violating the clear provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by authorizing spying by the National Security Agency on Americans' communications without a warrant, the administration went to Congress to seek legislation retroactively authorizing the crime. Since the president was exposed as having summarily and unconstitutionally invalidated some 800 laws passed by Congress through the use of what he calls "signing statements," an astonishing breach of the separation of powers, the administration has been seeking a new law in Congress that would in effect grant that power to presidents, again retroactively. Now Bush is apparently hoping to get the same compliant Republican-led House and Senate to backdate a law exempting him and his cohorts from punishment under the War Crimes statute--a law, ironically, passed almost without objection by both houses of a Republican-led Congress in 1996.

Of course, this attempt at a legal dodge might not work. Not only could a future prosecutor seek to have such a law ruled illegal itself (after all, the U.S. is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions, making them legally binding anyhow), but because the U.S. is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture in any form, the president and his subordinates could also be charged as war criminals by other nations--particularly if it were determined that the U.S. was unwilling or legally unable to prosecute.

That could make things a little claustrophobic for administration personnel once they leave office.

No doubt Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et all would like to continue their world travels once they leave government "service." For one thing, there’s lots of money to be made on the international speaking circuit. Lots more can be made by doing international business consulting. But if there were a threat of arrest and prosecution by prosecutors in countries like Spain, Germany or Canada, such travels would pose a huge risk. Similar fears have kept former National Security Director and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pretty much housebound since a near detention in Paris on war crimes charges a few years back.

Gonzales' anxious behind-the-scenes scuttling about in the halls of Congress in an effort to save his boss's neck also suggests that the White House is getting anxious about the November election. After all, if they thought they had a secure grip on Congress through November 2008, why the sudden rush to get a bill through undermining the War Crimes statute now? Maybe Bush is afraid that if he waits until November, he'll be dealing with a Democratic House and/or Senate, which would be unlikely to grant him such legal protection.

There is a delicious irony in watching this law-and-order, let-'em-fry president and his tough-guy VP, attorney general and defense secretary, resorting to the same kind of dodgy legal tactics that they accuse convicted killers (and terrorists) of using in an attempt to avoid the gallows.

Chances are their strategy will work, at least in the U.S. But at least it's entertaining to watch.
==========================

July 26, 2006

Global Warming's Gathering Storm

My insurance company and I just had a little "brush" with global warming.

It wasn't pretty.

I was driving my son to his karate class and noticed that the sky in the west where we were heading was incredibly dark. Since the sun was setting in that direction, the darkness of the clouds was particularly ominous.

I switched on the radio and heard an alert about severe thunderstorms in a broad front that was moving quickly across the eastern U.S. from Virginia up into New York.

At that point, the lightning began in the distance: huge bolts, in rapid succession. Then large drops of rain and hail the size of nickels began to pelt the car, and a severe wind began whipping the trees that lined the road and that stretched over us.

I had just decided that visibility was deteriorating to the point that I should slow down, when a tree fell from the left side of the road right across the street in front of my path. I barely had time to swerve to the right, missing the most substantial part of the trunk, but driving right over the mass of branches in front of me. There was a loud bang of something hitting the left side of my van and a lot of thumping as the wheels bounced over the branches.

Shaken, I pulled over to the side of the road and got out. My door popped as I opened it. Clearly the front end had been pushed back into the door. I also saw that a branch had hit my left mirror, shattering the glass, which I later learned had sprayed in tiny pieces through the open window of the car. Luckily, no major damage had occurred, and no injuries and I continued on. The next five miles were littered with fallen trees, many of them much larger than the one that had landed in front of me. It looked like a tornado had passed through, but it turned out later that the damage was much more widespread than a tornado. On our 15-mile return ride home, we had to search out alternate routes several times because so many roads were closed by fallen trees. All the traffic signals were out, because of downed lines.

This had been your garden-variety storm.

Our region had just gone through a record heat wave, with a week of temperatures in the mid to high '90s, with one day nudging into three digits. The summer itself has been the hottest on record.

At the body shop the next day, I learned that it had been a great day for the collision repair industry, but a bad day for the insurance industry. Cars—and houses--all over the tri-county area had been damaged by trees and branches. Our van sustained $1000 in damage.

Now I've lived in the Northeast all my life, and I can state with half a century’s experience that this has been no ordinary summer--and that this was no ordinary storm.

We're clearly experiencing the beginning of something new. Flowers are blooming out of season, some deciduous trees are showing signs of distress, their leaves yellowing in the intense heat. Other plants, like the poison ivy that is engulfing my property, seem to be growing at a pace way beyond what might be expected, the result of much higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.

We're in for it folks.

The world is getting noticeably warmer, and the soaring carbon content in the atmosphere guarantees that it's only going to get worse—much worse.

You'd think that people would get it, that there'd be a national clamor for drastic measures to do something about it, if only for our children and grandchildren, but no. People keep driving too fast, wasting gas, even at $3.20 a gallon. People keep driving half a mile to do an errand instead of walking or riding a bike. People keep buying oversized cars that get half the miles per gallon that a smaller vehicle might get. And people keep cranking up the air cons, making it feel like spring in July in their homes and offices. And in Washington, the political class is worked up about…stem cells and interstate travel by teens seeking legal abortions. How is it that politicians can get in a panic about an alleged Social Security crisis that won’t hit until 2075, but continue to ignore a crisis that is liable to swallow up New York's financial district and half of the Florida peninsula--not to mention Shanghai, most of Bangladesh, and a fair number of Pacific nations--well before that?

That dark cloud I saw last week, and the near-death experience it provided me and my son, was more than just a nasty frontal system. It, and the sweltering summer that has been setting heat records across the U.S., Europe, and much of the northern hemisphere, is a warning that we'd all better start getting serious about a crisis that promises to be as disastrous for the human race as a surprise comet was for the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.
========================

July 19, 2006

Happy Impeachment Day!

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been playing a leading role in battling the Bush administration’s attacks on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and international law, has declared today to be Impeachment Day, with teach-ins scheduled around the country.

Seems like a great occasion to offer up 10 reasons for impeaching the president, as presented in Barbara Olshansky’s and my new book The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office.

The case for impeachment just grew much stronger, with the US Supreme Court's powerful decision in Hamdan v Rumsfeld. In that decision, the justices didn't simply say that the President was wrong and in violation of U.S. and the international law in arbitrarily claiming that the Guantanamo detainees were not subject to the Geneva Convention on Treatment of Prisoners of War. The five-justice majority, which included conservative Anthony Kennedy, declared the President's bogus claim to have "special powers" as commander in chief in "time of war" to be just that--bogus.

What has been missed in almost all the mainstream media coverage of this important ruling is that this slap-down of Bush's justification for his Guantanamo decision also undermines his justification for many other of his constitutional violations.

Let's first look at the list of the president's High Crimes and Misdemeanors. They are:

1. "A Crime Against Peace." Initiating a war of aggression against a nation that posed no immediate threat to the U.S.--a war that has needlessly killed 2550 Americans and maimed and damaged over 20,000 more, while killing over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children, is the number one war crime according to the Nuremberg Charter, a document which was largely drawn up by American lawyers after World War II.

2. Lying and organizing a conspiracy to trick the American people and the U.S. Congress into approving an unnecessary and illegal war. This is defined as "A Conspiracy to Commit a Crime Against Peace" in the Nuremberg Charter, to which the U.S. is a signatory.

3. Approving and encouraging, in violation of U.S. and international law, the use of torture, kidnapping and rendering of prisoners of war captured in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the course of the so-called War on Terror. Note that the Hamdan decision actually declares Bush to have violated the Third Geneva Convention on Treatment of Prisoners of War, which means the justices are in effect calling the president a war criminal. Under U.S. and international law, if prisoners have died because of such a violation--and many have died in illegal US captivity because of torture authorized by this president--the penalty is death (a point made to the president in a warning memo written by his then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, the text of which is published in full in the appendix of our book).

4. Illegally stripping the right of citizenship and the protections of the Constitution from American citizens, denying them the fundamental right to have their cases heard in a court, to hear the charges against them, to be judged in a public court by a jury of their peers, and to have access to a lawyer.

5. Authorizing the spying on American citizens and their communications by the National Security Agency and other U.S. police and intelligence agencies, in violation of the First and Fourth Amendments and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

6. Obstructing investigation into and covering up knowledge of the deliberate exposing of the identity of a U.S. CIA undercover operative, and possibly conspiring in that initial outing itself.

7. Obstructing the investigation into the 9-11 attacks and lying to investigators from the Congress and the bi-partisan 9-11 Commission--actions that come perilously close to treason. (Former Florida Senator Bob Graham, who headed the Senate Intelligence Committee until his retirement at the end of 2002, has called this the president's most impeachable crime.)

8. Violating the due process and other constitutional rights of thousands of citizens and legal residents by rounding them up and disappearing or deporting them without hearings.

9. Abuse of power, undermining of the Constitution and violating the presidential oath of office by deliberately refusing to administer over 750 acts duly passed into law by the Congress--actions with if left unchallenged would make the Congress a vestigial body, and the president a dictator.

10. Criminal negligence in failing to provide American troops with adequate armor before sending them into a war of choice, criminal negligence in going to war against a weak, third-world nation without any planning for post war occupation and reconstruction, criminal negligence in failing to respond to a known and growing crisis in the storm-blasted city of New Orleans, and criminal negligence in failing to act, and in fact in actively obstructing efforts by other countries and American state governments, to deal with the looming crisis of global warming.

Crimes 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 and 9, and possibly crimes 1, 2 and 6 have all been justified by the president using the claim of "special powers" in his role as commander in chief, the claim that was ruled invalid by the High Court, in relation to crime number 3.

It is clearly high time for all Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and for all American citizens, whatever our politics, who care about the Constitution, American democracy, and the basic freedoms that we as a nation have assumed for over two centuries to be our birthright, to demand that this criminal usurper in the White House be called to account, along with his cronies--especially Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

This is no time for Democrats to be crqassly analyzing the political pros and cons of impeachment as a campaign strategy, the way Democratic Party leaders have been doing. Impeachment is the patriotic duty of anyone who has sworn to protect and defend the Constitution. No member of Congress should be re-elected who doesn’t support putting the president in the dock.
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July 18, 2006

One Cheer for the New York Times

One cheer for the New York Times!

In an editorial that surely ranks as one of the most daring in the paper’s history, the Times editorial board declared on July 16 what most Americans have long realized: that the Bush administration’s so-called War on Terror has always "had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power."

The half-page editorial focused on just two issues--the imprisoning, without any kind of honest trial or tribunal of hundreds of alleged “terror” captives from Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the world in violation of U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions, and the warrantless spying on US citizens by the National Security Agency.

The Times might have gone a lot farther in laying out this abuse-of-power case, and the cynical and fraudulent exploitation of 9-11 and a bogus “war” on terror, not to mention a real, if totally unnecessary and criminal war against Iraq, by a president and vice president obsessed with dreams of dictatorial power.

Take the stripping of citizens' right to an attorney, to hear the charges against them, to face their accusers, and to have a fair trial. The president has asserted, using the same argument that he used in ignoring the Geneva Conventions, that as commander in chief he has the power to declare anyone, even an American-born citizen, to be an “enemy combatant,” with no rights whatsoever.

Take the issuance of signing statements used to ignore or invalidate over 750 laws passed by the Congress. Again the president argues that as a commander in chief in “time of war,” his powers are “at their zenith” and that he can act as not just chief executive, but as legislature and court combined, and decide which laws to enforce, and how to interpret them.

What the Times, in its editorial, failed to mention, is that when the U.S. Supreme Court, by a slim majority of 5-3 with Chief Justice Roberts recused (he had voted the wrong way as an appeals court judge in the same case), ruled in late June that the president did not have any special power to over-rule Constitution or law--in particular the Third Geneva Convention on Treatment of Prisoners of War, which has long been incorporated into U.S. law--they were effectively undermining his justification for most of the abuses of power that he has engaged in over the course of the last five years.

The same reasoning the court used in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld would equally apply to the warrantless NSA spying in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Fourth Amendment. The president has no special power as commander in chief to ignore that law or that article of the Bill of Rights, as he and his "mob attorney" over in the "Justice" Department claim.

The same reasoning applies to the signing statements. The president has no special "unitary executive" powers to override the Congress or the courts. He must obey the Constitution, which grants "all legislative power" to the Congress.

The Times might have earned another cheer had the editors taken their newfound awareness of presidential abuse of power and laid out its true scale and its full implications.

This president, in fact, is in violation of his oath of office, which pledged him to protect and defend the Constitution. Instead, he and his vice president have been actively subverting the nation's founding document. This is an impeachable High Crime of the first order.

The president, in asserting that he and the military do not have to obey the Geneva Convention on Treatment of POWs, is in blatant violation of both U.S. and International Law. As such he is by definition a war criminal, and should be impeached and then indicted. Indeed, people have died as a consequence of this violation, and the penalty for that in the Geneva Convention and in U.S. law, is death.

The president, in denying habeas corpus to Jose Padilla and Yasir Hamdi, two American-born citizens, has violated both the Constitution and older Common Law, and has committed an impeachable crime.

Arguably, the president has also committed a grave abuse of power in refusing to cooperate with either the Senate and House Intelligence Committees or the Bi-Partisan 9-11 Commission, stonewalling requests for information, and barring some key administration officials from testifying or testifying fully (himself included). Now that the Times has recognized the administration's true motive--using 9-11 to aggrandize power--shouldn’t the paper (and Congress) be demanding that the administration be called to account for its whole handling--or ignoring--of pre-9-11 threats and warnings?

Clearly, when an elected leader so abuses his authority, and when he so cynically uses a national tragedy as a smokescreen to allow him to subvert traditional checks and balances, it behooves a leading member of the Fourth Estate to take a far more skeptical look than the Times has taken to date, at what the government was really up to in the months leading up to September 2001.

The Times would earn its third cheer if it would take this new understanding of Bush administration deceit and criminal abuse of power to its logical conclusion, and call for serious consideration of impeachment of the President for High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Bush's unconstitutional actions, surely, are the exact kind of tyrannical usurpation of power which the Founding Fathers had in mind when they decided to include impeachment in the Constitution.
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July 17, 2006

A Nice Mess Our President Has Made for US

In an excellent piece in Monday’s New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert tells how the Bush administration has been trying to turn not just the Guantanamo detainee tribunals but the entire U.S. legal system into the kind of judicial environment more appropriately depicted in a Marx Bros. film.

At the same time, U.S. foreign policy is coming to resemble not Marx-ism, but a Laurel and Hardy script.

Indeed, as Israel, with Bush's blessing, expands its initial militaristic bullying of Gaza into a full-scale invasion of Lebanon, with daily escalation of the violence threatening to ignite the whole Middle East, a version of Oliver Hardy’s famous line springs readily to mind: "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten us into."

It is clear by the ease and speed with which Israel's military moved systematically into Gaza, destroying the basic infrastructure of that hemmed-in captive community of a million impoverished human beings, that this had nothing to do with "rescuing" a "kidnapped" soldier, and everything with attempting to destroy the elected government of the nascent Palestinian state. Israel initiated this act of aggression after weeks of rocket and shelling attacks against the territory--including one which killed eight members of a family on a beach outing--all of which provocation took place without any criticism from the U.S.

It doesn't take much of a foreign affairs background to predict that such an all-out assault on the Palestinian people would elicit a response from the Palestinian people's closest ally, the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, and respond Hezbollah did.

Now there may be those in Israel's right-wing government who wanted Hezbollah to attack, giving Israel a pretext to move back into Lebanon and to unleash its American-provided and American taxpayer-financed weaponry against the Palestinian and Lebanese backers of a Palestinian state residing in Lebanon. There may even be those in Israel who for their own insane reasons want an excuse to expand the current bloody war further into Syria, which is a backer of Hezbollah. But where are America's interests here?

Apparently the Stan Laurel impersonator in the White House, with his biblical megalomania and his self-delusional neo-con advisors seems to think all this is a good thing. The president has had not a word of criticism to offer for Israel's blitzkrieg, and is content to take a historic conflict of national, ethnic and tribal dimensions and cram it into his simplistic "us-against-the-terrorists" dogma.

In the Bush worldview, bombing crowded urban areas by air and howitzer is "legitimate national defense," while capturing Israeli soldiers and firing small, unguided rockets back at Israeli territory is "terrorism."

Of course, we can trace this ignorant and simplistic thinking (if it can be called that) back to the invasion of Iraq, where President Laurel/Bush and his gang imagined first of all that invading that country would a) be a piece of cake and b) set off a wave of democratic reform across the Middle East.

A fine mess that has proven to be!

Iraq is now, by almost any measure, a worse place to live than it ever was under Saddam Hussein, and appears headed for at best a religious theocracy, and at worst an interminable period as a failed state of warring tribes and religious sects slaughtering for supremacy. As for spreading democracy, the only place where democracy seems to have really been attempted was Palestine, where the people, using the ballot, threw out the corrupt and ineffective PLO, and replaced it with a government led by Hamas. And what did President Laurel/Bush do in response for this dramatic and honest expression of the people's will? He joined Israel in condemning their decision, and set about, with Israel, in attempting to undermine and overturn that elected government.

We are reaping the result of this unprincipled idiocy today. Just watch the news (after filtering out the pro-Israeli slant on the coverage, if you can).

There are many people on the left and the far right who see all this as part of some master conspiracy of the zionists and neocons, claiming that the idea is to bolster Israel as a military master of the Middle East, while weakening the Arab regimes so that the U.S. can ultimately step in and control them and their oil. I have a couple of problems with this theory. First of all, the U.S. does control Iraq, and it can't even get cheap oil out of that country the way it was able to do while Hussein was in power. Meanwhile, the U.S. has effectively controlled Saudi Arabia for years, and gets full access to that country’s oil--and to neighboring Kuwait’s oil--without firing a shot. Why spend $1 trillion and create unpredictable chaos abroad and at home to accomplish something that we already have? The truth, anyway, is that while the U.S. is being bankrupted by war this without end, the Chinese are signing long-term oil-supply deals with Iran and other producing countries at favorable forward prices.

These are not smart people running American foreign policy. They’re the same kinds of bumbling idiots who brought us the War in Indochina.

A nice mess they’re getting us into.
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July 13, 2006

Last One Out (Please Turn Out the Lights)

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik, writing in her regular July 13 column about the final closing of Berkeley's famed Cody’s Books independent bookstore, reports that the last sale before the doors closed for good was of a copy of "The Case for Impeachment."

She writes:

"...and the buyer wasn't a grizzled hippie. He is described by spy B3 as a gent in one of those dress shirts with white collar and cuffs."

The closing of an important independent bookseller is a truly sad event, but it's nice to know some upstanding citizen's last purchase there was our new book.
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If They Broke the Law and People Died, String 'Em Up

A five-member majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has declared, in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling handed down late last month, that President Bush and his administration were in violation of the Third Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War.

Now let's think about that for a moment.

If a judge said that you had broken the state law against driving over the speed of 65 miles per hour, that would mean you were being declared a “"speeder," right? Similarly, if a judge or jury found that you had violated the law against using a gun to threaten someone on the street and to take his wallet, you were being called an armed robber. If a judge said that you had planned out and then killed someone you didn't like, you were being called a first-degree murderer.

So what were the justices doing when they said that Bush had violated the Third Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War? They were calling him a war criminal.

It's pretty clear really.

The president has responded by going to Congress in an effort to get the compliant Republicans and probably some cowed or fawning Democrats (like embattled Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, no doubt), to retroactively declare that the captives at Guantanamo are exempt from the protections of the Geneva Convention, but that doesn't change the fact that as of today, and in the eyes of the world, he is a war criminal, and has been declared such by the nation's highest court.

What should happen, of course, at this point, is that someone--the Attorney General, or perhaps special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald--should move to indict those who have perpetrated this heinous and shameful crime against humanity, and against the people of the United States. That would mean indictments on war crimes charges of Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Former AG John Ashcroft, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, former White House Counsel and now AG Alberto Gonzales, former terrorism prosecutor and now Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, and President and Commander in Chief George Bush, the Decider. Of course, because the president is protected against indictment while in office, his indictment would have to be served after he leaves office.

At the same time, there should be a bill of impeachment submitted to the House immediately demanding the impeachment of the president on war crimes charges. Instead of entertaining discussions on how to do an end run around the Geneva Conventions, Congress should be initiating impeachment proceedings to restore America’s sorry reputation abroad on this issue. The American government is quick to call for war crimes charges against the likes of Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic or Pol Pot, but when it comes to the criminals in our own government, we change the channel.

This would be an easy hearing. No need to subpoena lots of low-ranking people and grill them about what the president was "really" up to. We know. He was brazenly asserting the right of a dictator: to shove aside the nation’s Constitution, and the international treaties his predecessors had negotiated and signed, and to simply ignore the rule of law, declaring that people captured in Afghanistan or Iraq, or kidnapped by U.S. forces in other countries abroad, as part of the bogus “war” on terror, would not have even the minimal rights and protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions. The House Judiciary could just call in Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote quite clearly in his opinion in Hamdan, that the president was in violation of provisions of the Third Geneva Convention.

At that point, the president could be tried in the Senate, where, if the Senators were honest, they’d have to agree that he was a war criminal, and remove him from the White House.

Then he could be added to his indicted cabinet officers, and they could all face war crimes charges together.

I’m not in favor of the death penalty, so I don’t think Rumsfeld, Rice, Chertoff & Co. should face capital punishment for their role in this gross crime. But as for Bush and his legal lackey, Alberto Gonzales, I could make an exception. Bush, after all, oversaw and approved the execution of a record 152 people on Texas’s death row while serving as governor of that benighted state. Gonzales, as Gov. Bush’s legal counsel, had the job of looking over the clemency petitions of most of those men and women, and in only one case was clemency recommended and granted. The blood of all those people, many or most of whom were never afforded fair trials under Texas’ notoriously shoddy and biased legal system, which has allowed poor defendants in capital cases to have lawyers who slept or drank their way through their trials, is on Bush’s and Gonzales’ hands.

Gonzales, in a memo to the president which my co-author Barbara Olshansky and I include in the appendix of our new book, The Case for Impeachment, pointedly warned Bush that at some future date, he and his advisers could face prosecution for war crimes on grounds of the torture of detainees which he was approving at Guantanamo Bay. Gonzales further noted that where death of captives occurred, the punishment could be death. Knowing that, I say,if a court were to determine that Bush and Gonzales are liable for deaths in Guantanamo or elsewhere where POW’s have been illegally held and tortured at the president’s direction, they probably should get a taste of their own deadly medicine, as is called for in the Geneva Conventions, and in the U.S. Criminal Code, into which those Conventions were incorporated by act of Congress.
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July 11, 2206

Krauthammer Gets it Wrong: The Constitution Applies in War and Peace

Right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer has weighed in against the Supreme Court's latest ruling in Hamdan, claiming that the Court erred in barring President Bush from denying Guantanamo detainees the protections of the Third Geneva Convention. The basis for his argument is that the U.S. is at war, and that traditionally "supreme courts have been loath to intervene against presidential war powers in the midst of conflict."

Let's look at this assertion for a minute.

First of all, the fact that in the past, presidents have grievously abused their power during wartime, and damaged the Constitution in the process, is hardly grounds for letting this president do so again. Krauthammer cites, for example, President Lincoln's famous revocation of the age-old common law right of habeas corpus--the right to have one’s imprisonment brought before a judge--to justify Bush's current denial of habeas corpus to captives in Guantanamo Bay. Well, what Krauthammer fails to mention is that in 1866, the Supreme Court slapped down the administration of the assassinated President Lincoln, overturning the detention and execution order (never carried out) of one Lambdin P. Milligan, who had been arrested on orders of the president on a charge or treason and denied habeas rights. In that ruling, the Justice David Davis wrote:

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false, for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it which are necessary to preserve its existence, as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority. (Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866))

Those stirring words should be mailed to every member of Congress as they now consider the Supreme Court's Hamdan ruling, with many Republicans clamoring to pass a law exempting the Guantanamo detainees from the Geneva Convention’s jurisdiction.

Second, let's examine Krauthammer's (and the Bush administration's) premise that the nation is at war, and that therefore the president can claim special powers.

Is the country at war?

Certainly it's not at war in Afghanistan, where there is an elected government, and where U.S., British, French, German, Canadian and other military forces serve at the invitation of the government. To call the small-scale fighting against remnant Taliban fighters a war would be to say that the U.S. is always at war, for U.S. military forces have been in combat situations somewhere in the world almost constantly, especially since World War II. Consider Korea, Indochina, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, etc. (have I forgotten any?). If these situations, in which U.S. forces were shooting and being shot at, were all to be called states of war, then by Krauthammer's faulty "logic," the U.S. should have been under presidential rule, with the Constitution suspended, for several generations already.

Clearly this is absurd. For the term "war" to have any meaning, it must refer to a condition in which the nation itself is in jeopardy. Certainly it was this threat to America's very existence that led Lincoln to declare martial law in some jurisdictions, and to suspend the protections of the Constitution, rightly or wrongly.

Happily, nothing like that kind of threat pertains today.

Neither the fighting in Afghanistan, nor the larger fighting in Iraq--which was certainly a war (with us as the invader!), but which is now a police action at the request of a sovereign government, in the words of our president himself--is a war.

The only "war" that can be at issue then, is the so-called "war on terror." But is this in any way a real "war"? Unless one believes the self-serving clap-trap of the administration that the soldiers in Iraq are fighting in the war on terror--an absurdity because there were no terrorists in Iraq before the U.S. invaded that country, and now what is called "terrorism" in Iraq, at least as directed against U.S. interests, is nothing but garden variety guerrilla warfare against a foreign army (ours)--the answer has to be no. As Bush famously declared back on April 30, 2003, major combat ended in Iraq over three years ago. There is no war in Iraq.

That leaves the global "war" on terrorism. But let's get real. This is no more a war than was the "war" on drugs or the "war" on poverty. Sure, there may be a few soldiers who are involved, but mostly it's about spying, monitoring, infiltrating and arresting suspected terrorists. To call that kind of thing a war is to debase the currenty of the language beyond recognition. (The truth is there are probably more actual U.S. military forces involved in the so-called "war" on drugs than there are involved in the so-called "war" on terror.)

Moreover, while terrorists certainly can threaten the lives and safety of Americans, they cannot threaten the survival of or the territorial integrity of the United States, which is after all what wars are all about.

Furthermore, Krauthammer speaks of presidents needing to be able to suspend Constitutional rights and to claim special extra-constitutional powers during wars, and of the tradition of them then restoring those rights after a conflict ends. But the administration has made it clear, in between stirring calls for “total victory,” that there will be no end to this "war" on terror. And indeed there cannot be, for there will always be those who will seek to disrupt or punish a global power like the U.S. through the use of terror. To accept the argument that fighting against such threats requires a suspension of rights and a president with dictatorial powers is to say that the Constitution, with its separation of powers and its Bill of Rights, is finished.

Like the administration he serves, Krauthammer is simply wrong, and surely in making such a preposterous claim has surrendered the right to call himself a conservative.

Justice Davis, writing at a time right after the nation had fought a four-year war for its very survival, a year after the president had been slain by an agent of the enemy, and while forces of resistance in the South were continuing to battle U.S. occupation troops, had it exactly right when he said: “The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace.”

Period.
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July 9, 2006

Generalissimo Bush: Clear and Present Danger to the Republic

Commander-in-Chief: an officer who has supreme command of military forces; in the U.S. the president; used as an honorific title to denote the President of the United States, as commander of the nation’s armed forces.

Generalissimo: a supreme commander of the combined armed forces in some countries, who often also has political power.

The major crisis facing American democracy and its long-standing Republican form of government, especially the carefully crafted tri-partite separation of powers into executive, judicial and legislative, is at root the result of the deliberate conflation by President Bush and Vice President Cheney of the title commander in chief with the concept of generalissimo--a role exemplified by such benighted leaders as Mussolini and Franco in Europe, Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, and a host of Latin American dictators.

The authors of America's Constitution added the title and role of commander in chief to that of president, specifically out of concern about a possible military coup. Their idea was to ensure that as commander in chief, a president answerable to Congress and the people would outrank any general in the American governmental system.

Bush has taken that bare bones role, which has no relationship to his political duties as chief executive, and conjured up out of thin air the theory that "in time of war" his position as commander in chief allows him to assume the powers of both the legislature and the judiciary, and to override such inconvenient hindrances to executive authority as the Bill of Rights and common law protections such as habeas corpus dating back as much as 800 years.

He has, in effect, converted the very limited concept of commander in chief, which was really never anything more than a rank placing him above five-star general, to that of generalissimo, which is just another term for dictator.

Consider the fact that a ranking four-star general, even the joint chief of staff at the Pentagon, has no authority over the ordinary U.S. citizen. Except under a declaration of martial law, such a general can't even order a civilian not to cross the street. Nor can the president, in his role as commander in chief.

A generalissimo, however, besides being the top officer in the military, is also the absolute ruler over the populace and the other parts of the government. He answers only to himself, and makes and enforces the laws as he sees fit. This is exactly the power that President Bush is claiming as commander in chief.

When Bush argues, as he attempted to do unsuccessfully in the recently decided Hamdan case before the US Supreme Court, that as "commander in chief" he can decide the fate of captured fighters in the war in Afghanistan, or the so-called "War on Terror," and can arbitrarily ignore the Third Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Captured Prisoners of War, despite the US having signed that treaty and incorporated it into the US Criminal Code, when he claims the right, as he did in the case of US citizen Jose Padilla and several other Americans, to declare certain people to be "enemy combatants" and to revoke their rights of citizenship, when he claims the right to ignore duly passed acts of Congress, and to violate laws and such rights as the Fourth Amendment, as he has done in the case of the warrantless spying on citizens by the National Security Agency, he is claiming the power of a generalissimo, not of a commander in chief.

(It is significant to note that after the Supreme Court ruled against his commander-in-chief argument that he had the right to ignore the Geneva Conventions in Guantanamo, Bush, instead of saying he would "of course comply" with the court's ruling, said he was "willing to comply" with the decision, clearly implying that he didn't feel compelled to comply with a decision by the High Court.)

Ideally, Congress would be challenging this assault on its own authority by a megalomaniacal president. Ideally the federal courts would be slapping down this affront to the Constitution. But Congress is in the hands of the president’s party, and Republicans in Congress are content to sit on their hands as the Constitution they swore to uphold and defend is trashed. The Democratic "opposition" party, meanwhile, has been so afraid of being accused of "treason," or of being "soft on terrorism," that they have done little or nothing to block the president's power grabs. Many Democrats in Congress have even endorsed the nomination of judges like John Roberts and Sam Alito who back the president's dictatorial ambitions. And the Supreme Court, as well as the lower courts, are being packed with apologists for unfettered presidential power.

If we Americans do not demand that Congress stand up to this unconstitutional power grab, if we do not demand that only those who believe in the concept of separation of powers and who share the founders' abiding fear of an overly powerful presidency be elevated to the federal bench, and if we do not start publicly protesting this perversion of the presidency, American democracy could be on its last legs.

Italy suffered mightily as a strutting small-minded man with a grotesquely inflated ego launched that country into pointless wars of aggression in the Middle East, and usurped all governmental power, calling himself generalissimo.

America today is perilously close to a reprise of that tragedy, as another strutting small-minded man with a similarly grotesquely inflated ego launches the nation into pointless wars of aggression in the Middle East and usurps governmental power, calling himself commander in chief.
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Impeach marchers as Willimantic July 4 parade
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Cheers resounded, until Sen. Lieberman hove into view...

July 5, 2006
Impeachment Comes to Main Street, USA

By Ed Adelman

So, just how does Impeach Bush play out on Main Street, USA?

One indication was the now famous 21st Annual July 4th Boom Box Parade along Main Street in Willimantic, CT. The 20,000 people of this former mill town in northeastern Connecticut town are a gritty, hardscrabble if economically depressed bunch, but they’re also proud, resourceful and open-minded. The Boom Box Parade was born of necessity and civic pride when marching bands were cancelled for budget reasons, forcing an embarrassing postponement of a big parade. The community's creative response: put together a tape of parade music, play it on the local radio station and have marchers and audience bring their radios tuned to the station. Open enrollment--no pre-registration--just show up and march. It became a wonderful, all-American hodgepodge of scout and church groups, hopeful politicians, families looking for something fun to do before a barbecue, immigrant groups, historical groups, local businesses, political groups with a message and anyone with a desire to drive an antique car, tractor or lawn mower down Main Street with thousands cheering.

This year, about 20 of us marched behind a banner proclaiming "SAVE THE CONSTITUTION--IMPEACH BUSH," while carrying signs with specifics about Bush the terrorist, the liar, the shredder of habeas corpus, the promoter of fear and hate, etc. etc. Although we also announced that "Peace is Patriotic," we were anxious about our reception on this day, the granddaddy of Red, White and Blue holidays.

We needn't have worried. People in this blue-collar town don't like Bush. We got enthusiastic cheers from old and young, white, black and brown, flag wavers, bikers, students, hippies--Americans, all. Certainly, there were some thumbs down and boos, but far fewer than we expected. Passing by some of the more crowded areas, such as the Town Hall lawn, the ovations and cheers just grew as we passed. Informational flyers were willingly accepted, not just by those cheering, but by others who wanted more information about impeachment, which is making sense to more and more people.

Judging by our Main Street experience, it looks like the people are ready to take this step--they are fed up with lies, the arrogance of power, incompetence and manipulation by corporate interests. We just need the politicians who have the guts to get it rolling.
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Ed Adelman is a special education teacher in Lebanon, CT. He lives in the town of Hampton, CT.

Addendum by Dave Lindorff

More Boos for Lieberman, Cheers for Lamont

There was also plenty of booing along the July 4 parade route in Willimantic, CT. as the state's embattled senior senator, Joe Lieberman, marched past. The New York Times, which reported on the event on page one of its Metro section on July 5, said that while there were a few people who hugged Lieberman or offered to sign his petition to run as an independent candidate in November if he fails to win his party's nomination, most people were booing him, calling him a "traitor" for even contemplating an independent campaign.

Overwhelmingly, the cheering was reportedly reserved for Lieberman's challenger, political novice Ned Lamont, who also attended the parade, accompanied by a float that depicted Lieberman being kissed by President Bush (a reference to an event that took place at the president's last State of the Union address, and which Lamont has made good use of in his ad campaign for the Aug. 8 Democratic Primary.

Lamont, who is focusing his campaign on Lieberman's strong support for Bush’s Iraq invasion and for continuing war, is increasingly being considered a possible winner of the state's Democratic primary, which would be a remarkable upset of a senior senator who only six years ago was his party's vice presidential candidate.
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July 1, 2006

High Court Has Found Bush Guilty of War Crimes

Largely missed in all the coverage of the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case was the establishment by the court majority that all Bush administration claims to the contrary, the Geneva Convention rules regarding captured prisoners apply to the captives taken not only in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the so-called War on Terror.

What has been largely missed is the clear point that the Supreme Court has thus now declared that for the past five years, Bush and his gang of war-mongers, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State and former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, former Attorney General John Ashcroft and current Attorney General and former White House Chief Counsel Alberto Gonzales, and many others in the administration, have been guilty of violating the Third Convention on treatment of prisoners of war. They are also, therefore, in violation of federal law, which back in 1996 adopted that convention as part of the U.S. criminal code.

In other words, the whole top administration, from Commander in Chief George W. Bush on down, is guilty of war crimes. The punishment for committing war crimes ranges from a lengthy jail sentence to, in the event the crimes in question caused the death of any prisoners being held, to death. And there have been many deaths among those who have been held and tortured on orders of the administration--most recently the three suicides at Guantanamo, which included on man who had only three days earlier been targeted for release (but who never learned this because government's secrecy and tight security prevented his attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights from getting the news to him).

Interestingly, Gonzales actually cautioned Bush about this possibility. In a memo to the president, written on January 25, 2002 when he was still White House counsel, Gonzales warned prophetically that the U.S. adoption of the Third Geneva Convention as a part of the U.S. criminal code in 1996 made violation of the convention a "war crime" under U.S. law, which he said was defined as "any grave breach" of the Third Convention such as "outrages against personal dignity." He noted that this law applied whether or not a detained person qualified for POW status, and added that punishment for violation of the law "include the death penalty." But then he went on to say Bush could "substantially reduce" his risk of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act by making a presidential determination that the Third Geneva Convention "does not apply to al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Clearly, Gonzales here was behaving like a mob lawyer, not like an honest counselor. He was telling the president not what was right and legal, but how to dodge prosecution.

In Bush's case, this crime calls for his impeachment, and for his subsequent prosecution as a war criminal. In the case of his subordinates and abettors, it calls for criminal indictments.

Naturally, we cannot expect to see indictments issue from the Attorney General's Office, particularly given Gonzales' own complicity and personal culpability on the war crimes charge. Conceivably, I suppose, some career prosecutor like Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been given wide authority in his special counsel role, could bring charges, though this seems highly unlikely. Charges could also be brought by another country whose laws permit such extraterritoriality: Germany or Spain for example.

Meanwhile, we who value America's once elevated standing in the world as a supporter and author of the Geneva Conventions, should begin a campaign to press the Congress to consider a bill of impeachment against Bush for war crimes.

There are, as Barbara Olshansky and I explain in our new book The Case for Impeachment (which includes a copy of the above Gonzales memo in an appendix), many important reasons to impeach the president. Surely, however, the deliberate policy of involving the military in the commission of war crimes--torture, kidnapping, denial of access to some process of challenge the justice of their detention--is among the worst of all of those crimes against the Constitution.

The blood of war crime victims is on Bush's hands, and the hands of his henchmen, but unless we the people act, and unless the Congress acts, to call them to account, it will ultimately be on all of our hands.