A Controversial and/or Informative Site [Archive] - Page 20

Saundra Hummer

April 3rd, 2007, 04:14 PM

.:: :: :: :: :: Government and Citizenship

By
Charles Sullivan

04/03/07 "ICH" -- -- I have been thinking a great deal of late about government and its relationship to the citizenry. It should be obvious that any government that claims to be of the people and for the people must also serve the people. Yet it is clear that the current government does not serve the people—it exploits them. When sixty-four percent of the citizenry demand an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the government responds not by withdrawing its troops, but by escalating the war, that government cannot be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. What is it then?

It is a government of the wealthy; a corporate, fascist government of the highest order. It is a government that spurns ordinary people and uses its power against them. It is the opposite of the kind of representative government it purports to be. It extorts tax dollars from its citizens and sends them to do the bidding of the very wealthy under the pretense of patriotism and national defense. It is, in fact, using citizens against citizens and plundering the national treasure with the tools of empire, class warfare, and imperialism.

Every military weapon that is manufactured and put in use diminishes us as a nation. Militarism enriches the defense contractors and the plutocracy by robbing the citizens. It deprives us of an urgently needed national health care system, better schools, decent jobs that provide living wages; and it exacts social and environmental costs that are incalculable, all of which are important to ordinary Americans.

We do not have a government based upon the rule of law or equality, as evidenced by its own history—even its recent history, as we saw in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina; or in the dilapidated military hospitals across the land where limbless soldiers cannot get the health care they so desperately need, and lie waiting and wasting in filth and ruin. These are the troops the government purports to care so much about. Broken men and women from combat zones are the worn out tools of empire builders. Like unwanted toys, they are used up and no longer played with by our rulers; an embarrassment, something to be warehoused safely from public view.

The president and his minions behave as if they are above the law. Laws apply to his subjects, but not to the King who thinks he is the supreme ruler.

They want us to believe that we support our troops by placing magnetic ribbons on our vehicles and by prominently displaying American flags. But Walter Reed and other military hospitals across the land reveal what we really think about our military veterans in ways that cannot be offset by patriotic trinkets and jingoism. The government honors them in patriotic language even as they abandon them in deed.

There is a constant tension that exists between the government and the governed. The people are disorganized and the government is doing everything in its power to keep them that way. Nearly all of the public good that was ever accomplished in this country came as the result of public outcry for justice, a cry that brought people together in mass to organize against gross injustice. That is how chattel slavery was finally abolished. It is how civil rights were won. Organized mass civil disobedience and protest brought the Viet Nam war to an end.

When enough good people unite in common cause, government is forced to hear their voice and meet their demands. I should note here that it is only unjust governments that have anything to fear from its citizenry. Democratic governments do not treat its own citizens like terrorists by trying to quell dissent or spying on them. Nor do they imprison those who disagree with them and uphold a higher code of ethics and conduct than them.

The Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence—all of them important and eloquent documents—did not bring about the most important achievements in American history. Ordinary citizens did all of that by organizing and demanding justice. Freedom isn’t won in the courts or secured in documents; it is won in the streets through the deeds of an aroused and just citizenry. Just laws can be written but it is ordinary people who must bring them to life and give them meaning. Integrity must live in the hearts of the citizenry. Justice is not a noun—it is a verb that must be driven by principled action.

An alert, thoughtful, rational, conscientious citizenry; an aroused citizenry, is the worst nightmare of tyranny. That is why the government is spying on its citizens. That is why posse comitatus and habeas corpus were revoked by the Bush regime and enabled by a timorous congress. It has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. The government is keeping an eye on us, looking for signs of trouble. They must keep us from coming together, from organizing against the established order just as radical unions are kept out of the work place.

Most of the citizens of the United States, while quite naïve, are, I believe, good and decent people who play by the rules. The majority of them, whose voices are rarely heard above the noise of the corporate media, operate with a sense of justice and fair play. Most of them would not knowingly cheat a neighbor and only a small percentage, actually a fraction of one percent of them, would murder a neighbor. It is their naiveté, their ignorance and trust in authority that gets them into trouble.

Conversely, the government has a murderous history, a long record of criminality, and a track record of lying and deception that any sociopath would envy—especially in its present incarnation under George Bush and Dick Cheney. It has a lot to answer for. When violence is the first resort of a government, the people have no business referring to it as a democratic republic. They must offer resistance to it. They must bring it into line with the values and code of ethics of the citizenry.

Few would argue, no matter what political stripe they wear, that the current government bears no more resemblance to the citizenry than it does to the socio-economic demographics of the population as a whole. Thus the vast majority of us have government without representation. It is government that does not serve the people, but treats them as its servants.

If we are to see improvement, we must stop acting as if we are living on the plantation and take personal responsibility for what the government is doing in our name. This will require organized resistance beginning at the community level and spreading outward. It all begins with the personal choices we make. Ultimately, it will require global solidarity to meet a threat that is also global in extent.

Charles Sullivan is an architectural millwright, photographer, activist, and free-lance writer residing deep in the hinterlands of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at csullivan@phreego.com.

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Saundra Hummer

April 3rd, 2007, 08:11 PM

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HOW DID IT COME TO THIS?
San Francisco psychologist says environment plays big role in evil behavior
Edward Guthman
Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Naked men in hoods form a human pyramid. A prisoner crawls on the floor tethered to a dog leash. And next to them, grinning at the camera like soul-dead fools, are the Army reservists, one of whom dismissed the torture of Iraqi detainees as "fun and games."

No one can forget those images from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Now, three years later, San Francisco psychologist Philip Zimbardo has written a book arguing that the men and women who participated in the torture were not just "rotten apples," as the Bush administration has argued, but the unfortunate products of a "rotten barrel" mind-set that left them unsupervised, poorly trained and ignorant of Iraqi culture. He sees the American military establishment in Iraq as complicit in what happened at Abu Ghraib.

In "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil," Zimbardo writes that human nature is dualistic: Each of us, given certain uncontrolled circumstances, is capable of sadistic or abusive behavior. A professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, Zimbardo, 74, believes this so strongly that he spoke as an expert witness in defense of Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, the military guard who supervised the night shift on Tiers 1A and 1B at Abu Ghraib, where the beatings, torture and sexual humiliation took place.

Zimbardo describes Frederick, the son of a West Virginia coal miner and a devout Baptist, as "superpatriotic," a man who considers himself spiritual even in the wake of Abu Ghraib. Despite Zimbardo's testimony, Frederick was sentenced to an eight-year prison term, which Zimbardo calls "outrageous."

"What I'm saying is that they're good soldiers," Zimbardo explains during a conversation at his Russian Hill home. "The whole point of the book is to change people's minds. ... (The perpetrators) were just at the bottom of this barrel; there was all this pressure on them to do this."

Trying to understand the Abu Ghraib disgrace, he says, isn't the same as excusing it. "If you don't understand the dynamics -- and if you don't change the situation -- then it's going to happen over and over again."

Even apart from the lack of proper supervision, Zimbardo writes, the environment at Abu Ghraib -- a 280-acre complex, where Saddam Hussein tortured and executed critics of his Ba'athist government -- was so hellish that everyone was on the verge of cracking.

Porta Potties overflowed in 110-degree heat, leaving a nonstop stench. There were no mess halls, no proper showers, no separate facilities for prisoners with mental illness or contagious diseases such as tuberculosis.

In two months, the population on Tiers 1A and 1B swelled from 200 to 1,000 prisoners -- most of them innocent men rounded up in random military sweeps. Mortar and rocket-propelled grenade attacks on prison guard towers, launched by insurgents from the roofs of nearby buildings, occurred as often as 20 times per week.

"We all got numb in different ways," Zimbardo quotes one reservist saying.

Studying evil, which he defines as "intentionally behaving in ways that harm others," has occupied Zimbardo for years. He's lectured on the psychology of evil in classrooms and at professional conferences, and traveled to Brazil where he interviewed men who had been torturers and death-squad executioners. In the book, he draws examples from the 1994 Rwandan genocide of the early '90s, the lynching of blacks by whites in the American South and the more recent phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers.

He cites examples of men who, at the same time they inflicted evil in the context of work, maintained parallel lives as family men and loving fathers. "What I'm saying is that the human mind is so complex that any of us have templates to do anything. I mean, we could be Mother Teresa, we could be Idi Amin. We could be Nelson Mandela, we could be Saddam Hussein. But for most of us, we go in and out. It's not even a choice."

Evil needn't be on the scale of Abu Ghraib torture, he adds. Everyday evil includes "telling a racist or sexist joke, spreading gossip in school that can ruin another kid. Spousal or child abuse, doing something at work that violates your values. The newest evil now is cyber-bullying."

The division between good and evil is "permeable and nebulous," he writes. "It is possible for angels to become devils and, perhaps more difficult to conceive, for devils to become angels."

The largest section of Zimbardo's book deals with the Stanford Prison Experiment, a study he initiated and supervised in August 1971. After screening 100 male students from around the country, Zimbardo and his team selected 24 men -- "the most normal, most average, most healthy kids" -- paid them $15 per day and randomly assigned them to enact the roles of guards and prisoners.

The dynamics that arose, Zimbardo says, were "exactly" the same as those at Abu Ghraib -- even though the participants in the experiment were mostly anti-war activists.

The experiment was conducted in the basement of a building on the Stanford campus. "Guards" wore reflective sunglasses and fake military uniforms; "inmates" wore women's smocks and no underwear. At first, nothing happened and Zimbardo wondered if the experiment would be a bust.

After 36 hours, the prisoners rebelled against the guards' verbal and psychological degradation. Four men suffered emotional breakdowns, one broke out in a psychosomatic rash that covered his body.

"They became guards and prisoners," Zimbardo writes. "Anyone, when given complete control over others, can act like a monster." Instead of letting the experiment run its course of two weeks, he ended it on day six.

"There's no question they suffered," he says. "I mean, to that extent it was totally unethical. Kids suffered unnecessarily over an extended period of time." He spent a day debriefing with the participants after the study ended, and says he's still in touch with several of the men 35 years later.

Despite the trauma the men endured, none of them sued. "Nobody thought about it," Zimbardo says. "People didn't sue in 1971. Right now, I'd be sued. They'd have the house."

The lessons in human behavior demonstrated by Abu Ghraib are chilling, Zimbardo says. But, just as the essentially good person can manifest evil in adverse conditions, he believes that everyone -- even those conditioned to evil -- is capable of heroic action.

In Zimbardo's appearance on "The Daily Show" Thursday, host Jon Stewart agreed, and cited the example of Ishmael Beah, the former child soldier from Sierra Leone who, with his book "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier," demonstrates the possibility of such a transformation and the inspiration it delivers.

"It is not an abstract concept," Zimbardo writes. "As we are reminded by the Russian poet and former prisoner in Stalin's Gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "The line between good and evil is in the center of every human heart."

E-mail Edward Guthmann at eguthmann@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/03/DDGIFOV4M71.DTL
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the magnificent goldberg

April 4th, 2007, 06:07 AM

Each of us, given certain uncontrolled circumstances, is capable of sadistic or abusive behavior.

Zimbardo is using the wrong language to describe something that he understands very well indeed. The circumstances in his Stanford experiment; and those in Abu Ghraib, were in no way uncontrolled. They were set up deliberately, precisely in order to get this sort of result. And elsewhere in the world, the same techniques have been applied to the same end.

MG

the magnificent goldberg

April 4th, 2007, 06:14 AM

Why is it that they aren't having passangers plastered against their seats? Pressurized train compartments? Ride a fast ride at an amusement park and the force from the speed makes it feel like you're being crushed a bit.

It's acceleration, not speed, that plasters you against your seat. In an amusement park ride, the topography varies in order to produce sudden accelerations and (more gradual) decelerations, as you go down the hill and up the next rise.

If a train gradually speeds up at a normal rate, you wouldn't feel very much effect (though you can always feel something, particularly when starting up). Of course, once you're doing whatever enormous speed, you need to be enclosed, so you don't get blown away by the draft!

MG

Saundra Hummer

April 4th, 2007, 03:49 PM

It's acceleration, not speed, that plasters you against your seat. In an amusement park ride, the topography varies in order to produce sudden accelerations and (more gradual) decelerations, as you go down the hill and up the next rise.

If a train gradually speeds up at a normal rate, you wouldn't feel very much effect (though you can always feel something, particularly when starting up). Of course, once you're doing whatever enormous speed, you need to be enclosed, so you don't get blown away by the draft!

MG

I know we opened up my girl friends Corvette which Vasek Pollack (sic?) had built into a racing speed machine for her, which Bob Bondurant had won trophies driving in a few races. We were blowing by highballing diesel rigs going over 97 miles an hour like they were standing still, the speedometer needle was bouncing, we had passed it's registry. It was the acceleration one could feel. Crazy kids. It was exciting and fun.

Saundra Hummer

April 4th, 2007, 07:23 PM

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Peter Michaelson:
A Psychological Exposé
of
Creationism's Secret Genesis

Created 04/04/2007 - 2:37pm
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Peter Michaelson

A Newsweek poll reports this week that 48 percent of the American public rejects the scientific theory of evolution. That's nearly half the voting public that can't tell fact from fiction or reality from ideology. To save democracy, we've got to help these people to evolve.

We can begin by discrediting the pseudo-science known as creationism. This doctrine can be invalidated in the eyes of more people by exposing its emotional roots. It's pointless to debate creationists on the specific tenets of their doctrine. Such an approach plays into their defensive strategy and overlooks the source in the psyche of their irrationality.

The Christian right is using pseudo-science and mass-marketing techniques as a Trojan horse against reason, journalist and author Chris Hedges argued last week [1]. Obviously, he's right to be alarmed. And we can go deeper into the issue by asking why the Christian right is so determined to undermine reason.

The danger of creationism, Hedges writes, "is that, like the pseudo-science of Nazi eugenics, it allows facts to be accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained ideology." Nazi eugenics refers to the doctrine that racial engineering and sterilization can help to create a master race. The doctrine of eugenics was a self-defeating coping strategy that arose following the German people's collapse into self-doubt, despair, and even self-hatred after their humbling defeat in World War I and their country's subsequent hyper-inflation and economic depression.

Creationism, which identifies humanity as a master species in God's image, is also a coping strategy for a poor sense of self. The doctrine contends that human beings are special creations of God who have miraculously bypassed the evolutionary process that shapes all life forms. People embrace this belief as truth because doing so is emotionally satisfying: This belief elevates them in their own eyes. It's really not about God at all. In a mostly unconscious process, these individuals are desperate to feel recognized and validated by something bigger and better than them. God just happens to do the trick. This desperation for recognition arises out of their underdeveloped sense of self. Even their great hunger for salvation is a craving for rescue from such an impoverished experience of self.

Like eugenics, creationism is also self-defeating. Because it is used to cover up psychological issues, it's a blockage in the path of its adherents' self-development. If they refuse to believe in the possibility of evolution, they reject knowledge of who and what they are. This obviously limits their potential for growth. They sacrifice their well-being for an ideology: Their self-imposed stagnation becomes their evidence for the falsity of human evolution.

People with a poor sense of self often compensate by convincing themselves that they are superior. This is the mechanism of narcissists, who also have an exceedingly weak sense of self. The doctrine of eugenics, too, was a statement of superiority, induced by self-doubt and self-loathing. Creationists are also eager for some means by which to feel superior. They can feel superior by believing they're specially chosen by God. They can also convince themselves they are morally superior by condemning the beliefs and actions of humanists, secularists, and liberals. Their "superiority" extends, of course, to all creatures as well as the laws of nature.

Creationists are not usually aware of their unconscious compulsion to doubt and belittle themselves and of the consequences of doing so. Many of them are rural people who experience much of life on the basis of who is superior and who is inferior (a basis for racism, patriarchy, the Rapture, and authoritarianism). They also experience life through judgment of what is good, bad, permissible, and forbidden (a feature of fundamentalism). They believe (resentfully so) that "elitist" liberals consider themselves to be superior. These liberals, so the thinking goes, regard them as inferior. In a tit-for-tat exchange, creationists retaliate by seeing liberals as morally inferior.

In a process known as transference, people are inclined to perceive an attitude or judgment coming from someone else that corresponds with what they're prepared secretly to feel about themselves. Creationists make of liberals a mirror, and in that mirror, they imagine liberals look back at them with the scorn that, deep down, these creationists are secretly feeling about themselves. (On an inner level, the inner critic is very scornful of us when, through self-doubt, we believe we deserve self-criticism for allegedly not having measured up in our expectations, i.e., for success and happiness.)

Creationists writhe like Holy Rollers at the suggestion their belief system is formed by these inner issues. Yet they're fighting not so much for a specific belief system but to avoid a kind of metaphysical meltdown. Without special standing in God's eyes, it feels to them they'll be nothing but pinpricks of consciousness lost in space-without a direction, a home, meaning, or substance.

At a barely conscious level, these evolutionary stragglers live in terror of losing their myths and doctrines. They have no idea who or what they will be without these support systems that provide focus and hope for their existence. Consequently, reason, the debunker of illusion, is like a terrorist on the prowl.

Developmentally, these stragglers in the march of progress are like children. They're in terror of being abandoned by God, the way that children can imagine being abandoned by parents. As reason reveals humanity's need to evolve on our own or to die, they experience a loss of identity. They can't imagine how to separate from old forms or paradigms without being terrorized by the process.

As more people are enlisted into their belief system, the safer they feel. But the world is changing rapidly. Reality has no use for doctrine or ideology. Science and sophisticated knowledge, along with intelligent and articulate people, are pressing in from all sides. Creationists know at some instinctive level that time is running out. Hence, the more desperate they are - and the more irrational - as they cling to the old.

Making the transition from faith in dogma to belief in the enduring value of one's own self need not cause more grief than parting with a baby blanket. Mainly, we have to be prepared to examine our beliefs and not become identified with them. It helps to be on the lookout for important knowledge and to believe in our own capacity to figure out the essential things of life as well as anyone else.

An underdeveloped self can be a problem for secularists too, of course. Problems with anger, passivity, addictions, and relationships are consequences of it. The self is the inner richness we accumulate and consolidate as we invest in personal development. To develop the self, we need to be friends with truth, reality, and reason. We need to question and challenge our perceptions and those of others. The self is our inner peacemaker and, by extension, our peacemaker to the world. Without this inner resource and the strength it inspires, options such as violence and military force are more appealing.

Meanwhile, the debate with creationists needs to be expanded on our terms. Their emotionally held positions, developed out of inner weakness, can't be taken at face value. As we see the roots of their delusion, our insightful responses will hasten, mercifully, their abandonment of that losing cause.
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Peter Michaelson is a psychotherapist and author in Pasadena, CA. He is author of Democracy’s Little Self-Help Book, and he can be reached at www.PeterMichaelson.com [2].
Technorati Tags: Guest Contribution [3] Peter Michaelson [4] creationism [5] evolution [6]
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Saundra Hummer

April 4th, 2007, 07:57 PM

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Chairman Waxman
Asks for E-mails Related to Use of
Federal Resources for Political Purposes

Created 04/04/2007 - 11:58am
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

Today, Rep. Waxman writes to RNC Chairman Mike Duncan requesting emails stored on Republican National Committee servers related to the use of federal resources for political purposes. The text of the letter appears below:
April 4, 2007

Mike Duncan
Chairman
Republican National Committee
310 First Street, SE
Washington, DC 20003

Dear Mr. Duncan:

I am writing to request e-mail communications stored on Republican National Committee servers that relate to the use of federal agencies and federal resources for partisan political purposes.

Last week, the Committee held a hearing into allegations of misconduct at the General Services Administration. One of the issues examined at the hearing involved a partisan political presentation that White House Deputy Director of Political Affairs, J. Scott Jennings, made to the GSA Administrator, Lurita A. Doan, and approximately 40 GSA appointees in the GSA headquarters building on January 26, 2007. At this event, Mr. Jennings presented a 28-page PowerPoint briefing that reviewed the 2006 election results and identified the Republican party's top electoral targets in upcoming federal and state elections. Following the presentation, Ms. Doan asked her staff to consider how GSA resources could be used to help "our candidates" in the next election.

Serious questions were raised at the hearing about the legality and propriety of Mr. Jennings's presentation and the discussion that followed it. In addition, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service issued a report finding that the presentation itself and Ms. Doan's comments could be violations of the federal Hatch Act.[1] According to a White House spokesperson, however: "This is regular communication from the White House to political appointees throughout the administration."[2]

In communicating with GSA about the presentation, Mr. Jennings and his assistant used "gwb43.com" e-mail accounts maintained by the RNC rather than their official White House e-mail accounts. In their e-mails, they described the presentation as a "close hold" and said that "we're not supposed to be emailing it around."[3]

To assist the Committee in its investigation of these issues, I request that you provide any electronic messages sent or received by Karl Rove, J. Scott Jennings, or any other White House officials using accounts maintained by the RNC that relate to (1) the January 26, 2007, PowerPoint presentation at GSA, (2) the presentation of any similar political briefings at other federal agencies or to other federal employees, or (3) the use of federal agencies or resources to help Republican candidates.

The Committee requests that you produce these documents on or before April 18, 2007.

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the principal oversight committee in the House of Representatives and has broad oversight jurisdiction as set forth in House Rule X. An attachment to this letter provides additional information about how to respond to the Committee's request.

If you have any questions regarding this request, please contact David Rapallo or Anna Laitin with the Committee staff at (202) 225-5420.

Sincerely,

Henry A. Waxman
Chairman

Enclosure

cc: Tom Davis
Ranking Minority Member
[1]Memorandum from Congressional Research Service to House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Meetings, Conferences as "Political Activities" in a Federal Office, and "Hatch Act" Considerations (Mar. 26, 2007) (online at www.oversight.house.gov/ Documents/20070328154603-20874.pdf [1]).
[2]Panel Asks Rove for Information on '08 Election Presentation, Washington Post (Mar. 30, 2007).
[3] Email from Jocelyn Webster to Tessa Truesdale (Jan. 19, 2007) (W-02-0310).
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

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Links:
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Saundra Hummer

April 4th, 2007, 11:05 PM

Zimbardo is using the wrong language to describe something that he understands very well indeed. The circumstances in his Stanford experiment; and those in Abu Ghraib, were in no way uncontrolled. They were set up deliberately, precisely in order to get this sort of result. And elsewhere in the world, the same techniques have been applied to the same end.

MG

The sad thing is, after Hitler and his thugs, after Stalin's massive attrocities, and us learing of all that has gone on, we thought, or I did, being as naive as I am, that we would never have to learn of such things happening again. Then to learn that our own country; our own country men and women are behind such acts when we had such hopes for the world, is more than upsetting, it's a crying shame. It's also criminal.

Saundra Hummer

April 4th, 2007, 11:26 PM

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A Surprise? Hardly!
'Swift Boat' Donor Installed as Ambassador
Updated:2007-04-05 00:05:20
By
JENNIFER LOVEN
AP
WASHINGTON (April 5) - President Bush named Republican fundraiser Sam Fox as U.S. ambassador to Belgium on Wednesday, using a maneuver that allowed him to bypass Congress , where Democrats had derailed Fox's nomination.
Controversial Nominee
Go on-site to view article and photo, any links, etc.

The appointment, made while lawmakers were out of town on spring break, prompted angry rebukes from Democrats, who said Bush's action may even be illegal.

Democrats had denounced Fox for his donation to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 presidential campaign. The group's TV ads, which claimed that Sen. John Kerry exaggerated his military record in Vietnam, were viewed as a major factor in the Massachusetts Democrat 's election loss.

Recognizing Fox did not have the votes to obtain Senate confirmation in the Foreign Relations Committee, Bush withdrew the nomination last week. On Wednesday, with the Senate on a one-week break, the president used his power to make recess appointments to put Fox in the job without Senate confirmation.

This means Fox can remain ambassador until the end of the next session of Congress, effectively through the end of the Bush presidency.

Troops"It's sad but not surprising that this White House would abuse the power of the presidency to reward a donor over the objections of the Senate," Kerry said in a statement.

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said he plans to ask the Government Accountability Office to issue an opinion on whether the recess appointment is legal.

Recess appointments are intended to give the president flexibility if Congress is out for a lengthy period of time, such as the four-week adjournment in summer. But Dodd said the law was not intended to circumvent lawmakers' approval.

"This is really now taking the recess appointment vehicle and abusing this beyond anyone's imagination," said Dodd, a candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. "This is a travesty."

Bush also used his recess appointment authority to make Andrew Biggs deputy director of Social Security. The president's earlier nomination of Biggs, an outspoken advocate of partially privatizing the government's retirement program, was rejected by Senate Democrats in February.

Presidents since George Washington have made appointments during congressional recesses to fill positions in the executive and judicial branches. Bush has used the authority more frequently than some - but not all - of his most recent predecessors, making 171 so far, compared with 140 for President Clinton over two terms, 77 by his father in one term and 243 by President Reagan during two terms.

Some of Bush's more notable recess appointments include John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton arrived at the U.N. in August 2005 after being appointed during a congressional recess because he twice failed to be confirmed by the Senate. Still unable to get Senate backing, he stepped down in December.

Others include include William Pryor and Charles Pickering as federal appeals court judges, in 2004, and Otto Reich as an assistant secretary of state, in 2002.

Fox, a 77-year-old St. Louis businessman, gave $50,000 to the Swift Boat group. He is national chairman of the Jewish Republican Coalition and was dubbed a "ranger" by Bush's 2004 campaign for raising at least $200,000. He is founder and chairman of the Clayton, Mo.-based Harbour Group, which specializes in the takeover of manufacturing companies.

Fox has donated millions of dollars to Republican candidates and causes since the 1990s.

In answer to questions about the Swift Boat donation, Fox has said he gives when asked, insisting he was not involved with the writing of the ad scripts and never saw them before they aired but had been aware of the general thrust of the group.

Fox issued a statement saying he is "delighted and honored" to accept the ambassadorial appointment.

"As the son of a man who fled Europe to find freedom and a better life, I am especially humbled by the opportunity to return to that continent as this nation's representative," he said.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press
http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/swift-boat-donor-installed-as-ambassador/20070404172309990001
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the magnificent goldberg

April 5th, 2007, 05:36 AM

Saundra Hummer

April 5th, 2007, 12:58 PM

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Cheney’s Nemesis
By Rolling Stone.
On May 29th, 1975, an aide to then-White House chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld sat down with a yellow legal pad and in careful longhand sketched out a list of possible responses to a damaging investigative report in The New York Times. “Problem,” the aide wrote. “Unauthorized disclosure of classified national security information by Sy Hersh and the NYT.” He then laid out five options, ranging from the most ominous (an FBI investigation of the newspaper and a grand jury indictment) to the least offensive (”Discuss informally with NYT” and “Do nothing”). Number three on the list, however, read, “Search warrant: to go after Hersh papers in his apt.”

The note’s author? A viper-mean Beltway apparatchik named Dick Cheney, who was making his name doing damage control for the Republican White House after the Watergate disaster. Coming so soon after Nixon was burned at the public stake for similar targeting of political enemies, the Cheney memo was proof that the next generation of GOP leaders had emerged from the Watergate scandal regretting only one thing: getting caught.

This year, an almost identical note in Cheney’s same tight-looped, anal script appeared as a key piece of evidence in the trial of another powerful White House aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president’s handwritten ruminations on how best to dispose of an Iraq War critic named Joe Wilson are an eerie reminder of how little has changed in America in the past three decades. Then as now, we have been dragged into a bloody massacre in the Third World, paying the bill for the operation with the souls and bodies of the next generation of our young people. It is the same old story, and many of the same people are once again in charge.

But some of the same people are on the other side, too. In the same week that Libby was convicted in a Washington courthouse, Seymour Hersh outlined the White House’s secret plans for a possible invasion of Iran in The New Yorker. As amazing as it is that Cheney is still walking among us, a living link to our dark Nixonian past, it’s even more amazing that Hersh is still the biggest pain in his ass, publishing accounts of conversations that seemingly only a person hiding in the veep’s desk drawer would be privy to. “The access I have — I’m inside,” Hersh says proudly. “I’m there, even when he’s talking to people in confidence.”

America’s pre-eminent investigative reporter of the last half-century, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and was on hand, nearly four decades later, when we found ourselves staring back at the same sick face in the mirror after Abu Ghraib. At age seventy, he clearly still loves his job. During a wide-ranging interview at his cramped Washington office, Hersh could scarcely sit still, bouncing around the room like a kindergartner to dig up old articles, passages from obscure books and papers buried in his multitudinous boxes of files. A hopeless information junkie, he is permanently aroused by the idea that corruption and invisible power are always waiting to be uncovered by the next phone call. Somewhere out there, They are still hiding the story from Us — and that still pisses Hersh off.

During the Watergate years, you devoted a great deal of time to Henry Kissinger. If you were going to write a book about this administration, is Dick Cheney the figure you would focus on?
Absolutely. If there’s a Kissinger person today, it’s Cheney. But what I say about Kissinger is: Would that we had a Kissinger now! If we did, we’d know that the madness of going into Iraq would have been explained by something — maybe a clandestine deal for oil — that would make some kind of sense. Kissinger always had some back-channel agenda. But in the case of Bush and this war, what you see is what you get. We buy much of our fuel from the Middle East, and yet we’re at war with the Middle East. It doesn’t make sense.

Kissinger’s genius, if you will, was that he figured out a way to get out. His problem was that, like this president, he had a president who could only see victory ahead. With Kissinger, you have to give him credit: He had such difficulties with Nixon getting the whole peace package through, but he did it. Right now, a lot of people on the inside know it’s over in Iraq, but there are no plans for how to get out. You’re not even allowed to think that way. So what we have now is a government that’s in a terrible mess, with no idea of how to get out. Except, as one of my friends said, the “fail forward” idea of going into Iran. So we’re really in big trouble. Real big trouble here.

Is what’s gone on in the Bush administration comparable or worse than what went on in the Nixon administration?
Oh, my God. Much worse. Bush is a true radical. He believes very avidly in executive power. And he also believes that he’s doing the right thing. I think he’s a revolutionary, a Trotsky. He’s a believer in permanent revolution. So therefore he’s very dangerous, because he’s an unguided missile, he’s a rocket with no ability to be educated. You can’t change what he wants to do. He can’t deviate from his policy, and that’s frightening when somebody has as much power as he does, and is as much a radical as he is, and is as committed to democracy — whatever that means — as he is in the Mideast. I really do believe that’s what drives him. That doesn’t mean he’s not interested in oil. But I really think he thinks democracy is the answer.

A lot of people interpreted your last article in “The New Yorker” as a prediction that we’re going into Iran. But you also make clear that the Saudis have reasons to keep us from attacking Iran.
I’ve never said we’re going to go — just that the planning is under way. Planning is planning, of course. But in the last couple of weeks, it has become nonstop. They’re in a position right now where the president could wake up and scratch his, uh —

His what?
His nose, and say, “Let’s go.” And they’d go. That’s new. We’ve made it closer. We’ve got carrier groups there. It’s not about going in on the ground. Although if we went in we’d have to send Marines into the coastal areas of Iran to knock out their Silkworm missile sites.

So the notion that it would just be a bombing campaign isn’t true at all?
Oh, no. Don’t forget, you’d have to take out a very sophisticated radar system, and a guidance system for their missiles. You’d have to knock out the ability of the Iranians to get our ships.

So this is the “fail forward” plan?
I think Bush wants to resolve the Iranian crisis. It may not be a crisis, but he wants to resolve it.

The other implication of your piece is that we went into Iraq as a response to Sunni extremism, and now we are realigning ourselves with Sunni extremists to fight the Shiites. Is it really that simple? Are we really that stupid?
From what I gather, there’s no real mechanism in the administration for looking at the downside of things. In the military, when they do a major study, they say something like “We give it to you with the pluses and minuses.” They usually show it to you warts and all. But these guys in the White House don’t want the warts. They just want the good side. I don’t think they know all of the consequences.

This seems to be something that Bush has in common with Nixon: the White House ignoring everyone and seeking to become a government unto itself.
One of the things this administration has shown us is how fragile democracy is. All of the institutions we thought would protect us — particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress — they have failed. The courts . . . the jury’s not in yet on the courts. So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn’t. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that’s the most glaring.

In the Nixon years, you had the press turning against the Vietnam War after the Tet Offensive, you had Watergate, you had all these reasons why the press became involved in bringing the Nixon administration to an end. But it hasn’t performed that function in Bush’s case. Why do you think that is?
I don’t know. It’s very discouraging. I’ve had conversations with senior people at my old newspaper, the Times, who know that there are serious problems there. It’s not that they shouldn’t run the stories that they run. They run stories that represent the government’s view, because there are people at the Times who have access to senior people in the government. They see the national security adviser, they see Condoleezza Rice, and they have to reflect their view. That’s their job. What doesn’t get reported is the other side. What I always loved about the Times when I worked there is that I could write what the kiddies down the line said. But that doesn’t happen now. You’re not getting broad, macro coverage from the White House that represents anything like opposition. And there is opposition — the press just doesn’t know how to deal with it.

But why isn’t there more of an uproar by the public at atrocities committed by American troops? Have people become inured to those stories over the years?
I just think it’s because they are Iraqis. You have to give Bill Clinton his due: When he bombed Kosovo in 1999, he became the first president since World War II to bomb white people. Think about it. Does that mean something? Is it just an accident, or is it an inevitable byproduct of white supremacy? White man’s burden? You tell me what it is, I don’t know.

You talk a lot about the similarities between Iraq and Vietnam: how Lynndie England is the new Lt. Calley, how it’s lower-middle-class white kids from America killing nonwhite people overseas. Yes, there’s this similarity — but why is this same kind of war happening again? Is this a pattern that’s built into the way our government works?
I don’t know. Why would you go to war when you don’t have to go to war? It takes very little courage to go to war. It takes a lot of courage not to go to war.

I once had a friend — this was thirty years ago — from a major university. He studied the scientific problem the government had of detecting underground missile tests in Russia. It took him a couple of years, but he solved the problem. At that point the Joint Chiefs of Staff was against any treaty with the Russians on testing, because we couldn’t detect when they cheated. My friend attended a meeting of the Joint Chiefs and demonstrated conclusively that there was a technical way of monitoring missile explosions inside Russia, even without being on-site. But when the meeting was over, the Joint Chiefs just issued a sigh and said, “Well, we better go back to a political objection to the treaty now.” Where there had been a scientific objection to a treaty, now there was a political objection. So you begin to see that pushing for peace is very hard. There is safety in bombing, rather than negotiating. It’s very sad.

Did America learn anything from Vietnam? Was there a lesson in the way that war ended that could have prevented this war from starting?
You mean learn from the past? America?

Yes.
No. We made the same dumb mistake. One of the arguments for going into Vietnam was that we had to stop the communist Chinese. The Chinese were behind everything — we saw them and North Vietnam as one and the same. In reality, of course, the Chinese and the Vietnamese hated each other — they had fought each other for 1,000 years. Four years after the war ended, in 1979, they got into a nasty little war of their own. So we were totally wrong about the entire premise of the war. And it’s the same dumbness in this war, with Saddam and the terrorists.

On the other hand, I would argue that some key operators, the Cheney types, they learned a great deal about how to run things and how to hide stuff over those years.

From the press?
Oh, come on, how hard is it to hide things from the press? They don’t care that much about the straight press. What these guys have figured out is that as long as they have Fox and talk radio, they’re OK in the public opinion. They control that hard. It kept the ball in Iraq in the air for a couple of years longer than it should have, and it cost Kerry the presidency. But now it’s over — Iraq’s done. A lot of the conservatives who promoted the war are now very much against it. Some of the columnists in this town who were beating the drums for that war really owe an apology. It’s a sad time for the American press.

What can be done to fix the situation?
[Long pause] You’d have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives. You’d actually have to start promoting people from the newsrooms to be editors who you didn’t think you could control. And they’re not going to do that.

What’s the main lesson you take, looking back at America’s history the last forty years?
There’s nothing to look back to. We’re dealing with the same problems now that we did then. We know from the Pentagon Papers — and to me they were the most important documents ever written — that from 1963 on, Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon lied to us systematically about the war. I remember how shocked I was when I read them. So . . . duh! Nothing’s changed. They’ve just gotten better at dealing with the press. Nothing’s changed at all.

– Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/04/05/cheneys-nemesis/
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Saundra Hummer

April 5th, 2007, 01:52 PM

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Rosie O'Donnell Takes Fire in the Debate Over 9/11
By
Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on April 4, 2007

Last week, Rosie O'Donnell crossed a bright red line in the world of broadcast media: The outspoken actress and comedienne suggested that 9/11 was an "inside job." She implied -- never stating it outright -- that the World Trade Center was destroyed by the Bush administration in order to start a permanent war and also to cover up for the Enron scandal (the story goes that the IRS had records of all sorts of corporate malfeasance locked up in World Trade Center Tower 7, which was brought down in order to stymie investigations).

The reaction was fast, furious and predictable. Fox News host Bill O'Reilly called for O'Donnell's ouster, the National Review suggested she was insane and a host of right-wing bloggers held up the incident as emblematic of the way liberals think about national security. Right-wing talk-show host Joe Scarborough wondered if Rosie would bring about the end of "The View" host Barbara Walters' decades-long TV career. An (unscientific) opinion poll by America Online was swamped with more than a quarter of a million respondents; almost twice as many said that Rosie had "crossed a line" and should be fired than believed that O'Donnell's comments should be protected because "it's free speech."

Obscured by the predictable brouhaha were the rest of O'Donnell's comments. The discussion started with a debate about the British sailors being held by Iran. Even as some of the bastions of our supposedly "liberal" media have uncritically accepted the narrative that Iran today poses a threat like Nazi Germany did in the 1930s, O'Donnell, a TV personality, asked: "Historically, have governments ever faked incidents or incited incidents in order to get them into wars?"

She said: "In America we are fed propaganda, and if you want to know what's happening in the world go outside of the U.S. media because it's owned by four corporations. One of them is this one (ABC)." "Go outside of the country to find out what's going on in our own country," she urged an audience of millions of security-moms tuned into America's favorite coffee klatch, "because it's frightening."

"I think Democracy is threatened in a way it hasn't been in 200 years and if America doesn't stand up, we're in big trouble," she said. (You can watch the segment here. Go on=site to gain access to video by clicking on the URL at the end of article)

Of course, it wasn't her first brush with controversy on the show. In her short stint on "The View," O'Donnell has called for Bush's impeachment, argued that the trial of Saddam Hussein was a joke and joined most of the world's media in laughing at the Bush administration's claim that accused al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had confessed to every dastardly act committed since the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand started World War I.

With those comments, O'Donnell displayed the courage that's made her a nemesis to the right and a welcome voice for progressives. Joining Keith Olbermann, O'Donnell's unapologetic skepticism toward the conventional TV talk-show wisdom fills a yawning void in the commercial media;

Rosie and a very few others fill a gap left by a timid and often-complicit opposition party, one comfortable with the premise of American empire, and a lick spittle corporate media too deeply vested in the system to raise questions about it. They should be commended.

At the same time, relying on pampered celebrities to "speak truth to power" has inherent pitfalls. Rosie O'Donnell is not someone who has studied U.S. foreign policy like a Noam Chomsky, or the history of empire like Chalmers Johnson; she's someone trying to piece together what's happened in her country since 9/11, just like millions of other Americans.

And like millions of other Americans, she has apparently rejected the idea that the United States could experience real "blow-back" after decades of aggressive bullying in the Middle East. The rest of her comments on that day's show represented the worst of the left's conspiratorial tendencies; Rosie ran with the great intellectual fallacy that supports the 9/11 "Truth" movement: Anything not adequately explained by the official investigations into 9/11 are de facto evidence of an inside job:

"I do believe it's the first time in history that fire has melted steel," she said. "I do believe that it defies physics for the World Trade Center Building 7, which collapsed in on itself, it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved -- World Trade Center 7.

"One and two got hit by planes, 7 miraculously [for] the first time in history, steel was melted by fire -- it is physically impossible.

"I don't know, but to say we don't know and it was imploded in a demolition is beyond ignorant. Look at the films, get a physics expert here from Yale, from Harvard -- pick the school, it defies reason."

Nobody knows the precise sequence of events that brought Building 7 down, but claiming that the collapse defied physics is patently ridiculous. (Popular Mechanics, Public Enemy #1 for the 9/11 Truth crowd, refuted O'Donnell's specific claims.) What's more, Rosie's self-described "rants" support some of the prevalent right-wing story lines about liberals: that they're extremists, that they're defined by their fringe and led by out-of-touch Hollywood elites.

What's unfortunate about the incident -- and others involving celebrities jumping on the 9/11 conspiracy theory bandwagon -- is the opportunity cost: What might have led to a challenging debate about the close ties between the Bush administration and terrorist financiers, or about the United States' unshakable relationship with the Saudi Royal family or the nature of our energy policy or the toll of American militarism emerged instead as an easily-refuted argument based, at the end of the day, on a talk-show host's knowledge about the melting point of steel.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

All of us have the right to speak our mind; to make our beliefs known, however, and this is a big "HOWEVER", we all have to remember that oftentimes it is emotion rather than knowledge, or indepth knowledge, which drives many of us to speak out as Rosie has done. Many do have the indepth knowledge to drive home a point, while many read, or hear, just a small sampling of what is at the core of an issue, and speak out, leaving many to believe they are wacko's who should keep out of such issues, or, we believe in them as we would the "Gospel". If such acts by, say, a celebrity, get us thinking and delving into issues, then wonderful, but, and this again is a big point, if we take everything anyone and their brother tells us to heart, as being the way things truly are, and this includes the press, as well as politicians, then we are in trouble, as things can only go down-hill.

Many get carried away with their own self; their own self perceived knowledge, this happens, it seems, to many of us. We all need to dig a whole lot deeper into any number of issues, and use our reasoning skills at full bore. I include myself in this appraisal of those who would have us listen to all we say. I'm only printing what I find interesting & pertinent. Much is documented, however, most issues floating around out there, from, and about politicians, needs more scrutiny, this is true of the airwaves, tv, and print as well. All of what we hear, and see, may or may not be as it seems. Almost every issue could stand a bit of deeper digging. SRH

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/50116/
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Saundra Hummer

April 5th, 2007, 04:04 PM

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A NEWS LETTER

April 5, 2007

Dear Friend,

For much of the past week, CNN and its White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux have offered a steady stream of inaccurate and incomplete coverage of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) trip to the Middle East and her April 3 meeting with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. Please join us in demanding that CNN and Malveaux stop misinforming viewers about Pelosi's trip and present all the facts.

» Take Action Today!
http://mediamatters.org/items/200704050009?f=action20070405

Since April 2, Malveaux has wrongly and repeatedly claimed that Pelosi had no "standing" and was not acting in an "official capacity," has attacked the trip as "political theater" and a "political stunt," and has parroted the Bush administration's attacks on Pelosi for going to Syria while ignoring the fact that a Republican-led delegation met with Assad on April 1. Most recently, Malveaux asked whether Pelosi's trip was a "big wet kiss to President Al-Assad."

Other CNN personalities have joined in as well. Lou Dobbs devoted an entire segment to "Pelosi's bad trip," while the April 3 edition of Anderson Cooper 360 featured a segment on Pelosi's trip titled "Talking to Terrorists."

» Take Action Today!

After several days of inaccurate, one-sided coverage, it's time to tell CNN enough is enough. It's time to take action.

Sincerely,

Jamison Foser
Managing Director
Media Matters for America

P.S. Take action today to hold CNN accountable. Click here and be sure to tell your friends.

Check out these items on coverage of Pelosi's trip to Syria:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200704040010
http://mediamatters.org/items/200704040016
http://mediamatters.org/items/200704020012
http://mediamatters.org/items/200704050001
http://mediamatters.org/items/200704030010
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/04/04/what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-cnn/
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Saundra Hummer

April 5th, 2007, 05:18 PM

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Tomgram: Doin' the Karl Rove dance
Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com
04.04.07

At the White House Correspondents' Dinner the other night, Karl Rove was called up on stage and asked to identify himself. "Peter Fitzgerald," he promptly said. Then, he corrected himself, "Patrick Fitzgerald" (That is, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who had just convicted Vice President Cheney's former right-hand man, I. Lewis Libby.)

The Rove act then continued this way:

Comedian Brad Sherwood: "We just want to ask you some questions about, uh--"

Rove, tauntingly: "Lot's of people want to ask me questions."

Well, hand Karl the evening's prize for chutzpah. Nonetheless, one of these days, no matter how the President, Vice President, their top aides, officials, and advisors circle the wagons, no matter how aggressively they attack, no matter how many fallback explanations they have ready, no matter how many email dumps they make, they may be surprised to find themselves answering some of the questions that Americans increasingly do want asked.

Sooner or later, ours may look like a United States v. George W. Bush et al. world. (To some extent, it already does.) As it happens, that's the prescient title of a remarkable, bestselling book by Elizabeth de la Vega. A former federal prosecutor, de la Vega drew up her own hypothetical indictment laying out how the Bush administration defrauded us into war; convened her own "grand jury"; and, in a little paperback published late last year, made her worse-then-Enron case. It will be a defining document of our times and one that should be in every house in the land.

Meanwhile, de la Vega turns to the question of just what it means to be in a land of "loyal Bushies." Tom

Doin' the Karl Rove Dance
A Chorus Line of "Loyal Bushies"
By
Elizabeth de la Vega

Last week, Americans with access to YouTube were subjected to a once-in-a-lifetime performance by President Bush's senior political adviser Karl Rove. At least, I fervently hope that this event will only happen once in our lifetimes. Watching Rove, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, bobbing and weaving awkwardly in a pathetic parody of a rapper was painful. However, more excruciating than his routine -- "MC Rove: Doin' the Dance, the Karl Rove Dance" to lyrics supplied by comedian Brad Sherwood -- was the sight of the members of our so-called independent Washington press corps laughing amiably at the antics of a senior presidential aide whose conduct is so universally considered despicable that no one even flinches at ill-timed lines like: "Don't get the jitters/but MC Rove tears the head off of critters." That scene was the stuff of nightmares.

Rove's rap performance was disturbing, yes; but, in the end, it was also relatively brief and harmless. The same cannot be said of the danse macabre he has been directing since the Bush administration took over the White House. We know that Rove is a master of the quick-step and the hustle, but he almost never makes his moves in public. Instead, he has been directing the Bush production from the Office of Political Affairs whose purpose is, according to the White House website, to ensure "that the executive branch and the President are aware of the concerns of the American citizen."

Karl Rove has, for years, been choreographing an elaborate dance of death for the federal government designed to give life to the Republican Party, and yet the public remains largely ignorant of his activities because he so rarely takes the stage. That honor is reserved for an apparently infinite supply of young Republicans eager to dance their little hearts out for a chance to get plum appointments. In other words, the prerequisite for the success of the Bush administration's extravaganza -- whether in Washington, Iraq, or elsewhere -- has been a chorus line of "loyal Bushies."

Of course, the term "loyal Bushie" requires no definition, but one has recently been supplied by Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's former deputy chief of staff. Undoubtedly to his everlasting regret, Sampson, who resigned just prior to his testimony last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, used this term to describe those United States Attorneys who should be retained by the White House because they had "managed well and exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general." Those who "chafed against administration initiatives" were recommended for removal, according to Sampson; while the rest of the lot, including U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, were unranked.

I spent last Thursday watching Sampson testify about the White House choreographed firings of seven U.S. Attorneys who were chafers. I was compelled to watch, even though, having worked for more than 21 years as an Assistant United States Attorney myself, I considered the revelation of this latest outrage to be the least horrific of a long string of horrors carried out by the Bush administration in the name of the Department of Justice for the advancement of the Republican Party.

To satisfy the tobacco lobby, for instance, President Bush's Department of Justice (DOJ) appointees gutted the most significant case ever brought against the giant tobacco companies. To assuage the Republican base, Bush's DOJ brought an unprecedented number of civil rights cases on behalf of non-minorities, while drastically limiting its traditional affirmative-action lawsuits. In order to portray themselves as representatives of the party most likely to make the American people feel safe -- a cherished nugget of political wisdom from Karl Rove's constant polling activities -- Bush's Attorneys General have sanctioned, caused to be carried out, and/or turned a blind eye to the use of illegal spying on citizens, illegal detentions at Guantanamo and elsewhere, kidnappings and "extraordinary renditions" to countries which the State Department has classified as the most egregious of human rights violators and, worst of all, administration-sanctioned acts of torture.

It is these activities that, to adopt the words of a fellow former Assistant United States Attorney and lifelong Republican, "turn my stomach." Given that, under the stewardship of John Ashcroft and then Alberto Gonzales, the Department of Justice has consistently engaged in heinous criminal activity and blatant civil-rights violations around the world, I was finding it difficult to be as exercised as some about the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. Certainly, there is abundant evidence that as many as seven U.S. Attorneys were removed for no other reason than to enable the administration to fill their positions with up-and-coming Republicans or, worse, to interfere with or influence the investigation of one or more cases for partisan political reasons -- a purpose that even Sampson acknowledged would be improper. But that didn't get to me. Nor was I particularly incensed by the fact that, as former U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins of Little Rock, Arkansas commented on CBS's Face the Nation, the authority to make presidential appointments may possibly have been "delegated down through Harriet Miers, Karl Rove, Judge Gonzales and all the way down to a bunch of 35-year-old-kids who -- who got in a room together and tried to decide who was the most loyal to the president." That story seemed to me to be less an accurate description of what happened than a blame-it-on-the-kids alibi offered on behalf of Bush, Rove, Miers, and Gonzales.

Listening to Sampson, however, and reading the careless, often juvenile emails he exchanged with fellow loyal Bushies, 33-year-old Monica Goodling (Gonzales' top aide, now on administrative leave because she pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before Congress) and Scott Jennings (another thirty-something aide to Karl Rove in the Office of Political Affairs), I felt my stomach beginning to roil again. In the end, what really got me was the realization that none of these Republican-politicians-in-training had any concept of public service. Worse, they were entirely contemptuous of the very government they had been entrusted to run.

I spent my entire career in federal service, starting with a stint as a clerk for a federal judge. Modest and self-effacing as he was, just like every other judge I've ever known, he had a fondness for dispensing homely wisdom to his clerks. One of his favorites -- "When in doubt, do right" -- always made me laugh. It was, for starters, ridiculously corny. I thought, what a no-brainer -- except in those agonizing situations where competing moral or ethical concerns caused uncertainty about what course of action to follow. If you knew what was right, of course you would do it.

It never occurred to me that anyone would behave otherwise, but then again, I was young -- and I hadn't been around Karl Rove. On the other hand, the judge, a Republican, had been around his share of rogues. Indeed, he had survived an administration that was remarkably similar to the one we have today. Years before I clerked for him, he had been appointed United States Attorney by President Richard Nixon. As his first official act, the judge had selected a trusted colleague to be his First Assistant and they both went about their business.

One day not long afterwards, however, the judge returned from lunch to find a member of Nixon's legal staff waiting for him: The man had traveled from Washington, D.C to tell him that he had to fire his First Assistant because he was a Democrat. What did the judge do? He told the lawyer to get out of his office -- politely, I would imagine -- and not come back. That was the end of the matter.

As it happens, the judge's homely advice to his clerks is almost exactly the title of the Department of Justice Ethics Rules provided to every new employee. They inform the ethics training that DOJ employees around the country receive once a year. The standards of conduct issued by Alberto Gonzales' own shop are called "Do it Right" and here is the introductory paragraph:

"You may have heard it said that ‘public service is a public trust.' This means that each Federal employee has a responsibility to the United States Government and its citizens to place loyalty to the Constitution, laws and ethical principles above private gain. The public deserves and should expect no less."

Tragically, the public has been receiving so much less from the entire Bush administration. What would have happened to a Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney who engaged in the sort of brazen display of integrity I just described? We now know exactly what. Main Justice, as the DOJ's Washington, D. C. office is called, is well-staffed with "loyal Bushies" who will apparently carry out any tasks assigned, regardless of how unethical, illegal, or immoral they may be. The President is now trying to staff the U.S. Attorney's Offices throughout the country with the same feckless loyalists. If he is allowed to proceed unimpeded, those offices too will be run by United States Attorneys "Doin' the Karl Rove Dance."

Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in the Nation Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon. She writes regularly for Tomdispatch.com. She is the author of United States v. George W. Bush et al., which has been optioned for a movie scheduled to begin production in the summer of 2007. She may be contacted at ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net.
Copyright 2007 Elizabeth de la Vega
(c) 2007, TomDispatch.com
URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=22197 :: :: :: .

Saundra Hummer

April 5th, 2007, 05:57 PM

.
~~~~~~~
Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war.

The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.

Eugene Debs
16 June 1918:

The speech was given to about 1,200 people and was later used against Debs to make the case that he had violated the espionage Act. The judge sentenced Debs to ten years in prison:

~~~

"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by "a world of enemies", "one against all", that a fundmental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man".

Hannah Arendt
from her book
The Origins Of Totalitarianism
p.227

~~~~~ .
.

Saundra Hummer

April 5th, 2007, 06:22 PM

.
^^^^^^^^^^^

Questions Linger About Bushes and BCCI
Analysis by Lucy Komisar*
04/05/07 -- -- NEW YORK, Apr 4 (IPS) - Now that the U.S. Congress is investigating the truth of President George W. Bush's statements about the Iraq war, they might look into one of his most startling assertions: that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Critics dismissed that as an invention. They were wrong. There was a link, but not the one Bush was selling. The link between Hussein and Bin Laden was their banker, BCCI. But the link went beyond the dictator and the jihadist -- it passed through Saudi Arabia and stretched all the way to George W. Bush and his father.

BCCI was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a dirty offshore bank that then-president Ronald Reagan's Central Intelligence Agency used to run guns to Hussein, finance Osama bin Laden, move money in the illegal Iran-Contra operation and carry out other "agency" black ops. The Bushes also benefited privately; one of the bank's largest Saudi investors helped bail out George W. Bush's troubled oil investments.

BCCI was founded in 1972 by a Pakistani banker, Agha Hasan Abedi, with the support of Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi and head of the United Arab Emirates. Its corporate strategy was money laundering. It became the banker for drug and arms traffickers, corrupt officials, financial fraudsters, dictators and terrorists.

The CIA used BCCI Islamabad and other branches in Pakistan to funnel some of the two billion dollars that Washington sent to Osama bin Laden's Mujahadeen to help fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. It moved the cash the Pakistani military and government officials skimmed from U.S. aid to the Mujahadeen. It also moved money as required by the Saudi intelligence services.

The BCCI operation gave Osama bin Laden an education in offshore black finance that he would put to use when he organised the jihad against the United States. He would move money through the Al-Taqwa Bank, operating in offshore Nassau and Switzerland with two Osama siblings as shareholders.

At the same time, BCCI helped Saddam Hussein, funneling millions of dollars to the Atlanta branch of the Italian government-owned Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), Baghdad's U.S. banker, so that from 1985 to 1989 it could make four billion dollars in secret loans to Iraq to help it buy arms.

U.S. Congressman Henry Gonzalez held a hearing on BNL in 1992 during which he quoted from a confidential CIA document that said the agency had long been aware that the bank's headquarters was involved in the U.S. branch's Iraqi loans.

Kickbacks from 15 percent commissions on BNL-sponsored loanswere channeled into bank accounts held for Iraqi leaders via BCCI offices in the Caymans as well as in offshore Luxembourg and Switzerland. BNL was a client of Kissinger Associates, and Henry Kissinger was on the bank's international advisory board, along with Brent Scowcroft, who would become George Bush Sr.'s national security advisor. That connection makes the Bush administration's surprise and indignation at "oil for food" payoffs in Iraq seem disingenuous.
Important Saudis were influential in the bank. Sheik Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of the late Saudi King Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1963 to 1979, and the CIA's liaison in the area, became one of BCCI's largest shareholders. George Bush Sr. knew Adham from his time running the CIA in 1975.

Another investor was Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, who succeeded Adham as Saudi intelligence chief. The family of Khalid Salem bin Mahfouz, owner of the National Commercial Bank, the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, banker to King Fahd and other members of the ruling family, bought 20 to 30 percent of the stock for nearly one billion dollars. Bin Mahfouz was put on the board of directors.

The Arabs' interest in the bank was more than financial. A classified CIA memo on BCCI in the mid-1980s said that "its principal shareholders are among the power elite of the Middle East, including the rulers of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, and several influential Saudi Arabians. They are less interested in profitability than in promoting the Muslim cause."

The Bushes' private links to the bank passed to Bin Mahfouz through Texas businessman James R. Bath, who invested money in the United States on behalf of the Saudi. In 1976, when Bush was the head of the CIA, the agency sold some of the planes of Air America, a secret "proprietary" airline it used during the Vietnam War, to Skyway, a company owned by Bath and Bin Mahfouz. Bath then helped finance George W. Bush's oil company, Arbusto Energy Inc., in 1979 and 1980.

When Harken Energy Corp., which had absorbed Arbusto (by then merged with Spectrum 7 Energy), got into financial trouble in 1987, Jackson Stephens of the powerful, politically-connected Arkansas investment firm helped it secure 25 million dollars in financing from the Union Bank of Switzerland. As part of that deal, a place on the board was given to Harken shareholder Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz.

Then, in 1988, George Bush Sr. was elected president. Harken benefited by getting some new investors, including Salem bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's half-brother, and Khalid bin Mahfouz. Osama bin Laden himself was busy elsewhere at the time -- organising al Qaeda.

The money BCCI stolebefore it was shut down in 1991 -- somewhere between 9.5 billion and 15 billion dollars -- made its 20-year heist the biggest bank fraud in history. Most of it was never recovered. International banks' complicity in the offshore secrecy system effectively covered up the money trail.

But in the years after the collapse of BCCI, Khalid bin Mahfouz was still flush with cash. In 1992, he established the Muwafaq ("blessed relief") Foundation in the offshore Channel Islands. The U.S. Treasury Department called it "an al Qaeda front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen."

When the BCCI scandal began to break in the late 1980s, the Sr. Bush administration did what it could to sit on it. The Justice Department went after the culprits -- was virtually forced to -- only after New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau did. But evidence about BCCI's broader links exist in numerous U.S. and international investigations. Now could be a good time to take another look at the BCCI-Osama-Saddam-Saudi-Bush connection.

*Investigative journalist Lucy Komisar's chapter, "The BCCI Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad," appears in the new book "A Game as Old as Empire", just published by Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco). (END/2007)

Whoa!!! This is something, what a web they weave!

Go on-site, to access this article any links and to read more in this fantastic news gathering project. There's much to see.

URL:http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17488.htm
^^^^^^^^^^^^^ .

Saundra Hummer

April 6th, 2007, 11:22 AM

.
:: :: :: :: ::
NOAM CHOMSKY
ON TOMDISPATCH.COM
ON
THE IRAN EFFECT

This “debate” is a typical illustration of a primary principle of sophisticated propaganda. In crude and brutal societies, the Party Line is publicly proclaimed and must be obeyed — or else. What you actually believe is your own business and of far less concern. In societies where the state has lost the capacity to control by force, the Party Line is simply presupposed; then, vigorous debate is encouraged within the limits imposed by unstated doctrinal orthodoxy. The cruder of the two systems leads, naturally enough, to disbelief; the sophisticated variant gives an impression of openness and freedom, and so far more effectively serves to instill the Party Line. It becomes beyond question, beyond thought itself, like the air we breathe.

The debate over Iranian interference in Iraq proceeds without ridicule on the assumption that the United States owns the world. We did not, for example, engage in a similar debate in the 1980s about whether the U.S. was interfering in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and I doubt that Pravda, probably recognizing the absurdity of the situation, sank to outrage about that fact (which American officials and our media, in any case, made no effort to conceal). Perhaps the official Nazi press also featured solemn debates about whether the Allies were interfering in sovereign Vichy France, though if so, sane people would then have collapsed in ridicule.

In this case, however, even ridicule — notably absent — would not suffice, because the charges against Iran are part of a drumbeat of pronouncements meant to mobilize support for escalation in Iraq and for an attack on Iran , the “source of the problem.” The world is aghast at the possibility. Even in neighboring Sunni states, no friends of Iran, majorities, when asked, favor a nuclear-armed Iran over any military action against that country. From what limited information we have, it appears that significant parts of the U.S. military and intelligence communities are opposed to such an attack, along with almost the entire world, even more so than when the Bush administration and Tony Blair’s Britain invaded Iraq, defying enormous popular opposition worldwide.

“The Iran Effect”

The results of an attack on Iran could be horrendous. After all, according to a recent study of “the Iraq effect” by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, using government and Rand Corporation data, the Iraq invasion has already led to a seven-fold increase in terror. The “Iran effect” would probably be far more severe and long-lasting. British military historian Corelli Barnett speaks for many when he warns that “an attack on Iran would effectively launch World War III.” .............

CNN: US MILITARY PROTECTS IRAN TERROR GROUP

An Iranian opposition group based in Iraq is receiving protection from the American military despite being considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. The MEK is blamed for bombings in Iran but also credited with helping expose Tehran’s secret nuclear program. The U.S. designation of MEK as a terror group means no American can give support to its members.

Go on-site to gain access to these articles by clicking on the following URL:
URL: http://www.newsdissector.com/blog/
:: :: ::

papsrus

April 6th, 2007, 11:29 AM

This line from the above article on creationists struck me as one that could be applied to right-wing politicos in general:

Creationists know at some instinctive level that time is running out. Hence, the more desperate they are - and the more irrational - as they cling to the old.

Substitute the word "conservatives" for "creationists" and you don't miss a beat.

the magnificent goldberg

April 6th, 2007, 11:40 AM

This line from the above article on creationists struck me as one that could be applied to right-wing politicos in general:

Substitute the word "conservatives" for "creationists" and you don't miss a beat.

Quite right - you don't miss a beat in transferring the quote to Conservatives. But you DO miss a beat in applying it to Creationists in the first place - because I think they are reckoning on very long time scales. Unless they reckon "Armageddon, the musical" is coming out next week.

MG

papsrus

April 6th, 2007, 11:54 AM

the magnificent goldberg

April 6th, 2007, 12:04 PM

Hmmm ... good point. But doesn't their sense of desperation argue the opposite? That they are losing the argument with science and it is only a matter of time before science overtakes them? Or is that desperation rooted in a moral certainty that simply must be imposed at any cost?

I suspect the sound of desperation arises from the difficulty in finding a suitable Republican candidate for the Presidential election. Rudy looks like the best REAL Conservative - and his stances on abortion, guns and gay marriage are true Conservatism, did the freaks but know it (and did he but emphasise their position in a "get the Government out of people's private business" platform).

There's a lot that's RIGHT with the Right, and there's a lot that's RIGHT with the Left. It makes no sense to deny that the other side has SOME of the answers.

MG

papsrus

April 6th, 2007, 12:17 PM

... There's a lot that's RIGHT with the Right, and there's a lot that's RIGHT with the Left. It makes no sense to deny that the other side has SOME of the answers.

MG

Ahh ... very good. I agree with you here and perhaps we will find the middle ground again soon. But 6-plus years of being subjected to a right-wing think-tank experiment have left many weary. Me included. I am simply inclined to vote every incumbent out of office, frankly, whether they be right, left or centrist. Power seems to eventually corrupt all of them.

As for the creationists, I'd want to know the precise question that elicited the response that 48% (I think that was the number) don't believe in evolution. That may shed some light on things as well.

Saundra Hummer

April 6th, 2007, 12:29 PM

Ahh ... very good. I agree with you here and perhaps we will find the middle ground again soon. But 6-plus years of being subjected to a right-wing think-tank experiment have left many weary. Me included. I am simply inclined to vote every incumbent out of office, frankly, whether they be right, left or centrist. Power seems to eventually corrupt all of them eventually.

As for the creationists, I'd want to know the precise question that elicited the response that 48% (I think that was the number) don't believe in evolution. That may shed some light on things as well.

Quote:
Originally Posted by the magnificent goldberg
... There's a lot that's RIGHT with the Right, and there's a lot that's RIGHT with the Left. It makes no sense to deny that the other side has SOME of the answers.

MG
....

MG:

The thing is, there's the "Right Wing" and then there's the PNAC, which are a totally different matter to my way of thinking. From where I sit, it's the PNAC devotee's who are wrecking havoc with all we hold dear.

If you go on the Christian Science Monitor's web site (Not a religious tone is evident in any of their articles, except for ones on theology - the CSM is the most unbiased of all of our newspapers.) and look this up: The Plan for a New American Century; it tells about how and why we are where we are, as it's these mens dreams of an American Global Empire which has propelled too many of our politicians. This isn't the Right as we've always thought of it. Instead, these men, and other devotees to their cause, are a dangerous entity which has us all worried for the world, not just for ourselves.

the magnificent goldberg

April 6th, 2007, 12:47 PM

Quote:
Originally Posted by the magnificent goldberg
... There's a lot that's RIGHT with the Right, and there's a lot that's RIGHT with the Left. It makes no sense to deny that the other side has SOME of the answers.

MG
....

MG:

The thing is, there's the "Right Wing" and then there's the PNAC, which are a totally different matter to my way of thinking. From where I sit, it's the PNAC devotee's who are wrecking havoc with all we hold dear.

If you go on the Christian Science Monitor's web site (Not a religious tone is evident in any of their articles, except for ones on theology - the CSM is the most unbiased of all of our newspapers.) and look this up: The Plan for a New American Century; it tells about how and why we are where we are, as it's these mens dreams of an American Global Empire which has propelled too many of our politicians. This isn't the Right as we've always thought of it. Instead, these men, and other devotees to their cause, are a dangerous entity which has us all worried for the world, not just for ourselves.

Well, as I think I've pointed out elsewhere, America has never had a left wing Governent; just varying shades of right. So, in order to put clear water between each other, the two parties have had to concentrate on their extremes. This has meant that the extremism of the Right has had a wide open field, but that of the Left has been restricted due to the (false) identification of Socialism with Communism. It seems possible that you would have had better government had there been a real left, with a real chance at winning sometimes, simply because mutual extremism would have been unnecessary.

MG

papsrus

April 6th, 2007, 12:59 PM

Well, as I think I've pointed out elsewhere, America has never had a left wing Governent; just varying shades of right. So, in order to put clear water between each other, the two parties have had to concentrate on their extremes. This has meant that the extremism of the Right has had a wide open field, but that of the Left has been restricted due to the (false) identification of Socialism with Communism. It seems possible that you would have had better government had there been a real left, with a real chance at winning sometimes, simply because mutual extremism would have been unnecessary.

MG

Seems that politics here is all about following the money and identifying the constituency with the biggest cash flow. And since left-wing constituencies often don't have much of a cash flow, they don't have many politicians fighting for them.

I suppose that's stating the obvious, but it is perhaps ironic that the more economically successful a country becomes, the more likely it may be to turn to the right, politically.

A majority of people have enough to satisfy themselves so lets just get "conservative" and preserve everyone's happiness.

Course, it doesn't quite work out that smoothly ....

the magnificent goldberg

April 6th, 2007, 01:29 PM

Seems that politics here is all about following the money and identifying the constituency with the biggest cash flow. And since left-wing constituencies often don't have much of a cash flow, they don't have many politicians fighting for them.

I suppose that's stating the obvious, but it is perhaps ironic that the more economically successful a country becomes, the more likely it may be to turn to the right, politically.

A majority of people have enough to satisfy themselves so lets just get "conservative" and preserve everyone's happiness.

Course, it doesn't quite work out that smoothly ....

That's it. Have you read John Kenneth Galbraith's "The culture of contentment"? It's all about that.

MG

papsrus

April 6th, 2007, 01:33 PM

^ I have not. I will look for a copy though. Thnx

Saundra Hummer

April 6th, 2007, 04:12 PM

Well, as I think I've pointed out elsewhere, America has never had a left wing Governent; just varying shades of right. So, in order to put clear water between each other, the two parties have had to concentrate on their extremes. This has meant that the extremism of the Right has had a wide open field, but that of the Left has been restricted due to the (false) identification of Socialism with Communism. It seems possible that you would have had better government had there been a real left, with a real chance at winning sometimes, simply because mutual extremism would have been unnecessary.

MG

You hear the hollering, I'm certain of it. Republicans are rampant about how the Democrats are cowards, war mongers, money spending fools, advocates of more and bigger government, and on and on it goes. It's like we need to duck and run to try to avoid all they try to throw at us. All the worlds ills are the result of the "Left", meaning the Democrats. But look who's given us more and more to deal with as far as government goes. Under Reagan, it was more "Big Government", he deluged us with more and more, and now with Cheney and Bush it's more of the same, it's like a snowball gathering up more and more bulk and momentum, until it's an avalanche. This is dizzying.

We have a problem and that is lobbying. Lobbyists, and Corporations buy into any, and all who run for office. They own the country. They do; they own us. So, it's both sides who dance when the time comes; you can count on it; really, the time always comes. They will put in their inevitable requests. There's always payback time.

Saundra Hummer

April 6th, 2007, 07:02 PM

.
~~~~~~~

"Americans cannot escape a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around the world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate authority rests with the people. We empower the government with our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official actions overseas, we in effect endorse them."

Mark Hertzgaard

~~~

"The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance".

Benjamin Franklin

~~~

"The most effective means of preventing tyranny is to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts."

Thomas Jefferson

~~~

"Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act."

Albert Einstein

~~~~~
.

the magnificent goldberg

April 7th, 2007, 02:08 AM

You hear the hollering, I'm certain of it. Republicans are rampant about how the Democrats are cowards, war mongers, money spending fools, advocates of more and bigger government, and on and on it goes. It's like we need to duck and run to try to avoid all they try to throw at us. All the worlds ills are the result of the "Left", meaning the Democrats. But look who's given us more and more to deal with as far as government goes. Under Reagan, it was more "Big Government", he deluged us with more and more, and now with Cheney and Bush it's more of the same, it's like a snowball gathering up more and more bulk and momentum, until it's an avalanche. This is dizzying.

We have a problem and that is lobbying. Lobbyists, and Corporations buy into any, and all who run for office. They own the country. They do; they own us. So, it's both sides who dance when the time comes; you can count on it; really, the time always comes. They will put in their inevitable requests. There's always payback time.

It is quite important that business can lobby Government. It is equally important that Government can lobby business. It seems to me - from a British perspective and having worked within the British system, of course - that there are some conditions which make the lobbying process a lot more useful, to both Government and business, and a lot less iniquitous to the general public.

First, the Government has actually got to be prepared to use the lobby to influence business quite as much as business uses it to influence Government. Without that willingness, it's a one-way traffic, and that's bad.

Second, individual firms shouldn't generally have access to Government at a political level. Access should normally be through general trade organisations.

Third, even trade organisations shouldn't have much access to Government at a political level; at least until after permanent officials have cleared a lot of the ground and made sure the business side of the lobby understands the limits to which they'll be subject.

Even with these conditions, it's still possible for regulators to be captured by the regulated. So every so often, it's necesary to make some kind of sweeping changes.

I get the feeling that a two-way lobby is felt to be unAmerican. My experience is that it works; on many occasions I got industry to change its policies to ones which furthered Government policy in one area or other, while at the same time changing Government policy to something a bit more in accord with what industry wanted. Government is about doing deals - but negotiating hard for your side's benefit. The impression I get from America is that Government doesn't do this - it just does what the lobbyists tell them - and the people responsible then go on to lucrative jobs in those industies.

MG

papsrus

April 7th, 2007, 07:41 AM

the magnificent goldberg

April 7th, 2007, 08:07 AM

^ The accepted arrangements between business and government that go on in the United States (basically bribery) I believe would be illegal in most other civilized countries. But these arrangements all seem to be cloaked under the protection of the First Amendment.

What's the First Amendment? I know it can't say, "bribery is OK", because Dabia Baba was done for it. Or does it only apply to American billionaires?

MG

papsrus

April 7th, 2007, 10:59 AM

The First Amendment to the Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Basically, it's the "abridging the freedom of speech" part, I think. People who pay for access to politicians argue that restricting that access (ie: forbidding them to pay for that access) violates this principle. It's the argument that is always used to battle campaign finance reform. And campaign donations are an important way for big business to access and influence legislators.

Now, there have in recent years been some successes in campaign finance reform, but they amount to a fingers in the dike; restrictions that work for a while, but ultimately those who want to will always find a creative way around those limits.

the magnificent goldberg

April 7th, 2007, 11:35 AM

The First Amendment to the Constitution:

Basically, it's the "abridging the freedom of speech" part, I think. People who pay for access to politicians argue that restricting that access (ie: forbidding them to pay for that access) violates this principle. It's the argument that is always used to battle campaign finance reform. And campaign donations are an important way for big business to access and influence legislators.

My goodness! I'm lost for words!

papsrus

April 7th, 2007, 11:44 AM

^ Ya ... I know.

This is what happens in a nation of lawyers.

papsrus

April 7th, 2007, 12:04 PM

MG,
I see that John Kenneth Galbraith title you mentioned earlier over at amazon for $0.01. (used) :D

Free shipping is doubtful, but I'm going to go ahead and make the investment.

the magnificent goldberg

April 7th, 2007, 12:27 PM

MG,
I see that John Kenneth Galbraith title you mentioned earlier over at amazon for $0.01. (used) :D

Free shipping is doubtful, but I'm going to go ahead and make the investment.

Yes, I think I've commented on that before. This ain't the first time I've pimped that book.

But it IS excellent and Galbraith is a wonderful, literate, writer.

Perhaps you'd get free shipping if you ordered enough of his books :)

MG

Saundra Hummer

April 8th, 2007, 11:12 AM

.............
Disease underlies Hatfield-McCoy feud

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE
AP Medical Writer
Sat Apr 7, 9:14 PM ET

The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts.

Dozens of McCoy descendants apparently have the disease, which causes high blood pressure, racing hearts, severe headaches and too much adrenaline and other "fight or flight" stress hormones.

No one blames the whole feud on this, but doctors say it could help explain some of the clan's notorious behavior.

"This condition can certainly make anybody short-tempered, and if they are prone because of their personality, it can add fuel to the fire," said Dr. Revi Mathew, a Vanderbilt University endocrinologist treating one of the family members.

The Hatfields and McCoys have a storied and deadly history dating to Civil War times. Their generations of fighting over land, timber rights and even a pig are the subject of dozens of books, songs and countless jokes. Unfortunately for Appalachia, the feud is one of its greatest sources of fame.

Several genetic experts have known about the disease plaguing some of the McCoys for decades, but kept it secret. The Associated Press learned of it after several family members revealed their history to Vanderbilt doctors, who are trying to find more McCoy relatives to warn them of the risk.

One doctor who had researched the family for decades called them the "McC kindred" in a 1998 medical journal article tracing the disease through four generations.

"He said something about us never being able to get insurance" if the full family name was used, said Rita Reynolds, a Bristol, Tenn., woman with the disease. She says she is a McCoy descendant and has documents from the doctor showing his work on her family.

She is speaking up now so distant relatives might realize their risk and get help before the condition proves fatal, as it did to many of her ancestors.

Back then, "we didn't even know this existed," she said. "They just up and died."

Von Hippel-Lindau disease, which afflicts many family members, can cause tumors in the eyes, ears, pancreas, kidney, brain and spine. Roughly three-fourths of the affected McCoys have pheochromocytomas — tumors of the adrenal gland.

The small, bubbly-looking orange adrenal gland sits atop each kidney and makes adrenaline and substances called catecholamines. Too much can cause high blood pressure, pounding headaches, heart palpitations, facial flushing, nausea and vomiting. There is no cure for the disease, but removing the tumors before they turn cancerous can improve survival.

Affected family members have long been known to be combative, even with their kin. Reynolds recalled her grandfather, "Smallwood" McCoy.

"When he would come to visit, everyone would run and hide. They acted like they were scared to death of him. He had a really bad temper," she said.

Her adopted daughter, another McCoy descendant, 11-year-old Winnter Reynolds, just had an adrenal tumor removed at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital. Teachers thought the girl had ADHD — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Now, Winnter says, "my parents are thinking it may be the tumor" that caused the behavior. "I've been feeling great since they took it out."

Her adoptive father, James Reynolds, said of the McCoys: "It don't take much to set them off. They've got a pretty good temper.

"Before the surgery, Winnter, when we would discipline her, she'd squeeze her fists together and get real angry and start hollering back at us, screaming and crying," he said.

As for the older McCoys, "they just started dropping dead of the tumors," he said. "They didn't know what it was. A name wasn't really put on the disease until 1968. That's when one of my brothers-in-law had to have surgery, to have some tumors removed in his brain. They started to notice tumors occurring in each of the family members."

Dr. Nuzhet Atuk at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and geneticists at the University of Pennsylvania studied the family for more than 30 years, Rita Reynolds said.

"They went back on the genealogy and all of that stuff," she said. "They called it madness disease. They said that it had to be coming from the VHL. Our family would just go off, even on the doctors."

Now 85 and retired, Atuk said he could not talk about his work because of medical confidentiality.

Rita Reynolds had two adrenal tumors removed a few years ago. Her mother and three brothers also had them. So do McCoy descendants in Oregon, Michigan and Indiana, she said.

"When you have these tumors, you're easy to get upset," said Rita's mother, Goldie Hankins, 76, of Big Rock, Va., near the Kentucky-West Virginia border. "When people get on your nerves, you just can't take it. You get angry because your blood pressure was so high."

Still, many are dubious that this condition had much of a role in the bitter feud with the Hatfields, which played out in the hill country of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia for decades.

Some say the feud dates to Civil War days, when some members of the families took opposite sides. It grew into disputes over timber rights and land in the 1870s, and gained more notoriety in 1878, when Randolph or "Old Randal" McCoy accused a Hatfield of stealing one of his pigs. The hostilities left at least a dozen dead.

"The McCoy temperament is legendary. Whether or not we can blame it on genes, I don't know," said Ron McCoy, 43, of Durham, N.C., one of the organizers of the annual Hatfield-McCoy reunion. "There are a lot of underpinnings that are probably a more legitimate source of conflict."

"There was a lot of inter-marrying" that could have played havoc with the gene pool, he conceded.

Another relative, Bo McCoy, of Waverly, Ohio, said he had never heard talk of the disease although he has been diagnosed with a different adrenal gland problem — Cushing's syndrome.

Even Reo Hatfield, who drafted the "truce" the two families famously signed in 2003 to officially end hostilities, doubted the role of the McCoys' disease in the feud.

"I would be shocked" if doctors blamed it on illness, he said.

Altina Waller, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and author of a book about the feud, agreed.

"Medical folks like to find these kinds of explanations. Like the Salem witchcraft thing. That book came out about how that was caused by wheat that was grown that had this parasite or mold or fungus or something that caused everybody in Salem to go nuts," she said.

"How does it explain the other dozen or so feuds that I've looked at in other places?" she asked, citing disputes over coal and other issues. "The rage and violence as such was not confined to McCoys."

She acknowledges that an argument could be made for seeing the McCoys as the more aggressive of the clans.

"One of the reasons the McCoys don't like me as much in the Tug Valley as the Hatfields do is that I seem to suggest that Randal McCoy, the patriarch of the family, was sort of irrational and flamboyant and did jump to, into wanting violence more than, say, Anderson Hatfield," Waller said.

These days, the "feud" has taken a far more civil tone and all but disappeared, members of both families say. The last time it surfaced was in January 2003. McCoy descendants sued Hatfield descendants over visitation rights to a small cemetery on an Appalachian hillside in eastern Kentucky. It holds the remains of six McCoys, some allegedly killed by the Hatfields.
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Associated Press National Writer Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report. .
On the Net:
VHL Family Alliance: http://www.vhl.org

NIH: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/von_hippel_lindau/von_hippel_lindau.htm
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000340.htm

(An earlier version of the story misidentified Ron McCoy of Durham, N.C., as 'Randy')

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved....

Hot Ptah

April 9th, 2007, 09:57 AM

Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2007, 12:13 PM

There's been times when I think I have it myself. I've had times when I've completely lost it, it was like a light switch being pulled. Luckily for those around me and for myself, this has only happened a few times in my life, but they were terrible times, and I was terrible for being like that, regardless of the circumstances. Generally, things go smoothly, but when they don't, there's been those few times when I wish I had, had self control.

Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2007, 12:21 PM

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Another way to tell a war story
By LA Times.
NEW YORK — Allen Pizzey, a 60-year-old veteran war correspondent who considers himself a bit of a Luddite, never imagined that he would embrace blogging.

But the CBS newsman found himself turning to the Web during a recent stint in Baghdad after he noticed the numerous pieces on the network evening newscasts devoted to the pet food recall in the U.S.

“There seems to be an inordinate amount of time spent on what started out as 12 dead pets,” said Pizzey, who can catch the American newscasts every morning on the Baghdad bureau’s grimy television monitors, beamed in via satellite like day-old dispatches from another world.

Don’t get him wrong: Pizzey is an animal lover. (He and his family have four cats, two dogs and a terrapin at their home in Rome.) But he was disheartened by the disconnect between the horrors of the war and the preoccupations of American viewers.

Rather than stew quietly, he vented his concerns in an online reporter’s notebook, posted March 22 on CBSNews.com.

“What is depressingly clear is that what seems important here is far removed from what viewers in the U.S. seem to be concerned about,” he wrote, adding: “How 12 dead animals in a country the size of the U.S. rates with the sliding scale of mayhem here is what I’m finding hard to gauge. When only 12 human bodies are found on any given morning in Baghdad with marks of the kind of torture the ASPCA would quite rightly have a pet owner in court for, it is judged as ‘progress’ for the security plan.”

After covering conflicts around the globe for three decades, Pizzey has joined the ranks of television correspondents who have turned to the Internet to convey the messy realities of war that can’t be encapsulated in two-minute reports.

“It’s nice to be able to have that outlet,” he said in an interview this week from Rome, back home after a five-week rotation in Iraq. “One of the things that blogs provide is an opportunity for people who are interested in the news to understand a little bit about what it feels like. I don’t think I should personalize everything I do. But if you’re sitting in the middle of the kind of horror that is Iraq today, you sort of wonder, ‘How do I make these people understand?’ ”

NBC’s Richard Engel, ABC’s Terry McCarthy and other network war correspondents also supplement their on-air pieces with extensive online reports.

But Pizzey’s dispatches are often notable for their frank, personal assessments. They share a common theme: a deep-set frustration that the real story of the war is not getting through.

Mike Sims, director of news and operations for CBSNews.com, said he believes stories on the website can strike a more opinionated tone than those that air on television, as long as they’re clearly labeled.

“Allen has been there so many times; he’s earned the right to give his observations,” Sims said. “We think if we clearly let people know what they’re getting, that we can do more on the Web than just report the Joe Friday facts.”

Last week, in an essay labeled “Opinion,” Pizzey took Republican Sen. John McCain to task for asserting that some neighborhoods in Baghdad were safe enough to stroll through.

“For Senator McCain to claim there are places here where all is well is to woefully minimize the dangers faced by the troops he otherwise so admirably supports,” he wrote. ” … Any time Senator McCain wants to walk the streets of Baghdad, unarmed and without a serious security detail, we’d be glad to lend him a camera so he can record his experience.”

Pizzey said he felt compelled to write the piece because McCain “was talking utter rubbish.” (In a piece airing Sunday on “60 Minutes,” McCain said he misspoke.) He was also motivated by a belief that the media were not skeptical enough in the run-up to the war — a mistake he does not want to repeat.

“We the media gave the Bush administration a free ride for this war,” he said. “We did not question sufficiently the statements made by politicians. I’m as guilty as anybody else. We climbed on board, and that’s not what we should do.”

A former newspaper reporter in Africa who joined CBS in 1980, Pizzey is part of the network’s core group of correspondents who rotate through Iraq regularly. He said many of his colleagues in the U.S. reporting corps there share a frustration that the war does not get more air time. “I think that more coverage could and should be given to it,” he said. “But I’m not the guy who has to answer to the executives about the ratings.

“The people who run the newscast perhaps think people aren’t interested,” Pizzey added. “Our job isn’t to tell people the news they want to hear, but the news that is. We can’t make people care, but we can tell them what’s out there.”

– By Matea Gold
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/04/09/another-way-to-tell-a-war-story/ lllllllllllllllll

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Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2007, 01:37 PM

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The Theater of the Imperially Absurd
How the Bush administration destabilized the "Arc of Instability," from Baghdad to Mogadishu.
Tom Engelhardt
April 09 , 2007
This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.
MotherJones.com / Commentary / tomdispatch

One night when I was in my teens, I found myself at a production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. I had never heard of the playwright or the play, nor had I seen a play performed in the round. The actors were dramatically entering and exiting in the aisles when, suddenly, a man stood up in the audience, proclaimed himself a seventh character in search of an author, and demanded the same attention as the other six. At the time, I assumed the unruly "seventh character" was just part of the play, even after he was summarily ejected from the theater.

Now, bear with me a moment here. Back in 2002-2003, officials in the Bush administration and their neocon supporters, retro-think-tank admirers, and allied media pundits, basking in all their Global War on Terror glory, were eager to talk about the region extending from North Africa through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the former SSRs of Central Asia right up to the Chinese border as an "arc of instability." That arc coincided with the energy heartlands of the planet and what was needed to "stabilize" it, to keep those energy supplies flowing freely (and in the right directions), was clear enough to them. The "last superpower," the greatest military force in history, would simply have to put its foot down and so bring to heel the "rogue" powers of the region. The geopolitical nerve would have to be mustered to stamp a massive "footprint" -- to use a Pentagon term of the time -- in the middle of that vast, valuable region. (Such a print was to be measured by military bases established.) Also needed was the nerve not just to lob a few cruise missiles in the direction of Baghdad, but to offer such an imposing demonstration of American shock-and-awe power that those "rogues" -- Iraq, Syria, Iran (Hezbollah, Hamas) -- would be cowed into submission, along with uppity U.S. allies like oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

It would, in fact, be necessary -- in another of those bluntly descriptive words of the era -- to "decapitate" resistant regimes. This would be the first order of business for the planet's lone "hyperpower," now that it had been psychologically mobilized by the attacks of September 11, 2001. After all, what other power on Earth was capable of keeping the uncivilized parts of the planet from descending into failed-state, all-against-all warfare and dragging us (and our energy supplies) down with them?

Mind you, on September 11, 2001, as those towers went down, that arc of instability wasn't exactly a paragon of… well, instability. Yes, on one end was Somalia, a failed state, and on the other, impoverished, rubble-strewn Afghanistan, largely Taliban-ruled (and al-Qaeda encamped); while in-between Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a severely weakened nation with a suffering populace, but the "arc" was wracked by no great wars, no huge surges of refugees, no striking levels of destruction. Not particularly pleasant autocracies, some of a fundamentalist religious nature, were the rule of the day. Oil flowed (at about $23 a barrel); the Israeli-Palestinian conflict simmered uncomfortably; and, all in all, it wasn't a pretty picture, nor a particularly democratic one, nor one in which, if you were an inhabitant of most of these lands, you could expect a fair share of justice or a stunningly good life.

Still, the arc of instability, as a name, was then more prediction than reality. And it was a prediction -- soon enough to become a self-fulfilling prophesy -- on which George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and all those neocons in the Pentagon readily staked careers and reputations. As a crew, already dazzled by American military power and its potential uses, such a bet undoubtedly looked like a sure winner, like betting with the house in a three-card monte scheme. They would just give the arc what it needed -- a few intense doses of cruise-missile and B-1 bomber medicine, add in some high-tech military boots-on-the-ground, some night-vision goggled eyes in the desert, some Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drones overhead, and some "regime-change"-style injections of further instability. It was to be, as Andrew Bacevich has written, "an experiment in creative destruction."

First Afghanistan, then Iraq. Both pushovers. How could the mightiest force on the planet lose to such puny powers? As a start, you would wage a swift air-war/proxy-war/Special-Forces war/dollar-war -- CIA agents would arrive in friendly areas of Northern Afghanistan in late 2001 carrying suitcases stuffed with money -- in one of the most backward places on the planet. Your campaign would be against an ill-organized, ill-armed, ragtag enemy. You would follow that by thrusting into the soft, military underbelly of the Middle East and taking out the hollow armed forces of Saddam Hussein in a "cakewalk."

Next, with your bases set up in Afghanistan and Iraq on either side of Iran -- and Pakistan, also bordering Iran, in hand -- what would it take to run the increasingly unpopular mullahs who governed that land out of Tehran? Meanwhile, Syria, another weakened, wobbly state divided against itself, now hemmed in not only by militarily powerful Israel but American-occupied Iraq on the other would be a pushover. In each of these lands, you would soon enough end up with an American-friendly government, run by some figure like the Pentagon's favorite Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi; and, voilà! (okay, they wouldn't have used French), you would have a Middle East made safe for Israel and for American domination. You would, in short, have your allies in Europe and Japan as well as your possible future enemies, Russia and China, by the throat in an increasingly energy-starved world.

Certainly, many of the top officials of the Bush administration and their neocons allies, dreaming of just such an orderly, American-dominated "Greater Middle East," were ready to settle for a little chaos in the process. If a weakened Iraq broke into several parts; or, say, the oil-rich Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia happened to fall off that country, well, too bad. They'd deal.

Little did they know.

The Tin Touch
Here's the remarkable thing, when you think about it: All the Bush administration had to do was meddle in any country in that arc of instability (and which one didn't it meddle in?), for actual instability, often chaos, sometimes outright disaster to set in. It's been quite a record, the very opposite of an imperial golden touch.

And, on any given day, you can see the evidence of this on a case by case basis in your local paper or on the TV news. You can check out the Iraqi, or Somali, or Lebanese, or Iranian, or Pakistani disasters, or impending disasters. But what you never see is all those crises and potential crises discussed in one place -- without which the magnitude of the present disaster and the dangers in our future are hard to grasp.

Few in the mainstream world have even tried to put them all together since the Bush administration rolled back the media, essentially demobilizing it in 2001-2002, at which point its journalists and pundits simply stopped connecting the dots. Give the Bush administration credit: Its top officials took in the world as a whole and at an imperial glance. They regularly connected the dots as they saw them. The post-9/11 strike at Afghanistan was never simply a strike at al-Qaeda (or the Taliban who hosted them). It was always a prelude to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And the invasion of Iraq was never meant to end in Baghdad (as indicated in the neocon pre-war quip, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran"). Nor was Tehran to be the end of the line.

Under the rubric of the "Global War on Terror," they were considering literally dozens of countries as potential future targets. Dick Cheney put the matter bluntly back in August 2002 as the public drumbeat for an invasion of Iraq was just revving up:

"The war in Afghanistan is only the beginning of a lengthy campaign, Cheney noted. 'Were we to stop now, any sense of security we might have would be false and temporary,' he said. 'There is a terrorist underworld out there spread among more than 60 countries.'"

Almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, they began stitching together the arc of instability in their minds with an eye not so much to Arabs, or South Asians, or even Israelis, but to playing their version of what the British imperialists used to call "the Great Game." They had the full-scale rollback of energy-giant Russia in mind as well as the containment or rollback of potential future imperial power, China, already visibly desperate for Iraqi, Iranian, and other energy supplies. In the year before the invasion of Iraq, they were remarkably blunt about this. They proudly published that seminal document of the Bush era, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 2002, which called for the U.S. to "build and maintain" its military power on the planet "beyond challenge."

Think about that for a moment. A single power on Earth "beyond challenge." This was a dream of planetary dominion that once would have been left to madmen. But in what looked like a world with only one Great Power, it was easy enough to imagine a Great Game with only one great player, an arms race with only one swift runner.

The Bush administration was essentially calling for a world in which no superpower, or bloc of powers, would ever be allowed to challenge this country's supremacy. As the President put it in an address at West Point in 2002, "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace." The National Security Strategy put the same thought this way: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." That's anywhere on the planet. Ever. And the President and his followers promptly began to hike the Pentagon budget to suit their oversized, military fantasies of what an American "footprint" should be.

With this in mind, the arc of instability, which, in energy-flow terms, was quite literally the planet's heartland, seemed the place to control. And yet -- look hard as you will -– you're unlikely to find a single piece in your daily paper that takes in that arc; that, say, includes Somalia and Pakistan in the same piece, even though Bush administration policy has effectively tied them together in disaster. To take another example, the rise of Iran (and a possible "Shiite crescent"), Iran's influence or interference in Iraq, Iran's nuclear program, and Iran's off-the-wall president have been near obsessions in the U.S. media; and yet, you would be hard-pressed to find a piece even pointing out that the Bush administration's two invasions and occupations -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- which left both those countries bristling with vast American bases and sprawling American-controlled prison systems, took place on either side of Iran. Add in the fact that the Bush administration, probably through the CIA, is essentially running terror raids into Iran through Pakistan and you have a remarkably different vision of Iran's geostrategic situation than even an informed American media consumer would normally see.

After September 11, 2001, but based on the sort of pre-2001 thinking you could find well represented at the neocon website Project for the New American Century, the Bush administration's top officials wrote their own drama for the arc of instability. They were, of course, the main characters in it, along with the U.S. military, some Afghan and Iraqi exiles who would play their necessary roles in the "liberation" of their countries, and a few evil ogres like Saddam Hussein.

Today, not six years after they raised the curtain on what was to be their grand imperial drama, they find themselves in a dark theater with at least six crises in search of an author, all clamoring for attention – and every possibility that a seventh (not to say a seventeenth) "character" in that rowdy, still gathering, audience may soon rise to insist on a part in the horrific farce that has actually taken place.

Six Crises in Search of an Author
Sweeping across the region from East to West, let's briefly note the six festering or clamoring crisis spots, any one of which could end up with the play's major role before George W. Bush slips out of office.

Pakistan: The Pakistani government was America's main partner, along with the Saudis, in funding, arming, and running the anti-Soviet struggle of the mujahedeen, including Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan back in the 1980s; and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, was the godfather of the Taliban (and remains, it seems, a supporter to this day). In September 2001, the Bush administration gave the country's coup-installed military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, the basic you're-either-with-us-or-against-us choice. He chose the "with" and in the course of these last years, under constant American pressure, has lost almost complete control over Pakistan's tribal regions along the Afghan border to various tribal groups, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other foreign jihadis, who have established bases there. Now, significant parts of the country are experiencing unrest in what looks increasingly like a countdown to chaos in a nuclear-armed nation.

Afghanistan: In the meantime, from those Pakistani base areas, the revived and rearmed Taliban (and their al-Qaeda partners) are preparing to launch a major spring offensive in Afghanistan, using tactics from the Iraq War (suicide bombers or "Mullah Omar's Missiles," as they call them, and the roadside bomb or IED). They are already capable of taking over southern Afghan districts for periods of time. The Bush administration used the Northern Alliance -- that is, proxy Afghan forces -- to take Kabul in November 2001. It then set up its bases and prisons and established President Hamid Karzai as the "mayor of Kabul," only to abandon the task of providing real security and beginning the genuine reconstruction of the country in order to invade Iraq. The rest of this particular horror story is, by now, reasonably well known. The country beyond booming Kabul remains impoverished and significantly in ruins; the population evidently ever more dissatisfied; the American and NATO air war ever more indiscriminate; and it is again the planet's largest producer of opium poppies and, as such, supplier of heroin. Over five years after its "liberation" from the Taliban, Afghanistan is a failed state, home to a successful guerrilla war by one of the most primitively fundamentalist movements on the planet, and a thriving narco-kingdom. It is only likely to get worse. For the first time, the possibility that, like the Russians before them, the Americans (and their NATO allies) could actually suffer defeat in that rugged land seems imaginable.

Iran: The country is a rising regional power, with enormous energy resources, and Shiite allies and allied movements of various sorts throughout the region, including in southern Iraq. But it also has an embattled, divided, fundamentalist government capable of rallying its disgruntled populace only with nationalism (call it, playing the American card). Energy-rich as it is, Iran also has a fractured, weakened economy, threatened with sanctions; and its major enemy, the Bush administration, is running a series of terror operations against it, while trying to cause dissension in its oil-rich minority regions. It is also deploying an unprecedented show of naval and air strength in the Persian Gulf. (An aircraft-carrier, the USS Nimitz, with its strike group, is now on its way to join the two carrier task forces already in place there.) In addition, the administration has threatened to launch a massive air assault on Iran's nuclear and other facilities. Though Iraq runs it a close race, Iran may be the single potentially most explosive hot spot in the arc of instability. In a nanosecond, it would be capable, under U.S. attack, or even some set of miscalculations on all sides, both of suffering grievous harm and of imposing enormous damage not just on American troops in Iraq, or on the oil economy of the region, but on the global economy as well.

Iraq: Do I need to say a word? Iraq is the poster-boy for the Bush administration's ability to turn whatever it touches into hell on Earth. In Iraq, the vaunted American military has been stopped in its tracks by a minority Sunni insurgency. (In recent weeks, however, the war there is threatening to turn into something larger, as the American military launches attacks on radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.) Iraq now is the site of a religio-ethnic civil war of striking brutality, loosing waves of refugees within the country and on neighboring states; neighborhoods are being ethnically cleansed and deaths have reached into the hundreds of thousands. Amid all this, the occupying U.S. military fully controls only Baghdad's fortified citadel within a city, the Green Zone (and even there dangers are mounting) as well as a series of enormous, multibillion-dollar bases it has built around the country. Iraq is now essentially a failed state and the situation continues to devolve under the pressure of the President's latest "surge" plan. If that plan were to succeed, the citadel-state of the Green Zone would, at best, be turned into the city-state of Baghdad in a sea of chaos. Like Iran, Iraq has the potential to draw other states in the region into a widening civil-cum-religious-cum-terrorist war.

Israel/Palestine/Lebanon: From an early green light for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to join the Global War on Terror (against the Palestinians) to a green light for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to launch and continue a war against Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer, the Bush administration has largely green-lighted Israel these last years. It has also ignored or, in the case of the Lebanon War, purposely held back any possibility of serious peace talks. The provisional results are in. In Lebanon, the heavily populated areas of the Shiite south were strewn with Israeli cluster bombs, making some areas nearly uninhabitable; up to a quarter of the population was, for a time, turned into refugees; parts of Lebanese cities including Beirut were flattened by the Israeli air force; and yet Hezbollah was strengthened, the U.S.-backed Siniora government radically weakened, and the country drawn closer to a possible civil war. In the Palestinian areas, Bush administration democracy-promotion efforts ended with a Hamas electoral victory. Starved of foreign aid and having suffered further Israeli military assaults, the Palestinian population is ever more immiserated; Hamas and Fatah are at each other's throats; and the U.S.-backed President of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is in a weakened position. In the wake of a disastrous war, Israel, with a government whose head has a 3% approval rate, is hardly the triumphant, dominant power in the Middle East that various Bush administration figures imagined once upon a time. This looks like another deteriorating situation with no end in sight.

Somalia (or Blackhawk Down, Round 2): In 2006, Director Porter Goss's CIA bet on a group of discredited Somali warlords, threw money and support behind them, and -- typically -- lost out to an Islamist militia that took most of the country and imposed relative peace on it for the first time in years. The ever proactive Bush administration then turned to the autocratic Ethiopian regime and its military (advised and armed by the U.S. with a helping hand from the North Koreans) to open "a new front" in the Global War on Terror. The Ethiopians promptly launched their own "preventive" invasion of Somalia (with modest U.S. air support), installed a government in the capital, Mogadishu, proclaimed victory over the Islamists, and -- giant surprise --promptly found themselves mired in an inter-clan civil war with Iraqi overtones. Today, Somalia, long a failed state and then, for a few months, almost a peaceful land (even if ruled by Islamists fundamentalists), is experiencing the worst fighting and death levels in 15 years. The new government in Mogadishu is shaky; their Ethiopian military supporters bloodied; over 1,000 civilians in the capital are dead or wounded, and tens of thousands of refugees are fleeing Mogadishu and crossing borders in a state of need. Rate it: a developing disaster -- with worse to come.

In short, from Somalia to Pakistan, the region is today a genuine arc of instability. It is filled with ever more failed states (Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, which never even made it to statehood before collapse), possible future failed states (Lebanon, Pakistan), ever shakier autocracies (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan); and huge floods of refugees, internal and external (Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan) as well as massively damaged areas (Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon). It is also witnessing the growth of extremist and terrorist organizations and sentiments.

A Rube Goldberg Machine

At any moment, somewhere in the now-destabilized "arc of instability," that seventh character could indeed rise, demand attention, and refuse to be ejected from the premises. There are many possible candidates. Here are just a few:

Al-Qaeda, an organization dispersed but never fully dismantled by the Bush administration, has now, according to Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, rebuilt itself in the Pakistani borderlands with new training camps, new base areas, and a new generation of leaders in their thirties, all still evidently serving under Osama bin Laden. (In the future, Mazzetti suggests even younger leaders are likely to come from the hardened veterans of campaigns in Bush's Iraq). Al-Qaeda is a wild card throughout the region.

Iraqi Kurdistan is now a relatively peaceful area, but from the disputed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk to its Turkish and Iranian borders it is also a potential future powder keg and the focus for interventions of all sorts.

Oil pipelines, which, from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf, crisscross the region, are almost impossible to defend effectively. At any moment, some group or groups, copying the tactics of the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, could decide to begin a sabotage campaign against them (or the other oil facilities in the region).

Saudi Arabia, an increasingly ossified religious autocracy, faces opponents ready to practice terrorism against its oil infrastructure and rising unrest in its oil-rich Shiite areas as well as an ascendant Iran.

Syria, a rickety minority regime, under internal pressure, now faces the launching of a renewed Bush administration campaign to further undermine its power. Though we have no way of knowing the scope of this campaign, it seems the President and his top officials have learned absolutely nothing about what their meddling is likely to accomplish.

Outside the "arc of instability," but deeply affected by what goes on there, let's not forget:

The U.S. Army: 13,000 National Guardsmen have just been notified of a coming call-up, long before they were due for another tour of duty in Iraq. The Army, like the Marine Corps, finds itself under near-unbearable pressure from the Iraq and Afghan Wars and, as a result, is sending less than fully trained troops, recruited under ever lower standards, with worn equipment, into battle. The Army, for instance, is having trouble holding on to its best soldiers. Beyond their minimum five years of service, to take an example, "just 62% of West Pointers re-upped, about 25 percentage points lower than at the other service academies." And the public grumbling of the top brass is on the increase. Who knows what this means for the future?

The American People -- Oh yes, them. They haven't really hit the streets yet, but they've hit the opinion polls hard and last November some of them hit the polling booths -- decisively. Who knows when they will "stand up" and insist on being counted. Perhaps in 2008.

In other words, in addition to the normal cast of characters dreamt up by the Bush administration in its fantasy production in the global round, a whole set of unexpected characters are already moving up and down the aisles, demanding attention, and at any moment, that seventh character -- whether state, ethnic group, terrorist cadre, or some unknown crew in search of an author is likely to make its presence felt.

And let's not forget that there is one more obvious "character" out there in search of an author; that there is one more Bush-destabilized place on the planet not yet mentioned, even though it may be the most important of all. I'm talking, of course, about Washington D.C.; I'm talking about the Bush administration itself.

Consider the process by which it turned Washington into a mini-arc of instability: First, it fantasized about the "arc of instability," then stitched it together into a genuine Rube Goldberg instability machine, one where any group, across thousands of miles, might pull some switch that would set chaos rolling, the flames licking across the oil heartlands of the planet. Then, remarkably enough, the administration itself and all its dreams -- both of a Pax Americana globe and a Pax Republicana United States -- began to disintegrate. The whole edifice, from Rumsfeld's high-tech military to Karl Rove's political machine, became destabilized under its own tin touch. The putative playwright became just another desperate character.

It's no longer far-fetched to say that, with the President's polling figures in the low 30s, resistance to his war still growing, a Democratic Congress beginning to feel its strength, the Republican Party shaking and its presidential candidates preparing to head for the hills, corruption and political scandals popping up everywhere, and high military figures implicitly reading the riot act to their political leaders, the already listing Bush imperial ship of state seems to be making directly for the next floating iceberg.

Imagine then, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney still clinging tenaciously to what's left of their dreams and delusions amid the ruins of their plans -- as the USS Nimitz sails toward the Persian Gulf; as American agents of various sorts "advise" and, however indirectly, shuffle aid to extremist groups eager to fell the Iranian regime; as a new campaign against the Syrian regime is launched; as stolen Iraqi oil money is shuttled to the Siniora government in Lebanon (and then, according to Seymour Hersh, to Sunni jihadi groups in Lebanon and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria); and as American agents continue to "interrogate" suspected jihadis in their latest borrowed secret prisons in Ethiopia, while American-backed Ethiopian troops only find themselves more embroiled in Somalia. Imagine all that, and then ask yourself, what levers on that Rube Goldberg machine they've done so much to create are they still capable of pulling?

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of TomDispatch interviews.

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2007 The Foundation for National Progresshttp://www.motherjones.com/commentary/tomdispatch/engelhardt_six_crises.html
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Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2007, 02:43 PM

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$$$$$$$$$$$
The Econoclast
Bush's beltway boom

James K. Galbraith
March/April 2007 Issue

The rise of the Democrats brings some much-needed attention to the issue of income inequality, but while most observers focus on how income is distributed among people, it is also revealing to look at the distribution across places. This measure of income inequality, calculated using tax data recorded by county, actually declined quite sharply after 2000. Why? Because it tracks, with uncanny precision over more than 30 years, the nasdaq stock index. After declining in the early 1970s, both indices rose almost steadily until they reached an all-time peak in 2000; both fell thereafter.

In other words, income inequality in the United States has been driven by capital gains and stock options, mostly in the tech sector. This is what separates that mysterious top .01 of 1 percent from the rest of us: They're the people who run Google, Oracle, and eBay.

County data confirm this: The big income winners in the late 1990s were concentrated in just four counties—Santa Clara, San Francisco, and San Mateo in California (all in the environs of Silicon Valley), and King County in Washington (Microsoft)—as well as in Manhattan, the home of the bankers who made it happen. Take the big tech counties out, and the rise in inequality between counties in the late 1990s disappears. And, of course, while these counties were big winners through 2000, they became the big losers in the Bush Bust.

Though the tech bust reduced inequality in America, it doesn't follow that only rich places lost out, still less that only poorer places gained. In fact, there was one group of counties that did exceptionally well in the first four Bush years. Guess what? They're concentrated around Washington, D.C. Of the top 10 gainers from 2000 to 2004, three are Washington neighbors (Fairfax, Montgomery, and Baltimore), and one is D.C. itself. Among the top 35 gainers, there are five more counties in the immediate vicinity. Conversely, none of the top 50 losers are near the capital.

This should remind us that the Democrats under Clinton fostered a private-sector investment boom, fueled by technological optimism and foreign money. In economic terms, Al Gore really did invent the Internet, in a way; his cheerleading (and Clinton's, and Greenspan's) steered money into that nascent boom. True, certain citizens got very, very rich. But the tech boom was also good for most of the rest of us: We had nearly full employment, rising wages and productivity, and little inflation; we also got a lot of fiber-optic cable, cheap phone calls, and fast video games.

Bush inherited a bust. He fought it by cutting taxes, with a strong tilt toward the rich; together with low interest rates, this fostered a vast housing boom, now deflating. Much of that housing was high-end, as any visitor to the posher suburbs can tell. And though it was stronger in some places than others, it was widely diffused. Was this the right use of resources? Not in my book. But all that construction did keep the economy going when it might otherwise have tanked.

Bush's other big policy was to increase government spending, above all on the military. Who profits? Private contractors, consultants, Beltway bandits. And the epicenter was Washington and its suburbs, home to not only the Pentagon, the cia, and the National Security Agency but also, not coincidentally, defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.

Too bad for Bush: Most people don't live in the Beltway Bubble—but they can easily see the gap that separates them from those who do. It paints a grim picture that, under Bush, the government and housing are the key growth sectors since 2000. It's even worse that the capital region was the only major geographic center to show concentrated gains. Bush will go into history as a big-government president. Conservatives already know this, and the irony was not lost on them in the last election.

And now that Democrats have a voice, they ought to be asking: How can our policies help revive the private sector? How can we spread the growth and employment around? After the health care boom of the 1980s and the tech boom of the 1990s, after the war on terror and its military budgets, what's the next big thing?

My candidate would be climate change, and the investments in infrastructure and energy required to control it. For there is one simple index that tells you pretty much everything you need to know. But it's not an inequality measure. It's the CO2 content of the atmosphere, and if you aren't scared by that, you haven't been paying attention.

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2007/03/econoclast.html $$$
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Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2007, 04:17 PM

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~~~~~~~

Patriotism is a religion, the egg from which wars are hatched."

Guy de Maupassant

~~~
"Seas of blood have been shed for the sake of patriotism. One would expect the harm and irrationality of patriotism to be self-evident to everyone. But the surprising fact is that cultured and learned [socially conditioned and indoctrinated] people not only do not notice the harm and stupidity of patriotism, they resist every unveiling of it with the greatest obstinacy and passion (with no rational grounds), and continue to praise it as beneficent and elevating."

Leo Tolstoy

~~~

"Blind patriotism has been kept intact by rewriting history to provide people with moral consolation and a psychological basis for denial."

William H. Boyer

~~~

"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental ifference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man."

Hannah Arendt
The Origins Of Totalitarianism
p.227

~~~~~
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Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2007, 04:35 PM

.Khaleej Times
Khaleej Times Online >> News >> FOCUS ON IRAQ

Iraqi Shias burn US flags on regime fall anniversary

9 April 2007
(AFP)

NAJAF, Iraq - Hundreds of thousands of chanting Iraqi Shias burned and stamped on US flags at an anti-American rally called by firebrand cleric Moqtada Al Sadr on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Large crowds of men, women and children holding Iraqi flags and anti-US banners massed in the Shia holy city of Najaf shouting ‘No, No to America! Yes, Yes to Freedom!’

Security was also tight for fear of attacks in Baghdad, where four years ago on Monday a giant bronze statue of Saddam was torn down, dramatically symbolising the toppling of his iron-fisted regime by US-led invasion forces.

A 24-hour vehicle curfew was in place and all main roads and bridges were deserted as people remained indoors.

Jubilant Baghdadis who welcomed the US troops on April 9, 2003 now blame the rampant bloodshed and chaos on what even some of Iraq’s most senior leaders brand an unwanted occupation.

The Najaf rally was seen as a show of strength for Sadr, who has not been sighted for more than two months, since the launch of a security crackdown in Baghdad aimed largely at reining in his militiamen who are accused of killing Sunni Arabs.

The US military has said that Sadr -- regarded by the Americans as the most dangerous threat to stability -- has gone to Iran but his aides deny the claims and insist he is still in Iraq. He was not seen at the rally.

The Shia demonstrators marched from Kufa, the twin shrine city of Najaf, to Najaf’s central Sadrain Square where Sadr aides distributed anti-US leaflets.

Hundreds of banners saying ‘Down with Bush, Down with America’ were carried by protestors as Iraqi police and soldiers guarded checkpoints in and around Najaf and Kufa.

Many people draped in Iraqi flags set the Stars and Stripes ablaze and some stamped on US and Israeli flags painted on the ground with their shoes, a gross insult in Arab culture.

‘In four years of occupation, our sons have been killed and women made widows,’ cried Ahmed Al Mayahie, 39, a Shia from the southern city of Basra.

‘The occupier raised slogans saying Iraq is free, Iraq is liberated. What freedom? What liberation? There is nothing but destruction. We do not want their liberation and their presence. We tell them to get out of our land.’

Some Sunni religious groups also joined the rally.

‘This demonstration is a friendly message to unite Iraqis on one commmon issue and that is end of occupation,’ said Abdul Qadir Al Daim of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a powerful Sunni bloc.

Rally organisers distributed leaflets urging Americans and Europeans to pressure their governments to end the bloodshed.

US military spokesman Rear Admiral Mark Fox called the rally a sign of a growing ‘democratic society’ in Iraq and added that he was not ‘bothered necessarily’ with the burning of US flags.

The staunchly anti-American Sadr, who launched two bloody rebellions against US forces in 2004, is now a powerful figure in the Shia-led government with six ministers and 32 lawmakers.

On Sunday, he reiterated a call for Iraqis to unite against the Americans and end fighting that had erupted on Friday between his militiamen and security forces in the central city of Diwaniyah.

‘Iraq has had enough bloodshed. The occupation forces led by the biggest evil, America, are working to sow dissent either directly or through its agents.’

US commander Colonel Michael Garrett said the fighters in Diwaniyah appeared to be from Sadr’s Jaish Al Mahdi militia. ‘We believe they are associated with the Jaish Al Mahdi,’ he told reporters in Diwaniyah.

On April 9, 2003, US Marines pulled down the giant statue of Saddam by a rope around the neck, in a premonition of his hanging in December for crimes against humanity.

An Iraqi crowd beat the face of his fallen statue with shoes.

But gone are the euphoric cheers of ‘Good, Good, Bush’ praising US President George W. Bush for ousting the regime. Angry chants of ‘Down with Bush’ are a frequent background to brutal Shia and Sunni sectarian strife.

Since the invasion, tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in violence. At least 3,275 US troops have also been killed.

Fox admitted that the four-year period had been ‘disappointing, frustrating and increasingly dangerous in many parts of Iraq’.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/focusoniraq/2007/April/focusoniraq_April72.xml&section=focusoniraq
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Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2007, 04:45 PM

..............
Shiite leader calls for Iraqis to join militia
Flying the flag: Go on-site to view, link at end of post: Supporters of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr arrive in the Shiite holy city of Kufa, 160 kilometres south of Baghdad, to mark the fourth anniversary of coalition troops' arrival in Baghdad.
Photo: AP
LEADING Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has urged Iraqi security forces to unite with his militiamen against the American military in Diwaniya, an embattled southern city in Iraq where fighting has raged for three days.

The cleric's call was answered by thousands of Iraqis who flocked to the southern Shiite holy city of Najaf.

Sheikh Sadr, who blames the US-led invasion for Iraq's unrelenting violence, issued a statement on Sunday urging Iraqis to protest on the fourth anniversary of the day coalition forces swept into central Baghdad.

The US military says Sheikh Sadr, who is popular among Iraq's urban Shiite poor, is in neighbouring Iran. His aides say the cleric is in Iraq and have denied suggestions that he fled to Iran to escape a crackdown in Baghdad.

The Baghdad-Najaf road was packed with hundreds of vehicles yesterday crammed with passengers waving Iraqi flags and chanting religious and anti-US slogans.

"No, no to America … yes, yes Muqtada," they chanted as they converged on the holy city.

Sheikh Sadr's statement did not explicitly call for armed struggle against the Americans, but it still represented his most forceful condemnation of the US-led occupation since he went underground after the start of a crackdown in Baghdad nearly two months ago.

It came as the American military announced the deaths of 10 soldiers in five attacks over the weekend, the highest two-day total for American fatalities since the crackdown began on February 14. Five soldiers were wounded in the attacks.

Violence against Iraqis continued unabated on Sunday, with at least 43 people killed or found dead. Seventeen were killed and 26 wounded in a car bombing near a hospital and mosque in the insurgent enclave of Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad.

Sheikh Sadr's statement indicated that he might begin steering his militia, the Mahdi Army, towards more open confrontation with US forces.

Intense fighting broke out in Diwaniya when American and Iraqi soldiers isolated neighbourhoods there to search for militiamen.

Fighter jets hit militia positions on Saturday, and one police official said at least seven Iraqis had been killed and 15 wounded in the fighting. Residents reported American soldiers scampering across rooftops on Saturday evening.

"The strife that is taking place in Diwaniya was planned by the occupier to drag down the brothers and make them quarrel, fight and even kill each other," Sheikh Sadr said in a written statement.

"O my brothers in the Mahdi Army and my brothers in the security forces, stop fighting and killing because that is what our enemy and your enemy and even God's enemy hope for."

The American military said at least 39 people suspected of being militiamen had been detained during the weekend fighting, and soldiers had uncovered caches of particularly deadly explosives that American officials claim have come from Iran.

Brigadier Qassim Moussawi, spokesman for the US-Iraqi security crackdown in Baghdad, said a 24-hour vehicle ban was in force in the capital yesterday. "There will be protests marking the fourth anniversary (of occupation). We don't want to give the terrorists a chance to use this opportunity," Brigadier Moussawi said.

What largely began as a Sunni Arab insurgency against US and Iraqi forces after the 2003 invasion of Iraq has widened to include a sectarian conflict between the country's Shiites and Sunnis.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the past year alone. More than 3270 US soldiers have been killed since the invasion.
NEW YORK TIMES, REUTERS

Go on-site to gain access to the following:
Other related coverage
Anti-US protest puts Baghdad under curfew
Iraqi regime grapples with rising 'despair'
Truck bomb kills 15 near Baghdad
Death toll from truck bomb rises
Truck bombs leave 63 dead in northwest Iraq
April 10, 2007
URL: http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/shiite-leader-calls-for-iraqis-to-join-militia/2007/04/09/1175971016015.html# .......
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papsrus

April 10th, 2007, 09:13 AM

Spied this over on dailykos.com today regarding the White House's feigned outrage over Pelosi's trip to Syria:

3. Final exam: What does the Pelosi/Syria kerfuffle add up to?

White House + (Drudge + Fox) + (CNN x Fox envy) + (Washington Post op-ed page + Wall Street Journal op-ed page) + GOP surrogates + lazy journalists + Joe Lieberman – (accuracy x [White House + {Drudge + Fox} + {CNN x Fox envy} + {Washington Post op-ed page + Wall Street Journal op-ed page} + GOP surrogates + lazy journalists + Joe Lieberman]) - GOP hypocrisy + (Presidential OK + State Department OK) + fact-checking x (lefty blogs + Air America + Keith Olbermann) = __?

If you said zero, give yourself a cookie.
Got a giggle out of it.

Saundra Hummer

April 10th, 2007, 11:47 AM

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A PETITION REQUEST TO SIGN

Dear Saundra,

Right now Americans are coming together with one voice to demand George W. Bush follow the will of the people and not veto the Democratic plan for change in Iraq.

I've spent my entire professional career standing up for our men and women in uniform. I have carefully reviewed and considered the Democrats' plan for change in Iraq. More than any bill passed by the previous Republican Rubber Stamp Congress, it ensures our troops have the training and equipment they need - and our veterans get the services they deserve.

What it doesn't do, however, is give George W. Bush a blank check to continue his strategy for failure in Iraq.

We want a New Direction in Iraq and, together, we need to show that the American people support the Democratic plan for change in Iraq. That is why I am joining the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in telling the President not to veto the Democratic plan for change in Iraq and to treat our troops with the dignity and respect they deserve.

We have a goal of sending 50,000 signatures to President Bush before April 20th to show our support. Will you join us?

Tell President Bush Not to Veto the Democratic Plan for Change in Iraq

On November 7, 2006, the American people voted for change. They want to see fewer troops in Iraq - not more. I can tell you it's not only civilians who want a New Direction. Generals on the ground and Pentagon officials know we cannot succeed if we stay the course. The President is increasingly becoming more isolated in his stay-the-course strategy.

The Bush Administration also continues to falsely claim that resources for American troops will begin to run out later this month - despite the fact that the Pentagon and the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service confirm resources will be available well into the summer. Congressional Democrats will never cut off funding to our troops in harm's way.

Our nation has seen the terrible consequences of President Bush's failed policy in Iraq. It has made us less secure while costing us close to a trillion dollars. This administration sent our troops into harm's way without adequate equipment to protect them, and abandoned them when they returned by failing to provide proper health care to treat the wounded.

If President Bush vetoes the Democratic plan, he will be sending yet another signal that his 'plan' is simply to continue these failed policies.

I am standing up for the troops and I hope you will too. Join me in telling President Bush you stand with Democrats and insist on a new direction in Iraq.

Tell President Bush Not to Veto the Democratic Plan for Change in Iraq

Thank you,

Wes Clark

P.S. George W. Bush is threatening to veto this bill and ignore the will of the American people. All of us need to show him that we are behind the Democratic plan for change in Iraq. For four years he has failed - it's time for a new direction.

Tell President Bush Not to Veto the Democratic Plan for Change in Iraq

FORWARD OUR MESSAGE TO YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY
PROTECT OUR DEMOCRATIC CHAMPIONS

Click to gain access to petition by clicking on the following URLS:

http://www.dccc.org/r/60787/14046/

http://www.dccc.org/action_center/petitions_oi/clark_no_veto

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Saundra Hummer

April 10th, 2007, 03:30 PM

. lllllllllllll
. Rove Tries to Bury Sordid Secrets of a White House Gone Wild
The House Judiciary Committee just released two emails, dated February 5 and 7, from inside Karl Rove's office, in which the Rove-bots gloat that no US media have picked up the investigations of "that British reporter Greg Palast" found in my book Armed Madhouse. I couldn't make this up.
They will REALLY love to hear this: On April 24, I will be releasing a whole new expanded edition of Armed Madhouse with two new chapters, one just for Mr. Rove: "The Theft of 2008" -- and another, "Busted: the Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans."

The new edition's in paperback, dirt cheap and still contains all the original stories that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls, "a masterpiece. The story is like a spy thriller."

The Chicago Tribune says of the book, "Palast's stories bite. They're so relevant they threaten to alter history." The New Yorker says, "Armed Madhouse is great fun." Hey, what's so funny? This is: an investigation of economic piggery and political skulduggery so nasty you just have to scream or cry -- or laugh.

In the new Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild you'll find an America where Republicans sucking on Super-sized Slurpies hunt dark-skinned voters to eliminate their rights; where James Baker's fixer in alligator boots sets up the grab for Iraq's oil on her way to the rodeo; where educational testing profiteers terrorize our kiddies (in "No Childs' Behind Left"); plus, my chat with Hugo Chavez about his coming assassination. AND a killer recipe for fish curry. PLUS scores of illustrations of those intriguing documents marked, 'confidential' -- by the State Department, World Bank -- and Karl Rove.

If you want these stories to bite the White House press corps, then participate in this group purchase today to get their attention. Once you got the book send us a note, "I got it," to freebie(at)GregPalast.com and get a high-quality download of my film, "Bolivar's Heir" -- my talk with Chavez while he let's me play with Bolivar's sword.

And don't miss the Armed Madhouse Tour coming to:

April 21 -- Chicago, IL (With Amy Goodman and Jim Hightower)
April 22 -- Madison, WI (With Laura Flanders)
April 24 -- Portland, OR (On air with Thom Hartmann)
April 25 -- Eugene, OR
April 26 -- Berkeley/Oakland, CA
April 27 -- San Jose, CA
April 28 -- Los Angeles, CA
April 29 -- Santa Fe, NM
May 1 -- New York City (With Randi Rhodes and Robert Kennedy Jr.)
May 2 -- New York City
May 3 -- Washington, DC
May 4 -- Montpelier,VT (With Ben Cohen)

For more info on the specific tour events / dates click here:

http://www.gregpalast.com/announcing-palast-book-tour/

Rove's right. The US media doesn't want you and our nation to get these reports. Tell the truth on'm: Please pass this note on to your own lists, post it on your sites, to your chat groups.

Yours,

Greg Palast

P/S - Mr. Rove, I'm not British and you are un-American.

See: http://www.gregpalast.com
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Saundra Hummer

April 10th, 2007, 04:12 PM

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Evelyn Pringle:
Congress Must Cut Off Bush Family War Profits
By Chad
Created 04/10/2007 - 10:53am
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Evelyn Pringle

On Monday, April 9, the Boston Herald reported that the U.S. military had announced the Easter weekend deaths of 10 more American soldiers, including six killed on Sunday. The Associated Press reports that, since the war began in March 2003, over 3,000 members of the U.S. military have been killed in Iraq, as of April 8.

The military reported the deaths of four more U.S. soldiers on Tuesday.

It's nearly impossible to estimate the number of deaths of civilians in Iraq, but the Herald reports that at least 47 people were killed or found dead in violence on Easter Sunday, including 17 execution victims dumped in the capital.

News releases out of Iraq also report that a woman wearing a black veil and strapped with explosives blew herself up outside a police station in Iraq on Tuesday, killing 16 people.

According to the January 14, 2007 Los Angeles Times, Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, says that, starting with the anti-terrorism appropriation a week after the 9/11 attacks, he estimates the U.S. has spent $400 billion fighting terrorism through fiscal 2006, which ended on September 30, 2006.

This January, Marine Corps spokeswoman Lt. Col. Roseann Lynch told Reuters the war in Iraq is costing about $4.5 billion a month for military "operating costs," which did not include new weapons or equipment.

Since this war on terror was declared following 9/11, the pay levels for the CEOs of the top 34 defense contractors have doubled. The average compensation rose from $3.6 million during the period of 1998-2001 to $7.2 million during the period of 2002-2005, according to an August 2006 report entitled, "Executive Excess 2006," by the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the Boston-based United for a Fair Economy.

This study found that since 9/11, the 34 defense CEOs have pocketed a combined total of $984 million, or enough, the report says, to cover the wages for more than a million Iraqis for a year. In 2005, the average total compensation for the CEOs of large U.S. corporations was only 6% above 2001 figures, while defense CEOs pay was 108% higher.

But the last name of one family, which is literally amassing a fortune over the backs of our dead heroes, matches that of the man holding the purse strings in the White House. On December 11, 2003, the Financial Times reported that three people had told the Times they had seen letters written by Neil Bush that recommended business ventures in the Middle East, promoted by New Bridges Strategies, a firm set up by President Bush's former campaign manager, who quit his Bush appointed government job as the head of FEMA, three weeks before the war in Iraq began.

Neil Bush was paid an annual fee to "help companies secure contracts in Iraq," the Times said.

But Neil Bush is by no means the only Bush profiting from the war on terror. The first President Bush is so entangled with entities that have profited greatly that it's difficult to even know where to begin. Bush joined the Carlyle Group in 1993, and became a member of the firm's Asian Advisory Board.

The Carlyle Group was best known for buying defense companies and doubling or tripling their value and was already heavily supported by defense contracts. In 2002, the firm received $677 million in government contracts; by 2003, its contracts were worth $2.1 billion.

Prior to 9/11, some Carlyle companies were not doing so well. For instance, the future of Vought Aircraft looked dismal when the company laid off 20% of its employees. But business was booming shortly after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, and the company received over $1 billion in defense contracts.

The Bush family's connections to the Osama bin Laden's family seem almost surreal. On September 28, 2001, two weeks after 9/11, the Wall Street Journal reported that, "George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm."

As a representative of Carlyle, one of the investors that Bush brought to Carlyle was the Bin Laden Group, a construction company owned by Osama's family. The bin Ladens have been called the Rockefellers of the Middle East, and the father, Mohammed, has reportedly amassed a $5 billion empire. According to the Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq bin Laden to invest $2 million with Carlyle.

The Journal found that Bush had met with the bin Ladens at least twice between 1998 and 2000. On September 27, 2001, the Journal reported that it had confirmed that a meeting took place between Bush Senior and the bin Laden family through Senior's Chief of Staff, Jean Becker, but only after the reporter showed her a thank you note that was written and sent by Bush to the bin Ladens after the meeting.

The current President's little publicized affiliation with the bin Laden family goes back to his days with Arbusto oil when Salem bin Laden funneled money through James Bath to bail out that particular failed company.

Probably the most eerie report about this strange group of bedfellows is that on 9/11, the day that served as a kickoff for the highly profitable war on terror, Shafiq bin Laden attended a meeting in the office of the Carlyle Group, and stood watching TV with other members of the firm as the WTC collapsed.

The fact that so many Saudis, including many bin Ladens, were allowed to fly out of the country right after 9/11, while Americans were still grounded, has always seemed a bit strange to most people also, especially when nobody in the Bush administration was able to explain who gave permission for the flights.

About a month after 9/11 in October 2001, the Carlyle Group severed its ties with the Bin Laden Group, but the Bush family did not. In January 2002, Neil Bush took a trip to Saudi Arabia that was sponsored by the Bin Laden Construction Company and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the same Prince who offered New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani $10 million to help the 9/11 victims, a gesture that Rudy refused.

In fall 2003, Bush Senior finally resigned from the Carlyle Group as the accusations of family war profiteering grew louder. However, according to the Washington Post, he still retained stock in the firm and gave speeches on its behalf for a fee of $500,000.

Carlyle companies have also scored big in the Homeland Security bonanza. Federal Data Systems and U.S. Investigations Services hold multi-billion-dollar contracts to provide background checks for airlines, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security. U.S. Investigations used to be a federal agency, until it was privatized in 1996 and taken over by Carlyle.

Marvin and Jeb Bush are also highly successful members of the family war profiteering team. Marvin is a co-founder and partner in Winston Partners, a private investment firm, and Jeb is an investor in the Winston Capital Fund, which is managed by Marvin.

Winston Partners is part of the Chatterjee Group, which owned 5.5 million shares in a company called Sybase in 2001, a firm that had contracts worth $2.9 million with the Navy, $1.8 million with the Army, and $5.3 million with the Department of Defense. All totaled, the federal procurement database listed the firm's contracts that year as $14,754,000.

And Sybase was not the only company delivering war profits to Marvin and Jeb. The portfolio of Winston Partners also included the Amsec Corp, which in 2001 was awarded $37,722,000 in Navy contracts.

Marvin's business partner, Scott Andrews, sat on the board of directors at AMSEC, and the company's CEO was Michael Braham, who formerly worked for Paul Bremer, the leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority responsible for handing out contracts in Iraq.

This is the same Paul Bremer who used Iraqi money from the Development Fund for Iraq to award 5 no-bid contracts to Dick Cheney's cash cow, Halliburton, worth $222 million, $325 million, $180 million, and $194 million combined for the last two, according to a July 28, 2004, report by the CPA Inspector General Stuart Bowen, entitled, "Comptroller Cash Management Controls over the Development Fund for Iraq."

As it turns out, Halliburton received 60% of all contracts paid for with Iraqi money. In a January 2005 report, Inspector Bowen concluded that occupation authorities accounted poorly for $8.8 billion in Iraqi funds, and said, "The CPA did not implement adequate financial controls."

The President's uncle, William (Bucky) Bush, is the most visible war profiteer on the team. He sat on the board of a major military contractor called Engineered Support Systems (ESS). Six months before the war in Iraq began on September 16, 2002, CNN/Money Magazine called ESS one of "seven defense stocks that fund managers like," and one fund manager said ESS was one of two companies that "would gain the most from a war from Iraq."

As a director, Uncle William received a monthly fee and held stock options. In January 2003, before the Iraq war began, he owned 33,750 shares of stock, but a year later in January 2004, he owned 56,251.

The fact that Uncle William had an inside line to the White House can hardly be disputed. On March 25, 2003, Bush asked Congress for funding, "to cover military operations, relief and reconstruction activities in Iraq, and ongoing operations in the global war on terrorism," and the very next day, ESS announced a large order from the Army for its Chemical Biological Protected Shelter systems.

Uncle William has become a very rich man since his nephew took office. In January 2005, SEC filings show that he made about $450,000 by selling ESS stock. But he did even better the next year.

According to the Excess Report, through a series of defense contracts, ESS earnings reached record levels and set the stage for the sale of the firm to another defense contractor, DRS Technologies in January 2006, and among the beneficiaries of the deal was Uncle William, who cleared $2.7 million in cash and stock off the sale.

It's time for Congress to stop the direct deposits of tax dollars into the Bush bank accounts. Lawmakers need to notify the White House that all funding for Iraq is done, other than what is needed for the immediate removal of our troops from this disgusting war profiteering scheme.

Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for OpEd News and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government and corporate America.

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Saundra Hummer

April 10th, 2007, 04:28 PM

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^^^^^^^^^ High Stakes: Chávez Plays the Oil Card By
SIMON ROMERO and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
April 10, 2007

CARACAS, Venezuela, April 9 — With President Hugo Chávez setting a May 1 deadline for an ambitious plan to wrest control of several major oil projects from American and European companies, a showdown is looming here over access to some of the most coveted energy resources outside the Middle East.

Moving beyond empty threats to cut off all oil exports to the United States, officials have recently stepped up the pressure on the oil companies operating here, warning that they might sell American refineries meant to process Venezuelan crude oil even as they seek new outlets in China and elsewhere around the world.

“Chávez is playing a game of chicken with the largest oil companies in the world,” said Pietro Pitts, an oil analyst who publishes LatinPetroleum, an industry magazine based here. “And for the moment he is winning.”

But this confrontation could easily end up with everyone losing.

The biggest energy companies could be squeezed out of the most promising oil patch in the Western Hemisphere. But Venezuela risks undermining the engine behind Mr. Chávez’s socialist-inspired revolution by hampering its ability to transform the nation’s newly valuable heavy oil into riches for years to come.

As Mr. Chávez asserts much greater control over Venezuela’s oil industry, his national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, is already showing signs of stress. Management has become increasingly politicized, and money for maintenance and development is being diverted to pay for a surge in public spending.

During the last several decades, control of global oil reserves has steadily passed from private companies to national oil companies like Petróleos de Venezuela. According to a new Rice University study, 77 percent of the world’s 1.148 trillion barrels of proven reserves is in the hands of the national companies; 14 of the top 20 oil-producing companies are state-controlled.

The implications are potentially stark for the United States, which imports 60 percent of its oil. State companies tend to be far less efficient and innovative, and far more politicized. No place captures the shift in power to nationalist governments like Venezuela.

“We are on a collision course with Chávez over oil,” said Michael J. Economides, an oil consultant in Houston who wrote an influential essay comparing Mr. Chávez’s populist appeal in Latin America with the pan-Arabism of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya two decades ago. “Chávez poses a much bigger threat to America’s energy security than Saddam Hussein ever did.”

Consider the quandary facing Exxon Mobil after its chairman, Rex W. Tillerson, recently suggested that Exxon might be forced to abandon a major Venezuelan oil project because of its growing troubles with Mr. Chávez.

The energy world took notice. So did Mr. Chávez’s government.

Only a day later, Venezuelan agents raided Exxon’s offices here in the San Ignacio towers, a bastion for this country’s business elite. The government said that the raid was part of a tax investigation, but energy analysts said the exchange of threat and counterthreat was all too clear.

Politics and ideology are driving the confrontation here as Mr. Chávez seeks to limit American influence around the world, starting in Venezuela’s oil fields. Mr. Chávez views the Bush administration as a threat, in part because it indirectly supported a coup that briefly removed him from power five years ago. Yet the United States remains Venezuela’s largest customer.

Mr. Chávez recently decreed that Venezuela would take control of heavy oil fields in the Orinoco Belt, a region southeast of Caracas of so much potential that some experts say it could give the country more reserves than Saudi Arabia. The United States Geological Survey describes the area as the “largest single hydrocarbon accumulation in the world,” making it highly coveted despite Mr. Chávez’s erratic policies.

By setting a May 1 deadline for what some foreign oil executives consider an expropriation, the Venezuelan leader risks losing Exxon, ConocoPhillips and other companies, which are loath to put their employees and billions of dollars in assets under Venezuelan management.

A departure of expertise and investment could weaken an oil industry already unsettled by being transformed into Mr. Chávez’s most crucial tool for carrying out his reconfiguration of Venezuelan society.

Mr. Chávez has raised taxes on foreign oil companies and forced other oil ventures to come under his government’s control. And he has purged more than 17,000 employees from Petróleos de Venezuela after a debilitating strike about four years ago.

The talks have bogged down over how much the oil companies’ stakes in four big Orinoco projects are worth, whether Venezuela’s cash-short oil company would pay for the assets in oil instead of cash and, most important, who would manage the reduced operations of the foreign oil companies.

Still prevented from producing oil in places like Saudi Arabia and Mexico, the companies desperately want to hold on to their Venezuelan reserves. Companies like Exxon, whose Venezuelan assets were nationalized in the 1970s and returned to it in the 1990s, know the pitfalls of operating here and figure that Mr. Chávez will not be around forever.

With oil prices at high levels, oil-rich countries as varied as Angola, Norway and Russia are also waiting to see how the talks unfold. Governments in Kazakhstan and Nigeria are trying to negotiate better terms with foreign oil companies as well. But none are doing so with Mr. Chávez’s revolutionary flourish.

“It is a defining moment,” said Christopher Ruppel, a geopolitical risk analyst at John S. Herold Inc., the energy consulting firm.

Last week, Rafael Ramírez, Venezuela’s energy minister, sent a chilling signal to the oil companies, saying Venezuela might sell refineries in Texas and Louisiana that process crude from Exxon’s Venezuelan oil fields. Analysts say Venezuela could be setting the stage to produce much less oil in ventures with American oil companies for export to the United States.

The oil companies decline to talk publicly about the negotiations, but people in the industry say Exxon and ConocoPhillips, two of the largest American companies in Venezuela, are digging in their heels. The companies, however, lack a united front: Chevron is expected to accept Mr. Chávez’s terms, since it is also negotiating access to a large natural gas project in Venezuela.

“If the majors want to negotiate a settlement, they have to be able to let Chávez save face and look like he has won this with his people,” said Michael S. Goldberg, head of the international dispute resolution group at Baker Botts, a law firm in Houston that represents many of the major oil companies around the world.

For decades, Venezuela has been a leading supplier of oil to American refineries, a resilient economic relationship that remains intact despite deteriorating political ties. Venezuela is the fourth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, accounting for more than 10 percent of American oil imports.

Once Venezuela’s heavy oil is counted, its reserves may surpass those of Saudi Arabia or Canada, though the oil will be worthless without ventures to extract it. American oil producers are drawn here by Venezuela’s 80 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, among the largest outside the Middle East.

But Mr. Chávez is chipping away at those ties by forming ventures with state oil companies from China, Iran, India and Brazil. Venezuelan exports of oil and refined products to the United States fell 8.2 percent to a 12-year low in 2006 of about 1.3 million barrels a day, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Meanwhile, Mr. Chávez has accepted higher shipping costs to reach China, expanding exports tenfold to about 160,000 barrels a day since 2004.

“If the United States wants to diversify its oil supplies for reasons of national security, then Venezuela should be allowed to diversify its customer base for the same reason,” said Mazhar al-Shereidah, an Iraqi-born petroleum economist who is one of Venezuela’s leading energy experts.

But even under the best of circumstances, China’s retooling of its refineries to handle Venezuela’s sour, or high-sulfur, crude oil could take five to seven years. And it is not clear whether Mr. Chávez’s new foreign energy partners are prepared to invest heavily until they are confident they can trust him.

In a country where many facets of life are politicized, output levels are no exception. Venezuela says it produces 3.3 million barrels a day, but OPEC officials say production is closer to 2.5 million, 1 million barrels less than in 1999 when Mr. Chávez’s presidency began.

No one sees an immediate crisis at Petróleos de Venezuela. But its windfall from high oil prices masks the devilish complexity and rising costs of producing heavy oil.

Meanwhile, the company acknowledged last month that spending on “social development” almost doubled in 2006, to $13.3 billion, while its spending on exploration badly trailed its global peers. And Petróleos de Venezuela’s work force has ballooned to 89,450, up 29 percent since 2001 even as production declined.

Independent analysts are alarmed by a troubling increase in explosions and refining accidents during the last two years, which authorities brush off as sabotage. Mr. Ramírez, the energy minister, declined repeated requests for an interview.

With heavily subsidized domestic oil consumption surging, the government spends an estimated $9 billion to keep gasoline prices under 20 cents a gallon. Moreover, Mr. Chávez uses Petróleos de Venezuela to finance other nationalizations, like its $739 million purchase of an electric utility in Caracas from the AES Corporation.

Petróleos de Venezuela’s cash is said to be running short as Mr. Chávez uses its revenue to cement political alliances with Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua. The company has borrowed more than $11 billion since the start of the year, a rapid debt buildup that reflects a wager by Mr. Chávez that oil prices will remain high indefinitely.
Simon Romero reported from Caracas, Clifford Krauss from Houston.Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company ^^^^^^^
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Saundra Hummer

April 11th, 2007, 05:11 PM

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Reality not violent enough for neo-cons
Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, April 11, 2007

To some people, the themes of international politics are indistinguishable from those of professional wrestling. They see in the relations of nation states a ritualized melodrama of dominance vs. submission, triumph vs. humiliation. To them, every game’s a zero sum game; millions of individual human beings are labeled “good” or “evil.” All conflicts that don’t end violently, end shamefully; compromise equates with cowardice. So it was with the standoff between Great Britain and Iran over 15 Royal Navy sailors taken captive in the Persian Gulf. Ordinary people welcomed their release with happiness and relief. Actually, it’s tempting to say most normal people did. A perilous situation had been resolved without tragedy and without provoking a potentially disastrous war. Sure, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used the occasion to score propaganda points. But what points ? That Iran is a sovereign nation capable of defending its territory. That its leaders can act magnanimously, freeing the prisoners before Easter as a “gift to the British people.” With a characteristic lack of subtlety, Ahmadinejad all but spelled out the message: We respect your faith. Maybe you should respect ours.

Although there were indications the crisis came as a surprise to Iran’s government—London’s Guardian newspaper reported that Revolutionary Guard hotheads had acted on their own—it managed to present the thing as a Persian morality play on Farsi- and Arab-language TV. For their part, the Brits reportedly waved off a series of aggressive military options suggested by the Pentagon. In the aftermath, Prime Minister Tony Blair praised his country’s handling of the crisis as “firm but calm—not negotiating but not confronting, either.”

Without addressing Ahmadinejad directly, Blair told the Iranian people, “We bear you no ill will. On the contrary, we respect Iran as an ancient civilization, as a nation with a proud and dignified history. And the disagreements we have with your government we wish to resolve peacefully through dialogue.”

In the end, neither side budged from its original story about whether the sailors were captured in Iraqi or Iranian waters. Time was, Glenn Greenwald pointed out on salon. com, when one could simply have assumed the Brits were telling the truth and the Iranians lying. But that was before Blair assumed his role as what British detractors call George. W. Bush’s “poodle.” Anyway, none of that mattered as much as the bloodless ending.

Needless to say, the peaceful resolution threw American neo-conservatives into a fury. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer lamented the “pointed humiliation of Britain” and the “fatuousness of the ‘international community.’” Where others saw compromise, he discerned “impotence,” “ capitulation” and “farce.”

If the outcome of the standoff was a success, “one hesitates to ask what would constitute failure,” wrote former U. N. Ambassador John Bolton in the Financial Times. “The only thing risen from this crisis is Iranian determination and resolve to confront us elsewhere, at their discretion, whether on Iraq, nuclear weapons and terrorism.”

Disappointment was profound among those clamoring for war with Iran. FOX News pundit William Kristol complained of U. S. passivity. He favored bombing Tehran. So did GOP presidential wannabe Newt Gingrich. He appeared on right-wing talk radio calling for the destruction of Iranian oil refineries and a blockade of the Persian Gulf—potentially doubling the price of oil and throwing the world’s economy into a tailspin.

And for what ? Try to believe even Gingrich said it: To “show the planet that you’re tiny and we’re not.”

See, it’s not enough to invade Iran’s neighbors, Afghanistan and Iraq, and to fill the Persian Gulf with U. S. and British warships. Mere reality never suffices. To really make these jokers feel all virile and manly, it’s necessary to kill a lot of people, and strut around the ring with the championship belt raised over their heads.

George Orwell analyzed the phenomenon in a 1945 essay called “Notes on Nationalism,” which he defined as “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” Writing immediately after World War II, Orwell emphasized that “[n ] ationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.” It was to him a species of moral insanity. A patriot loves his country and its institutions, while “a nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige.... [H ] is thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations.... Nationalism is powerhunger tempered by self-deception.” Did Ahmadinejad, an annoying jerk, use the British seamen badly ? He did. But here’s what Iran didn’t do: No torture, no waterboarding, no being stripped naked, no 24-hour stress positions, no sensory deprivation, no sexual humiliation, no naked pyramids, no dog attacks or dog leashes. The sailors were released in two weeks, basically unharmed. If Iran won a propaganda victory, it’s important to recognize it wasn’t British capitulation that made it easy, it was American tough guys.
—–––––•–––––— Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
Go on-site to access this article and more, by clicking on the following URL's:

http://www.buzzflash.com/

http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/187100/
Why is it that so many men would rush us into war, while they themselves, with their own children and friends, sit back and Monday morning quarterback? They are living the good life and it seems they believe that wars will keep them in it. Why is it that the Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Newt Gingrich types are so willing and so quick to lead us into war? Why is is that so many clamor to hear and believe everything they feed to us? These are dangerous men as they lead too many of us down these dangerous paths; this, by their incessant article's, OP ED's, and television appearances.

They haven't lived in our real world, they just don't understand it.

We're their cannon fodder. We're the ones working in dead end jobs, jobs which, after a life time of faithful service, are left destitute more often than not, especially after we've reached retirement age and one catastropic illness wipes us out financially. We're the ones who pays the price to keep them and their cohorts in the lifestyles they've become so accustomed to.

Little do they seem to realize, they could bring a nuclear, germ or chemical cloud down on all our heads; theirs as well as ours. The odd thing is, they are willing to go ahead with their war-mongoring plans. They keep trying to implement their dreams of empire. Will it ever stop? Bill Kristol is no more than a carbon copy of his father; so, it seems there's always new crop of malcontents, those who would change the world to suit themselves

These are the dangerous men in our society, forget the crackheads at our doors. It's the Bill Kristols and Newt Gingrich types who are the ones who have the potential to destroy us from within; more than any criminal element in our country, or, any outside threat ever could. My belief anyway.

These men have the potential of leading too many of our beliefs here in our own country, milking and using the old Goebbels Nazi propaganda to it's full potential, fooling us, while scaring other countries into banding together as an organized military. Each and every day other countries are becoming more and more leary of us; while one would have hoped we would have been drawing them in as steadfast freinds and business partners. No, instead, they are tired of us, tired of what they see as empire building; they would like to see us fall. Why would they not? Especially after our recent acts?

You think there was vacum in Iraq? You want to see a vacum? Then let the United States fall apart and so will the world. A vacum could turn into a conflagration like never seen in our world. These countries had better be careful of what they wish for. It just might happen.

If we're thought of as a financial and military threat by several of our luke warm new friends, there's the possibility they could band together to protect themselves; a preeminent strike always being a possibility; we might even be the ones to do it, fearing just this, and hit them first. Those in the know, believe this very thing will happen. SRH
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Saundra Hummer

April 11th, 2007, 07:17 PM

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.............MARYLAND
First to approve move to sidestep national Electoral College
By
BRIAN WITTE
The Associated Press
Apr 10, 2007 4:15 PM (1 day ago)
ANNAPOLIS, Md. - Maryland officially became the first state in the nation Tuesday to approve a plan to give its electoral votes for president to the winner of the national popular vote, instead of the candidate chosen by state voters.

Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, signed the measure into law, one day after the state's General Assembly adjourned.

The measure would award Maryland's 10 electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. The plan would only take effect if states representing a majority of the nation's 538 electoral votes decided to make the same change.

Sen. Jamie Raskin, a law professor and sponsor of the idea, said Maryland is largely ignored by presidential candidates during campaigns, because they assume the Democratic state will vote for the Democratic candidate.

Raskin, a Democrat, said he hoped Maryland's support for the idea will start a national discussion and "kick off an insurrection among spectator states - the states that are completely bypassed and sidelined" during presidential campaigns.

"Going by the national popular vote will reawaken politics in every part of the country," Raskin said.

Other states are considering the change to avoid an election in which a candidate wins the national popular vote but loses in the Electoral College, as in 2000 when Democrat Al Gore lost to George W. Bush.

Hawaii's legislature recently passed a similar measure, sending it to Republican Gov. Linda Lingle. California lawmakers adopted the measure last year, but Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it.

National Popular Vote, a group that supports the change, said there are legislative sponsors for the idea in 47 states. Ryan O'Donnell, a spokesman for the group, described O'Malley's decision to sign the legislation as "an open invitation" for other states to join Maryland.

"We're really filled with optimism that other states are going to see that this is not only a possible way to fix broken elections, but a sound way," O'Donnell said.

But not everyone is buying into the idea. North Dakota and Montana rejected it earlier this year. Opponents say the change would hurt small rural states, where the percentage of the national vote would be even smaller than the three electoral votes they each have in the overall Electoral College.

Zach Messitte, a professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at St. Mary's College in Maryland, said the change would make candidates focus on highly populated areas, at the expense of smaller states that are protected by the current system.

"I personally don't think it's a great idea," Messitte said. "I think there are negatives to this, and I think it ignores this broad historic sweep that at different times of American history, different parts of the country have their different moments in the sun."

Under the current Electoral College system, voters decide to support slates of "electors," who meet to choose the president. A candidate needs a majority of 270 out of 538 to be elected.

URL:http://www.buzzflash.com........

Saundra Hummer

April 12th, 2007, 12:18 PM

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Imus And Beyond
By
TomPaine.com.
Isaiah J. Poole
is the executive editor
of
TomPaine.com.

Soon, the Don Imus groveling and penitence tour sparked by his jaw-dropping description of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ‘hos” will come to an end. And then what?

Does Imus say, in the words that the Rev. Al Sharpton used when Imus appeared on his radio show Monday, “let’s get past that, go on to the next commercial, and I live to curse another day”?

If the past is any guide, that is a sure bet. Imus has a long and sordid history of trafficking in racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. And a lot of people who consider themselves reputable—both Democratic and Republican politicians, political consultants, journalists and pundits—have shacked up in this seedy AM radio motel as if it were a five-star forum for serious political discourse. They knew better, as did the advertisers who bankrolled this enterprise and the networks that broadcast it. They have no one to blame but themselves for the soil on their own images as a result, and for whatever consequences they face if they go back in.

Imus keeps saying that he is a “good person” who said “a bad thing,” but that’s not the full truth.

As far back as 2000, TomPaine.com was chronicling the sewage spewing from Imus’ microphone in a series of articles by Philip Nobile and others that reached back into programs that aired years before. TomPaine.com published an ad in The New York Times and even bought time on Imus’ show to raise the issue, and Nobile wrote an article in 2000 for the Columbia Journalism Review.

In one article posted May 16, 2000, Nobile wrote,

Just about anything goes—from saying that [African-American former basketball player] Larry Johnson ruined [white female TV news personality] Willow Bay for white men, to asking the borough president of the Bronx if he felt “like the mayor of Mogadishu.” Epithets like “brillohead,” “dark meat,” “dingos,” “mandingos,” and “Uncle Ben” are okay on Imus.

When Imus appeared on Sharpton’s radio show, he talked about how he helps “restore the self-esteem and dignity” of children with cancer and other medical conditions through a boot-camp-style program at his ranch in New Mexico. But that’s not what Nobile heard about the ranch when he tuned into a March 1999 show:

VOICE IMITATING GENERAL GEORGE PATTON: … and what is the stated Imus ranch mission? You in the back.
PRIVATE: To give sick kids hands-on experiences of the great American cowboy from the rough and rugged all West.
VOICE IMITATING GENERAL GEORGE PATTON: And that is defined as?
PRIVATE: Sir, that’s defined as where men were men and sheep were sheep and Billy the Kid knew with whom to sleep.
VOICE IMITATING GENERAL GEORGE PATTON: Precisely, and that sleeping, boys, was not accomplished with the help of a damn down-filled, double-stitched, quilted, puffed-up, panty-waist, tofu-sucking sleeping bag you’d find rolled up in the back of Martha Stewart’s Land Rover tucked in beside the damned Nordstrom picnic basket. Boys, when we go out to that ranch we will give the troop that cowboy experience. Whether Corporal Imus knows it or not, even though we’ll be bivouacked in the vicinity of Santa Fe, we will not be conducting experiments in the lifestyles of the gay caballero. Gear we employ will not originate at L.L. Bean. It will be obtained from the quartermaster of our beloved United States Army. OD in color, standard regulation issue. Do I make myself clear?
PRIVATE: Sir, yes sir, sir. No Judy Garland gear, sir.
VOICE IMITATING GENERAL GEORGE PATTON: I can’t hear you.
PRIVATE: [louder] Sir, no Judy Garland gear, sir.
VOICE IMITATING GENERAL GEORGE PATTON: Sound off like you had a pair, maggot.
PRIVATE: [shouting] Sir, all steers, no queers, sir.

Imus has denied that he referred to prominent African-American journalist Gwen Ifill, now with PBS, as “the cleaning lady” when she was a White House correspondent for The New York Times, though that was reported in 1998 by reputable New York Daily News columnist, Lars-Erik Nelson, referring to a comment in a 1995 show: “Isn’t the Times wonderful. It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

Still, with this track record, MSNBC has been simulcasting the program since 1996 and even moved the program into its Secaucus, N.J., studios (which makes MSNBC’s disavowal of the show in the wake of this latest flap—that it’s just a product of CBS Radio and Westwood One that MSNBC and its parent, NBC Universal, has nothing to do with—disingenuous at best).

But this is not just about Imus. It may be too much to expect that the dozens of radio and TV personalities who serve up on-air bigotry as pseudo-news and entertainment will be reasonably constrained by the corporations that sign their paychecks. But what we can do is deny them continued legitimacy. Politicians who want our votes and journalists who want our trust should not be appearing on their shows; if they do, ask why they consented to be on a program that has regularly broadcast slurs against people of color, women and gays and lesbians. Make advertisers feel uncomfortable for being associated with such shows, especially those that have refused to support progressive radio alternatives.

Finally, the next time Imus or another one of these jocks utters a slur, let’s not leave the targets of the slur alone to fend for themselves. When Imus slandered those Rutgers players, he wasn’t simply denigrating young women on a basketball court with one of the foulest of slurs. Anyone who believes that every person should be treated with dignity should feel the defamation and be moved to act on their outrage. That’s what progressives do..
Go on-site to access this article and several others on Media Channel.org:

http://mediachannel.org

Click here to access more material on Don Imus from the TomPaine.com archives:
http://www.tompaine.com/docs/TomPaine_com%20Bigot%20In%20The%20Morning.htm .............
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Saundra Hummer

April 12th, 2007, 12:26 PM

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VIDEO
Why Don Imus? There Are Racists All Over The Media
By
MediaChannel:

To gain access to this video, click on the following URL:
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/04/12/why-don-imus-there-are-racists-all-over-the-media/
^^^^^
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Saundra Hummer

April 12th, 2007, 10:49 PM

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Creating a Market for Security
By
Paul Craig Roberts

04/12/07 "ICH" -- -- The War on Terror is a marketing campaign for security industries and terrorism experts. The latter are pulling in the consulting fees, and the former are rapidly inventing new products that enable “our” government to watch our every move and to know our location at every moment.

Although it should be working on its corporate ethics (see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6182137.stm ), BAE Systems is working on an “Onboard Threat Detection System.” The system consists of tiny cameras and microphones implanted in airline seats. The Onboard Threat Detection System records every facial expression and every whisper of every passenger, allowing watchful eyes and ears to detect terrorists before they can strike. BAE says its system is so sophisticated that it can differentiate between nervous flyers and real terrorists.

Think about this for a moment. Aside from the Big Brother aspect, the Onboard Threat Detection System is either redundant or the security authorities have no confidence in the expensive and intrusive airport security through which passengers are herded.

We have reached the point where we can no longer fly with more than three ounces of lotions, shampoo, toothpaste, and deodorants, because the government pretends that we might concoct a bomb out of the ingredients. Three ounces of shampoo is safe, but three and one-half ounces blows the airliner to smitherins.

We must shed coats, shoes, and belts to pass through airport security. We are wanded and patted down. Luggage is X-rayed and searched. IDs and boarding passes are endlessly checked as we proceed from check-in to gate. And we still need an Onboard Threat Detection System to monitor our expressions and words.

Other firms are developing chip implants that identify a person to scanning machines and allow our movements to be monitored by GPS systems. Still others are developing ID cards that have retina scans and our DNA. No doubt we will be required to have both.

All of this is to protect us from terrorists.

No thought is given to whether the intrusion from the protection is a greater threat than possible terrorist acts by foreigners protesting American hegemony over their own lives. If American hegemony has this big a price, I can do without it.

Some of us remember when it was possible to read a book in an airport while waiting on a flight. Today it can’t be done without ear plugs. TVs blaring the latest propaganda compete with incessant repetitive terrorist warnings interrupted by announcements of flight cancellations and gate changes. The cacophony of sound is maddening. If only we could go back to the days of crying babies and screaming children.

Once a terrorist warning is produced, it lives forever. Every US airport endlessly plays the same ancient warning from decades ago instructing passengers to carefully watch their luggage and not to accept items from other people to carry aboard flights. This warning dates from pre-security days when the explosion of an airliner in flight was blamed on a passenger accepting a parcel from a stranger to carry to a person waiting at the flight’s destination. Allegedly, the parcel was a bomb.

To hear this warning today thirty or forty times after passing through security makes a person wonder about the efficiency of airport security. Were all those warrantless searches pointless?

The greatest problem confronted by marketers of anti-terrorist products is the shortage of terrorist attacks. The only terrorist events Americans have experienced are the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As for 9/11, we still don’t have a good explanation of how so much security failed in one morning.

To prime the market for anti-terrorism products, the Bush administration used 9/11 to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush administration has been attempting to occupy both countries for several years at a cost to taxpayers estimated at 1,000 billion dollars.

The main result of the military action has been to stir up resentment among Muslims in the hopes that the resentment will find expression in terrorist acts in the US. We have been made less safe in order that entrepreneurs can make big bucks protecting us with new security products. It would have been much better just to give the 1,000 billion dollars to the security firms and not invaded the two countries.

Keep that in mind when you are being monitored in your airliner seat and are blinking too much because you still wear the old hard contact lenses or are suffering from allergies. Excessive blinking is a telltale sign of stress and means that the blinker is about to commit a terrorist act. When you are arrested don’t bother arguing with the foolproof Onboard Threat Detection System. Just be thankful that your senators and representative received enough campaign donations from security firms to be concerned with your security.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17521.htm
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Saundra Hummer

April 12th, 2007, 11:10 PM

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Kurdistan’s Covert Back-Channels

News:How an ex-M ossad chief, a German uberspy, and a gaggle of top-dollar GOP lobbyists helped Kurdistan snag 15 tons of $100 bills.

By
Laura Rozen

04/12/07 "Mother Jones" -- -- In June 2004, journalist Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker that Israelis operating in northern Iraq under the guise of businessmen were in fact cultivating Kurdish proxies to gather intelligence in preparation for possible future action against Iran. About the same time, I too was hearing about Israelis operating in Kurdish northern Iraq. First, from a former senior American diplomat who was invited by an Israeli American businessman to advise the Kurds on how to get billions of dollars they believed they were owed from the Saddam Hussein-era United Nations Oil-for-Food program. The diplomat gave me the Israeli’s name—Shlomi Michaels—and phone numbers for Michaels in Beverly Hills, Turkey, and Israel. The diplomat had walked away from the project, put off by Michaels’ temper, and also, he said, by doubts about what Michaels was really up to, and who he might really be working for.

So I was intrigued when, last summer, I read in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Shlomi Michaels had become the subject of an Israeli government investigation for allegedly operating in Iraq without the required authorization from the Israeli authorities. Not only had I known about Michaels for two years, I had spent about as long trying to understand if the Bush administration would embrace the regime-change policy of its Iran hawks, who believe that the solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions is to promote mass uprisings of ethnic minority and dissident groups such as the Kurds.

For much of the past year, I have been digging into the story of Shlomi Michaels’ operations in Kurdistan, and his connections in Israel, the United States, and around the world. My investigation took me to Israel early last fall, shortly after the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to talk with Israeli officials investigating Michaels, as well as one of Michaels’ long-time American associates, and Michaels’ business partner, the former Mossad chief Danny Yatom.

What I found was not the story I had expected. Instead of Michaels being part of a covert operation to set up anti-Iranian proxies in Kurdish Iraq, I discovered that Michaels and his associates were part of an effort by the Kurds and their allies to lobby the West for greater power in Iraq, and greater clout in Washington, and at the same time, by a group of Israeli ex security officials to rekindle good relations with their historical allies the Kurds through joint infrastructure, economic development, and security projects. It was, in other words, a story about influence-building, buying, and profit, albeit with subplots that were equal parts John le Carre and Keystone Kops, and a cast of characters ranging from ex-Mossad head Yatom to a former German superspy, with Israeli counterterrorism commandos, Kurdish political dynasties, powerful American lobbyists, Turkish business tycoons thrown in—not to mention millions of dollars stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

Yatom met me in the lobby of the Tel Aviv Sheraton at 7:30am on a Sunday, the beginning of Israel’s work week. The ex-Mossad chief turned Labor Party member of parliament was on his way to his office at the Knesset after a stop at the gym, dressed casually in a white button down shirt and black jeans. He spoke openly about his business relationship with Shlomi Michaels and the Kurdish venture they’d developed together, noting that he was no longer involved in its operations; after being elected to the Knesset in 2003, he’d put his business interests in a blind trust, as required by Israeli law.

Yatom said he and Michaels were introduced to key Iraqi Kurdish players by a European intelligence official whom he wouldn’t name; interviews with his associates revealed that it was Bernd Schmidbauer, West Germany’s intelligence chief in the 1990s. Dubbed “008” for his intelligence adventures during the waning days of the Cold War, Schmidbauer—now a member of the German parliament—did not respond to numerous messages left with his offices in Berlin and in Heidelberg.

Shlomi Michaels was similarly elusive, despite messages left at several of his far-flung residences. Fifty-two years old, six feet tall, and built, according to an acquaintance, “like a brick shithouse,” with the commando’s trademark shaved head and a black belt in karate, Michaels splits his time between Israel and the United States, with detours to Switzerland, Turkey, and Kurdistan. The elite counterterror officer turned entrepreneur and multimillionaire is well networked in Tel Aviv, Washington, and New York, where he taught a counterterrorism course at Columbia University in 2003. For a time, according to one source, he even ran a security consulting business in Los Angeles.

When the United States was preparing to invade Iraq, Michaels evidently saw an opportunity: According to his business associates, as well as public records and Israeli media reports, he reached out to contacts in Washington, seeking high powered lobbying help to get the Kurds a greater share of United Nations Oil-for-Food Program money, a fund set up by the UN in 1995 to use Iraq’s oil revenues to provide Iraqis humanitarian supplies during international economic sanctions against Iraq. During Saddam Hussein’s rein, the Oil-for-Food “revenue was spent in Arab parts of Iraq but not in Kurdistan,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “Kurdistan’s share of the fund was set at 13%. At least $4 billion accrued in Kurdistan’s name, Kurdish officials say, and some contend that the amount could be as much as $5.5 billion.” The paper reported that in late June 2004, just five days before he turned Iraq back over to domestic rule and flew out of Iraq, then-top US official in Iraq Paul Bremer ordered the transfer by three U.S. military helicopters of $1.4 billion in 100 dollar bills to Kurdistan—his calculation of the Kurds’ share of Oil-for-Food funds; but the Kurds and their advocates believe they are owed a few billion more. It was so much cash—15 tons’ worth—the paper further reported, that no bank could be found in which to deposit it.

Even as he helped connect the Kurds to those who lobbied for them to receive more money, Michaels positioned himself to be in line for some of the cash. A year before the invasion of Iraq, Yatom and Michaels had formed an investment and security consulting company called the Interop Group (short for international operations group) that has since done millions of dollars of business in Kurdish Iraq. Michaels’ main business in Iraq is a joint venture called the Kurdish Development Organization, or KUDO. One American source describes Kudo as a joint venture between Michaels’ company and the Barzani part of a Kurdish governmental entity. According to a second American source (who has at times offered differing accounts), KUDO is a venture between Michaels, Schmidbauer, Yatom, and members of the powerful Barzani Iraqi Kurdish political family. According to this source, KUDO serves as a general service contractual liaison between the Kurdish Regional Government and the contractors for the massive $300 million project to build a new international airport in the Kurdish city of Irbil. The main contractor on the airport project is a Turkish company called Mak-yol. A third Michaels’ company, Coloseum Consulting, is registered in Switzerland as an affiliated company of Interop, according to Swiss federal corporate registration papers.

More covertly, the Israeli newspapers Yedioth Ahronoth and Haaretz have reported, Michaels has also brought in former Israeli military officers to provide counterterrorism training to Kurdish security forces at a secret “camp Z” in Iraq. Sources say the contract was mere “bupkas”—a few million dollars—and Michaels undertook the work out of friendship with then-Kurdish Minister of Interior and security chief Karim Sinjari, and also because the Kurds faced a threat from al Qaeda.

Whatever the reasoning, the execution of the “Camp Z” project was problematic. In 2004, according to Israeli media reports, Michaels’ team brought in dozens of Israeli combat veterans through the Turkish-Iraqi Kurdish border, traveling on Israeli passports whose details were duly noted by Ankara. Soon the Turkish government grew alarmed that Israeli military types were moving into northern Iraq, claiming to be agriculture advisers and the like. The story made it to Israel, whose nationals are prohibited from doing business in Iraq without explicit government permission. “There is a legal state of war between Israel and Iraq,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev told me. “It is therefore illegal for Israeli nationals to visit Iraq. Hopefully that will change one day.” But since it has not yet, the news about Michaels’ operation caused a stir; making matters worse were Michaels’ alleged feuds with his business partners over money. One disgruntled former Israeli employee went to the Israeli press in the fall of 2005, revealing with documents and photographs the extent of Michaels’ involvement in Kurdistan.

The story kicked up controversy—Israeli operations are a source of paranoid fascination in the region—and led to two separate Israeli government investigations. Exposure has also led to the necessary departure of almost all of the Israelis working for Michaels from northern Iraq. (Speculation was further fanned by Seymour Hersh’s 2004 New Yorker report that Israel is forging a “plan B” for Iraq that includes training Kurdish commandos and use them to infiltrate Iran and Syria.) One of those probes—by the Israeli ministry of defense, which wanted to know why it had never been approached for export licenses for the Israeli defense and secure communications equipment sold in northern Iraq—has since been referred to the Israeli police and “will continue as long as necessary,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told me in an email last fall.

Skeptics dismiss the probe as a PR gesture aimed at the Turks, whose goodwill is critical to Israel and who resent any moves to arm the Kurds on their border In fact, notes one former senior U.S. diplomat, “Michaels said to me… he had the explicit approval of the Israeli government” for his private business activities in Kurdish Iraq. “What they were trying to do is develop influence in the Kurdish area.”

None of this activity has geopolitical implications, insists the Kurdish government’s polished young representative in Washington, Qubad Talabani, who happens to be the son of Iraq’s president, and whose family has been the historic rival of Michaels’ partners in the Barzani clan. In an interview in his offices on I Street, Talabani told me any Israeli business development activities in Kurdistan were “purely private sector activities,” and that “Kurdistan is open for business.”

As Talabani walked me out after my interview, we passed a poster advertising a new bi-weekly direct Austrian Airlines route from Vienna to Irbil, site of Michaels’ airport project—a town of 990,000 people until recently served only by regional air carriers and charter flights. “We will become the gateway to Iraq,” Talabani told me.

Plenty of non-Kurds would like to help—and make a little profit along the way. According to lobbying records, the high powered, White House-connected lobbying firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers, LLC has earned $800,000 promoting the Kurdistan Regional Government’s interests since 2004; before hiring the firm, two U.S. sources say, Michaels had approached Jack Abramoff about representing the Kurds, but the discussions never went beyond the initial stages.

Russell Wilson, a former senior professional staffer for the House international relations committee who helped advise the Kurds on Washington representation and who was formerly listed as a non equity officer in Interop, notes that Kurdistan has many of the things the rest of Iraq lacks: “It’s safe, secure, it’s geographically rich”—features include plenty of unexplored potential oil and natural gas reserves—”and the people are extremely nice.” Wilson says it was he who recommended in the spring of 2004 that the Kurds hire Ed Rogers, a former political director in the Bush I White House, of Barbour Griffith & Rogers as their Washington lobbyist.

In the end, Yatom and Michaels’ business activities may well be evidence, as much as any covert U.S. interests, of the Kurds’ superb gamesmanship, pragmatism, and sense of opportunity—instincts honed to a fine art by a people that, lacking durable proximate allies, has learned how to cultivate the enemies of its enemies. The Mossad’s former Irbil station chief, Eliezer Geizi Tsafrir, told me that like the Israelis, the Kurds regard themselves as an historically stateless people surrounded by hostile nations. Back when Tsafrir served in Irbil, he even helped set up a Kurdish intelligence service, in cooperation with the Barzani patriarch, Mustafa Barzani. “They [the Kurds] approached us, saying they had nobody to help them in the world, and our people had suffered too,” he said. “We supplied them with cannons, guns, anti-air equipment, all sorts of equipment, and even lobbying. The contacts between us, and the sympathy, will last for generations to come.”

Reporting for this project was supported by the Nation Institute.

© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17524.htm $$$ .

Saundra Hummer

April 13th, 2007, 08:30 AM

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Federal law requires preservation of electronic communications.

Rob Kezelis
April 12, 2007 - 23:31.

It is like lifting a bandage and finding out that not only is the scab missing, but the wound has turned puss-filled, even gangrenous. The AttorneyGate scandal has mushroomed into something big enough to eclipse the entire administration. Here's why:

Just a quick overview:

8 lawyers canned

Had it not been for the bloggers and the internet tubes, no one would have noticed this incredible attack on independent DOJ attorneys.

Monica Goodling pleads the 5th

Proof positive that Regent University is pumping out idiots and morons, with 150 of them probably as bad, or worse. Had she kept quiet, it would have blown over. instead, she raised eyebrows, and therefore interest.

White House e-mails turned over, many missing

Oh wow, 3,000 DOCUMENTS turned over! except they weren't. Edited, selectively chosen, this news dump is turning out to be a problem for the DOJ and Karl Rove.

Goodling resigns

This was a shocker. WHAT DID SHE KNOW? and what is she hiding?

Political pressure applied to fire US Attorneys

Bit by bit, the public learns that something really unseemly, perhaps illegal occurred. What ever it was, it ain't pretty.

US Attorneys pressured to pursue Democrats on voter fraud nationwide

The first shoe drops. Politicization of the DOJ is now a fact, not some paranoid drug induced fiction. We also learn that the government futzed with voter fraud data, hiding evidence that there is little voter fraud anywhere, except in the minds of political warriors working for Karl Rove.

Alberto goes to school

The idea that the ATTORNEY GENERAL of the entire USA has to be trained on how to testify before congress is astounding. Either he is a criminal, (and hiding things) or he is an idiot(and not capable of handling the office), or he is incompetent.

Alberto flunks out

Maybe all three.

More evidence of missing e-mails

The idea that an entire branch of government deliberately created a separate, secret, and hidden communications system for top administration people, his political leaders (Karl Rove) and the DOJ people (who were tasked with pushing 93 US attorneys to do their politically-based attacks) is itself criminal. “Amazing” is simply not strong enough to describe it.

Shadow communications violate federal law. How could this story get any worse? First, the White House says that only 22 people ever used it. So sorry. On second thought, 50 people used it. And in response to a legal demand to turn over all these records, guess what happens.

"Ahem, we just lost SEVERAL MILLION E-Mails and instant messages."

Slowly, from this murky swamp a few truths become clear. This administration knowingly, deliberately, and repeatedly broke the law, hiding communications in an effort to prevent anyone from finding out what they were doing with the DOJ. They routinely pressured existing US attorneys to do their political bidding, using the entire federal legal system to attack democratic voters, politicians and anyone else who stood in their way.

In essence, this was an attack on our democratic form of government. They almost succeeded. Had they stolen enough votes last November, they probably would have.

This incredible string of events raises another burning issue. Compared to the hundreds of pointless, wasteful, and destructive investigations raised by the GOP during Clinton's presidency, there has been only one investigation – the one that led to Scooter Libby's conviction. Anyone willing to bet that Patrick Fitzgerald never learned about the secret, hidden e-mail and blackberry systems while he investigated Cheney, Libby, Rove and others?

Obstruction of justice? You bet. Time for a revolution. Let's put them all in jail before they destroy this country beyond repair.
URL: http://www.capitolhillblue.com/cont/node/2237 ^^^^^ .

papsrus

April 13th, 2007, 08:37 AM

Saundra Hummer

April 13th, 2007, 03:09 PM

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:: :: :: :: :: :: ::
The Emails the
White House
Doesn't Want You to See
New details continue to emerge on the story of the emails White House officials sent through non-governmental addresses, a possible violation of the law that we detailed in March. Five million of them have been lost, many of which reportedly relate to the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys. Also revealed is the fact that Karl Rove was the only staffer exempt from White House policy. Daniel Schulman, Mother Jones
The U.S Attorney firings provide more evidence of the Bush administration avoiding its own email system (and accountability, posterity, prosecution).
Daniel Schulman
March 30 , 2007
MotherJones.com /
washington_dispatch / 2007
On February 6, 2003, lobbyist Jack Abramoff sent an email to his former executive assistant Susan Ralston, who had since gone on to work for Karl Rove, requesting that she pass along an important message to her boss. A Louisiana Indian tribe, the Jena band of Choctaws, was seeking to acquire land for a casino, a project at odds with the interests of Abramoff's tribal clients who feared it would siphon business from their own gaming establishments. Abramoff wanted Rove to intercede and "to get some quiet message from the WH [White House] that this is absurd." After Ralston agreed to pass along word, Abramoff replied to thank her. But he slipped up.

Instead of responding to an email account administered by the Republican National Committee (sralston@georgewbush.com) as he had intended, he sent the message to Ralston's White House address. The following day Abramoff was alerted to his error by a colleague, Kevin Ring, who'd spoken to a White House official to whom Abramoff's request had been forwarded. "She said it is better to not put this stuff in writing in their email system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc.," Ring wrote. Abramoff responded swiftly: "Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her rnc [Republican National Committee] pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system."

The significance of this intriguing exchange, which was among thousands of emails reviewed by investigators for the House Government Reform Committee as part of an extensive investigation into Abramoff, might have gone unrecognized had it not been for another scandal, this one involving the abrupt firings of eight U.S. Attorneys. As the controversy intensified in early March and hearings were held, the Department of Justice was forced to release thousands of documents, including email exchanges between Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson, who resigned in mid-March, and Rove deputy J. Scott Jennings.

Here too was evidence that White House officials were conducting business using RNC email accounts, domains such as gwb43.com and rnchq.org. But why? For one, as Abramoff was attempting to do, it is a way of bypassing the White House server and skirting its automatic archiving function, insuring that potentially damaging or incriminating emails will not be preserved for posterity by the National Archives, or worse, come to light through the efforts of a federal prosecutor or congressional investigator. In a March 15 letter to Henry Waxman's Government Reform Committee, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington noted that this practice might violate the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which governs how the papers of presidents and their staffs are to be preserved, and urged an investigation. "This refreshed our memory about what we'd seen in the Abramoff emails," says one Waxman aide.

A little over a week later, Waxman's Committee fired off its own letters to Mike Duncan, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Marc Racicot, the former chair of the president's reelection committee, demanding that they preserve White House emails on their organization's servers "because of their potential relevance to congressional investigations"—"multiple" investigations the letter stressed. "The e-mail exchanges reviewed by the Committee provide evidence that in some instances, White House officials were using the nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications." (According to the Waxman aide, Duncan and Racicot have yet to respond.)

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists' project on government secrecy, says the use of RNC email accounts is interesting for another reason. "It shows how closely intertwined the White House is with its partisan allies," he says. "The fact that the White House and the RNC are working hand in hand and White House officials are using RNC emails is itself remarkable." He added, "Iran-Contra is getting invoked a lot these days and this may be another parallel, where the famous White House emails were recovered even after they were deleted from the White House server. People may have learned that lesson."

Oliver North certainly did. Back in 1986, when most people had not even heard of email and the government's email system was still known as PROFS (Professional Office System), he and John Poindexter attempted to purge their hard drives of electronic communications related to Iran-Contra. ("We all sincerely believed that when we send a PROFS message to another party and pressed the button 'delete' that it was gone forever. Wow, were we wrong," North later remarked after his incriminating messages were resurrected.)

In 1993 then-National Archivist Don Wilson inked a secret agreement with George H.W. Bush in the final hours of his presidency giving him sole control over his administration's computer records. (Wilson went on to become the executive director of Bush's presidential library; a federal court later declared their agreement unconstitutional.) Years later, with the embattled Clinton administration faced with numerous allegations of impropriety, including charges that it had illegally obtained FBI files on prominent Republicans for political purposes—this controversy became known as Filegate—a White House whistleblower came forward claiming that the administration had suppressed 100,000 emails related to ongoing investigations. Sheryl Hall, who helped to supervise the computer system in the Clinton White House, reported being told by a colleague that "if the contents of these e-mails became known, that there would be different outcomes to these scandals, as the e-mails were incriminating and could cause people to go to jail." Congressional Republicans, then in the majority, cast the alleged cover-up as a worse scandal than Watergate, concluding in a report by the House Government Reform Committee that "the e-mail matter can fairly be called the most significant obstruction of congressional investigations in U.S. history." (Democrats, led by Henry Waxman, fired back with their own report, which noted, among other things, that "this Committee has a long history of making unsubstantiated allegations.")

In general, past administrations, Democratic and Republican, have chafed at the prospect of turning over their records, per the Presidential Records Act, says Bruce Montgomery, the director of the University of Colorado at Boulder's archives and an expert on presidential papers. "No president since Carter, who signed the Presidential Records Act into law, has looked kindly on that statute. Carter did not want the Presidential Records Act to apply to him. The Carter Justice Department saw it as a breach of the separation of powers." In 1985, a young lawyer working in the Reagan White House questioned the constitutionality of the law in a memo to his boss, White House counsel Fred Fielding, who is currently reprising that role in the Bush administration. That lawyer, John Glover Roberts Jr., who we know as Chief Justice Roberts, noted that the "existence of the Act serves to burden the full and frank exchange of advice." That advice, he argued, "is protected by the constitutionally based doctrine of executive privilege." He fretted, however, that it was too early to mount a constitutional challenge. That would have to wait until 2001, when, after the 12-year waiting period outlined in the law, the first batch of Reagan-era documents would be released.

When that moment arrived, scarcely a year into President Bush's first term, the president signed a controversial executive order that, among other things, claims broad authority to review and block the release of presidential papers and extends executive privilege to the heirs of the officeholder and to the Vice President. The order was met with outrage by archivists and historians, some of whom argue that this statute effectively gives the administration the power to write its own history. "This is very much pre-Nixon in the sense that they want presidents and their families to control what people see and what they cannot see, what history they can write and what history they cannot write," says Montgomery, the presidential papers expert. "They want to manage their own historical legacy."

John Carlin, the former governor of Kansas who served as the national archivist from 1995 to 2005, says the administration's expansion of executive privilege "was probably the major issue where we as an agency disagreed with the White House." Carlin, who was asked to resign from the National Archives in December 2003 by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, no explanation given, says his agency was granted ample opportunity to object to the directive, but, in the end, "We said our piece and they made their decision."

The president's executive order has long been the subject of bi-partisan concern in Congress and, in March, legislation passed the House that would essentially revoke it. But even before the measure could come to a vote, the White House issued a veto threat, writing in a Statement of Administration Policy that "executive privilege is not subject to Congressional regulation, but rather arises directly from the Constitution itself."

In this context, the news that at least some White House officials are using alternate email accounts to avoid creating an official record of their communications seems to fit a broader pattern. But in many ways, says Steven Hensen, the past president of the Society of American Archivists and the technical director of Duke University's archives, this practice seems "a bit more devious." "It clearly looks like an attempt to conceal official business," he says.

Asked about the use of RNC email accounts during a press briefing on March 27, White House spokesperson Dana Perino played down this unusual practice. "What I know—I checked into this—is that certain White House officials and staff members who have responsibilities that straddle both worlds, that have responsibilities in communication, regularly interface with political organizations, do have a separate email account for those political communications. That is entirely appropriate, especially when you think of it in this case, that the practice is in place and followed precisely to avoid any inadvertent violations of what is called the Hatch Act…. Under an abundance of caution so that they don't violate the Hatch Act, they have these separate emails." She added that "people are encouraged, on official White House business, to use their official White House accounts."

The Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activity while on the job. But, according to two lawyers I spoke with, both of them well versed in the details of that law, this rationale doesn't entirely hold water. A lawyer who works for the Office of Special Counsel, the agency charged with investigating Hatch Act violations, told me that Senate-confirmed presidential appointees as well as staffers whose salaries are paid from an appropriation for the Executive Office of the President are exempt from some of the strictures of that law and are allowed to engage in political activity. (No federal employee, however, is allowed to fundraise on the job, or solicit or discourage the political activity of people with business before their agencies.) And even if they weren't exempt, simply using a non-government email account wouldn't make any difference, the lawyer explained. "Using my personal account or some other email account that's not a federal email account would not remove me from the prohibition if I'm still either on duty or in a federal building."

Perino's explanation doesn't hold up on another level as well. Since the administration has been so insistent that the eight fired U.S. attorneys were let go for performance rather than political reasons, how to explain why Rove aide J. Scott Jennings was using his "political" email account to push for Tim Griffin, a former Rove aide, to take over Bud Cummins' job as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas? "The statements from the White House so far have been rather confusing," says the Waxman aide. "Very odd."

While some White House officials may legitimately be using RNC-issued laptops and BlackBerrys to conduct party business, it's clear that others are taking pains to use alternate email accounts simply to keep their communications from becoming public record. In 2004, U.S. News & World Report noted, in a three-sentence item, that many White House aides had begun using Web-based email in order to avoid the White House system. "I don't want my E-mail made public," one White House "insider" told the magazine. "It's Yahoo!, baby," another said.

In the Clinton White House, according to an official staff manual circa 1997, there was a strict prohibition against using anything but the official system. In addition, a 2000 directive to White House staff states that "the system designated for EOP [Executive Office of the President] mail… is to be used exclusively for E-mail communications within the EOP Complex and with outside parties. Other applications (e.g., commercial E-mail services) may not be used to send or receive E-mail."

Whether or not the use of non-governmental email accounts ultimately breaches the Presidential Records Act, it virtually assures an incomplete historical record of the Bush presidency. "The only way accurate history can be written is if the full records are available to evaluate," says John Carlin, the former national archivist, who did not want to weigh in directly on the current controversy. "Records undergird a democracy."

But the email controversy may be of significance not only to historians who will pour over the Bush papers in years to come, but to others who are working to provide present-day accountability. Indeed, among other people, these revelations could be of particular interest to a certain federal prosecutor who recently won the conviction of the Vice President's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, on charges of obstructing an investigation into the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity. Contained in the lengthy docket of U.S.A. v. Libby is a January 23, 2006 letter from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to Libby's defense team, who were then jousting over classified discovery. In it, Fitzgerald advises Libby's attorneys, "in an abundance of caution," that "we have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system." Though the prosecution later received an additional 250 pages of records from the vice president's office, it remains unclear what the true nature of this archiving problem was or whether Fitzgerald received all of the documents that may have been relevant to his investigation. (Fitzgerald's office declined to comment after being provided with a detailed request.) Perhaps Fitzgerald, along with other investigators who have sought White House records, was looking in the wrong place. He may want to check the RNC's servers.
Daniel Schulman is an Investigative Reporter at Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2007/03/white_house_emails.html :: :: :: .

Saundra Hummer

April 13th, 2007, 03:18 PM

It would be comical, if it wasn't so serious, how out of control this bunch is. Every day -- every day! -- there's some Keystone Kops buffoonery revealed about these boneheads running the country. :shrug:

You're so right papsrus, I don't believe in my heart of hearts that people in other countries are laughing either; not so much as they're aghast at what's going on with our so called "leaders", as their stupidity and war mongering is scaring the bejesus out of them. It would have to. The whole globe is less stable due to this administrations bungled attempts to rule the world.

Saundra Hummer

April 13th, 2007, 05:17 PM

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“To initiate a war of aggresion . . . is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Nuremberg Tribunal

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"the US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN charter."

UN Chief Kofi Annan
September 2004.
Source BBC

~~~
"When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law."

Frederic Bastiat - (1801-1850)
French economist, statesman,
and author.
Source: The Law,
by
Frederic Bastiat, 1850

~~~
"Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave."

Frederick Douglass

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Saundra Hummer

April 13th, 2007, 05:46 PM

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^^^^^^^
Canada offers forum for lecturer barred from U.S.
By
Jonathan Woodward
From
Wednesday's Globe and Mail

04/13/07 "Globe and Mail" 04/11/07 VANCOUVER A highly regarded Iraqi epidemiologist who wants to tell Americans about an alarming rise in cancer levels among Iraqi children will come to Canada instead because he couldn't get a visa to the United States.

Unable to travel to the University of Washington, Riyadh Lafta -- best known for a controversial study that estimated Iraq's body count in the U.S.-led war in Iraq at more than half a million -- will arrive at Simon Fraser University in B.C. this month to give a lecture and meet with research associates.

"The University of Washington wanted him, but the U.S. denied his entry," said his colleague at SFU, Tim Takaro. "They need to be able to collaborate, even if his results are unpopular with the Americans. Now he's at SFU, and the best they're going to get is a video feed."

Once in Canada, Dr. Lafta will present estimates that paint a damning portrait of the war's ravages on children: that birth defects are on the rise since the war began, and that the number of children dying from cancers such as leukemia has risen tenfold.

Dr. Lafta had tried for six months to get a visa into Seattle to speak in Washington, and was ignored a half-dozen times, Dr. Takaro said.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services couldn't be reached for comment. But a spokesman for Seattle Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott said he couldn't understand the decision. "Jim's certainly more than a little unhappy about it. We don't know whether this was a snafu or more than that," Mike DeCesare said. "Certainly with the doctor not able to be on the campus, and engage directly with people, you've got to believe that's a net loss for everybody."

Dr. Lafta was born in Baghdad in 1960, was trained as a physician at Baghdad University College and then worked for 14 years for the Ministry of Health under Saddam Hussein. He became the head of the communicable disease department and then the primary-care department of Diyala province in northern Iraq.

Dr. Lafta, who is still in Iraq, couldn't be reached by e-mail yesterday. But Dr. Takaro shared a message from his personal communication. "The main point is that people outside Iraq do not realize the real disaster we are suffering," Dr. Lafta writes. "Only the Iraqi people know that, simply because the foreigners are listening to the news while we are living the events on the ground."

Special to The Globe and Mail
© Copyright 2007 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

URL:
http://www.informationclearinghouse....ticle17526.htm ^^^^^^^ .

Saundra Hummer

April 14th, 2007, 10:36 PM

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A NEWSLETTER:

ACTION ALERT

freepress
Dear Richard R.,

Imus is Gone but Big Media Remain

Demand More Diversity on the Airwaves

Tell Your Friends to Act

The controversy over Don Imus' racist remarks goes far beyond one bigoted commentator. But getting rid of Imus won't fix the media problem.

Most of our TV and radio stations are owned by giant corporate conglomerates. They don't represent the views of most Americans -- and they make huge profits off the public airwaves.

What we need are more diverse, independent and local media owners. Yet right now less than 10% of TV and radio stations are owned by people of color or women.

But instead of addressing this national disgrace, the Federal Communications Commission is actually trying to let the largest companies buy up even more stations!

1...Tell the FCC: We Need More Diversity in the Media

What Imus said is just the tip of the iceberg. Scores of other TV and radio hosts regularly make racist and sexist comments. The best way to stop this race to the bottom is to change who's sitting at the top -- and making the decisions about who's behind the mic.

Today, according to one industry study, only 2.5% of radio stations have a person of color in the role of general manager, and only 4.4% have a racial or ethnic minority in the role of news director. The percentage of women in these jobs isn't much higher. No wonder shock jocks like Imus have been able to keep their jobs for so long.

Now is our chance to make a change. In 2003, we stopped the FCC from allowing more media concentration, when more than 3 million people took action to stop Big Media.

2...Tell Your Friends To Act

This time, we must not only stop further consolidation -- we must demand media ownership that reflects the diversity that makes our nation great.

Onward,

Robert McChesney
President
Free Press
www.freepress.net

P.S. For more on how minority owners have been shutout of the media system, read the Free Press study Out of the Picture:" http://www.stopbigmedia.com/=shutout

Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this.
Tell-a-friend!
http://www.stopbigmedia.com/=shutout
.........

Saundra Hummer

April 15th, 2007, 01:33 PM

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???????
Again with the Madrassa Nonsence?
FROM BLOG:
The Carpetbagger Report - Reality-Based Commentary, Analysis, and Tirades on Politics in America
The following blog post is from an independent writer and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.com.

POSTED: Friday, April 13, 2007
Reason #1,684,349 why I do not watch television news. This was CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric in last night’s “Notebook” segment:

“Hi, everyone. Is America ready to elect a president who grew up praying in a mosque?

“Barack Obama has arguably the most diverse religious background of any candidate ever. He was raised in Indonesia by a Christian mother and Muslim stepfather and attended a Catholic school — but while growing up, also studied Islam. That background sparked rumors that he had studied in a radical madrassa, or Quranic school — rumors his campaign denied, declaring that Obama is now a practicing Christian. Last month, the Los Angeles Times interviewed people who grew up with Obama. “We prayed in the mosque,” one of them said, “but not seriously,” noting that Obama also prayed with his Catholic schoolmates.

“It’s too soon to know what America will decide about Barack Obama or his background, but it’s not too soon to wonder if America will see that as an asset or a liability.”

This nonsense was debunked in January. There have been zero new revelations, details, or discussion. What on earth is Couric thinking?

By the time Couric said that Obama’s campaign “denied…rumors” about the senator having “studied in a radical madrassa,” I had to check to make sure Couric wasn’t cribbing from right-wing talking points. The madrassa nonsense didn’t just get a “denial” from campaign staffers; it was entirely debunked. It has no basis in reality — a tidbit that Couric felt no need to share with her viewers.

As Media Matters noted, the rest of the report was equally unreliable.
Couric also cited a March 15 Los Angeles Times article, claiming that the Times “interviewed people who grew up with Obama,” and that it quoted “one of them,” Zulfan Adi, saying, “We prayed in the mosque … but not seriously.”

However, in a March 25 article, the Chicago Tribune challenged much of the Times’ reporting. The Tribune noted that Adi — who the Times claimed “describe[d] himself as among Obama’s closest childhood friends” — said “he was not certain” about his claim that Obama “regularly attended Friday prayers” at the mosque with his stepfather and that he “only knew Obama for a few months, during 1970, when his family moved to the neighborhood.” The Tribune further reported: “Interviews with dozens of former classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends show that Obama was not a regular practicing Muslim when he was in Indonesia.”

So what are we left with? A leading anchor, in one of journalism’s premier positions, rehashing months-old nonsense for no reason and with no accuracy.

“Is America ready to elect a president who grew up praying in a mosque?” I don’t know; is America ready to watch an anchor who doesn’t know what she’s talking about? http://today.reuters.com/News/Articl...6Cz2gqL3VePYjO :: :: ::.

Saundra Hummer

April 15th, 2007, 02:26 PM

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Four Hired Guns in an Armored Truck, Bullets Flying, and a Pickup and a Taxi Brought to a Halt. Who Did the Shooting and Why?
A Chaotic Day On Baghdad's Airport Road

By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 15, 2007; A01

On the afternoon of July 8, 2006, four private security guards rolled out of Baghdad's Green Zone in an armored SUV. The team leader, Jacob C. Washbourne, rode in the front passenger seat. He seemed in a good mood. His vacation started the next day.

"I want to kill somebody today," Washbourne said, according to the three other men in the vehicle, who later recalled it as an offhand remark. Before the day was over, however, the guards had been involved in three shooting incidents. In one, Washbourne allegedly fired into the windshield of a taxi for amusement, according to interviews and statements from the three other guards.

Washbourne, a 29-year-old former Marine, denied the allegations. "They're all unfounded, unbased, and they simply did not happen," he said during an interview near his home in Broken Arrow, Okla.

The full story of what happened on Baghdad's airport road that day may never be known. But a Washington Post investigation of the incidents provides a rare look inside the world of private security contractors, the hired guns who fight a parallel and largely hidden war in Iraq. The contractors face the same dangers as the military, but many come to the war for big money, and they operate outside most of the laws that govern American forces.

The U.S. military has brought charges against dozens of soldiers and Marines in Iraq, including 64 servicemen linked to murders. Not a single case has been brought against a security contractor, and confusion is widespread among contractors and the military over what laws, if any, apply to their conduct. The Pentagon estimates that at least 20,000 security contractors work in Iraq, the size of an additional division.

Private contractors were granted immunity from the Iraqi legal process in 2004 by L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. occupation government. More recently, the military and Congress have moved to establish guidelines for prosecuting contractors under U.S. law or the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but so far the issue remains unresolved.

The only known inquiry into the July 8 incidents was conducted by Triple Canopy, a 3 1/2 -year-old company founded by retired Special Forces officers and based in Herndon. Triple Canopy employed the four guards. After the one-week probe, the company concluded that three questionable shooting incidents had occurred that day and fired Washbourne and two other employees, Shane B. Schmidt and Charles L. Sheppard III.

Lee A. Van Arsdale, Triple Canopy's chief executive officer, said the three men failed to report the shootings immediately, a violation of company policy and local Defense Department requirements for reporting incidents. He said Triple Canopy was unable to determine the circumstances behind the shootings, especially since no deaths or injuries were recorded by U.S. or Iraqi authorities.

"You have to assume that, if someone engages, he is following the rules and that he did feel a threat," Van Arsdale said, adding that conflicting accounts, delays in reporting the incidents and lack of evidence made it impossible to determine exactly what provoked the shootings. Triple Canopy officials said they have lobbied for more regulation of contractors since 2004 to better define how incidents such as the July 8 shootings are reported and investigated.

Many details about the shootings are in dispute. This account is based on company after-action reports and other documents, court filings, and interviews with current and former Triple Canopy employees, including all four men riding in the armored Chevrolet Suburban that day.

Schmidt and Sheppard said they were horrified by what they described as a shooting rampage by Washbourne and waited two days to come forward because they feared for their jobs and their lives. The two have sued Triple Canopy in Fairfax County Circuit Court, arguing that the company fired them for reporting a crime.

But another man in the vehicle, Fijian army veteran Isireli Naucukidi, said Sheppard, who was driving, cut off the taxi on Washbourne's orders, giving him a better shot. Naucukidi said the three American guards laughed as they sped away, the fate of the Iraqi taxi driver unknown. Schmidt told Washbourne, "Nice shot," according to Naucukidi.

Naucukidi also said that Schmidt was responsible for an earlier shooting incident that afternoon involving a white civilian truck, and that he believed Schmidt and Sheppard had blamed Washbourne to cover up their own potential culpability. Schmidt denied responsibility for that shooting but acknowledged in an interview he had fired a warning shot into the grille of a car on a separate airport run that morning and had failed to report it.

Naucukidi left Triple Canopy on his own shortly after the incidents occurred. Company officials said he was not fired because, unlike the three other guards, he had reported the shootings immediately. During an interview on the Fijian island of Ovalau, where he farms, Naucukidi said he decided not to return to Triple Canopy because "I couldn't stand what was happening. It seemed like every day they were covering something" up.

The presence of heavily armed guards on the battlefield has long been a wild card in the Iraq war. Insurgents frequently attack them. Iraqi civilians have expressed fear of their sometimes heavy-handed tactics, which have included running vehicles off the road and firing indiscriminately to ward off attacks.

Current and former Triple Canopy employees said they policed themselves in Iraq under an informal system they frequently referred to as "big boy rules."

"We never knew if we fell under military law, American law, Iraqi law, or whatever," Sheppard said. "We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night."

Naucukidi said the American contractors had their own motto: "What happens here today, stays here today."

June 2: Hilla

Washbourne sported a shaved head, a goatee and a mosaic of tattoos and piercings on his muscular, 6-foot-3-inch frame. He led one of two teams on Triple Canopy's "Milwaukee" project, a contract to protect executives of KBR Inc., a Halliburton subsidiary, on Iraq's dangerous roads. He earned $600 a day commanding a small unit of guards armed with M-4 rifles and 9mm pistols, the same caliber weapons used by U.S. troops.

The men referred to each other by their radio call signs. Washbourne was "JW," his initials. Sheppard, a former U.S. Army Ranger, was "Shrek," for his resemblance to the cartoon monster. Schmidt, a former Marine sniper, was "Happy," an ironic reference to his surly demeanor. Naucukidi was "Isi," an abbreviation of his first name.

Schmidt and Sheppard earned $500 a day. Naucukidi earned $70 a day for the same work.

One of the largest security firms in Iraq, Triple Canopy was known for its elite, disciplined guards, including many Special Operations veterans from all branches of service. The company provides security at some checkpoints inside Baghdad's Green Zone. But Triple Canopy officials said the company is not responsible for protecting the Iraqi parliament building, where a bomb Thursday killed at least one person and wounded at least 20.

On the Milwaukee project, Washbourne came to symbolize a lack of discipline that was a departure from the company's approach, according to several current and former employees.

Unlike the U.S. military, which prohibits drinking, Triple Canopy employees ran their own bar, called the Gem, inside the Green Zone. Washbourne sometimes drank so heavily his subordinates had to roust him for his own operations briefings, four current and former employees said. Washbourne said he drank, but seldom to excess.

An incident a month before the shootings underscored doubts among his colleagues about Washbourne's leadership, several of them said. On June 2, Washbourne was leading a convoy to a State Department compound in Hilla, about 60 miles south of Baghdad. The Suburban in which he was a passenger jumped a curb at a high rate of speed, shattering the axles and halting the exposed SUV in the middle of the highway.

A blue civilian truck suddenly flew around a blind curve and headed toward the convoy, according to Washbourne and Naucukidi, who was riding with him that day. Washbourne fired more than a dozen rounds into the oncoming truck with his M-4, wounding the driver. He later said he felt threatened. Washbourne then insisted on torching his damaged SUV with incendiary grenades instead of having it towed.

Washbourne said he was following standard operating procedure, which calls for a vehicle to be destroyed once it is disabled to prevent it from falling into the hands of insurgents.

Naucukidi said Washbourne ordered the guards to tell investigators that the convoy had been attacked by insurgents, even though many of them believed it had merely been involved in a traffic accident. Washbourne insisted that a small explosion precipitated the incident and that the SUV had been run off the road by another vehicle.

When the team returned to Baghdad, Naucukidi said, it was met by Ryan D. Thomason, a close friend of Washbourne's who was serving as acting project manager.

"What happens here today, stays here today," Thomason said, according to Naucukidi. "Good job, boys."

Thomason instructed the team not to discuss the incident for security reasons, said his attorney, Michael E. Schwartz. Triple Canopy recently opened a separate investigation into the incident after new information about it surfaced during litigation over the July 8 shootings.

July 8: Baghdad Airport

The July 8 afternoon run was to be Washbourne's last before he returned to Oklahoma. The team was to travel to Baghdad International Airport to pick up a client, then return to the Green Zone.

Washbourne, as team leader, led a pre-mission briefing in the parking lot. As the briefing concluded, according to Naucukidi, Washbourne cocked his M-4 and said, "I want to kill somebody today."

Naucukidi said he asked why. He recalled that Washbourne replied: "Because I'm going on vacation tomorrow. That's a long time, buddy."

In an incident report that he later submitted to Triple Canopy, Sheppard wrote that Washbourne also informed him that he was "going to kill someone today." In an interview, Schmidt said he heard a similar remark. Washbourne denied making any comment about his hope or intention to kill that day.

Naucukidi said he didn't take the comment seriously, because Washbourne frequently made similar jokes. "He did this really every mission: 'Okay, let's go shoot somebody,' " Naucukidi said.

Washbourne sat in the front passenger seat of the "follow" vehicle -- the third Suburban in a three-truck convoy, which included a lead vehicle, filled with guards, and what they called the "limo," a Suburban used to ferry the client. Sheppard drove. Schmidt and Naucukidi sat behind them facing backward to protect against a rear attack.

The four men agree on what happened next. The convoy arrived at Checkpoint 1, just outside the airport, and set up a blocking position to allow the lead vehicle and the "limo" to proceed through the checkpoint. The contractors noticed a small white pickup truck moving up slowly behind them from a distance of about 200 yards.

At this point, the stories diverge.

Naucukidi said Sheppard moved the Suburban to give Schmidt a better view. Naucukidi said that he and Schmidt tried to warn the white truck to stop but that it was still moving forward when Schmidt fired three times with his M-4. He said the truck stopped immediately but was still too far away for the men to see where the bullets hit.

Naucukidi also said the truck was too far away and was moving too slowly to pose a threat.

Schmidt and Sheppard waited two days before coming forward, then gave nearly identical accounts of what happened. Both said that it was Washbourne who shot at the white truck and that he fired intentionally into the windshield. "His intention was to kill," said Schmidt, who claimed he saw a "splash" of glass from the bullets striking the windshield.

Schmidt and Sheppard said Washbourne warned them not to mention the incident, quoting him as saying, "That didn't happen, understand?"

Washbourne said he only recalled firing two warning shots at a much larger white truck in an incident during a different run that morning. Naucukidi said he believes Washbourne is confusing that shooting with yet another incident that had occurred at the same location a few days earlier.

"There was no comments about 'That didn't happen, you understand,' or anything," Washbourne said.

"I am not a clever or witty man; I don't say things like that," he said. "And I'm not a morbid or sadistic" person.

July 8: Route Irish

The convoy continued through the checkpoint to pick up the KBR executive at the airport. It then left the airport and began the return trip.

Sheppard wrote that he observed "an Ambulance and a lot of activity" where the shooting had taken place. He and Schmidt said Washbourne threatened them again not to say anything.

Washbourne denied making any threats and said no ambulance was parked near the checkpoint. Naucukidi also said he did not see an ambulance.

The convoy continued down the airport road, called Route Irish by the military and contractors, toward the Green Zone. It reached speeds of 80 miles per hour.

Schmidt, Sheppard and Naucukidi agree that the convoy then came upon a taxi.

According to the accounts of Schmidt and Sheppard, Washbourne remarked, "I've never shot anyone with my pistol before." As the Suburban passed on the left, Washbourne pushed open the armored door, leaned out with his handgun and fired "7 or 8 rounds" into the taxi's windshield, both wrote in their statements.

Schmidt wrote: "From my position as we passed I could see the taxi had been hit in the windshield, due to the Spidering of the glass and the pace we were travelling, I could not tell if the driver had been hit, He did pull the car off the road in an erratic manner."

Sheppard said Washbourne was "laughing" as he fired.

Washbourne called their accounts "an absolute, total fabrication." He said the Suburban's high rate of speed and the wind resistance would have made the shooting "physically impossible."

"There's not an ounce of truth in it. It did not happen," Washbourne said angrily. "And as far as the statement goes where I said, 'I've never shot anyone with my pistol,' that is a lie. It was never one time said."

Naucukidi said that Washbourne fired at the taxi with his M-4 and that he ordered Sheppard to cut off the taxi beforehand. Naucukidi said Sheppard followed the order and used the Suburban to slow down the taxi and give Washbourne a better position to shoot from.

"When we were slightly ahead, JW just opened his door and started shooting the taxi from where we were sitting," Naucukidi said in an interview.

Naucukidi described the taxi driver as a 60- to 70-year-old man. He said he saw one hole in the taxi's windshield but could not tell if the driver had been hit. He said the taxi abruptly stopped.

"From my point of view, this old man, he was so innocent, because he was ahead of us with a normal speed," Naucukidi said. "He couldn't have any danger for us."

Sheppard sped away to catch up to the rest of the convoy, according to Naucukidi, who added that the three Americans were laughing and that Schmidt reached over, tapped Washbourne on the shoulder and told him, "Nice shot."

"They felt that it was so funny," Naucukidi said.

Schmidt denied that he complimented Washbourne. "No, I don't get a thrill out of killing innocent people," he said. "That was a moment of shame."

Divergent Reports

When the convoy returned to the Green Zone, members of the team scattered.

Naucukidi said he immediately told his supervisor, Jona Masirewa, who served as a liaison between the Fijian contractors and the Americans, about the incidents. He said Masirewa instructed him to write up a report to use in case an investigation occurred.

Naucukidi wrote the one-page report on his laptop. It contained brief summaries of the two afternoon shootings.

Of the first incident, near the airport checkpoint, Naucukidi wrote that the white truck was approaching slowly and was 200 meters away when Schmidt opened fire: "Happy shot three (3) rounds from his M4 rifle, and the white bongo truck stopped."

In the second incident, Naucukidi wrote, the Suburban "over took one white taxi with an Iraqi single pack," or passenger. He wrote that "our team leader opened his door and fired three rounds at white taxi."

But Naucukidi said Masirewa feared losing his job and did not immediately turn over the report. "It was a difficult thing for us because we are TCNs," or third-country nationals, "and they are expats," Naucukidi said. "They are team leaders, and they make commands and reports on us. And the team leaders were always saying, 'What happens today, stays today,' and if something like that happens, the team leaders, they start covering each other up."

Masirewa, who is still employed by Triple Canopy in Iraq, did not return e-mails seeking comment.

By the time Washbourne went on vacation the following day, Schmidt and Sheppard had not reported the incidents. Schmidt said he was concerned about "catching a bullet in the head." Sheppard said he was so shaken he spent the night at another location inside the Green Zone.

But other employees did not believe that Schmidt and Sheppard feared for their safety. Rather, they said, the two men feared for their high-paying jobs and believed that Thomason, the assistant project manager, would throw his support behind Washbourne, his close friend.

On July 10, two days after the incidents on the airport run, Sheppard finally went to Asa Esslinger, another supervisor, and reported them to Triple Canopy management.

'Just a Rampant Day'

On July 12, back home in Oklahoma, Washbourne received a call on his cellphone from Triple Canopy's country manager, Kelvin Kai, he recalled later.

Washbourne said Kai asked him if he remembered any shooting incidents July 8. Washbourne said he told Kai that he had forgotten to file written reports. He said he rushed to his apartment from a Tulsa pizza restaurant and sent in the reports from his laptop.

Two hours later, Kai called again from Baghdad. "He said that allegations were made that it was just a rampant day, is I believe what he called it, of shooting and mayhem," Washbourne recalled. "I said, 'No, boss, you got those two reports.' "

Kai could not be reached for comment. Triple Canopy declined to make him available, citing the ongoing lawsuit.

The following day, Triple Canopy suspended Schmidt and Sheppard pending an internal investigation. No action was immediately taken against Washbourne because he was home on leave, according to the company.

"It is essential that we have your complete cooperation in reporting the facts and circumstances of all the activities not only to Triple Canopy but also to officials from DoD and KBR if necessary," wrote Tony Nicholson, a Triple Canopy vice president, in letters to Schmidt and Sheppard.

Triple Canopy said it took statements from 30 potential witnesses for its internal probe. One week later, the three guards were informed by Raymond P. Randall, a senior vice president of Triple Canopy, that they had been fired.

"I am personally disappointed that you failed to immediately recognize the seriousness of this breach of operating procedures and its potential impact on the company's reputation," Randall wrote.

The terminations did not preclude the possibility of future investigations by the military, Randall wrote.

Van Arsdale, a retired colonel in the Army's Delta Force and a winner of the Silver Star, said Triple Canopy reported the incidents to KBR and to military officials in the Green Zone.

Triple Canopy officials said that because of the seriousness of the allegations, they expected that the military would conduct a separate investigation to determine whether further action was warranted.

Lt. Col. Michael J. Hartig, the former director of security for the Green Zone, said Triple Canopy officials approached him in his office but did not specify the allegations. "They mentioned they had a couple guys do some things that were questionable on the road, and that was pretty much it," he said.

Hartig said he informed Triple Canopy that such incidents were "out of my venue." He said he referred the company to the Joint Contracting Command for Iraq and Afghanistan, which administers contracts. "I didn't want to get involved in this because I had enough going on in my life," Hartig said. "It was like, 'Here's the point of contact. Have a nice day.' "

Two military spokespeople said they were unaware of any investigations into the shootings. Maj. David W. Small, a spokesman for the United States Central Command, which oversees Iraq, said: "This is not a Centcom issue. It's whoever was running that contract."

"We're fighting a war here," Small said.

Staff writer Tom Jackman and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

http://www.buzzflash.com
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Saundra Hummer

April 15th, 2007, 04:19 PM

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^^^^^^^
War to Spread Terror
By
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

“The Strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”-
Thucydides -- The Melian Dialogue

04/14/07 "ICH" --- - Unchallenged, America’s pursuit of global hegemony bears an eerie resemblance to the building of empires in the past. As this Administration expands its international dominance, the dictates of the Athenians to the Melians come to mind in which they are told that their submission to the rule of the Athenians would be of mutual benefit.

Melians: “And how, pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for you to rule?”

Athenians: “Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you”. [i]
This is the tacit dialogue between Mr. Bush’s coalition of willing and Iran today – and Iraq before that. This is an ongoing dialogue between any free nation that stands in the way of imperialist ambitions of this White House and their neo-con cohorts. And so it is that terrorism is defined by the strong in order for a ‘a war of terror’ to be declared so that the innocent may be wiped out, and their resources stolen should they fail to hand them over willingly. (Afghanistan is beyond the scope of this writer’s knowledge at present).

Not content with the failed covert operations that have been the hallmark of U.S. foreign policy, it has become necessary to use a new justification for a colonial raid, sanctions and warfare under the pretext of nuclear threat and terrorism. Intimidated by fear, propaganda, and coercion, the world body condemns the victim and puts its muscle behind the aggressor, only to realize later that it was mistake. This tardy realization that comes with the so much blood and carnage, has shame as its intimidator; forcing one to delude oneself that the decision made had been the right one. More blood continues to spill to cover the shame of flawed decisions, of a restless consciousness.

Yet, if we choose once again to abandon our intellect and remain complacent, we are equally complicit in the acts of terror carried out in our name. Professor of international law, Francis Boyle, in his book Biowarfare and Terrorism (Clarity Press), charges the Administration of "unconstitutionally usurp and nullify the right and the power of the United States Congress to declare war, in gross and blatant violation of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution." Furthermore, according to Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, over 300 scientific institutions and 12,000 individuals have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare and terrorism.[ii] We are preparing for a biological warfare.

On April 9th, 2007, al-Jazeera reported that the former commander of Iraq's Republican Guard has accused the US of using non-conventional weapons when they attacked Iraq. Saifeddin Fulayh Hassan Taha al-Rawi told al-Jazeera “"The enemy used neutron and phosphorus weapons against Baghdad airport... there were bodies burnt to their bones”.

[iii] Fallujah has seen the horrors of phosphorous.

The following are excerpts from an Independent Media Center:

“grenades with white phosphor have been fired on Falluja which created a wall of fire, burning all the
- many people did melt; so enourmous is the heat
- Iraqi doctor Kamal Hadeethi told journalists of the Washington Post: »I`ve seen many people injured; the streets are full of crying people -and full of dead people: they even were melt down to the street.« Falluja residents told that all the streets are destroyed, houses are ruines, and at walls stick parts of human meat. [iv] ”

Our Administration uses weapons of terror and spends billions building them.

In its “war on terror”, this Administration has co-opted terrorists, the Mojahadeen-e Khaleg (MEK). While the American soldiers in Iraq chauffer them around, they are being used to plant seeds of unrest in Iran in order to bring about a regime change [v] .
This group is highly endorsed by neo-conservatives Raymond Tanter, Daniel Pipes and Patrick Clawson of Washington Institute for Near East Policy who praised them as U.S. allies. [vi] (Clawson had on one occasion recommended sabotaging the Iranian nuclear plants regardless of the death toll, C-Span, Woodrow Wilson Center 2005).

While the Patriot Act is robbing our freedoms under the myth of protecting us from terrorists, terrorists are being hired by our government to wage war on a sovereign nation. In a report prepared on March 15, 2005 by ‘Center for Policing Terrorism’, the terrorist acts of this group, including but not limited to the killing of Americans, their involvement in the 1979 American Embassy takeover and subsequent hostage crisis, the bombing of 11 Iranian embassies around the globe, and other involvements has been described. [vii]. Yet this Administration, in his ‘war on terror’, would like these terrorists to be his foot soldiers and to sabotage the regime in Iran, the alleged state sponsor of terrorists.

Having lost their faith in the MEK foot soldiers, or perhaps prompted by impatience, they decided to diversify. Mr. Cheney decided to visit Pakistan and solicit more terrorists in order to cause mayhem in Iran, tear her apart, and separate her children. Pakistani government sources say the secret campaign against Iran by Jundullah was on the agenda when Vice President Dick Cheney met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in February. It seems that the U.S. government has secretly encouraged, advised, and paid for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran since 2005[viii] .

Charges of terrorism aside, the United States has led a campaign charging Iran with allegations that it intends to build a nuclear bomb. Contrary to these allegations, the IAEA has found no evidence of Iran diverting its nuclear energy program to weaponization, yet the US has coerced the UN Security Council into sanctioning Iran.

An indisputable fact of globalization and modernization is that sophisticated technologies transferred to the third world countries are controlled by transnational companies and/or governments. This has led to the concept of ‘self-colonization’ or acceptance of Western values and superiority; which deems that third world countries look to the West for research and development instead of self-reliance (Hveem, 1983). Iran escaped this trap due to the disdain felt towards it as a result of the 1979 revolution and the isolation forced upon it during the Iran-Iraq war. Iran learned self-reliance and escaped self-colonization.

It is in pursuit of its legal right under the NPT that it is pursuing nuclear fuel to satisfy its domestic needs for energy and clean air. However, the US, insisting on its global expansion, needs to use this as yet another pretext to bring ruin to Iran and attack it.

A country that in spite of a CIA-backed coup, the downing of the passenger jetliner which took 290 innocent lives, the support of the US for the enemy in an 8-year with Iraq in which the United States supplied Saddam Hossein satellite guidance, weaponry and chemical weapons, but also persuaded the United Nations to look the other way while Iranians were being subjected to chemical weapons for 3 years, a nation which under sanctions and threat of war, still bears good will towards the American people, and a true ally in the region, if attacked, will produce a disaster of unimaginable consequences

So as a subject of this world, I am asking all Americans, hyphenated or not, to defend their birthright, humanity, and justice. We must determine our own destiny today lest someone robs us of our future with their actions. America cannot afford to lose the battle for peace, justice and humanity because humanity has not found a place in this Administration. In the American ‘Dialogue’, we are the ‘strong’, for we have the power of the people, justice, and above all, the Constitution of the United States of America.

Impeach Bush & Cheney for Peace
-
www.marchofthepeople.org

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich has lived and studied in Iran, the UK, France, and the US. She obtained her Bachelors Degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is currently pursuing her education in Middle East studies and Public Diplomacy. Soraya has done extensive research on US foreign policy towards Iran and Iran’s nuclear program. She can be reached at sorayau@earthlink.net

Notes
[i] Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, The Melian Dialogue (Book 5, Chapter 17), Translated by Richard Crawley. Electronic text from the Internet Classics Archive at MIT: downloaded April 6, 2007 http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/p...r.5.fifth.html

[ii] http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/node/479

[iii] http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exer...12FE7889F7.htm

[iv] http://www.indymedia.org/or/2004/11/864368.shtml

[v] http://www.campusactivism.org/server..._wars12_20.pdf

[vi] https://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa578.pdf pp 6-7

[vii] http://www.cpt-mi.org/pdf_secure.php?pdffilename=MeK

[viii] http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/...ws_exclus.html
Go on-site to gain access to the numerous links within the article itself by clicking on the following link:
http://www.informationclearinghouse....ticle17531.htm
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Saundra Hummer

April 15th, 2007, 06:21 PM

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~~~~~~~

"Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

George Orwell

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"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them".

George Orwell

~~~

"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men".

George Orwell

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"They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening".

George Orwell ~~~~~
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Saundra Hummer

April 16th, 2007, 05:22 PM

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"The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day"

Theodore Roosevelt

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"The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the conscience' of the civilized world."

James Baldwin
From chapter I
"The Devil Finds Work"
(orig. pub. 1976)

~~~
"My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest...no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak... Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism...true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village."

Gandhi
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Saundra Hummer

April 16th, 2007, 05:32 PM

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The Party of Brownshirts

By Paul Craig Roberts
04/16/07 "ICH" -- -- Neoconservatives have turned the Republican Party into a Brownshirt Party.
Look at the evidence. While real patriots flee the party, the remaining supporters cling to power by asserting dictatorial dominance for President Bush. The Republican Attorney General denies that the US Constitution provides habeas corpus protection to American citizens. Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, Republican candidates for the 2008 presidential campaign, believe the president has the power to imprison US citizens indefinitely without warrants or trials. The “conservative” Federalist Society favors concentrating more power in the executive. Neoconservative ideologues claim the right to impose American hegemony over all others--especially over Muslims.

All of these Republican tyrants and budding tyrants claim to be protecting liberty and democracy.

Polls show that the percentage of Americans who tilt Republican has declined to 35 percent. Republican recruits are refusing to run for Congress. Ken Mehlman, until recently the party’s chairman, says many voters have lost confidence in Republicans. To win back people’s confidence, Mehlman says the party will have to become less reliant on white males and expand its support among Hispanics and blacks.

Decency and intelligence have departed Republican ranks. The party’s shrunken base consists of ignorant and fearful people who believe Muslim jihadists are going to murder them in their beds, rapture evangelicals who believe that war in the Middle East is the prelude to their being wafted up to heaven, the military-security complex reveling in power and fortune, and resentful and frustrated people who can freely vent their anger and hate on “terrorists.”

This collection of fear, delusion, greed, and resentment comprises the 30 percent of Americans who constitute Bush’s base. The Republican Party has made itself so unattractive that Democrats believe that it is now possible for a woman or a black to win the presidency.

The Republican Party lost its majority for the following reasons:

Greedy transnational corporations offshored US manufacturing jobs and destroyed the hopes and livelihoods of blue-collar Reagan Democrats. The gains from offshoring are diffused, but the costs are concentrated.

The same greedy and short-sighted corporations have spent the first years of the 21st century destroying the prospects of American middle class university graduates by offshoring jobs in professional services and by importing foreigners on work visas who work for less.

Neoconservatives captured conservative philanthropies, cut off funding to true conservatives, and used the captured conservative foundations to entrench themselves as advisors to the Republican party. The same neoconsertives that Reagan fired as a result of the Iran-Contra scandal occupy important policy positions in the Bush administration and dominate the National Security Council.

Republican “law and order” apathy to civil liberties easily transferred to the “war on terror.” Republicans regard civil liberties as protective devices for criminals and terrorists. Republicans mistakenly believe that the law can be cut down selectively so that only certain despised groups are deprived of its protection.

The Bush administration lied to the American people and invaded two countries on false pretenses for indefensible reasons that the administration has never acknowledged. The war has had catastrophic consequences that are now apparent to a majority of Americans, but the Republican Party still supports the continuation of the war.

The Bush administration has destroyed American prestige and moral aura with torture scandals and disregard for Iraqi, Afghani, Palestinian and Lebanese civilian lives.

The Bush administration’s budget and trade deficits have undermined the dollar. The Bush administration is calling for currency realignments that will lower the real incomes of import-dependent Americans.

The Bush administration’s determination to exercise American hegemony through warfare, and its assaults on civil liberties, the separation of powers, American prestige and on good American jobs and the value of the dollar have destroyed the party’s support.

America’s virtue is its Constitution. An administration that attacks the Constitution attacks America’s virtue. The true dangers that Americans face come from George W. Bush and Richard Cheney and their neoconservative Brownshirt Party.

Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is author or coauthor of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell.
Go on-site to view war statistics, costs in human lives and monitarily as well. Check out the archives for cartoons etc. Just click on the following URL:http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17541.htm....... .

Saundra Hummer

April 16th, 2007, 05:46 PM

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Torture, Secrecy, and the Bush Administration

By
Scott Horton

04/16/07 "Harpers" 04/14/07 -- -- I want to give a bit of pre-constitutional history, and share with you the story of John Lilburne, an Englishman born in the early 1600s because his story—the story of an agitator who directly challenged the English legal system—has a great deal to tell us about the issues we're facing today. Lilburne's story explains why these matters—torture and secrecy—were not issues to the Founding Fathers, and it helps us understand the true nature of a government which, like the current administration, thrives in that matrix of torture and secrecy.

So much of what has happened over the last six years seems a repetition of events drawn from English history, from the turbulent years from the Civil War to the Glorious Revolution—this could be said of the struggle over habeas corpus, which was right at the center of the conflict between Parliament and king, as seen in the Five Knights case of 1627 or the Shipmaster's tax case of 1637. But the notion of secret legal proceedings, closed courts and the use of secret evidence also characterize that period of history. Before the English Civil War, court proceedings were frequently closed, and one of the principles of fair process introduced in the Commonwealth—it seems to have been an initiative of the solicitor general, John Cooke—was the notion that no court should conduct its hearings behind closed doors, and neither should any evidence be taken which could not be shared with the public and presented to the defendant and the jury.

The key case for this notion involved a man commonly called “Freeborn John,” or John Lilburne. He was a person of little formal education who became a firebrand pamphleteer among the Puritans in the years of the Civil War. He had republican sentiments, but more to the point he was a sharp critic of the king's justice—writing constantly of the aspects which were, well, unjust. He was particularly outraged by the use of the king's courts to persecute dissenters, as the Anglicans called them—though at the time this would be a changing blend of Puritans, Calvinists, Baptists and Quakers; not to mention the “terrorists” of the day, the Catholics. Lilburne had been convicted in the Star Chamber in 1638 on a charge of importation and dissemination of unregistered religious tracts. He wrote a compelling account of his treatment—he had been imprisoned for refusing to answer questions and then flogged, pilloried and gagged—but he also described the use of coercive interrogation techniques to extract a confession, the denial of rights of confrontation, the fact that his judges were all political figures placed there to do their king's bidding—the Star Chamber, you see, was to Lilburne's age what the Military Commission is to ours.

His account was an instant bestseller and provided much of the impetus for the abolition of the Star Chamber by the Long Parliament in 1641. As Uncle Tom's Cabin was to abolition, Liburne's book was to habeas corpus and the Star Chamber. Lilburne served with distinction as an officer during the Civil War, and afterwards his advocacy of Republican virtues caused Oliver Cromwell a bit of discomfort, and at length Cromwell decided to silence Lilburne by charging him with treason. The trial convened in October 1649, which is to say just months after the second Civil War had been successfully concluded for the Parliamentary forces.

This was in effect the second significant trial for the Commonwealth after the trial of King Charles himself in January. Lilburne was a popular figure in London and was well aware of that fact. When the court proceedings commenced behind closed doors in the Painted Chamber of Westminster, Lilburne opened his answer to the charges read in court with these famous words: “The first fundamental liberty of an Englishman is that all courts of justice always ought to be free and open for all sorts of peaceable people to see, behold and hear, and have free access unto; and no man whatsoever ought to be tried in holes or corners, or in any place where the gates are shut and barred.” Lilburne was raising a direct challenge to the reputation of the Commonwealth courts—asking whether one of the most abusive of the practices of justice under the Stuart monarchs would be continued. The court fully understood this and directed that the doors be opened, in order that “all the world may know with what candour and justice the court does proceed against you.”

In the balance of that remarkable case, Lilburne established a number of other principles. The prisoner in the dock was to be treated with dignity and respect, not dragged before the court in manacles and an orange jumpsuit. There were to be no ex parte communications between the counsel and the court. He was to have a right to confront all evidence against him (that is, there could be no secret evidence), and the public also was to be allowed to hear it, to form its own opinion of the quality of justice dispensed by the court. He was guaranteed the right of counsel, and for the first time, counsel were permitted to participate in the presentation of evidence for the defense as well.

The fairness of the proceedings had its limit. The judge charged the jury that they must convict, saying “never was the like treason hatched in England.” But the vigor of Lilburne's defense was impressive and the jury returned a verdict of acquittal. (To this day, some attribute the acquittal to Judge Keble's refusal of the jurors' request of a “butt of sack,” which is to say, a very large quantity of fortified wine, as a pre-deliberation refreshment).

The Lilburne case sums up the most significant of what may be called the “Commonwealth reforms” of criminal procedure—one of the few legacies of the revolution to survive the restoration of the monarchy.

Secrecy was what the Roundheads found most odious about the Stuart monarchs' justice. Certainly unjust practices accompanied some of our Puritan forefathers to this country; we can't forget the Salem witch trials, for instance. But so too, did a healthy contempt for the abuses practiced by the Stuart monarchs, starting with the notions of torture and secret courts with secret evidence. The contempt was reciprocal of course—they say that King Charles' lip would curl at the very mention of the word “Massachusetts,” and seven of the ten members of the first graduating class of Harvard—the class of 1642—returned to England to enlist in the Model Army and fight against the King. The practice of secret courts. The use of torture to secure confessions. The receipt of secret evidence. The exclusion of the public from proceedings. The offering of evidence in the form of summaries delivered to the judges, without the defendant being able to confront the evidence or conduct a cross-examination. These practices were the definition of tyrannical injustice to the Puritan fathers and the Founding Fathers. We thought them long-banished a hundred years and more before our own revolution. And now suddenly here they are again.

Secrecy has reemerged just as torture has made its comeback, being justified on the public stage, by government officials for the first time since the famous gathering at the Inns of Court in 1629 at which the judges declared “upon their and their nation's honor” that torture was not permitted by the common law.

The two fit together, hand in glove: torture and secrecy. Torture and secrecy. Where one is used, the other is indispensable.

Torture is no longer a tool of statecraft. Today it is a tool of criminals, though sometimes of criminals purporting to conduct the affairs of state. Having resorted to these “dark arts,” to quote Dick Cheney, the torturers now have the dilemma faced so frequently by criminals. They seek to cover it up. And so the path flows from torture to secrecy, the twin dark stars of the tyrannical state.

If we look quickly at the proceedings that held the world's attention down in Gitmo over the last two weeks, we see what the secrecy is all about.

When the Combat Status Review Tribunal process commenced, the Pentagon told us that the proceedings would not be open to the public. Instead, it said, a transcript would be offered up to the public a few days later, giving the Pentagon an opportunity to redact “classified national security” information from the transcripts. Pete Yost of the Associated Press gave me a ring just as this came out and asked: what do you suppose they think is going to require censoring? I said the answer is clear based on submissions the Department of Justice has made in four or five cases: they will take the position that any evidence of torture must be censored or expunged, because the testimony would disclose the specific torture techniques which have been applied, and that would divulge highly classified national security data. Why do you think the DVDs of the treatment of Jose Padilla, all two dozen copies, mysteriously disappeared? Why, as Colonel Couch recently told the Wall Street Journal's Jess Bravin, did the recording devices inexplicably malfunction whenever torture incidents occurred? Yes. Why indeed. Of course, I was relying not only on what was said and done in Padilla, El-Masri, Arar and other cases, but also on Terry Gilliam's movie, “Brazil,” in which all of this morally deviant thinking is taken to its logical conclusion. What the Bush Administration has created in Gitmo is “Brazil,” minus, of course, any pretense of humor.

Now we have the first two transcripts, and the results are exactly that. The torture is cut out. The case of al-Nashiri is particularly striking:

PRESIDENT (of the tribunal): Please describe the methods that were used.

DETAINEE: (CENSORED) What else do I want to say? (CENSORED) There were doing so many things. What else did they did? (CENSORED) After that another method of torture began. (CENSORED) They used to ask me questions and the investigator after that used to laugh. And, I used to answer the answer that I knew. And if I didn't replay what I heard, he used to (CENSORED).
Now let's consider—would there be any need to censor the allegations unless they are true? No. Indeed, the fact that they are censored should be taken as an admission. No meaningful effort is made to refute any of the detainee's contentions. No records are spread out showing that he was not tortured. Why might that be?

And the second case for secrecy we see in the trial of David Hicks, which follows a pattern established with the John Walker Lindh case. It came to a plea bargain in the end, and a strong focus on silencing the witness. In particular, he was to be gagged as to everything that was done to him while he was in U.S. custody for a period of one year, which is to say, until the Australian elections are past. The plea bargain, it appears, was negotiated by Susan J. Crawford, a protégée of Vice President Cheney, and Cheney had only six weeks earlier visited Australian Prime Minister John Howard downunder. According to accounts of their meeting published at the time in the Australian press, at the top of Howard's agenda was an urgent plea to bring the Hicks case to a speedy conclusion that would allow him to serve a brief sentence in Australia. Crawford delivered exactly what was requested.

There is a common theme to these cases. Secrecy is not invoked to protect military or legitimate state security confidences. It is invoked for nakedly political reasons, or darker and still more likely, to obscure crimes and avoid the creation of court records which would document them.

On April 27, 1961, John F. Kennedy gave a speech in the Waldorf-Astoria to the American Newspaper Association. “The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society;” Kennedy said “and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control.”

I believe that the moment—the day of “official censorship and concealment”—that Kennedy foresaw is drawing near, if it is not already upon us in America today. The moment has crept upon us by stealth, as a result of decisions taken at the highest level in government. These decisions have been made behind closed doors, with no public discussion—and indeed with a concerted effort to misdirect the public as to the gravity of the changes in policy which have been undertaken. They have led to a dramatic expansion of Government action without oversight, which is to say on the basis of a decision by the President unchecked by courts and Congress, and to a shrinkage of individual freedom.

We have a duty to posterity, and that is to bear witness to these events. We must document them carefully. We must act to avoid the destruction of valuable evidence—and recognize, as we have already seen, that it is in the character of those who commit crimes to destroy the evidence of their misdeeds. In this way we lay the path for the justice which will in good time be meted out to those who betrayed a nation's trust. For I believe, like the Puritans, in the certainty that justice will triumph and that wrongdoers will be held to account, though I am not so foolish as to think that this will happen soon. Still, the time is coming, as John Milton wrote,

that sun part the clouds which tyrants muster,
that good men may enjoy the freedom which they merit,
and the bad the curb which they need. ...........
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Saundra Hummer

April 18th, 2007, 12:14 PM

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PBS Swings Right
By
Alison Weir
I attended an extremely disturbing event Thursday night. It was hosted by WETA, the PBS station in Washington DC, and was part of the national launch of an 11-part PBS series, “America at a Crossroads,” began airing April 15. It featured clips from the series followed by a panel discussion with some of those involved in the films, moderated by Robert MacNeil. The panel discussion represented a “wide” spectrum of opinions: all the way from, at one end, suggesting that all Muslims are terrorists to, at the other end, suggesting that some Muslims are not terrorists.

In other words, from what we were shown on Friday, it appears that much of the series contains subtle, intellectually “acceptable” Muslim-bashing. While the title of the series claims that it is focusing on America, many of the clips seemed to be focusing, over and over again, on Islam, largely examining “bad Muslims” (the majority) with a few “good Muslims” thrown in (often consisting of those who bash bad Muslims).

One entire program in the series, funded with federal money dispensed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), is dedicated to Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who pushed for “regime-change” in Iraq and is now promoting it once more in Iran. While his opponents are also included in the segment, Perle is given the opportunity to rebut each one; the film was produced by his associate Brian Lapping. The title of the program, “The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom,” seems to indicate a perspective that few facts would support. While only short clips were shown on Friday, Perle’s approving, and welcomed, presence at the screening seems to indicate a happy CPB-PBS-Perle relationship. Happy for Perle that is; not for those of us who are less than pleased at manipulations that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives, at least, and whose agenda appears to be an Israeli American empire based on a mutilating sword, and whose deathly swath cuts many ways.

At the other end of Friday night’s “A” through “C” gamut of views was Michael Isikoff, whose rebuttal of Perle’s claims about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction was deservedly applauded by the audience. Isikoff’s own clip portrayed him as a crusading investigative reporter, a la Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men.” However, it turned out that Isikoff’s form of crusading reporting was not to uncover presidential malfeasance but to expose “dangerous Muslims,” i.e. those who oppose tyrannical regimes or who dare to suggest that Hamas and Hezbollah are resistance movements opposing brutal Israeli aggression.

Practicing the reverse of A.J. Liebling’s dictum that the duty of journalism is “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” Isikoff’s offering in this series appears to be to go after arguably the most attacked community in the US today. A few miles away from where Isikoff was being feted by PBS for his work in exposing “Muslim terrorists,” Sami Al-Arian (who has never been convicted of any crime, but who has spoken out passionately in favor of Palestinian rights) is spending his fourth year in prison, largely in solitary confinement. Perhaps Isikoff will now turn his investigative skills to examining the role of Israel and its partisans in Al-Arian’s persecution and in the Crossroads series itself. He may wish to begin with CPB’s head, Cheryl Halpern, a former chairwoman for the Republican Jewish Coalition, who, according to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, currently sits on the board of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), whose husband is a member of AIPAC, and whose family has business interests in Israel. Her predecessor at CPB was similarly solicitous of Israel, as are so many of the neocons now associated with the organization.which brings me to my next point:

Missing

It is interesting that in an 11-program series focused largely on the Middle East, no mention is made of the core issue of the region: the enormous injustice perpetrated in 1948 when Israel ethnically cleansed most of the indigenous population, and its ongoing and ruthless efforts in this direction today. While the series focuses on the activities of people who are opposing past and present dispossession, it appears that no mention is made of the oppression they are resisting. It is a little like describing the actions of someone being attacked by wolves without mentioning the wolves.

The issues in the Middle East and 9/11 have far more to do with the usual causes of war, competition over territory and resources, than with religion. Nevertheless, there are religious dimensions to the conflict, and it would certainly be valuable to explicate these. Yet PBS ignores the fact that there are three major religions centered in the Middle East, not just one, and that the major ethnic-cleansing at the region’s core was done in the name of one of the two religions ignored in the series. If one of the religions is going to be examined, with much of the focus on its alleged warts, it seems to me that the other two should be exposed to equal scrutiny. Why was this not done?

Fundamentalist Jewish settlers are among the most fanatic and violent populations in the Middle East, and they proclaim that their violence is endorsed, even required, by their religion. Growing numbers of Christians endorse and fund this violent dispossession of the world’s original Christians and others, and also claim to base their activities on their religion. Similarly, violent Jewish and Christian extremists operate in the United States, some cells defined, even by the US government, as “terrorist.” While at least six out of PBS’s eleven programs focus on Muslims and their connections to violence, not a single program focuses on Jewish extremists who torture farmers, attack children regularly, and whose core beliefs include the proposition that a non-Jew is “not worth the fingernail of a Jew.” Similarly, there is not a single program examining American Christians who advocate violence at home and abroad, and who eagerly anticipate mass slaughter, in the name, they say, of their religion.

Moreover, with all this attention on Islam, one would at least expect some depth from a $20 million, publicly funded series that spends so much time on this subject. Sadly, however, despite a surface appearance of balance, there is much to suggest that PBS has actually provided little more than tokenism. In Washington DC there are numerous scholars on Islam, many of them living and working within a short distance of Friday’s event. Yet, PBS gave us a panel in which two Jews and one Christian informed us about Muslims. While I suspect that no one would accuse the panelists of undue humility, I sincerely doubt that even one would claim to be an Islamic scholar. In addition, for the only program of the series in which a Muslim is the main “expert” on Muslims, PBS has chosen to utilize a woman whose new-found media fame, and resultant fortune, have come from attacking Muslims.

Soft Core

Let me emphasize that I am not accusing PBS of hate speech. I fully anticipate that the 11-part series will contain many uplifting and accurate statements about Islam and Muslims. My expectation is that the series will be skillfully produced, its approach will be intelligent, and its tone will be tolerant. (One of the shows that received Public Broadcasting Corporation funding for the series, by neoconservative Frank Gaffney, a member of the Project for a New American Century who previously worked under Perle, was deemed too openly “alarmist” and has been postponed for further editing. A second program, by yet another neoconservative, Robert Kaplan, is also being held for broadcast later.)

Overall, I expect that the series will provide what appear to the general public to be nuanced and thoughtful answers. My concern is simple: that it will so rarely, if ever, ask the right questions. Most of all, I am worried that in its many hours of programming, the wolves, and these are many and diverse, will be missing.

In some ways, the title of the series is quite correct; America is indeed at a crossroads, but of a very different nature than the series discusses. Either we will continue to let our mainstream media, from the “public” to the commercial, from the liberal to the conservative, manipulate Americans into fear and hatred of Muslims, thereby enabling Israeli and American aggression; or we will stand up and oppose this media manipulation, and refuse to allow the resultant policies of barbarism.

During the question and answer period following the screening, I briefly raised a few of the points mentioned above. (Robert MacNeil responded that PBS probably should have included something about Israel-Palestine; Isikoff misconstrued what I said and then disagreed.) Afterwards, several people came up to tell me they agreed with my comments. One man who expressed deep concern at the targeting of a minority population explained his own experience with such activities: he had fled Nazi Germany at the age of seven.

Instead of undertaking a thinly veiled prosecution of Muslims in which it found some of the accused “not guilty,” it would have been valuable for PBS to do what it claimed: examine ourselves and the divergent paths from which we must choose. Either we will continue in the direction promoted by Perle, Gaffney and others, and continue destroying more and more of the globe, and quite possibly ourselves; or we will turn back to efforts to build a nation and a world in which ethnic agendas and outmoded tribalisms give way to universal principles of justice, equality, and coexistence.

In my opinion the second path is not only the direction that morality decrees, it is also the only path that will ever provide the safety from violence and cruelty that we all seek for ourselves and our children.

If you agree, I hope you will let PBS ombudsman Michael Getler (http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/) know: 703-739-5290. He’s never returned any of my phone calls (even in his previous incarnation as ombudsman at the Washington Post); maybe he’ll return yours.

– Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew (www.ifamericansknew.org). Her blog is alisonweir.org. She can be reached through either website

Go on-site to view this article, and other important issues about the media. This is a good site, and you can sign up for their newsletter.
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/04/18/pbs-swings-right/

Here's a response to the article:

One Response to “PBS Swings Right”
Posted on 18 Apr 2007 at 3:42 pm by Ralph Heymann
This is copy of memo we had sent earlier to PBS

My wife and I were most unhappy about the Perle propaganda movie shown on
PBS last night.
Could you explain to us why we had to be exposed to Perle’s self
glorification and misjudgments?
Why do we need a defense of an insane war, a war that is bankrupting our
economy and world standing?
At the very least we should give equal voice to those who oppose this
unfortunate adventure.

Thank you very much,

Ralph Heymann, Davis
:: :: :: :: :: .

Saundra Hummer

April 18th, 2007, 12:43 PM

.~~~~~~~
"People have not been horrified by war to a sufficient extent ... War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today".

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

~~~
"The pioneers of a warless world are the youth that refuse military service".

Albert Einstein

~~~
"I have seen men march to the wars, and then I have watched their homeward tread, And they brought back bodies of living men, But their eyes were cold and dead".

Edmund Vance Cooke

~~~
"When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

~~~
"Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism".

Martin Luther King, Jr.

~~~~~
.

Saundra Hummer

April 18th, 2007, 01:02 PM

.
$$$$$$$
The Inexplicable Enrichment of Bush Cronies
The Iraq Money Trail
By
Evelyn Pringle

04/17/08 "ICH " -- -- - It's time for Americans to face the cold hard truth that nothing will be accomplished by allowing the daily carnage in Iraq to continue, and if Bush has his way, our young people will be dying in this war profiteering scheme until hell freezes over. Congress needs to authorize funding to pull our troops out of that deathtrap and not one dime more.

It apparent that Bush is a madman who will listen to no one. After Bush's speech on January 10, 2007, about the plan to send more troops, retired Army Col Doug McGreggor, a former advisor to Don Rumsfeld in 2003, said in a broadcast interview, "There seems to be a complete failure to understand that we have been trying to suppress a rebellion against our occupation."

"As long as we are there," he warned, "we are the number one public enemy for the Muslim-Arab world."

"We were after all," he points out, "a Christian army occupying a Muslim Arab country, something which in the Middle East, is essentially a disaster."

This decorated combat veteran says Bush's strategy will never work. "We did not go to Iraq originally," he explains, "to dismantle the state, dismantle the army, the police, and the government, to occupy the place with the object of changing the people that lived there into something they did not want to become."

After Bush's speech, military families also spoke out publicly against the decision to send more troops. "I don't have words for it," said Nancy Lessin, of Military Families Speak Out, a group of 3,100 families, including 100 who have lost a loved one in the war.

"This is a war," she said, "that should never have happened, that has wreaked so much havoc on our loved ones, Iraqi children, women and men, and now to be facing, almost four years into it, this news of an escalation of the war, is just unbearable."

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll showed that 70% of Americans opposed sending more troops, but Bush went right ahead and did it anyways. And then to make matters worse, this month he announces the plan to extend the 12-month tours to 15-months to allow his 30,000-troop buildup in Baghdad to stay for another year.

This war is going to bankrupt the US. A January 2007 study by Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, who won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes, estimated that the total costs of the Iraq war could be more than $2 trillion when the long-term medical costs for the soldiers injured so far are factored in.

The only people who are benefiting from Bush's war on terror are members of the Military Industrial Complex. Since 9/11, the pay for the CEOs of the top 34 defense contractors in the US has doubled, according to the August 2006 report, "Executive Excess 2006," by the Institute for Policy Studies, and the United for a Fair Economy.

The bill is rising so fast because the level of war profiteering is unprecedented. The Excess Report lists George David, CEO of United Technologies, as the top earner, making more than $200 million since 9/11, despite investigations into the poor quality of the firm's Black Hawk helicopters.

Halliburton CEO David Lesar made $26.6 million in 2005, and nearly $50 million since 9/11, an amount that even beats the $24 million that Dick Cheney received in exchange for the guarantee that Halliburton would be the number one military contractor during the Bush administration.

Cheney himself is also taking in war profits, contrary to what he told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" in 2003, when he denied making any money off his former employer. "Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president," he said, "I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest."

"I have no financial interest in Halliburton," Cheney told Tim, "of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years."

Those statements were proven false when financial disclosure forms showed that Cheney had received a deferred salary from Halliburton of $205,298 in 2001, $262,392 in 2002, $278,437 in 2003, and $294,852 in 2004.

In 2005, an analysis released by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), reported that Cheney continued to hold over 300,000 Halliburton stock options and said their value had risen 3,281% over the previous year, from $241,498 to more than $8 million.

"It is unseemly for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his Administration funnels billions of dollars to it," Senator Lautenberg said.

Cheney may be the most visible profiteer to those who find it difficult to follow the war on terror money trail, but many other members of the administration with insider knowledge set themselves up to profit early on as well.

For instance, there was the Undersecretary of Defense, Doug Feith, largely credited for fabricating the tales that got the US into the war to begin with, along with his fellow neocons and best buddy, Ahmed Chalabi.

Feith was a partner with Marc Zell, in the Feith & Zell, DC law firm before joining the administration. After he left for the White House, Zell renamed the firm, Zell, Goldberg & Co, and teamed up with Salem Chalabi, Ahmed nephew, to solicit contracts for clients in Iraq. This scam operated under the name, "Iraqi International Law Group."

At the time, the National Journal quoted Salem as saying that Marc Zell was the firm's "marketing consultant" and had been contacting law firms in Washington and New York to ask if they had clients interested in doing business in Iraq.

According to its web site back then, the IILG was made up of lawyers and businessmen who "dared to take the lead in bringing private sector investment and experience" to the war-torn country and offered to "be your Professional Gateway to the New Iraq."

"The simple fact is," the site stated, "you cannot adequately advise about Iraq unless you are here day in and day out, working closely with officials at the CPA, the newly constituted governing council and the few functioning civilian ministries [oil, labor and social welfare, etc]."

It is highly likely that the preceding statement was absolutely true when made because Feith helped set up the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2003, with its leader Paul Bremer, and Feith's office and the CPA were in charge of awarding reconstruction contracts with Iraqi money.

For his part, Salem was a legal adviser to Iraq's governing council, of which his Uncle was a member, and Bremer even tried to appoint him to lead the tribunal that would try Saddam.

Uncle Chabali footprints in the profiteering racket can be traced back to September 2003, when the CPA awarded an $80 million contract to Nour USA, a company with ties to Winston Partners, which is a whole other story in itself because Winston Partners is headed by none other than Marvin Bush, the brother to the president.

In May 2003, Nour was founded by, Abul Huda Farouki, whose financial ties to Ahmed Chalabi date back to 1989, when Chalabi was CEO of the Petra Bank, and helped Farouqi finance projects around the world.

Nour's website at the time described the firm as an "international investment and development company" with more than 100 employees based in Iraq, and listed expertise in telecommunications, agribusiness, internet development, recruitment, construction materials, oil and power services, pharmaceuticals and fashion apparel.

In January 2004, Nour picked up another contract to equip the Iraqi armed forces and police worth $327 million. However, shortly thereafter, Nour came under fire when a shady deal surfaced involving the first $80 million contract and Ahmed Chalabi.

Newsday reported that Chalabi had received $2 million for helping to arrange the contract, but as it turned out, the contract was actually awarded to Erinys International, a firm set up in Iraq immediately after the invasion. The problem arose, Newsday said, because within days of receiving the contract, Erinys became a joint venture operation with Nour.

Next, the $327 million contract was in jeopardy after it was revealed that Nour had no experience providing military equipment and Nour claimed that it planned to subcontract its weapons procurement to Ostrowski Arms. However, the army soon learned that Ostowski had no license to export weapons.

The contract was finally axed in March 2004, after six of the 17 firms that bid on it complained that Nour's winning bid was impossibly low.

Following the money trail on this insider deal turned up the names of a few more suspects. According to the National Journal, a Nour executive said the Cohen Group "introduced us to people in the U.S. government who were involved in oil-industry security."

Former Republican Congressman and Secretary of Defense under President Clinton, William Cohen, sits at the helm of the Cohen Group, and according to a report by David Hilzenrath in the Washington Post on May 28, 2006, when he left office in January 2001, Cohen was saddled with debt and his final financial disclosure form, "listed tens of thousands of dollars of charge-account debts at interest rates as high as about 25 percent."

However, within a matter of weeks Cohen and his wife were residing in a $3.5 million mansion. It seems Cohen had wanted this house but was still in office and had no way to finance the purchase, so Frank Zarb, then chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, sold the house to Michael Ansari, chairman and CEO of defense contractor MIC Industries, in October 2000, and the Cohen took up residence in January or February of 2001, according to the Post.

From there, Cohen went on to join the board and audit committee of the Nasdaq Stock Market, and 11 days after he left office, MIC announced Cohen's appointment as chairman of its board of advisers in a press release.

In no time at all the Cohen Group was raking in mega-bucks. In applying for one contract, that earned the Group $490,000 over seven months, the firm bragged that it had helped Lockheed win a $3.6 billion contract for the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Poland, financed by the US government.

The Group's proposal said its efforts for the Lockheed deal included "advocacy with key decision-makers in the White House, Office of the Vice President, National Security Council, Department of Defense and the State Department during an 18-month campaign," according to the Post.

In regard to helping Nour get contracts in Iraq, according to the Post, where the government disclosure form for Nour asks the firm to identify "Specific lobbying issues," the Group's filings say: "Exploring overseas business opportunities."

When it comes to war profiteering, members of the Bush administration have given a whole new meaning to the "revolving door." A whole gang of thugs has been robbing us blind in Iraq since day one and nobody seems to be able to stop it.

Congress knows what's going on. Back on September 30, 2003, during the Senate debate over the first Iraq spending bill, Senator John Edwards said he refused to funnel the $87 billion to Cheney and other Bush cronies after learning that Bush's former campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, who was later appointed to head FEMA, had quit his job 3 weeks before the bombs began to fall in Iraq to start the consulting firm, New Bridge Strategies, for clients seeking contracts in Iraq.

"First, Vice President Cheney's Halliburton receives more than $2 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts," he said, "and now this."

He called it outrageous and disrespectful to the young people serving in Iraq. "President Bush should start addressing this credibility gap by calling on Joe Allbaugh and his friends to stop using their influence to secure government contracts in Iraq," he said.

Senator Edwards said there used to be talk about money for Iraq being a blank check but we now "know the president is writing it out to Joe Allbaugh and Halliburton and it's all endorsed by Vice President Cheney," he said.

In hindsight, Edwards should have expressed outrage at a few more people because the profiteering team at New Bridges was stacked with Republicans. The company's address was the same as a lobbying firm run by Haley Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee that went under the name of Barbour Griffith & Rogers.

And as luck would have it, Lanny Griffith was the CEO of New Bridge, and Ed Rogers was the vice president.

The firm's initial web site told potential clients, "the opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in Washington, D.C., and on the ground in Iraq."

And these greedy thugs were so shameless that they didn't even try to hide their elation over all the money they planned to make in Iraq. "Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products can be a gold mine," one of the firm's partners told Naomi Klein, quoted in an article in Harper's Magazine in September 2004.

"One well-stocked 7-Eleven," the partner said, "could knock out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country."

There were rumors that a McDonald's might open, a Starwood hotel was mentioned, and General Motors was said to be planning a factory and according to Ms Klein, Citigroup was preparing to offer loans guaranteed against future sales of Iraqi oil.

However since the war never did end, in 2004, Joe Allbaugh abandoned the quest for reconstruction gold mine in Iraq and started a consulting firm with the former director of Cheney's secret energy task force, Andrew Lundquist, and their first client was Lockheed Martin.

The marriage between the ex-campaign manager, Cheney's buddy, and Lockheed apparently worked out much better than the plan to build 7-Elevens in Iraq, because Lockheed stock value has doubled since 2001, and according to the Excess Report, the firm's CEO has made $50 million since 9/11.

It may well have been that Joe's new firm was simply an outgrowth from the many other firms set up by this same gang because Haley Barbour had already worked as a lobbyist for a Lockheed.

On thing is certain, Lockheed was not lacking for administration insiders when Allbaugh came knocking. For instance, before Cheney took over as VP, his wife, Lynne served on the board of Lockheed, receiving deferred compensation to the tune of half a million dollars in stock and fees, according to a January 16, 2007 report by Richard Cummings.

Cummings notes that Cheney's "2004 financial disclosure statement lists Lockheed stock options and $50,000 in Lockheed stock."

In addition, Cheney's son-in-law, Philip Perry, Cummings says, was appointed to serve as general counsel to the Department of Homeland Security, and he had been a registered lobbyist for Lockheed who had worked for a law firm representing Lockheed with the Department of Homeland Security.

According to Cummings, less than a month after 9/11, in October of 2001, the Pentagon announced a $20 billion contract for Lockheed for the development of the Joint Strike Fighter, called the F-35. At the time, Edward Aldridge was Undersecretary of Defense for acquisitions, technology and logistics, which was responsible for the approval of the contract. Aldridge left his government post in 2003, and he now just happens to serve on Lockheed's board of directors.

However, the most stunning revelation in the Cummings report, is that in November 2002, Stephen Hadley, deputy national security advisor at the time, called Lockheed employee, Bruce Jackson, to a meeting at the White House and told him that the US was definitely going to war in Iraq but there was one small hitch, the administration could not decide what reason to use to justify it.

So Jackson formed the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq," and its mission statement said it was "formed to promote regional peace, political freedom and international security by replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations."

According to Cummings, the "pressure group began pushing for regime change - that is, military action to remove Hussein - in the usual Washington ways, lobbying members of congress, working with the media and throwing money around."

Jackson told Cummings that he did not see the point of going on about WMDs or an Al Queda link because he thought the human rights issue was enough to justify the war.

However, Hadley did not agree. "The committee's pitch," Cummings says, "or rationale as Hadley would call it, was that Saddam was a monster -- routinely violating human rights -- and a general menace in the Middle East."

Jackson said he closed down the Committee in June 2003 because its human rights rationale had been abandoned. "We were cut out," he told Cummings, "after the whole thing went to Rumsfeld," and Hadley explained that "terrorism and WMDs" were now the rationale for the war, not human rights.

However, Cummings reports that members of the war sales team that served with Jackson have done well for themselves. The president of the Committee, Randy Scheunemann, became the president of the Mercury Group, and lobbied for Lockheed and others, and then set up the firms, Scheunemann and Associates, and Orion Strategies, which, among other things, consults with companies and countries looking to do business in Iraq.

In November 2003, another Committee member, Rend Al-Rahim Francke, was appointed Iraqi ambassador to the US.

Meanwhile back in Iraq goldmine, the Iraqis have nothing to show for all the torture that they have endured for the past 4 years. On average, Iraqis still get only about two hours of electricity a day, and the situation won't be improving anytime soon because the US has not built a single major power plant.

And despite the $22 billion funneled to the war profiteers for reconstruction, a US official recently said, Baghdad may not have continuous 24-hour electricity until the year 2013.

For the people drawn to Iraq to fight against the occupation, this is not a war against Americans; it's a war against Bush. He tore this country apart for no reason and then just as the Iraqis predicted, the greedy gang of thugs swooped in and ripped everybody off.

And there is no reason to believe that the thievery has ended or the situation in Iraq will get better because an audit released on January 31, 2007, by Inspector General, Stuart Bowen, reported that the $300 billion war and reconstruction effort continues to be plagued with waste and corruption, and yet Bush now wants us to hand over another $100 billion to be funneled through Iraq to the exact same gangsters.

We will never win in Iraq no matter how long we stay because the other side will always have more people willing to die for the cause, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if the number of daily attacks continues to escalate as they have for the last 4 years, the US will run out of troops before they do.

Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for OpEd News and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government and corporate America

http://www.informationclearinghouse....ticle17547.htm$$$ .

Saundra Hummer

April 18th, 2007, 01:27 PM

After this last tragedy At Virginia Tech, and the insight into the corner of the shooters mind, glimpses given to us on the news and in interviews of of one of his professors, it seems, and this is only conjecture, that much of what troubled him was (the belief), that he had been sexually abused as a child. He had an overwhelming rage dwelling in his soul. If having been sexually abused caused his rage, his becoming unbalanced to the point that he could kill without remorse, then. we can see all the more why these types of abusers should never see the light of day outside prison walls.
This latest tragedy verywell could have been due to his hellish childhood, that is if this isn't just the ramblings of a sick minds imagination.

Even if this had never happened to him in the real world, we still need to be certain that these types of sexual perverts are never free to do any harm to any child. A mandatory lifes sentence is what we should demand of our justice system to protect our most vulnarable; those least able to protect themselves. Innumerable lives have been ruined due to these devient dangerous men walking the streets, preying on our children. We need the strongest laws possible to protect all children from such acts.

El Hombre

April 18th, 2007, 01:55 PM

Saundra Hummer

April 18th, 2007, 03:07 PM

.
...........
VT Killer Ruled Mentally Ill by Court; Let Go After Hospital Visit
Harassed Two Female Students; Concerns He Was Suicidal
By
NED POTTER and DAVID SCHOETZ
April 18, 2007 — -A Virginia court found that Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho was "mentally ill" and dangerous. Then, the state let him go.
In 2005, after a district court in Montgomery County ruled that Cho was either a danger to himself or to others -- the legal criteria to obtain a detention order -- he was evaluated by a state doctor and ordered to undergo outpatient care.

The doctor found that Cho's "insight and judgment are normal" and that he was not taking any medications, according to documents obtained by ABC News.

The ruling came after Cho was taken by police to a nearby psychiatric hospital for evaluation in December 2005, after two female schoolmates said they received threatening messages from him and police and school officials became concerned that he might be suicidal.

That information came to light two days after Cho, a Virginia Tech senior, killed 32 people and then himself in a shooting rampage on the university's campus.

Police obtained the order from a local magistrate after it was determined by a state-certified employee that Cho's apparent mental state met the threshold for the temporary detention order.

Under Virginia law, "A magistrate has the authority to issue a detention order upon a finding that a person is mentally ill and in need of hospitalization or treatment.

"The magistrate also must find that the person is an imminent danger to himself or others," says the guideline from Virginia's state court system.

Wendell Flinchum, the chief of the Virginia Tech police department, said that it's common for university police to work with state-affiliated mental health facilities instead of on-campus counseling because it is easier to obtain a detention order.

"We normally go through access [appealing to the state's legal system for help] because they have the power to commit people if they need to be committed," Flinchum said at a press conference Wednesday morning.

Cho was taken to Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health Center in Radford, Va., a private facility that can take 162 inpatients, according to court documents.

It's unclear whether Cho went to the hospital with police on his own or was taken there under protective custody, a possibility under the temporary detention order obtained by police.

Authorities did not say how much time Cho had spent at the hospital.

One of the young women complained in November 2005 that Cho, then 21, was stalking her, but she declined to press legal charges against him. Police interviewed Cho for the first time and referred the case to the school's internal disciplinary board.

It's unclear whether any action was ever taken by the school, although Edward Spencer, a school vice president, said that it's not uncommon for a complaint to never reach a full hearing.

A second girl, less than two weeks later, told authorities she received disturbing instant messages from Cho, and asked police to make sure there was "no further contact" from him.

Police spoke to Cho the next day. They say that shortly after, they received a call from an acquaintance of his, expressing concerns that he might be suicidal.

For a third time, police met with him. "Out of concern for Cho, officers asked him to speak to a counselor," Flinchum said. "He went voluntarily to the police department."

Police say Cho talked with a therapist from a local mental health agency not affiliated with Virginia Tech. That agency had authority to seek the detention order from a local magistrate.

The student complaints that brought Cho to the attention of authorities came during the same time that creative writing professor Lucinda Roy went to administrators to voice her concern about violent themes in Cho's writing.

Roy told ABC News that Cho seemed "extraordinarily lonely -- the loneliest person I have ever met in my life."

But authorities said they had no contact with Cho between then and Monday's mass killings.

While the school, citing privacy laws, did not conclusively say that school counselors had ever worked with Cho, they did say that a system for working with outside mental health agencies and local authorities is in place.

"Clearly, mental health professionals have a legal and moral responsibility," when a student presents a possible risk, said Christopher Flynn, head of the university's counseling center. "We have a duty to warn."

But Flynn also said that signs of trouble in Cho's behavior were not a clear indicator that action would follow. "It is very difficult to predict when what someone perceives as stalking, is stalking."

A Loner, Mysterious Even to His Roommates

Seung Cho was quiet -- so quiet that some classmates of his say they never heard his voice in three years. His roommates reported he was distant and private, eating by himself night after night, and watching wrestling on TV.

Cho's roommates say he obsessively downloaded music from the Internet. One of his favorites was the song "Shine," by Collective Soul, which he played over and over

He even scribbled some of the lyrics on the wall, they said -- lyrics like, "Teach me how to speak; Teach me how to share; Teach me where to go."

He was early to bed and early to rise, normally in bed by 9 p.m., and sometimes up by 5:30 the next morning. His roommates tell ABC News they would see him in the morning putting in his contact lenses, taking prescription medication and applying acne medicine to his face.

"He pretty much never talked at all," said Joseph Aust, who shared a bedroom with him in a six-person dorm suite in Harper Hall. "I tried to make conversation with him earlier in the year. He gave one-word answers.

"He pretty much never looked me in the eye," Aust said.

In recent weeks his routine had changed. His roommates say he went to the campus gym at night, lifting weights to bulk up. He went for a haircut -- surprising them by coming back to the room with a military-style buzz cut.

Aust and another roommate, Karan Grewal, say they were aware that Cho had pursued women on campus. They said he also seemed to have an imaginary girlfriend, a supermodel named "Jelly."

Students say he seemed as quiet as ever in the days before Monday's rampage.

Trey Perkins, a student who saw Cho during the shooting spree, said it was unreal, "being that close to a monster."
Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures
http://abcnews.go.com/US/print?id=3052278
...............
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Saundra Hummer

April 19th, 2007, 01:18 PM

.:: :: :: :: ::Cultural Learnings of KazakhstanCohen
It’s not everyday an American like me gets to attend a media conference half a world away featuring the former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran – not to mention Russia’s ex-prime minister and the two Richards of American foreign policy, former Assistant Secretary of State Holbrooke and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Perle, along with assorted representatives of NATO, the National Security Council and the OSCE. Nor is it common to have a television personality from Al Jazeera International, also known as (in the USA at least) the “terror channel,” as the Conference Chair.

Even less familiar is the conference’s location – Almaty, the largest city in the Republic of Kazakhstan, heretofore unfortunately best known in the West as the butt of Borat jokes… Kazakhstan, it turns out, is the ninth largest country in the world –- actually bigger than all of Western Europe — although its population is estimated at just over fifteen million people. Bordering on Russia, China, and the Central Asian countries of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the country stretches over a vast expanse of northern and central Eurasia and is also partially located in eastern-most Europe, west of the Ural River.

Greetings, then, from the sixth annual EurAsian Media Forum, which kicked off this morning with a welcome from Dr. Dariga Nazarbayeva, the very modern and dynamic daughter of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who noted that issues of energy security, power in world politics, nuclear proliferation and global problems in journalism would all be covered during the three-day event. She was followed by former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, who spoke of the existence of “multiple cultural networks” and “different neighborhoods in a multi-cultural world,” and how “new communications technologies have opened civilizations to one another,” while bemoaning the indisputable fact that “threats and violence are still largely dominant in the international sphere.”

“Why is the image of the East in the West, and vice versa, so distorted?” wondered Khatami. “The loud voice of violence does not allow the voice of ‘others’ to be heard or understood… We need not just to tolerate but also to understand the other.

”The world needs peace and the values and dialogue of development,” concluded Khatami. “But it stands instead at a dangerous crossroad. And the global media has a crucial role to play.”

President Nazarbayev then spoke, pointing out that Kazakhstan itself is a crossroad, a nexus of “East and West, North and South,” with one hundred and ten different ethnic groups within its boundaries. Citing his country’s ten percent annual growth rate and ongoing economic and social transformation, he said many problems still remain for his country, and concluded, “We need to find our place within the international community,” while still pointing with pride to positive trends and reminding the assembly that after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan possessed the fourth largest nuclear arsenal in the world – and promptly surrendered all its WMD! “We gave up our nuclear weapons,” he said. “Others should follow our example.”

Not surprisingly, much of the focus of the confab here is on fear and security. Speaking of which, the Intercontinental Hotel, where the conference is taking place, was under tight lockdown owing to the presence of Nazarbayev, who was re-elected in 2005 for a seven-year term with more than 90% of the votes, amid protests that the ballot had been rigged and OSCE observations that the election was seriously flawed. Nazarbayev maintained it had been fair and showed that people wanted evolution instead of revolution. Although supporters give him credit for preserving stability and encouraging multi-ethnicity, opponents say he has suppressed dissent and concentrated power in his own hands. And though he claims to advocate democracy in the long-term, Nazarbayev also warns –perhaps too conveniently — that stability could be at risk if the changeover is too rapid.

But then, outside the womb of the West, much is different. Take the focus of the panel discussions here, for example: “World Politics – Questions of Power and Justice” was the opening plenary session; “’Glamorization’ of the Media” is the closing one. Different too is the language used to describe the sessions – much more pointed than one would find at, say, the We Media Conference… Check out this introduction to the first panel, which concerned the war in Iraq: “Now generally accepted as without moral legitimacy and certainly without international support, events have undermined the authority and credibility of the international institutions…and have also exacerbated the underlying tension between the US and the UN…the current administration decreasingly concerns itself with the international community and displays a diminishing respect of international law.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself!

Befitting the controversial description, the panel itself was filled with conflict, and notably marked by Holbrooke storming off the stage in response to a vociferous attack on the United States by a fellow panelist, British MP George Galloway. But first Bakhtiar Amin, former Minister of Human Rights in Iraq gave a baleful account of the toll of death and destruction visited upon his countrymen by decades of the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein, followed of course by the US invasion and overthrow of Hussein, and the ongoing occupation and civil war currently raging in Iraq.

Amin was asked by Al Jazeera’s Riz Khan, “Is there any reason for hope?” He answered by quoting an Iraqi proverb: “We have the pessimism of reason and wisdom and the optimism of will.” He added that Iraqis are “incredibly resilient –anyplace else would have disintegrated by now.”

Richard Perle – known in some circles as the ‘Prince of Darkness’ – was then asked if he had any regrets, in hindsight, over his advocacy of invading Iraq. Apparently not… “After the attacks of 9/11,”Perle said, ”A defensive action had to be taken in light of the threat. The decision to remove Saddam was right – but we shouldn’t have allowed the liberation to become an occupation, in the mistaken belief that we could reconstruct Iraq. Only Iraqis can do that.”

Former Russian prime minister Eugenie Primakov took issue with Perle. “The US saw a threat – but there was none,” he responded. “There was no WMD, no connection to Al Qaeda. The US policy of unilateralism does not justify the use of force.

“The policy is inefficient,” Primakov concluded. “Now there is civil war, now there is terrorism in Iraq, where before there was none.”

Galloway then began his attacks. “The United States brought Osama bin Laden to the region, not Saddam Hussein,” he said, decrying the “cant and hypocrisy” of Perle. “Bush is now such a broken reed that even Richard Perle has abandoned him! No one believes our leaders any more—even if they are telling the truth – due to the tower of lies they built to justify the invasion.”

Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation tried to intervene. “This is no time for finger pointing,” said Cohen. “That said, I heard the same Russian analysis before the war. I heard what Primakov said today in 2003, and it was right even then. But the crucial question now is not ‘What was done?’ but ‘What is to be done?’”

Holbrooke then noted that ‘two thirds of the American people now are opposed to the war, and want a quick solution, but there is no such thing. Responsible leaders oppose a precipitate withdrawal.”

Galloway then launched into a broadside of undiluted anti-American remarks, which were greeted repeatedly by applause, prompting Holbrooke to note his “dismay and disappointment” and to respond that “If you disagree with the Bush Administration, join the club! So do two thirds of all Americans. But I am saddened that many of you seem to conflate opposing the Bush Administration policies with opposing the American people.”

When Galloway repeated his verbal attacks, Holbrooke made a show of storming off the stage. I half-expected someone to take off his shoe and start pounding on the table…

If today’s opening session is any indication, I guess we can expect such sparks to continue to fly throughout the three-day conference. Frankly, the anti-Bush, anti-America sentiments being expressed here saddened me as well. Even at the height of the Vietnam War, most of the world was still able to make a crucial distinction between the politicians and the people. Saddened — but certainly not surprised. It’s just one more sign of the extent of the loss of prestige and respect the United States has undergone in the past six years, under one of the worst Administrations in the history of our own republic.

Go on-site to gain access to this article, & photo. There are other current articles as well as their archives and activist list, just click on the folowing URL:
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/04/19/stalk-market/ :: :: ::
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Saundra Hummer

April 19th, 2007, 05:44 PM

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"Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery."

Georges Bernanos
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1888-1948)
Source: in Diary of a Country Priest

~~~

"What no one seemed to notice. . . was the ever widening gap. . .between the government and the people. . . And it became always wider. . . the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway . . . (it) gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about . . .and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated . . . by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. . .

From Milton Mayer
They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1938-45
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11845.htm

~~~

"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, (I conjure you to believe me fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government."

George Washington (1732-1799)
Founding Father, 1st US President,
'Father of the Country'
Source: Farewell Address,
September 17, 1796, Ref:
George Washington:
A Collection, W.B. Allen,
ed. (521)

~~~~~
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Saundra Hummer

April 19th, 2007, 05:53 PM

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Back Bush's war strategy?

Then bring back the draft
By
Joseph L. Galloway

04/19/07 "McClatchy Newspapers" -- -- Here's a question for those who still support President Bush's strategy to stretch out the Iraq War until after he's left office, and for those who think we should be prepared to continue our bloody occupation of Iraq for five or 10 more years:

Are you ready to support reinstating Selective Service - the draft - even if that means your sons and daughters or your grandchildren will have to put on the uniform and go hold the cities and towns of a nation in the middle of a civil war?

Until now, the burden and sacrifices of military service in Afghanistan and Iraq have been borne by volunteers - young men and women who in large part hail from small towns and counties of our nation.

But the volunteer military, especially the Army and the Marine Corps, has been ground down by endless combat deployments that began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and may continue for years.

The president's "surge strategy" of adding 30,000 or more troops in Iraq may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. There weren't 30,000 extra troops sitting around doing nothing when the call came.

The surge is being manned by extending the combat tour for Army troops to 15 months, with a "guarantee" of 12 months at home before going back. Soldiers who've been yanked back into combat after seven or eight or 10 months at home - resting, refitting, retraining and getting to know their children - know better than to believe such a promise.

The administration's new plan to add 95,000 new recruits to the force over the next five years is too little, too late, and it can't be achieved without big increases in the cash enlistment bonuses that recruiters wave in front of youngsters whose choices are already limited by who they are and where they live.

The demands of the wars on our troops and their aging, worn-out equipment already have pushed the annual cost of enlistment and re-enlistment bonuses above $1 billion and of recruitment advertising to $120 million annually.

It's becoming clear that the current pace of deployments cannot continue unchecked. All the cheap fixes have been used. Peter has been robbed so often to pay Paul that he has nothing left in his pockets.

Our nation for the first time in many years has no strategic reserve available to respond to a crisis elsewhere in the world. The Army division that was the tripwire in Korea has dwindled down to a brigade of 3,000 troops. The Ready Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division is standing down after decades of being ready to parachute into a trouble spot on 12 hours' notice so that it, too, can shuffle in and out of Iraq or Afghanistan.

The brigades and divisions home from a deployment cannot be counted on in a major crisis. Most are immediately whittled down to 65 percent or 70 percent of their authorized strength upon their return home as hundreds and thousands of troops complete involuntary extensions of their enlistment or are assigned to military schools to study or teach. Most of their combat equipment, including armored vehicles, is left behind in the war zone to be used by their replacements.

The barrel has been scraped so hard and so often that it no longer even has a bottom.

On Capitol Hill this week, the subject of restoring the draft after more than three decades of the all-volunteer force was gingerly raised in a House subcommittee hearing in the face of near-unanimous opposition by the Bush administration, the military chiefs in the Pentagon and politicians afraid of the consequences of embracing an unpopular solution even if it's the only one left.

All of them know that a fairly administered Selective Service system that distributed the burden of military service to rich and poor alike, with deferments limited to physical and mental disqualifiers, would ensure that 99.5 percent of Americans would suddenly have a huge investment in any suggestion that going to war is a quick and easy solution to a foreign problem.

Does anyone really believe that the war in Iraq would have dragged on for four-plus years if draftees from all over the country were doing the fighting and dying and suffering quietly absorbed by today's volunteer troops and their families?

If you aren't prepared to invest your son or daughter in continuing this war, then it's time for you to give some serious thought to how and when it can be ended, and what the candidates for president in 2008 are saying about an open-ended commitment of other Americans' sons and daughters to a war we can't afford and can't win.
Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young." Readers may write to him at: P.O. Box 399, Bayside, Texas 78340; e-mail: jlgalloway2@cs.com.
The enlargement of the last paragraph in the article as well as the color are mine. SRH http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17556.htm/////\\\\\/////\\\\\
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Saundra Hummer

April 19th, 2007, 06:25 PM

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This administration is seething to the boiling over point with the biggest bunch of wackos to ever hold office.

If they were to do as much good as they do harm; if they used this cunning, to try to do things up right, what a better world we would have, but no, just look at what they're up to now. This is unheard of since Hitler gassed those with handicaps, those with severe medical problems. Can't happen here?

What in the world then is their reasoning behind this? Just an overwhelming need to be all seeing, to know everything about all of us? Good god I'm sick of them and their ways. We can't have the door hit then in but none too soon, it's time they go, oh "if only wishes were beer and nuts". The day this gaggle of spys, thugs, bullies, and neer do wells, are out of office, I'm going to have my own party, I'm going to celebrate and cheer! Seriously, I'll feel as though a weight has been lifted. This feeling of helplessness, this feeling so weighted down by them and all they do is tiresome.

I'm sick and tired of their greed. I'm sick and tired of their power grabs. I'm sick and tired of their war mongoring. I'm sick and tired of their criminal ways. We're sick of it. Sick and tired of it. SRH
*************
Bush administration is prying into your medical records in violation of the law
by
John Aravosis (DC) ·
4/19/2007 11:15:00 AM ET
Thursday, April 19, 2007

We learned yesterday that the Bush administration has created a database of every single prescription drug user/patient in the country (that would pretty much be all of us). The database was created pursuant to a 2005 law that was intended to prevent the abuse of prescription drugs. Funny that this massive new database of your private medical information is now being (ab)used for a purpose that wasn't intended in or approved by the law.

The federal database of your private medical information is now being used by federal law enforcement to investigate crimes that have nothing to do with prescription drug abuse. We know this because yesterday ABC News disclosed that the feds checked the database to see what prescription meds the Virginia Tech shooter might have been on. How does the mass murder of students and faculty at Virginia Tech have anything to do with prescription drug abuse? It doesn't.

The Bush administration has created a massive database of your private medical records and they're now abusing it. Gee, what a surprise - the Bush administration secretly prying into our private lives in violation of the law. If they wanted this power, they could have sought it from Congress. They didn't. So they took it anyway, even though the law doesn't allow it.

Your privacy is gone, and it's not terribly clear that anyone in Washington cares. http://americablog.blogspot.com/2007/04/bush-administration-is-prying-into-your.html
******* .

Phat Boi

April 19th, 2007, 07:19 PM

Arnold Shwartzanegger is also the governer of California.

Saundra Hummer

April 19th, 2007, 07:39 PM

Arnold Shwartzanegger is also the governer of California.

His stance on the enviornment was a big surprise to me, and how he isn't kowtowing to the Cheny~Bush administration on that issue, is an even bigger one. Seems he's turning out to be his own man on a lot of issues. Thank you Maria! Ha!

Saundra Hummer

April 20th, 2007, 03:36 PM

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Nugent: Gun-free zones are recipe for disaster
By Ted Nugent
Special to CNN

Editor's note: Rock guitarist Ted Nugent has sold more than 30 million albums. He's also a gun rights activist and serves on the board of directors of the National Rifle Association. His program, "Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild," can be seen on the Outdoor Channel.

Read an opposing take on gun control from journalist Tom Plate: Let's lay down our right to bear arms. (Go on-site to gain access to link to this article, and others as wel. Click on the URL at end of post to gain access.

WACO, Texas (CNN) -- Zero tolerance, huh? Gun-free zones, huh? Try this on for size: Columbine gun-free zone, New York City pizza shop gun-free zone, Luby's Cafeteria gun-free zone, Amish school in Pennsylvania gun-free zone and now Virginia Tech gun-free zone.

Anybody see what theevil Brady Campaign and other anti-gun cults have created? I personally have zero tolerance for evil and denial. And America had best wake up real fast that the brain-dead celebration of unarmed helplessness will get you killed every time, and I've about had enough of it.

Nearly a decade ago, a Springfield, Oregon, high schooler, a hunter familiar with firearms, was able to bring an unfolding rampage to an abrupt end when he identified a gunman attempting to reload his .22-caliber rifle, made the tactical decision to make a move and tackled the shooter.

A few years back, an assistant principal at Pearl High School in Mississippi, which was a gun-free zone, retrieved his legally owned Colt .45 from his car and stopped a Columbine wannabe from continuing his massacre at another school after he had killed two and wounded more at Pearl.

At an eighth-grade school dance in Pennsylvania, a boy fatally shot a teacher and wounded two students before the owner of the dance hall brought the killing to a halt with his own gun.

More recently, just a few miles up the road from Virginia Tech, two law school students ran to fetch their legally owned firearm to stop a madman from slaughtering anybody and everybody he pleased. These brave, average, armed citizens neutralized him pronto.

My hero, Dr. Suzanne Gratia Hupp, was not allowed by Texas law to carry her handgun into Luby's Cafeteria that fateful day in 1991, when due to bureaucrat-forced unarmed helplessness she could do nothing to stop satanic George Hennard from killing 23 people and wounding more than 20 others before he shot himself. Hupp was unarmed for no other reason than denial-ridden "feel good" politics.

She has since led the charge for concealed weapon upgrade in Texas, where we can now stop evil. Yet, there are still the mindless puppets of the Brady Campaign and other anti-gun organizations insisting on continuing the gun-free zone insanity by which innocents are forced into unarmed helplessness. Shame on them. Shame on America. Shame on the anti-gunners all.

No one was foolish enough to debate Ryder truck regulations or ammonia nitrate restrictions or a "cult of agriculture fertilizer" following the unabashed evil of Timothy McVeigh's heinous crime against America on that fateful day in Oklahoma City. No one faulted kitchen utensils or other hardware of choice after Jeffrey Dahmer was caught drugging, mutilating, raping, murdering and cannibalizing his victims. Nobody wanted "steak knife control" as they autopsied the dead nurses in Chicago, Illinois, as Richard Speck went on trial for mass murder.

Evil is as evil does, and laws disarming guaranteed victims make evil people very, very happy. Shame on us.

Already spineless gun control advocates are squawking like chickens with their tiny-brained heads chopped off, making political hay over this most recent, devastating Virginia Tech massacre, when in fact it is their own forced gun-free zone policy that enabled the unchallenged methodical murder of 32 people.

Thirty-two people dead on a U.S. college campus pursuing their American Dream, mowed-down over an extended period of time by a lone, non-American gunman in illegal possession of a firearm on campus in defiance of a zero-tolerance gun law. Feel better yet? Didn't think so.

Who doesn't get this? Who has the audacity to demand unarmed helplessness? Who likes dead good guys?

I'll tell you who. People who tramp on the Second Amendment, that's who. People who refuse to accept the self-evident truth that free people have the God-given right to keep and bear arms, to defend themselves and their loved ones. People who are so desperate in their drive to control others, so mindless in their denial that they pretend access to gas causes arson, Ryder trucks and fertilizer cause terrorism, water causes drowning, forks and spoons cause obesity, dialing 911 will somehow save your life, and that their greedy clamoring to "feel good" is more important than admitting that armed citizens are much better equipped to stop evil than unarmed, helpless ones.

Pray for the families of victims everywhere, America. Study the methodology of evil. It has a profile, a system, a preferred environment where victims cannot fight back. Embrace the facts, demand upgrade and be certain that your children's school has a better plan than Virginia Tech or Columbine. Eliminate the insanity of gun-free zones, which will never, ever be gun-free zones. They will only be good guy gun-free zones, and that is a recipe for disaster written in blood on the altar of denial. I, for one, refuse to genuflect there.

What is your take on this commentary?E-mail us

The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer. This is part of an occasional series of commentaries on CNN.com that offers a broad range of perspectives, thoughts and points of view.
Read an opposing point of view from journalist Tom Plate:Let's lay down our right to bear arms

Your responses
CNN.com asked readers for their thoughts on this commentary. Below you will find a small selection of these e-mails, some of which have been edited for length and spelling: (There are more comments on-site, as well as links within the article. Go on-site by clicking on the URL at the bottom of post.)

Travis Carollo, Sullivan, Missouri
I agree 100 percent. The only thing anti-guns laws will prevent is normal law-abiding citizens from owning them. Criminals will always find a way to obtain a gun. They are criminals. They will never follow the law. Way to go Nuge!

Doug, Houston, Texas
Frankly I got sick in my stomach reading Mr. Nugent's article. According to Mr. Nugent, the solution is very simple: All citizens should be armed and the world would be a much safer place. Let's take a moment to think about the implication of this. The criminals are not dumb. If we average law-abiding citizens were allowed to freely purchase weapons, the criminals would do everything they could to ensure they have the upper hands on their firepower. Of course, we would immediately do the same to regain our upper hands. What then would you think the criminals would do in return?

Kathy Culley, Virginia Beach, Virginia
Ted has hit the nail on the head. Making the right to bear arms illegal is only illegal for the "good" guys. The "bad" guys will always have access through their illegal ways. Just thinking that someone may be carrying a gun might deter would-be killers out of their heinous crime. Way to go Ted for speaking out for our American rights!

Nita Olson, Florence, Mississippi
I believe he is right! I'm not fond of guns, but I believe we should have the right to bear arms and protect our loved ones. I, for one, would not hesitate to shoot someone trying to enter my house, car, etc. Reason being you ask? If the "suspect" is entering my home, armed with a gun, then I feel no remorse about shooting someone who is coming into my "zone" with the intent of hurting/killing me or family and taking things that I have worked hard for and will not give it up "because it can be replaced."

Joe Russo, Staten Island, New York
Ted Nugent really has a twisted way of looking at the violence that seems to regularly plague us. As a hunter and gun owner, I do believe in our right to bear arms. However, that right should not include hand guns and assualt weapons.

Josh Munford, Lincoln, Nebraska
Simply stated, Ted Nugent is right. The fact of the matter is that these anti-gun activists have created more problems. Evil will always find a way and giving them more opportunity by creating "anti" laws in all reality protects them. It's common sense to a criminal: "Law-abiding citizens won't be prepared here or here or here, so I'll be able to create the most destruction, panic and chaos there." What are you thinking by creating anti-gun laws, and gun free zones?

URL: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/19/commentary.nugent/index.html
Frankly, I have a hard time recognizing the rationale of a man so swallowed up by the gun culture, so obsessed with the lifestyle, that I haven't seen him in anything but camouflage since he appeared on Miami Vice. God, that was a lifetime ago. His way of going seems more than a bit radical. SRH llllllllllllllll .

Saundra Hummer

April 20th, 2007, 06:26 PM

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Vermont Senate Calls For Impeachment Of Bush
(AP)MONTPELIER, Vt. Vermont senators voted Friday to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying their actions have raised "serious questions of constitutionality."
The non-binding resolution was approved 16-9 without debate — all six Republicans in the chamber at the time and three Democrats voted against it.

The resolution says Bush and Cheney's actions in the U.S. and abroad, including in Iraq, "raise serious questions of constitutionality, statutory legality, and abuse of the public trust."

"I think it's going to have a tremendous political effect, a tremendous political effect on public discourse about what to do about this president," said James Leas, a vocal advocate of withdrawing troops from Iraq and impeaching Bush and Cheney.

Vermont lawmakers earlier voted to demand an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq in another non-binding resolution.

Democratic House Speaker Gaye Symington has kept a similar resolution from reaching the floor in her chamber. She argued that an impeachment resolution would be partisan and divisive and that it would distract Washington from efforts to get the United States out of Iraq, which she says is more important.

In the Senate, Republican Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie had opposed the resolution, but he was absent Friday. That left Democratic Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin in charge, and he immediately took up the measure.

More than three dozen towns voted in favor of similar nonbinding impeachment resolutions at their annual town meetings in March. State lawmakers in Wisconsin and Washington have pushed for similar resolutions.

© 2007 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
http://cbs2chicago.com/national/topstories_story_110100239.html ***** .

Saundra Hummer

April 20th, 2007, 07:20 PM

.VVVVVVV
Dark of Heartness, Part II:
Compassionless Conservatives
By David Michael Green

04/20/07 "ICH " -- --Et tu, Wolfie? Et tu ?Imagine our shock at Paul Wolfowitz’s shock. He not only masterminded humanity’s greatest current catastrophe, the US invasion of Iraq, but he did so by fabricating and marketing a complete mythological cosmology of Good versus Evil (Bush good! Saddam bad!), the likes of which might have left even Jim Jones envious and amazed. And he did so in a fashion that no doubt brought a posthumous smile to the face of his graduate school mentor, Leo Strauss, who taught that we of the hoi polloi don’t have the right stuff to maintain our democracy, and thus need enlightened elites like Wolfowitz to spoon feed us religion and other fairytales in order to keep us on the right course, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons.

But then, of course, the whole dang thing came a cropper in Baghdad, and – as if the symmetries between Vietnam and Iraq weren’t already spookily profound enough – Wolfie found himself following the trail of shame pioneered by Robert McNamara, casually parachuting out of his Pentagon office and into the presidency of the World Bank. (Does this mean that, like McNamara, thirty years from now Wolfowitz will be the subject of a feature film in which he kinda sorta apologizes for his grand goof? We’ll just have to wait and see if he becomes the last human on earth to recognize the full magnitude of his spectacular achievement in Mesopotamia.) Meanwhile, safely ensconced at the apex of financial (as opposed to military) power, Wolfowitz simply refused any longer to answer questions related to his previous employment. Though the dead and the dying of Iraq will not be any time soon, Wolfowitz had simply moved on.

And, with seemingly nary a whiff of irony about him, he came to his new position preaching the virtues of ‘accountability’. Moreover, Wolfowitz – dictatorial leadership style no worse for wear after the last go ‘round – blasted into the World Bank declaring that the evils of corruption were the key source of global development problems, and that rooting them out would become job one at the Bank. But now he and his supporters, including the Wall Street Journal, the National Review and the White House, profess shock at all the hullabaloo generated by the revelation that the anti-corruption president was ordering up massive promotions for his girlfriend (also his employee) while simultaneously preaching the gospel of squeaky clean, again with no apparent sense of irony. So Mr. Accountability is now running around trying to make sure that no one holds Mr. Anti-Corruption accountable for his corruption. Meanwhile, Mr. It’s-All-About-Me is utterly uncomprehending when it comes to understanding other people’s feelings about all this.

What’s going on, here? Sadly, a pattern.

But at least one which we’ve finally figured out. Did you here about the recent study in which biologists discovered an overwhelmingly robust relationship between genetics and ideology? It seems that, like chimps (with no offense intended to my furry primate friends), conservatives are 99.87 percent identical to fully developed homo sapiens, except that they are missing one particular strand of DNA that scientists say is intimately linked with the human capacity for compassion.

In the world of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, the fact that the above paragraph is not true (or at least not yet; or at least not to my knowledge) would, of course, be a fact of little consequence (in fact, it wouldn’t be a fact at all). If the assertion had any utility in advancing one or more of their venal objectives, it would be promptly employed, regardless of its veracity. Like, for example – and I’ll just make something up at random here – mushroom cloud smoking guns, or knowing for sure where the WMD were stashed in Iraq (around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat, of course).

And its too bad I’m not self-loathing enough to traffic in the sort of bald-faced lies which have become a staple of the regressive diet in recent decades, because this scientific non-finding concerning the missing bit of DNA would otherwise explain so much, wouldn’t it?

Have you noticed with the regressive right how the rules that they love to apply to you and me somehow don’t seem to apply to them? And that when those rules inevitably come crashing into even their privileged lives that they miraculously have a change of heart? And it does happen inevitably. As even the non-regressive New Jersey governor Jon Corzine just found out, while politicians may often successfully place themselves above the law, the laws of physics offer no such exemptions to either the rich or the powerful (and Corzine is very much both). (Note to the good folks reading this: Wear your seatbelt. Note to Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of youse nasties: Your safety belt usage is optional.)

But, seriously, have you noticed that the only time you see compassion from conservatives is when it applies to them (which means, of course, that it’s not really compassion at all)? That’s just the pattern, isn’t it? That’s precisely how it works. The examples are myriad.

Quick, name one conservative figure who is an avid supporter of ending the gun madness which claims thirty thousand casualties in this country every year. Why, it’s James Brady. How could we possibly explain the uniqueness of this apostasy by a former leading figure in the Reagan administration? Could it have anything to do with the bullet that penetrated his skull in the course of the attempt on Reagan’s life?

And while we’re talking Reagans, how ‘bout that Nancy, eh? She’s a solid citizen, isn’t she? A good, old-fashioned regressive from the Marie Antoinette school. A firm supporter of tax cuts for the rich, war-mongering wherever possible, and eviscerating school lunch programs for indigent children (what, you have a problem with counting ketchup as a vegetable?). Except, of course, for one issue where she’s broken publicly with the troglodyte tendency: stem cell research. What’s amazing about that, if you think about it, is the massive coincidence of her position on that issue and the fact that she suffered for years taking care of her husband while Alzheimer’s – a disease likely to be cured by such research – turned his brain to mush. What a bizarre, random, happenstance!

If your heart bleeds for Nancy, it must surely go out to Dick Cheney, who could (literally and figuratively) badly use it. Don’t you just feel awful for this guy, the way he gets roughed up over his daughter’s sexual orientation? When she and her lesbian partner gave birth to a child they are raising together, journalists actually asked Grandad questions about that! With such impudence having consumed the bold gatekeepers of the Fourth Estate, it is no wonder Cheney got all huffy and refused to answer. For crissakes, you’d think he was one of those crass politicians who win elections by using gays as political whipping boys or something! Cheney seems to be saying that people’s sexual orientation is their own business, not the government’s, and I for one am glad that he’s there in Washington making sure that’s so. You go, Dick!

I’m also glad that Jeb Bush is out there protecting us from the thinly-veiled racism that politicians of a certain persuasion are fond of using when (gay-bashing having lost its bite), they pontificate with malice aforethought about the current illegal immigration ‘crisis’. Not Jeb, though. He’s a regular profile in courage. That’s why it was reported that “the Florida governor calls the anti‑immigration ‘chest pounding’ of politicians hurtful”. You really have to admire selfless politicians like Jebby, willing to cut across the vicious political grain of the regressive right, with nothing in it for themselves, and stand four-square behind fundamental human rights principles like..., like..., well, like not demonizing immigrants in order to score political points. Oh, did I mention that Jeb’s wife Columba is Mexican?

If you’re like me, you’ve long recognized Trent Lott and his Republican colleagues as stalwart advocates for the ordinary guy against the evils of corporate predators continually seeking to ransack hapless Americans, pin them to the wall, and fleece them mercilessly. Frankly, looking at the senator’s voting record in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy, draconian bankruptcy laws, or meat-axe cuts to social spending can be a bit deceiving. He’s really a powerful voice in Washington for the downtrodden who are forever getting kicked around by big business. It was no surprise, then, that Lott was fuming at the despicable treatment that insurance companies doled out to the already miserable citizens of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their homes. Who wouldn’t be incensed at the insurance companies refusing to pay off claims due to policyholders? “I am outraged,” he said. “I’m concerned there are lots of abuses in the aftermath of the hurricane.” Of course, given his well-established track record fighting for the little guy, I doubt seriously that State Farm’s rejection of Lott’s personal claim for his loss of a $400,000 home had anything to do with his position on this issue. (Memo to State Farm CEO: Fire your entire senior management team for a complete absence of political savvy. Memo to State Farm Board: Fire your CEO for making lousy personnel choices.)

You see the same kind of thing with guys like Clarence Thomas, who vigilantly and even vehemently guards the barricades against the societal corrosion endemic to programs like affirmative action. Apparently, nothing so incenses the good justice more than the idea that historically thwarted classes of individuals might get some remedial assistance from governing institutions to overcome the barriers they still face today. Preposterous! Offensive! Outrageous! Rightly so, Judge T. has so far found only one single individual for whom the advantages of affirmative action seem to pass muster against his strict criteria for protection of the endangered commonweal. What is so bizarre is the remarkable coincidence in all this: This person has exactly the same name as the judge! (Whether he also shares Justice Thomas’ passion for pornography is unknown at this time.)

But you gotta love Matthew Dowd, especially. With the exception of Karl Rove, perhaps no one in the world is more responsible for making sure that George W. Bush is your president. It seems that Dowd, the chief campaign strategist for the 2004 Bush campaign, was just utterly enthralled with the personality of Young George, going all the way back to Texas days. And who could blame him for that? Smart, articulate, heroic, uniting, tolerant, wise – George W. Bush has it all. “It's almost like you fall in love”, Dowd said (not that kind of love, of course – even Cheney’s not up for this one). So Matt did what needed to be done (and, trust me on this, there was a lot, and it was ugly) to push The Disaster That Is Bush over the finish line in 2004. Now, barely two years later, he reveals that it was a mistake, so much so that recently he had actually even written an op-ed piece entitled “Kerry Was Right”. He somehow never quite managed to submit it, but that’s another story.

Dowd ran the 2004 campaign around security fears, arguing that voters “trust this president more than they trust [flip-flopping] Senator Kerry on Iraq”. Now he tells us he was wrong. Wow, you don’t see that happen every day, and kudos to Dowd for his courageous statements. I’m quite sure they had nothing to do with the fact that the Bush administration is about to ship his son Daniel over to Iraq. I also doubt that fact has anything to do with why Daniel’s father now says “I do feel a calling of trying to re‑establish a level of gentleness in the world”. I agree that’s a pretty good idea, Matt. I even thought it was a good idea in 2004.

These are all great examples of concerned conservative compassion, but my true favorites are the ones regarding criminal justice values. You know, like Rush Limbaugh, who regularly rails on about how we should string up druggies and how there’s nothing wrong with denying due process to those bad people incarcerated at Guantánamo. How different was his tune when ‘prosecutorial zealousness’ and bias led to his arrest for drug abuse, and when he was, I’m pretty sure, glad to have a high-priced lawyer, appellate courts, and the right to throw bail. Then there was Bob Ney and Mark Foley entering alcohol rehab programs after being exposed as thieves and perverts. Gosh, whatever happened to that old time religion of ‘personal responsibility’? Or how about Bush administration insider David Safavian pleading for leniency from the court before being sentenced to 18 months for corruption in the Abramoff case. Leniency? I don’t remember seeing a lot of that in the conservative playbook. You mean like for indigent African American convicts, former abused children one and all, shipped off to death row without even competent counsel? That kind of leniency?

Now comes the visage of Alberto Gonzales, the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the land. Back in the day, the “Judge” (as he likes his staff to call him) was the plausible deniability guy for a Texas governor named Bush. Gonzales would give Bush the most wonderfully brief and narrow summaries of death row clemency appeals that could possibly be put together and, amazingly, Bush would always deny them. This was all done in the name of getting tough on law and order, mind you. Now the Attorney General’s former top staffer has testified before Congress that Gonzales lied about his involvement in firing prosecutors for political reasons. Records released so far also prove he’s lied. And another top staffer has taken the Fifth to avoid testifying at all. It kinda looks like Gonzales is going down, doesn’t it? And I’m just guessing, but I bet that when he seeks a pardon from the president for his crimes, he’ll be thankful that he himself is not writing the brief.

Anyhow, you get the picture here? Me, I’m thinking about renouncing my silly moral hangups about truth and all that junk, and just going with the genetic story after all, ‘cause it seems so damn true! Is there any doubt but that conservatives are simply missing the compassion gene? Nancy Reagan couldn’t give a damn about your specific healthcare problem until it became her problem, then she figured it out – but only that. Don’t hold your breath waiting for enlightened leadership on Social Security, a living wage or even general healthcare delivery from the wife of the president who couldn’t even mouth the word “AIDS” while the disease was beginning its march to the sea in the 1980s, taking out a wide swath of Americans along the way.

Matthew Dowd not only sold us a lying president and his prevarications about war just three years ago, but he built an entire campaign around an even more egregious lie – that his candidate was a war hero, and that the other candidate, an actual war hero, was a weak imposter. Now, as his own misdeeds loom up with the potential to bite him back hard, like some figure out of Shakespeare or a Greek tragedy, he finds doubt and regret. Doubt? Regret? I tell you what, man, you go drink down one percent of the blood you’ve spilled, first. You go apologize on your hands and knees to one percent of the families you’ve decimated. You go pay back one percent of the treasure you’ve wasted – money needed for healthcare and education. Then come tell us your self-serving tales of doubt and regret. Because, funny, somehow we never got that vibe from you in 2004.

If it seems like conservatives are congenitally incapable of compassion until they’ve had to struggle with something themselves, that’s because it’s true. If you think the whole business of wealthy Americans demanding additional tax cuts for themselves to pay for their third yacht while others go to bed hungry is part of the same mentality, that’s because it is. If you’re horrified that people are capable of such rampant hypocrisy, you ought to be. This is truly a scary bunch, with the full intellectual firepower of adults, but with social ethics that could make the dynamics of a kindergarten sandbox seem positively Gandhian by comparison.

And that leaves we more enlightened grown-ups with just two choices. We could make sure that every conservative in the White House or Congress loses a child in Baghdad, has another one shot-up with the assault rifles the NRA defends, contracts AIDS, gets wrongly accused of a capital offense and is forced to take a court-appointed drunken lawyer getting paid $6.75 and hour and sleeping during court, is forced to live off a Wal-Mart wage, gets kicked off the voting rolls because of their race, lives in New Orleans and depends on FEMA for housing assistance, gets knocked-up and has to figure out how to deal with an unplanned pregnancy, gets stomped to a bloody pulp because of their sexual orientation, and has to cope by themselves with a parent whose mind has been destroyed by Alzheimer’s. That’s one alternative. And wouldn’t they (and, more importantly, we) be better off for it?

Or, better yet, we could instead make sure that there simply are no more conservatives in the White House or Congress. Progressives, and especially Democrats, need to regain the courage of their convictions, and stop standing by as passive observers while these emotional midgets with their constipated compassion capacities kick our sorry political asses up and down the street. People don’t want the garbage they’re selling, and just about all we have to do is point out that it is garbage in order for it to be rejected.

Right now, regressives are peddling a lovely mix of war, debt, environmental destruction, torture, division at home, hatred abroad, a tattered constitution, a shaky economy and a healthcare system in free-fall, as well as lies and corruption that could make Imelda herself blush. How is it these guys even exist? How is it they are even allowed within a hundred yards of government buildings? Is there a shortage of ankle bracelets? Even if they were Iraqi suicide bombers blowing up government they couldn’t begin to equal the damage they’ve already done in government.

If emotionally-stunted regressives can’t get to compassion on their own, maybe they can learn from the lesson of Lee Atwater, the man whose major contribution in life was to inject a pure and virulent fresh dose of racism into American politics via the Willie Horton ad. Imagine having that as the first line of your three-line obit. (But, hey, it resulted in that really great George H. W. Bush presidency, so it was worth it, right?) When he later got a brain tumor, Lee at last found that elusive compassion thing and apologized on his death bed. Like Matthew Dowd, Atwater’s timing was impeccable. And like Dowd, his completely altruistic absence of a motivating self-interest was plain for anyone to see.

I don’t wish retribution on even those who have brought harm to the rest of us, and, anyway, surviving and then reacting to regressive policies is about as clear a lose-lose scenario as one could possibly manufacture. Better that we simply stand our ground, match decibel to decibel, stratagem to stratagem, and hope that the integrity and validity of our arguments are sufficient to win the policy debates of the day. (And if they’re not, well, then Marx was right: people get the government they deserve.)

There was a reason that Bush the Monster dressed up for Halloween as a so-called compassionate conservative in 2000. It’s the same reason that Bush Who Spawned the Monster tried to pitch himself as a kinder, gentler conservative in 1988. In both cases it had to be sold, because who would believe it otherwise? Between Reagan, Gingrich and the rest, Americans had seen the face of conservatism all too clearly. Those who live in fear happily lined-up right behind those who trafficked in it. Those who knew better rightly identified this regressive conservatism for the political carcinogen that it is. It was those in-between who could perhaps be persuaded by such an adeptly crafted marketing slogan.

At least Poppy Bush didn’t lie (about that). He was actually kinder and gentler. Than Reagan! That wasn’t exactly difficult to do. But his mutant progeny pulled the ultimate bait-and-switch. By 2001, the compassionate conservative of just one year earlier had become the catastrophic conservative with which we’re all now so well acquainted.

I will be haunted forever by Cindy Sheehan’s description of her family’s meeting with him to acknowledge the loss of her son, Casey. This was before Cindy Sheehan became Cindy Sheehan. Bush comes bounding into to the room, all frat-boy jovial and wise-cracking, asking “Okay, who’s the mom here?”, and glibly continuing to refer to Cindy throughout as “Mom”. The family is shocked and astonished by his callousness. He, on the other hand, is completely unable to make even the remotest connection to their grief, and this is even before they would come to lay that grief at his doorstep. They try to show him pictures of Casey and he refuses to look, quickly withdrawing from the room, and then more famously later refusing to meet with her at all.

This is the true face of the regressive conservatism that has invaded our polity today, and we should call it for what it is. Does this sound familiar?: “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others”. How about this?: “having little regard for the feeling and welfare of others”. These are defining terms for antisocial personality disorder, better know by its predecessor label for those so diseased: sociopath.

Note that “People with this disorder may exhibit criminal behavior”, and symptoms may include “not learning from experience, no sense of responsibility, inability to form meaningful relationships, inability to control impulses, lack of moral sense, emotional immaturity, lack of guilt and self‑centeredness”. No kidding. Really?

If the person in question is Cho Seung-Hui (or Saddam Hussein) we recognize them for the sociopaths they were, though we still happily arm them to the teeth and miraculously express genuine surprise at the fireworks that ensue.

But if the sociopath in question is George W. Bush – and who can deny that he precisely fits this definition, for no amount of Rove’s marketing magic has prevented evidence of these symptoms from ultimately bleeding through to our consciousness – if it is George W. Bush, then we dress him up with all the accouterments of presidential power and prestige and allow him to launch wars of massive destruction, willy-nilly.

Bush has no more compassion than does Nancy Reagan or Matthew Dowd. They, and their ilk, know only self-interest, and if they’re ever able to miraculously find their way to favoring stem-cell research or ending the Iraq war it is only because they are personally affected and can therefore begin to start imagining other people’s suffering. But still, only on that one issue. Otherwise they remain as oblivious – as sociopathic – as ever.

How did these people – the very worst amongst us – come to speak for America?

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net. “Dark of Heartness, Part I: A Journey Into the (Reputed) Soul of Conservatism” can be found here.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17566.htm VVVVV .

Saundra Hummer

April 21st, 2007, 11:03 AM

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AP IMPACT: Sounding alarm over pet drug
By
JEFF DONN, Associated Press Writer
3 minutes ago

The first hints of trouble came with vague warnings from the outer reaches of the bureaucracy.

She was "pushing too hard."

She was "alarmist."

But it was something else — a clumsy bid to call her off the scent of the dangerous veterinary drug she was tracking — that really galled her. Maybe that was her last possible moment to keep soundless and safe.

"When enough dogs die, this product will take care of itself," a colleague said.

Her reply tumbled out like a boulder that, once rolling, will no longer stop. Victoria Hampshire heard herself say: "I don't know what I'm doing here then."

What she was doing — trying to do, at least — was her job: She kept count of side effects from animal drugs for the Food and Drug Administration. She made tallies, analyzed numbers, and alerted supervisors when something seemed amiss.

And something seemed amiss that spring of 2004.

A big drug maker had crafted what seemed a star performer in Proheart 6, a three-year-old injected drug to prevent heartworm, the common parasite in dogs. Hampshire's numbers showed, though, that dogs were dying at alarming rates.

What happened next — and the price she paid for speaking up — have spurred a U.S. Senate inquiry and shined a spotlight on the complex topography of drug safety, where interests collide like tectonic plates and squeeze decisions from all sides.

On this landscape, the government's watchdogs come in disparate breeds too. Some whimper at approaching trouble; others bark gamely.

And some, like Hampshire, won't give an inch.___
While dogs were dying, her dad's heart was failing.

Gifford Hampshire was an FDA press officer in the 1960s, when the agency firmly held the public trust. There was no Vioxx scare, little fuss about taking money from industry.

His daughter Victoria — everyone called her Tory — now worked as a veterinarian at the same agency. She grew up on a Virginia horse farm, where her mother raised basset hounds, and learned to treat animals with compassion. She once crafted little sleeping bags from cloth to help mice recover from surgery.

Her dad was so proud of her. She'd worked hard on her government career. Then age 44, she was smart and upstanding in everyday life too, someone who points out undercharges and never speeds. But she wasn't timid. When she'd stare over reading glasses, it wasn't always fun to be her focal point.

"I could feel like I'd get an honest opinion from her, without brownnosing," says Dr. Judith Davis, her former supervisor at the National Institutes of Health. That meant Hampshire was not always "a real subtle person," says Dr. Linda Tollefson, who was deputy head of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine.

In summer 2004, Hampshire was analyzing Proheart 6 side effects for a fast-approaching showdown with drug maker Wyeth. Evenings, she'd visit her dad at the hospital. Then she'd work into the night.

She asked her dad if he wished she'd done anything differently in her life. Be less intense and have more fun, he suggested. That evening, she noticed an old Jaguar for sale on the roadside. She wrote a $1,000 check on the spot and drove it back to the hospital. She made a martini for her dad and pointed to the car parked outside.

It would be her last moment of comfort for a long, long time.___ Two days after his death, setting aside her grief, Hampshire went toe-to-toe with Wyeth.

She and Tollefson clearly remember the confrontation in a conference room at FDA headquarters. As adverse events coordinator, Hampshire was anxious about thousands of reported autoimmune, allergic, liver and other reactions. Almost 500 dogs had died after taking Proheart 6_ surpassing all competitors combined.

But Wyeth was known for strongly defending its drugs from claims of harm. It had rallied for its estrogen replacement and for its half of the fen-phen diet combo. Its veterinary subsidiary, Fort Dodge Animal Health, had sold 18 million doses of Proheart 6, worth tens of millions of dollars. It surely wouldn't give up without a fight.

Many vets also liked replacing pills with the twice-a-year shot, which put heartworm prevention back into their hands. One vet with ties to Wyeth lectured colleagues about seizing on Proheart 6 as a "hook" to pull in healthy pets for profitable regular exams.

As the FDA meeting unfolded, the company said Hampshire was inflating her side-effect numbers. Things turned nastier when Hampshire said Fort Dodge had previously expressed its own concerns over tumors. Fort Dodge said it hadn't.

"Either you're lying, or I'm imagining it," Hampshire erupted.

Dr. Stephen Sundlof, FDA's veterinary chief, grabbed her hand under the table, silencing her, Hampshire says. (He didn't answer messages seeking comment for this story.)

"Tory did not have experience dealing with animal pharmaceutical community people, who are not different than the human pharmaceutical people. They make a lot of money on this stuff. They will never ever admit there's something wrong," says Tollefson, who is now FDA's assistant commissioner for science.

On Sept. 4, 2004, in the face of Hampshire's damning data, Wyeth ordered all Proheart 6 back from vets — without conceding it was dangerous.

It was perhaps the largest recall ever of a pet drug.___ Two months later, Wyeth's chief executive officer went to FDA offices for a personal meeting with then-FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford.

The CEO, Robert Essner, wanted to work out a big problem: Victoria Hampshire.

His company had uncovered a Web site that gave Hampshire a cut of its drug sales. Though Proheart 6 was sold there, Wyeth focused on competing drugs.

"We felt Dr. Hampshire had a conflict of interest in regard to her evaluation of this product, and we wanted the agency to be aware of it," says Wyeth spokesman Doug Petkus.

FDA policy banned agency vets who moonlight from taking payments by pharmacies independent of their own practices. But so many staffers unknowingly violated the rule that it was rewritten the next year.

Hampshire acknowledges using the Web site, mainly to prescribe drugs for pets of old clients and friends, without needing to warehouse medicines at her Bethesda home. She says she meant to drop the site and hadn't bothered to disclose it as an outside activity that year — a bad decision, she now acknowledges. But an invoice shows her earnings were a mere $160 over 2 1/2 years.

Wyeth also accused her of inciting complaints from dog owners like Jean Brudd, of Thornton, Colo., who had contacted the FDA about the deaths of her two dogs.

In one e-mail to Brudd, Hampshire had written that "autoimmune disease is being reported in growing numbers" and laid out how Brudd's friends could submit side-effect reports.

Hampshire says it was her duty to check complaints and help people navigate the FDA.

Wyeth wanted Hampshire reassigned and threatened to sue her, says agency manager Tollefson, though Wyeth denies it.

In the end, Crawford "thought it best ... to protect Tory to get her out of it completely," explains Tollefson, who was briefed after the top-level meeting. She says she and Sundlof, the center head, agreed to transfer Hampshire.

Tollefson says they also wanted to keep her from being a "distraction" when the recall was reviewed, because they too were troubled by the drug's safety record.

Crawford didn't respond to interview requests for this story. In 2005, he abruptly quit the FDA and later admitted hiding stocks he owned in medical and food companies it regulated. He was fined about $90,000.

But former FDA lawyer Daniel Troy, also at the Essner-Crawford meeting, defends how it was handled. "At the same time the FDA is actually getting smashed and bashed by the news media on conflicts of interest, here there was an allegation of conflict of interest, and the FDA took it seriously," he says.___
One morning two months later, Hampshire was working on Proheart 6 data when she was called in to the veterinary director's office without explanation.

There, in a bright office decorated with a folksy painting of dairy cows, Tollefson waited with an FDA manager of market reviews. Hampshire figured they needed help as the FDA prepared to reconsider the Proheart 6 recall.

But Tollefson inhaled sharply, as if steeling herself. Then she wiped a tear from her eye. Hampshire had known Tollefson since working at the health institutes; they were friendly, but she'd never seen anything like this.

"Wyeth has pulled all the plugs at the level of commissioner," Tollefson told a stunned Hampshire. They were transferring her to the vaccines building to care for the rats and monkeys.

She pleaded for her job. They refused to give details but reassured her that this would all blow over. She was likened to a cop who'd shot somebody in the line of duty.

"I haven't shot anybody," she protested. "I've done my job."

She left the office in tears.

Her shame deepened when a committee of FDA advisers took up the Proheart 6 recall three weeks later in January 2005. She wasn't allowed to talk to them, and they voted just barely, 8-7, to keep the drug off the market for the time being.

The next month, an agency inspector from Internal Affairs asked to see Hampshire. He told her she was under investigation over Wyeth objections to her outside activities. He referred obscurely to a "sinister plot."

A prosecutor had already ruled out most criminal charges. But the inspector made her sign a statement saying she could be fired and, if she lied, charged with perjury. He reminded her about the jailing of domestic guru Martha Stewart over a financial conflict.___
Hampshire dragged herself through the next several months, feeling she'd been cast, weak and worthless, into a hole. A colleague worried she was headed for a breakdown.

She was sent to an interim FDA office job within the capability of "anybody with half a brain," she says. She didn't know where the investigation would lead. She didn't know who might be bent on ruining her career, but she looked for a better job somewhere. She saw — or imagined — warning signs and potential enemies everywhere. She hoped for protection from members of Congress she contacted.

She fretted at home. "To take this much stress home and not to sleep for weeks is not worth it," she says. Even her two children noticed changes in her.

Then, out of the blue, there was a flicker of light. In April 2005, she landed a better job in the FDA itself, at a separate office that evaluates devices for the human heart. "It sounded to me like she really hadn't done anything wrong," explains her new supervisor, Dave Buckles.

That July, more relief came: Hampshire was told she was cleared by agency investigators. "A valued employee" is how FDA spokeswoman Julie Zawisza now describes her, but she won't discuss the transfer and investigation.

Tollefson now believes the affair was mishandled. "Everybody saw that we reassigned Tory, no explanation was ever given — not a good one — so the message to me was very clear: If you do your job right and you're questioned, you lose your job."

Although Wyeth has been sued on behalf of dozens of people whose pets took Proheart 6, the company hopes to be vindicated too. It has kept selling the drug in Canada, Europe and elsewhere, and it has approached the FDA with more data for a possible U.S. comeback.

In June 2005, a Wyeth manager made a sales call at an Alabama veterinary practice, where he openly blamed Hampshire for the Proheart 6 recall, according to a confidential letter written by a vet there to the FDA. The Wyeth employee boasted that the company had her investigated by private detectives, and she had been "taken care of," according to the letter obtained by The Associated Press. He then predicted the drug's swift return to market.

That Wyeth manager, Glen Kimmorley, did not answer AP messages left at a home phone in his name. The Wyeth spokesman said Kimmorley "was expressing his own opinion and was not authorized to speak on behalf of the company."

However, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who has been investigating Hampshire's case, says Wyeth "tried to destroy a reputation."

He added: "Her own agency sold her down the river."___
Hampshire still feels edgy, less trusting, shamefully naive about corporate influence on government. Her husband, Bob Balaban — himself a senior scientist at the National Institutes of Health — says she's "not the same person." They hope for more answers from Senate investigators.

Others have reached their own conclusions. Last year, Hampshire was sitting in a big conference room in Denver at a veterinary meeting of the U.S. Public Health Service. The agency was announcing its veterinarian of the year. She grabbed her camera to photograph the winner.

And then, as if scripted by Hollywood, her own name was announced.

She heard a health officer say she had "raised the bar in every category of professional and personal integrity, passion, and commitment."

People rushed over to hug her. For the first time in years, she let down her guard.
Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. ******* .

Saundra Hummer

April 23rd, 2007, 03:37 PM

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///\\\///\\\
Voter Fraud
and
Fired U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton
by
Cho
Sat Apr 21, 2007
at
05:05:11 PM EST
in collaboration with eagle eye Avahome, Roxy and Standingup
--
originally posted Sat Apr 21, 2007 at 10:35:09 AM EST -- bumped
While political junkies and media everywhere have been fixated on "I don't Recall" Gonzales and his testimony last week, a late Friday (4-20-07) A.P. story, Court Rejects Blocking Ariz. Voter Law, reports interesting developments in fired U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton's Arizona District...and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Friday's ruling adds to ePluribus Media's earlier rumblings about the Politicization of the Civil Rights Division and the two engines of subverting its original agenda and mandate.

The ruling is one more in a growing body of circumstantial evidence that supports what 35-year veteran and once head of the Voting Rights Section Joe Rich alleges is a well-orchestrated partisan program to disenfranchise minority voters, who, as a general rule, tend to vote Democratic.

more below the fold.

Commentary
:: ::

And indeed, A.P. reporter Paul Davenport tells us that, with the recent ruling, Arizona can now proceed with refusing voting rights to anyone who doesn't produce government-issued picture ID or two pieces of other non-photo identification as specified by the new law -- the very legislation recently struck down in Georgia. According to Davenport:
Critics said that the law would disenfranchise voters, particularly minorities and the elderly, and that requiring voters to acquire and produce identification would be burdensome in time, money and effort.
A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based appeals court said the law doesn't appear at first blush to severely burden the right to vote, violate a federal law on voter registration, place a disproportionate burden on naturalized citizens or require what would be an unconstitutional poll tax.[/

But how do those voter ID laws actually play out in reality? Here's what happened to Roxy's elderly mother in the 2004 presidential election:
My mother ... bless her heart ... turns 98 years young today. To the best of my knowledge she has never missed voting in an election. I grew up with the mantra -- "if you don't vote, don't bitch." She has lived in the same district for the last 82 years, and in the 2004 election she ran afoul of the Montana's new voter ID law.
Mom has never had a driver's license -- or any state issued photo ID -- and when she got to the polls they asked her for ID. She didn't have ID, but determined to vote, she made the person that drove her to the polls take her home to get a piece of mail. (The elections folks would accept her social security card, but would not accept her medical insurance ID or her baptismal certificate). There are only 753 (maybe less now) people in the little town where she lives. The poll workers all knew her, her name was on the voting register ... yet, the "two men in suits" insisted she provide ID to vote.
Additionally, in Rich's Los Angeles Times opinion editorial, Bush's long history of tilting Justice, he writes that the Bush Administration's Department of Justice:
has notably shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights. From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.
It has been strongly suggested that two of the U.S. Attorneys who were fired (Mckay and Inglesias), were so in part because they refused to use their office to further the Bush/Rove/Gonzales policy of using the faux issue of voter fraud to politicize Justice investigations prior to national elections -- and we are not talking about the long lines, the too few machines, the lock down on voter recounts because of terrorist threats in Ohio. Instead, we are talking about a systematic, planned process of shutting out the poor and middleclass.
One place to start looking seems to be who in the Civil Rights Division are pushing for the Voter ID Laws...in Georgia, Alabama, Indiana, Missouri. We should become familar with names such as Robert Popper, the new Special Counsel in the Voting Section, acting/interim U.S. Attorney Brad Schlozman, and Hans von Spakovsky, of whom Digby says

He was hired by the Bush Justice Department's civil right's division shortly after his stint down in Florida during the recount. Anyway, Von Spakovsky is not just another Atlanta lawyer. He had for years been involved with a GOP front group called the "Voter Integrity Project" (VIP) which was run by none other than Helen Blackwell, wife of notorious conservative operative Morton Blackwell. (Many of you will remember him as the guy who handed out the "purple heart" bandages at the 2004 GOP convention but he's actually much better known for years of running the dirty tricks school "The Leadership Institute" and is even credited with coining the name "Moral Majority." Let's just say he's been a playah in GOP circles for a long time --- and the VIP is one of his projects.)

Wanderindiana provided a link to Real Nightmare.org for a map of the states where these Voter ID laws are in effect or winding their way through the courts.

Many in the blogs saw a pattern of the fired U.S. Attorneys being predominantly in the western border states. This pattern led many to speculate that enforcement of immigration or perhaps control of the 8th and 9th Circuit of Appeals might be contributing reasons for the firings.

Perhaps the refusal to participate in faux Voter Fraud litigation should be added to the list.

Go on-site to access the links in this article and to gain access to more topical issues of the day:

http://buzzflash.com

http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2007/4/21/10359/8263 ///\\\///\\\ .

Saundra Hummer

April 23rd, 2007, 06:02 PM

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xxxxxxxxxLimbaugh:
Cho was a liberal
April 23, 2007
On the April 19 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show , the famous conservative talk radio host opined about the political views of Seung-hui Cho, the Virginia tech massacre madman.

"If this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? " Limbaugh asked. "This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich and all this other -- this guy's a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it's a liberal that committed this act. Now, the drive-bys will read on a website that I'm attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them. That's exactly what they do every day, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation; I'm just pointing it out. "

Limbaugh went on to say that "back in the early '90s, when there was any kind of an incident, crime or what-have-you that attracted national attention, in the early days of this program, the drive-by media went out and they tried to connect the perpetrator to this program. They did everything they could. In fact, it went so far as Bill Clinton blaming me for influencing Timothy McVeigh to blow up the bureau building . These are the people sponsoring lies and distortion for the purposes of dividing this country and creating hatred. These are the people that invented this kind of tactic, if you will ."

The reference to Clinton harkens back to CONTROVERSIAL COMMENTS the former president made after the Oklahoma City bombing in which he slammed "loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable."

Clinton did not mention Limbaugh's name. In fact, he didn't even say "talk radio," but many folks inferred that's who he was talking about.

Limbaugh, conversely, spoke more directly. Cho "had to be a liberal," he said just days after the worst school shooting in U.S. history.
What do you think?-- jpt
April 23, 2007
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What do you expect comming from one of Dick Cheneys thugs? Rush is a degenerate, sick and depraved man. IF anyone deserves a firing its HIM! But we all know thats not about to happen. IS it? To many right wing repubicans listen to him. Where go you think he gets his broadcasting money? This man truly needs to seek out some sort of mental help. Sad, just plain sad.

Posted by: WebOne | Apr 23, 2007 7:21:02 PM

This low life bottom feeder is a disgrace, not only to everyone in this country, but to the people who give him the means to spew such stupidity. Shut this ideot down. People like this should not be allowed to use the public waves for this nonsense crap. Shame on us all!.Posted by: Mike Al Khalili | Apr 23, 2007 7:20:50 PM
When is this going to stop?! This is yet one more example of these foaming at the mouth blowhards who proffer nothing but sheer speculation, inuendo and hate. We as a nation need to take a long hard look at what we're becoming and what we're allowing to happen to civil discourse in this country. It's alarming and very sad..
Posted by: S Cox | Apr 23, 2007 7:19:51 PM

Rush, hush.
.Posted by: Alessandro Machi | Apr 23, 2007 7:18:05 PM

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, no one ever went broke by exploiting the greed, fear, and paranoia of the American public, and Mr. Limbaugh is an expert at that.

And to quote Diane Chambers, "The man is pond scum.".Posted by: Mustang Bobby | Apr 23, 2007 7:16:49 PM

If the current crop of neo-cons and right wing kooks such as Rush establish the norm, count me as a liberal anytime. Anything but what Rush is..Posted by: T Nelson | Apr 23, 2007 7:14:46 PM

It's unbelievable that you all are falling for ABC's purposely targeting Limbaugh for a very benign comment. The guy probably was a liberal, most college kids are until they get into the real world and have to pay taxes, get a job, etc. Nothing to be ashamed about by being called a liberal from a conservative. Do we now have to get outraged when a liberal calls someone a conservative? Come on ABC there are more important stories out there than this, unless Rush is the MSM's next target to be Imused. Pathetic..
Posted by: Unbelievable | Apr 23, 2007 7:12:03 PM

The question was 'What was his ideology?'.
Is it really neccessary to pick between
only 2 ideologies?
Apart from that, the 'despiccable' comment
was correct.

Cho was obviously delusional and messianic, IMHO.
Does that make Charles Manson a liberal too?
O.K. then the "Zodiac" killer must be a conservative.... ROTFL.
Posted by: Stewbaby | Apr 23, 2007 7:10:12 PM

Whutsa madda, Rush? Ratings taking a slide? Well then, it's time to capitalize on a tragedy. Maybe Cho was also a non-Caucasian. You could have some fun with that, huh Rush? .
Posted by: Dave | Apr 23, 2007 7:07:53 PM

we need to pray for rush and maybe the lord will show him the evils of his ways and rush is not right.
Posted by: bobby peterson | Apr 23, 2007 7:06:33 PM

I think Rush should go the way of Imus. What a jerk to say something like that at this time. How horrible for this country in deepest mourning to hear this garbage broadcast on the air waves. Who cares what Cho was politically? He was a sick man who did what he did because he was not right in the head. Me thinks Rush is not right in the head either. Rush must be fearing the heat from the anti-gun lobby to say such a creepy thing so soon after the shootings..
Posted by: Beth Boyle | Apr 23, 2007 7:05:04 PM

Rush Limbaugh cannot be taken seriously about anything. He himself is so biased and his opinions are so illogical that he has no credibility. It's hard to believe that he has such a large audience. I can't imagine who finds him entertaining or insightful. He is a symptom of America in decline..
Posted by: steve | Apr 23, 2007 7:04:49 PM

The Lt. Gov. of Virginia said it best on Sunday, when he said:
"I don't have a lot of time for folks on either side...who want to take advantage of a situation like this to ride their political hobbyhorse.".
Posted by: Anton | Apr 23, 2007 7:03:37 PM

I'm sure the family and friends of those killed are delighted to hear this news from Mr. Limbaugh. How rewarding it must be for those connected to this tradgey to know this all boils down to a loud mouth angling for a political statement. How thoughtless can anyone be. In a world of 24/7 everthing, to get people to listen Limbaugh just gets louder, cruder and dumber to get more attention..
Posted by: Jerry Grogan | Apr 23, 2007 7:03:05 PM

Rush Limbaugh's assumption that Cho was a liberal is just that: an assumption. Speaking of Limbaugh, I believe he is heavily on painkillers and that affects his views and judgments because of side effects. He just cant help it, its chemical reactions in his brain.
Posted by: Tony | Apr 23, 2007 7:02:38 PM

Limbaugh is Correct...Liberals believe that they are losers in the economic Game, and that they are Victims. They always feel the need to protect the "Underdogs", and therefore they lash out at the "oppressors." That's exactly what this nut Cho did...he was lashing out because he knew he was loser in the game of life, and he lashed out at what his delusional mind thought were his oppressors. Just like Liberals. Cho was a Liberal. http://abcnews.go.com/?CMP=EMC-1396xxxxxxx

Saundra Hummer

April 23rd, 2007, 08:39 PM

.
~~~~~~~
". . .government is instituted for the protection, safety, and happiness of the people, and not for profit, honour, or private interest of any man, family, or class of men. . .the origin of all power is in the people, and they have an incontestable right to check the creatures of their own creation, vested with certain powers to guard the life, liberty and property of the community. . ."

Mercy Otis warren 1728-1814
Poet, Historian, Patriot
Advocate of the Bill of Rights
~~~
"The dissenter is every human being at those times of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself."

Archibald Macleish (1892-1982)
Poet - Playwright - Librarian of Congress,
&
Assistant Secretary of State under
Franklin Roosevelt
Source: 4 December 1937
~~~
"If for decency, progress, order and liberty in the community and nation we cannot rely upon the character, sentiments, allegiances, and moral habits of the people, upon what, in heaven's name, can we rely?"

Charles Beard
1874-1948
~~~~~
.

Saundra Hummer

April 23rd, 2007, 08:52 PM

....
Who Grieves For Them?
By Mary Pitt
04/23/07 "ICH" -- --- - While spending my usual Sunday morning, watching the news shows on television, I founds myself in total empathy with the parents of the slain college students at Virgina Tech. Having lost a child of my own a year ago, I understand intimately the pain which they now must bear. I thought of how nice it is that some find solace in speaking to the nation which mourns with them about their lost sons and daughters via the television interviewers. Also, according to the news, grief counselors are being sent in to help the students and families to deal with this intense grief.

Then, as it is wont to do, the news moved on to the war in Iraq and so did my thoughts. Without taking a thing from the sympathy for the Blacksburg parents, I realized that these young people who are dying in Iraq are contemporaries of the college kids. Who grieves for them? While we have lost a hundred children in that conflagration for every student who fell prey to the mad gunner, the nation mourns only those who were presumably safe from harm while those who fell in service to our country are hidden from our sight and rarely mentioned by name unless they qualify as "heroes". They fly home under cover of night and then are treated as baggage on commercial flights until they are taken to their home town. Their family, friends, and neighbors turn out for their funeral with none taking notice except, perhaps, Rev. Fred Phelps and his little band of ghouls. The funeral over, the families go home to deal with their own desolation as they reflect on the life that was lost and the hopes and dreams that will never come to fruition. They will forever wonder why.

But these loving families are forbidden from learning the specifics of the untimely death which their child suffered. Only rarely are any details given and then only after a long, painful investigation by people who are ill-eqipped for the task. Cindy Sheehan went to Washington to ask why. She was told, in essence, "Your son is dead. Accept it and move on!" Government officials and their partisans regard her as a mentally ill person and a pariah. The Tillmans have been more fortunate in that they did uncover the fact that their son feel to "friendly fire" which was covered up in order to provide the warmongers with a famous "hero". When all is said and done, these two families may be more responsible for bringing this war to an end than will any other factor.

As the youngest child in a large family, I saw five of my seven older brothers march off to war against "Hitler and Tojo" in the company of many others from our community. The pain of missing family members was a common one as almost every home wore the placard of stars in a window, denoting the home of a member of the armed services, blue for a stateside deployment, silver for one serving overseas, and gold for one who had fallen. I recall all too well the sense of emptiness on departure and the tension that pervaded the home when a "missing in action" notice was received. The sight of a Western Union delivery boy brought the neighbors to learn which son had disappeared and all prayed that he had been captured rather than perishing. A military car at the curb brought neighbors with food and sympathy and the whole community joined in the mourning. There was an article in the local newspaper with a photograph and a letter of condolence from the President.

During that war, the soldiers who did not volunteer were drafted and the burden was borne by all. Now, with the "all-volunteer army", the fear and grief fall upon young wives and small children in most cases as the fighting is done by a few who are having their service extended until it must seem to them that the only way home is "in a box". When they are killed, they are little more than numbers on a tote board and little grief is known outside their intimate circle. Their survivors will not have the comfort that is brought about by televised funeral services, on-camera interveiws, and the knowledge that the whole nation is sharing their grief.

It simply does not seen fair, during this Sunday morning contemplation, that while the sky-scrapers are going up in New York City as a memorial to the fallen in the World Trade Center and we mourn the loss of the lives and potential of the students at Virginia Tech, several more young men and women will lay down their lives in Iraq in what seems as senseless an endeavor as whatever the troubled youth was trying to prove in Blacksburg. If the citizens of the United States cannot stop our government from hiding them away like so many little dirty secrets, we should at least be all owed to mourn them.

Mary Pitt lives in a house by the side of the road in a little rural village in Kansas where she can observe the world both as it is and as she would like it to be. Questions and comments will reach her at mpitt@cox.net
Go on-site to view this article, the stats for the war dead on both sides and the monitary costs. They're staggering. Just click on the following URL:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17581.htm
...........

papsrus

April 24th, 2007, 09:33 AM

Re: Limbaugh: Cho was a liberal

Limbaugh says:
"If this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? " Limbaugh asked. "This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich and all this other -- this guy's a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it's a liberal that committed this act. Now, the drive-bys will read on a website that I'm attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them. That's exactly what they do every day, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation; I'm just pointing it out. "

This guy is just flat out dangerous. Not to mention crude, a liar, a hypocrite and a hate-monger. He's already jumping on this tragedy to score political points with the pinheads who mainline his junk every day? Disgusting.

The term "liberal" has practically lost all meaning, it has been demonized so much by people like Flush. But to expose the idiocy of his remarks (aside from the fact that he has no idea what the political leanings of Cho were, and aside from the likelihood that whatever his political leanings, they had nothing to do with either rationality or his rampage), lets apply Flush's logic to the Oklahoma bombing. You would have to conclude, based on Flush's logic, that because Timothy McViegh was a decorated veteran from a conservative upbringing, that must mean conservatives and the military are evil. It's juvenile.

In addition, does Flush think there are no wealthy people who are progressive? If there are, his logic further unravels. He can't even think straight, let alone put forth any kind of reasoned idea. It's all just school yard smack.

papsrus

April 24th, 2007, 11:45 AM

Joan Walsh at Salon weighs in:

Tuesday April 24, 2007 09:06 EST
Wait, how did I miss Rush Limbaugh?

I've been trying to track the worst explanations for the Virginia Tech massacre, and I don't know how I missed this one. ABC News' Jake Tapper reports that on April 19, days before Newt Gingrich blamed liberalism, Limbaugh went one better, insisting that shooter Cho Seung-hui himself "was a liberal."

How did Limbaugh reach that conclusion about the mentally ill Cho, raised a devout Christian in a red state, who had no apparent political affiliations? "This guy had to be a liberal," the pain-med aficionado told his listeners. "You start railing against the rich and all this other -- this guy's a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it's a liberal that committed this act. Now, the drive-bys will read on a website that I'm attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them. That's exactly what they do every day, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation; I'm just pointing it out."

As I wrote Monday, I'm not aware of any major liberal or Democratic political leader or pundit who has blamed conservatism for Cho, or claimed he was a Republican. And if one did, he or she would be consigned to the outer fringes of Ward Churchill-land. But hate-mongers like Limbaugh have bullied political discourse so far to the right that such claims go unchallenged and even sometimes unreported. Thanks to Tapper for picking up on that one.
-- Joan Walsh

Saundra Hummer

April 25th, 2007, 12:14 PM

.. . . . . . . . .Office of Special Counsel's War On Whistleblowers
OSC is investigating Karl Rove's political machine. But until recently OSC head Scott Bloch's policy was to ignore whistleblowers' tips on murder, espionage, and terrorism, while vigorously rooting out any signs of the "homosexual agenda."
Daniel Schulman
April 24 , 2007

it looked as if leroy smith was going to get some recognition after all. A safety manager at a federal prison in California, he had challenged his bosses, risked his job, and endured threats of retaliation to expose hazardous conditions in a prison computer recycling program where inmates were smashing monitors with hammers, unleashing clouds of toxic metals. Now the federal government was flying him to Washington, D.C., as a whistleblowing hero. The Office of Special Counsel (osc), the federal agency charged with protecting government employees who expose waste, fraud, and abuse, had scheduled a catered event honoring Smith as "Public Servant of the Year." The office's director, Scott Bloch, had prepared a flowery speech that was later posted on the agency's website, referencing Sophocles and The Shawshank Redemption: "In the end, Morgan Freeman's character truly becomes what his name implies—a Free man," it read. "One person can root out corruption and abuse of power. Once he understands this, he is redeemed and can break out of the trap of fear, and break free into the light of integrity and justice. That is the effect of seeing a brave whistleblower stand up and win; it inspires the rest of us."

Only Bloch never delivered that speech. Just minutes before the September 7 ceremony was to begin, Smith received word that the event was off because a relative of an osc staffer had died. It seemed "kind of fishy" to Smith; indeed, an osc source told me the excuse was so transparent as to be "ludicrous." The real problem, the source said, was that Bloch—a Bush appointee who, employees say, shares his boss' antipathy for dissent—had learned that Smith was planning to speak at a press conference sponsored by the whistleblower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (peer), a persistent critic of the osc. The peer event went forward as planned, and at it Smith told the press that he felt the osc "bears some examination." True, he had been vindicated, but many of his colleagues who'd made similar disclosures had been ignored, and the prison conditions had not changed. "I cannot help but feel that my experience is a beacon of false hope for public servants who are trying to correct wrongdoing," he said.

Then again, given the current climate for whistleblowers, false hope might be all the hope there is. A series of court rulings, legal changes, and new security and secrecy policies have made it easier than at any time since the Nixon era to punish whistleblowers; the climate has deteriorated in recent years with the Bush administration's emphasis on plugging leaks and locking down government information. Bloch's tenure—he is the first director of the whistleblower office to face a whistleblower complaint of his own—has only added insult to injury.

It's come to the point where some advocates now counsel federal employees against coming forward, period. "When people call me and ask about blowing the whistle, I always tell them, 'Don't do it, because your life will be destroyed,'" says William Weaver, a professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and a senior adviser to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. "You'll lose your career; you're probably going to lose your family if you have one; you're probably going to lose all your friends because they're associated through work; you'll wind up squandering your life savings on attorneys; and you'll come out the other end of this process working at McDonald's."

Weaver says that most of the people who contact him are so determined, they go ahead with their disclosures anyway. "I see what the result is," he sighs. "It's destruction from one end of their lives to the other."

the term "whistleblower" refers to the warning English bobbies used to sound when they saw a crime in progress, an alarm to other officers as well as bystanders. The first U.S. law protecting whistleblowers, the 1912 Lloyd-La Follette Act, came after the Taft administration tried to forbid federal employees from talking directly to Congress. But whistleblowers continued to encounter harassment and retaliation; in 1969, Air Force auditor Ernie Fitzgerald, who had told Congress about massive cost overruns in the C-5 cargo plane program, found himself fired at the behest of President Nixon. (On the Watergate tapes, Nixon can be heard saying, "Get rid of that son of a bitch!") Later, Nixon's plumbers went after Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, at one point breaking into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in an effort to discredit and humiliate him. In response to these and other cases—and to the role that Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat, had played in exposing Watergate—Congress passed a wave of anti-retaliation measures, including the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, which established the Office of Special Counsel, and the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act. But today, many of these safeguards are gone or at serious risk. In 2005, the Washington-based Project on Government Oversight reported that the Whistleblower Protection Act has "suffered from a series of crippling judicial rulings [that] have rendered the Act useless, producing a dismal record of failure for whistleblowers and making the law a black hole." Says Thomas Devine, longtime legal director of the Government Accountability Project and one of the law's key advocates: "My baby turned out to be Frankenstein."

Long gone are the days of successful whistleblowers such as Ernie Fitzgerald—who ended up winning his job back and worked at the Pentagon until his retirement last year. "That's the wrong model for today's environment," a senior Pentagon official told me. "The model for today's environment is Deep Throat. You need to be buried deep in the system, completely anonymous, in order to have effective protection." These days, he added, whistleblowers who go public can expect "15 minutes of fame and 40 years of misery."

In theory, the Office of Special Counsel is supposed to prevent those problems—both by taking whistleblower tips and referring them for investigation, and by helping whistleblowers facing retaliation. In practice, advocates as well as some of the agency's staffers say, the osc has become yet another black hole into which disclosures and complaints disappear.

Bloch, 48, who's tall and heavyset and wears a close-cropped goatee, is a former law professor and attorney from Lawrence, Kansas. A devout Catholic and one-time fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute, he was tapped early in President Bush's first term as the deputy director of the Justice Department's Task Force for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives; then, in June 2003, the president nominated him to run the osc.

It was a culture clash from the start. Having chosen as his deputy a Catholic lawyer who had publicly taken a position against the "homosexual agenda," and hired young lawyers from Ave Maria Law School, the conservative Catholic school founded by Domino's Pizza billionaire Tom Monaghan, Bloch questioned whether the osc should defend federal workers discriminated against for their sexual orientation. When the story got out and dozens of members of Congress signed letters of protest, Bloch blamed whistleblowers: "It's unfortunate that we have a leaker or leakers in our office who went to the press rather than coming to me," he told the Federal Times. Eventually, an embarrassed White House delivered a subtle rebuke to Bloch in the form of a statement reaffirming a long-standing federal prohibition against sexual-orientation discrimination, and noting that the president "expects federal agencies to enforce this policy."

Bloch's high-profile troubles had only begun. In February 2005, his office was accused of improperly dismissing hundreds of whistleblower cases that had been pending when Bloch took over. Among them was the complaint of Adam Finkel, a senior official at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration who, in October 2003, had disclosed to the osc that the government had refused to offer blood testing for federal workplace inspectors who were likely to have been exposed to the toxic substance beryllium while inspecting plants that use the metal. (When osha finally did test the inspectors, in 2004, 3.7 percent in fact came up positive for exposure to beryllium, which can cause fatal lung disease.) "It's bad enough that this all happened at osha, where they have a worker-protection mission," says Finkel, who is now a visiting professor at Princeton University, "but the federal employee who goes to osc looking for some kind of intelligent and grown-up analysis of these health issues, at least in my case, is getting nothing of the kind. I got nothing but skepticism and amateur science.... I was treated like, 'You're a Harvard Ph.D. but you're not a medical doctor, are you?'"

Bloch says he did not dismiss any cases improperly, but was simply trying to reduce the osc's perennial backlog. Before his tenure, he points out, some whistleblowers died while waiting for a response to their complaints. "If outside advocacy groups want to throw rocks at me, that's fine. We can take criticism. But it's really unfair to federal workers, and it's really unfair to the career staff here who have been working their tails off to bring justice in a more timely fashion."

It's those same career staffers, though, who have become Bloch's harshest critics. Weeks before the controversy over the dismissed cases erupted, Bloch announced, with no warning, that he was reassigning 12 staffers—about 10 percent of the total osc workforce, and the majority of them his perceived critics—to field offices across the country. They had 10 days to accept, or else they'd be fired. (Ten ultimately resigned.) Three months later, four Washington-based advocacy groups and an anonymous group of current and former osc employees—some affected by the transfers, some not—filed a complaint against Bloch with his own office. The transfers, says the employees' lawyer, Debra Katz, were retaliation against Bloch's critics, those perceived to be loyal to his predecessor, and those seen to have a "homosexual agenda."

Members of Congress also considered Bloch's reorganization suspicious. During a Senate oversight hearing in May 2005, Senator Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) said he was "alarmed" by the restructuring—especially given that it came on the heels of a $140,000 outside evaluation of the office that had not recommended anything of the kind.

So that Bloch wouldn't have to investigate himself, the complaint against him was ultimately referred to the inspector general in the federal Office of Personnel Management. The investigation has been under way for more than a year, and there have recently been reports in the conservative press—which has cast Bloch as a martyr to liberal and gay activism—that the White House may be trying to cut him loose. "Bloch has been ostracized by the White House and was privately sent word that he should resign," the Weekly Standard reported in October. Bloch would neither confirm nor deny the report, saying only, "I look forward to being exonerated. There simply is no truth to the allegations, and I stand by that."

whatever bloch's fate, his critics say the osc controversy is symptomatic of a larger problem. "The Bush administration has absolutely not endorsed the concept of whistleblowing—they see it as disloyalty," one senior osc official told me. Bloch's tenure, echoes Sibel Edmonds, a former fbi translator and the founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, is simply "a very good example that shows that the system is broken." Helped by post-9/11 security fears, the Bush administration has worked to lock down information in all areas of government. "Secrecy has become a central axis of executive branch policy," William Weaver, the Texas professor, testified before Congress this winter.

The administration has fought disclosures by invoking provisions such as the State Secrets Privilege and "sovereign immunity"—the English common-law notion that the king can do no wrong. It has worked behind the scenes on Capitol Hill to undermine whistleblower legislation, and, in the case of the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, has launched a criminal probe to determine the source of leaks to the press. The president himself told reporters that leaking the nsa program had been "a shameful act" and said "the fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy." More documents than ever before are being shielded from public view—the number of classifications nearly quadrupled from 1995 to 2005, from 3.6 million to 14.2 million. The rampant classifications put whistleblowers at risk of criminal prosecution: Disclosing classified national security information to someone not cleared to receive it is a felony. In fact, in the administration's view, even members of Congress who sit on the intelligence committees and have top security clearances don't have the right to know some of the government's business. After nsa whistleblower Russ Tice made clear his intention to report the agency's warrantless surveillance program, carried out under a highly classified Special Access Program (sap), the nsa warned him that "neither the staff nor the members of the [Senate and House intelligence committees] are cleared to receive the information covered by the saps."

The courts have also not been kind to whistleblowers. Last May, in what whistleblower lawyer Steve Kohn calls "the single biggest setback for whistleblowers in the courts in the past 25 years," newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito cast the tiebreaking vote in Garcetti v. Ceballos, a case involving a prosecutor in the Los Angeles district attorney's office who claimed whistleblower retaliation. Under the ruling, Kohn says, public employees—all 22 million of them—have no First Amendment rights when they are acting in an official capacity, and in many cases are not protected against retaliation. "What that means is for employees who are making these disclosures on the job or in any official capacity, unless they have some statutory protection, they're shit out of luck," says Jeff Ruch, executive director of peer, the whistleblower advocacy group. Kohn estimates that "no less than 90 percent of all whistleblowers will lose their cases on the basis of that decision." Members of Congress—both Democrats and Republicans—scrambled to pass broader protections but failed in the face of opposition from the White House.

There are signs that Congress might be poised to reclaim some of its authority. On a bleak and snowy morning in late winter, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform—in whose name chair Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) had just restored the word "oversight," stricken by his Republican predecessor—held hearings on government secrecy, with Edmonds and Tice watching from the gallery. That day, Waxman introduced whistleblower-protection legislation that has since passed in the House of Representatives; the White House has threatened a veto. Later this year, Congress will also take up the fate of Bloch's osc, which is up for reauthorization. (Proposals include moving the agency into Congress' Government Accountability Office, removing it from the White House's purview.)

For Bloch's critics, change can't come soon enough. "The public has every reason to be concerned," says the osc official. Bloch, he adds, "has contempt for whistleblowers."
Case Studies
Hung Out to Dry
Joseph Darby
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Fellow soldiers at Abu Ghraib
ALLEGATION: Torture
REWARD: Death threats
UPSHOT: Still fears for his life
For weeks after turning over graphic pictures depicting the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to military investigators, Army Specialist Joseph Darby slept with a cocked pistol under his pillow, fearing what might happen if his fellow soldiers caught wind of what he'd done. His name surfaced in Seymour Hersh's April 30, 2004, New Yorker exposé on Abu Ghraib but troops in Iraq didn't notice. A week later, as Darby sat in the mess hall watching a congressional hearing about Abu Ghraib, he heard Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld publicly thank "Specialist Joseph Darby, who alerted the appropriate authorities that abuses were occurring." Darby was quickly dispatched back to the United States; upon his arrival, the Army warned him not to return to his hometown of Cumberland, Maryland, where many regarded him as a traitor. He and his wife now live in an undisclosed location. In a rare interview with 60 Minutes in December, Darby said he still fears for his safety. "I worry about the one guy who wants to get even with me," he said.

Rumsfeld "nailed [Darby] to the cross," a senior Pentagon official told me. "How can you go home and get a job selling cars in Maryland when you've just been revealed to be the guy who narc'd on all your people from Maryland who were from the same unit?" He added, "That case was completely blown. That guy's life has been ruined."
Code Talker
Russ Tice
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Defense Intelligence Agency
ALLEGATION: Agency infiltrated by spies
REWARD: Fired
UPSHOT: Went on to expose nsa domestic spyingA veteran intelligence official involved with the nation's most secretive special-access (or "black") programs, Russ Tice was subjected to emergency psychological testing, trailed by the fbi, stripped of his security clearance, and then exiled to the National Security Agency motor pool to gas up cars and chauffeur government officials—all after he reported his suspicion that a colleague at the Defense Intelligence Agency might be spying for China. It hardly seemed like a coincidence when, days after his May 2005 appearance at a press conference on Capitol Hill to advocate for stronger whistleblower protections, the nsa fired him.

Seven months later, Tice made headlines as a source for the New York Times' exposé on warrantless eavesdropping by the nsa. The Bush administration quickly launched a grand jury investigation—into the leaks, not the eavesdropping—and Tice was served with a subpoena, a move he says was meant to intimidate fellow whistleblowers. Tice insists that he didn't provide the paper with any classified material, and says he has much more information about "probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts" at the nsa and the dia. But thus far he has been prevented from sharing this information with Congress because, the nsa maintains, no one on Capitol Hill has the security clearance to hear what he has to say
Red Team Alert
Bogdan Dzakovic
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Federal Aviation Administration
ALLEGATION: Lousy airport security (pre-9/11)
REWARD: Demotion
UPSHOT: Still sidelined
Wanna know how to get a bomb onto a plane? A submachine gun? Ask Bogdan Dzakovic, who for seven years led an faa "red team" that probed airport vulnerabilities and managed to breach security 90 percent of the time. Instead of taking action, the faa attempted to whitewash Dzakovic's findings. "We were ordered not to write up our findings in some cases and not to retest airports where we found particularly egregious vulnerabilities to see if the problems had been fixed," he later told the 9/11 Commission. "Finally, the agency started providing advance notification of when we would be conducting our 'undercover' tests