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[Saundra Hummer]

CONFUSION
Is It A Ploy?

I caught a bit of Condi's spin on television yesterday and was amazed at how contradictory it was, was she confused or was she with her way of sounding so informed and competent saying what she was, using it as a way to confuse and divert our thoughts away from what we percieve to be reality? The reality that - we do torture - that we do fly or have others fly in suspected combatants to countries to be interviewed, and then tortured. ???

It's amazing to me how this administration thinks, and how they believe we are on board with their every policy. We aren't and all the spin won't make it happen. Some have been fooled for quite a while, and perhaps it is because many out there were wanting to believe the best, not wanting to admit there are decievers and carpet baggers in high office, however now, eyes have been opened due to too much having been done, too much has seeped out for them to continue without trying to exert damage control. We now are seeing just what has been going on, and if it is this much that is visable, what on earth are they still hiding? I'd still like to know the minutes of the meetings behind closed doors of the Vice Presidents office with Energy Conglomerate Heads, their CEO's.

After hurting workers in this country for so long, now Bush is out there working the Retirement benefits angle, clutching at straws, will we let it work?

Anyway, off topic, but check out this article and then remember what it is Condi is trying to convince us of. Sandi

America can't take it anymore

The Bush administration has embraced torture as a key part of the "war on terror." Finally, members of Congress, the military and the CIA are speaking out against the abuse.
By Mark Follman
Dec. 5, 2005 "Salon"

-- -- Five days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney instructed the nation that the U.S. government would begin working "the dark side" to defeat its enemies in a new global war. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion," Cheney declared on NBC's "Meet the Press." He added, "It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal."

More than four years later, the Bush administration has delivered on Cheney's vow to wage war in the shadows, free from oversight and accountability. Policies for seizing and interrogating suspects -- conceived and commanded at the highest levels of the White House -- have permitted numerous acts of torture and even murder at the hands of American soldiers and interrogators.

The grim acts unleashed by those policies are no secret today. Cruel and wanton abuses have been exposed at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and other lesser known U.S. military bases and prisons around the world. In November, the Washington Post uncovered a global network of covert CIA prisons known as "black sites," top-secret interrogation facilities reportedly operating in far-flung locations from Eastern Europe to Thailand. Still, many dark details remain unknown.

"There is no instance in American history where we've been exposed as being so deeply involved in actually conducting torture on a routine and regular basis," says Thomas Powers, an expert on national security and the author of two books on the CIA.

In recent months, a fierce backlash against the abuses has not only been rising in Washington, but well beyond. Many Americans on the front lines of national security are demoralized and angered by the fact that only a few foot soldiers have been punished -- such as Pvt. Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib infamy -- while commanders in the field and policymakers have remained untouched. A growing number of military and CIA personnel, according to officers from both realms, admit that the Bush policies, hatched in the fearful weeks and months after 9/11, have deeply corrupted military and intelligence operations over four years of war.


In October, the Senate passed the McCain amendment with overwhelming bipartisan support. It would impose uniform standards for interrogation on both the military and CIA, adhering to the Geneva Conventions' ban on torture and other "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners. As the amendment makes its way to the House, the Bush administration is fighting it every step of the way. Cheney is wielding his influence on both Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon, seeking to water down language in the McCain amendment and exempt the CIA from new guidelines.

Following the revelation of the black sites, President Bush stated: "We do not do torture." Much evidence proves otherwise, but what else could the president of the United States say? Torturing prisoners is both illegal and morally reprehensible. Committed by Americans, it has undermined the mission to bring democratic reform to Afghanistan, Iraq and the greater Middle East. It has done profound damage to America's image at home and worldwide. And most intelligence experts, including CIA director Porter Goss, agree that when it comes to gathering useful information, torture simply doesn't work.

By now, the public may be desensitized to all the personal testimonials of torture brought to light in the media. In some cases, skepticism is warranted: Captured al-Qaida training manuals revealed instructions for prisoners to lie about being tortured to undermine the enemy. Military investigators have said they've found instances of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay making false allegations.

But evidence of widespread use of torture by the United States under the Bush administration is indisputable, including the policy of rendition, or the handing over of prisoners to foreign allies like Jordan and Egypt who are known to torture. European leaders have been in an uproar as further evidence emerges that the CIA has secretly used European airports to transport prisoners for interrogation.

The numbers alone tell a chilling story. According to recent reports by the Associated Press, the United States has held more than 83,000 prisoners since the war on terror began, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, more than 14,000 remain in U.S. custody, mostly in Iraq, where U.S. military officials have acknowledged in the past that many prisoners were of little or no intelligence value. Military officials have said the same of the majority of prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay; yet from Guantánamo to the war zones, more than 4,000 prisoners have been held for a year or longer, with several hundred held for multiple years.

As of March this year, 108 detainees were known to have died in U.S. military and CIA custody. Of those, 22 died when insurgents attacked Abu Ghraib prison, while others reportedly died of natural causes. At least 26 deaths have been deemed criminal homicides.

Particularly troubling, says Powers, is that the Bush White House has taken no responsibility for the long trail of illegal abuses committed in the name of fighting terror: "Has anybody high up been held accountable for those 26 homicides? Not that I know of. And I'd be very surprised if we ever learn the full extent of all this. My guess is that if we could see the whole picture, it'd be extremely dark and unpleasant."

Army Capt. Ray Kimball is among the growing number who say that interrogation by torture is anti-American, ineffective and categorically wrong. In an interview with Salon, he said it also causes severe harm to U.S. soldiers themselves.

"Torture not only degrades the victim, it also ultimately degrades the torturer," said Kimball, who served in Iraq and now teaches history at West Point. "We already have enough soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder after legitimate combat experiences. But now you're talking about adding the burden of willfully inflicting wanton pain on another human being. You tell a soldier to go out there and 'waterboard' someone" -- strap a prisoner to a board, bind his face in cloth, and pour water over his face until he fears death by drowning -- "or mock-execute someone, but nobody is thinking about what that's going to do to that soldier months or years later, when it comes to dealing with the rationalizations and internal consequences. We're talking about serious psychic trauma."

A few courageous soldiers, including Army Capt. Ian Fishback of the elite 82nd Airborne Division, have spoken out against policies they say have cultivated torture on the battlefield. For 17 months, Fishback sought clarification within the military for the proper treatment of prisoners, and could find none. "I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder," Fishback wrote in an open letter to Sen. John McCain in September. "I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq."

Coercion used on detainees, Fishback wrote, "is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable ... If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession."

More soldiers are starting to come forward with the support of groups like Human Rights Watch, which conducts leading research on torture in the war on terror. Although unwilling to talk on the record for fear of retribution by the military, a number of active-duty soldiers who've spoken with Human Rights Watch are increasingly angry about the torture scandals, according to researcher John Sifton. While some soldiers are wary that media and human rights groups are out to make the military look bad, Sifton says most of them realize that they are taking the sole blame for the abuses.

"A number of soldiers we've talked to have told us they were ordered by military intelligence to torture," Sifton told Salon. "And not just at Abu Ghraib but at forward operating bases across Iraq." According to Sifton, several soldiers who tried to report misconduct say their superiors told them to take a hike.

One of them was Army Spc. Tony Lagouranis, who worked as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison and in a special intelligence unit that operated across Iraq in 2004. After multiple attempts to report wrongdoing, he became frustrated by stonewalling inside the military and took his knowledge of abuses to the media.

"It's all over Iraq," Lagouranis, now retired, told the PBS show "Frontline" in late September. "The worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They were using things like ... burns. They would smash people's feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs." At the root of the abuses, he said, was a lot of "frustration that we weren't getting good intel," and murky directives regarding the treatment of prisoners. Inevitably, Lagouranis said, those conditions gave rise to instances of "pure sadism," like the ones at Abu Ghraib.

There are other accounts of stonewalling and coverup by the military: One Army whistleblower who tried to report abuses in Iraq in 2003 was suddenly declared psychologically ill and forcibly shipped out of the country. "They were determined to protect their own asses no matter who they had to take down," said Sgt. Frank "Greg" Ford, in a Salon report last year.

In a joint effort with Human Rights First and NYU's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Human Rights Watch has been amassing a database of "literally hundreds and hundreds of cases of torture" at the hands of the U.S. military and CIA that have gone uninvestigated or unresolved. "There are only two cases I know of in which an officer or senior NCO has been accused of criminal conduct because of actions of those under their command," Sifton said. While some lower-level troops who committed abuse have been rightfully punished, he said, "it's simply shocking that nobody higher up has been held criminally liable."

"The message that's going out to guys is, as long as you're a senior military member or administration staffer, you're golden," says one active-duty Army officer, a veteran of combat in Iraq. "Just make sure either you've got a fall guy, or you're high enough up in the hierarchy, and you'll be fine."

Beginning almost immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, policies crafted inside the Bush White House set the conditions for rampant abuses by the military and CIA. In the first fearful weeks and months after the attacks, top administration lawyers in the White House and Justice Department drew up a series of secret legal memos that recast the rules for the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, those considered terrorist suspects from no easily identifiable army or nation. The memos argued that captured enemy combatants were not entitled to fundamental protections of U.S. or international law, including the obligations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, a treaty the United States ratified in 1994 explicitly outlawing "torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of prisoners.
The administration also relied on a classified document known as a "presidential finding," authorizing broad covert action by the CIA to capture, detain or kill members of al-Qaida anywhere in the world. The finding, which administration legal advisors apparently ruled lawful, was signed by Bush on Sept. 17, 2001. A day later, Congress granted the administration additional power by authorizing the use of "all necessary and appropriate" military force at the discretion of the president.

This November, in response to the torture scandals, the Pentagon issued a new high-level directive requiring that interrogations be conducted using "humane" treatment. That term replaced language in an earlier draft of the directive modeled after the international rules against torture -- a change that was made following intense pressure from Cheney's office.

According to one senior Army officer, a judge advocate general who has been involved in discussions with Pentagon officials on the issue, reaching a consensus on what constitutes "humane" treatment can be exceedingly difficult -- and vague language remains precisely the strategy of the Bush administration's legal maneuverings on detention and interrogation. Pentagon officials working to revise the Army field manual have also reportedly faced stiff resistance from Cheney's office. In theory, the senior Army JAG says, the rules outlined in the current version of the manual, including 14 techniques approved for interrogations, were already well-defined enough to avert wrongdoing -- at least until the Bush administration began calling for "the gloves to come off" in the war on terror.

According to the senior Army JAG, who wasn't authorized to speak to the media and was granted anonymity by Salon, many fellow JAGs and military officers feel that the administration has long since veered into dubious territory. "There are plenty of us who think that the legal opinions put forth by the administration, while maybe passable from a technical standpoint, aren't serving our long-term interests. The feeling is that there are steep costs to the administration's views, and that we're just beginning to pay them."

It is no accident that the McCain amendment seeks to tighten controls over both the military and CIA. The two often work in concert in an ill-defined, shadowy world of prisoner capture, transport and interrogation. While some abuses took place in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay prior to the Iraq war, conventional wisdom holds that torture only ballooned with the rise of the Iraqi insurgency. But according to one active-duty Army officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, U.S. intelligence operatives were working alongside the military in the Middle East well before the war even began.

"Before the invasion of Iraq, I was on an airfield in a foreign country that had an OGA site operating on it," says the Army officer. (OGA, or "other government agency," is parlance for a nonmilitary agency, typically the CIA.) "The airfield was prepped for any number of missions. It was made abundantly clear to us that those guys were self-sufficient and operated under their own set of rules. And if we didn't like that, that was too damn bad."

Robert Baer, a veteran CIA officer who operated in Iraq and across the Middle East before retiring in 1997, affirms that the CIA often works with military and private contractors, including on interrogations. He says joint operations are likely all over Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at the "black sites," which, according to the Washington Post, were set up beginning nearly four years ago.

A recent report by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker revealed how the joint operations can shield any single agency from responsibility for torture. The killing of a terrorist suspect in U.S hands at Abu Ghraib in 2003 may go unpunished, according to the report, because of murky circumstances over whether the military or CIA had custody of him. The prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, was first captured and roughed up by Navy SEALS before being handed over to a CIA interrogator at the prison. The CIA interrogator reportedly placed a bag over al-Jamadi's head, bound his hands behind his back, and hung him by his hands. Top forensics experts who examined the case said al-Jamadi, who had broken ribs, suffocated to death.

Several military investigations have fingered the CIA for operations in Iraq that essentially made prisoners like al-Jamadi disappear within the military's detention system with no record of their captivity -- a practice known as "ghosting." To date, only one agency employee has been held to account, a CIA contractor -- but not an officer -- charged for beating a prisoner to death in Afghanistan.

The CIA has never had a sterling reputation on human rights, says author Thomas Powers, though no one inside the agency would ever admit to using torture. "They've also said they don't commit assassinations," Powers says wryly. "They don't, except when they do."

Nevertheless, Bush policies appear to have corrupted the CIA to an unprecedented degree. Between the torture scandals and the prewar intelligence meltdown -- Powers says analysts were made to "hop on one leg and whistle" while pumping up bogus intelligence on Iraqi WMD -- the CIA has become an "operational arm" of the Bush White House.

The network of secret CIA prisons is particularly disturbing, Powers says, because they make prospects for oversight and accountability even dimmer. As with the military, it's likely that only the rank and file will be held accountable. "Over the last 50 years the agency has been asked many times to do extreme things," Powers says. "But almost always, whenever there's somebody to be blamed for it, nobody in the White House takes a hit."

Other CIA experts confirm that torture fails to exact useful information from prisoners, especially insurgents. "I've never seen torture solve an insurgency problem. It just makes it worse," Baer says. In addition to decrying its ineffectiveness, some veteran CIA officers, like their counterparts in the military, have begun to speak out against torture on moral grounds.

"It goes completely against the profile of people the CIA wants to recruit," Baer says, adding that officers are trained to resist interrogation, but generally not to conduct it. "This is a 180-degree turn, and it's wrecking the CIA further."

The rising backlash against torture today indicates more military and intelligence officers are realizing that the Bush administration is sinking the United States into an unprecedented moral quagmire -- one that could lead to an especially dire end. "The problems with this are huge and they're hitting home now," Powers says. "How do you let these people go, especially the ones deemed to be of no intelligence value, after they've been treated so badly? Are you just going to hold them forever? You have to ask whether or not they will eventually reach the stage of just summarily killing them. It may have happened already. This policy isn't just ineffectual -- it's complete madness."

Last summer, Sen. Richard Durbin, a senior Democrat from Illinois who co-wrote the McCain amendment, was savaged by the White House for pointed criticisms he made comparing torture at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay with Nazism and the Soviet gulags. Looking back, Durbin maintains he could have chosen his words more carefully -- but more importantly, he says, Cheney's battle against the McCain amendment represents a betrayal of America's men and women fighting on the front lines, and an "incredible contradiction" from the White House on torture.

For Durbin, who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee until last January, the revelation of the CIA "black sites" has raised new, troubling questions. "To my knowledge, it was never discussed -- whether they exist, where they exist, who runs them, and what's going on inside," Durbin said, speaking by phone from his office on Capitol Hill. "I think we absolutely need a more thorough investigation. But we'll be hard pressed to see it because it reflects directly on statements made by the president and vice president. And when it gets that delicate politically, the Senate Intelligence Committee has refused to step in."

That's been the norm under the Bush White House, Durbin adds. Cheney, he says, enjoys powerful sway over the committee. "There is a close relationship between Sen. Pat Roberts [who heads the Intelligence Committee] and the vice president. I can tell you that little or nothing was done while I served on the committee, in terms of a thorough review of our treatment of prisoners."

While Durbin and fellow lawmakers responsible for oversight were kept in the dark on covert interrogation operations, before he left the committee he and others viewed hundreds of classified photos of torture from Abu Ghraib. According to Durbin, a number of the images they witnessed were even more horrific than the public has seen to date, though he declined to go into detail, because they remain classified. "In all of my years of public service, I'll never forget that day. I was standing there in a room with fellow senators, some of whom were in tears, as we watched brought up on a screen hundreds and hundreds of photos showing the most unimaginable treatment of prisoners."

"I honestly believe that when this war is over, we'll look back on this treatment of prisoners as our own Japanese internment-camp issue," Durbin says. "It's further illustration that when a nation is in fear, as we are of continued attacks of terrorism, a nation will do things that do not stand up well at all by the judgment of history."

Mark Follman is an associate news editor at Salon.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article11231.htm

[Saundra Hummer]

Open and Shut
By Jarrett Murphy
The Village Voice

Monday 05 December 2005

Four years later, we still have ten big questions.


Four years later, we still have ten big questions.
On Monday, December 5, the 9-11 Public Discourse Project - a private group formed by 9-11 Commission members after their official mandate lapsed in 2004 - held a wrap-up press briefing in Washington, signaling the last gasp of official inquiries into the attacks four years ago. The National Institute of Standards and Technology also recently completed its final report on the twin towers. Already gathering dust are a Federal Emergency Management Agency study, the joint inquiry by Congress, the McKinsey reports on New York City's emergency response, probes by federal inspectors general, and other efforts to resolve the myriad doubts about the hijackings.

Some questions can't be answered: People who lost loved ones will never know exactly how the end came, if it hurt, what the final thoughts and words were. But other questions are more tractable. Here are 10 of them:

1. Where Was the "National Command Authority"?

There has never been a true accounting of why the nation's leaders were out of the loop for so long that morning. George W. Bush and his aides even have told different versions of how the president was actually informed of the first plane striking: The president claimed erroneously that he saw it on TV, while chief of staff Andrew Card said it was Karl Rove who told the president. According to the official version, after Rove told Bush, the president talked to then national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. She told him about the crash but apparently did not know about the reported hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11, which military air defenses learned about 17 minutes earlier.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was informed of the second plane hitting the WTC - yes, the second plane - during his intelligence briefing but continued the briefing and was at his desk when Flight 77 struck the Pentagon.

Together, the president and secretary of defense are the National Command Authority that is supposed to lead the country in the case of military emergency. But Bush didn't get in touch with Rumsfeld until after 10 a.m., around the time the fourth and final plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. When Bush was criticized days after 9-11 for failing to return to Washington until more than 10 hours after the first attack, the White House claimed there had been a threat ("real and credible," in flack Ari Fleischer's words) to Air Force One. There was none. All the 9-11 Commission says of this phantom threat is that it was the product of "a misunderstood communication."

2. Who Gave the Order to Try to Shoot the Planes Down?

The commission is noticeably vague on this point. The official version says Dick Cheney told the military a little past 10 a.m. to shoot down a threatening plane, claiming that the president had given his approval for the order. But while a few people in the White House bunker noted a call between Cheney and Bush moments earlier, only Rice says she heard Cheney bring up the shoot-down order. Despite the fact that people at both ends of the call were taking notes, the commission found that "there is no documentary evidence of this call." Meanwhile, some of the fighter jets in the air over D.C. received no orders to shoot down planes, while other military aircraft got the OK from the Secret Service to fly "weapons free," which means they had wide authority to take out suspicious aircraft.

Since the military was given little or no notice about the planes, maybe it doesn't matter who authorized a shoot-down. But the record is unclear. Neither Cheney nor Bush testified under oath before the 9-11 panel, in public or private.

3. What Exactly Were All Those Firefighters Doing in the Towers?

Reports on the disaster reflect confusion over the exact mission of the firefighters who climbed the twin towers, many of whom died. The 9-11 Commission says fire chiefs decided early on that because the fire was so big, their job would "primarily be one of rescue." But NIST reports that some fire commanders thought their men would fight fires to save people trapped above them, and individual fire companies thought their mission was to "get up to the fire as soon as possible, put the fire out, and get ready for their next assignment." According to oral histories collected by the FDNY, some firefighters were told to head up the stairs carrying hoses, and others to drop their hoses in the lobby. Some were ordered simply to head up the stairs without a clear idea of where they were going or why.

While it is doubtless that first responders saved lives that day, it's not clear that there were many people left to be rescued when late-arriving firefighters began climbing the stairs, especially in the north tower. Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg have said up to 25,000 people escaped the towers; NIST has put that figure at around 15,000 - still a blessing. But NIST believes that 90 percent of those civilians who survived started descending both towers before the second plane hit. (About 1,000 of them were "mobility impaired" and needed help getting out.) Just shy of 2,000 of the roughly 2,150 civilians who died in the towers were trapped above the impact zones, with no chance of rescue.

4. Did Anyone Think the Towers Would Collapse?

Reports on the FDNY response to 9-11 generally agree that, as the FDNY-commissioned McKinsey study put it, "Chief officers considered a limited, localized collapse of the towers possible, but did not think that they would collapse entirely." For some of the fire officers, that confidence might have been based on a misconception about how the towers were built: The FDNY chief of safety says in his oral history that he thought the towers were made of block construction, with a solid concrete core, so that fire crews would have at least three hours to work. In fact, the cores of the towers were sheetrock over steel. And the citywide safety chief in charge that day didn't know a plane had hit the north tower.

Evidently, fears about collapse evolved as the disaster wore on. Peter Ganci, the highest ranking chief and one of the 343 fire personnel who died, reportedly told the commander in the north-tower lobby at 9:45 a.m. that he might want to consider an evacuation - almost 45 minutes before that building collapsed. Assistant Chief Joseph Callan, the citywide tour commander that day, told investigators: "Approximately 40 minutes after I arrived in the lobby I made a decision that the building was no longer safe and that was based on the conditions in the lobby - large pieces of plaster falling, all the 20-foot-high glass panels on the exterior of the lobby were breaking, there was obvious movement of the building, and that was the reason on the handy talky I gave the order for all fire department units to leave the north tower. Approximately ten minutes after that we had collapse of the south tower." Fire chiefs also received - just moments before the south tower fell - a report that someone from the city's Office of Emergency Management thought the towers weren't structurally sound. The source of that report is unknown.

5. Why Was Giuliani's Command Bunker at Ground Zero?

A constant refrain in rehashes of 9-11 is that the cooperation between police and fire services that day was poor. The OEM was unable to bridge the gap because it was busy evacuating its own emergency center in 7 WTC. "The loss of the OEM operations center," NIST found, "created difficulties related to the coordination of emergency responder operations and resources." Because the World Trade Center had been a terrorist target in 1993, Giuliani was criticized in 1998 for his decision to locate the emergency center there. Yet when Giuliani and Jerry Hauer (who was OEM director when the 7 WTC site was picked) appeared before the 9-11 Commission, no one asked them about the bunker. Nor did commissioners ask Giuliani specifically why firefighters were using the same radios on 9-11 that had worked so poorly in the '93 bombing. Part of the reason was the city had broken contracting rules when it purchased new radios earlier in 2001, and those radios had to be withdrawn because of technical problems.

6. Why Did 7 WTC Fall?

Seven World Trade Center - where, besides OEM, the CIA, Salomon Smith Barney, and other entities had offices - was the last building to collapse on 9-11. It was also probably the first steel skyscraper anywhere to collapse solely because of fire. We still don't know why. While NIST has completed its twin towers reports, it has delayed its 7 WTC report twice; it's currently not expected until next spring.

Several 7 WTC tenants, including OEM and the Secret Service, had tanks filled with diesel fuel to power emergency generators. If that fuel leaked and burned, it may have heated the building's steel supports to the point of failure, but according to FEMA's report on the collapse this "best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence."

7. How Did the Twin Towers Fall?

Many FDNY personnel who saw the south tower collapse reported explosions at the lower levels as the top began collapsing. These reports, as well as "squibs" of smoke seen on video of the collapses, have led to theories that the towers were brought down in controlled explosions. NIST dismisses these notions, claiming that the puffs of smoke were the result of air being forced down by the top of the tower collapsing.

NIST said the towers fell because the planes shook fireproofing loose from the steel superstructure, and the fire heated the floor-supporting trusses so much that they pulled in on support columns that were already holding more than their regular load. But NIST's computer simulation stops at the point the collapse begins, and does not document exactly how the rest of the buildings crumbled in 10 seconds. The reason for this omission could be the sheer complexity of the computations - even NIST's simplified model took weeks to run on a computer.

Conspiracy theorists aren't the only ones who dispute NIST's version: Some fire scientists also take issue with the institute's methods and conclusions. And the point isn't just historical. The lessons learned from the WTC collapse will inform decisions about the safety of other modern office towers.

8. How Dangerous Was - and Is - the Air at Ground Zero?

A few days after the towers fell, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that tests of air and water near the WTC site "indicate that these vital resources are safe." The only problem was, as the EPA's inspector general reported later, the agency "did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement." What's more, the inspector general said, "the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced, through the collaboration process, the information that EPA communicated to the public."

The 9-11 Commission did not address this topic in the body of its final report. In a single footnote, the panel said it didn't have the expertise to talk about the air testing, but let the White House off the hook for influencing EPA press releases. Then - EPA head Christine Whitman told the commission that she had met with a top Bush economic adviser "regarding the need to get financial markets open quickly," but denied any pressure to fudge the air quality readings. A group of 12 people has sued the EPA over health problems they blame on poor air quality near the site after the attacks. Meanwhile, the EPA just last week approved a plan to test and clean apartments south of Canal Street.

9. What Exactly Did Zacarias Moussaoui Plan to Do?

Was he the 20th hijacker? Or was he supposed to pilot a fifth plane on September 11? Or was he a backup for Ziad Jarrah, the Flight 93 hijack pilot, whose disagreements with Mohammed Atta almost got him dropped from the plot? Or was he a pilot for a "second wave" of attacks, as captured Al Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is quoted saying in the 9-11 Commission report?

Last April, Moussaoui pled guilty to conspiracy charges, but claimed that he had nothing to do with 9-11 and instead was planning a separate attack to try to free Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.

The Department of Justice hasn't said publicly exactly what Moussaoui did - stating in court filings merely that Moussaoui "participated" in the 9-11 plot - but it does want to execute him for his alleged role

10. What's on Those Blanked-Out Pages?

"The Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001," which was released in late 2002, included 28 pages that were blanked out, apparently concerning the possible role of Saudi government officials. Those aren't the only blank spots in the public record. As the Voice reported in October, there are multiple redactions in the FDNY oral histories that in some cases seem to concern the radios or suspicious activity near the WTC site before and during the attacks.

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120605Q.shtml

[Saundra Hummer]

Mr. Bush, Have I Got an Exit Strategy for You


By Gus R. Stelzer
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Monday 05 December 2005

Despite much talk about an exit strategy from the Iraq quagmire in which our nation is embroiled, the No. 1 exit strategy has not been proposed. Let me fill that void. First you have a right to know where I'm coming from.

When I reached the legal voting age of 21 in 1936, I voted for Republican Alfred Landon against Franklin D. Roosevelt. I continued voting Republican through 1980, when I founded a PAC in San Diego with my own money to help Ronald Reagan defeat Jimmy Carter.

But I didn't vote for Reagan in 1984 because of his misguided trade and fiscal policies.

Whereas the United States enjoyed a $28 billion trade surplus and only $700 billion in federal debt in the previous 36 years, in eight years Reagan piled up $1.042 trillion in trade deficits and $1.692 trillion in federal debt. That was 186 percent more than all 39 prior presidents.

I haven't voted for a Republican or Democrat candidate since because I have no desire to vote for the lesser of two evils. I retired in 1976 as a senior executive of General Motors, with responsibility for more than 35,000 employees, and have been a member of the World Affairs Council, the Institute for the Americas at the University of California, the Advisory Board of the School of Education at the University of San Diego, a Rotary Club president, etc. I've traveled widely and lived in many states.

Any CEO of a corporation who screwed up as many things as George W. Bush would have been fired by its board of directors. Here's a few of the ways:

Invasion of Iraq, which is the biggest strategic blunder and scandal in US history. Saddam Hussein never initiated a belligerent act of aggression or terrorism against us. The buildup to that war was based on fabrications, deception and lies.

.Death of 2,100 US soldiers, wounding 15,000 more, and the death of 30,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children.

.Immoral and unconstitutional trade policies that caused $2.824 trillion in trade deficits in just five years.

.The worst fiscal performance in our history, piling up $2.472 trillion in added federal debt in five years en route to a major economic collapse.

.Tax policies that are an insult to working people who make dividends possible but who are required to pay a higher marginal tax rate than those who collect dividends without working.

.Foreign policies that have alienated most of the rest of the world.

.A misguided attempt to turn future Social Security pensions over to Wall Street.
In typical arrogance, Bush said we must stay the course in the Iraq war, which means continuing his tragic record while killing and wounding more US soldiers. That has no more credibility than to say a fox should be put in charge of maintaining order in a hen house after he has just created mayhem therein.

Earlier this year, Terri Schiavo lay in a permanent coma connected to a feeding tube. Her husband said she would have wanted that tube removed. But Republican members of Congress passed a resolution to maintain the tube, causing Bush to fly from his ranch in Texas to Washington to sign that legislation.

As his pen was poised to sign the document, Bush said, "If there is an error in this matter, it is best to err on the side of life."

Why didn't Bush make that same judgment in early 2003 when millions of Americans protested against a possible invasion of Iraq, as did many foreign leaders? Bush had no qualms about killing and wounding thousands of soldiers and innocent civilians.

In view of his miserable record, his arrogant lack of good judgment and his failure to understand the gravity of his record, President Bush (and Vice President Dick Cheney) should be shown the exit door with a proviso to never darken the Oval Office again.

That should be exit strategy No. 1!

I was a Republican, but never a knee-jerk Republican.

-------
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120605R.shtml

[Saundra Hummer]

U.S. Interrogations Save European Lives, Rice Tells Europe...s Leaders

By Joel Brinkley
THE NEW YORK TIMES

BERLIN

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chastised European leaders on Monday, saying that before they complain about secret jails for terror suspects in European nations, they should realize that interrogations of these suspects have produced information that helped “save European lives.”

Her remarks were the Bush administration’s official response to the reports of a network of secret detention centers in at least eight European nations, said to house dozens of terror suspects.

At the same time, she denied that the United States has moved suspects to these prisons to allow interrogators to use torture. “The United States,” she said, “does not permit, tolerate or condone torture under any circumstances.” At another point, she said, “The United States does not transport and has not transported detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture.”

Intelligence gathered from these interrogations, she said, “has stopped terrorist attacks and saved innocent lives in Europe as well as the United States.” But she declined to offer examples or provide any specific information to support her assertions. She said any information related to the prisons was classified. Rice did not explicitly confirm the existence of the detention centers, first described in news reports early last month. But acknowledgment of them was implicit in her remarks. Without the debate over the covert jails, there would have been no reason for her statement.

“We must bring terrorists to justice wherever possible,” she said, “but there have been many cases where the local government cannot detain or prosecute a suspect, and traditional extradition is not a good option.”

“In those cases,” she added, “the local government can make the sovereign choice to cooperate in” the transfer of a suspect to a third country, which is known as a rendition.

“Sometimes,” she added, “these efforts are misunderstood.”

Administration officials from the White House, State Department and Central Intelligence Agency labored over Rice’s statement for days and said it would serve as the basis of the government’s official answer to an inquiry about the covert detention centers issued by the European Union last week — one of a half dozen inquiries that are under way.

Rice offered her remarks to reporters early Monday morning, in a departure lounge at Andrews Air Force Base just outside Washington, moments before setting off for a trip to Europe. The timing, she said later, was not coincidental. She wanted to issue the statement “before I go to Europe so if there are questions I can answer them.”

Her five-day trip will take her to Germany, Belgium, Ukraine and Romania. Analyses of flight records of U.S. government aircraft have suggested that Romania may be the site of one covert detention center, but Romanian officials say that no such facility exists. Rice arrived in Berlin too late Monday night to meet with any German officials or to gauge any reaction to her remarks in Washington.
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Click on the following links for this article and more:

http://informationclearinghouse.info/
=
This story was published on Tuesday, December 6, 2005.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V125/N59/59long4.html

[patricia]

So, who are you going to believe? Are you going to believe Rice, or your own eyes and ears??

[Saundra Hummer]

Hi Patricia.....Our own eyes of course. Ha!
Here is another fact, and it's not so pretty either. It isn't that when we were being accused of being sore losers, that we didn't have a right to complain and become indignant, as we could plainly see something just wasn't Kosher! We knew it, we had heard all about the impropriety, and there was more than this following article tells of. The manipulation and polling place violations were numerous and dispicable. The things that had gone on had become ever so clear. So why so late in getting to it? Is it this? - who's afraid of a Lame Duck?

Here's the latest:

Ex-GOP Official Faces Conspiracy Charge
By BEVERLEY WANG, Associated Press Writer

CONCORD, N.H. - A former national Republican Party official played a key role in an Election Day 2002 phone jamming plot against New Hampshire Democrats, the prosecution said Tuesday during opening statements.

James Tobin, President Bush's onetime New England campaign chairman, is being tried on one federal count of conspiring against voters' rights and several counts involving telephone harassment. He could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

U.S. Attorney Andrew Levchuk said the state GOP's former executive director, Chuck McGee, had Tobin's blessing for the scheme as well as his help in the plot to disrupt Democratic get-out-the-vote phone banks and a nonpartisan ride-to-the-polls line.

Tobin, 45, resigned as New England chairman of Bush's 2004 campaign in October 2004 when the phone jamming accusations became public. Tobin also has been political director of the Republican National Committee.

McGee, who admitted hatching the plot, completed a seven-month sentence for conspiracy. Another conspirator, Allen Raymond, also pleaded guilty for organizing the jamming, but wants a five-month sentence reduced in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors.

Prosecutors claim McGee paid Raymond, former president of Alexandria, Va.-based GOP Marketplace LLC, $15,600 to arrange for hundreds of computer generated hang-up calls to jam phone banks in Claremont, Rochester and Manchester on Nov. 5, 2002.

Dane Butswinkas, one of Tobin's lawyers, on Tuesday warned jurors to be wary of Raymond's motives when he testifies. "That five months is hanging over his head like a piano," he said.

McGee testified he couldn't find anyone willing to carry out the phone jamming and asked Tobin for help about a week before Election Day.

He said Tobin gave him Raymond's phone number. "He just says give him a call," McGee said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051207/ap_on_el_pr/gop_phone_jamming;_ylt=AiZ9EtaezLJJX4.wmniIqwOs0NU E;_ylu=X3oDMTA3OXIzMDMzBHNlYwM3MDM-

[Saundra Hummer]

Why 'Tookie' Williams deserves clemency

2 AM ET

Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, is no bleeding-heart liberal. He's a rock-hard conservative who believes so fervently in the death penalty that he's willing to be an executioner.

Land told me that if John Couey, a Florida man who confessed to raping and burying alive 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford, is sentenced to death, he would volunteer to give the convicted sex offender a lethal injection.

But while he's hard, Land is not heartless when it comes to the death penalty. "If you are going to support the death penalty, then you have to be as supportive of its equitable and just application," Land said in response to a question I put to him. It is immoral to do otherwise, he answered, while pointing out that the poor and people of color are much more likely to be executed in this country.

Land probably wasn't thinking of Stanley "Tookie" Williams when he uttered those words, but he should have been. Williams, who was sentenced to die in the shotgun killings of four people in 1979, is scheduled to be executed next week. On Thursday, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will hold a private hearing to consider Williams' appeal for clemency.

Equitable and just

I don't know whether Williams is innocent of the crimes that sent him to death row, but I'm convinced that this nation's criminal justice system has failed to meet the "equitable and just" application test that Land laid out.

"I believe in this individual case. We've got a man who is better off to us alive rather than dead," NAACP President Bruce Gordon said of Williams, who he says was convicted on circumstantial evidence and has lived an exemplary life behind bars. Williams was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to steer kids away from the violent gang life he led.

There is strong evidence that the scales of justice are way out of balance when it comes to the people on death row. As with so much else in this country, race matters in death penalty cases.

Killing someone white is far more likely to land a person on death row than murdering blacks. While blacks were nearly 47% of this nation's homicide victims from 1976 (the year the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty) to 2002, 80% of the victims of the people on death row were white, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

White vs. black

All but 25 of the 570 whites executed through Oct. 1 had white victims - as did 62% of the blacks who were put to death. This suggests that the criminal justice system places a higher value on the lives of white capital crime victims than those of blacks. That's an inequitable and unjust application of the death penalty. One of the four men Williams was convicted of killing was white; the others were Asians.

"I have been arguing for years that this is a barbaric practice that demeans us as a just society and erodes our moral core," Mike Farrell, an actor and passionate death penalty opponent, said of capital punishment. Like many others among a long list of celebrities and activists, Farrell says Williams' efforts to end the gang violence he helped spawn by founding a Los Angeles-based street gang is redemptive. And he has urged Schwarzenegger to spare Williams' life.

I hope he can muster the strength to do just that. This nation struggles with an awful duality. On the one hand, we are the strongest beacon of light for people around the world who crave a democratic and just society. On the other, we are aligned with countries such as China, Iran and North Korea in carrying out capital punishment.

This duality tears at the soul of our nation and erodes the moral high ground we claim. By commuting Williams' sentence, Schwarzenegger can help force this nation to find ways to apply the death penalty equitably - or end its use.

DeWayne Wickham writes weekly for USA TODAY.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20051206/cm_usatoday/whytookiewilliamsdeservesclemency;_ylt=Aj2sTChmdBa xLt8k1lPCfaes0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3YWFzYnA2BHNlYwM3NDI-

[Saundra Hummer]

Republicans Have Lost High Moral Ground

By Robert Scheer
Truthdig.com

Wednesday 07 December 2005

Call it Tonto's revenge: The outrageous rip-off of Native American tribes by a top Republican lobbyist is leading inexorably to a reckoning for the allegedly morally superior religious and political right.

"I don't think we have had something of this scope, arrogance and sheer venality in our lifetimes," Norman J. Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in Roll Call. "It is building to an explosion, one that could create immense collateral damage within Congress and in coming elections."

Selling firewater to the natives-or in this case charging them $82 million for government breaks on slot machine and other gaming licenses - is not exactly what the high-minded prophets of the Republican revolution promised. And to see behind the scenes as Christian right superstar Ralph Reed, bought off by top Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, dupes his grassroots "pro-family" followers into unwittingly supporting casino-rich Indian tribes under the guise of anti-gambling initiatives, is to glimpse moral corruption of biblical proportion.

Reed, now a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Georgia, at first denied knowing the $4 million he acknowledges receiving from Abramoff and his closet associate, public-relations expert Michael Scanlon, to run the pseudo anti-gambling campaigns in the South came from tribes hoping to retain local monopolies for themselves. Once the investigation picked up steam this past summer, however, he changed his mind and said he was assured that the tribal money didn't come directly from casino proceeds - a hair-splitting attempt at face-saving ethics, indeed, since the goal of the payments was so clearly to benefit the casinos.

Furthermore, the release of a treasure trove of documentation on the Abramoff investigation to the Internet by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chair of the Senate's Indian Affairs Committee, makes it clear that Abramoff and his colleagues had no interest in the finer points of morality when they were transferring huge sums of cash from the tribes to the accounts of such allegedly high-minded heavyweight pro-Republican outfits as Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform.

"This town has become very corrupt, there's no doubt about it,'' McCain said Sunday on "Meet the Press," adding that he expects "lots" of indictments and that there is "strong evidence" of "significant wrongdoing" by some legislators.

Reading the documents, in fact, is a horrifying look at democracy for sale. For example, an Abramoff e-mail to Reed about a conversation the lobbyist had with Nell Rogers, a Choctaw representative: "Spoke with Nell. They have a budget issue. They want to know if we can get through to October on $1 million. Can we? If not, let me know."

In response, Reed lays out what it costs, in very precise amounts, to kill legislation on Capitol Hill to favor of a wealthy entity: "I believe [$1 million will be enough]. If we can kill it in the House [,] definitely. If it goes to the Senate, the worst case scenario is what the pro-family groups spent to defeat video poker and the lottery - each about $1.3 million. ... We will be doing all we can to raise money from national anti-gambling groups, Christian CEOs and national pro-family groups."

Overall, both Reed, once the religious right's boy savior, and Abramoff, the former head of the College Republicans, a "pioneer"-grade fundraiser for President Bush, and a stalwart friend of Texas Rep. Tom DeLay, come off as morally degenerate political savants in the Senate committee's files. Reed seems possessed by the gods of greed as he exults, "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!"

But Abramoffgate goes much higher than these two political pimps. In those e-mails between Abramoff and Scanlon, it is clear that they trafficked in their ties to DeLay and others in the Republican leadership. As the Washington Post reported, Abramoff "cultivated a reputation as the best-connected Republican lobbyist in Washington," and it was not a false claim. DeLay, who referred to Abramoff as "one of my closest and dearest friends," received no fewer than three free golf trips to Scotland from Abramoff, among other payoffs.

Both DeLay and Abramoff are under indictment for charges in other cases but not, as of yet, this one. Scanlon has already pleaded guilty to conspiring with Abramoff to defraud various Indian tribes and bribe government officials. Former White House official David Safavian has been indicted for lying about his ties to Abramoff. The bet now is that Abramoff will also cop a plea bargain instead of spending many years in jail and paying even larger fines than the $19.7 million Scanlon has accepted.

If so, more depressing tales of corruption may be detailed publicly. But what is already clear is that the Republicans' reputation for moral superiority is as dead as the Lone Ranger.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120705J.shtml

[Saundra Hummer]

The Most Destructive Crop on Earth Is No Solution to the Energy Crisis

The Most Destructive Crop on Earth Is No Solution to the Energy Crisis
By George Monbiot
The Guardian UK

Tuesday 06 December 2005

By promoting biodiesel as a substitute, we have missed the fact that it is worse than the fossil-fuel burning it replaces.

Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic.

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter "containing 44 x 1018 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet's current biota". In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries' worth of plants and animals.

The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy - and the extraordinary power densities it gives us - with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back. But substitutes are being sought everywhere. They are being promoted today at the climate talks in Montreal, by states - such as ours - that seek to avoid the hard decisions climate change demands. And at least one substitute is worse than the fossil-fuel burning it replaces.

The last time I drew attention to the hazards of making diesel fuel from vegetable oils, I received as much abuse as I have ever been sent for my stance on the Iraq war. The biodiesel missionaries, I discovered, are as vociferous in their denial as the executives of Exxon. I am now prepared to admit that my previous column was wrong. But they're not going to like it. I was wrong because I underestimated the fuel's destructive impact.

Before I go any further, I should make it clear that turning used chip fat into motor fuel is a good thing. The people slithering around all day in vats of filth are performing a service to society. But there is enough waste cooking oil in the UK to meet a 380th of our demand for road transport fuel. Beyond that, the trouble begins.

When I wrote about it last year, I thought that the biggest problem caused by biodiesel was that it set up a competition for land use. Arable land that would otherwise have been used to grow food would instead be used to grow fuel. But now I find that something even worse is happening. The biodiesel industry has accidentally invented the world's most carbon-intensive fuel.

In promoting biodiesel - as the EU, the British and US governments and thousands of environmental campaigners do - you might imagine that you are creating a market for old chip fat, or rapeseed oil, or oil from algae grown in desert ponds. In reality you are creating a market for the most destructive crop on earth.

Last week, the chairman of Malaysia's federal land development authority announced that he was about to build a new biodiesel plant. His was the ninth such decision in four months. Four new refineries are being built in Peninsula Malaysia, one in Sarawak and two in Rotterdam. Two foreign consortiums - one German, one American - are setting up rival plants in Singapore. All of them will be making biodiesel from the same source: oil from palm trees.

"The demand for biodiesel," the Malaysian Star reports, "will come from the European Community ... This fresh demand ... would, at the very least, take up most of Malaysia's crude palm oil inventories." Why? Because it is cheaper than biodiesel made from any other crop.

In September, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impact of palm oil production. "Between 1985 and 2000," it found, "the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia". In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest have been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares are scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5 million in Indonesia.

Almost all the remaining forest is at risk. Even the famous Tanjung Puting national park in Kalimantan is being ripped apart by oil planters. The orangutan is likely to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist. The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by the palm growers. The entire region is being turned into a gigantic vegetable oil field.

Before oil palms, which are small and scrubby, are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon, must be felled and burnt. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they've cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidises, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the trees. In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria.

The British government understands this. In a report published last month, when it announced that it would obey the EU and ensure that 5.75% of our transport fuel came from plants by 2010, it admitted "the main environmental risks are likely to be those concerning any large expansion in biofuel feedstock production, and particularly in Brazil (for sugar cane) and south-east Asia (for palm oil plantations)."

It suggested that the best means of dealing with the problem was to prevent environmentally destructive fuels from being imported. The government asked its consultants whether a ban would infringe world trade rules. The answer was yes: "Mandatory environmental criteria ... would greatly increase the risk of international legal challenge to the policy as a whole." So it dropped the idea of banning imports, and called for "some form of voluntary scheme" instead. Knowing that the creation of this market will lead to a massive surge in imports of palm oil, knowing that there is nothing meaningful it can do to prevent them, and knowing that they will accelerate rather than ameliorate climate change, the government has decided to go ahead anyway.

At other times it happily defies the EU. But what the EU wants and what the government wants are the same. "It is essential that we balance the increasing demand for travel," the government's report says, "with our goals for protecting the environment." Until recently, we had a policy of reducing the demand for travel. Now, though no announcement has been made, that policy has gone. Like the Tories in the early 1990s, the Labour administration seeks to accommodate demand, however high it rises. Figures obtained last week by the campaigning group Road Block show that for the widening of the M1 alone the government will pay £3.6bn - more than it is spending on its entire climate change programme. Instead of attempting to reduce demand, it is trying to alter supply. It is prepared to sacrifice the south-east Asian rainforests in order to be seen to be doing something, and to allow motorists to feel better about themselves.

All this illustrates the futility of the technofixes now being pursued in Montreal. Trying to meet a rising demand for fuel is madness, wherever the fuel might come from. The hard decisions have been avoided, and another portion of the biosphere is going up in smoke.
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Food Crisis Feared as Fertile Land Runs Out
By Kate Ravilious
The Guardian UK

Tuesday 06 December 2005

Maps show 40% of Earth's land is used for agriculture. Growing human 'footprint' a risk to the environment.
New maps show that the Earth is rapidly running out of fertile land and that food production will soon be unable to keep up with the world's burgeoning population. The maps reveal that more than one third of the world's land is being used to grow crops or graze cattle.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison combined satellite land cover images with agricultural census data from every country in the world to create detailed maps of global land use. Each grid square was 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) across and showed the most prevalent land use in that square, such as forest, grassland or ice.

"In the act of making these maps we are asking: where is the human footprint on the Earth?" said Amato Evan, a member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison research team presenting its results this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

The current map shows a snapshot of global land use for the year 2000, but the scientists also have land use data going back to 1700, showing how things have changed.

"The maps show, very strikingly, that a large part of our planet (roughly 40%) is being used for either growing crops or grazing cattle," said Dr Navin Ramankutty, a member of the Wisconsin-Madison team. By comparison, only 7% of the world's land was being used for agriculture in 1700.

The Amazon basin has seen some of the greatest changes in recent times, with huge swaths of the rainforest being felled to grow soya beans.

"One of the major changes we see is the fast expansion of soybeans in Brazil and Argentina, grown for export to China and the EU," said Dr Ramankutty.

This agricultural expansion has come at the expense of tropical forests in both countries.

Meanwhile, intensive farming practices mean that cropland areas have decreased slightly in the US and Europe and the land is being gobbled up by urbanisation.

The research indicates that there is now little room for further agricultural expansion.

"Except for Latin America and Africa, all the places in the world where we could grow crops are already being cultivated. The remaining places are either too cold or too dry to grow crops," said Dr Ramankutty.

By continuing to monitor changes in land use the scientists hope that they will be able to highlight problems and help find solutions.

"The real question is, how can we continue to produce food from the land while preventing negative environmental consequences such as deforestation, water pollution and soil erosion?" said Dr Ramankutty.

The next phase of the project is to build an internet-based databank - called the Earth Collaboratory - that would draw on the knowledge of scientists around the world, local environmentalists and members of the general public.

Jonathan Foley, director of the Wisconsin-Madison research team, said: "[The Collaboratory] will truly be a brave new experiment that effectively bridges science, decision-making and real-world environmental practice - collectively envisioning a new way to live sustainably."
------
http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/120605EA.shtml

==
. .. [. .. Our overpopulated planet is in dire need of a solution.
Here in Oregon we have land use laws which are in effect, preventing acreage from being split up into smaller than 20 acre parcels, land which is often times so marginal that it is almost useless as a food producing area, not at all like California, where in large areas you can grown anything, and look at what is happening there. The land has become to valuable to farm, and so is being split off into subdivisions, and shopping centers. My husbands father in law sold part of his land to Mitsubichi and they put in a huge car lot, where peaches and grapes had once been grown. It wasn't a huge tract, only a few acres, ten or 20, I can't recall how much, but here in Oregon where we are, it wouldn't have been allowed, even though the land is often times marginal farm land, or just outcrops of volcanic rock, which doesn't or won't grow much, other than a bit of bunch grass, juniper trees, buck, sagebrush, and the numerous invasive weeds & plants the Russian immigrants brought with them to plant to feed their animals when they arrived here early in our states history. We are wanting to sell off 5 acre plots and retire, but the land use laws here are preventing us from making as much as we could had there not been these laws in place. A new law had been voted in which would have allowed us to sell like we would need to, but the court overturned the vote. Well, 20 acre plots is another way to go, we can keep a few acres for ourselves and the old house and sell off the rest, but this land has never been prime farm land. It does grow decent hay, potato's, and they say carrots, but that's a crop that's hard to get into as it is tied up by large growers, as are potato's. Finding the seeds crop and potato cuttings is a problem for someone not already established in the business, so you would need to lease out to have your land used for potato's or carrots. Then when harvesting the dust is so thick you can barely see around the area it's like a thick fog. We lived several miles from where potato's were harvested, however, when that was going on, we couldn't see and 1/8 of a mile, so that's another down side of growing root crops. Nice land for raising a few head of farm animals, having horses and such, but productive farm land? It varies. Wish there were an easy fix, but it's not out there, so hope someone comes up with a viable solution and this nonsense of killing our planet, and thereby ourselves, heads in a new and better direction.
People are upset over farm subsidies, and believe me there are and have been abuses, we know of two incidents first hand, but they are needed to keep our country productive and self sufficient. ?Fix the abuses, but keep our farmers healthy and productive, as we can't depend on the rest of the world to feed us.

About bio-diesel, it sounds like damned if we do and damned if we don't. Willie Nelson is going into it hoping to make a difference, and it sounded so good on the show I watched. Perhaps if it is done correctly it can be something that will work, done with corn they say, old cooking oil, etc. Will his plan and operation be as bad for the planet as what is being planned in Indonesia?

Just too many people and our needs are just too great....SRH ..]

[Saundra Hummer]

The President's Speech on Iraq Reconstruction

By Rep. Henry A. Waxman
t r u t h o u t | Statement

Wednesday 07 December 2005

The President's claims today are mindboggling. Either he doesn't understand the facts or simply doesn't want to face them. The reconstruction of Iraq has been an enormous boondoggle - not an example of "quiet, steady progress." Halliburton has repeatedly overcharged American taxpayers through fraud, waste, and abuse. The U.S. officials in charge of the reconstruction have been incompetent and, in some cases, corrupt. And billions of dollars have been squandered without increasing oil or electricity production.

Key Facts about the Reconstruction

Lack of Progress.

Massive spending on reconstruction has produced little or no progress in key sectors like electricity and oil. Despite a $2.2 billion investment in Iraq's oil infrastructure, production and export levels have actually dropped below pre-war levels. And despite the $4.4 billion the Bush Administration spent to boost Iraq's electricity production, it has fallen far short of its goal of 6000 megawatts of peak output capacity. In fact, the Administration has conceded, "We'll never meet demand." Iraqis living in Baghdad typically have just two hours of power followed by four hours without power throughout the day.

Rampant Overcharges and Lax Oversight.

Large government contractors like Halliburton have repeatedly overcharged the taxpayer. Auditors at the Defense Contract Audit Agency have identified over $1.4 billion in unreasonable and unsupported charges by Halliburton in Iraq. Whistleblowers have testified about $100 bags of laundry, $45 cases of soda, and brand new $85,000 trucks being abandoned because of a flat tire. Yet the Administration refuses to take action. Last month, the Defense Department paid Halliburton $130 million in reimbursements, profits, and bonuses for billings that the department's own auditors recommended against paying.

Incompetent Management.

The Bush Administration's management of the reconstruction of Iraq has been fundamentally incompetent. Billion-dollar contracts were awarded with little or no competition to favored contractors. Competition for discrete reconstruction projects was suppressed by dividing Iraq into a handful of fiefdoms and awarding lucrative monopoly contracts to companies that never had to compete against each other for specific reconstruction tasks.

Burgeoning Corruption.

Between May 2003 and June 2004, U.S. officials shipped nearly $12 billion in cash to Iraq. As government audits later found, the cash was spent and disbursed by U.S. officials with virtually no financial controls or reliable accounting. The Administration cannot account for over $8 billion that was transferred to Iraqi ministries. This unsupervised flood of cash into Iraq became an open invitation to corruption. A senior U.S. official already has been charged with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks from a U.S. contractor in exchange for steering up to $3.5 million in fraudulent contracts his way. Government investigators have said that there are dozens of other criminal corruption cases being processed.
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Senator Russ Feingold Responds to President's Speech
By Senator Russ Feingold
t r u t h o u t | Statement
Wednesday 07 December 2005

"The President does not understand that his Iraq policies are preventing us from succeeding in our larger campaign against global terrorists - Iraq is not the be-all and end-all of our country's national security. The President also fails to understand the limited role the U.S. military should play in Iraq's long-term political and economic reconstruction efforts. Our brave servicemen and women won a resounding victory in the initial military operation, and their task is largely over. Maintaining the current U.S. military presence, without a clear plan and timetable to finish the military mission in Iraq, isn't a strategy for success in Iraq or for success in the fight against global terrorism.

Rather than continuing with a media blitz that tries to repackage a "stay the course" strategy that isn't working, the President and his administration should give the public a plan, with a timetable, to complete the military mission in Iraq. We need to get the focus back on the significant threats the United States faces that are currently being ignored or inadequately addressed."

Feingold voted against the Iraq resolution in October 2002. In June, he introduced a resolution that called on the President to provide a flexible, public timetable for concluding our mission in Iraq - one that is tied to clear and achievable benchmarks. In August, Feingold suggested December 31, 2006 as a target date to complete the military mission there.
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Bush Lauds Iraq Progress, Cites Challenges
By Deb Riechmann
The Associated Press

Wednesday 07 December 2005

Trying to build support for Iraq war strategy, President Bush acknowledged Wednesday that reconstruction has proceeded with "fits and starts" but spreading economic progress is lifting people's hopes for a democratic future.

In particular, Bush cited Najaf, 90 miles south of Baghdad, and Mosul in northern Iraq - once the sites of some of the bloodiest battles of the war - as two cities where headway is being made, giving Iraqis more of a stake in their country's future.

"In places like Mosul and Najaf, residents are seeing tangible progress in their lives," Bush said. "They're gaining a personal stake in a peaceful future and their confidence in Iraq's democracy is growing. The progress in these cities is being replicated across much of Iraq. And more of Iraq's people are seeing the real benefits that a democratic society can bring."

There's still plenty of work left to do in cities like Najaf and Mosul, he said.

"Like most of Iraq, the reconstruction in Najaf has proceeded with fits and starts since liberation," Bush said. "It's been uneven. Sustaining electric power remains a major challenge. ... Security in Najaf has improved substantially but threats remain. There are still kidnappings and militias and armed gangs are exerting more influence than they should in a free society."

Bush's speech was the second in a series of four to answer criticism and questions about the continuing U.S. presence in Iraq more two and a half years after the war started.

Bush is shouldering the lowest job approval rating of his presidency, and the latest series of speeches amount to a public relations campaign to respond to political pressure that has mounted as U.S. deaths have eclipsed 2,100. He and other administration officials are working to shore up slumping public support for the war in the run-up to the Dec. 15 vote in Iraq to create a democratically elected government that will run the country for the next four years.

While Bush talked about reconstruction projects and the reopening of schools, markets and hospitals, the upgrading of roads and the growth of construction jobs in the two cities, he also acknowledged that both cities still face challenges.

"Iraqis are beginning to see that a free life will be a better life," Bush said. "Reconstruction has not always gone as well as we had hoped, primarily because of the security challenges on the ground. Rebuilding a nation devastated by a dictator is a large undertaking."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi suggested that Bush was out of touch with reality in Iraq. "Just because he says thing are improving there, doesn't make it so," the California Democrat said.

"The president says the security situation on the ground is better. It is not," Pelosi said. "More of the same in Iraq is not making us safer."

After a caucus meeting on Iraq, she and other Democrats in leadership sought to project a unified front on the war, even though they disagree over just when U.S. troops should return home.

In his speech, Bush acknowledged that there's still plenty of work left to do in cities like Najaf and Mosul.

"Like most of Iraq, the reconstruction in Najaf has proceeded with fits and starts since liberation," he said. "It's been uneven. Sustaining electric power remains a major challenge."

"Security in Najaf has improved substantially but threats remain," Bush added. "There are still kidnappings and militias and armed gangs are exerting more influence than they should in a free society."

Critics of the administration's reconstruction strategy in Iraq say not enough has been done since the U.S.-led invasion to reduce unemployment, step up oil production and keep the lights on.

"There's no doubt there are a lot of good things happening economically, but to conclude, therefore, that the economy is fundamentally healthy or that it's improving fast enough to really help us with the war, I think goes too far," said Michael O'Hanlon, foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank in Washington.

The administration also is trumpeting progress on the economic front in a 35-page booklet titled "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" that it released a week ago when the president gave the first speech of the series at the U.S. Naval Academy. There, he highlighted progress in training Iraqi army and police forces. Democrats dismissed his remarks at the time as a stay-the-course speech with no real strategy for success

"This is quiet, steady progress," Bush said Wednesday. "It doesn't always make the headlines and the evening news. But it's real and it's important and it is unmistakable to those who see it close up."

Senate Democrats were issuing a report Wednesday saying the U.S. faces a reconstruction gap. While the administration cites the number of new schools built, roads paved and businesses created, "the simple fact is that basic needs - jobs, essential services, health care - remain unmet," according to the report obtained by The Associated Press.

"Iraq's economic progress has fallen significantly short of administration's goals," the Democratic report said. "Clearly, efforts to grow Iraq's economy have been challenging because Saddam Hussein left his nation's economic infrastructure in shambles. However, the Bush administration has exacerbated the challenge by its poor planning and policies."
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120705A.shtml
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[Saundra Hummer]

Warning Bell in Ohio


Commentary: Court decision: the unequal application of voting laws in the states violates the Constitution.
By Tova Andrea Wang
December 6, 2005

Article created by The Century Foundation.

A federal court in Ohio has just issued a decision that has potentially enormous significance for elections all over the country. In The League of Women Voters et al. v. Blackwell, a federal judge denied a motion to dismiss by the Governor and Secretary of State. Instead, he ruled that if the League and other voting rights organizations can demonstrate there were “systemic breakdowns” in the election system that led to widely disparate levels of voting access throughout the state in 2004 (and for over three decades before that), the state likely violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

Judge James G. Carr writes,

Put simply, LWV contends that defendants’ election system provides different voting rights to different citizens based solely on where those citizens happen to reside and vote. Some citizens get short lines, properly functioning voting machines, well trained and informed poll workers, accurate registration information, and the opportunity to cast unencumbered absentee or proper provisional ballots. Other citizens, due to the vagaries of residence and registration, encounter long lines, defective voting machines, ill-trained and uninformed poll workers, inaccurate registration information, and absentee or provisional ballots that are ultimately deemed invalid. If LWV’s allegations are well founded, defendants may be depriving citizens of the franchise depending on where they live in violation of the equal protection clause.

This statement should be a loud and clear warning bell for states all over the country. The problems in Ohio were perhaps the most pervasive and certainly the most publicized, but similar problems plagued many states in 2004, and threaten to continue to do so if action is not taken.

For example, many states had completely inconsistent policies and practices regarding the casting and counting of provisional ballots. There was not just inconsistency across states—there were varying types of treatment within states. According to a report by the nonpartisan electionline.org:

In Arizona, a state that requires provisional ballots be cast in the correct precinct to be counted, at least two counties, Gila and Pinal, counted provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct. . . . During the state’s presidential primaries, Illinois did not count provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct. The State Board of Elections issued a directive for the November election instructing counties to count ballots cast in the wrong precinct for some federal races. Some counties followed the directive, while others citing state law requiring the correct precinct did not.

According to other reports, some places voters were offered a provisional ballot when they were supposed to get one, while other voters were simply denied their right to cast a provisional ballot.

With respect to absentee ballots, certain counties in Florida completely disenfranchised voters through mismanagement. Voters who requested absentee ballots in a timely manner nonetheless either never received them or received them too late to vote. As was reported in the Bradenton Herald on October 27, 2004, 6 days before the election, “The Broward County Supervisor of Elections office on Tuesday said it couldn’t account for nearly 60,000 missing absentee ballots sent to voters and that its phone lines were being overwhelmed by calls.” The next day, the Miami Herald reported that 76,000 missing absentee ballots would be re-mailed—5 days before the election, to people all over the country. According to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, many of these voters were completely disenfranchised as a result of these difficulties. Notably, the counties with problems were all Democratic strongholds.

The state of Washington’s complex and confusing law regarding the voting rights of ex-felons has led to widespread inconsistency in treatment of voters. Neither citizens nor elections administrators are sure of what the law requires. Until threatened with legal action, in 2003 in New York, more than half of the state’s 62 county boards of elections, including all five boroughs in New York City, were found to have been refusing to register individuals with felony records until they provided various documents.

Also in New York, in 2004, disparities in training and voting information were made all too apparent in a study finding elections officials had wildly varying interpretations of what the state’s voter identification requirement was.

Finally, with respect to voting machines, Florida’s troubles continue. A study by the Broward Daily Business News of three South Florida counties found:

[The] voter-to-machine ratio varied significantly among the counties. Overall, Miami-Dade precincts had an average of 195 registered voters per machine, Broward precincts had an average of 184 voters per machine and Palm Beach County had an average of 145. The contrasts were more dramatic between the 1,502 precincts in the three counties. Precinct 640 at the University of Miami had a registered voter to voting machine ratio of 347—the highest in the three counties. In contrast, in some Palm Beach County precincts, a single registered voter was assigned his or her personal machine. . . . At the University of Miami, the wait times were as long as five hours, and many students who had classes and tests left without casting a ballot. . . . Of the 20 precincts where [Elections] Supervisor Kaplan’s office most severely underestimated the number of voters, 14 were in heavily Democratic Miami Beach.

What makes this case all the more interesting is that the judge found that the Governor and Secretary of State were the proper defendants in the action. In other words, those at the top will be held responsible for ensuring that our democracy is equally accessible to all voters—regardless of race, ethnicity, and yes, where they happen to live. It also shows that no matter how many laws the federal or state government passes, if elections officials implement them in a wrongful or incompetent manner, true election reform can never have real meaning.

Of course, the Supreme Court based its Bush v. Gore decision in 2000 on the equal protection clause, but famously held that, “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.” Judge Carr’s ruling suggests that while the judicial system might be obligated to ignore that particular case, it cannot continue to ignore the conflict between the constitution and the way elections are conducted in the United States.

Tova Andrea Wang is senior program officer and Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation.Related articles

Related Articles
Bad Fixes, Wrong Problems
The Carter-Baker report on election reform misses the point.
P L U S :
Photo ID Requirement Compromises Voter Rights.
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GO ON SITE TO ACCESS THESE FOLLOW UP STORIES AND MUCH MORE. jUST CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING LINK.

http://motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/12/warning_bell_in_ohio.html

[Saundra Hummer]

A Higher Frequency


NEWS: How the rise of Salem Communications' radio empire reveals the evangelical master plan

By Adam Piore
Illustration: John Hersey

December/January 2006 Issue

IT'S A SUNNY MORNING IN SOUTHERN California, but inside the gleaming Glendale studios of KKLA, nationally syndicated radio personality Dennis Prager has spotted a dark cloud on the horizon, namely the “soullessness” of Europe. The white-haired host with a deep baritone and, this morning, a purple tie has fresh evidence of the Continent’s decline: a recent study linking depression in France to the nation’s loss of religious faith. “The breakdown in Christianity has led to a profound crisis,” he says, his meaty hands cutting the air for emphasis. “What will people believe in? It leads to communism and fascism. It’s one of the reasons I so worry about secularism in our society. I don’t want that breakdown here.”

You’ll hear that message a lot on stations owned by Salem Communications, a little-known for-profit Christian radio empire that has ridden the evangelical movement to the big leagues and is quietly becoming a force in national politics. Before it was purchased by Salem, KKLA was owned by a cigar-chomping preacher whose promises of redemption raked in millions to help finance a lavish Pasadena estate, replete with a Rembrandt, a Monet, and show ponies. But Salem’s founders, Stuart Epperson and Edward Atsinger III, have a far grander goal: spreading the word of the Lord and offering an alternative to the creeping secularism that they see as responsible for America’s moral decay. “When you secularize a culture,” says Epperson, “you lose your moral compass.” A mission statement in Salem’s 2003 annual report reads: “One mended marriage. One regained childhood. One restored faith. One broadcast at a time.”

Atsinger and Epperson started their company 30 years ago as young, idealistic evangelicals. Today Salem is the second-fastest-growing radio chain in the nation. The left—which for years dismissed evangelical activists as out-of-touch zealots—has nothing on the radio dial even close to Salem’s reach and influence. Air America is broadcast on 70 stations and owns none. Salem owns 103 stations in the nation’s largest markets and broadcasts to more than 1,900 affiliates. It owns radio stations in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta. In fact, it doesn’t own just one station in those markets. It owns two—sometimes more. In Los Angeles it owns four. In Honolulu it owns seven. It also owns 62 websites and a magazine publishing division.

Though the chain is not as large as Clear Channel Radio (which owns 1,200 stations) or Viacom’s Infinity Broadcasting (178), Salem’s programming is available to one-third of the U.S. population; its websites are read by some 3 million people. Salem Radio Network News division is, according to its website, “the only Christian-focused news organization with fully equipped broadcast facilities at the U.S. House, Senate, and White House manned by full-time correspondents—ensuring timely, on-the-spot coverage of breaking news…specifically created for Christian-formatted radio stations.” In a move that mirrors the Republican Party’s objectives, Atsinger and Epperson have recently expanded Salem’s stable of Christian talk-show hosts—James Dobson, Randall Terry, Janet Parshall—to include conservative Jews like Prager and Michael Medved. The company is a leading outlet for Christian rock, one of the music industry’s fastest-growing segments, and is chasing after black and Latino listeners. The company was also quick to embrace iPod technology to do what evangelicals call “godcasting.”

By melding business savvy, generous political giving, and an unshakable faith in their own moral righteousness, Epperson and Atsinger have built Salem into a blue-chip Wall Street company that has tapped into what Medved calls “a conservative religious counterculture” that is “far more powerful and far more significant than anything in the stupid counterculture of the 1960s.”

For all such thunder, resembles any other radio station. In its studio, a chubby, disheveled engineer spins the dials while a moody young woman struggles to keep pace with the flood of calls to Prager’s show. In his office, general manager Terry Fahy pores over Arbitron ratings and listener patterns. Look a little closer, though, and you’ll notice that the engineer’s T-shirt is emblazoned with a huge American flag and the words “God Bless America,” the screener’s handbag sports a “Jews for Bush and Cheney” pin, and on Fahy’s bookshelf is a small glass cross and a piece of framed scripture—the latter a gift from missionaries who smuggle Bibles into China.

According to University of Akron political science professor John C. Green, conservative Christians listen to Salem’s stations “the same way sports fans listen to sports radio shows,” keeping abreast of the latest developments regarding abortion, gay marriage, Iraq. In many ways, Green says, the chain typifies “the congealing of the religious communities into a potent political force. When traditional issues become important in campaigns—as they did in the last campaign—they can have a huge impact.” Programming such as Salem’s “challenges people to accept their obligation as Christian citizens,” says Frank Wright, president of National Religious Broadcasters. (Epperson currently serves on NRB’s board.) “Our faith in Jesus Christ has eternal spiritual dimensions, but it has a temporal practical obligation to live out your faith in the world around you. That means being involved in the world around you, whether it be the law or medicine—certainly government and politics.”

Salem’s stations allow the religious right to share information, mobilize allies, and galvanize public opinion. During the Terri Schiavo battle, Dobson took to Salem’s airwaves and told listeners: “A woman’s life hangs in the balance. We really have to defend this woman, because if she dies, the lives of thousands of people around the country can be killed, too. There’s a principle here: It’s a paradigm of death versus a paradigm of life.” Dobson’s cohost then reeled off the phone numbers of Florida legislators. Salem’s founders are as politically skilled as their hosts. Time magazine recently named Epperson—who’s twice run for Congress as a Republican—as one of “the 25 most influential evangelicals in America” in a cover-story package that asked “What Does Bush Owe Them?” Atsinger is a Bush Pioneer, meaning he gave $100,000 to the president’s reelection campaign. In the 1990s, he helped revolutionize California politics, first by running Christians for local school boards and then backing candidates who took over the legislature. In 2000, the two men, along with a close political ally, funneled $780,000 into a California state ballot initiative to ban gay marriages. Both have served on the board of the Council for National Policy, a secretive and exclusive network of conservative activists and moneymen.

In 2004, Atsinger cochaired Americans of Faith, a massive, church-based, get-out-the-vote campaign, and Salem ran hundreds of radio spots urging Christians to vote. A Salem affiliate in Pennsylvania sponsored an Operation Vote caravan that registered voters, offering them prizes of cars and cash. Epperson and Atsinger were “spark plugs to take voter registration to the next level,” says NRB’s Wright. They also contributed $15,000 to John Thune’s campaign to defeat Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, and Salem host Kevin McCullough solicited funds for Thune on his Salem-sponsored blog.

For all their political activity, Atsinger, 66, and Epperson, 69, have shunned the spotlight. Atsinger declined to discuss his activism, and Epperson would rather talk about the Bible. He’s particularly fond of Romans, in which Paul describes the plight of those who’ve turned away from God: “So they are without excuse, for though they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him. But they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”

Says Epperson: “I personally am happy the president won. But we’ve been very careful as a company to be nonpartisan. We talk about issues and urge people to vote their conscience. Democrats can be more credible by looking at the issues we care about and being responsive to our issues.”

In other words, get with the program.

In a Barnes & Noble parking lot in Orange, California, Salem host Michael Medved sits at a table flanked by speakers. A large heckler in a “Newt and Bush: Dumb and Dumber” T-shirt is at the mike, and Medved has him on the ropes.

“Why are you so concerned about what people in France think about Americans defending themselves?” Medved asks.

“Because Americans are stupid and idiotic!” says the man, who identifies himself as Russ.

“Why are you so full of hate?” shouts an elderly lady in the audience.

“I’m a pacifist,” Russ objects.

“You’re not really a pacifist,” Medved scoffs. “What would the right response have been when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor?”

The crowd is eating it up, and when Russ eventually slinks off, Medved is showered with applause.

It’s easy to cheer when you’re on the winning team, especially against such an easy target. But things weren’t always so fun for the traditional-values crowd. In 1972, when Atsinger and Epperson bought their first station together in Bakersfield, California, it was liberals who seemed to have the last laugh. Abortion was about to be legalized, school prayer had been banned, and gays were on the march. “Things move very slowly in a culture,” Epperson says. “But the increasing secular humanism in our culture seemed to be moving at a gallop pace. We felt we needed to do something.”

Epperson had learned early that radio is a powerful tool to spread the gospel. He grew up on a tobacco farm in Ararat, Virginia. Andy Griffith hailed from just down the road in Mount Airy. During World War II, Epperson’s older brother worked for the Navy, developing radar. Upon returning home, he built a radio station on the second floor of the Epperson farmhouse, and when word of it spread through the hills, musicians began showing up on Saturdays with banjos, guitars, and fiddles to play their “hillbillery.” The preachers took the microphone on Sundays. Stuart Epperson made his debut at 10, reading the 23rd Psalm.

He studied broadcasting at Bob Jones University and founded his first station in 1961. Through his wife, Nancy, he met his future business partner: her brother, Edward Atsinger III. Born in Honolulu in 1939 and raised in Southern California, Atsinger had also graduated from Bob Jones, after which he taught public speaking in the L.A. public schools.

The two soon purchased a small secular station in Bakersfield. But it was at tiny KDAR in Oxnard, California—their first Christian station, bought in 1974—that Atsinger and Epperson began developing the formula they would later replicate so successfully. Preachers paid for time to sermonize, listeners could call in, some slots were reserved for Christian music. KDAR was a refuge from the hedonism and cynicism of the mainstream stations, and Atsinger and Epperson realized people craved it. “We felt we had a message, and we felt the message deserved—demanded—the best facilities,” Epperson says. “We felt our mission was to build a platform for the best communicators to communicate biblical truth,” to speak about “the eternal soul and the destiny of man.”

Once they got a taste, nothing seemed more important. In 1977, Epperson and Atsinger mortgaged their homes and sold all their secular stations. Over the next eight years, leveraged to the gills, they went to the very places where cynicism and secularism breed the fastest—American cities. They got licenses in San Francisco, San Antonio, Seattle, Boston, even a weak signal on Staten Island.

Sometimes their quixotic mission felt more like a burden than a blessing. “It was a fearful time,” remembers Epperson. “I went to Boston and bought WEZE and came back home, got a mortgage on the house, and told my wife we may be starting over.” In some cities, Epperson and Atsinger were greeted with skepticism, even outright hostility. But everything changed with the acquisition of KKLA. The previous owner, Gene Scott, had operated a transmitter 1,000 times more powerful than tiny KDAR-Oxnard. When the FCC accused Scott of stealing from his tax-exempt ministry and didn’t renew his license, Epperson and Atsinger were well positioned to take over the signal. In 1985, Salem won the right to beam the word of God into the nation’s second-largest radio market and to an audience used to opening its checkbooks for Christian causes.

Using this blue-chip Los Angeles-area station as collateral, Atsinger and Epperson could now secure even larger loans. From 1986 to 1990, Salem moved into Chicago, bought two stations in Portland, Oregon, and one in San Diego, then scored a strong signal in the mother of all markets, New York City.

Unlike KKLA, WMCA did not come with a Christian audience accustomed to tuning in. WMCA’s audience was all about rock and roll; back in its heyday, the station broadcast a famous Beatles concert live from Shea Stadium. “There was some degree of opposition and ridicule, but the more difficult thing to overcome was apathy,” remembers Joe Davis, whom Salem had hired to revamp WMCA. “They weren’t impressed. In a cosmopolitan city that prizes intellectual pursuits, freedom of thought, and independence of lifestyle, New Yorkers saw religious people as second-class citizens. It was hard to get them to engage and recognize that the station did have something to say.”

Salem responded with the same methodical network building that has characterized the political rise of evangelicals across the nation. On Sundays, Davis loaded his wife, Carolyn, into their Ford Taurus and headed to churches across the tristate area. After services, they handed out WMCA program guides to parishioners and then lunched with the local pastor. Over the course of three years, the Davises visited 154 churches and got to know pastors from Harlem to Westchester. On New Year’s Eve, Davis recruited church youth groups to go to Times Square to hand out hot chocolate and church literature. Salem’s DJs spent the night interviewing the kids, keeping congregations back in their hometowns apprised of their activities as the excitement built toward midnight. The young people got to know each other. The church elders mingled. Salem gained listeners.

In addition to patient proselytizing, Salem’s rapid expansion owed a lot to Reagan-era deregulation. Until 1987, the FCC required broadcasters to provide equal time to political opponents. And the last thing a religious broadcaster wanted to do was eat up airtime with liberals “promoting” abortion and homosexuality. But when the FCC repealed the fairness doctrine, the shackles that had forced Salem to tiptoe cautiously around the society’s great cultural fault lines fell away. KKLA station manager Terry Fahy first realized the raw political power Salem now commanded when Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ hit the theaters in 1988. KKLA spearheaded a demonstration at MCA Universal Studios, where chanting protesters mobbed the entrance, waving signs and banners. “They were saying Route 101 is really blocked, you can’t get there,” remembers Fahy, who now manages Salem’s four-station L.A. cluster. Tens of thousands of people also participated in protests at theaters and video stores nationwide. That was a lot of Christians—enough, by any objective measure, to wield significant political clout if harnessed.

It was around this time that Jerry Sloan, a former fundamentalist minister turned gay activist who heads Project Tocsin, which monitors the political activities of evangelical groups in California, began hearing the name Edward Atsinger III. The reason had nothing to do with radio. In 1989, a mysterious entity named the Capitol Commonwealth Group began recruiting Christian activists to run for school boards and other offices. “Nobody knew who they were, but we got word from candidates who said they were being asked questions about their feelings on homosexuality and abortion,” Sloan says.

Liberals would forever after ruefully refer to what happened next as the “San Diego Surprise.” Sixty of the mysterious group’s 90 candidates won. The surprise part came when parents realized the new school board members advocated school prayer and creationism—and that their financial backers were the largely unknown, but ex- tremely wealthy, evangelicals Howard Ahmanson Jr. and Robert Hurtt, who’d founded a like-named lobby shop (Capitol Resource Institute) a few years earlier. Ahmanson is an heir to a savings and loan fortune and a trustee of a think tank run by the Reverend R.J. Rushdoony, who preached that the death penalty should be instituted for crimes against the family, such as homosexuality and marital infidelity (see “A Nation Under God,” page 32). Hurtt is a wealthy businessman and devout follower of James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and a Salem host.

The San Diego Surprise was only a taste of what was to come. Ahmanson and Hurtt soon recruited Edward Atsinger, along with publishing magnate Roland Hinz, whose wife, Lila, has served on the board of directors of Paul Weyrich’s National Empowerment TV, and another millionaire Bob Jones alumnus named Richard Riddle.

Over a series of lunches in Orange County in 1991, these five men, all members of the secretive conservative Council for National Policy, hashed out an ambitious plan to transform California politics. The Capitol Commonwealth Group was reborn as the Allied Business PAC and began financing conservative candidates for the state Assembly. “We were tired of being the supply ship,” Hurtt told a reporter at the time. “We said, ‘Screw that; we’re now going to be the flagship.’” Together, backers of Allied Business “very quietly campaigned in the churches and passed out fliers urging them to vote for their candidates,” Sloan says. More important, they spent prodigiously. Allied Business was the fourth-largest political donor in the 1992 election cycle, giving $915,745. That was peanuts compared to the 1994 election cycle, in which Allied and its five founders doled out more than $5.3 million, and Hurtt spent an additional $952,080 on his own state Senate campaign. The result: a political earthquake. Two-thirds of Allied’s candidates won, the Republicans controlled the Assembly for the first time in 25 years, and Hurtt became the state Senate minority leader.

This success came with too much limelight for Allied, which was renamed the California Independent Business PAC (CIBPAC) and began funding candidates to challenge fellow Republicans whom CIBPAC’s founders found too moderate. Take the demise of Republican Assembly Speaker Brian Setencich. When 31-year-old Robert Prenter, a Fresno-area medical equipment salesman with no political experience, entered the 1996 Republican primary, Setencich didn’t take the kid too seriously. But Prenter was Ed Atsinger’s nephew. In the waning days of the campaign, Atsinger and his CIBPAC buddies bombarded the district with mailers that said Setencich opposed the death penalty for carjackers, was a “traitor” to the Republican Party, and was guilty of “public attacks on Christians and those who want to restore moral values to society.” Prenter won by 500 votes.

But in many ways CIBPAC’s victories were Pyrrhic. That same year the Democrats retook the legislature—in part by portraying CIBPAC candidates as demagogues—and voters passed a tough campaign spending law (though it has since been overturned). And CIBPAC’s tactics created a schism between Republican moderates and conservatives that has since only deepened. “These guys throw $50,000, $100,000 at a candidate before they’re even out of the gate,” Sloan says. “More moderate candidates who have nothing feel like they can’t run.” Kevin Drum, who writes the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, says that while “the Republican party in California, and particularly in Orange County, has always been very conservative, it’s never been religious based. Even Orange County is more anticommunist conservative. But money is the mother’s milk of politics.”

If party cohesion is the measure of success, then the religious conservative wing has been “disastrous” for California Republicans, says Drum. While candidates whom CIBPAC’s funders have sponsored still comprise a sixth of the current legislature, the Republicans twice lost the governorship by fielding ultraconservatives against Democrat Governor Gray Davis. But if bringing conservative ideals to the political fore is the yardstick, then the men behind CIBPAC have been wildly successful. Though Atsinger and Epperson aren’t on record as having contributed to the ballot initiative campaign to recall Davis, Salem radio personalities “made it a topic every day,” says Sloan. “Talk-show hosts like Ollie North said he was a sleazeball, raising money all the time. They attacked Davis on immigration, they used gay marriage. They stirred up the evangelicals and got them out to the polls.” In the election to decide whether or not to recall Davis and who his replacement might be, conservatives backed Tom McClintock, whom Atsinger had helped put in the state Senate with a $100,000 loan in 2000 and whom Ahmanson funded in the 2003 recall circus. And while McClintock proved no match for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s star power, Atsinger and Epperson have adeptly used California politics to catapult issues to the head of the national debate.

Particularly gay marriage. In 2000, Atsinger, Epperson, and Ahmanson poured $780,000 into a state ballot initiative against such unions. Along with Hurtt and Hinz, they’ve funded a vast network of conservative think tanks and special-interest groups that continue to influence policy, notably antigay activist Reverend Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition and the Western Center for Law and Religious Freedom, which famously defended the Kern County school district’s decision to ban Gabriel Garcìa Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude on the grounds of its “profanity” and “vulgarity.” Another such group, the Campaign for California Families, sued San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom last year to stop him from marrying gay couples. The debate over gay marriage in California became a national hot-button issue in part because Salem stations kept their audiences primed for outrage.

And that’s what George Bush owes these evangelicals.

By the mid-1990s, Salem had developed a signature business strategy. Atsinger and Epperson would approach highly leveraged stations and offer huge amounts of money. “They are actually pretty shrewd at buying stations, but also at moving stations around to maximize their coverage,” says John Crigler, an attorney in Washington, D.C. (Crigler represented Reed College after Salem acquired a station in Oregon and then moved its transmitter, which effectively blocked Reed’s signal.) Shows taped at KKLA and the three other stations based in the Glendale office are beamed out to affiliates, offering the company a significant advantage over single operators.

Soon, though, Salem bumped up against the FCC laws limiting the number of stations any one company could own nationwide and in each market. So, like everyone else in the broadcast industry, Epperson and Atsinger lobbied for the Telecommunications Act of 1996. They gave $74,000 to key legislators, a small part of the tidal wave of industry contributions. Pushed by Newt Gingrich’s 104th Congress, largely written by lobbyists, and signed by President Clinton, the new law eliminated FCC national ownership caps and loosened local ownership restrictions. After that, Salem Communications went on an acquisitions tear, owning 40 radio stations nationwide by the end of that year and organizing stations into local “clusters,” which shared administrative resources and gave Salem a further cost-saving edge over smaller operations.

Salem remains focused on deregulation. Between 1998 and 2004, Salem Communications and its executives contributed $423,000 to federal candidates—making it the sixth-largest industry donor today—96 percent of which went to Republicans. Salem also has a PAC, which contributes only to Republicans—about $54,000 to Republican congressional candidates in the last election cycle.

And because he’s been a reliable ally on deregulation as well as social issues, Salem’s leaders have maintained a close relationship with embattled former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. For the past six years, Salem Communications has paid about $26,000 a year to the Alexander Group, a Washington, D.C., lobbying group run by DeLay’s former chief of staff that had DeLay’s wife on its payroll. In 2000 and 2002, Atsinger was among the top contributors ($28,311) to the Republican Majority Issues Committee, a 527 advocacy group closely affiliated with DeLay that is now under fire for paying DeLay’s daughter a large salary; Epperson kicked in another $5,000. Atsinger is also one of only a handful of private citizens to contribute (thus far, $6,000) to DeLay’s legal expense trust fund. Salem’s support for DeLay should come as no surprise, says John Dunbar of the Center for Public Integrity: “Any radio company that wants to get bigger is obviously going to spend a ton of money lobbying because the issue of deregulation is very much in play.”

Salem has another reason to cultivate allies in Congress: hate crime legislation. “Historic Judeo-Christian teachings have always held that homosexual conduct is a mortal sin,” says NRB’s Wright. “We are fearful that criminal penalties for so-called hate crimes might impinge on Christian broadcasters.” In a recent op-ed about indecency laws pushed by some Christians, Epperson worried that such laws could be twisted by liberal opponents to muzzle Christians. “Sure right now an FCC dominated by reasonable people wouldn’t do anything drastic,” Epperson wrote. “But let us suppose that with this bill on the books the nation has elected Hillary Rodham Clinton as President.” Then, he says, Salem’s support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage would open it up to attacks. “The homosexual lobby would organize itself to insure that there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of complaints against stations that took that point of view. Armed with that sort of ammunition, the FCC would have no problem finding the excuse for shutting down those voices that broadcast what they would call homophobic views.”

By the late 1990s, Epperson and Atsinger were debating taking the company public. Joe Davis, Salem’s executive vice president of radio stations, remembers them worrying that to do so would force Salem to become mainstream. “Before the Bush phenomena, Wall Street didn’t understand niche broadcasting,” he says. “We’ve never had a litmus test, where a guy had to sign a statement of faith. Now we knew we really wouldn’t. The question was, would we be invaded by people who don’t share our values?”

The decision to go public was announced by Atsinger at a 1999 company conference in Colorado Springs. “We wanted this to be a company for eternity as well as for our time. We have unabashedly embraced Judeo-Christian values, and the whole purpose is to propagate those values,” Davis remembers Atsinger telling Salem’s station managers. “Up until now, we’ve been a Christian company. My prayer is that we will lead the industry as an excellent public company.” After Atsinger left the room, the station managers gathered together to pray, and then burst into a church hymn.

After going public, Salem bought eight stations from Clear Channel for $185.6 million. In 2000, it launched a flagship contemporary Christian music station in Dallas. In 2001, Salem added 12 stations in cities like Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Tampa. In 2002, it purchased Crosswalk.com, a website with 2.1 million monthly readers. In 2003, Salem acquired stations in Boston, Sacramento, Jacksonville, and Colorado Springs. In February, it paid $3.4 million for the URL Christianity.com.

Today Salem’s stock trades on the NASDAQ at around $20. In an industry rocked by an advertising slump, the company’s national advertising revenue grew 23 percent during 2004. “We believe this is due to a growing recognition among advertising agents and their clients of the significant size and buying power of the Christian audience in America. And the fact that Salem’s radio, publishing, and Internet platform offers the best way to reach this audience on a national basis,” Atsinger recently told a conference call of Wall Street analysts. Jonathan A. Jacoby, an analyst with Bank of America Securities, wrote recently that the current stock price does not yet reflect the company’s growth potential. “We increasingly like Salem’s growth strategy.”

Overall, Salem’s revenue grew 10 percent last year, second in the industry only to Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, according to a Bear Stearns analyst. And more than 40 percent of Salem’s revenue comes from programming by some 65 ministries and advocacy organizations such as Focus on the Family. Ninety percent of such clients who rent “block programming” reenlist, analysts say, which makes them a reliable source of revenue in advertising slumps.

Salem has made it clear that it won’t sacrifice its values for profit, even stating so in its annual report. But Epperson and Atsinger have apparently decided that the time has come to bring nonevangelicals into the fold. In 2004 Salem acquired 16 new news and talk stations, doubling its stable of secular stations. It also signed William Bennett—the former drug czar, education secretary, and Book of Virtues author—whose nationally syndicated show, “Morning in America,” is a huge draw. Salem has inked a deal to provide exclusive religious and family-issues talk for XM satellite radio, it owns a large and expanding number of Christian rock stations, and it sponsors huge outdoor concerts billed as “safe for the whole family.” It’s courting conservative Jews, Catholics, and Latinos—all constituencies prized by the Republican Party. “What they’ve decided to do is not just preach to the converted but to reach out to a larger audience,” explains Medved. “This is secular radio. But part of the idea is that you cannot separate faith from the ongoing debate in society at large or the nation’s political future.”

Carol Pierson, president and CEO of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, says the growth of religious broadcasting behemoths has come at the expense of locally produced public-interest and independent radio stations. In some areas, stations that once played jazz or broadcast NPR now feature religious programming. “Several religious networks own a huge number of licenses,” Pierson says. The nonprofit Educational Media Foundation is gobbling up parts of the spectrum reserved for educational programs and broadcasting religious programming. In the for-profit market, cash-rich companies like Salem are “pricing everybody out of the market,” Pierson says. “I think this is a major issue, and its impact on democracy is incredible.”

More than 100 million Americans now listen to Christian stations at least once a month, 43 percent more than five years ago, and, according to NRB president Frank Wright, Salem has spearheaded the trend. “Salem is far and away the fastest-growing Christian radio chain. Their growth has been meteoric,” says Wright. “I think these two guys are visionary.”
==
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/12/higher_frequency.html

[Saundra Hummer]

. .. "It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.": Samuel Adams

===

. .. "The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much less dissent.

"Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions..." : Gore Vidal

=

. .. "Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths.

"The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state.": David McGowan

=
. .. "Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." : Mark Twain. The Mysterious Stranger 1916.

===
To read this newsletter online http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/ or http://snipurl.com/ayzc

[Saundra Hummer]

Voters take back elections

While Congress wallows in the ethical swamp where money and politics meet, one more state just found a way out. Voters there will pay for campaigns, which might be the bargain of the century. They'll save countless dollars doled from public coffers to the favor seekers who fund campaigns now.

Connecticut's Legislature voted last week to create a public financing option for candidates who run for state office. Seven other states and two cities have done the same over the past decade - a movement that hasn't been spotted on the national radar but might auger a seismic shift in attitudes.


In Connecticut, an embarrassing run of state and local scandals, including the jailing of a corrupt governor and several others, finally forced action. But the experience of states like Maine and Arizona that pioneered the "clean money" alternative should encourage others to do the same.


The idea is simple: Candidates for the Connecticut Legislature or a statewide office who raise a modest amount of seed money from small donors to prove their legitimacy can qualify for public funds, which range from $25,000 for a state House race to $3 million for a gubernatorial campaign. In return, they must pledge to spurn private donations:


• In Maine, where the movement started, more than 80% of last year's legislative candidates rejected private money, freeing them to spend more time talking to voters about the issues instead of having to hustle the state's political big spenders.


• In Arizona, 56% of all candidates last year ran with "clean money."


• In North Carolina, a dozen judicial candidates accepted public money, avoiding the ethical quagmire of taking donations from those likely to have issues before the courts.


Experience suggests that public financing is creating more competition and encouraging more women and other first-time candidates to get involved. No wonder, then, that many incumbents and the special interests behind them don't like the idea, since it could threaten their hold on power. (In Massachusetts, the Legislature sabotaged a public financing plan that voters adopted overwhelmingly in a referendum.)


Connecticut's lawmakers had been avoiding reform for years, many of them comfortable with the too-cozy system of hitting up lobbyists and state contractors for campaign cash. But enough finally got weary of being ridiculed as "Corrupticut" to pass the reforms by comfortable margins.


Vermont, New Jersey and New Mexico have also adopted public financing on a limited basis, as have Albuquerque and Portland, Ore. - where it's called "voter-owned elections."


Defenders of the status quo ridicule public financing as welfare for politicians and warn of potential abuses. But while hundreds of candidates have used the option, the few cases of misuse or disputes about overspending are a small price for taking ownership of elections away from interests that want to manipulate them for their own benefit.


Whether it's the statehouse or Congress, if the public doesn't claim ownership of elections by paying for them, plenty of others are willing to do so - at the public's expense.
==
Click on link to see article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20051206/cm_usatoday/voterstakebackelections;_ylt=An.U5CEn2f2LcXB2zQ8.v tWs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3YWFzYnA2BHNlYwM3NDI-

. .. [. .. See previous article back a few posts ago, as it is about this as well. SRH. ...]

[Saundra Hummer]

Archive
The October Surprise Mystery



The Original Eight-Part Series -- 'October Surprise X-Files'

The Russian Report
What the KGB knew about the October Surprise mystery, but the American people didn't. (12-11-95)

The Ladies Room Secrets
How historic secrets about this political era were recovered from a remote Capitol Hill wash room. (12-21-95)

Bill Casey's Iranian
What FBI wiretaps captured about secret payments from BCCI and a Bush-connected lawyer to an Iranian "double-agent."(12-31-95)

Follow the Money
How some of the world's most secretive and powerful players joined forces to fix the pivotal 1980 election. (1-15-96)

Saddam's 'Green Light'
What a "top secret" report reveals about the origins of the bloody Iran-Iraq War. (1-31-96)

Where's Bill Casey
How the national news media and Congress "debunked" the October Surprise allegations by adopting bogus alibis for Bill Casey. (2-14-96)

Bush & a CIA Power Play
What CIA veterans and former CIA director George Bush did to regain The White House in the 1980s. (2-29-96)

Lies Spun into History
How absurd alibis became part of the October Surprise historical record. (3-14-96)

More Recent Updates

The Bushes & the Death of Reason
Some Americans can't understand why George W. Bush and the neoconservatives were so confident in their ability to sell the nation on a bogus case for war with Iraq. Part of the answer can be found in the Republican success in turning back Iran-Contra accusations through the use of irrational arguments. One such case study starts with an unpublished photograph taken at the Bohemian Grove resort on the last weekend of July 1980. May 9, 2005

Real-Life 'National Treasure' -- in Reverse
Walt Disney's action film, "National Treasure," is a fanciful hunt for hidden treasure with characters following complex clues left behind by the Founding Fathers. In real-life Washington, the "October Surprise mystery" -- whether Republicans sabotaged Jimmy Carter in 1980 with behind-the-back dealings with Iran -- represents how the world really works, with modern-day leaders doing all they can to destroy any clues that might lead the nation to an honest conclusion. May 6, 2005

A Lawyer & National Security Cover-ups
Prominent Washington lawyer Lawrence Barcella has come under criticism for the use of a false affidavit to convict former CIA officer Edwin Wilson on terrorism charges in 1983. But the unraveling of the Wilson case -- and its damage to Barcella's reputation -- also raise new doubts about Barcella's role in "debunking" the October Surprise allegations that the Reagan-Bush campaign disrupted President Jimmy Carter's Iran-hostage negotiations before the pivotal national election in 1980. May 4, 2005

David Rockefeller & 'October Surprise' Case
Election 1980 was a turning point in American political history, but how the Republicans exploited Jimmy Carter's humiliation over the Iranian hostage crisis to ensure Ronald Reagan's victory is still little understood. Nor do the American people know the background roles in the "October Surprise" case played by David Rockefeller, the Shah of Iran's banker, and his many powerful friends. Adapted from Secrecy & Privilege. Posted April 15, 2005

Rockefeller Aide's Tie to 'October Surprise'
Some of the most intriguing documents found in the files of the House 'October Surprise' Task Force relate to the role of Joseph Verner Reed, one of Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller's top aides. According to an FBI agent's notes, Reed tried to stonewall the investigation of alleged Republican interference in President Carter's 1980 Iran-hostage negotiations. The Reed documents were never released to the American people but were found by reporter Robert Parry in a Capitol Hill storage room. Part of our new Document Archive. Posted April 12, 2005.

Russian Report on 'October Surprise' Case
For the first time, we are posting the "confidential" Russian government report about the 1980 "October Surprise" case. The report -- a rare case of Moscow cooperating with the United States on an intelligence investigation -- asserts that Reagan-Bush campaign officials did secretly negotiate with Iranian leaders behind President Carter's back. Posted April 5, 2005

Arafat & the Original 'October Surprise'
Skeletons of an election controversy past -- the alleged Reagan-Bush "October Surprise" scheme of 1980 -- have surfaced, as a top aide to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat describes a secret meeting between the PLO and a key Republican. The Arafat aide says the Republican sought the PLO's help in sabotaging President Carter's efforts to free 52 American hostages in Iran. November 2, 2004

Russia's Prime Minister & 'October Surprise'
Boris Yeltsin’s nominee for Russia’s new prime minister wrote a secret report in 1993, confirming the 1980 ‘October Surprise’ charges and implicating top Republicans in a hostage plot with Iran. Sergey Stepashin sent the explosive report to the U.S. Congress, but the extraordinary document was hidden. By Robert Parry. May 14, 1999

Earl Brian: Reagan's 'Scandal Man' Off to Jail
In the early 1990s, the word of Ronald Reagan's friend Earl Brian helped debunk two major scandals. But now, Brian's credibility has collapsed with his federal fraud conviction. (8/25/97)

October Surprise: Finally, Time for the Truth?
Seven years ago, Jamshid Hashemi, an Iranian businessman and CIA operative, broke his silence about the October Surprise controversy. Now, with more and more public figures corroborating parts of the story, Jamshid Hashemi is revealing new details about this ultimate dirty trick and the CIA. (5/5/97)

October Surprise: Time for Truth? (Part 2)
The enduring mystery of George Bush and alleged Paris meetings with Iranians in 1980: Did he go or did he stay? (5/19/97)

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile.html

===

. .. [. .. An interesting bit of reading, agree or not, it is fascinating. . .. SRH. ..]

[Saundra Hummer]

Archive
The October Surprise Mystery



The Original Eight-Part Series -- 'October Surprise X-Files'

The Russian Report
What the KGB knew about the October Surprise mystery, but the American people didn't. (12-11-95)

The Ladies Room Secrets
How historic secrets about this political era were recovered from a remote Capitol Hill wash room. (12-21-95)

Bill Casey's Iranian
What FBI wiretaps captured about secret payments from BCCI and a Bush-connected lawyer to an Iranian "double-agent."(12-31-95)

Follow the Money
How some of the world's most secretive and powerful players joined forces to fix the pivotal 1980 election. (1-15-96)

Saddam's 'Green Light'
What a "top secret" report reveals about the origins of the bloody Iran-Iraq War. (1-31-96)

Where's Bill Casey
How the national news media and Congress "debunked" the October Surprise allegations by adopting bogus alibis for Bill Casey. (2-14-96)

Bush & a CIA Power Play
What CIA veterans and former CIA director George Bush did to regain The White House in the 1980s. (2-29-96)

Lies Spun into History
How absurd alibis became part of the October Surprise historical record. (3-14-96)

More Recent Updates

The Bushes & the Death of Reason
Some Americans can't understand why George W. Bush and the neoconservatives were so confident in their ability to sell the nation on a bogus case for war with Iraq. Part of the answer can be found in the Republican success in turning back Iran-Contra accusations through the use of irrational arguments. One such case study starts with an unpublished photograph taken at the Bohemian Grove resort on the last weekend of July 1980. May 9, 2005

Real-Life 'National Treasure' -- in Reverse
Walt Disney's action film, "National Treasure," is a fanciful hunt for hidden treasure with characters following complex clues left behind by the Founding Fathers. In real-life Washington, the "October Surprise mystery" -- whether Republicans sabotaged Jimmy Carter in 1980 with behind-the-back dealings with Iran -- represents how the world really works, with modern-day leaders doing all they can to destroy any clues that might lead the nation to an honest conclusion. May 6, 2005

A Lawyer & National Security Cover-ups
Prominent Washington lawyer Lawrence Barcella has come under criticism for the use of a false affidavit to convict former CIA officer Edwin Wilson on terrorism charges in 1983. But the unraveling of the Wilson case -- and its damage to Barcella's reputation -- also raise new doubts about Barcella's role in "debunking" the October Surprise allegations that the Reagan-Bush campaign disrupted President Jimmy Carter's Iran-hostage negotiations before the pivotal national election in 1980. May 4, 2005

David Rockefeller & 'October Surprise' Case
Election 1980 was a turning point in American political history, but how the Republicans exploited Jimmy Carter's humiliation over the Iranian hostage crisis to ensure Ronald Reagan's victory is still little understood. Nor do the American people know the background roles in the "October Surprise" case played by David Rockefeller, the Shah of Iran's banker, and his many powerful friends. Adapted from Secrecy & Privilege. Posted April 15, 2005

Rockefeller Aide's Tie to 'October Surprise'
Some of the most intriguing documents found in the files of the House 'October Surprise' Task Force relate to the role of Joseph Verner Reed, one of Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller's top aides. According to an FBI agent's notes, Reed tried to stonewall the investigation of alleged Republican interference in President Carter's 1980 Iran-hostage negotiations. The Reed documents were never released to the American people but were found by reporter Robert Parry in a Capitol Hill storage room. Part of our new Document Archive. Posted April 12, 2005.

Russian Report on 'October Surprise' Case
For the first time, we are posting the "confidential" Russian government report about the 1980 "October Surprise" case. The report -- a rare case of Moscow cooperating with the United States on an intelligence investigation -- asserts that Reagan-Bush campaign officials did secretly negotiate with Iranian leaders behind President Carter's back. Posted April 5, 2005

Arafat & the Original 'October Surprise'
Skeletons of an election controversy past -- the alleged Reagan-Bush "October Surprise" scheme of 1980 -- have surfaced, as a top aide to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat describes a secret meeting between the PLO and a key Republican. The Arafat aide says the Republican sought the PLO's help in sabotaging President Carter's efforts to free 52 American hostages in Iran. November 2, 2004

Russia's Prime Minister & 'October Surprise'
Boris Yeltsin’s nominee for Russia’s new prime minister wrote a secret report in 1993, confirming the 1980 ‘October Surprise’ charges and implicating top Republicans in a hostage plot with Iran. Sergey Stepashin sent the explosive report to the U.S. Congress, but the extraordinary document was hidden. By Robert Parry. May 14, 1999

Earl Brian: Reagan's 'Scandal Man' Off to Jail
In the early 1990s, the word of Ronald Reagan's friend Earl Brian helped debunk two major scandals. But now, Brian's credibility has collapsed with his federal fraud conviction. (8/25/97)

October Surprise: Finally, Time for the Truth?
Seven years ago, Jamshid Hashemi, an Iranian businessman and CIA operative, broke his silence about the October Surprise controversy. Now, with more and more public figures corroborating parts of the story, Jamshid Hashemi is revealing new details about this ultimate dirty trick and the CIA. (5/5/97)

October Surprise: Time for Truth? (Part 2)
The enduring mystery of George Bush and alleged Paris meetings with Iranians in 1980: Did he go or did he stay? (5/19/97)

Click on the following link to access site, and it's links.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile.html
===
. .. [. .. An interesting bit of reading, agree or not, it is fascinating - a lead up to todays world, and a look at what is happening now. . .. SRH. ..]

[LAL]

(http://www.mises.org/story/1971)
Our Money Madness by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

We flatter ourselves, in this technological age driven by financial innovation and mind-boggling efficiencies, that we know more than any previous generation. But there is lost knowledge, among which is the knowledge of what sound money feels and looks like, what it does, who makes it and why, and how it holds its value.

So let us revisit Robert Louis Stevenson's classic story, Treasure Island, and the climactic scene where the pirates and their companions have finally found their treasure and prepare to haul it away. The narrator reports as follows:

It was a strange collection, like Billy Bones's hoard for the diversity of coinage, but so much larger and so much more varied that I think I never had more pleasure than in sorting them. English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges, and Louises, doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider's web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle, as if to wear them round your neck -- nearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection; and for number, I am sure they were like autumn leaves, so that my back ached with stooping and my fingers with sorting them out.

There is more to learn about real money from this paragraph than in most money and banking texts. Here we discover that money is international. It matters not what nation-state or private party mints it. Money can come in all shapes and sizes. It has enduring value for hundreds of years. It can be put in a vault and found by anyone in the future and retains its value. Its merit as money is not dependent on the existence or persistence of any single government.

The regimes that minted the coins may be long forgotten but the money they made stays as a permanent part of the economic landscape until it is melted. What this suggests is independence for the people who have, hold, and use the money. They are not roped into any regime as such. They go about their economic affairs as independent people. Their money, which cannot be destroyed by the actions of a central government or a central bank, testifies to their status as free people.

And what is it made of? Gold, silver, or any precious metal, something or anything that will cause a back to ache and the fingers to hurt from sorting them out. Money is heavy, robust, durable, divisible, enduring. It is treasure. It worth hiding when one is in trouble and worth hunting for if one stumbles upon a map to guide you there. As to when it was minted and by whom, it doesn't matter. Money lasts. Money is true. It transcends the generations. It transcends the nation. It transcends the state.

As for any money minted or printed in the last fifty years, some of it may have value as a collectible but its value would vanish to near zero if it were melted. As for the paper, it would be truly worthless. One can imagine the scene in Treasure Island had they opened the trunk to discover wads of paper currency from defunct governments. Let's just say the story would have ended very differently. It might have looked more like that scene in Lawrence of Arabia where the warriors trek hundreds of miles across the desert for treasure only to find crates full of paper cash, which the plunderers promptly throw to the wind. Lawrence wisely departs the scene on a horse, promising to return with real money.

Incidentally, I do think there is a point to buying children coins for presents. Just to hold an older coin of gold and silver imparts a lesson of sorts. It illustrates the reality of a history that is different from our present. I've never seen a child disregard a nice gold or silver coin. They keep it in a safe box, show it to their friends, and reflect on the sense of personal empowerment they experience from owning it. Children know what treasure is, even if central bankers do not.

Today we think of money as something to possess for instrumental purposes but something otherwise created and managed by the government to keep the economy going.

The new Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, was grilled at his Senate confirmation hearings as if he were a magician who could pull rabbits or squirrels out of his hat, depending on his mood that day. All the questions related to whether he would tend to prefer the rabbit of employment to the squirrel of inflation. The goal of these politicians was to prod him into admitting that squirrels are far to be preferred to rabbits, and if he would just admit it and swear to it, they would give him a free pass and let him perform, while Congress and president provide the necessary smoke and mirrors.

And by the way, Bernanke also promised to keep the Fed completely free from politics. "I assure this committee that, if I am confirmed, I will be strictly independent of all political influences and will be guided solely by the Federal Reserve's mandate from Congress and by the public interest."

When ex-Fed chairman Arthur Burns arrived at the Bonn airport as ambassador to Germany, a reporter asked him how he could have agreed to Nixon's desire to inflate so massively? The Fed chairman must do as the president wants, he answered, or the Fed would lose its independence.

Here is a rule of thumb. If an institution has a dot-gov in its web address, as in FederalReserve.gov, it is not independent and it is not free of politics.

One politician summed up the Fed's mandate this way: "guiding the economy to create broadly shared prosperity."

Herein we find the perfect summary of what is wrong with Washington's view of economic life. It imagines the economy to be guided by the Fed, and that prosperity is created by its printing press. Bernanke, however, was not in a position to correct the record, for he has himself spoken about the wonderful and limitless power of the Fed to create as much money as it wants to.

Thus spake Bernanke to those worried about deflation: "The US government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of US dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the US government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation."

What awesome power! Are we really supposed to believe that a government that possesses the ability to create unlimited amounts of money will wall off the institution that does the creating from any political influence? Surely not. The independence of the Fed is just a mask that the government uses so that it can avoid taking responsibility for any downside that comes about from the Fed's awesome power.

I suppose that if I had a counterfeiting machine, I too would want it kept out of the house and run by someone I could appoint who would nonetheless swear to be completely independent if caught in the act.

The Bernanke hearing was a despicable display in more ways than we can count. That there is a direct relationship between inflation and employment was never questioned, even though that relationship does not exist as a matter of history or economic law. To use the printing presses to drive down unemployment is to risk not only inflation but also radical economic instability and business cycles that can end in the worst of all worlds. And the idea that low unemployment — as a symbol of a growing economy — needs constant infusions of paper money inflation from the Fed is belied by the whole of the 19th century, as well as by economics.

What did Bernanke and his examiners agree on? They agreed that the Fed should be all-powerful in matters of macroeconomics. They agreed that there should not be any ironclad rule for the conduct of monetary affairs, but rather that smart guys ought to wing it day by day to achieve the right mix of policy options. And they all agreed that the prevention of deflation, meaning a fall in the general level of prices, ought to be the number one priority. So when you hear that Bernanke favors "low inflation," remember that the emphasis is on the noun and not its modifier. It means that he prefers any amount of inflation to a condition of deflation.

Why the hysteria against deflation? We are faced with a real puzzle here. In the whole of the private sector, the number one focus of retailers these days, particularly those dominant retailers such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot, is low prices. This they emphasize above all else because they know that this is what consumers want.

And yet in the public sector, we find exactly the opposite: an ironclad promise that prices will not be low but rather will be continually rising. So if Wal-Mart's slogan is "Always Low Prices," the slogan of the Fed and the government should be "Always Higher Prices."

The question is why. Why is it that Congress, the Fed, and the presidency all agree that deflation is something to be avoided at all costs? The experience of the Great Depression looms large but, as Murray Rothbard has shown, low prices were just about the only good economic trend that was happening throughout the 1930s. Imagine if you had all the same disasters occurring — all inspired by bad economic policy — but with high prices on top of it all! Here is a test. We all know people who lived through it. Ask them today if they would have been better off if all goods and services had been two or three or ten times more expensive.

No, the trouble with the Great Depression was not low prices. Nor were low prices and wages the cause of the economic downturn. As Rothbard further showed, the downturn was a correction of a previous inflation, a macroeconomic version of the dot-com bust, and one that was made ever worse by governmental attempts to fix the problem. As for the Fed, it did not pursue a policy of benign neglect but rather desperately attempted to inflate the money supply and was unable to do so.

The real blame for the Great Depression lies with precisely the policy that Bernanke favors, that is, a steady and relentless increase in the money supply to keep the economy humming while not sparking price increases that are politically objectionable. This inflation targeting is precisely the problem since it sends false signals to capital-goods investors and borrowers, skewing the production structure forward in time to a greater degree than underlying savings can support.

Not knowing what the Austrian School says, Congress and the Fed might believe that a policy of low-grade inflation is the best protection against depression. But I don't believe that this is why they favor such a policy. Nor do I think that the desire to boost employment is the reason, since there is no evidence for anything like a long-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment.

The reason the government — and here I speak of Congress and the presidency — favors a loose monetary policy, a discretionary rule at the Fed, and ongoing low-grade inflation is the most obvious one of all. It pays the bills. In other words, the reason is no different from that of private counterfeiting. They like to have money without having to work to get it. That is essentially what the Federal Reserve provides the government. It doesn't have to worry about its bond rating collapsing or its credit standing falling. It doesn't have to bother with taxing people. It can hide the costs of government in the complications associated with monetary affairs.

Full article here: http://www.mises.org/story/1971

[the magnificent goldberg]

I think you should have posted the entire article, LAL. The guy goes on to recommend a return to the gold standard. I'm afraid he is pure crank.

Which is not to say that some of what he has said isn't right. No doubt his quote of Burns is accurate. But this is a matter of specific fact, not a universal rule. The Bank of England has been independent of the UK Government since 1997 and its two Chairmen since then have both acted as if Gordon Brown, in giving the Bank this independence, ACTUALLY MEANT IT, (whether he did in reality or not). I have no doubt that, if the Tories at some time win an election, the Bank, and its Board and staff, will continue to act as if the new administration meant it as well (unless they publicly renege; most unlikely now). (I say this with some knowledge of the people involved, including both Chairmen.)

The Bank's experience since 1997 shows that it is possible for a Central Bank to follow broad objectives set by Government, in a manner that is not dictated by Government. The UK objective is low inflation. This has been delivered since 1997, with unemployment that is at levels economists describe as "frictional" - ie the result of people changing their jobs for various reasons and experiencing a short period of unemployment in the process. That means, in ordinary parlance, full employment.

If it doesn't happen in America, that is the fault of the individuals in charge of the system, not the system itself. Cranks who wish to see a return to the gold standard forget that the world money supply MUST increase approximately in line with the growth of the aggregate of world GDP. If this doesn't happen, deflation is the inevitable result of a growth in the supply of goods and services for which insufficient money exists to buy them. Deflation implies that producers obtain less in prices than the costs of production plus what they consider a worthwhile return on capital invested. If they can't get that, they won't produce. This will cause prices to rise to reach some equilibrium point when both supply and demand can be met by the existing money supply. But if the money supply is static, then production will be static. On a world wide scale, most of the world will be condemned to be forever poor/starving, because the supply of precious metals cannot be expanded to cover all their needs, far less their demand for luxuries of the kind that we enjoy.

MG

[Saundra Hummer]

Statement of Senator Russ Feingold on the Patriot Act Conference Report


By Senator Russ Feingold
t r u t h o u t | Statement

Thursday 08 December 2005

"I will do everything I can, including a filibuster, to stop this Patriot Act conference report, which does not include adequate safeguards to protect our constitutional freedoms. The version of the Patriot Act that was signed today is a major disappointment. I appreciate that it includes four-year sunsets on three controversial provisions, but merely sun-setting bad law is not adequate. We need to make substantive changes to the law, and without those changes I am confident there will be strong, bipartisan opposition here in the Senate.

This isn't about stopping Patriot Act reauthorization. The President could sign Patriot Act reauthorization legislation into law tomorrow if the House would just take up and pass the compromise Senate bill that was approved unanimously in the Senate earlier this year - a bill that includes important and reasonable privacy protections. The conference committee had the opportunity to fix many of the provisions of the Patriot Act to which Americans across the political spectrum have voiced their opposition over the last four years. Unfortunately, they decided not to listen. This battle is not over."

Bipartisan Group of Senators Oppose Patriot Act Revision
t r u t h o u t | Statement
By Jesse J. Holland
The Associated Press
Thursday 08 December 2005

House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement Thursday to extend the USA Patriot Act, the government's premier anti-terrorism law, before it expires at the end of the month. But a Democratic senator threatened a filibuster to block the compromise.

"I will do everything I can, including a filibuster, to stop this Patriot Act conference report, which does not include adequate safeguards to protect our constitutional freedoms," said Sen. Russ Feingold (news, bio, voting record), D-Wis., who was the only senator to vote against the original version of the Patriot Act.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., announced Thursday that a House-Senate negotiating committee had reached an agreement that would extend for four years two of the Patriot Act's most controversial provisions - authorizing roving wiretaps and permitting secret warrants for books, records and other items from businesses, hospitals and organizations such as libraries. Those provisions would expire in four years unless Congress acts on them again.

"All factors considered it's reasonably good, not perfect, but it's acceptable," Specter said of the agreement.

Also to be extended for four years are standards for monitoring "lone wolf" terrorists who may be operating independent of a foreign agent or power. While not part of the Patriot Act, officials considered that along with the Patriot Act provisions.

The Republican-controlled House had been pushing for those provisions to stay in effect as long as a decade, but negotiators decided to go with the GOP-controlled Senate's suggestion.

Most of the Patriot Act would become permanent under the reauthorization.

Feingold is not alone in his dislike of the compromise.

"We believe this conference report will not be able to get through the Senate," said a group of six senators, including Feingold, who have been working against the emerging deal. They said they will not support it in any form.

The other senators are Republicans Larry Craig of Idaho, John Sununu of New Hampshire and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois and Ken Salazar of Colorado.

It takes 60 senators to overcome a filibuster in the 100-member Senate.

"I don't think there will be a filibuster," Specter said. "I don't think it will succeed if there is one."

Sen. John Cornyn (news, bio, voting record), R-Texas, said the deal should satisfy everyone. "This agreement both preserves the provisions that have made America safer since 9/11 and increases congressional and judicial oversight, which should alleviate the concerns of those who believe the law enforcement tools endanger civil liberties," he said.

But the American Civil Liberties Union immediately denounced the deal, calling on lawmakers to reject the legislation because it intrudes too far into the privacy of innocent Americans.

"This sham compromise agreement fails to address the primary substantive concern raised by millions of Americans, as well as civil liberties, privacy and business organizations and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle and in both chambers," said Caroline Fredrickson, the ACLU's Washington legislative office director.

The ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, has not yet decided whether to support the agreement, a spokesman said. But the GOP-majority negotiating committee has enough votes to send the House and Senate the compromise if all of the Republican negotiators agree to it.

The Senate is expected to vote on the compromise next week, Specter said. That would give them enough time to deal with any filibuster threats before the Patriot Act provisions expire on Dec. 31.

Congress overwhelmingly passed the Patriot Act after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The law expanded the government's surveillance and prosecutorial powers against suspected terrorists, their associates and financiers.

The compromise also makes changes to national security letters, an investigative tool used by the FBI to compel businesses to turn over customer information without a court order or grand jury subpoena.

Under the agreement, the reauthorization specifies that an NSL can be reviewed by a court, and explicitly allows those who receive the letters to inform their lawyers about them.

The Bush administration contends that such consultation already is allowed, citing at least two court challenges to NSLs. However, in a letter obtained by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on its Web site, the FBI prohibits the recipient "from disclosing to any person that the FBI has sought or obtained access to information or records under these provisions."
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120805A.shtml

[Saundra Hummer]

Rumsfeld's Handshake Deal with Saddam: History out of Media Bounds

By Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 08 December 2005

Christmas came 11 days early for Donald Rumsfeld two years ago, when the news broke that American forces had pulled Saddam Hussein from a spidery hole. During interviews about the capture, on CBS and ABC, the Pentagon's top man was upbeat. And he didn't have to deal with a question that Lesley Stahl or Peter Jennings could have logically chosen to ask: "Secretary Rumsfeld, you met with Saddam almost exactly 20 years ago and shook his hand. What kind of guy was he?"


Now, Saddam Hussein has gone on trial, but such questions remain unasked by mainstream US journalists. Rumsfeld met with Hussein in Baghdad on behalf of the Reagan administration, opening up strong diplomatic and military ties that lasted through six more years of Saddam's murderous brutality.

As it happens, the initial trial of Saddam and co-defendants is focusing on grisly crimes that occurred the year before Rumsfeld gripped his hand. "The first witness, Ahmad Hassan Muhammad, 38, riveted the courtroom with the scenes of torture he witnessed after his arrest in 1982, including a meat grinder with human hair and blood under it," the New York Times reported Tuesday. And: "At one point, Mr. Muhammad briefly broke down in tears as he recalled how his brother was tortured with electrical shocks in front of their 77-year-old father."

The victims were Shiites - 143 men and adolescent boys, according to the charges - tortured and killed in the Iraqi town of Dujail after an assassination attempt against Saddam in early July of 1982. Donald Rumsfeld became the Reagan administration's Middle East special envoy 15 months later.

On December 20, 1983, the Washington Post reported that Rumsfeld "visited Iraq in what US officials said was an attempt to bolster the already improving US relations with that country." A couple of days later, the New York Times cited a "senior American official" who "said that the United States remained ready to establish full diplomatic relations with Iraq and that it was up to the Iraqis."

On March 29, 1984, the Times reported: "American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name." Washington had some goodies for Saddam's regime, the Times account noted, including "agricultural-commodity credits totaling $840 million." And while "no results of the talks have been announced" after the Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad three months earlier, "Western European diplomats assume that the United States now exchanges some intelligence on Iran with Iraq."

A few months later, on July 17, 1984, a Times article with a Baghdad dateline sketchily filled in a bit more information, saying that the US government "granted Iraq about $2 billion in commodity credits to buy food over the last two years." The story recalled that "Donald Rumsfeld, the former Middle East special envoy, held two private meetings with the Iraqi president here," and the dispatch mentioned in passing that "State Department human rights reports have been uniformly critical of the Iraqi President, contending that he ran a police state."

Full diplomatic relations between Washington and Baghdad were restored 11 months after Rumsfeld's December 1983 visit with Saddam. He went on to use poison gas later in the decade, actions which scarcely harmed relations with the Reagan administration.

As the most senior US official to visit Iraq in six years, Rumsfeld had served as Reagan's point man for warming relations with Saddam. In 1984, the administration engineered the sale to Baghdad of 45 ostensibly civilian-use Bell 214ST helicopters. Saddam's military found them quite useful for attacking Kurdish civilians with poison gas in 1988, according to US intelligence sources. "In response to the gassing," journalist Jeremy Scahill has pointed out, "sweeping sanctions were unanimously passed by the US Senate that would have denied Iraq access to most US technology. The measure was killed by the White House."

The USA's big media institutions did little to illuminate how Washington and business interests combined to strengthen and arm Saddam Hussein during many of his worst crimes. "In the 1980s and afterward, the United States underwrote 24 American corporations so they could sell to Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction, which he used against Iran, at that time the prime Middle Eastern enemy of the United States," writes Ben Bagdikian, a former assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, in his book The New Media Monopoly. "Hussein used US-supplied poison gas" against Iranians and Kurds "while the United States looked the other way."

Of course the crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime were not just in the future when Rumsfeld came bearing gifts in 1983. Saddam's large-scale atrocities had been going on for a long time. Among them were the methodical torture and murders in Dujail that have been front-paged this week in coverage of the former dictator's trial; they occurred 17 months before Rumsfeld arrived in Baghdad.

Today, inside the corporate media frame, history can be supremely relevant when it focuses on Hussein's torture and genocide. But the historic assistance of the US government and American firms is largely off the subject and beside the point.

A photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand on December 20, 1983, is easily available. (It takes a few seconds to find via Google.) But the picture has been notably absent from the array of historic images that US media outlets are providing to viewers and readers in coverage of the Saddam Hussein trial. And journalistic mention of Rumsfeld's key role in aiding the Iraqi tyrant has been similarly absent. Apparently, in the world according to US mass media, some history matters profoundly and some doesn't matter at all.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120805C.shtml

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death [. .. .Isn't that the truth? Spin and Spin till we can't think straight! SRH .. ..]

[Saundra Hummer]

JIM HIGHTOWER COMMENTARY

Click on the following link to access his audio or printed articles on these subjects:

HALLIBURTON's "TCNs" ......................12/7/2005

BUILDING A PROGRESSIVE FUTURE........12/6/2005

BUSH'S TWO NEW WAR LIES................12/5/2005

THE ABSURDITY OF PAT......................12/2/2005

SENATORIAL BEGGING..........................12/1/2005

DANDEROUS PRESIDENTIAL....................11/30/2005
SILLINESS......................................... .

ANOTHER CORPORATE CAPTIVE FOR........11/29/2005
THE COURT.........................................

CORPORATE FREE SPEECH......................11/28/2005

LOVE YOUR SHOES................................11/25/2005

A THANKSGIVING CONNECTION.................11/24/2005

HAPPINESS......................................... ...11/23/2005

LOCATIONG CORPORATE-FREE...................11/21/2005
COFFEE............................................ .....

And there's more in his archives, just click on the following line to either read or listen to his commentary:

http://www.jimhightower.com/air/archive.asp

[Saundra Hummer]

Beyond Spin

The propaganda presidency of George W. Bush
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2005, at 7:13 PM ET

A frequent complaint about the Clinton administration was that it tried too hard to "spin" everything in its own favor. Clinton's spin doctors had a variety of individual styles but shared a grating habit of relentlessly coloring the news to support their side in any argument. George Stephanopoulos, with whom the technique was closely identified, once defined spin as "a hope dressed up as an observation." In practice, Clinton-era spinning meant that officials seldom conceded the obvious or acknowledged losing, failing, or being wrong about anything.

George W. Bush arrived in Washington avowing an end to all that. He promised he would never parse, shade, or play nice with the truth the way that Clinton had. But if Bush has shunned spinning, it has been in favor of something far more insidious. If the Clintonites were inveterate spinners, the Bushies have proved themselves to be thoroughgoing propagandists.

Though propaganda and spin exist on a continuum, they are different in essence. To spin is to offer a contention, usually specious, in response to a critical argument or a negative news story. It does not necessarily involve lying or misleading anyone about factual matters. Habitual spin is irksome, especially to the journalists upon whom it is practiced, but it does not threaten democracy. Propaganda is far more malignant. A calculated and systematic effort to manage public opinion, it transcends mere lying and routine political dishonesty. When the Bush administration manufactures fake "news," suppresses real news, disguises the former as the latter, and challenges the legitimacy of the independent press, it corrodes trust in leaders, institutions, and, to the rest of the world, the United States as a whole.

Propaganda is the only word for the Pentagon's recently exposed secret efforts to plant positive stories in the Iraqi press. There is, to be sure, precedent for the U.S. funding democratically-minded foreign journalists, both clandestinely through the CIA and openly through agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID. Covert funding is both ethically indefensible and, in most cases, practically counterproductive. In the Cold War context, however, such efforts were often aboveboard and directed toward supporting courageous independent media and opposition voices in repressive countries.

In the Iraq cash-for-flacks scheme, on the other hand, the Pentagon did something simply stupid and wrong by hiring a propaganda-making firm called the Lincoln Group to cultivate an impression of grass-roots support for the American occupation. In this greenhouse, the gardeners did not just water and fertilize the seedlings; they handed out plastic flowers and hoped no one would notice they weren't real. American operatives paid Iraqi journalistic mercenaries to publish a farrago of puffery and outright misrepresentation. Here's my favorite quote from the Nov. 30 Los Angeles Times piece that exposed this operation: "Zaki [an Iraqi newspaper editor] said that if his cash-strapped paper had known that these stories were from the U.S. government, he would have 'charged much, much more' to publish them."

*More of Today's Cartoons on Iraq (*Go on site to access these.}

As with the torture and rendition scandals, Bush administration officials are sorry about this only because they got caught doing it. Look at Donald Rumsfeld's Dec. 5 response: The only blame he assigns is to the international news media, which has "pounded" the revelations. With one wave of the hand, Rummy excuses the government's ham-fisted propaganda effort and expresses his dripping contempt for genuine journalists, who in his mind are eternally spreading negativity, undermining support for the war on terror, and compromising military security. Like his colleagues in Bush's war council, Rummy indicates with every gesture that he simply does not accept the legitimate role of a free press.

According to a recent report in the British press, Bush last year proposed bombing Al Jazeera's headquarters to Tony Blair. This may or may not have been a joke, but given our military's record of accidental assaults on journalists in Iraq, it's not impossible to imagine that the president thinks smart-bombing would be a good way to respond to hostile coverage. At home, it's more a matter of freezing out and anathematizing organs, such as the New York Times, that are deemed unfriendly, while promulgating his own, dubious version of reality. The familiar litany of the administration's domestic disinformation efforts includes the Department of Education paying Armstrong Williams to defend the No Child Left Behind Act, HHS hiring Maggie Gallagher to promote its "marriage initiative," and both agencies sending local TV stations prepackaged pseudo-news videos advocating administration policies. Any of these incidents might be excused as an episode of poor judgment by an underling. In combination and accompanied by various presidential comments about not reading the newspaper, preferring to get his news from aides, and so on, they suggest a propaganda ethic.

For the Bush team, rolling-your-own news has the further advantage of supporting the revolving-door conservative welfare state that has flourished in five years of expanding, undivided government. The administration's need to outsource its propaganda work—for reasons of deniability, not efficiency—has promoted the emergence of a new kind of PR-industrial complex in the nation's capital. Outfits like the Ketchum's Washington Group, the shadowy Lincoln Group, and the even more flourishing, even more shadowy Rendon Group are the parasitic fruit not just of unchecked self-puffery but of a lucrative new patronage network.

In a way, what's most troubling about the Bush's administration's information war is not its cynicism but its naiveté. At phony town hall meetings, Bush's audiences are hand-picked to prevent any possibility of spontaneous challenge. At fake forums, invited guests ask the president to pursue his previously announced policies. New initiatives are unveiled on platforms festooned with meaningless slogans, mindlessly repeated ("Plan for Victory"). Anyone on the inside who doubts the party line is shown the door. In this environment, where the truth is not spoken privately or publicly, the suspicion grows that Bush, in his righteous cocoon, has committed the final, fatal sin of the propagandist. He is not just spreading BS but has come to believe it himself.

Related in Slate
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Earlier this week, revelations about the scheme had Christopher Hitchens calling for heads to roll at the Pentagon. This, coupled with the administration's WMD fantasy, could cause some to label the administration "Misleaders." When it comes to propaganda, Jack Shafer thinks the president is doing his best Kim Jong-il impression. Maybe if the president took Fred Kaplan's advice and recalled Karen Hughes, we wouldn't have had to plant good news stories in Iraq at all. Click here for proof that the folks at Today's Cartoons aren't on the take from the administration.

Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.

Photograph by Sabah Arar/Agence France-Presse.

More the big idea
Beyond Spin
The propaganda presidency of George W. Bush.
posted Dec. 7, 2005
Jacob Weisberg
The Misleaders
Who is Dick Cheney kidding?
posted Nov. 22, 2005
Jacob Weisberg

Karl Rove's Dying Dream
So much for the permanent Republican majority.
posted Nov. 2, 2005
Jacob Weisberg

Illiberal Prosecution
Why Democrats should take no comfort in the Plame case.
posted Oct. 18, 2005
Jacob Weisberg

Condi, Hillary, and … Angelina?
When celebrities act like politicians, and politicians act like celebrities.
posted Oct. 11, 2005
Jacob Weisberg
Search for more Big Idea, They[pre in our archive.
Remarks from the Fray:

Jacob Weisberg . . . excellent and perceptive frayverse posters have been stating similar things about the Bush Administration from day one while the gentlemen and ladies of our nation's mass media have - um - accepted embedded reporting slots to put their seal of endorsement on the known lies and obvious propaganda utilized by this administration to promote the Iraq War.

So, tell me Jacob, are you press professionals going to tell us just which one of the nearly countless and blatant assaults against truth, integrity, and the fundamental principle that once made this nation great finally broke your collective credulity back?

…We have known this … for many years now and most people are also pretty much aware of this now in the real world. So why are you people still playing coy when it comes to the dropping the other shoe while finally daring to call propaganda and scummy unethical behavior what it has obviously been all along?

Never mind, it no longer matters. Back when it might have made a difference in such things as - say - elections, when a daring free press filled with professional ethics and the courage of their convictions might have made a significant difference to the future of this nation, it would have been nice to have heard something even as significant as a whisper from you people. But now we are stuck with three more years of this madness. Gee thanks guys…

--Hauteur

(To reply, click here)


…Jacob himself notes the Clinton administration's addiction to wild impressionistic painting of the facts to match the needs of the moment. Just thinking of Emanuel and Begala and the rest of that crew makes me cringe, but from my half-squinting position I can see the straight line leading from point A then to point B now. I say this not to excuse the current crop of miscreants or to play pin-the-blame-on-Clinton, but to point out that one wrong uncorrected begets another. While the buying of "news" abroad and at home is without a doubt unworthy of our principles as a democracy, it is simply the endgame of a glib contest of ethical "chicken" that began long ago.

When I lived in New Orleans, I was always amused by residents expressing shock about high crime rates. If you sell yourself as a city where some rules don't apply, where is the credibility for enforcing the others? Conversely, whether you loved or hated Giuliani, his tenure was marked by dramatic improvements in crime rates … Is there something to be said for the concept that ethical stringency can become a self-perpetuating thing, flowing from small matters to larger ones? And why would the reverse not be true? To borrow a point from an unrelated topic: many have (correctly) suggested that the Bush administration's vagueness on whether torture is really all that bad lends itself to interpretation by those at lower levels that it must be all right - Cue the footage of hooded prisoners with electrodes on their testicles. Why would such a slippery slope not exist for government once its keepers see that they can define what the meaning of "is" is in whatever way is most convenient?

--Sawbones

(To reply, click here)

(12/8)

http://www.slate.com/id/2131768/

OR, GO ON-SITE TO:

http://www.workingforchange.com

This article is there as well as several other topical articles in their archives and/or on their home page, check out the columns, commentary, etc.

[Saundra Hummer]

Christmas under attack: A manufactured crisis

Bill Berkowitz - WorkingForChange

12.07.05 - Christian fundamentalists, right wing Christian legal groups, and most of the Fox News Channel's prime time crew are echoing variations on the same them; liberals are once again out to destroy Christmas. Instead of the ancient cry that "Jews killed Christ," fundamentalist Christians and their conservative allies are accusing liberals -- which in those circles is often read, Jews -- for trying to remove Christmas from the public square.

Last year, the Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed, "secularists" "hate Christ" and want to "steal Christmas from America. This holiday season, Falwell's Lynchburg, VA.-based Thomas Road Baptist Church has joined forces with a Christian legal outfit, Liberty Counsel, for its "Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign."

Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly -- under fire for recent explosive comments seemingly condoning the destruction of Coit Tower, San Francisco's monument to heroic firefighters, argued on his program that viewers should shun stores that are "anti-Christmas."

William Donahue's New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, launched a fevered, and short-lived, boycott of Wal-Mart when the store's website recognized the terms "Hanukkah" and "Kwanzaa," yet turned the words "Christmas season" into "holiday season." Wal-Mart apologized for the mishap.

The Scottsdale, Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group, announced that 800 attorneys agreed to voluntarily handle without fee complaints about "improper attempts to censor the celebration of Christmas in schools and on public property," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently reported. "In 2004, the second year of its 'Christmas Project,' affiliated attorneys sent a detailed memo on ADF's view of Christmas and constitutional law to 7,000 school districts," the newspaper pointed out.

John Gibson, the host of Fox News Channel's "The Big Story," has penned a new book called "The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought (Sentinel, October 2005), which is devoted to the controversy.

Falwell's Christmas Play

To paraphrase essayist Jon Mooallen, "The most demoralizing form of violence that could visit a Christian right leader such as the Rev. Jerry Falwell is the violence of not being noticed." While nowhere near being the preeminent fundamentalist figure he was during the halcyon days of the Moral Majority more than a decade ago, Falwell can still command media attention. Moreover, unlike the Rev. Pat Robertson, whose awkward commentaries have become so common that they have become boring, Falwell picks his targets a bit more carefully.

These days he has latched onto a doozy of a controversy: In a recent edition of Falwell Confidential, the online "insider weekly newsletter to The Moral Majority Coalition and The Liberty Alliance," he maintained that Christmas is under attack. Christians, Falwell advised, should, "draw a line in the sand and resist bullying tactics by the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the American Atheists and other leftist organizations that intimidate school and government officials by spreading misinformation about Christmas."

"Celebrating Christmas," Falwell declared, "is constitutional!"

(Coincidentally, the organizations Falwell points out as responsible for attacking Christmas are several of the same groups he blamed for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He later issued a rather understated apology.)

Targeting left-wing Grinches trying to drive Christmas out of the public square, Falwell wrote, "In many public venues, and in our schools and workplaces, many Americans have discovered that they are not permitted to erect Christmas decorations, exchange Christmas cards or sing Christmas carols."

To combat the Christmas bashers, Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church -- the church he has pastored for almost 50 years -- is sponsoring local newspaper ads promoting its save Christmas campaign. The genesis of the campaign is rooted in last year's effort that included a pro-Christmas advertising campaign organized by Dr. Jerry Prevo, pastor of the Anchorage Baptist Temple, Alaska's largest church. Dr. Prevo, chairman of the Falwell's Liberty University Board of Trustees, "thought the ads were necessary in this age of political correctness that has convinced many of our fellow Americans that Christmas is a dirty word," Falwell wrote.

Dr. Prevo worked closely with the Orlando-based Liberty Counsel -- "a nonprofit litigation, education and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and the traditional family," according to its website -- to formulate the language of the ads, which are part of Liberty Counsel's Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign. The "Friend or Foe" campaign aims to prevent blatant religious discrimination during the Christmas holidays.

In 2003, the Liberty Counsel organized a campaign called "Don't Let The 'Grinch' [read that liberals] Steal This Christmas." Mathew D. Staver, Liberty Counsel's President and General Counsel, laid out his rationale for that campaign:

Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. If we separate these fundamental principles from our civic life, we destroy our government in the process. Our Founding Fathers believed that religion and morality were necessary to our success as a nation. President Washington once said that anyone who would attempt to remove religion and morality from our country cannot be considered a true patriot. He also predicted a rising national immorality if we exclude religious principles.

In mid-December 2004 on Fox News, the Liberty Counsel's Staver claimed that a former Florida mayor was hostile to Christianity because he was "apparently Jewish."

Fox on Board

On the Fox News Channel, ranting about liberals out to destroy Christmas is as ubiquitous and inaccurate as the station's "fair and balanced" credo. Last year, according to the Media Matters for America website, "In a 'Talking Points Memo' devoted to "[h]ow Martin Luther King would view things today,'" O'Reilly said that King "would be appalled by the secular culture" and by "the attacks on Christmas, the demonizing of Christianity."

In addition to plugging Gibson's book, O'Reilly recently ranted about the anti-Christmas practices of two major retailers - Sears/K-Mart and Kohl's. On his November 9 broadcast, he told his audience:

Here's what we found out: Sears/Kmart would not answer our questions. Spokesman Chris Braithwaite simply ducked the issue. Their website banners: "Wish Book Holiday 2005." They were the worst we had to deal with. OK? Sears/Kmart. JCPenney says its catalog is always called "Christmas catalog." Federated Department Stores -- Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Burdines -- says the words "Merry Christmas" will be used in most advertising. Same thing at May, Filene's, Lord & Taylor, and Marshall Field's. But Kohl's refused to define how the company will deal with Christmas. Dillard's, however, will use the slogan "Discover Christmas, Discover Dillard's." So there you go. Shop where you like the atmosphere. Just remember, Kohl's and Sears/Kmart, basically, not all right.

John Gibson, who claims he is a "non-practicing Christian," recently said that, "his Jewish son researched the book," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. Gibson maintained that those leading the fight against Christmas are primarily "secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians."

And Sean Hannity, co-host of Fox's "Hannity and Colmes" program, weaved the Christmas controversy into a recent segment discussing the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. According to the News Hounds website -- "We watch FOX so you don't have to" -- Hannity introduced the segment on Alito by saying that his "most controversial decision may have [involved]... the defense of Christmas." Hannity pointed out that Judge Alito "appl[ied] the law" and upheld "common sense" by allowing Jersey City, New Jersey to put up a Christmas display.

The "liberals are messing with Christmas" mantra was the focus of last year's winter fundraising drive by RightMarch.com. The group sent out an "e-alert" that contained a laundry list of examples of how Christmas had been attacked during 2004. RightMarch.com is a group headed by the relatively unknown William Greene, who Campaign & Elections magazine called one of its "Rising Stars of Politics" in 2002, and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon-owned Washington Times dubbed a "conservative Internet guru."

Greene, who earned his chops while working with the King of Direct Mail, Richard Viguerie, was aiming "to STOP groups like the ACLU from removing all mentions of Christmas from the public square!"

The centerpiece of the RightMarch campaign was a radio ad that RightMarch.com claimed had aired on more than 200 radio stations around the country and reached over two million people. The message was a simple "stand up and DEFEND Christmas." In addition to the radio spots, RightMarch.com placed full-page newspaper ads in several national publications and organized an extensive internet ad campaign.

This year, Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church advertisements provide information about "free legal assistance by Liberty Counsel to individuals facing persecution for celebrating Christmas." Liberty Counsel is also providing participants with a free educational legal memo (containing "a pledge to be a 'Friend' to those entities which do not discriminate against Christmas and a 'Foe' to those that do."

A Fundraising Scheme?

Over the years, the American Civil Liberties Union has fought religious-themed displays on public property. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "an official ACLU bulletin says the Constitution forbids school observances 'that promote or emphasize the religious significance' of Christmas, but not aspects 'that have become part of our country's secular culture.'"

The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and evangelical groups have agreed "on minimal rules about school religious issues. On holidays, the accord says schools may celebrate secular aspects and 'objectively teach about their religious aspects' but not observe them as religious events.

Americans United believes "public schools aren't the appropriate place to celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday. That's a job for the home and the church," Americans United's spokesperson Rob Boston told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Supreme Court's ruling that towns' Nativity displays must add secular symbols proves that if people "want a truly religious experience, city hall is not the place," Boston added.

Michael Johnson of Shreveport, La., an ADF staff lawyer, told the newspaper that his organization wants to "defend the rights of the 96 percent of Americans who celebrate Christmas." He believes the ACLU's goal is "ultimately to silence people of faith, and in many cases people of the Christian faith."

While it is impossible to get a handle on how much money these holiday season campaigns raise, it sure beats the heck out of your annual run-of-the-mill end-of-year fundraising appeal.

"About 95 percent of the whining from the far right" has more to do with fundraising than Christmas, Boston pointed out. "They're trying to get people worked up so they will think Christmas is being removed from public life. There isn't any evidence that's happening."

(c) 2005 Working Assets Online. All rights reserved


URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=20037

[Saundra Hummer]

August 26, 2003

A South Bay Tale
Surfers & The
Tijuana Jail

Hello Bob
Thought I would write to you using my notepad, so I can take my time writing about some of my last experiences with my beach and surfing friends. This may have been the last, most memorible crazy happening of them all! I kid you not!

I don't recall where we all were when we decided that opening day at the bull fights Cinco de Mayo in Tijuana is where we should go. Not something the beach crowd never seemed to or wanted to miss. It were as if it were a giant party, planned and put on just for us.

I had just come home from the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, where I had met my future husband, Rich Hummer. My foot had flared up again, so he drove me home so I could go to UCLA once again to have it operated on. After the healing process was over, he came back down, and found work in Southern California, so he would drive to see me on weekends, and at other times when there was a lull where he worked.

On one of his trips up to see me, we were at a party when the decision was made that we were all going to go to opening day of the Bull Fights, "Cinco de Mayo", and it seems the whole of the South Bay surfer and party crowd headed south, picking additional people all along the way down the coast. We had met up with someone who was living with Mike Zutell, Dewey Weber, (kids we had gone to high school with and friends from the beach), and a fellow named Tony, and so a day before, or so - we, Rich, Marcia, and a couple of other people all headed for Laguna Beach where they were living. We got there about 2 days before we were to go on to Tijuana. We hadn't seen Mike or Dewey for a long time, so it was fun making up for lost time, letting each other know what had been going on in our lives.

Bill Bender, and a fellow named Duffy were staying in Laguna Beach with them for a while, & had kindof hooked onto all of them, and just stayed. Mike and Dewey had never met them before, nor had Tony. None of the others knew them either. The funny thing was that Marcia Schatan who had been in Squaw with me knew them and so did I. We had met them while there, and there was an animosity between us and them, especially since I had a box of expensive shoes that two of his girlfriends he had brought to the party, where we were staying, stole. A size four and a half, so I knew who had taken them, as it is an unusual size. This was extremely upsetting to me, as I had a hard time finding shoes that would work for me because of the numerous surgeries I had had on my feet. (My nickname because of this was "Sandi Crutches". to differentiate me from the several other Sandi's. You might remember that nickname, it seems to be the one everyone remembers the most..) I had been told by my doctors that I was to wear different shoes each day, never the same shoe twice in a row, so I tried to follow this if possible, however, snow and rain made it impossible at times as I would have to wear something that had better traction, or was water proof. To shorten this up, it is not being able to do this after the theft, that I believe was a contributing factor for me to have to have another surgery on my foot.

Getting back to Laguna: We had taken my big white dog, a Samoyed named Thor that I had bought from a fellow from the beach named Brian Gardner. He was a huge dog, over 140 lbs, and the prettiest Samoyed I have ever seen. People, everywhere we took him were just in awe of him, especially at Squaw Valley, where he was the talk of the town. Bill Bender didn't like this dog, so when there was a party that night, since we had loaned our car to someone, and Marcia had left with her car, we put Thor in Mike Zutell's vintage Black Cadillac, as we had found he had left a gate open -twice he did this -on purpose we found out. Since I didn't want to lose him down there again. that's the reason for putting him there. We had no sooner walked back in the door, and Mike said, "Hope you didn't put Thor in my car, just had it detailed!" Oh brother were we ever upset with outselves, so we almost ran out to his car, got Thor out, and started looking for white dog hair, which was everywhere as he was shedding his winter coat. You know, as much as Mike loved that car, he kept it as clean as whistle, he never once complained to me about it. No need, I felt terrible, but after what had happened to Thor once before in Laguna, I wasn't going to chance it happening again. This is another story completely, one in which Bruce Brown plays the savior role, and did it well I might add! He is a class act!

We all talked most of the night then everyone just crashed, exhausted from the three days of hitting the party scene, from the South Bay, to Laguna. The night before we left we had tried to talk Dewey into going with us, but he was shaping for Velzy and said Dale was counting on him so he really had to go to work and finish up the boards, as they were needed by a special customer. We all planned on getting an early start for San Diego, pick up some more friends, and let people get changes of clothes, and money, which we did, then we were off for Tijuana. We took Marcia's car, left ours for Tony, who said he would watch and take care of Thor for me, as they had struck up a mutual admiration for one another, which was strange for Thor, as he was selective, once he got older, as to who he would associate with, ha! Really, he was, as so many people had teased him when he was younger, and a trait of these dogs is to act somewhat cowardly when young, and that tended to irk people, so they picked on him, or they didn't like me, so they took it out on him. This never happened once he matured, as he became very agressive if someone were mean, to him or anyone or anything. He loved to protect people and other animals even baby chicks. Anyway, Tony kept Thor, and we were off.

We got to Tijuana, and it was bedlam, it really was. Usually the Federales are all over the place and making their presence felt, but not on that day, as we heard that they were afraid of riots. There were so many gringos; in the thousands, so they kept a very low profile, we were only seeing them on the very outskirts of town. We dropped everyone off on the main drag, and went hunting for a place to park. We were to meet up with every one at the "Foreign Club", birthplace of the "Caesar Salad." By the time we got there, Jim King, was up on a table doing a dance, and everyone there was cheering him on, and I mean everyone, Mike Zutell was joining him, it was just wild, then one of the girls, their antics had people cheering, and the ruckus was drawing a larger and larger crowd. We were standing shoulder to shoulder, and we were up against the bar, almost to the back wall, but not quite, when the crowd became more, and more tightly packed, then a beautiful girl, in a pretty sundress was down on the floor, up against the wall, with people standing on her, she was passing out, and more people were starting to fall, no one knew it, and it just was becoming worse each second; a tragedy in the making. Rich squated down as low as he could, raising up swiftly and powerfully and taking his arms he started flinging people -- hopefully towards the door, knocking a drink out of another man's hand, throwing his drink all over him, and his nice shirt. He was about Rich's size, both of them big, and in top physical shape! He started to punch Rich, but then when Rich motioned to him and towards the girl, he began to help us get the crowd off of her. It was so scary for her that she was white as a sheet. Rich, and whoever the other fellow was, and me, helped her outside to see if she was OK. She assured us she was after she got her breath back, so that was a relief. She and that fellow couldn't thank us enough. This incident has forever taught me to avoid crowds like that one ever since. Jim and the group never knew what had happened until a day later when we met up with everyone in Hermosa Beach at the Poop Deck, Howard Bugby's old beer bar on the Strand, next to the Mermaid. Another great memory site!

Back to Tijuana: We dropped off Bill Bender, Duffy, Marcia, Mike, and everyone that had crammed themselves into Marcia's old Ford, and we went hunting for a parking place near the bull ring. I had to be kindof close, as my foot needed to be favored somewhat, as I was off my crutches and didn't want to walk too far on it. Used to walk miles on them, but needed to not do that on my foot so soon after surgery. We finally found a place off in a dirt lot not too near the bull ring. When we finally got to the ticket booth, most of the sunny side seats, the desirable ones had been sold. Why we didn't have Marcia or Mike pick up tickets for us, I'll never know, so we were separated from our friends, and we we had to sit up in the top rungs of a very steep shakey arena. We were sitting with only Mexicans who were really into it; whistling and stamping their feet when they saw something that they didn't like, either in the ring or with what the gringos were doing in the stands, and they would be waving white hankerchiefs, and stamping their feet when they saw something that they did like, so regardless of what was happening good, or bad, the arena stands were just trembling and shaking terribly. It got so wobbly up where we were, the pilings being only skinny metal scaffolding poles just the kind contractors and painters use, the ones that aren't any bigger than 3 or 4 inches, more like three, and they were supporting all of us, that we began to think we might just die. It really did get shaking badly and it was pretty scarry. It got to shaking so badly a few times, that we really felt like the whole grandstand were about to collapse. There were big cracks in the 1" by 12" dried out old plank boards that were the walkways to the seats. We were looking down on blacktop through these cracks, and could see the ticket booth below as well, the stands were a disaster waiting to happen, which did, just as we thought it would, not too much longer after we were there. The bull ring collapsed killing and injuring people. Now they have a better safer ring.

Joannie, I can't remember her last name now, had driven her car down filled with people also. Her father is the one who owned the Phoenix Oil Company, this may not be the right name, but it had as it's logo a red Phoenix on a black background, or vice-versa. I think there was Jim Arney, and who else has just slipped my mind, Vick, ??? Anyway a car full of people were with her also. They had the good seats, the "Sunny Side!" After the top bullfighter had done something the crowd liked, the sunny side people were throwing things into the ring for him bota bags filled with wine, money, so Jim Arney, I think it was Jim, he threw Joannie's pretty black lace bra, which he had found in her glove compartment along with another blouse, into the ring. The top billed bullfighter picked it up held it up and out to examine it, laughed and put it inside of his suit jacket, and bowed to her blowing her a kiss. Embarrassing her no end. She was so red faced. The crowd was shouting "Ole!" The Mexicans were stamping their feet, and whistling, it made them angry, and we were just shaking terribly up so high and it seemed we would fall to our deaths, really, I'm not going overboard with this thought, we were higher up than a tall telephone pole in that shaking rotten bull ring, all the while thinking our friends were going to get us killed up there! We were trying so hard not to laugh at times, or let the Mexicans know we were part of that group, as they were getting hot over their antics. All that was going on was making them angry. Even when Rich would make the descent to get us something to drink, he was careful not to go up to my friends, as it was seeming like a riot might break out, and we weren't wanting to be in the middle of all of the Mexicans, and have them come down on us with no back up where we were. We were the only gringo's any where near where we were, not one anywhere! Of course the "Sunny Side" crew, knew nothing of what was going on up in the Mexican section, they were oblivious to it all!

It was such a wild party scene, people squirting tourists in their finery with wine filled bota bags (forgot how this is spelled! Jeeze can't believe this!) filled with red wine, a lot of expensive sundresses ruined that day, people jumping into the ring, trying to fight the bulls, which was a sight! Thankfully no one we knew was doing that but there were about three or four people who did endangering their lives and the bull fighters lives as well. The matadors and other bull fighters, had to do their best to keep them from becoming a statistic, or from causing someone else to get hurt, like themselves. They arrested one guy, but the Matadors talked the authorities into releasing him after the crowd went into an uproar, it was a sight to see and hear. After that fiasco, with the Mexicans very happy about the arrest, and the gringos having some fits, they stated that the next person to get into the ring would "Be Put In The Tijuana Jail! For ten days! No Quarter! He would be "made an example of." The crowd screamed Ole!", and the band started playing the Kingston Trio's "Tijuana Jail," the crowd went wild! It was really a funny moment, and everyone was cracking up over it all. The band at least had a sense of humor.

The fights were finally over so we made our way down from the top,walked a couple of blocks over, and went out to Marcia's car in the dirt lot, and wow, what a scene was awaiting us out there, like out of a movie, another "Pulp Fiction" type moment, even though that movie wouldn't come out for decades, I know of no other way to describe it. That or the Twilight Zone.

There was a man who had called for a cab, we talked to him for a few minutes before his cab pulled up, as he looked like he wasn't well, and he said he wasn't, that's why he had called a cab. When the cab finally came he walked over to it when he did, that put him, and the cab about 40 feet or so away from us, out in front of us. He no sooner got in his cab, when two more cabs pulled up, the drivers jumped out, and pulled the man out of the back seat, and put him in their cab, yanking and jerking on him to do it, him in a state of disbelief, then two or three more cabs pulled up and they started a tug of war with the man, pulling him and shoving him from cab to cab. Shoving him inside of them, and then he would be jerked out, it was insane. Now, this was an older man, hey, our age (now) or older now! He wasn't in great shape, in fact he looked like he had never had any physical activity in his life, he was balding, paunchy, and over weight by about 75 to 100 pounds. He had said he wasn't feeling well and was worried that his cab wasn't showing up, so that's why we had offered him a ride. He was very fair skinned, with almost strawberry blond hair, or that is what it looked like with the little amount of hair that he had left. This poor man was starting to go terribly red in the face, and was huffing an puffing, going weak in the knees, so part of the time they were just literally dragging him back and forth. The toes of his shoes dragging the dirt So, you must wonder why we let this go on for such a long period of time, well, there were no other people around, they had just vanished or so it seems. You have to imagine the scene here! We were in a dusty dirt parking area, no one but us, and the poor man who just wanted a ride, which we had offered him, which he turned down as he was waiting for a cab, and then there were the taxi cabs and their drivers who arrived on the scene screeching in in stages in clouds of dust, blocking one-anothers cabs, so no one could leave, not even us! Now picture this -- the cabs had been painted with all types of symbols, and designs, the one I remember the most was the lizard motif, then I think there were the birds, Jaguar, etc. These designs were all over the cabs, in several different colors, and another feature of these cabs is that each and every cab, and I kid you not, were full of bullet holes, their windows, their doors, their trunks, their hoods and their fenders, each and everyone was full of bullet holes, not one, or two, or even six, but just riddled with bullet holes, from the windows to the body of the cab, so you know the poor passanger that they were fighting over could not help but notice that himself. We then saw that the poor man was going to pass out,we were about 30 to 40 feet away, however we both began to yell to them that he was an old man, that they were killing him, that he was going to have a heart attack, for some reason they just stopped in their tracks, the man was in-between all of them and several taxi drivers and their back ups holding him up and onto him, they stopped looked at us, then the two original cab drivers, took over, helped him into a cab, and shot off to where, and what other turmoil, we'll never know. Weeks later we read about the "Tijuana Taxi Cab Wars" in the paper, and then we see it on TV, but we didn't know a thing about it before we saw it with our own eyes. There had been and there were shootings and killings over cab fares. We sure saw part of it in action, and it was something to behold. Twilight Zone time, that's for sure. I just thank the Gods that be which helped us out of that mess, as not one gun was fired, they had them, but no gunplay. Thank our lucky stars!

We were finally able to get out of there after all of the cabs left, about twelve of them, and over to the motel, cafe-cocktail lounge the one which has the swimming pool not far from the bull ring, The Oasis, I think was it's name, and the party was continuing on - full bore. Of course after all of the wine, beer, and Tequilla, the lines to the bathrooms were over one block long, if not farther, and I don't need to stretch it one bit, believe, me the line was the longest I had ever seen for a bathroom. I finally made it to the place, immediately started to gag, couldn't even walk in the door, and decided I am out of there, so we rounded up everyone we could find, except Mike, as he was no where to be found, which did have us worried. We were at our designated meeting place, so we started to ask around about where he was, found some people who knew. Mike was in the Tijuana Jail! No kidding. We had heard when they announced over the loud speaker at the ring that that was where he was going, We had heard it, but we had no idea it was Mike. They kept saying that an example was going to be made of him. We couldn't believe what we were hearing, we talked to some other people, and they confirmed what we had been told, we went to the jail, and then back; we brainstormed, and decided not to try to get him out ourselves, as they might arrest anyone who tried, as that is known to have happened in the past. So we figured out what to do, and that was to head back to Hermosa Beach as fast as we could, so we were off. It was getting dark, and we knew enough to get out of Tiajuana, before nighttime hit, as the Police were starting to show up in force, and they were about sick of all of us, and you know, they all looked just alike, like out a mold! They had to all be related, the same size, the same jaw lines the same style mustache, at least the ones on motorcycles. Everyone said if you're smart, get out of here, so we got everyone loaded up and we were off. We would have been back in Laguna before or just at nightfall, but Bill Bender, and Duffy were the ones we had to take with us. Marcia had hooked up with some old friends, maybe Al Michaels the sports announcer and his friends, or her old boyfriend from the San Diego area, Ron Dixon, I think that is his name. His dad owned the Ford car lot there, (and it sold boats also that's another long story,) I believe that's his name? I can't remember for sure who she came back with. Anyway, we started trying to leave Tijuana, but every few feet, Bender and Duffy would jump out of the car, with it actually moving, and run down the street to see a friend, we would have to stop, angering people behind us, while they would shoot the bull with whomever it was they thought they just had to talk to. Like little kids. Some times we would have to go around the block, and do this several times. We were afraid we would run out of gas, it was bumper to bumper traffic all through town and no one was wanting to run out of gas down there, and so we kept telling them that the next time they did that to us, we were leaving them, but they did this about six or more times, so we did just that, we left them in Tijuana. It was after dark, we didn't quite make it, which really upset us, but we got out of there without incident, but it took what seemed like hours to make it through the check at the border. We didn't make it back to Laguna until about 11;30 or so at night. Everyone wanted to know what had happened to all of the people we had left with, and when we told them about Mike, they just couldn't believe it. When we told them about leaving Bender, and Duffy, they just cracked up laughing and said they had pulled the same stunt on them at other places, and that they had been wanting to leave them just like we did. Tony was so pleased with our actions that he insisted on taking us out for breakfast, on him. Funny really, but there is more to this story.

When we told Dewey and Tony and everyone else what had happened to Mike, that we had to get him out of there - and fast, we decided we had better head for the Poop Deck back in Hermosa and look up a special friend, so, we got a little sleep, and took off for Hermosa. We got there late in the morning, as we knew any earlier wouldn't do us any good. We just had to wait for the right people to come in. We told everyone what had happened, and here is what went on: Any of you who ever knew Mike Zutell, knew how he liked to shock. He really was doing something all the time to set people back, clear a room, or just throw someone into a tizzy. He used to put on the wild and crazy things Warren Miller filmed in his movies, he worked for him. Well he really did it this time, and it was the officials at the Tijuana Bull ring he threw into a snit. While the brass bull fight band played "The Lonely Bull." Mike jumped into the ring tossing the ratty old seat cushions that everyone who goes, buys, spending about a dollar or so on them, and they always throw them back when the fights are over, too ratty to keep, and there was Mike down in the ring throwing them back up into the seating area, while doing a strip tease to the music for the crowd. The band was loving it. The ring was so steep, that just a gentle toss would put them in the ring. and a gentle toss back up in the high seats, straight up and down is more like it, the steepest place I've ever watched anything in. We could hear the ruckus, the "Ole's" and the band really getting with it, but we had tossed our cushions, and were already out of there, on our way to the "Taxi Cab War", so we had no idea as to what was happening back at the bull ring. I guess he just couldn't let them threaten the crowd without testing to see if they meant it. He ended up buck naked, (so glad I missed that), and it really infuriated the Mexicans in the crowd who had brought their families, and it infuriated the officials, I guess the band liked it, as I heard them and they just kept playing, and people kept yelling "Ole!" I just had no clue as to who it was who was bringing the house down.

We had all heard horror stories about the jail down there, so we were justifiably worried about Mike, I mean we were all really concerned. Not just a little bit, but really frightened as to what might happen to him. It seems that it was around 11:30 or so, when in walked the fellow we were waiting for. A fellow we had all grown up with, who, rumor had it, was connected, but didn't live that life style, but could get things taken care of when no one else could. I explained to him what had happened, and what the whole situation was as far as I could understand it, which is all it took, he took about three steps to the payphone on the center post in the middle of the Poop Deck; one or two calls were made by him; he then called the Tijuana Police and he was telling them that he wanted "him out of there, without one hair on his head out of place," and that he wanted him "delivered to the Poop Deck in Hermosa Beach within four hours." That was the longest four hours any of us had spent in a long time, but unbelievable as it may sound, Uniformed Tijuana Police pulled up out back with him, in one of their gray paddy wagons, and there was Mike Zutell, not a hair out of place! The two policeman who delivered him came in, shot the bull, rather sheepishly, had two beers each, looked around in disbelief, and took off for Tijuana. There were two couples there, ones which we called tourists, not beach people, and one of the women came up to me saying, "We're in a movie right?" "Are we in a movie???" "Where's the camera's???" Where are they hidden?" I kept telling her it was for real, but she was off somewhere and wouldn't believe me. She is trying her best to find where the cameras are hidden, looking about everywhere in that little bar. Unbelievable, but true, and I am sure there are still people who are alive who can verify this.The fellow who did the wheeling, and dealing to get Mike back, delivered safe, and sound, is still around I believe, as is Howard Bugby who owned the Poop Deck, Hugh Corrigan, is another one who might know of this, I know Hugh still frequents the Mermaid, next door to the Poop Deck. His son used to work there, but that was several years ago, so might not any longer.

We took off and took Mike back to Laguna, to pick up my dog, and Rich's car. Tony took us for breakfast the next day, laughing his head off telling us about how Bill Bender and Duffy came in the next morning all stove up, couldn't stand up straight, because they had to hitch-hike, and the only person who would stop and pick them up, (even people they knew drove past them as they knew what they were like,) were two fellows in a little classic green MG, so one rode the brake, and the other had to sit between the other guys legs alternating between that and his lap, and they were so stiff, because the metal bar on the rag top was hitting them in the back the whole way so that they were hunched over terribly. Tony was actually thanking us for leaving them there. Took us out for breakfast as a treat because of us doing that, laughing and saying he had wanted to do that himself several times. That was a relief as we really thought every one would be mad at us. Dewey couldn't believe it, and acted a bit upset to begin with,wanting to know why we had left them, and when we told him, he said he'd have done the same. Mike Zutell told everyone that it had to be bad, as he had known me for years, and knew that I just wouldn't do anything like that just to be cute, that something had to go wrong for me to do that, well, Mike himself was a big part of what had gone wrong, as we had tried to figure out how to get him out of jail and that took forever, Rich and I went there, but left in a hurry when it got a bit strange, that and the fact that Bill and Duffy were going to cause problems with their Junior High School antics, as people were starting to come up to our car and threaten us if we didn't move, while they were out there pulling their stunts, Rich would tell the ones threatening us, "Well, let's get it on!" luckily after seeing him they would back off, and I would about die, thinking "God Help Us!"

This is one of my last times with all of my friends from the South Bay, and our friends from Laguna, and one of the best send offs a person could have, as far as far out funny memories go! Just a special off the wall group of people. Don't you think so too?

Saw Dewey a few times after that, after he had moved back to Hermosa, he lived down the street from me, and one night his dog kindof chased after my dog, they got into a fight, my dog won, Deweys white German Shepherd and my white Samoyed. Dewey heard the commotion, came running out with a bat, saw it was Thor, and we just laughed about it, as neither dog had really injured the other. That is about the last time I ever saw Dewey, as I moved to Central California again, after that, and almost completly dropped out for several years.

I keep in touch with Rosemari Russell Rice, Johnny Rice, Diane Behm McNulty, Mike McNulty, Marcia Schatan, and Katie Grannis, (Katies dad is the famous surfing photographer Katie herself moved to Mexico Cozemul, and runs the diving decompression chamber there for hungover tourists) and Gwen Florea, (Gwens dad's the one who took the famous picture of Betty Grable looking over her shoulder, you know, the famous WWII pinup picture. He was known as the photographer of the stars. He also did CHIPs, the t.v. series. He just died last year). Gwen, his daughter was living in Hawaii however she is in Las Vegas now. His photos are up on the internet, as she is selling them through a gallery and they post them. I see Diane Behm, and Mike McNulty quite a bit and talk to them on the phone a lot in fact.

I just wanted to make sure someone who knew some of these people heard this story, as I haven't heard of anyone else writing about it at all. Dewey was dating some girl then called "Monkey Girl," what a tag to put on someone, don't you think? I had actually never seen him even date one girl at all before that . Had you? This was in 1960.

Rich and I got married June 5, 1960, and we moved to Central California, came back down to Hermosa in 1962 just before Barri, our daughter was born, lived there and in Redondo Beach until Barri was 3 years old, and moved away, back to Central California, once more then to Oregon in 1972. I saw a few people during those years, but not too many, as people started moving south, north, or to Hawaii, and Peru, (Mickey Dora ended up in France), and who knows where else.

Hope you can get through all of my errors here, as I am not used to this notepad, and everytime I edit something out, the margins change, and I try to even them up, and more problems arise, so I am sick of trying to fix it, that, and I needed to use the dictionary a couple of times, but didn't feel like doing that either, sick, and not feeling perky, so please over look the discombulated state this letter is in.

Had you ever heard this story before, if so, from whom? I think it is an all time classic, like you and your friend in Ecuador or where ever it is you were. There must be a God, don't you think? Something sure saved you!

I am with you on all of our old friends dying, it is just such an all enveloping thing. Tim Kelly was such a shock, and just devastating. I know you have read where I have said this before, but it really is all enveloping. Part of our childhoods are going with them. This is how it makes me feel, and it is really true, part of our lives and souls are going with them. So God Speed!

Bye Sandi Winkler Hummer

This is an edited version of a letter to an old aquaintance and thought I would share it, don't mind the errors, you know how it is with me. SRH

[truthseeker]

. . . . . . . . . . KENT STATE: "HANDS OFF DAVE!"

ACTIVISTS, WRITERS, PROFESSORS AND VETERANS COME TO THE DEFENSE OF KENT STATE STUDENTS

TRANSCRIPT - DAVID AIRHART ON THE KILLING OF CIVILIANS IN IRAQ, THE ABUSE OF DETAINEES, HIS TRANSFORMATION TO AN ANTIWAR ACTIVIST, AND HIS NONVIOLENT PROTEST AT KENT STATE

NOVEMBER 9TH, 2005

David Airhart speaking at the 2005 Midwest Socialism Conference
November 5, 2005 - University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, IL.

First of all I want to thank everyone for their support; that means a lot to me. The more support the better. What I'd like to talk about are things that are occurring in the military that are sort of unknown by the majority of the American public, mostly because the media deprives them of this information.

I spent 4 months in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and 6 months in Iraq and 7 months in Afghanistan, so I have a pretty well rounded perspective of everything that's going on in this war on terror.

When I was in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, my unit's job was to transport the detainee's coming from Afghanistan to Cuba. We'd transport them on a school bus where we removed all of the seats and all the prisoners would be shoved in there like sardines. We were encouraged to kick them in different sensitive areas like their ribs, and parts of their legs if they made the lightest movement like maybe a movement of their finger or they took too deep of a breath. We were encouraged to use severe physical punishment to prevent them from moving. But after a while it became sort of a form of entertainment for a lot of marines to sporadically kick some of these detainees for entertainment purposes. And I started to realize I think then that there are things go on in the military aren't quite as noble as our government tries to portray. We did that for 4 months. There wasn't a day I was there there wasn't some sort of prisoner beating festivity going on.

From there I went to Iraq. I guess I really wasn't ready for what was in store for me and my unit in Iraq. My unit - I was in the First Battalion, Second Marine Regiment, Charley Company. We were the unit that went in during the whole Jessica Lynch thing in An Nasinyah.


While we were there, we were supposedly fighting Iraqi rebels and Iraqi military personnel, but I can't really remember ever seeing any actual Iraqi soldier that we were fighting during the supposed firefight. What I do remember, we were mostly being shot at by our own close air support and helicopters. 95% [of the soldiers who were dilled in my unit were] killed by friendly fire and I'd say 98% of the casualties I saw weren't fighters of any kind - they were civilian, women, children and people who had nothing to do with the fighting. They were just innocent bystanders.

When I realized how over the top it was, was after An Nasinyah. We were supposed to set up a perimeter around the city. We were out of sand bags. We didn't have enough sand bags to protect our holes from small arms fire and things like that. Conveniently, there was a flour truck driver riding a truck down the highway that was full of canvas flour bags. And sand bags are made out of canvas, so this was perfect for sand bags. We were ordered to open fire on this man - just say, a working family man, and to use his flour bags as sand bags. A lot of guys in my platoon opened fire and the man was killed. And the individuals who didn't open fire on this man were ordered to remove his body from the truck and throw it off in a ditch on the side of the road and throw some dirt on top of it. And after that, I was an extreme, I guess, sort of anti-war marine (applause).

After An Nasinyah, we spent most of our time doing vehicle check points where you just stop random civilian drivers and search their vehicles for weapons and things like that. Oftentimes if it was a very confusing situation and the drivers of the vehicles would not understand what we were saying when we told them to stop. And when they wouldn't stop, we were ordered to open fire on these individuals. That happened on a daily basis. And never once out of all these occasions were there any weapons in these individual's cars. Usually it was full of family, a husband and a wife and children and they would all be killed. This happened on a daily basis. This was pretty hard to deal with after a while. And people just started to shut down. Maybe part of them wanted to pretend that they killed some innocent little girl for some sort of good cause. But we all know that's not true.

After Iraq I thought "well great, now I'm done and I can just be a jackass in the Marine Corp until I get out. But unfortunately for me I was sent to another unity that was deploying to Afghanistan. My last 7 months in the Marine Corp was spent in Afghanistan. Mostly what we did there was just guard prisoners and operatea on individuals who stepped on landmines that are all over Afghanistan. It's one of the most heavily landmines countries in the world. And then after that I got out of the military after 4 long miserable years.

I came to Kent State. One of the most significant reasons I decided to go to Kent State was because it hs such a rich history of being a strong antiwar school. And I thought "well, I need to go somewhere that's an extreme opposite of the military. I ran into Pat Gallagher of the ISO and I told him I had been to Iraq. He told me to "come to one of our meetings and there's people who would like to hear what you have to say."

So after that I got comforted, I would guess would be a good thing to say, by the ISO because until then I didn't really feel anyone supported the antiwar movement. It seemed like most people I ran into were for the war and thanked me for serving, and yada yada yada.

Recently, I think it was a week and a half ago, the military were on Kent State trying to pervert my happy place (audience laughter), and take away happy people at Kent State and send them to Iraq to die and kill for reasons that don't make any sense. Out of maybe anger and sort of disgust with the military, that the administration allows the military on our campus, and allows Kent State to be used as a supplier for fresh bodies to be sent over to Iraq - I climbed up the wall and I posted an antiwar slogan on the wall. And I was then chased down by several of the recruiters and one of them grabbed my shirt. That's the "Hands Off Dave." [campaign] (audience laughter). And now I'm in a lot of trouble with the university. I might be expelled from school for good. I guess I just don't understand the logic behind this fiasco it's created with the administration. I don't think maybe they realize what's really going on in Iraq. I don't know if they think it's just something on TV. But you know, it's not. I hope that the administration will see that it's them that are endangering the students, and I was simply trying to do all I can do to get them removed from campus and keep our campus safe and un-perverted by the military. So, again, thanks again for all your support. I need it.

Transcript prepared by Charles Jenks. Please compare the transcript to the audio before quoting.

http://www.traprockpeace.org/audio/david_airhart_O5novO5_64k.mp3
or if that didn't work hit this link"
http://www.traprockpeace.org/audio/david_airhart_05nov05_64k.mp3
===
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M.JUNAID ALAM

November 8th, 2005

"The authorites at Kent State did not shed too many tears when Dave Airhart was dispatched to fight wars of agression, in which thousands have been tortured, killed and maimed, in the lands of Iraq, Afghanistan, and on Guantanamo Bay. When Airhart found the courage tp speak up and protest against these abominations on an American college campus, however, these same authorities decided to try and punish him for what else? - being a threat to himself and a threat to others. Where was their most pious concern during the four years for which Mr. Airhart was placed in danger and was tasked with bnnging danger and destruction to others? This is a question the shameless administration at Kent State has yet to answer, even as they continue to allow military recruiters - those salesmen of death - to invite harm and violence upon Bush's next unwarranted targets.

http://www.lefthook.org

While onsite for the Hands Off Dave Article, read this:

KENT STATE THREATENS IRAQ VETERAN WITH EXPULSION - ACTIVISTS SPRING TO DEFENSE OF FREE SPEECH
OCTOBER 29, 2005
By Nikki Robinson

UPDATE: Activists, writers and professors come to the defense of Kent State Students (see statements of support and letters to Kent State administration)

It is being asked in this article that you "Call/email the Kent State University administration to tell them how you feel:

Carol Cartwright - University President: 330.672.2210

Carol.cartwright@kent.edu
==
==
Greg Jarvie- Dean of Undergraduate Students: 330.672.0404

Gjarvie@kent.edu
==
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William Ross - Ecucutive Director of the Undergraduate Student Senate
330.672.3207
wross@kent.edu
==
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Read this article onsite in it's complete form, and see if you would like to join Dave Airhart in his campaign to not have military recruiters on campus at Kent State.
==
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KSAWC is a member of the national student grassroots
organization, Campus Antiwar Network (CAN)

http://www.campusantiwar.net

This is an interesting site with several articles about their efforts nation wide



I know guys that were in the 1/2. I have a close relative who was in the 1/2. He knows Dave Airhart.

Dave Airhart is a coward and a liar. Give him enough time and he will claim he was in Cambodia during Christmas in 1968.

It's a shame what some people will do for attention. Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame, Dave; when the left-wing gets done using you they'll throw you away like yesterday's garbage. And you won't be able to go back to the guys you stabbed in the back, either.

Enjoy your lonely little life, Dave "John Kerry" Airhart.

[Saundra Hummer]

I know guys that were in the 1/2. I have a close relative who was in the 1/2. He knows Dave Airhart.

Dave Airhart is a coward and a liar. Give him enough time and he will claim he was in Cambodia during Christmas in 1968.

It's a shame what some people will do for attention. Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame, Dave; when the left-wing gets done using you they'll throw you away like yesterday's garbage. And you won't be able to go back to the guys you stabbed in the back, either.

Enjoy your lonely little life, Dave "John Kerry" Airhart.

One does have to wonder about his motives, but the name Kent State does dredge up memories which aren't at all happy ones, and I can understand some of the hostility towards it's administration and therefore the government, but it is unfair of anyone to capitalize on that tragedy, regardless of the time elapsed. If this is what he's doing, I join you in your criticism. I can agree with you totally.:cheers

[Saundra Hummer]

IN PICTURES: WHAT OUR DOLLAR'S BUY: FACES OF WAR

- Warning - images depict the reality and horror of war.

Photo's Comments and statistics from Iraq
Vice President Dick Cheney delivers a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Monday, Nov. 21, 2005. Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday said he strongly disagrees with Rep. John Murtha,D-Pa., a battle-tested congressman who advocates quickly pulling all U.S. troops from Iraq, calling such a proposal "a dangerous illusion." But Cheney stopped short of joining those Republicans who have questioned the patriotism and courage of Murtha, calling him "a good man, a Marine, a patriot." (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

**FILE** Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, is seen May 23, 2005, in Cincinnati. Schmidt apologized Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, for her sharp comments about a fellow lawmaker's call to withdraw troops from Iraq, which caused a furor in the House. Schmidt was booed off the House floor Friday, Nov. 18, 2005, after she criticized U.S. Rep. John Murtha, saying a Republican state legislator told her to tell the Pennsylvania congressman that "cowards cut and run, Marines never do." (AP Photo/The Cincinnati Enquirer, Michael E. Keating) **NO SALES**
=
=
Go to this site by just clicking on it to see the article and it's many photo's:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info

or:

http://tinyurl.com/8denj

[Saundra Hummer]

Corporate Plantation: Political Repression and the Hampton Model
Heavy-handed Repression of Recent Student Activism

by John Robinson and Brandon King

The BLACK CoMMentator

Commentary, analysis and Investigations on Issues affecting African AmericAns

www.blackcommentator.com
The following commentary is a first person account by the authors.

The students charged in this incident were not expelled. See AP story, December 2.

On Wednesday November 2, 2005, at Hampton University, the progressive campus group affiliated with Amnesty International, United Students Against Sweatshops, and Campus Anti-War Network held a student walk-out on the issues of New Orleans urban renewal, AIDS crisis, homophobia, the prison industrial complex, the war in Iraq, and the crisis in Sudan. The organizers for the group had been planning the action for some time, and promoted it with radio announcements, posters around the campus, and handing out fliers at campus group meetings. The planned activities included speeches, chants, poetry, and musical performances. Earlier that day, an international student was subjected to intense interrogation by the Dean of Women and was told by the Hampton University police that she would be shadowed by a cop. At twelve noon Brandon King began to speak to about 75-100 students in the Student Center about our plans for the day. We handed out information on the Iraq war and the Katrina disaster. Then armed HU police abruptly shut down our activities.

The HU police booked several people just because they were wearing stickers and other paraphernalia that advertised our events. They booked people who weren't even wearing paraphernalia because they looked suspicious. The police used hand-held camcorders to record the faces of the activists without our permission. They attempted to intimidate the student onlookers by their random targeting. Three of us were singled out as leaders by the Dean of Men and HU police, who temporarily confiscated our student ID cards. The next day, one leader of our group, Brandon King, was told by a Hampton University Lieutenant Detective that, despite the fact that he was a "hometown athlete," he would be expelled if he did not cooperate and give up the names of other group members.

Now Brandon, three sophomore activists, a junior activist, a non-affiliated supporter and John Robinson have all been summoned to an administrative hearing for violating the code of student conduct by "actions to cajole or proselytize students," "distributing and/or posting unauthorized information," and "violating the administrative guidelines for student demonstrations." The students were given notice at 5:00 p.m. Friday, November 18 to appear at an administrative hearing at 10:00 a.m. Monday, November 21. This short notice obviously made it virtually impossible for the students to organize support from lawyers, parents, witnesses, other students, and sympathetic organizations both on campus and in the wider community. Nevertheless, the Administration received many calls and e-mails and agreed on Monday morning to postpone the hearings indefinitely. Upon returning to school from Thanksgiving break on Monday, November 28, the students learned that the hearings had been rescheduled for Friday, December 2.

Shortly before the break, students met with local reporters in a nearby shopping center owned by the Administration. As the students described to the reporters the repressive conditions they face at Hampton University, a Hampton University cop, sent by the Dean of Students, confirmed the students' allegations. He pulled his squad car to within inches of the camerperson and cut short the interview by stepping inbetween the cameraperson and the student interviewee. After the reporters put their camera away, the police still demanded that they leave the property. The video footage of these events was shown on the nightly news. The story also appeared the next day as the cover story in the local newspaper, The Daily Press. The Dean of Students, in turn, wrote a letter to the editor of The Daily Press, responding that the school encourages peaceful protest, and the kids who face discipline refused to use the legitimate routes. This letter was mass copied and two copies were placed on every dorm door on campus.

Repressive Rules, Selective Enforcement

It is clear that the school seeks to quell all social activism by maintaining repressive rules and selectively enforcing them against any progressive student activism. "Actions to cajole and/or proselytize students" constitute an offense that is so vague and broad that virtually every student, teacher, and administrator is guilty of it every day. To "cajole" is defined as trying to influence or manipulate others through insincere arguments, which is something Hampton administrators routinely do to students. Every recognized student club on campus to some extent attempts to "proselytize," that is, to persuade students to adopt a specific orientation or actions. This rule is vague so that it can be selectively enforced in the interests of the Administration.

Moreover, the school's concern about the actions of our group speaks to a much deeper issue. The Administration itself has long been guilty of attempts at cajoling and proselytizing black students with its strict assimilationist program. The most profound contradiction in Hampton's program is that it aims to make its black students ignorant of the racism which pervades our society, while fostering an elitist and individualist culture that works to the detriment of the Black Community. The accused students merely attempted to challenge the corporate bourgeois indoctrination prevalent at Hampton and to promote ideas more attuned to the interest of the community and humanity in general. It is only in the sickest sense that the promotion of human rights-related issues can be seen as an attempt to convert the students from one persuasion to another. The school makes no attempt to educate its black students on any of the issues, and seems to prefer cultivating political docility and subordinance instead.

The students also face charges of violating the guidelines set forth by the Administration on student demonstrations. It has been our experience that the provisions which control student demonstrations, as delineated in the Student Handbook, effectively prevent any expression of dissent, and therefore any semblance of democracy. This is because any demonstration, march, vigil, or rally on campus must be called by an officially recognized student group and approved in advance by the Chief of Police and Director of Student Activities. Any student group that might call for such actions never gets recognized by the Administration in the first place.

Hampton University's Administration has shown time and time again that it will not recognize, nor give any legitimacy to our organizations and our causes. We have repeatedly been denied access even to the Administration's own procedures through which groups are evaluated and then either recognized or denied recognition. Our applications have never been afforded the hearings and votes to which we are supposed to be entitled. The Administration, whenever it feels like, simply announces that "there is a moratorium on new student organizations".

In refusing to acknowledge and recognize the groups that they suspect to be prone to protest and activism, the Administration of Hampton, in effect, bans activism on campus. This is what has long been enforced at Hampton University. The violations outlined in the hearings summons were only technicalities, created by the arbitrary and repressive policies of the Administration itself, which seek to deny any free and independent social and political expression by Hampton University students. And now the Administration has informed the accused students that they can be expelled for their offenses. More and more students at HU believe, however, that their school's disdain for democratic principles is unacceptable and must, at all costs, be resisted.

The Administration was very clear in its opposition to our agenda from the very beginning. When we put up the posters and fliers across campus at night, they organized police teams during the day to march through the campus and snatch down every paper. But the corporate elitist ethos cultivated by Hampton still had to be counteracted, so we put up more…and more. The administrative response was always swift but never swift enough, each time more overtly repressive than before.

Meanwhile, students and other groups, whether officially recognized or not, routinely pass out unauthorized fliers and put up unauthorized advertisements on campus daily. The advertisements are usually promoting parties, bars and other venues for alcohol consumption. The Administration rarely interferes with this activity and never punishes those who engage in it. But the activists at Hampton put up posters about a social justice-oriented student walk-out, and passed out information on the brutal, highly unpopular War in Iraq, and they alone are threatened with the penalties outlined in the student handbook. This selective enforcement of the rules reveals the true nature of the Hampton Administration.

The Hampton Model as Apparatus of Exploitation

Some of the Hampton police who harassed us said that they just "had to do their job." Just for clarification, their bosses are the University President Dr. William R. Harvey, who is a Bush appointee to the Federal National Mortgage Association, and a Board of Trustees bounteous with Bush-Cheney campaign beneficiaries. A close friend of President Harvey, especially relevant to this discussion is the commencement speaker he selected this past spring, Alphonso Jackson, Bush's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Jackson has made a priority of cutting back access by poor black people to subsidized Section 8 housing. Shortly after hurricane Katrina, Jackson told the Houston Chronicle that most of the black population of New Orleans should not be allowed to return, and that New Orleans in the future will be a predominantly white city. The University president has often shown this same contempt for the Black Community. A recent example is when he was asked by a few members of our group at a Town Hall Meeting, the reason why the school did not have an AIDS awareness group. President Harvey responded that we probably did not need one because everyone knows about AIDS. The women did not accept that answer because they knew that AIDS disproportionately affected Blacks, and the Hampton Roads area was in the Top ten AIDS infected areas. They started a campus AIDS group the next week.

Students at Hampton University have become accustomed to, although not content with, the school's restraint of free thought and expression. The issue has arisen publicly before with the Hampton school of journalism. In 2003, a student writer for the supposedly "student-run" campus newspaper, "The Hampton Script", wrote an article about the school cafeteria and its 100-plus health code violations. The Administration wasn't particularly enthused about how the information would affect the school's image – so they seized all copies and destroyed them. They also basically purged the staff, attempted to expel the student writer, and created a task force to supervise the creative process of the newspaper. This task force, chaired by the University's Dean of Students, who has no journalistic credentials, made several "recommendations" to the newspaper staff. One worth mentioning here states that "Oversight and guidance from a faculty advisor (or advisors) with adequate journalistic knowledge and an appreciation and commitment to the Hampton Model are necessary." This model was used in the academic programs of other HBCUs. And while the faces and tactics have changed, the underlying principle is nonetheless the same.

Hampton History

When providing an even closer look at the educational environment of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), one will gain a clearer understanding of its purpose in society and also the setting for which student resistance to its educational model originated. William Watkins explained how with the creation of HBCU's more specifically, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) "played no small role in creating a comprador class for the twentieth century. Black compradors have anchored the Black South. They have been pious, conservative, obedient, and loyal to the sociopolitical order. They have supported gradualism, incrementalism, and non-violence over revolution. They have provided a sometimes prosperous middle class without which the capitalist economy could not have stabilized. They have acted as a buffer in the South, providing business services, education, religion, fraternal orders, and hope to a people battered by slavery, sharecropping, violence and four centuries of oppression."

An avid proponent of this as an educational model that creates these pseudo-progressive results was the founder of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong. Armstrong's true feelings of blacks should not go unmentioned due to how these beliefs guided him in administering education to blacks. Armstrong felt the black "does not see 'the point' of life clearly; he lacks foresight, judgment, and hard sense. His main trouble is not ignorance, but deficiency of character; his grievances occupy him more than his deepest needs. There is no lack of those who have mental capacity. The question with him is not one of brains, but of right instincts, of morals and of hard work." Armstrong placed blacks in the category of "savage races" that were "mentally sluggish" and "indolent." Character training was/is the only way blacks could be salvaged. This is why Hampton University's educational model is so significant. It is not just schooling, but also it was/is, as Watkins puts it, "saving a race from itself."

The most prominent black advocate for this model was Armstrong's neophyte Booker T. Washington. Because blacks faced oppression and political repression on a daily basis, W.E.B. Du Bois felt this reality should not go ignored. He pleaded with Washington to address these realities by stating, "It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil doing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so… We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white." In saying this, Du Bois draws the line between himself and supporters of Armstrong's and Washington's form of education and indoctrination. When black students rebel against the existing social order, they are looked at as deviant because they buck an educational model that truly does not function in their favor.

Student Resistance Through the Years

At Hampton University in 2005, this student resistance has been more intense perhaps than ever before. In the wake of such social atrocities as the Katrina disaster, black students have achieved a much higher degree of political consciousness than in previous years. The student activist group at Hampton, whose members are now being threatened with expulsion, has worked tirelessly for years promoting consciousness on social issues and providing ways for students to become involved.

In the Fall of 2002, students attempted to get Dr. Taye Wolde-Semayat, a former political prisoner in Ethiopia and President of the Ethiopian Teachers Union, to speak on campus. He had been released following a five-year campaign by Amnesty International, the National Union of Teachers, and teachers' unions around the world. Hampton University refused to allow him to speak on campus. The Vice President of Student Affairs, Dr. Bennie McMorris, signed a form which would allow for Dr. Taye to speak on campus but later rescinded his signature and refused to allow the event to take place on campus. The students got a local church as a venue for Dr. Taye to speak. These students also organized massive carpooling for students to attend the event. Over 200 people, including community and church members, students, and faculty attended the event which was held two miles away from the campus.

After this event, our organization continued to fight to be a recognized organization on campus. We were met with an Administration that repudiated the idea of recognizing an organization that sees as its mission advocating, promoting, and mobilizing people to fight for human rights. Each year we applied for recognition and have been consistently denied access to the democratic process to which we are entitled. Not only has our organization been denied recognition, but other socially conscious and politically aware groups have also been denied. To date, there are no progressive groups on the campus of Hampton University.

Securing the Future

That has not stopped us from organizing. We've managed to have our meetings in random classrooms on campus through developing really good relationships with campus workers. Many students see the need to address social justice issues through activism and education. Even though the University does not provide an environment conducive to activism or allocate any resources to our group, we've managed not only to function, but to grow. Our membership has increased exponentially and the members are more passionate than ever. The Administration is now attempting to stifle this growth by singling out the next generation of activists and trying to scare them into committing themselves to the Hampton Model.

When the HU police and Administration stopped our gathering, some of the members of our group felt demoralized. We thought that the intimidation of students by the Campus police and Administration meant that we had failed. But seeing how energized the campus became after the incident helped us change the way we saw the situation. Although the police prevented us from making the point that we intended to make, the students ultimately were made conscious in a much deeper way that could not have been achieved through our speeches and poetry. The students saw what their school's Administration was really for by seeing what it was against. Students saw first hand what happens when students stand up for human rights and social justice. So many students openly express their anger with the way Hampton handled the situation. Students have been very supportive and sympathetic with what we are doing at Hampton. Students who wouldn't normally have been involved are now compelled to be active after watching their school reveal its "true colors." The Administration was so arbitrary and ruthless that it threatened an unaffiliated supporter with expulsion. It seems that even moral support for activism is a grave violation to Hampton's Administration. These recent events have exposed the true nature of Hampton University, its educational model, how it fits into the rest of society, and above all else, why it should be resisted.

As students face administrative hearings that promise to be as grossly undemocratic as the proceedings thus far, it is imperative that we send a message to Hampton officials that they cannot get away with this. We have gotten much support from students on campus, as well as individual and groups outside the school who share our passion and recognize the interconnectedness of our plights. However, we still need a lot more. By singling out the younger activists, the school figures it can "nip activism in the bud" and it is thus our duty to make it clear that they can do no such thing. It is vital that African Americans are able to express their concern about the issues that so uniquely and disproportionately affect our community. This remains true despite the large sums of money the university receives from the military and other places for maintaining a docile student body.

We aim to act not defensively, but counter-offensively in our resistance. It is not enough to just ask the Administration to leave us alone in this one instance. We intend to illuminate problems that perennially have plagued the campus of Hampton and we therefore DEMAND that Hampton University drop all charges against the five students and change its general policy toward social justice-oriented groups on campus. We will not accept this denial of democratic procedure, nor the school's betrayal of the Black Community. We are black students and we will no longer be cajoled by the flattery of a dishonest Administration nor proselytized to the ways of the corporate elite. We will not forget about our people. We will not be intimidated. Fight not for us, but with us because the actions of the Hampton Administration and the increasingly frequent campus repression happening nationally, ultimately threaten us all.

Call the school! Let Hampton Administrators know how you feel. Tell them to drop all charges against the students, recognize the activist club as an official student organization, and craft a free speech policy that doesn’t criminalize dissent.

Dr. Bennie McMorris,
Vice President for Student Affairs
757-727-5264
bennie.mcmorris@hamptonu.edu

Woodson Hopewell,
Dean of Men
woodson.hopewell@hamptonu.edu

757-727-5303

Jewel Long,
Dean of Women
jewel.long@hamptonu.edu

757-727-5486

John Robinson is an organizer at Hampton University. He is one of the students charged in violation of the Hampton University Student Code of Conduct. He is a senior sociology major from Washington D.C.

Brandon King is also both an organizer at Hampton U and one of the students charged in violation of the Hampton University Student Code of Conduct. He is a senior sociology major and a native of Chesapeake VA.

For updates on the situation unfolding at Hampton University go to

Campus Anti War Network

Defend Hampton University Students

Support Hampton Students' Right to Protest!

And for support please send email to hamptonsolidarity@yahoo.com
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http://www.blackcommentator.com/162/162_corporate_plantation_pf.html

[Saundra Hummer]

Sharks, Elephants, Abandoned Puppies,
and a Tiger of a Total Man:
Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams
by Terry Lynn Howcott
Guest Commentator

Issue 162 - December 8, 2005


I vehemently oppose the killing machine that is called “the death penalty.” It is part and parcel of a more than 200-year historic national desire to perpetrate the killing of Black people – and Black men in particular. I can only hope and pray that Governor Schwarzenegger will extend his thinking about Stanley “Tookie” Williams’ case beyond his political “habitat.”

As we know, Stanley “Tookie” Williams was just 17 years old when he co-founded the notorious gang “Crips” in 1971. After an early life of crime, he was convicted in a strangely administered 1981 court case for killing four people in a robbery. After his conviction, for a time he furthered his gangster behaviors behind bars. His having been reprimanded to solitary confinement guided him through a spiritual awakening that gave birth to Stanley “Tookie” Williams – the total man. With that, I would say not only the Governor, but all who deliberate his case should focus first on the facts from that 1981 courtroom drama – and then upon the magic Mr. Williams made beyond his strange and questionable conviction.

THE CASE: Apparently, circumstantial evidence along with several witnesses who were facing a mound of felony charges (including fraud, rape, murder and mutilation) were the crux of the prosecution’s case against “Tookie” Williams. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stated in a September, 2002 ruling that witnesses in Mr. Williams case had soiled backgrounds and “incentives to lie, in order to obtain leniency from the state in either charging or sentencing.”

Unidentifiable fingerprints at the scene were never attributed to Stanley “Tookie” Williams. A bloody boot-print near the victims was never identified. A shotgun shell found at that crime-scene was in fact from a gun purchased by Tookie Williams. But, police found the gun under the bed of a husband and wife who were themselves facing felony insurance fraud charges, and were under investigation for murdering their crime partner.

A primary witness at Williams’ trial, who served in a prison cell next to “Tookie” Williams’ cell, testified he confessed to him in prison. But 20 years after Mr. Williams conviction, it was revealed that a Los Angeles police officer left a copy of the Williams primary police file in that felon’s cell for “overnight study.” In exchange for his testimony he was given a lesser sentence of his own. Surviving family members of the victims in the case have opposed his clemency request, insisting Mr. Williams never apologized for the killing of their loved ones. But, the facts suggest a strong possibility Mr. Williams is as stone-cold not-guilty as he says he is – and would have nothing for which to apologize – outside of his general life of crime for which he has paid dearly and given much.

THE TOTAL MAN: Clear about his charge, and accepting his White-man-ufactured fate, Mr. Williams launched an impassioned intellectual crusade to save as many inner-city youth as he could from crime, gangs, drugs and other self-destructive behaviors. He metamorphosized to author nine children’s books about optioning out of gang mentalities. A Williams book “Life in Prison” was awarded two national honors, including one from the American Library Association. His writings have been used and reused in schools, libraries, correctional facilities and in criminal “justice” systems the world over. He has been the face and voice of anti-gang public service announcements aired across the country – and in 2001 he was nominated for a Nobel Prize.

A group of Nobel Laureates and actors, from Bishop Desmond Tutu, to Danny Glover, Anjelica Huston, Noah Wyle, and former New York governor Mario Cuomo have called upon Governor Schwarzenegger to "affirm the human capacity for personal transformation and reinforce the meaning of hope for young people everywhere." Actor, singer extraordinaire Jamie Fox, rapper man Snoop Dogg and others with skill and utter passion have advocated for clemency for Mr. Williams.

So here we have a gentleman, Stanley “Tookie” Williams who may have been prosecuted by a demon, fingered by people who had compelling reasons to lie, and convicted with evidence that either showed the unlikelihood of his involvement or pointed to the involvement of others. Yet, he has summoned from within a way to both create and inspire the young and the old on an international scale. I would just think in particularly pious conservative circles, Mr. Tookie Williams would present the perfect picture of their dictation of the world – the transformation of our lives in order to live like their interpretation of Jesus.

Their support of Mr. Williams would require them to accommodate real world information and incredibly well deserved second chances. Note, Stanley “Tookie” Williams’ 1981 prosecutor manipulated and removed every Black person on his jury, leaving him with an all-White jury to deliberate his case. Then, in a last ditch effort to send race-coded messaging to these all White jurors, he compared Mr. Williams to a “Bengal tiger in the San Diego zoo,” saying South Central Los Angeles, a predominantly Black community, was equivalent to the natural “habitat” in which Mr. Williams would “behave like a Bengal tiger.”

With that, typically unyielding conservatives and others would also have to reassign their compassions for extinct man-eating sharks, tusk-rich elephants, dying off frogs and abandoned puppies everywhere to save the life of a Nobel Prize-nominated tiger of a peacemaker, author, humanitarian and total man, Stanley “Tookie” Williams.

Terry Howcott is a Master of Social Work, Lecturer, Activist, Thinker, and Writer. She resides in Detroit, MI and can be reached at Terrylynnh@yahoo.com.

Save Tookie Williams Website:

http://www.savetookie.org/

Stan is a peacemaker on death row.

He has been nominated 5 times for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in helping to prevent gang violence.

He has been nominated four times for the Nobel Literature Prize for his children's books that warn young people about the pitfalls of joining a gang and exposes them to alternatives.

He maintains innocence of the crimes he was accused of, and faced racist discrimination throughout his trial. One issue highlighted the fact that the prosecutor in Tookie's original case removed three African-American jurors from the jury. During Stan's trial, this prosecutor made racially-coded remarks during his closing argument, comparing Stan during the trial to a Bengal tiger in the zoo and stating that a black community - South Central Los Angeles - was equivalent to the natural "habitat" of a Bengal Tiger.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Tookie on his final appeal and set his execution date for December 13. Thus they disregarded 9 of the 24 Ninth Circuit Court judges' assertion that the District Attorney at Tookie's trial employed "reprehensible and unconstitutional" racist tactics, using animal-in-a-jungle metaphors to refer to Tookie and to the South Central environment in which he lived. This landmark ruling means that minorities can now legally be rejected from juries based on race. This is now the law of the land.

More About Stan Tookie Williams:[Go on-site to see the total article and pictures, links, etc.]

http://www.blackcommentator.com/162/162_howcott_tookie_williams_pf.html

[Saundra Hummer]

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10cDaily Show: Stewart - Terror Blues
Since 9/11 the White House has devoted a great deal of background signage to homeland security.Most Recent Videos from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
> Passing the Torture
> Tortured Logic
> Ken Auletta
> A Fortune in Cold
> Secular Central

Just click on the following address to see the clips:

http://www.workingforchange.com

http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=36012

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. .. "If we emphasize the life and works of our greatest contributors . . . people will come to realize that moral courage is bravery of the highest type, and America will be called the "Champion of Peace." : Senator Spark Matsunaga
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. .. "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." Friedrich NietzcheThese are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland." : John Kenneth Galbraith - (1908- ) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor. Source: The Affluent Society, 1976

=

. .. "There is little to be feared from the standard picture of a totalitarian society in which 'cogs,' who are watched by Big Brother or his equivalent, carry out orders emanating from the top. Such a society would collapse in inefficiency. What is infinitely more fearsome is the capacity of a dictatorship to use the principle of competition to organize terror and murder." Ronald Wintrobe - Source: The Political Economy of Dictatorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 328.

=

. .. "Freedom... refer[s] to a social relationship among people -- namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect." Thomas Sowell - (1930- ) Writer and economist

=

. .. "You can't hold a man down without staying down with him." Booker T. Washington - (1856-1915) Author

To read this newsletter online:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/ or http://snipurl.com/ayzc

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Former Senator Eugene McCarthy Dies at 89

The Associated Press

Saturday 10 December 2005
Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose insurgent campaign toppled a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died Saturday. He was 89.

McCarthy died in his sleep at assisted living home in the Georgetown neighborhood where he had lived for the past few years, said his son, Michael.

Eugene McCarthy challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination during growing debate over the Vietnam War. The challenge led to Johnson's withdrawal from the race.

The former college professor, who ran for president five times in all, was in some ways an atypical politician, a man with a witty, erudite speaking style who wrote poetry in his spare time and was the author of several books.

''He was thoughtful and he was principled and he was compassionate and he had a good sense of humor,'' his son said.

When Eugene McCarthy ran for president in 1992, he explained his decision to leave the seclusion of his home in rural Woodville, Va., for the campaign trail by quoting Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian: ''They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view.''

McCarthy got less than 1 percent of the vote in 1992 in New Hampshire, the state where he helped change history 24 years earlier.

Helped by his legion of idealistic young volunteers known as ''clean-for-Gene kids,'' McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote in the state's 1968 Democratic primary. That showing embarrassed Johnson into withdrawing from the race and throwing his support to his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey.

Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York also decided to seek the nomination, but was assassinated in June 1968. McCarthy and his followers went to the party convention in Chicago, where fellow Minnesotan Humphrey won the nomination amid bitter strife both on the convention floor and in the streets.

Humphrey went on to narrowly lose the general election to Richard Nixon. The racial, social and political tensions within the Democratic Party in 1968 have continued to affect presidential politics ever since.

''It was a tragic year for the Democratic Party and for responsible politics, in a way,'' McCarthy said in a 1988 interview.

''There were already forces at work that might have torn the party apart anyway -- the growing women's movement, the growing demands for greater racial equality, an inability to incorporate all the demands of a new generation.

''But in 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others.''

Although he supported the Korean War, McCarthy said he opposed the Vietnam War because ''as it went on, you could tell the people running it didn't know what was going on.''

In recent years, McCarthy was critical of campaign finance reform, winning him an unlikely award from the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2000.

In an interview when he got the award, McCarthy said that money helped him in the 1968 race. ''We had a few big contributors,'' he said. ''And that's true of any liberal movement. In the American Revolution, they didn't get matching funds from George III.''

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, McCarthy said the United States was partly to blame for ignoring the plight of Palestinians.

''You let a thing like that fester for 45 years, you have to expect something like this to happen,'' he said in an interview at the time. ''No one at the White House has shown any concern for the Palestinians.''

In a 2004 biography, ''Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism,'' British historian Dominic Sandbrook painted an unflattering portrait of McCarthy, calling him lazy and jealous, among other things. McCarthy, Sandbrook wrote, ''willfully courted the reputation of frivolous maverick.''

In McCarthy's 1998 book, ''No-Fault Politics,'' editor Keith C. Burris described McCarthy in the introduction as ''a Catholic committed to social justice but a skeptic about reform, about do-gooders, about the power of the state and the competence of government, and about the liberal reliance upon material cures for social problems.''

McCarthy was born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, a central Minnesota town of about 750. He earned degrees from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the University of Minnesota.

He was a teacher, a civilian War Department employee and college economics and sociology instructor before turning to politics. He once spent a year in a monastery.

He was elected to the House in 1948. Ten years later he was elected to the Senate and re-elected in 1964. McCarthy left the Senate in 1970 and devoted much of his time to writing poetry, essays and books.

With a sardonic sense of humor, McCarthy needled whatever establishment was in power. In 1980 he endorsed Republican Ronald Reagan with the argument that anyone was better than incumbent Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.

On his 85th birthday in 2001, McCarthy told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that President Bush was an amateur and said he could not even bear to watch his inauguration.

In an interview a month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, McCarthy compared the Bush administration with the characters in the William Golding novel ''Lord of the Flies,'' in which a group of boys stranded on an island turn to savagery.

''The bullies are running it,'' McCarthy said. ''Bush is bullying everything.''

McCarthy was an advocate for a third-party movement, arguing there was no real difference between Republicans and Democrats.

In 2000, he wrote a political satire called ''An American Bestiary,'' illustrated by Chris Millis, in which high-level advisers are portrayed as park pigeons -- ''they strut and waddle'' -- and reporters are compared with black birds who flock together.

He blamed the media for deciding who is and is not a serious candidate and suggested he should have kept his 1992 candidacy a secret, since announcing it publicly did no good.

McCarthy also ran for president in 1972, 1976 and 1988.

For McCarthy, the 1950s and 1960s were the Democratic Party's high points because it pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress and championed national health insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

''I think he probably would consider his work in civil rights legislation in the 1960s to be his greatest contribution,'' his son said Saturday.

The bad times, Eugene McCarthy said, began with America's increased involvement in the Vietnam War and the simultaneous failure of some of Johnson's Great Society social programs.

Instead of giving people a chance to earn a living, McCarthy said, the Great Society ''became affirmative action and more welfare. It was an admission the New Deal had failed or fallen.''

In recent years McCarthy had lived at Georgetown Retirement Residence, an assisted living center in Washington. He and his wife, Abigail, separated after the 1968 election. She died in 2001.

Survivors include daughters Ellen and Margaret and six grandchildren, Michael McCarthy said.

A private burial is planned for next week and a memorial service in Washington will be scheduled, Michael McCarthy said.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/121005W.shtml

[Saundra Hummer]

The Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth and Politics
By Harold Pinter
The Guardian UK


This is the text of the lecture to be given by Harold Pinter when he receives the 2005 Nobel prize for literature on Saturday. Forbidden by doctors from going to Stockholm to receive the £720,000 prize, the ailing playwright and poet has delivered his speech by video

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously

.....[THE PRECEDING AND FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM AN ARTICLE. TO SEE IT ALL GO TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST AND CLICK ON THE LINK.]

...... Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets! *

[QUOTED UP ABOVE]: Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

--------

*Extract from "I'm Explaining a Few Things" translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING LINK TO GO TO THE SITE, IT IS MORE UNDERSTANDABLE WHEN IN CONTEXT AND COMPLETE. ITS NOT AS INTERESTING AS WHEN YOU CAN SEE IT ALL:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120805M.shtml

[Saundra Hummer]

kATRINA DESTROYS ONCE GREAT WINE CELLAR
By MARY FOSTER, Associated Press Writer
Sat Dec 10, 3:34 AM ET

NEW ORLEANS - In the dark, dank recesses of what was once one of the great wine cellars of the world, the fabled bottles sit. The 1870 Lafite Rothschild, the Chateau Moutons, Chateau Magaux — fine wines with enormous price tags, or at least they were.

The wine cellar at Brennan's Restaurant, winner since 1983 of Wine Spectator magazine's Grand Award as one of the 85 top cellars in the world, has 35,000 bottles that since Hurricane Katrina have gone from vintage to vinegar.

"They may be drinkable, but they're probably better for salads," said Ted Brennan, whose brother Jimmy spent 35 years building the collection.

The Brennan's wine cellar covers two floors in what was once the carriage house of the 1795 French Quarter mansion-turned-restaurant. Domestic wines are stacked to the ceiling on the first floor, European vintages on the second floor. Behind a locked gate is the private collection — dusty bottles of fine wines so costly they have waited for years for someone to taste them.

The collection, which was insured for $1 million, was ruined when the electricity went off after the hurricane. The wine cellar, normally kept at 58 degrees year-round, was suddenly at the mercy of the broiling sun and heat wave that followed the storm.

"It got so hot those few weeks, I know it easily got to 120 degrees in there," Brennan said. "The wine was literally cooked."

Wine lovers made regular pilgrimages to Brennan's to sample what cellar master Harry Hill believes was the biggest and best cellar between Florida and Texas and the Gulf of Mexico and Chicago.

Diners could easily add hundreds, even thousands of dollars to their tab by ordering wine. Hill sadly showed off a magnum of 1997 Opus One that the restaurant bought several years ago for $400, now worth $1,000.

"It was one of those years when God bent over and kissed California," Hill said of the wine, its bottle now covered with mold spots.

"Some of the youngest wines might be drinkable for someone who doesn't really know what to expect," he said. "But even they have lost their finish."

For older vintages, the heat's effect was worse.

There was also damage when cases of wine fell during the storm, exploding and spewing their contents over other bottles.

Before rebuilding the cellar, the Brennans will send the remaining bottles to a man in California who bought them from the insurance company, Ted Brennan said. The man plans to auction them off.

"Someone might want to buy a special bottle to commemorate an occasion," Brennan said. "Or someone might want to roll the dice and hope to get a rare vintage cheap and be able to drink it."

One bottle will be a special bargain.

That 1870 Lafite Rothschild. The Brennans bought it a decade ago for $14,000.http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051210/ap_on_re_us/katrina_wine;_ylt=AhSandnn7iNKwc0Rmlv.S4ms0NUE;_yl u=X3oDMTA3ODdxdHBhBHNlYwM5NjQ-

[Saundra Hummer]

Death of an American City

The New York Times | Editorial

Sunday 11 December 2005

We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.

There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.

At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.

The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.

The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year's estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.

Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?

Losing a Major American City

"We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.

Of course, New Orleans's local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.

The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.

Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/121105Z.shtml

[Saundra Hummer]

Heads roll at Veterans Administration
Mushrooming depleted uranium (DU) scandal blamed


by Bob Nichols

Project Censored Award Winner
Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter charged Monday that the reason Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi stepped down earlier this month was the growing scandal surrounding the use of uranium munitions in the Iraq War.

Writing in Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter No. 169, Arthur N. Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law in New York, stated, “The real reason for Mr. Principi’s departure was really never given, however a special report published by eminent scientist Leuren Moret naming depleted uranium as the definitive cause of the ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ has fed a growing scandal about the continued use of uranium munitions by the US Military.”

Bernklau continued, “This malady (from uranium munitions), that thousands of our military have suffered and died from, has finally been identified as the cause of this sickness, eliminating the guessing. The terrible truth is now being revealed.”

He added, “Out of the 580,400 soldiers who served in GW1 (the first Gulf War), of them, 11,000 are now dead! By the year 2000, there were 325,000 on Permanent Medical Disability. This astounding number of ‘Disabled Vets’ means that a decade later, 56% of those soldiers who served have some form of permanent medical problems!” The disability rate for the wars of the last century was 5 percent; it was higher, 10 percent, in Viet Nam.

“The VA Secretary (Principi) was aware of this fact as far back as 2000,” wrote Bernklau. “He, and the Bush administration have been hiding these facts, but now, thanks to Moret’s report, (it) ... is far too big to hide or to cover up!”

“Terry Jamison, Public Affairs Specialist, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs, at the VA Central Office, recently reported that ‘Gulf Era Veterans’ now on medical disability, since 1991, number 518,739 Veterans,” said Berklau.

“The long-term effects have revealed that DU (uranium oxide) is a virtual death sentence,” stated Berklau. “Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist, who retired from the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, and was also involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in the soldiers (from the 2003 Iraq War) as ‘spectacular … and a matter of concern!’”

When asked if the main purpose of using DU was for “destroying things and killing people,” Fulk was more specific: “I would say it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people!”

Principi could not be reached for comment prior to deadline.

References

1. Depleted uranium: “Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets: A death sentence here and abroad” by Leuren Moret, :

http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml.

[. .. This is a tragedy. While GW Bush keeps telling our troops "We're with you." Is he himself being exposed or endangered? Dumb question. Of course he, nor are any of those he is close to are. Not he himself, or a friend or relative is anywhere near this danger. If I'm wrong, fill me in. ...SRH ...]

[Saundra Hummer]

Members of Congress Ask Bush to Stop Undercounting US Casualties

Incalculable pain
By Mark Benjamin
www.salon.com

Saturday 10 December 2005

The Pentagon is underreporting the number of American soldier casualties in Iraq.
A group of seven House Democrats wrote President Bush this week, accusing the Pentagon of underreporting casualties in Iraq.

It's a shocking charge. The letter writers argue that Pentagon casualty reports show only a sliver of the injuries, mostly physical ones from bombs or bullets. But war doesn't work like that, the Democrats declare, adding that the reports skip a horrible panoply of accidents, illness, disease and mental trauma.

"We are concerned that that the figures that were released to the public by your administration do not accurately represent the true toll that this war has taken on the American people," the group wrote Bush on Dec. 7. The Dems are right.

Pentagon casualty reports show 2,390 service members dead from Iraq and Afghanistan and over 16,000 wounded. By far the vast majority of the wounded and dead are from Iraq.

But by Dec. 8, 2005, the military had evacuated another 25,289 service members from Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries or illnesses not caused directly by enemy bullets or bombs, according to the U.S. Transportation Command. That statistic includes everything from serious injuries in Humvee wrecks or other accidents to more routine illnesses that could be unrelated to field battles.

Yet those service members are not included in the Pentagon's casualty reports. That's odd. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a casualty as "a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment or capture or through being missing in action."

"We don't do Webster's," Jim Turner, a Pentagon spokesman told me in 2004 as I was reporting on counting casualties. In a written statement, the Department of Defense told me that the casualty reports describe casualties to fit the "understanding of the average newspaper reader."

In the past few weeks, I've been spending time with two soldiers currently getting treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. One is a 40-year-old man who served in Iraq with the South Carolina Army National Guard. He got hit by a truck in Iraq, fracturing a vertebra, chipping another, and hurting his shoulder. The impact also caused his brain to rock violently inside his skull. He has been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. His wife can't dispatch him down the aisle of a supermarket to fetch ice cream because he often can't remember what happened just five minutes ago.

Another 46-year-old soldier who served in the West Virginia Army National Guard was in an armored personnel carrier that crashed into an eight-foot hole. Because of his traumatic brain injury, his memory is shot. He slurs his words like a drunk and walks with a cane because of dizzy spells. Given the way the Pentagon tabulates casualties, neither of these men count.

Neglecting these kinds of casualties does not appear to be an invention of the Bush administration. Pentagon casualty reports from previous wars, including Vietnam, list the number of dead and wounded and also appear to exclude non-combat injuries and illnesses.

In their letter to Bush, the Democrats cite a November 2004 "60 Minutes" segment (to which I contributed), which featured "badly injured soldiers who were upset by their being excluded from the official count, even though they were, in one soldier's words, 'in hostile territory.'" Democrats assert that counting casualties sustained only from bombs and bullets "does not represent the entire picture of American lives affected by the war."

As the war goes on, that picture is becoming more painfully clear. The Department of Veterans Affairs provides soldiers with medical care after leaving the military. An October V.A. report shows that 119,247 service members who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan - and are now off duty - are receiving health care from the V.A. Presumably, some of those health problems are unrelated to the war.

But the statistics seem to show that a lot of those health problems are war-related. For example, nearly 37,000 have mental disorders, including nearly 16,000 who have been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. Over 46,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan receiving benefits from the V.A. have musculoskeletal problems. These are all veterans who within the last four years were considered by the military to be mentally and physically fit enough to fight.

In their letter, the seven Democrats assert that the entire picture of casualties coming out of the Department of Defense is distorted. But the letter concludes that one thing is clear: "What we can be certain of is that at least tens of thousands of young men and women have been physically or psychologically damaged for life."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Members of Congress Ask Bush to Stop Undercounting US Casualties

By Kevin Zeese
DemocracyRising.us

Wednesday 07 December 2005

The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States of America
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

We are concerned that the Department of Defense has been under-reporting casualties in Iraq by only reporting non-fatal casualties incurred in combat. We write today to request that you provide the American people with a full accounting of the American casualties in Iraq since the March 19, 2003 invasion, including a full accounting of the fatalities, the wounded, those who have contracted illnesses during their time overseas, and those suffering from mental afflictions as a result of their service in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. We are concerned that the figures that were released to the public by your Administration do not accurately represent the true toll that this war has taken on the American people.

On November 21, 2004, CBS' 60 Minutes led its program with a segment on the subject of uncounted "non-combat" casualties. They interviewed badly injured soldiers who were upset by their being excluded from the official count, even though they were, in one soldier's words, "in hostile territory...". The Pentagon declined to be interviewed, instead sending a letter that contained information not included in published casualty reports. "More than 15,000 troops with so-called 'non-battle' injuries and diseases have been evacuated from Iraq," wrote the Department of Defense. John Pike, Director of GlobalSecurity.org told 60 Minutes in that segment that this uncounted casualty figure "would have to be somewhere in the ballpark of over 20, maybe 30,000."

As you know, more than one in four U.S. troops have come home from the Iraq war with health problems that require medical or mental health treatment. Thus, with more than 300,000 troops having served in Iraq, this amounts to at least 50,000 cases of mental trauma. Moreover, 101,000 of the 431,000 troops who have returned home from service in Iraq and Afghanistan and who have separated from the military, have sought help. This figure shows the Pentagon's official Iraq casualty count of 2,082 U.S. troops killed, and 15,477 wounded as of today, to be inaccurate by several multiples. What we cannot understand is why you are only reporting the total American casualty figure at just over 15,000 when you know that this figure is not an accurate representation of the facts and does not represent the entire picture of American lives affected by the war. We also need to understand where your numbers are coming from and how you arrived at them given the facts and data that has been released from the Pentagon.

Based on the data that have been released by your Administration and the unofficial data that are coming out of the Pentagon, what we can be certain of is that at least tens of thousands of young men and women have been physically or psychologically damaged for life. To be exact, the figure ranges somewhere between 15,000 and 101,000 today. This is a staggering range of casualties by any standard, as these casualties will affect the lives of at least hundreds of thousands of family members and others. We cannot emphasize enough how important it is that we understand the gravity of the situation that we are faced with.

Since the March 2003 invasion, our troops have been dying at a rate of about 800 a year, with most killed in action by crude but powerful roadside bombs. More than 90 percent of the deaths have come after you declared an end to "major combat operations" on May 1, 2003. Moreover, the Pentagon reports that of the service members returning from the Iraq war this year, 47 percent saw someone wounded or killed, or saw a dead body. This is no small matter that can be downplayed by superficial reassurances designed to temporarily assuage the uneasiness of the American public. The effects of this war will remain for many years to come and each and every one of us will have to cope with it.

The American people have sacrificed a great deal as a result of this war and they deserve to know what you know. Those who have sacrificed deserve to know that their sacrifice counted and that their service abroad was as recognizable as that of our fallen soldiers. Further, the failure of your Administration to acknowledge the loss of Iraqi lives prevents the American people from having a complete picture of the cost of this war. We urge you to honor your duty as our Commander-in-Chief to keep the American people regularly informed of the true human cost of the Iraq War.

Sincerely,

Rep. John Conyers, Jr.

Rep. Sam Farr

Rep. Raul M. Grijalva

Rep. Carolyn Maloney

Rep. Betty McCollum

Rep. Jim McDermott

Rep. Jan Schakowsky
-------
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/121105X.shtml

[Saundra Hummer]

New Orleans Now: Bay Area volunteers share shocking stories

by CC Campbell-Rock

The flicker of the changing images held the packed warehouse community co-op audience spellbound. At least 70 people, mostly white social justice activists, turned out to watch the New Orleans update from the Common Ground Collective’s Video Committee. The new video is a compendium of footage and images from at least seven Bay Area volunteers who took part in the organization’s rebuilding New Orleans campaign.

The new footage captured the views of social justice activists, New Orleanians and Bay Area volunteers who participated in the Thanksgiving weekend’s “Roadtrip for Relief,” called for by the organizers of the Common Ground Collective.

The film paled in comparison to the stories of at least 10 volunteers who put their lives on hold and answered Common Ground Collective’s call for 300 people to come and work to rebuild New Orleans. They told stories of a New Orleans that existed before Hurricane Katrina. Their accounts exposed the dirty little secrets that the popular Southern city has harbored for centuries.

“The Common Ground Collective called for a national caravan to converge in New Orleans and for 300 people to meet down there to do all kinds of work, to support people in New Orleans,” said Natasha Dedrick, a core organizer of the Common Ground Collective.

Dedrick coordinated the road trip and the recent meeting. “We’re proud to say that we had the largest contingency. At least 50 Bay Area residents accepted the challenge of helping hurricane victims.

Essentially, Hurricane Katrina unmasked the realities that the majority of city residents experienced on a daily basis: virulent, insidious forms of racism, repression and corruption, which trapped generations of New Orleanians in the cycle of poverty, on which mainstream media reported, initially.

In three short days, Dedrick, who pulled together a cross-section of volunteers, helped to raise $5,000 for the Common Ground Collective. She borrowed a truck, filled it up with cleaning supplies and was joined by at least 50 others on the trip.

She got involved after hearing news reports on the hurricane’s devastation. “I started freaking out, once I saw the response to it. I called Malik (Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground) and Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children. I couldn’t reach anyone. My friends said, ‘Just go down there.’”

Not only did she go for the road trip, but Dedrick has been to New Orleans at least three times since the hurricane ravaged the city and the Gulf Coast. “It’s (destruction) going on for miles and miles,” the activist affirmed.

“The interesting thing about going down is that there’s almost nothing happening on the ground, except what the grassroots is doing. The Common Ground Collective is about the only group on the ground doing anything. There are almost no city workers. When I see them, they look like little ants on a mountain of destruction. The National Guard is roaming the streets in humvees. They drive by and you want to say, ‘Get out and start working.’”

Perplexed by the useless activities of the National Guard, Dedrick, who is volunteering in honor of her mother, an activist and artist who passed away five years ago, asked a national guardsman about his work. She was told the National Guard was in the fourth phase of a national recovery program.

“The first, second, third and fourth stages are patrolling. They’re patrolling what? It’s a ghost town. The fifth phase is the clean up, which will start in January. But then, that will only be done by the Louisiana National Guard. The other units are pulling out. We (Common Ground Collective) were able to do 30 houses and give out food. It was a lot, but that’s nothing,” compared to the work that remains.

“I couldn’t be more disgusted,” she adds, about the hidden agenda of some involved in the reclamation of the city. “There’s no mistake. It is ethnic cleansing … just the fact there is no electricity. What is that? No schools. No electricity and hot water. How much work is down there? An endless amount of work, and residents can’t get jobs. Where are the jobs?”

Justin Hite, another core organizer with the Common Ground Collective, told the story of the arrest of Brandon Darby, the Ninth Ward coordinator for Common Ground Collective. “Brandon was on his way to get King (one of the Angola 3), who was stranded in his home, shortly after the hurricane. A ranger came along and made Brandon get into a boat. He jumped off the boat and began swimming. The cops were in pursuit. Things were getting rough, until the media showed up. Then the rangers dispatched a boat to get King.”

Justin and several other volunteers also had to take turns on watch for anyone who wanted to destroy or damage the reputation of the Common Ground Collective and its leader, Malik Rahim. “At dusk, white militias formed up and would patrol, with machine guns, the Black communities looking for looters.”

Hite said they started the Common Ground Collective by posting 7,000-8,000 fliers on doors. The owner of a daycare center donated her building for free for three months. The collective today uses the location as a distribution center. More recently, the group launched a women’s center across the street from the distribution outlet.

Nicole Derse, a political organizer, said she was surprised at the response from government. She went to Thailand after the tsunami, where she helped to set up the Tsunami Volunteer Center. She also went down to New Orleans to help the Katrina victims. The way the Thailand government handed that country’s natural disaster compared with the Bush administration’ handling of the U.S.’s greatest natural disaster stunned her.

“I was shocked that the government wasn’t even trying to pretend to help. The Thailand government did what it could (after the tsunami), as small as it is, but the local, state and federal governments here do not want people to return. They do not want New Orleans to be a predominately Black city any longer,” Derse explained.

Most shocking to Derse, is that the cost to rent a home or apartment in New Orleans has tripled. “A two-bedroom will now go for $2,500 per month,” when it previously cost $800 per month. Moreover, developers are offering homeowners pennies on the dollar to purchase their property. “All the evidence suggests that this is the greatest example of racism and peril of capitalism I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” she says.

Emma Gerard, a tenant organizer, said the Housing Authority of New Orleans is telling public housing tenants that there is no place for them to live if they come back. “There has been a governmental moratorium on evictions since Oct. 29, but since then, 100 people per day are being evicted. I personally witnessed a woman’s belongings being pushed out.”

Most egregious, she adds, is the behavior of the Housing Authority of New Orleans. “There is a push to shut down the projects and to reduce Section 8 tenants,” Gerard explains.

Tenants at the B.W. Cooper public housing development were told that they couldn’t return to Cooper because of “extensive damage” done by the hurricane. “Sam Jackson took us on a tour of his apartment and there was no damage there. Tenants have found out that HANO is using their homes to house relief workers and HANO staff members,” says Gerard.

Conversely, FEMA has been giving out Section 8 vouchers, but landlords are refusing to take them. They would rather rent to higher paying government workers and contractors, Gerard concludes.

Derse added, “It’s easy to get evicted in New Orleans. There is a five-day eviction notice. If you don’t show up for a hearing, the landlord has a right to put your stuff out on the street.”

Common Ground Collective is working in tandem with No Heat on an anti-eviction campaign. As a result of the recent lawsuit, landlords have to send eviction notices to the last registered addresses of the tenants and FEMA has to give the City of New Orleans a list of tenants to be evicted.

Several prison activists went to New Orleans to monitor and report on the prison system and to monitor police activities. Aaron and Genca visited the House of Detention, a holding jail, and saw MPs patrolling with assault rifles. The activists were not allowed to enter the courtroom.

They were able, however, to pass out 50-100 legal rights handbooks. Aaron shared instances of frivolous arrests of people in New Orleans. “Mostly for things that sound like slave code violations, like double-parking,” he said.

One organizer, Jimmy, was arrested for double-parking while trying to off-load supplies. “They were always arresting Black people for nothing,” he continued. Another was arrested for littering on Halloween night.

“The state of the prison isn’t fit for anyone to be in there. They just threw a bunch of bleach on the mold. There is no running water. The toilets are overflowing. They’re arresting people and putting them in jail, where they are getting sick. People are in a state where they need trauma relief, as well as getting back into their homes,” Genca added.

Aaron added, “I also heard several stories about how fines have dramatically increased since before Katrina. They were saying that since the city was nearly broke, they needed to increase fines.” For example, a fine that was $50 before Katrina shot up to $250.

“Only one public defender is back. He is recommending that people plead guilty and pay the fines, so you don’t have to spend the night in Parish Prison.”

Aaron then told the story of two Mexican-Americans and their father who left Texas to do demolition work in Plaquemines Parish. Anyone who lives in Louisiana knows that Plaquemines Parish was legendary as a bastion of racism, as exhibited by the late Parish President Leander Perez.

They two workers were called “wetbacks” by the parish’s police, and one family member was arrested and charged with being an illegal alien, even though he was American born. Bail was set at $10,000 and the trial for February 2006.

“When the family brought the money for bail, they were given a series of clearly racist things as excuses for holding their brother in jail. For example, they said the INS had a hold on his record, he had a fake ID etc.,” Aaron said.

They sent the family to Orleans Parish to the INS, which said there was no hold on this person, and they were sent back to Plaquemines. While there, a Plaquemines clerk gave them the INS phone number for work permits for their brother, who was born in the U.S.

“They were given 30 different phone numbers. That was a totally racist system being used. Another person held with him is still in jail. There have been 1,200 arrests since the hurricane. The ACLU is collecting stories like that to mount a legal challenge in court.”

Aaron also says, “If people want to go back, this is the time. Both the white conservatives and the white liberals are going in to do their thing,” he continued, “but no one is listing to Black people. And the other community organizations and clinics are not trying to help out.”

Lisa Milos went to New Orleans to work with Common Ground also. She’s interested in establishing a nationwide effort similar to Freedom Summer in the 1960s, when young people took a leadership role in the civil rights movement.

“I would like to see young people in the grassroots go down and rebuild and shame the government into redirecting the money away from Blackwater Security and Halliburton,” she explained.

Milos spoke of incidents of wage disparities that she witnessed. “One woman, a Bobcat operator, was offered $10 per hour one week, when others were being paid $15 an hour. Blacks and Latinos were making $10-$12 per hour.

“Then there is this incredible Guatemalan, whose employer asked him to pay $1,000 in rent to share a spare room. They are trying not to hire residents, especially if they are Black or Latino,” Milos said of major contractors in New Orleans.

“I’m just an uneducated forklift operator,” another participant said. “But I went down to help when I heard Malik call for help on the radio. He said, ‘You don’t have to have a college degree.’

“They need bodies there to do the work. If you can push a broom, please go down and help.”

“We gutted 30 houses, but there is 93 miles of destruction. We’re building a new solidarity movement like in the ‘60s. It’s a historic slap in the face of Black and poor people that the government has turned its back on them.

“We want our solidarity to transform institutions, to transform the way society runs, the way we live. Common Ground is calling for another convergence in January, but people are welcome any time,” Natasha Dedrick said.

The Common Ground Collective needs your help. For more information on the “Roadtrip for Relief,” call Brandon Darby, Ninth Ward coordinator, at (512) 912-8000. To contribute to the Common Ground Collective’s Rebuilding New Orleans Campaign, send your tax-deductible contribution to Common Ground Collective, c/o Community Futures Collective, 221 Idora Ave., Vallejo, CA 94591. Community Futures Collective is a 501(c)(3), EIN 72-1584619.

Email CC at campbellrock@sfbayview.com.

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http://www.sfbayview.com/120705/neworleansnow120705.shtml

...[... This is an eye opener don't you think? Before, it just seemed like a disaster which hurt everyone, now we can see it is class and race which are taking hit after hit, it's about the haves and have nots. Each are looking at this situation differently. How could they not. Latino and Blacks, they are being worked against with the hope that they move on and out. What a sorry state of affairs. Greed and racism, such a combination. Sickening, it really is. . ...SRH. ..]

[Saundra Hummer]

HOW TRUE - HOW TRUE

"A simple truth of human existence is that it is vastly easier to amplify fear than it is to assuage it."

"Gone Fishing," How the President Got a Life
By Tom Engelhardt
Tom Dispatch

Thursday 08 December 2005


The "usually disengaged" President, as columnist Maureen Dowd labeled him, had just returned from a prolonged, brush-cutting Crawford vacation to much criticism and a nation in trouble. (One Republican congressman complained that "it was hard for Mr. Bush to get his message out if the White House lectern had a 'Gone Fishing' sign on it.") Democrats were on the attack. Journalistic coverage seemed to grow ever bolder. Bush's poll figures were dropping. A dozen prominent Republicans, fearful of a President out of touch with the national mood, gathered for a private dinner with Karl Rove to "offer an unvarnished critique of Mr. Bush's style and strategy." Next year's congressional elections suddenly seemed up for grabs. The President's aides were desperately scrambling to reposition him as a more "commanding" figure, while, according to the polls, a majority of Americans felt the country was headed in the wrong direction. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld had "cratered"; in the Middle East "violence was rising."

An editorial in the New York Times caught the moment this way in its opening sentence: "A simple truth of human existence is that it is vastly easier to amplify fear than it is to assuage it." Now, there was a post-9/11 truth - except that the editorial was headlined "The Statistical Shark" and its next sentence wasn't about planes smashing into buildings or the way the Bush administration had since wielded the fear card, but another hot-button issue entirely. It went: "Consider the shark attacks that have occurred in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina this summer."

This was, in fact, September 6, 2001, the waning days of a man-bites-dog summer in which headlines had been dominated by the deaths of David Peltier, a 10 year-old boy in Florida, and Sergei Zloukaev, a 27-year-old in North Carolina in fatal shark attacks. Just the day before, in fact, the Times had carried a piece by William J. Broad reassuring readers that scientists did not believe the world was facing a shark "rampage." "If anything," Broad concluded, "the recent global trend in shark attacks is down."

It was just past Labor Day. Congress was barely back in session. Heywood Hale Broun, the sportswriter, would die at 83 that relatively quiet week, while Mexican President Vicente Fox swept triumphantly into Washington and a new book, featured on Newsweek's cover, would carry the title, The Accidental President. The Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section was promoting "the new season" in entertainment, while that night a highly publicized 10-part mini-series was premiering on HBO - Band of Brothers, a Tom Hanks/Steven Speilberg production that followed a platoon of Greatest-Generation soldiers deep into Germany. If World War II nostalgia was on the tube, war elsewhere in the American world was also largely on screen. On September 7, Times journalist Thom Shanker reported on a classified war game, a computer-generated simulation played out by "the nation's senior commanders" which determined that the U.S. military could "decisively defeat one potential adversary, North Korea, while repelling an attack from Iraq" - even if "terrorists [attacked] New York City with chemical weapons."

All in all, that week before September 11th was a modestly uneventful one. An afternoon spent revisiting the New York Times' version of it, via a library microfiche machine, making my way through that paper, day by day, section by section, plunged me into a nearly forgotten world in which the Democrats still controlled the Senate by a single vote and key Republican senators - it was Texan Phil Gramm's turn to announce his retirement that week - were going down like bowling pins. (Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond had preceded Gramm "adding a new element of uncertainty to the 2002 race.") The President had been met by exceedingly gloomy economic news as the unemployment rate jumped that Saturday to 4.9% - another 100,000 jobs lost - a full point above election day, ten months earlier; and Wall Street responded with a sell-off that dropped the Dow Jones to 9,600. Republicans were "panicked," the administration adrift, and we wouldn't see the likes of it again for four years.

Eerie Resonances

A number of post-9/11 subjects would be in the paper that week:

Torture was in the headlines - leading off the culture page that Saturday ("Torture Charge Pits Professor vs. Professor") in a memory piece, datelined Santiago, on Augusto Pinochet's brutal military rule in Chile. (The anniversary of his bloody coup - September 11, 1973 - was approaching.)

Then, too, an American citizen had been imprisoned without charges for 18 months - but it was electrical engineer Fuming Fong and China was holding him.

Anthrax made the op-ed page - but only because Russian scientists had developed a new type that could "overcome the standard Russian and American vaccines."

Terrorism in the U.S. was in the news - an Oklahoma prosecutor was seeking the death penalty for Terry L. Nichols in the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing.

"Violence in the Middle East" was on the front page - but in that week, it had only one meaning, the endless Israeli/Palestinian conflict. (The first Israeli-Arab suicide bomber had just struck.)

The Taliban could be found on the front page on September 7 (and inside on subsequent days) - but only because the mullahs were trying eight foreign aid workers for preaching Christianity. The bemused articles ("Another Strange Kabul Problem: Finding a Lawyer") were of the weird-foreigners variety.

Military recruitment was a topic of interest then as now - the Army, after switching ad agencies and slogans ("Army of One" for "Be All You Can Be") had just conducted an "elaborate event" at the Pentagon, swearing into service its 75,800th recruit of the year, 19 year-old Rodrigo Vasquez III of Karnes City, Texas, in order to highlight meeting its recruitment goals a month ahead of schedule in the "most successful recruiting year since at least 1997."

Howard Dean made the inside pages of the paper that week - the little-known Vermont governor (tagged with "fiscal conservativism/social liberalism") announced that he would not seek reelection to his fifth two-year term. There was "speculation" that he might even "run for the Democratic nomination for President."

Missing in Action

And then there were - in terms of what we've been used to ever since - the missing, or almost missing. Saddam Hussein didn't make it into the paper that week. Kim Il Sung was nowhere in sight. Osama bin Laden barely slipped into print - twice deep into articles - as "the accused terrorist" being hosted by the strange Taliban government. The Axis of Evil, of course, did not exist, nor did the Global War on Terror, and the potential enemy of the week, pushed by Donald Rumsfeld (himself on the defensive over the military budget and arguments with his generals), was "the rising China threat." Iran was scarcely a blip on the news radar screen; Syria rated not a mention. Also missing were just about any of the names we now consider second nature to the post-9/11 news. No "Scooter" Libby. No Valerie Plame. No Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, or Douglas Feith. In fact, not a neocon made it into the pages of the paper over those seven days, and Judy Miller, the neocons' future dream reporter, who would soon enough storm the front page of the Times and take it for her own, had two pieces that week, a September 5th page-five article about a former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency general counsel challenging the administration's "assertion that the global treaty banning biological weapons permits nations to test such arms for defensive purposes"; and, two days later, a tiny Israel piece tucked away at the bottom of page fifteen on "the alleged [on-line] support for terrorism" by Islamic groups and charities. The Vice President, seen silently at the President's side at a "hastily arranged" and awkward "appearance" on the White House grounds after the unemployment figures broke, was otherwise nowhere to be seen, though the Times speculated on its editorial page ("The Bush Merry-Go-Round") that he was "losing influence." ("Mr. Cheney's heart problems and his ardent embrace of the coal, oil and gas industries seem to have hobbled him.")

Though the sharks in the world's oceans that week were feeding on something other than humans, there were still "sharks" around. Allison Mitchell began a Sunday lead Week in Review piece ("Face Off: Which Way to Win Control of Congress?") this way: "Talk about shark season, Congress came back into session last week and the Democrats were circling, sensing blood in the political waters." Little wonder. This was, after all, a non-majoritarian President who had, as Times writers didn't hesitate to remind people, just squeaked through with a helping hand from the Supreme Court. After managing to get one massive tax cut by Congress, he began to drift like a lost lifeboat at sea, while his advisers fretted over polls "showing that many people still view Mr. Bush not as decisive but as tentative and perhaps overly scripted." He was, as a front-page piece by Richard L. Berke and David E. Sanger, put it on September 9th, "essentially out of economic ammunition."

The nature of politics in Washington that week could be caught in lines like: "Democrats go on the attack…" and "Democrats intensified their attacks against Mr. Bush…" Less than a year into a Bush presidency, Columnist Tom Friedman was already offering the faltering leader heartfelt advice on how not to lose the next election. Be "Clinton-minus," not "Reagan-squared" was the formula he offered. As the Mitchell piece made clear, this was a presidency under siege as well as a Republican Party - so "everyone" in Washington agreed - "in peril." In the sort of action not to be seen again for years, a Senate committee actually cut money from the defense budget that week, an act Shanker of the Times termed "another stark challenge" from committee Chairman Carl Levin of Michigan. The political failure of the President's father was evidently on Washington minds as well, and so the paper in a number of pieces linked father and son. The father's bid for reelection had, after all, gone down in flames in the nation's previous recession or, as the headline of one story put it, "Like Father, Bush Is Caught in a Politically Perilous Budget Squeeze."

A few aspects of our post-9/11 political world were quite recognizable even then. That week, the Bush administration was easing up on Big Tobacco ("Justice Official Denies Pressure to Settle Tobacco Suit") and Big Computer ("U.S. Abandoning Its Effort to Break Apart Microsoft"), while preparing to bail from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. And as the administration pushed for legislation to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a "hobbled" Dick Cheney was already stonewalling about what had occurred when his Energy Task Force of Big Oil met earlier in 2001.

The two days before 9/11 were so quiet that you could practically hear a news pin drop. In the Times of September 11th - in that moment before the Internet took full possession of us, a day's lag between events and the news was a print norm - the major story ("Key Leaders Talk of Possible Deals to Revive Economy, Bush is Under Pressure") indicated that "some Republicans" were anxiously bringing up the 1982 midterm elections when President Reagan "told the nation to 'stay the course' in a recession" and the Party dropped numerous House seats in the midterm elections.

At the bottom of the front page was a plane-hijacking story, though it was thirty years old. ("Traced on Internet, Teacher Is Charged In '71 Jet Hijacking.") Across the rest of the page-bottom on that final morning were: "In a Nation of Early Risers, Morning TV Is a Hot Market" and "School Dress Codes vs. a Sea of Bare Flesh."

For intimations of what was to come, you would have had to move inside. On page 3, Douglas Frantz reported, "Suicide Bomb Kills 2 Police Officers in Istanbul," a bombing for which no one took credit and which was automatically attributed to "a leftist terrorist group" (something that would not happen again soon). A page farther on, you could find Barry Bearak and James Risen's piece "Reports Disagree on Fate of Anti-Taliban Rebel Chief" about the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, an anti-Taliban warlord, by two Arabs posing as journalists (which we now know was connected to the September 11 plot). In its penultimate paragraph was this: "If the would-be assassins were indeed Arabs… the fact would lend credibility to those who contend that foreigners, including Osama bin Laden, are playing an ever bigger decision-making role among the Taliban."

Peering further into the future - on page 8, under World Briefs, was a throwaway paragraph on the low-level air war even then being conducted against Saddam Hussein's Iraq ("Iraq said eight civilians were killed and three wounded when Western planes attacked farms 100 miles southeast of Baghdad. The Pentagon said American and British warplanes attacked three surface-to-air missile sites in the so-called no-fly zone…"); and another, "Iran: Denial on nuclear weapons," that began: "The government rejected charges by the United States that it was seeking nuclear weapons…"

And then, of course, there was nothing to do but oh-so-slowly turn the microfiche dial, knowing exactly what was around the corner of time and, after a pitch-black break between days, stumble into those mile-high headlines - "U.S. Attacked, Hijacked Jets Destroy Twin Towers and Hit Pentagon in Day of Terror" - and, despite yourself, experience with a kind of gasp the sky in your brain filling with falling bodies.

Here, by the way, is how that September 6th Times shark editorial ended. If it doesn't give you a little chill for what we've lost, I don't know what will. "Life is full of things that carry more risk than swimming in the ocean. Most of them are inevitably the byproducts of daily life, like falling televisions and car accidents, because daily life is where we spend most of our time. It may lack the visceral fears aroused by the unlikely threat of a shark attack, but it is also far more lethal."

Only five days after that was written, almost three thousand New Yorkers, some adopted from countries around the globe, would face a danger far more shocking - and, until that moment, far less imaginable to most of us, than any shark attack. Things would indeed fall from the sky - and from a history so many Americans knew nothing about - and visceral fears would be aroused that would drive us, like the Pearl Harbor-ish headlines that greeted the audacious act not of a major power but of 19 fanatics in four planes prepared to die, into a future even more unimaginable.

Put another way, an afternoon spent in the lost world of September 5-10, 2001, reminds us that the savage attacks of the following day would, in fact, buy a faltering, confused, and weak administration as well as a dazed and disengaged President a new life, a "calling" as he would put it, and almost four years to do its damnedest. It would be 2004 before the President's polling figures settled into the levels of that long-lost September 10th. It would be the summer of 2005 - and the administration's disastrous handling of hurricanes Sheehan, Katrina, and Iraq - before the President would again be criticized for his "gone fishing" summer vacation; before the Democrats would again begin to attack; before newspapers would again be relatively uncowed; before the Republicans would again gather in those private (and then public) places and begin to complain; before Congress would again be up for grabs. Four long years to make it back to September 10th, 2001 in an American world now filled to the brim with horrors, a United States which is no longer a "country," but a "homeland" and a Homeland Security State.
==
[Note for Tomdispatch readers: This is the first of two pieces. The second, to appear sometime next week, will be on the world of Bushism after Bush and Cheneyism after Cheney, the American world our children will inherit.] ...

[ . .. My father in law always said, "Why should I care, I won't be here!", and with how things are going for all of us, it must be how too many others are thinking as well. . .. .. Oh, go to this site to see the mal-formed children whose condition they say is a direct result from the chemicals and other contaminants in the air, soil and water their parents and therefore them, were, and are exposed to because of war. Are we going to see the same things with children whose parents served "over there"? With children being born to "our service men and women?" Will they too suffer the same fate? Are we accepting of this? I have to hope not, surely not. .. .SRH]
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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 the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has just come out in paperback.
------
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120905O.shtml

[Saundra Hummer]

. .. "And reason...teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions." -John Locke

=

. .. "Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them." Ralph Waldo Emerson

=

. .. "Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash, your picture in the paper nor money in the bank, neither. Just refuse to bear them." William Faulkner

[Saundra Hummer]

Israel readies forces for strike on nuclear Iran

By Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv, and Sarah Baxter, Washington

12/11/05 "The Times" -- -- ISRAEL’S armed forces have been ordered by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, to be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran, military sources have revealed.

The order came after Israeli intelligence warned the government that Iran was operating enrichment facilities, believed to be small and concealed in civilian locations.

Iran’s stand-off with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over nuclear inspections and aggressive rhetoric from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, who said last week that Israel should be moved to Europe, are causing mounting concern.

The crisis is set to come to a head in early March, when Mohamed El-Baradei, the head of the IAEA, will present his next report on Iran. El-Baradei, who received the Nobel peace prize yesterday, warned that the world was “losing patience” with Iran.

A senior White House source said the threat of a nuclear Iran was moving to the top of the international agenda and the issue now was: “What next?” That question would have to be answered in the next few months, he said.

Defence sources in Israel believe the end of March to be the “point of no return” after which Iran will have the technical expertise to enrich uranium in sufficient quantities to build a nuclear warhead in two to four years.

“Israel — and not only Israel — cannot accept a nuclear Iran,” Sharon warned recently. “We have the ability to deal with this and we’re making all the necessary preparations to be ready for such a situation.”

The order to prepare for a possible attack went through the Israeli defence ministry to the chief of staff. Sources inside special forces command confirmed that “G” readiness — the highest stage — for an operation was announced last week.

Gholamreza Aghazadeah, head of the Atomic Organisation of Iran, warned yesterday that his country would produce nuclear fuel. “There is no doubt that we have to carry out uranium enrichment,” he said.

He promised it would not be done during forthcoming talks with European negotiators. But although Iran insists it wants only nuclear energy, Israeli intelligence has concluded it is deceiving the world and has no intention of giving up what it believes is its right to develop nuclear weapons.

A “massive” Israeli intelligence operation has been underway since Iran was designated the “top priority for 2005”, according to security sources.

Cross-border operations and signal intelligence from a base established by the Israelis in northern Iraq are said to have identified a number of Iranian uranium enrichment sites unknown to the the IAEA.

Since Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, “it has been understood that the lesson is, don’t have one site, have 50 sites”, a White House source said.

If a military operation is approved, Israel will use air and ground forces against several nuclear targets in the hope of stalling Tehran’s nuclear programme for years, according to Israeli military sources.

It is believed Israel would call on its top special forces brigade, Unit 262 — the equivalent of the SAS — and the F-15I strategic 69 Squadron, which can strike Iran and return to Israel without refuelling.

“If we opt for the military strike,” said a source, “it must be not less than 100% successful. It will resemble the destruction of the Egyptian air force in three hours in June 1967.”

Aharon Zeevi Farkash, the Israeli military intelligence chief, stepped up the pressure on Iran this month when he warned Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, that “if by the end of March the international community is unable to refer the Iranian issue to the United Nations security council, then we can say the international effort has run its course”.

The March deadline set for military readiness also stems from fears that Iran is improving its own intelligence-gathering capability. In October it launched its first satellite, the Sinah-1, which was carried by a Russian space launcher.

“The Iranians’ space programme is a matter of deep concern to us,” said an Israeli defence source. “If and when we launch an attack on several Iranian targets, the last thing we need is Iranian early warning received by satellite.”

Russia last week signed an estimated $1 billion contract — its largest since 2000 — to sell Iran advanced Tor-M1 systems capable of destroying guided missiles and laser-guided bombs from aircraft.

“Once the Iranians get the Tor-M1, it will make our life much more difficult,” said an Israeli air force source. “The installation of this system can be relatively quick and we can’t waste time on this one.”

The date set for possible Israeli strikes on Iran also coincides with Israel’s general election on March 28, prompting speculation that Sharon may be sabre-rattling for votes.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the frontrunner to lead Likud into the elections, said that if Sharon did not act against Iran, “then when I form the new Israeli government, we’ll do what we did in the past against Saddam’s reactor, which gave us 20 years of tranquillity”.

TEHRAN MINISTER MET MILITANTS BEFORE NEW OFFENSIVE

Iran’s foreign minister met leading figures from three Islamic militant groups to co-ordinate a united front against Israel days before a recent escalation of attacks against Israeli targets shattered fragile ceasefires with Lebanon and the Palestinians, writes Hugh Macleod in Damascus.

The minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, held talks with leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah in Damascus on November 15.

Among those who attended the meeting were Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas leader, and a deputy leader of Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for last Monday’s suicide bombing of a shopping mall in Netanya that killed five Israeli citizens.

Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine- General Command, was also present. “We all confirmed that what is going on in occupied Palestine is organically connected to what is going on in Iraq, Syria, Iran and Lebanon,” said Jibril.

Seven days after the talks, Hezbollah fired a volley of rockets and mortars at Israeli targets, sparking the fiercest fighting between the two sides since Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon five years ago.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article11279.htm

[Saundra Hummer]

The War in Iraq Costs


Below is a running total of the U.S. taxpayer cost of the Iraq War. The number is based on Congressional appropriations.
http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182

CLICK ON THE LINK UP ABOVE TO GO TO THIS SITE AND YOU WILL BE ABLE TO SEE SOME VERY INTERESTING COMPARISONS OR COMPARE TO THE COST OF:

SEE THE COST IN YOUR COMMUNITY
PRESCHOOL
KID'S HEALTH......................PUBLIC HOUSING.........WORLD IMMUNIZATION
PUBLIC EDUCATION..............WORLD HUNGER...........AIDS EPIDEMIC
COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIPS/I]

[Saundra Hummer]

A HUMOROUS LOOK AT A OUR PLIGHT

Don't Start Cheering Just Yet
Beginning of the End?
By BEN TRIPP

Watching the zeppelin of the neoconservative movement burst into flames, tethered to the mooring mast of George W. Bush's presidency, I experience a shiver of such undiluted schadenfreude it's like to blew my earlobes off. What joy to see these scheming, lubricious barghests come undone, sinking beneath the hubris of their utter assurance that they alone are blessed with the vision to fulfill mankind's destiny: to shovel money into their pockets, regardless of the cost to life, love, or the future of the world. May a trillion satanic parrots empty their fetorous bowels on the sleek Italian suitings of these cruel arch-manipulators throughout a sulfurous eternity. When any organism behaves in a manner contrary to the mandates of survival, it perishes. This is the single law of life. So the neoconservatives and their Republican strongmen have behaved, and so they succumb. All well and good. But it's not over yet. The Right-wing beast is not dead. Do not rejoice until the monster's head is stuffed and mounted over the fireplace, and even then, keep a fire axe close to hand, and watch its eyes. Because anything that lives on greed, lives forever. It will need killing again before long.

There's been overmuch crowing on the Left at the misfortunes of the rulership: look, hurricanes and sputtering economies and ill-got wars and evil in all its banal and exotic forms, a once-great nation drowning in its own effluent. Bird flu and cancer, radioactive waste and Chinese capital; we little righteous folk may suffer, but we suffer less for being the least culpable. At least our consciences are clean as we're flung like bundles of faggots at the feet of the self-martyred burning swine that sought to rule the world. So what? We're being just as gullible as swing voters. After all, even if the cabal disbands, its members will be richer than the greatest Caesars of Rome, more powerful than all the Medicis and Rothschilds and a gross of King Louies together, even in disgrace. The laws are bent in their favor, the rules loopholed to suit their game; Croesus never had it so good, and the rest of us, besotten on good-on-yer revenge, will continue to eat cold soup out of cans and live three to a bedroom in shambolic obscurity until it's time to die.

The neocons have won, and won the long game, even if Bush goes down, which he may not. The media loves a comeback story. If Bush cleans house, fires a couple of front men and replaces them with photogenic ringers, and goes on the road, the least penitence will earn him congratulatory spreads in People magazine that would make an actress emerging from rehab blush. A comeback narrative! O joy. O POTUS, promote us. And his poll numbers will go up and he'll see to it that abortions are made illegal and the IRS is devoted only to harrying the poor and the War on Frightening People goes on and on forever and the loot pours into the coffers of a few corporations with which he's friendly. Legacy? His legacy is secured henceforth, no need to accomplish more. There is fifty years of work ahead of us to repair the damage done to our republic, and two hundred years of goodwill lost, and five hundred centuries of novelty weather to contend with, and if there is a God, he is big wroth, daddy. I call that a win for the folks that couldn't care less about such trifles. The rest of us have work to do. For the next hundred years.

For one thing, America doesn't work properly. We need to fix that. The two-party system has done what all binary systems do: it has settled into stasis. Neither side has much more sway than the other, and so both sides have drifted into the gravity of a larger body, in this case money. Immense quantities of money have caused the so-called Left and Right to enter an orbit around it. A third party would throw the system out of balance, and then some progress might be achieved. Strip corporations of their spurious human rights. That also would help. But whatever else must be done, we must not imagine the fight is over. Winston Churchill, at the Lord Mayor's Luncheon in 1942, said, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Obviously he was drunk, but the fat lady hasn't even cleared her throat yet. Semper vigilans, me hearties. The beast lives.

Ben Tripp is an independent filmmaker and all-around swine. His book, Square In The Nuts, may be purchased here, with other outlets to follow: http://www.lulu.com/Squareinthenuts. Swag is available as always from http://www.cafeshops/tarantulabros. And Mr. Tripp may be reached at credel@earthlink.net.

http://www.counterpunch.org/tripp11052005.html

[Saundra Hummer]

Hunt Continues for 1,300 Children Lost during Katrina
By Tina Susman
Newsday


Saturday 10 December 2005

While investigators believe most of the missing are safe somewhere, finding splintered families is proving a gargantuan task.
New Orleans - Three months after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, the fate of more than 1,300 children remains unknown.

Until a few days ago, Lil Joe and Kolenik Williams, brothers from New Orleans, were among the lost.

A teenage sister living in Baton Rouge when Katrina hit called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children several weeks after the Aug. 29 storm, saying she had not heard from them or from their mother, Nicole Williams.

That left two investigators working for the center to pursue the only lead they had one recent afternoon - the children's father, an inmate in New Orleans' storm-battered jail.

As the pair, Paul M. Burke and Bill Gleason, climbed the jailhouse's chipped, concrete steps, they were optimistic. That quickly faded, once inside the dreary visiting area.

The father, Joseph Jackson, shook his head back and forth as Burke pressed him for information - friends' names, relatives' locations, a grandmother's phone number.

"Would she contact your brother?" Burke asked. Jackson said no. "Would she know where he's at?" Burke pressed, leaning closer toward the glass. "I don't even know where he's at," Jackson responded, again shaking his head.

Like so many leads, this one was a bust.

Burke and Gleason headed downstairs. "We spent days to get absolutely nothing," Burke said, clearly frustrated. "They could be anywhere."

So could the hundreds of others, a situation that illustrates one of the most anguishing and challenging consequences of the flight from Katrina. For, while investigators believe most of the missing are safe somewhere, the wrenching apart of their families is proving a gargantuan obstacle to overcome.

In the evacuations after New Orleans flooded, families were scattered across 48 states. Those overseeing evacuations, in their rush to clear people from the city, often separated families as they pressed them onto buses, helicopters and planes, which then went in different directions.

Documentation proving custody of children or other family ties was destroyed or lost. Access to phones and computers was minimal, creating gaps between the time families were separated and the time children were reported missing. Shelters had no coordinated system for feeding evacuees' names, birth dates and other information into a national database.

On top of that, many families were severely splintered even before the hurricane.

Many children had been in the care of aunts, grandparents, great-grandparents or unrelated guardians before the storm, and those caretakers often lacked information crucial to finding children, such as birth dates, names of the youngsters' friends, recent photographs and nicknames.

"They're scattered physically, which doesn't help, but they're also scattered socially," said Burke. "When you have this sort of family structure, it's very difficult. When they scatter, they're just gone."

All of this has created a labyrinthine nightmare for investigators such as Burke and Gleason, who can spend hours a day roaming the mangled streets of New Orleans in search of information that could reunite children with their families.

Burke, a retired Alaska state trooper, and Gleason, a retired Los Angeles homicide detective, are members of Team Adam, a unit of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The group, comprising retired law enforcement officers from across the country, serves as a quick-reaction force when children vanish.

It took just hours for Team Adam members to be deployed after Katrina, a reflection of the level of need created by the storm - initially, 4,819 children were unaccounted for.

Bob O'Brien, director of the national center's missing children's division, said tens of thousands of calls came in immediately after the center established a special Katrina phone bank on Labor Day. Quickly, he said, the team had to rewrite its own rules to handle the unprecedented situation.

By mid-November, the center's Katrina-related caseload was down to about 1,320.

O'Brien said some of those still missing could be dead. Identification of bodies has been slow, because of the poor condition of so many of them. But most of the children, he said, probably are safe but separated from relatives or guardians, who because of the haphazard evacuation cannot find them.

They might be in foster care or staying with friends or Good Samaritans. But no one can be sure until they are found, and accomplishing that has become more difficult as shelters close and as those searching, or being searched for, shift locations.

The problem is likely to worsen when the federal government stops paying for hotel rooms for evacuees, who will be forced to move yet again. Most states have been given a Dec. 15 cutoff date for hotel payments, but some were given until Jan. 7.

"It's like eating an elephant sandwich," said Gleason of chasing down leads across various states and gleaning information from family members who often don't communicate much in the best of times.

The Williams' case was one such example.

Two of Nicole Williams' children live with her mother in Texas. Another, a 17-year-old with a baby of her own, lives in Baton Rouge. Only 6-year-old Joseph, known as Lil Joe, and 1-year-old Kolenik were living with their mother in New Orleans.

It was the 17-year-old who reported the youngest ones missing.

The key to finding them was to find Nicole Williams, and one way to find her was to find their father.

The jailhouse meeting with Jackson took two days to arrange, and it underscored the difficulties of nailing down reliable information. Jackson, for example, said he and Nicole Williams were married, something the investigators did not know but that could affect the surname she used if she had applied for assistance. He said Kolenik's name was spelled differently - Colnik - than what the case file contained, something that could prove important if the children had been enrolled in school somewhere.

It was their fifth stop of the day, which had begun hours earlier in Baton Rouge, where volunteers receive case files and head into the field. Most files contain scant information gleaned from phone calls and e-mails from those who have filed reports. Often, information is limited to the child's last known address or the name and possible address of a relative.

"Phones are hit and miss, so we spend a lot of time driving around, going from address to address, knocking on doors," Gleason said.

Even with a GPS device in their car, the going was slow as they traversed the bleak and barren post-flood landscape.

Most missing children come from the most heavily damaged parts of the city - the poor and working-class areas - and buildings there still bear the scrawls of search-and-rescue teams. "Dog prints inside," read the message on one door. "Dead cat," read another, the grim words adding to the dismal nature of the investigators' task.

"There's nobody at this address," Gleason said as they arrived at one damaged house on the end of a cul de sac, where 11-year-old LaChristina Taylor, for which the center had no photograph, had reportedly been living with her grandfather. That was all Gleason and Burke knew of the little girl.

They updated the file, and the next step, for another day, would be to try to find out where the grandfather had gone.

Burke and Gleason then headed toward another part of town, where the aunt of a missing 11-year-old boy lived. The boy's mother was in jail. His father, who reported him missing, lives in Georgia but thought his son was with the aunt, who had been told to expect the investigators.

As Burke and Gleason approached a home, they saw a woman sitting on the second-floor porch talking into her cellular phone. It was the woman, known only as Aunt Wanda, and as the men got out of the car she put down the phone and pulled out her identity documents.

"I'm his auntie!" she said anxiously. Then, she produced the missing boy, Jeremy, who apparently had no idea he was considered missing.

Burke and Gleason stayed just long enough to verify his identity, then headed off, grateful at having resolved one case but cognizant of the heaps of others that remain open.

"I would hope," Burke said when asked if he believed all the cases would be resolved. "I have to hope."

Then, as they drove toward another address that turned out to be an abandoned house, Burke's phone rang and he let out a "whoop!" Nicole Williams' mother had been found in Texas, and she had provided a new phone number for her daughter.

The next day, Nov. 16, the case was declared resolved.

Nicole Williams, Lil Joe and Kolenik had survived the hurricane and floods by holing up in a high-rise building. When the water receded, Williams led the children to the convention center. There, they boarded an evacuation bus to Houston, spent time in a shelter, and in November got vouchers that enabled them to rent an apartment.

Throughout all of this, Williams, in a recent phone interview, said she had tried to contact relatives but that the constant moving, the lack of a phone, and the family's already scattered circumstances made it difficult.

When they left their home, Williams said she and the children walked several miles to the convention center, then sat in despair with thousands of others as buses passed them by. When, after a day and a night, she saw a chance to board a bus, they joined the surge of people.

A police officer took Lil Joe and Kolenik away from her and put them on the bus.

"I said, 'I'm not going to let you separate me from my boys,' " Williams says she told the officer. "They were telling me, 'Don't worry, everybody is going to the same place.' "

Another officer intervened and let Williams join the boys, but Williams wonders what might have happened had she not stood her ground.

"I wasn't letting my boys out of my sight, because nobody was going to save their lives like I would," she said, choking back tears. "You'd have to be a mother to know that ain't nobody going to risk their lives like you would to save your kids."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Drowned City Cuts Its Poor Adrift By Peter Beaumont
The Observer

Sunday 11 December 2005

The waters have receded but the mainly black, low-income citizens of New Orleans are now the victims of rising rents, forced evictions and plans that favour the better off.

Miss Mildred's piano lies where the water knocked it down three months ago, amid ruined photographs and clothes. Her favourite chair is jammed in a corner; the wooden tiles of her tiny clapboard house muddy and peeled loose. There is nothing to salvage from a thrifty, industrious life, so she has come to see her home in New Orleans' devastated Ninth Ward for one last time.

'I don't have anything to come home to. No food, no water or electricity,' said the 74-year-old, whose family has been scattered. 'I can't afford to live in the French Quarter and there is nowhere else to rent. I have three more years on the mortgage to pay for this.' She will not sell the property, she says, but she also will not return. And Mildred W Franklin is angry. In a city where the wealthy areas are buzzing with reconstruction, her neighbourhood, one of the worst affected, is silent and ghostly. 'They want us to be disgusted. They don't want us to return.'

She is not alone in thinking this. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans it was the city's poor - almost exclusively African Americans - who were left to fend for themselves as the city drowned in a lake of toxic sludge. Now, three months on, the same people have been abandoned once again by a reconstruction effort that seems determined to prevent them from returning. They are the victims of a devastating combination of forced evictions, a failure to reopen the city's public house projects, rent gouging and - as in the case of Mildred - a decision to write off whole neighbourhoods.

They are victims too of a reconstruction effort that, while its funding remains stalled in Congress, and lacking proper leadership, has been left to the care of the private sector with little interest in the city's poor. As a rapacious free market has come to dominate the rebuilding of the Louisiana city, it has seen spiralling prices and the influx of property speculators keen to cash in on the disaster. The result is one of the most shocking pieces of urban planning that black and poor America has seen: reconstruction as survival of the wealthiest.

Sitting in the back of the pick-up truck of union activist Jim Prickett, Aaron is on fire with anger. A young black man in his twenties in dreadlocks and a Veterans for Peace T-shirt, he flares out at all around him. 'My grandpa died at the airport [during the evacuation]. Now me and my mama can't get into our home. There is a notice on the door. If we try, we are looting. Do you understand how that must feel?' he shouts. 'Do you understand? I live how I can. It has jumbled me up here,' he points to his head. 'It is genocide and ethnic cleansing. It's the return of Jim Crow.'

Aaron's anger is not unique, although a crushed sense of depression is more common. It is fuelled by the suspicion among the city's dispersed poor that what is happening is nothing short of an attempt to redraw the city's demographics and gentrify it. It is a suspicion fuelled by widely reported comments from senior administration and city officials that in the future New Orleans, which once had a population that was 65 per cent black, will no longer look that way. Alphonso Jackson, President George Bush's Housing and Urban Development Secretary, is one of those who has predicted a change in the ethnic mix of the Big Easy. 'Whether we like it or not,' he told the Houston Chronicle, 'New Orleans is not going to be 500,000 people for a long time ... New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.'

Jackson is not alone in holding that view.'As a practical matter, these poor folks don't have the resources to go back to our city, just like they didn't have the resources to get out of our city,' said Joseph Canizaro, once one of the city's biggest developers and a member of New Orleans' rebuilding commission. 'So we won't get all those folks back. That's just a fact. It's not what I want, it's just a fact.'

While some in the city are overtly racist, what is happening in New Orleans is only racist by default. The discrimination is against the poor, who once made up an unusually high percentage of the population for a US city. It just happens that the vast majority of them are African Americans.

One who is not is Sonia Fabiola, 54, a house cleaner from Guatemala whose story is typical in a city where thousands are being evicted by private landlords keen to cash in on doubled monthly rentals after the loss of 200,000 homes to the storm. And it is being fuelled by a property boom. 'We were one of the 25 most underpriced markets in the United States,' Arthur Sterbcow, president of the region's Latter & Blum estate agents, told Reuters recently. 'We were as far away from what they called a housing bubble as you get. Now we've had three record-breaking months in a row.'

It is a boom that has fuelled unscrupulous practices of which Sonia has been a victim. A resident in a low cost private complex in the Terrytown district, Ms Fabiola, who was evicted from her apartment last Wednesday after a struggle to remain, had been the victim of constant harassment since her return home, allegedly with the connivance of some members of the police. It is a story of pure Rachmanism. She had been threatened, had her rent cheque refused, her electricity cut off and seen her absent neighbours' flats cleared of all their possessions, while rubbish was dumped outside her door.

But in a state with some of the poorest tenants' protection laws in the US, her fight to remain was hopeless. And that is likely to be a massive problem in a city whose rents have doubled and trebled in some instances. 'I came here from my own country to get away from corruption and this kind of behaviour,' said Ms Fabiola, 'and now I am treated like this in the United States. It is terrible. No one sees how the poor people here are being treated. I have never missed my rent in the 20 years I have lived here, and now I am being treated like this.'

'The racial issues are real,' said Miles Granderson, an activist lawyer who grew up in New Orleans and returned after the storm to campaign on housing issues. He adds a caveat: 'It is socio-economic more than anything, but in many cases black and poor and black and criminal are seen as the same thing - consciously or subconsciously. The main issue here is housing - and it is utterly incomprehensible that we don't have large numbers of emergency trailers here, or that we haven't finished or significantly progressed in rehabilitating the areas with only modest damage, or opened more public housing units.'

A case in point is the Iberville Project on the edge of the French Quarter, an area now bustling with out-of-state contractors spending their money in the restaurants and bars off Bourbon Street. Despite the project suffering minimal damage, like the vast majority of the city's projects its residents remain shut out. Public housing campaigners in the city believe that 3,750, or about half of the public housing units, are either ready for occupation now or can easily be made so. Yet only a few dozen have been reopened.

The net effect is a city that is not only too expensive for its low-income families to return to, but a city that many are not sure they want to reclaim. And as a consequence, the longer that people are kept away the less likely they are to return. 'There is a real concern that we will lose the nation's attention the longer this takes,' Bobby Jindal, a Republican from Metairie, just west of New Orleans, recently told the New York Times. 'People are making decisions now about whether to come back. And every day that passes, it will be a little harder to get things done.'

They are all problems that are unlikely to have been noticed by the former Presidents George Bush Snr and Bill Clinton when they came to New Orleans last week. The places that they visited were a bustle of activity, including one city worker set pointlessly to work with a tree pruner neatly clipping the branch ends of a tree.

It was a different story just 15 minutes' drive across the city in the flood-devastated neighbourhoods of the Ninth and Lower Ninth and in the city's east. For if there is busy reconstruction work in New Orleans, it has largely been following the money to households that can afford thousands of dollars to put them right.

On an official level there appears too to be a danger that the same assumptions are emerging. A report commissioned from the Urban Land Institute by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has been equally controversial in suggesting that resources be focused on rebuilding New Orleans' less damaged neighbourhoods first - which also happen to be the wealthier ones - while studying whether it makes sense to repopulate areas that saw the worst flooding. And while Nagin has sought to calm critics by stressing that 'every section of the city will be rebuilt', the long delays in the poorest and worst-affected districts have effectively condemned vast areas of largely wooden housing to rapid disintegration.

Which makes such men as Newell Jack doubly courageous in trying to come back. Last week he had returned to his flood-damaged house on Abundance Street in the Ninth Ward to clear the debris prior to renovation. Mr Jack is fortunate in one sense: his house, like several in his street, is made of brick. For those few like him who have returned and are trying to rebuild it is a massive gamble. If no one else comes back, the inheritance of their effort will be a house in a blighted ghost town.

'I was lucky,' he says amid the acrid smell of 200lb of rotting shrimps the restaurateur was forced to abandon to Katrina. 'I was well insured. But a lot of people are going to have problems coming back. I own four chicken places. I lost two of them. Another is open and I'm working on the fourth. I can't leave what I had here. But the authorities have left it too long to come in and clear up this neighbourhood. They picked up some trash, but not much else. Now the mould has got into all the houses.'

For all his anger at the way he feels his neighbourhood has been abandoned, Newell Jack, however, is an optimist. 'New Orleans'll come back,' he says. 'It might take a while, but it will come back.'

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/121205K.shtml

[Saundra Hummer]

How the CIA Paid for Judy Miller's Stories

Weekend Edition
December 10 / 11, 2005

All the News That's Fit to Buy

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The Bush era has brought a robust simplicity to the business of news management: where possible, buy journalists to turn out favorable stories and, as far as hostiles are concerned, if you think you can get away with it, shoot them or blow them up.

As with much else in the Bush era, the novelty lies in the openness with which these strategies have been conducted. Regarding the strategies themselves, there's nothing fundamentally new, both in terms of paid coverage, and murder, as the killing in 1948 of CBS reporter George Polk suggests. Polk, found floating in the Bay of Salonika after being shot in the head, had become a serious inconvenience to a prime concern of US covert operations at the time, namely the onslaught on Communists in Greece.

Today we have the comical saga of the Pentagon turning to a Washington DC-based subcontractor, the Lincoln Group, to write and translate for distribution to Iraqi news outlets booster stories about the US military's successes in Iraq. I bet the Iraqi newspaper reading public was stunned to learn the truth at last.

More or less simultaneously comes news of Bush's plan, mooted to Tony Blair in April of 2004, to bomb the hq of Al Jazeera in Qatar. Blair argued against the plan, not, it seems, on moral grounds but because the assault might prompt revenge attacks.

Earlier assaults on Al Jazeera came in the form of a 2001 strike on the channel's office in Kabul. In November, 2002 the US Air Force had another crack at the target and this time managed to blow it up. The US military claimed that they didn't know the target was an Al Jazeera office, merely "a terrorist site".

In April 2003 a US fighter plane targeted and killed Tariq Ayub, an Al Jazeera reporter on the roof of Al Jazeera's Baghdad office. The Arab network had earlier attempted to head off any "accidental" attack by giving the Pentagon the precise location of its Baghdad premises. That same day in Iraq US forces killed two other journalists, from Reuter's and a Spanish tv station, and bombed an office of Abu Dhabi tv.

On the business of paid placement of stories in the Iraqi press there's been some pompous huffing and puffing in the US among the opinion-forming classes about the dangers of "poisoning the well" and the paramount importance of instilling in the Iraqi mind respect for the glorious traditions of unbiased, unbought journalism as practised in the US Homeland. Christopher Hitchens, tranquil in the face of torture, indiscriminate bombing and kindred atrocities, yelped that the US instigators of this "all-the-news-that's fit-to-buy" strategy should be fired.

Actually, it's an encouraging sign of the resourcefulness of those Iraqi editors that they managed to get paid to print the Pentagon's handouts. Here in the Homeland, editors pride themselves in performing the same service, without remuneration.

Did the White House slip Judy Miller money under the table to hype Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? I'm quite sure it didn't and the only money Miller took was her regular Times paycheck.

But this doesn't mean that We The Taxpayers weren't ultimately footing the bill for Miller's propaganda. We were, since Miller's stories mostly came from the defectors proffered her by Ahmad Chalabi's group, the Iraqi National Congress, which even as late as the spring of 2004 was getting $350,000 a month from the CIA, said payments made in part for the INC to produce "intelligence" from inside Iraq.

It also doesn't mean that when she was pouring her nonsense into the NYT's news columns Judy Miller (or her editors) didn't know that the INC's defectors were linked to the CIA by a money trail. This same trail was laid out in considerable detail in Out of the Ashes, written by my brothers, Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, and published in 1999.

In this fine book, closely studied (and frequently pillaged without acknowledgement) by journalists covering Iraq the authors described how Chalabi's group was funded by the CIA, with huge amounts of money ** $23 million in the first year alone *- invested in an anti-Saddam propaganda campaign, subcontracted by the Agency to John Rendon, a Washington pr operator with good CIA connexions.

Almost from its founding in 1947, the CIA had journalists on its payroll, a fact acknowledged in ringing tones by the Agency in its announcement in 1976 when G.H.W. Bush took over from William Colby that "Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any US news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station."

Though the announcement also stressed that the text the CIA would continue to "welcome" the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists, there's no reason to believe that the Agency actually stopped covert payoffs to the Fourth Estate.

Its practices in this regard before 1976 have been documented to a certain degree. In 1977 Carl Bernstein attacked the subject in Rolling Stone, concluding that more than 400 journalists had maintained some sort of alliance with the Agency between 1956 and 1972.

In 1997 the son of a well known CIA senior man in the Agency's earlier years said emphatically, though off the record, to a CounterPuncher that "of course" the powerful and malevolent columnist Joseph Alsop "was on the payroll".

Press manipulation was always a paramount concern of the CIA, as with the Pentagon. In his Secret History of the CIA, published in 2001, Joe Trento described how in 1948 CIA man Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects, soon renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency, the very first in its list of designated functions was "propaganda".

Later that year Wisner set an operation codenamed "Mockingbird", to influence the domestic American press. He recruited Philip Graham of the Washington Post to run the project within the industry.

Trento writes that

"One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers." Other journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA, included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (Miami News), Herb Gold (Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times).

By 1953 Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies, including the New York Times, Time, CBS, Time. Wisner's operations were funded by siphoning of funds intended for the Marshall Plan. Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers."

In his book Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA, Alex Constantine writes that in the 1950s, "some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts".

Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner said recently, apropos the stories put into the Iraqi press by the Lincoln Group, that it wasn't clear whether traditionally-accepted journalistic practices were violated. Warner can relax. The Pentagon, and the Lincoln Group, were working in a rich tradition, and their only mistake was to get caught.


Go to these links to see this article and several more:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info

and/or

http://www.counterpunch.org/youmans11262005.html

[Saundra Hummer]

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has denied clemency for killer Stanley Tookie Williams.



. .. [I really hope that this denial doesn't cause erruptions of violence.

After reading some of the reasons why clemency should be granted, it does seem that it should be. I haven't really gone into it in depth, but on the surface it seems that he wasn't represented properly. . .. SRH ...]

[Saundra Hummer]

"Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.": Sir Francis Bacon

=
. .. "Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason." Sir John Harrington, 1561-1612

=

. .. "When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty." George Mason

=

. .. "The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." Plato

=

. .. "Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." H.L. Mencken

[Saundra Hummer]

Canada Wants to Protect Itself from the Patriot Act
Canada Wants to Protect Itself from the Patriot Act
By PC
Le Devoir

Monday 12 December 2005

Ottawa - According to a federal proposition, a Canadian governmental agency could annul a contract with an American company should the latter transmit personal information concerning Canadians to American agencies in the fight against terrorism.

This measure aims to respond to the fear that the American FBI can now access confidential Canadian data that the government supplies to American companies working with the Federal Ministries in Ottawa.

The Patriot Act, adopted in the United States following the attacks of September 11, 2001, allows the FBI broader access to the files maintained by US companies. Thus, the FBI can ask an American court to force a company to reveal its files - including those containing information concerning Canadians - in order to assist its investigations that aim to prevent terrorism or espionage. That means that American authorities could have access to information on Canadians through the intermediary of American companies or their subsidiaries, even if that data were stored in Canada.

The Treasury Council has charged a work group to elaborate special dispositions that would have to be included in future documents and business contracts to reduce this risk. According to the preliminary proposal, federal data bases containing confidential information created by businesses would have to be situated in Canada and accessible only from inside the country. The government suggests that businessmen not be able to conclude a contract until they have committed to respect Canadian privacy laws.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/121305H.shtml
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======

. .. [. .. Since our own government officials seem, for the most part, unwilling to take a long and serious look at what this "Patriot Act" is all about, are we to be straddled with it?

Thankfully there are those in government willing to stand up and fight for our rights, so lets hope that they have the strength and backing to accomplish this goal.

How is it that we survived threats all these many years without anything as intrusive and invasive as this act? We have enough laws on the books to handle any and all situations, and have had since well before September 11.

Political ineptitude is what we need laws to protect us from. Remember - if memos, briefs, briefings, and reams of intelligence been heeded, perhaps we would have never know the grief and fear which the mad men in those planes wreaked.

How in the world have we survived all these decades? We've had threats such as the Russian Missle crisis, numerous spies and malcontents who would, and did incite violence, and we are still here, but this thing they call "The Patriot Act", is an invasion of our rights like we've not seen since the Japanese, and Japanese Americans were rounded up during WWII. We thought we had progressed beyond that mentality - those types of fears - but it seems we have learned nothing. We are bound and determined to regress back onto the island we once thought we were.

Each and everyone of us could end up wishing that the Patriot Act weren't a part of our individual lives. It has that much danger inherent in it. It is a losing situation. Lets hope this latest fight is won by our men and women in office who are going up against the status quo on this one. .. SRH. ...]

[Saundra Hummer]

. .. "A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own." H.G. Wells

=

. .. "Don't ever let them pull you down so low as to hate them." (also cited as: "I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.") Booker T. Washington

=

. .. "The soul of our country needs to be awakened . . .When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders." Veterans Fast for Life

=

. .. "If we work in marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity." Daniel Webster

===

[Saundra Hummer]

Reduced to double talk in defending torture policy


By HELEN THOMAS

12/11/05 "Chron.com" -- -- How long will the American people tolerate the shaming of their nation by the inhumane treatment of prisoners of war and the spiriting of detainees to secret prisons outside the United States?

Is it any wonder that other countries believe that America has lost its moral purpose by surrendering our well-earned reputation for human rights?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is facing the music on her quick trip to Germany, Russia, Romania, Ukraine and NATO headquarters in Brussels.

She had hoped to mend relations that have been strained by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Instead, to her exasperation, she has been hounded with questions about whether the United States has maintained secret prisons in two European nations — as reported by the Washington Post. She has steadfastly refused to answer yes or no, thus providing inadvertent confirmation of the report.

In a departure statement before she left, Rice tried to define the perimeter of acceptable questions. "We cannot discuss information that would compromise the success of intelligence, law enforcement and military operations," she declared.

She stressed that other nations are cooperating and the United States would not transgress their sovereignty without permission.

At the same time, she confirmed that the United States has used "renditions" — the secret transport of terrorist suspects from the country where they were captured "to their home country or to other countries where they can be questioned, held or brought to justice."

Rendition is a "vital tool" in combating international terrorism, she said.

The whole process raises the question of why U.S. officials believe that interrogators in another country would be more successful than American questioners in obtaining information from the person being "rendited." And that raises the possibility that the other questioners could use torture to get answers.

Not so, says Rice, speaking very carefully.

"The United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country where we believe he will be tortured," she asserted.

Get this: "Where appropriate," she added, "the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured." That assumes that some of the destination countries have the reputation for torturing people.

She has a sad mission as she naively tries to defend the indefensible among Europeans, some of whom have long memories of living under inhumane governments.

German officials confronted her with a long list of overflights by CIA airplanes, apparently carrying detainees to clandestine prisons.

At a White House briefing last Tuesday, press secretary Scott McClellan was asked repeatedly why we sent prisoners to other countries to be questioned.

He evaded providing a direct answer, saying: "I'm not going to talk further about intelligence matters."

Nor did he respond to questions on whether there is U.S. oversight of those we send away to make sure they are not tortured.

While Rice insists that the United States does not tolerate torture, many studies by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and Human Rights First have come to the opposite conclusion.

Torture under the law is described as cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Waterboarding or mock drownings, sleep deprivation, beatings, shackles and other horrors apparently do not fall into the administration's definition of torture.

This is the same administration that is threatening a presidential veto of pending legislation that would explicitly prohibit the use of torture. The White House led by Vice President Dick Cheney insists on an exception for the CIA.

The ban is being pushed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was tortured when he was a prisoner of war in the Vietnam era. Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, is now seeking a compromise.

How do you compromise torture? Fortunately, McCain says: "No deal."

Human Rights First — a human rights advocacy group — charged that Rice's departure statement continued to fuzz up U.S. obligations under the U.N. convention against torture.

As for detainees, Rice said, "We must treat them in accordance with our laws, which reflect the values of the American people," she added. "We must question them to gather potentially significant, life-saving intelligence. We must bring terrorists to justice wherever possible."

Rice has yet to master the art of diplomacy but she certainly excels in double talk.

Thomas is a Washington, D.C.-based columnist for the Hearst Newspapers. - hthomas@hearstdc.com

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article11297.htm

. .. [Helen Thomas knows when to speak up and when to not. She has held her ground in many just causes, and here we have her again, knowing what it is which is right and fair. It seems to me that this administration needs her likes as an advisor and moral guide. She has never been known as a placater and "Yes" woman, she has more scruples and knowledge for that, she made her own way, and has walked her own path, and I would think that there is something to be gained from that perspective. .. SRH. ...]

[Saundra Hummer]

Pentagon's use of media firm, company's performance, scrutinized

BY KIM BARKER AND STEPHEN J. HEDGES
Chicago Tribune

Posted on Tue, Dec. 13, 2005

KABUL, Afghanistan - When The Rendon Group was hired to help Afghan President Hamid Karzai with media relations in early 2004, few thought it was a bad idea. Though Rendon's $1.4 million bill seemed high for Afghanistan, the U.S. government was paying.

Within seven months, however, Karzai was ready to get rid of Rendon. So was Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and now the American envoy in Iraq, according to interviews, e-mails and memos obtained by the Chicago Tribune. The complaint: too much money for not enough work.

Despite such grumbling, The Rendon Group, based in Washington, managed to secure even more U.S.-funded work with Karzai's government, this time a $3.9 million contract funded by the Pentagon, to create a media team for Afghan anti-drug programs. Jeff Raleigh, who helped oversee Rendon in Kabul for the U.S. Embassy, and others in the U.S. government said they objected because of Karzai's and Khalilzad's opposition but were overruled by Defense Department superiors in Washington.

"It was a rip-off of the U.S taxpayer," said Raleigh, who left the U.S. Embassy in September.

Rendon departed from Afghanistan in early October when its $3.9 million contract expired. But diplomatic sources said it is in line for another multimillion-dollar Afghan contract: a three-year deal to work on counternarcotics public relations.

The company's work in Afghanistan is just a sliver of the more than $56 million the Pentagon has paid Rendon since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became one of the leading media consultants in the Bush administration's war on terrorism. It also is doing work for the Pentagon in Iraq.

Its performance, and the Defense Department's use of the company to shape its anti-terrorism message, has come under renewed scrutiny amid reports that the Bush administration hired Rendon to track foreign media and reporters and to help foreign governments shape their own anti-terrorism messages and images.

Advocates say Rendon helps fight propaganda from Islamic fundamentalists. Critics say the Pentagon's use of media firms such as Rendon blurs the line between public relations and propaganda.

The company's fees also have been an issue. CIA staff members have complained about the group's work on other projects, such as a costly media campaign against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul estimated that the work the company was hired to do on its second contract in Afghanistan could have been performed for about $200,000 rather than $3.9 million.

The firm was to train five Afghan press officers, according to e-mails and people familiar with the contract. But it trained only three, and one has left her job.

Company founder John Rendon, a former Democratic political operative, said neither Afghan nor U.S. officials registered complaints about his firm's work in Afghanistan. "I never heard that from Karzai," he said.

He said he won the second Afghan contract by applying anti-drug campaign experience he gained years ago as a Massachusetts state official.

"I took that experience over to the Ministry of Interior and provided training to people in the ministry so they could use communications to support their police initiative," with good success, he said.

At least one Afghan official publicly backed Rendon - the deputy interior minister for counternarcotics. And a former U.S. government official who worked in Afghanistan with Rendon said the company did a good job of helping Karzai organize his media operations.

"There was just remarkable improvement," the former official said. "It was a fledgling government office, but they did a great job, really."

In early 2004, presidential spokesman Jawed Ludin asked the U.S. Embassy for $1 million to help develop his office. He spoke to Richard McGraw, a former Pentagon spokesman and congressional liaison working with the little-known Afghanistan Reconstruction Group, a small group of U.S. executives, lawyers and other professionals who advise Afghan and U.S. officials on reconstruction.

Instead of handing over money, McGraw suggested hiring Rendon, which already was working in the country for the Pentagon, Ludin said.

McGraw, who said he became familiar with Rendon's Pentagon work during his own service on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's staff, requested bids from Rendon and the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller. Rendon's bid was "far and away the best," said McGraw, who was the main public relations officer at G.D. Searle & Co. outside Chicago when Rumsfeld was the drug company's chief executive.

But Jim Lake of Burson-Marsteller's Washington office said McGraw asked only for a preliminary assessment, not a formal proposal that the company routinely prepares for competitive bidding on government work. "I thought we were in the information stage, not a bidding process," he said.

Rendon workers spent about five months at the presidential palace on a contract reportedly worth $1.4 million. "I think they did an excellent job in a tough circumstance," McGraw said.

The contract ended in August 2004. Raleigh, who had replaced McGraw with the Afghanistan Reconstruction Group, pushed for a two-month extension because of the upcoming presidential election. But by then, Karzai and his staff had concluded that Rendon wasn't worth its pay.

"The president was really upset about it," said Ludin, now the president's chief of staff.

Karzai also complained to Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador, who agreed with Karzai, U.S. officials said.

Several U.S. Agency for International Development and State Department officials said in interviews that Rendon's work had been inadequate and that others in the U.S. Embassy ended up doing a large share of media advisory work with Karzai's staff.

"There's been a sense of frustration that a lot of money is being wasted on consultants who, frankly, just aren't worth the money," said a senior U.S. official familiar with Rendon's work in Afghanistan who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They were very well-intentioned, but they weren't plugged into what was happening there."

But within a month of the contract's expiration, Rendon won a new contract through the Defense Department, $3.9 million to train Afghans in counternarcotics public relations at the Interior Ministry, officials said.

Raleigh said he told Pentagon officials that Khalilzad and Karzai did not want Rendon to stay, but that they worked out a plan to allow Rendon to report directly to Raleigh and Doug Wankel at the U.S. Embassy, instead of to the Pentagon. Wankel, who refused to comment for this story, works on counternarcotics for the embassy.

An e-mail from Wankel on Sept. 10, 2004, backed up Raleigh's account, saying Wankel had met with Khalilzad to discuss whether the Defense Department contract with Rendon would be canceled or continued. Wankel said in the e-mail that Khalilzad agreed to a third option - a 90-day trial in which Rendon would work under Raleigh and Wankel.

Rendon and the Afghan government would hire and train five Afghan media specialists and support all counternarcotics publicity, Wankel wrote.

At first, the company helped put on a counternarcotics conference, just after Karzai's inauguration in December 2004. But by January, the end of the trial period, Raleigh questioned where the money was going. He said the company should lose its contract, according to e-mails. But Rendon stayed.

Mary Beth Long, who oversaw the contract for the Pentagon, declined to be interviewed.

By May, Rendon was pushing to have its contract extended from the end of July through the parliamentary elections in September. Raleigh sent an e-mail to Long and others. "For the record, let me reiterate what I have been saying for months - paying The Rendon Group is a waste of taxpayer funds," Raleigh wrote.

But the Rendon contract was extended through the end of September for $600,000, according to interviews with officials.

"I don't think their performance was worth more than $50,000," said Lutfullah Mashal, until recently the spokesman for the Interior Ministry. "It certainly was not worth millions of dollars."

Barker reported from Kabul, Hedges from Washington.
-----
=====

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info

OR:

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/world/13398283.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

[Saundra Hummer]

The Great Perversion

By Charles Sullivan

12/13/05 "ICH---- Both television and today’s sophisticated computer games are powerful psychotropic drugs that alter one’s perception of reality. Indeed, they have become a substitute for reality—a surrogate for actual experience. Rather than living life, most Americans now experience it vicariously through the medium of television. Hence the proliferation of so many so called Reality Shows. Contrary to public opinion, the purpose of commercial television is not to inform the people with information that is relevant to their lives. It is to substitute fantasy for reality, lies for truth; entertainment for knowledge. The programming that most of us watch is not the primary purpose of television. Commercials—capitalism—are the primary reason for the existence of television. Even public television is not immune from heavy-handed manipulation from the Whitehouse and corporations.

The experience that most Americans live vicariously through television is an utter fraud. As Thoreau said, “We have become the tools of our tools.” Our lives have become more virtual than real. Fraud does not inform our experience; nor does it provide us with the information we need to make intelligent decisions about life. Like all things American, television has been perverted from a tool with enormous potential for education to the trivial commodity of patent capitalism we call entertainment.

According to consumer advocate Ralph Nader, ninety percent of television is commercial. That makes it ninety percent trivial and about ten percent useful to the growth of human potential. Television is a powerful, seductive, mind numbing drug that renders viewers physically passive, but open to the endless message of blind consumption. It holds the viewers fast while programming the mind to consume and to accept the manifest lies and propaganda spewed forth by the corporate juggernaut that has hijacked both the American government and the public air waves. As a compelling mind altering drug, television is without equal in the annals of human history.

Both television and computer games cajole and control the unsuspecting minds of their subconscious addicts. They reduce the attention span and render us useless as citizens. Those who are seduced and mesmerized by television are not likely to make trouble. They are not going to question corporate America’s version of reality and make waves for the status quo. Television is junk food for the mind that leads to morbid mental obesity. The result is impaired mental function. It stifles free thought and inhibits human potential. Nothing in the history of civilization has been more responsible for dumbing down the American public than commercial television. Television numbs the mind and impoverishes the spirit. It is an essential tool of the corporations that have hijacked the American government and led to the commodification of everything from forests to human labor. Without the commanding and highly addictive drug of television, America’s powerful military industrial complex, with its ambitions for world domination, would be rendered moot.

Introduced to the world as a tool with enormous potential for education, television has been converted into an insidious tool for mindless consumption by unbridled capitalism. This is an important point because the political perception of the average American is shaped almost entirely not by reality or by the evidence, but by the self serving interest of corporate entities driven by an insatiable lust for obscene profits. Tragically, we have allowed those entities to do our thinking for us—often with horrific results.

This point is equally valid for commercial radio where rabid right wing talk show hosts work the airwaves tirelessly in the service of their corporate pay masters. Daily, a cadre of deceitful corporate puppets masquerading as public servants fleeces a gullible American public with their endless drivel and incessant propaganda. They are so effective in selling the public their well coordinated daily talking points—many of which emanate from television’s Fox News—that they actually convince millions of people to deliberately act against their own self interest. Once the domain of considerable diversity that featured local programming, the public owned radio waves are now the almost exclusive domain of corporations that hold contempt for the public welfare. Corporate entities like Clear Channel have neither heart nor soul. What matters to them are market shares and profit margins. They are raking in billions by tapping into the millions of exploited angry white conservatives who unwittingly do the bidding of corporate America. Here is a news flash for those white, mostly male conservatives: It’s the corporations, stupid!

Government is not the problem that conservatives make it out to be. Government is the scapegoat of the corporations that have stolen it from under our inattentive noses. Government becomes a problem when it is run by corporations and millionaires rather than by ordinary people who serve the public interest.

To the extent that any segment of the American public is awake to a reality that adheres closely to the observed evidence, we find ourselves utterly abandoned by those who are supposed to serve us. The government is no longer the servant of the people that it promised to be. It has been bought by ill gotten corporate wealth. It makes a mockery of the very concept of democracy. Let us learn to call the American government what it really is. We use terms like freedom and democracy much too recklessly. We live in a corporate oligarchy or a plutocracy, not a democracy. It’s not even close.

This explains why it is so absurd for Americans to talk about bringing democracy to the Middle East. We cannot bring democracy to any nation, to any people, until we demand it here. We cannot liberate anyone until we liberate ourselves from the iron grip of capitalism and its ugly cousin, corporatism. The airwaves, whether pertaining to television or radio, belong to the people—not to the corporations that exploit them for private gain. The public air waves should be used in the public interest. The corporations that have stolen them will never give them back unless we force them to. Do not look to the commercially owned puppets in government to help us. They are in the pockets of their corporate pay masters. It is up to us.

Charles Sullivan is a furniture maker, photographer, and free lance writer residing in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article11295.htm

[Saundra Hummer]

More Blacks Live with Pollution

By David Pace
The Associated Press

Tuesday 13 December 2005

Chicago - An Associated Press analysis of a little-known government research project shows that black Americans are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger.

Residents in neighborhoods with the highest pollution scores also tend to be poorer, less educated and more often unemployed than those elsewhere in the country, AP found.

"Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not exclusively, suffer disproportionately," said Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration when the scoring system was developed. "If you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located, they're not in the upper middle class neighborhoods."

With help from government scientists, AP mapped the risk scores for every neighborhood counted by the Census Bureau in 2000. The scores were then used to compare risks between neighborhoods and to study the racial and economic status of those who breathe America's most unhealthy air.

President Clinton ordered the government in 1993 to ensure equality in protecting Americans from pollution, but more than a decade later, factory emissions still disproportionately place minorities and the poor at risk, AP found.

In 19 states, blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to live in neighborhoods where air pollution seems to pose the greatest health danger, the analysis showed.

More than half the blacks in Kansas and nearly half of Missouri's black population, for example, live in the 10 percent of their states' neighborhoods with the highest risk scores. Similarly, more than four out of every 10 blacks in Kentucky, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin live in high-risk neighborhoods.

And while Hispanics and Asians aren't overrepresented in high-risk neighborhoods nationally, in certain states they are. In Michigan, for example, 8.3 percent of the people living in high-risk areas are Hispanic, though Hispanics make up 3.3 percent of the statewide population.

All told, there are 12 states where Hispanics are more than twice as likely as non-Hispanics to live in neighborhoods with the highest risk scores. There are seven states where Asians are more than twice as likely as whites to live in the most polluted areas.

The average income in the highest risk neighborhoods was $18,806 when the Census last measured it, more than $3,000 less than the nationwide average.

One of every six people in the high-risk areas lived in poverty, compared with one of eight elsewhere, AP found.

Unemployment was nearly 20 percent higher than the national average in the neighborhoods with the highest risk scores, and residents there were far less likely to have college degrees.

Research over the past two decades has shown that short-term exposure to common air pollution worsens existing lung and heart disease and is linked to diseases like asthma, bronchitis and cancer. Long-term exposure increases the risks.

The Bush administration, which has tried to ease some Clean Air Act regulations, says its mission isn't to alleviate pollution among specific racial or income groups but rather to protect everyone facing the highest risk.

"We're going to get at those folks to make sure that they are going to be breathing clean air, and that's regardless of their race, creed or color," said Deputy EPA Administrator Marcus Peacock.

Peacock said industrial air pollution has declined significantly in the past 30 years as regulations and technology have improved. Since 1990, according to EPA, total annual emissions of 188 regulated toxins have declined by 36 percent.

Still, Peacock acknowledged, "there are risks, and I would assume some unacceptable risks, posed by industrial air pollution in some parts of the country."

Government scientists and contractors spent millions of dollars creating the health risk measures. They're based on air emission reports from industry, ratings of each chemical's potential health dangers, the paths pollution takes as it spreads through neighborhoods, and the number of people of different ages and genders living near plants.

The AP used EPA risk scores from 2000 so they would match the Census data and because it takes years for the government to get corrected emissions data. Some risks may have changed since then as factories opened or closed or their emissions changed. The risk scores aren't meant to calculate a citizen's precise odds of getting sick but rather to help compare communities and identify those in need of further attention.

The scores also don't include risks from other types of air pollution, such as automobile exhaust.

Kevin Brown's most feared opponent on the sandlot or basketball court while he was growing up wasn't another kid. It was the polluted air he breathed.

"I would look outside and I would see him just leaning on a tree or leaning over a pole, gasping, gasping, trying to get some breath so he could go back to playing," recalls his mother, Lana Brown.

Kevin suffered from asthma. His mother is convinced the factory air that covered their neighborhood triggered the son's attacks that sent them rushing to the emergency room week after week, his panic filling the car.

"I can't breathe! I have no air, I'm going to die!"

The air in the neighborhood where Kevin played is among the least healthy in the country, according to research that assigns risk scores for industrial air pollution in every square kilometer of the United States.

Altgeld Gardens, the housing project where Kevin spent most of his childhood staying with his grandmother and going to school, is in a virtually all-black neighborhood where more than half the people live in poverty. The two-story project is nestled among the south Chicago steel mills, which for decades turned the night skies orange with pollution.

Most of those steel mills are now closed, victims of imports. But the area still retains enough industry to rank among the nation's neighborhoods with the highest health risks.

Just across the Little Calumet River from Altgeld, the ISG Riverdale steel plant annually releases into the air tens of thousands of pounds of heavy metals like manganese, zinc, lead and nickel. Dave Allen, a spokesman for Mittal Steel, which acquired the factory this year, said his company is committed to improvements.

"The environment is a matter of focus and pride for us and we hope to be good operators," he said.

Mrs. Brown said the asthma attacks that hit Kevin, now 29, were most serious and frequent during the time he stayed in Altgeld Gardens.

"He may now get an attack maybe once a year, if that often, where he has to go to a hospital," she said. "He was having them at one point quite frequently, at least two to three times a month."

Mrs. Brown was interviewed at the home she purchased seven years ago on a tree-lined street neighborhood south of the plant, where the health risk from industrial pollution is one-fifth the level in Altgeld Gardens.

She said she never considered pollution the culprit in her son's asthma, even after she left the neighborhood. It was only after she moved back into her mother's home for several years that she began to realize how widespread breathing problems were in Altgeld Gardens. Two children who lived next door had asthma, and one used a breathing machine as many as three times a day, she said.

"You see things happening and then you say let me start investigating," she said. "I found out a lot of people either had bronchitis or some kind of respiratory problem. Someone in each household seemed to have a respiratory problem."

In Louisville, Ky., Renee Murphy blames smokestack emissions in the "Rubbertown" industrial strip near her home for the asthma attacks that trouble her five children. Her neighborhood, which is 96 percent black, ranks among the nation's highest in risk from factory pollution.

"It's hard to watch your children gasp for breath," she said.

The Murphy family lives just a few blocks from Zeon Chemicals, which released more than 25,000 pounds of a chemical called acrylonitrile into the air during 2000. The chemical is suspected of causing cancer, and the government has determined it is much more toxic to children than adults.

Tom Herman, corporate environmental manager at Zeon, said the plant is reducing its emissions and is talking with area residents concerned about air quality to show that "there are real people working here concerned for them as well as our own health."

Malcolm Wright, 43, operates power washing equipment in Camden, N.J., where several neighborhoods also rank among the worst nationally. He said he developed asthma after moving to the city in his early 30s, and he blames the city's air pollution for attacks that sent him to the hospital four times last year.

Air pollution "works with many other factors, genetics and environment, to heighten one's risk of developing asthma and chronic lung disease, and if you have it, it will make it worse," said Dr. John Brofman, director of respiratory intensive care at MacNeal Hospital in the suburban Chicago town of Berwyn.

"Evidence suggests that not only do people get hospitalized but they die at higher rates in areas with significant air pollution," he said.

Repeated studies during the 1980s and 1990s found that blacks and poor people were far more likely than whites to live near hazardous waste disposal sites, polluting power plants or industrial parks. The disparities were blamed on a lack of political clout by minorities to influence land use decisions in their neighborhoods.

The studies brought charges of racism. Clinton responded in 1993 by issuing an "environmental justice" order requiring federal agencies to ensure that minorities and poor people aren't exposed to more pollution and other environmental dangers than other Americans.

Recent reports suggest little has changed:

The Government Accountability Office concluded earlier this year that EPA devoted little attention to environmental equality when it developed three major rules to implement the Clean Air Act between 2000 and 2004.


The EPA's inspector general reported last year that the agency hadn't implemented Clinton's order nor "consistently integrated environmental justice into its day-to-day operations." The watchdog said EPA had not identified minority and low income groups nor developed any criteria to determine if those groups were bearing more than their share of health risks from environmental hazards.


The US Commission on Civil Rights concluded two years ago after an investigation that "federal agencies still have neither fully incorporated environmental justice into their core missions nor established accountability and performance outcomes for programs and activities."
EPA Assistant Administrator Granta Nakayama disputed those reports, saying the agency has been choosing its enforcement initiatives to maximize the impact on minority and poor communities.

Environmental experts say most pollution inequities result from historical land use decisions and local development policies. Also, regulators too often focus on one plant or one pollutant without regard to the cumulative impact, they say.

Short of government action, citizens in high-risk neighborhoods have little legal recourse. They can file lawsuits under the 1964 Civil Rights Act but must prove intentional discrimination, a difficult burden.

And while some federal agencies have rules that ban environmental practices that result in discrimination, the Supreme Court has said private citizens can't file lawsuits to enforce those rules.

Citizen complaints to EPA have had little effect. From 1993 through last summer, the agency received 164 complaints alleging civil rights violations in environmental decisions and accepted 47 for investigation. Twenty-eight of the 47 later were dismissed; 19 are pending.

"There is no level playing field," said Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. "Any time our society says that a powerful chemical company has the same right as a low income family that's living next door, that playing field is not level, is not fair."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Associated Press analyzed the health risk posed by industrial air pollution using data from the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Census Bureau.

EPA uses toxic chemical air releases reported by factories to calculate a health risk score for each square kilometer of the United States. The scores can be used to compare risks from long-term exposure to factory pollution from one area to another.

The scores are based on:

The amount of toxic pollution released by each factory.

The path the pollution takes as it spreads through the air.

The level of danger to humans posed by each different chemical released.

The number of males and females of different ages who live in the exposure paths.
The scores aren't meant to measure the actual risks of getting sick or the actual exposure to toxic chemicals. Instead, they are designed to help screen for polluted areas that may need additional study of potential health problems, EPA said.

The AP mapped the health risk scores to the census blocks used during the 2000 population count, using a method developed in consultation with EPA. The news service then compared racial and socio-economic makeup with risk scores in the top 5 percent to the population elsewhere.

Similar analyses were done in each state, comparing the 10 percent of neighborhoods with the highest risk scores to the rest in the state.

To match the 2000 Census data, the AP used health risk scores calculated from industrial air pollution reports that companies filed for EPA's 2000 Toxic Release Inventory. It often takes several years for EPA to learn of and correct inaccurate reports from factories, and the 2000 data were more complete than data from more recent reports that were still being corrected.

The AP adjusted the 2000 health risk scores in Census blocks around some plants that filed incorrect air release reports in 2000, after plant officials provided corrected data.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Counties that had the highest potential health risk from industrial air pollution in 2000, according to an AP analysis of government records. The health risk varies from year to year based on the level of factory emissions, the opening of new plants and the closing of older plants.

Washington County, Ohio

Wood County, W VA

Muscatine County, Iowa

Leflore County, MS

Cowlitz County, WA

Henry County, IN

Tooele County, Utah

Scott County, Iowa

Gila County, AZ

Whiteside County, IL.
Factories whose emissions created the most potential health risk for residents in surrounding communities in 2000, according to an AP analysis of government records:

Eramet Marietta Inc., Marietta, Ohio

Titan Wheel Corp., Walcott, Iowa (closed in 2003)

Eastman Kodak Co., Rochester, NY

American Minerals Inc., El Paso, Texas

F.W. Winter Inc., Camden, NJ

Meridian Rail Corp., Cicero, IL

Carpenter Tech. Corp., Reading, PA

Longview Aluminum LLC, Longview, WA (closed in 2001)

DDE Louisville, Louisville, KY

Lincoln Electric Co., Cleveland, Ohio.

-------
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/121305T.shtml

[Saundra Hummer]

Study Verifies Power of Positive Thinking
By Lauran Neergaard
Associated Press
posted: 28 November 2005
08:05 pm ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Your medicine really could work better if your doctor talks it up before handing over the prescription.
Research is showing the power of expectations, that they have physical -- not just psychological -- effects on your health. Scientists can measure the resulting changes in the brain, from the release of natural painkilling chemicals to alterations in how neurons fire.

Among the most provocative findings: New research suggests that once Alzheimer's disease robs someone of the ability to expect that a proven painkiller will help them, it doesn't work nearly as well.

It's a new spin on the so-called placebo effect -- and it begs the question of how to harness this power and thus enhance treatment benefits for patients.

"Your expectations can have profound impacts on your brain and your health,'' says Columbia University neuroscientist Tor Wager.

"There is not a single placebo effect, but many placebo effects,'' that differ by illness, adds Dr. Fabrizio Benedetti of Italy's University of Torino Medical School, who is studying those effects in patients with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and pain.

The placebo effect is infamous from studies of new medications: Scientists often given either an experimental drug or a dummy pill to patients and see how they fare. Frequently, those taking the fake feel better, too, for a while, making it more difficult to tease out the medication's true effects.

Doctors have long thought the placebo effect was psychological.

Now scientists are amassing the first direct evidence that the placebo effect actually is physical, and that expecting benefit can trigger the same neurological pathways of healing as real medication does. Among them:

--University of Michigan scientists injected the jaws of healthy young men with salt water to cause painful pressure, while PET scans measured the impact in their brains. During one scan, the men were told they were getting a pain reliever, actually a placebo.

Their brains immediately released more endorphins -- chemicals that act as natural painkillers by blocking the transmission of pain signals between nerve cells -- and the men felt better. To return to pre-placebo pain levels, scientists had to increase the salt-water pressure.

"Our brain really is on drugs when we get a placebo,'' says co-researcher Christian Stohler, now at the University of Maryland. More remarkable, some especially strong placebo responders suggest "many brains can actually stimulate that (pain-relief) system more.''

Italy's Benedetti gave Parkinson's patients a placebo and measured the electrical activity of individual nerve cells in a movement-controlling part of the brain. Those neurons quieted down, a decrease in firing of about 40 percent that correlated with a reduction in patients' muscle rigidity -- they moved more easily.

To further prove the power of belief, Benedetti hooked pain patients to a computerized morphine injection system. Sometimes the computer administered a dose without them knowing it; sometimes a nurse pretended to give it. The morphine was up to 50 percent more effective when patients knew it was coming.

Likewise, Parkinson's patients moved much better when they were told that doctors had turned on a pacemaker-like implant in their brains, which blocks tremors, than when it was turned on covertly.

But in a similar experiment with Alzheimer's patients suffering pain, Benedetti found no difference between covert or expected dosing. The results are preliminary, he cautioned a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last month. But it appears that because Alzheimer's robs patients of the cognitive ability to expect a benefit, they need higher doses of painkillers to get as much relief as non-demented patients.

Placebos aren't a substitute for real medicine. But the research suggests maybe doctors should try to manipulate patients' treatment expectations, for at least some hard-to-treat conditions.

"The bigger question is how do we capitalize on the placebo effect,'' said Dr. Helen Mayberg of Emory University, whose studies suggest some antidepressants have a "placebo-plus'' activity in the brain. "There may be a phenomenon we all have access to.''

Study: Optimists Live Longer

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/ap_051128_placebo.html

[Saundra Hummer]

How Ambiguity Messes with Our Brains

By Ker Than

LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 09 December 2005
10:52 am ET


The brain responds emotionally and often illogically when forced to make decisions based on little or conflicting evidence, a new study suggests.

These types of choices are known as ambiguous decisions and are different from risky decisions.

In a risky decision, a person is uncertain about the outcome of their choice but has an idea of the probability of success. In an ambiguous decision, a person is ignorant of both factors.

"Psychologists would say ambiguity is the discomfort from knowing there is something you don't know that you wish you did," said Colin Camerer, an economist at the California Institute of Technology and the primary researcher in the study.

In the experiment, test subjects made ambiguous bets while their brains were scanned using a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI).

In one example, the subjects were given the choice between betting money on the chances of drawing a red card from a "risky" deck that had 20 red cards and 20 black cards—that is, where the probability of choosing either color was 50:50—and making the same bet with an "ambiguous" deck where the color composition of the cards was unknown.

In most cases, the subjects chose to make the risky bet. Logically, however, both bets would have been equally good because in both cases, the chance of pulling a red card on the first draw was 50:50.

The brain scans revealed that ambiguous wagers were often accompanied by activation of the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), two areas of the brain that are involved in the processing of emotions. In particular, the amygdala has been found to be closely associated with fear.

A correlation between aversion to ambiguous decisions and activation of emotional parts of the brain makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, Camerer said. "Freezing in the face of danger is an old, emotional response which probably was evolutionarily adaptive in our ancestral past."

In the modern human brain, this translates into a reluctance to bet on or against an event if it seems at all ambiguous.

The finding could help scientists understand how humans make decisions in the real world, because the choices people make are often based on very limited information, Camerer told LiveScience.

"If you think about it, how often do you know the probability of success?" he said. "Probably, the situation we modeled with the risk game is more the exception than the rule."

The study was detailed in the Dec. 9 issue of the journal Science.

Duped and Clueless: How Easily We Fool Ourselves
Brain Breakthrough: Scientists Know What You'll Do
Only Using Part of Your Brain? Think Again

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/051209_brain_ambiguity.html

[Saundra Hummer]

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[Saundra Hummer]

W. Won't Read This

By Maureen Dowd

WASHINGTON

12/14/05 "New York -- -- Never ask a guy who's in a bubble if he's in a bubble. He can't answer.

'Cause he's in a bubble.

But the NBC anchor Brian Williams gamely gave it a shot, showing the president the Newsweek cover picturing him trapped in a bubble.

"This says you're in a bubble," Brian told W. "You have a very small circle of advisers now. Is that true? Do you feel in a bubble?"

"No, I don't feel in a bubble," Bubble Boy replied, unable to see the bubble because he's in it. "I feel like I'm getting really good advice from very capable people and that people from all walks of life have informed me and informed those who advise me." He added, "I'm very aware of what's going on."

He swiftly contradicted himself by admitting that "this is the first time I'm seeing this magazine" - his version of his dad's Newsweek "Wimp Factor" cover - and that he doesn't read newsmagazines.

The anchor and the anchorite spent a few anodyne moments probing the depths of what it's like to be president. "I just talked to the president-elect of Honduras," W. said. "A lot of my job is foreign policy, and I spend an enormous amount of time with leaders from other countries."

Brian struggled to learn whether W. read anything except one-page memos. Talking about his mom, Bubble Boy returned to the idea of the bubble: "If I'm in a bubble, well, if there is such thing as a bubble, she's the one who can penetrate it."

"I'll tell the guys at Newsweek," the anchor said impishly.

"Is that who put the bubble story?" W. asked. First he didn't know about it, and now he's forgotten it already? That's the alluring, memory-cleansing beauty of the bubble.

The idea that W. is getting good advice from very capable people is silly - administration officials have blown it on everything from the occupation and natural disasters to torture. In the bubble, they can torture while saying they don't. They can pretend that Iraqi forces are stronger than they are. They can try to frighten people with talk of Al Qaeda's dream of a new Islamic caliphate - their latest attempt to scare Americans into supporting the war they ginned up.

"Whether or not it needed to happen," the president told the anchor, "I'm still convinced it needed to happen." The Bubble Boy can even contradict himself and not notice.

W.'s contention that he's informed by people from all walks of life is a joke, as is his wacky assertion that he can "reach out" to the public more than Abraham Lincoln because he has Air Force One. Lincoln actually went to the front in his war, with Minié balls whizzing by. No phony turkey for him.

The president may fly over all walks of life in Air Force One or drive by them and hide behind dark-tinted windows. In his bubble, he floats through a comforting world of doting women, respectful military audiences, loyal Republican donors and screened partisan groups - with protesters, Democrats, journalists, critics and coffins of dead soldiers kept at bay.

(He has probably even been shielded from the outrage of John and Stacey Holley, both Army veterans, who were shocked to learn that their only child, Matthew, killed in Iraq, would be arriving in San Diego as freight on a commercial airliner.)

Jack Murtha, a hawkish Democrat close to the Pentagon who supported both wars against Iraq waged by the Bushes, has been braying against the Bush isolation. He told Newsweek that a letter he wrote to the president making suggestions about how to fight the Iraq war was ignored for seven months, then brushed off by a deputy under secretary of defense. Even after he went public, he still did not get a call from the White House.

"If they talked to people," he said, "they wouldn't get these outbursts."

Mr. Murtha told Rolling Stone that the administration's deafness had doomed Iraq: "Everything we did was mishandled. Plans that the military and the State Department had in place - they ignored 'em. The military tells me that when they were planning the invasion, the administration wouldn't let one of the primary three-star generals in the room."

The president's bubble requires constant care. It's not easy to keep out huge tragedies like Katrina, or flawed policies like Iraq. As Newsweek noted, a foreign diplomat "was startled when Secretary of State Rice warned him not to lay bad news on the president. 'Don't upset him,' she said."

Heaven forbid. Don't burst his bubble. :shrug: :tearhair: :shrug:

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article11308.htm

[Saundra Hummer]

Jim Hightower's Common-Sense Commentaries



BUSH'S TWO NEW WAR LIES
Is it just me, or do George W's eyes seem to get beadier and grow closer together whenever he gets in a tight spot?
http://updates.jimhightower.com/ctt.asp?u=3610486&l=113363

BUILDING A PROGRESSIVE FUTURE
Here's an idea: What if instead of waiting for a progressive political future to be delivered to us by a magical someone on a big white steed galloping down a bright beam of sunlight - we actually went to work to build our own future from the ground up?
http://updates.jimhightower.com/ctt.asp?u=3610486&l=113364

HALLIBURTON's "TCNs"
Is any low too low for Halliburton?
http://updates.jimhightower.com/ctt.asp?u=3610486&l=113365

EVANGELICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM
It's obvious to even a casual observer that the Lord works His wonders in mysterious ways. You could ask Jim Inhofe about that.
http://updates.jimhightower.com/ctt.asp?u=3610486&l=113366

AIRLINES DOING LESS FOR MORE
Isn't it just pure pleasure to fly the friendly skies these days? I'm sure there are mule trains that offer more joy per mile.
http://updates.jimhightower.com/ctt.asp?u=3610486&l=113367

+++++++++++++++++++++++
CLICK ON THE ONAIR LINK TO HEAR HIS COMMENTARIES OR READ THEM, IT'S YOUR CHOICE.

[Saundra Hummer]

Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?

Secret database obtained by NBC News tracks ‘suspicious’ domestic groups

By Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella

12/13/05 "MSNBC" -- -- WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.

“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It's an example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We're not doing anything illegal.”

The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.


“I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact, has reached too far,” says NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin.

The Department of Defense declined repeated requests by NBC News for an interview. A spokesman said that all domestic intelligence information is “properly collected” and involves “protection of Defense Department installations, interests and personnel.” The military has always had a legitimate “force protection” mission inside the U.S. to protect its personnel and facilities from potential violence. But the Pentagon now collects domestic intelligence that goes beyond legitimate concerns about terrorism or protecting U.S. military installations, say critics.

Four dozen anti-war meetings
The DOD database obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center. One “incident” included in the database is a large anti-war protest at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles last March that included effigies of President Bush and anti-war protest banners. Another incident mentions a planned protest against military recruiters last December in Boston and a planned protest last April at McDonald’s National Salute to America’s Heroes — a military air and sea show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The Fort Lauderdale protest was deemed not to be a credible threat and a column in the database concludes: “US group exercising constitutional rights.” Two-hundred and forty-three other incidents in the database were discounted because they had no connection to the Department of Defense — yet they all remained in the database.

The DOD has strict guidelines (.PDF link), adopted in December 1982, that limit the extent to which they can collect and retain information on U.S. citizens.

Still, the DOD database includes at least 20 references to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons. Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. One DOD briefing document stamped “secret” concludes: “[W]e have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the [I]nternet,” but no “significant connection” between incidents, such as “reoccurring instigators at protests” or “vehicle descriptions.”

The increased monitoring disturbs some military observers.


“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it's the beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.”

Some former senior DOD intelligence officials share his concern. George Lotz, a 30-year career DOD official and former U.S. Air Force colonel, held the post of Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight from 1998 until his retirement last May. Lotz, who recently began a consulting business to help train and educate intelligence agencies and improve oversight of their collection process, believes some of the information the DOD has been collecting is not justified.

Make sure they are not just going crazy
“Somebody needs to be monitoring to make sure they are just not going crazy and reporting things on U.S. citizens without any kind of reasoning or rationale,” says Lotz. “I demonstrated with Martin Luther King in 1963 in Washington,” he says, “and I certainly didn’t want anybody putting my name on any kind of list. I wasn’t any threat to the government,” he adds.

The military’s penchant for collecting domestic intelligence is disturbing — but familiar — to Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer.

“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War, Pyle blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he published an article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.

The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens — many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.

But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says some of the information in the database suggests the military may be dangerously close to repeating its past mistakes.

“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again,” he says.

Too much data?
Some Pentagon observers worry that in the effort to thwart the next 9/11, the U.S. military is now collecting too much data, both undermining its own analysis efforts by forcing analysts to wade through a mountain of rubble in order to obtain potentially key nuggets of intelligence and entangling U.S. citizens in the U.S. military’s expanding and quiet collection of domestic threat data.

Two years ago, the Defense Department directed a little known agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to establish and “maintain a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense.” Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also established a new reporting mechanism known as a TALON or Threat and Local Observation Notice report. TALONs now provide “non-validated domestic threat information” from military units throughout the United States that are collected and retained in a CIFA database. The reports include details on potential surveillance of military bases, stolen vehicles, bomb threats and planned anti-war protests. In the program’s first year, the agency received more than 5,000 TALON reports. The database obtained by NBC News is generated by Counterintelligence Field Activity.

CIFA is becoming the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community. Its “operational and analytical records” include “reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts” by the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats. Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies.


One of the CIFA-funded database projects being developed by Northrop Grumman and dubbed “Person Search,” is designed “to provide comprehensive information about people of interest.” It will include the ability to search government as well as commercial databases. Another project, “The Insider Threat Initiative,” intends to “develop systems able to detect, mitigate and investigate insider threats,” as well as the ability to “identify and document normal and abnormal activities and ‘behaviors,’” according to the Computer Sciences Corp. contract. A separate CIFA contract with a small Virginia-based defense contractor seeks to develop methods “to track and monitor activities of suspect individuals.”

“The military has the right to protect its installations, and to protect its recruiting services,” says Pyle. “It does not have the right to maintain extensive files on lawful protests of their recruiting activities, or of their base activities,” he argues.

Lotz agrees.

“The harm in my view is that these people ought to be allowed to demonstrate, to hold a banner, to peacefully assemble whether they agree or disagree with the government’s policies,” the former DOD intelligence official says.

'Slippery slope'
Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is very little that could justify the collection of domestic intelligence by the Unites States military. If we start going down this slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again,” he says.

Some of the targets of the U.S. military’s recent collection efforts say they have already gone too far.

“It's absolute paranoia — at the highest levels of our government,” says Hersh of The Truth Project.

“I mean, we're based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says Truth Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are Quakers.”

The Defense Department refused to comment on how it obtained information on the Lake Worth meeting or why it considers a dozen or so anti-war activists a “threat.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11302.htm

[Saundra Hummer]

. .. "In war, there are no unwounded soldiers." Jose Narosky

=

. .. "Most people want security in this world, not liberty." Henry Louis Mencken: American journalist, 1880-1956

=

. .. "We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security." Dwight David Eisenhower : 34th president of the United States, 1890-1969

=

. .. "I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction." John Steinbeck: American novelist, Nobel Prize for Literature for 1962, 1902-1968

=

. .. "Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights." John Wooden - (1910- ) "Wizard of Westwood", legendary UCLA Basketball coach

[Saundra Hummer]

Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?

Secret database obtained by NBC News tracks ‘suspicious’ domestic groups

By Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella

12/13/05 "MSNBC"-- -- WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.

“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It's an example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We're not doing anything illegal.”

The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.


“I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact, has reached too far,” says NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin.

The Department of Defense declined repeated requests by NBC News for an interview. A spokesman said that all domestic intelligence information is “properly collected” and involves “protection of Defense Department installations, interests and personnel.” The military has always had a legitimate “force protection” mission inside the U.S. to protect its personnel and facilities from potential violence. But the Pentagon now collects domestic intelligence that goes beyond legitimate concerns about terrorism or protecting U.S. military installations, say critics.

Four dozen anti-war meetings
The DOD database obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center. One “incident” included in the database is a large anti-war protest at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles last March that included effigies of President Bush and anti-war protest banners. Another incident mentions a planned protest against military recruiters last December in Boston and a planned protest last April at McDonald’s National Salute to America’s Heroes — a military air and sea show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The Fort Lauderdale protest was deemed not to be a credible threat and a column in the database concludes: “US group exercising constitutional rights.” Two-hundred and forty-three other incidents in the database were discounted because they had no connection to the Department of Defense — yet they all remained in the database.

The DOD has strict guidelines (.PDF link), adopted in December 1982, that limit the extent to which they can collect and retain information on U.S. citizens.

Still, the DOD database includes at least 20 references to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons. Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. One DOD briefing document stamped “secret” concludes: “[W]e have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the [I]nternet,” but no “significant connection” between incidents, such as “reoccurring instigators at protests” or “vehicle descriptions.”

The increased monitoring disturbs some military observers.


“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it's the beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.”

Some former senior DOD intelligence officials share his concern. George Lotz, a 30-year career DOD official and former U.S. Air Force colonel, held the post of Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight from 1998 until his retirement last May. Lotz, who recently began a consulting business to help train and educate intelligence agencies and improve oversight of their collection process, believes some of the information the DOD has been collecting is not justified.

Make sure they are not just going crazy
“Somebody needs to be monitoring to make sure they are just not going crazy and reporting things on U.S. citizens without any kind of reasoning or rationale,” says Lotz. “I demonstrated with Martin Luther King in 1963 in Washington,” he says, “and I certainly didn’t want anybody putting my name on any kind of list. I wasn’t any threat to the government,” he adds.

The military’s penchant for collecting domestic intelligence is disturbing — but familiar — to Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer.

“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War, Pyle blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he published an article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.

The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens — many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.

But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says some of the information in the database suggests the military may be dangerously close to repeating its past mistakes.

“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again,” he says.

Too much data?
Some Pentagon observers worry that in the effort to thwart the next 9/11, the U.S. military is now collecting too much data, both undermining its own analysis efforts by forcing analysts to wade through a mountain of rubble in order to obtain potentially key nuggets of intelligence and entangling U.S. citizens in the U.S. military’s expanding and quiet collection of domestic threat data.

Two years ago, the Defense Department directed a little known agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to establish and “maintain a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense.” Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also established a new reporting mechanism known as a TALON or Threat and Local Observation Notice report. TALONs now provide “non-validated domestic threat information” from military units throughout the United States that are collected and retained in a CIFA database. The reports include details on potential surveillance of military bases, stolen vehicles, bomb threats and planned anti-war protests. In the program’s first year, the agency received more than 5,000 TALON reports. The database obtained by NBC News is generated by Counterintelligence Field Activity.

CIFA is becoming the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community. Its “operational and analytical records” include “reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts” by the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats. Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies.


One of the CIFA-funded database projects being developed by Northrop Grumman and dubbed “Person Search,” is designed “to provide comprehensive information about people of interest.” It will include the ability to search government as well as commercial databases. Another project, “The Insider Threat Initiative,” intends to “develop systems able to detect, mitigate and investigate insider threats,” as well as the ability to “identify and document normal and abnormal activities and ‘behaviors,’” according to the Computer Sciences Corp. contract. A separate CIFA contract with a small Virginia-based defense contractor seeks to develop methods “to track and monitor activities of suspect individuals.”

“The military has the right to protect its installations, and to protect its recruiting services,” says Pyle. “It does not have the right to maintain extensive files on lawful protests of their recruiting activities, or of their base activities,” he argues.

Lotz agrees.

“The harm in my view is that these people ought to be allowed to demonstrate, to hold a banner, to peacefully assemble whether they agree or disagree with the government’s policies,” the former DOD intelligence official says.

'Slippery slope'
Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is very little that could justify the collection of domestic intelligence by the Unites States military. If we start going down this slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again,” he says.

Some of the targets of the U.S. military’s recent collection efforts say they have already gone too far.

“It's absolute paranoia — at the highest levels of our government,” says Hersh of The Truth Project.

“I mean, we're based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says Truth Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are Quakers.”

The Defense Department refused to comment on how it obtained information on the Lake Worth meeting or why it considers a dozen or so anti-war activists a “threat.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11302.htm

[Saundra Hummer]

Bob Novak Says President Knows Leak Source

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
Wed Dec 14,10:57 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Columnist Bob Novakwho first published the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, says he is confident that President Bush knows who leaked Plame's name.

Novak said that "I'd be amazed" if the president didn't know the source's identity and that the public should "bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is."

Novak's remarks, reported in the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer, came during a question and answer session Tuesday after a speech sponsored by the John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record) urged Bush to identify Novak's source or to say that he does not know who it is.

In 2003, Novak exposed Plame's identity eight days after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of manipulating prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. In the column disclosing Plame's CIA status, Novak said the sources for his column were two administration officials.

The identity of Novak's sources has been one of the secrets in the CIA leak investigation.

Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, is one of Novak's sources, according to people close to the investigation, but his other source is not publicly known.

Novak apparently is cooperating with the criminal investigation of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, though the journalist has never said so.

The prosecutor has aggressively pursued contempt of court orders against reporters who have refused to cooperate and Novak is not among those who have become embroiled in court battles in the probe.

Schumer, D-N.Y., urged Bush to share the identity of Novak's sources if the president knows.

"You are in a position to clear this matter up quickly," Schumer said in a letter to the president on Wednesday.

"Unlike Mr. Novak, who can claim an interest in maintaining the confidentiality of his sources, there is no similar privilege arguably preventing you from sharing this information," Schumer wrote.

"You have repeatedly suggested that you would like to get to the bottom of this affair," Schumer reminded Bush. "At one point, in 2004, you suggested that anyone who was involved in leaking the name of the covert CIA operative would be fired."
___

On the Web:

http://www.newsobserver.com/722/story/377675.html

[Saundra Hummer]

Rice with Indefensible Brief; Cheney in Last Throes
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 09 December 2005

European reaction to visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's statements on torture can be summed up in lead commentary Wednesday in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, among the most widely respected German newspapers. Under the title "Justice à la Rice," the editor "translated" her message into these words: "The end justifies the means and terrorism can be fought with borderline methods on the outer edges of legality." He added: "Rice came to Germany to begin a new era. She has resoundingly failed to do so. Injustice remains injustice, and a wrong policy remains a wrong policy. On this basis you cannot re-launch the trans-Atlantic relationship."

There was no mushroom cloud, but Rice is radioactive nonetheless. No matter how much she and the embedded reporters traveling with her tried to spin her words, they are falling on deaf ears in Europe. Even here at home, the administration is encountering unusual skepticism in the heretofore-domesticated media. The normally sleepy editorial side of the Washington Post, for example, found it possible to lead its first editorial yesterday by reminding readers that Rice broke no new ground in claiming Wednesday that US personnel - "wherever they are" - are prohibited from using cruel or inhuman interrogation techniques. This is hardly a profile in courage for the Post: The president's spokesman, Scott McClellan, had already told reporters that Rice was merely expressing existing policy.

Trouble on the Home Front
With attention riveted on the cause célèbre occasioned by revelations concerning CIA-run prisons abroad, kidnapping, and "extraordinary renditions" of captives to torture-prone foreign countries - and the predictably neuralgic reaction among our allies - it is easy to miss the likely political fallout here at home.

Vice President Dick Cheney, whose unbridled chutzpah has led him to take public and well as private credit for being the intellectual author of US policy on torture, has become such a glaring liability that his tenure may be short-lived. There is a growing possibility that the vice president will resign at the turn of the year "for reasons of health," and that his partner-in-crime - in what Colin Powell's former chief of staff at the State Department, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, has labeled the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" - will choose to retire to his home in Taos early next year.

Never in the sixty years since World War II has an American secretary of state been received with such hostility by our erstwhile friends in Europe. In one sense, it can be seen as poetic justice that Rice, who as national security adviser to the president never heard a Cheney suggestion she didn't like, is taking the heat, while the vice president hides behind her skirts. Poetic justice for Cheney himself, though, may be just around the corner.

It is no secret that Cheney bears primary responsibility for making our country a pariah among nations by punching a gaping hole in the (until now) absolute ban on torture under international and US law. Under international treaties, including treaties ratified by the US Senate and thus the supreme law of the land, civilized societies have long since prohibited practices widely recognized as torture. No matter. At the instigation of the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal, the inherent human right to physical integrity and personal dignity has become an early casualty of the US "war on terror."

We did not need Col. Wilkerson to tell us that. What he has revealed in tracing responsibility for the US rogue policy on torture to the office of the vice president and Rumsfeld merely confirmed much of what is already known, but reported meagerly - if at all - in US media.

Just five days after 9/11, the vice president told Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press:

"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side ... a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies ... it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."

At that same time President George W. Bush reportedly issued instructions to the CIA to take a no-holds-barred approach when interrogating suspected terrorists and, according to counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, used colorful language to impress his attitude upon Clarke and Rumsfeld: "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." The head of the Counter-terrorism Center at the CIA conveyed the atmosphere quite well when he testified to Congress that after 9/11 "the gloves were off."

This was the message conveyed to CIA director George Tenet, who dutifully marched off to find interrogators to be set loose on "suspected terrorists" likely to be captured in Afghanistan - and then Iraq. For it was clear from the start that Iraq, too, was in the gun sights of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the president himself.

"Dark-side" operations, using "any means at our disposal" - like, say, "enhanced interrogation techniques" - by law require a "finding" signed by the president. Before signing, Bush would have sought the advice of his White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales - the more so, since this particular finding raised serious questions with regard not only to international law but also to US criminal statutes, and particularly the War Crimes Act of 1996 (18 U.S.C. 2441).

Enter the (in)famous memorandum of January 25, 2002, from Gonzales to the president, in which some provisions of the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war were described as "quaint" and "obsolete." Referring to the US War Crimes Act, the author of that memorandum argued that there was a "reasonable basis in law" that Bush could escape future criminal prosecution for violating that law.

Powell Protests ... Not Too Much
Then-Secretary of State (and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Colin Powell protested, and his warning, which was inserted into the January 25 memorandum to the president, speaks volumes:

"A determination that the GPW [Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War] does not apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban could undermine US military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries."

In a memo dated January 26, 2002, Powell also warned that such behavior by the US would "undermine public support among critical allies [and] reverse over a century of US policy and practice in supporting the Geneva conventions and undermine the protections of the law of war for our own troops." But Powell was a day late and a penny short with these latter warnings. And it is altogether likely that then-national security adviser Rice, at the prompting of the cabal, never showed the president Powell's January 26 memorandum. As for the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush-shy Powell, he confined himself to sending memos to the president's lawyer.

And so, on February 7, 2002, Bush signed the watershed memorandum telling our armed forces "to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva." Therein lies the gaping loophole that largely accounts for the widespread practice of torture of the kind so graphically represented in the photos from Abu Ghraib. It was not a "few bad apples" at the bottom. The bad apples were at the very top of the barrel.

But Who Wrote the January 25 Memorandum?
The author was Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, whom the vice president had the gall to promote to be his chief of staff after I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby was indicted. Addington's authorship has been openly acknowledged, and Cheney appears to regard it as a feather in Addington's cap. One searches in vain, however, for legal experts who support Addington's tortured (no pun intended) reasoning. Indeed, in November 2004, 130 prominent jurists - including twelve federal judges, eight former American Bar Association presidents, and former FBI director William Sessions - issued a highly unusual statement criticizing Addington and others by name for failing in their "high obligation to defend the Constitution."

Bypassing the "Six Blind Mice"
What is new is the willingness of patriotic officials within the government to put their country before their career and go to the media to blow the whistle on the various indignities and crimes they have witnessed. Those officials, initially cowed by the object lesson served up by White House retaliation against former ambassador Joseph Wilson, have become increasingly scandalized at the jettisoning of long accepted practices like those that used to govern interrogations. And so, officials with first-hand knowledge have now begun to come forward and tell what has been going on, in hopes of getting the country back on track. Cheney no longer has Libby to keep his finger in the dike to prevent leaks that are fast becoming a flood, and Karl Rove is preoccupied with his own efforts to avoid indictment.

Most important, Cheney's formidable power has been deeply dented by the indictment of his closest aide Libby, and the vice president's unabashed support of torture has prompted old friends and colleagues like Gen. Brent Scowcroft to say, "I don't know Dick Cheney." Absolute power may still corrupt absolutely even when it is deeply dented, but then it is not as threatening to those with the courage to confront it.

It is no surprise that patriotic truth-tellers within the government have chosen to go to the fourth estate rather than to a Congress controlled by the president's party. Their choice reflects a realization that little but trouble can be expected in seeking recourse from those who have become known as "the six blind mice" - Senators Pat Roberts, John Warner, and Richard Lugar, who chair the committees with jurisdiction in the Senate; and Congressmen Pete Hoekstra, Duncan Hunter, and Henry Hyde in the House.

--------

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an analyst with the CIA for 27 years and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120905Z.shtml

[Saundra Hummer]

MOLLY IVINS CHRISTMAS GIFT LIST: HER FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR .
Procrastination central
One-stop book shopping for everyone on your list

Molly Ivins - Creators Syndicate
12.13.05 - AUSTIN, Texas-- Pre-procrastination Christmas booklist! Look at this, fellow procrastinators -- almost two weeks before the actual day, and here I am to solve all your shopping problems with the annual one-stop, hit-the-bookstore with less than 24-hours-to-go, all-purpose Procrastinator's List.

Now, the only challenge is to hang onto the list long enough to get to a bookstore, lest we ONCE AGAIN wind up as the last customer at the Jiffy Mart at 11:45 p.m. Christmas Eve, trying to decide whether our nearest and dearest would prefer a nice jug of STP 40W or the new hemorrhoid cure.

For a terrific read and a great political yarn, "An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas" is my nomination for best surprise book of the year.

The story of Diane Wilson and her decade-long fight against a multinational chemical company pretty much has everything from corporate chicanery to political hoggery to fab Texas characters. It's a bit like a true version of John Le Carre's "The Constant Gardener," only starring a chemical company and a true-grit Texas working-class woman with five kids and a mouth on her, who just happens to be one of the best writers I've come across in years. Not just enviros, activists and liberals, but all will celebrate what one citizen can do against power.

It's lovely to hear from an older Kurt Vonnegut in a book of what might be called "easily digested meditations" -- "A Man Without a Country" -- except Vonnegut has always been able to make getting through mental fiber seem effortless.

He's a little sadder and little angrier perhaps than he used to be, but then, as he puts it, almost everyone he knows is dead now, and he no longer has a country. Vonnegut is still an irresistible writer who can make you smile, wistfully.

Also in an elegiac key -- but that astonishing precision that distinguishes all her work -- Joan Didion's "Year of Magical Thinking" is a great writer's gift to all of us. It's the gift of recognition, the incomparable solace that comes from connecting to someone who gets it right, who makes you say: "Yes. That's it. That's what this experience is."

For Aunt Eula and other mystery lovers, life is easy. A new P.D. James ("The Lighthouse"), a new Alexander McCall Smith ("In the Company of Cheerful Ladies"), a new Reginald Hill ("The Stranger House") and the fun Texas series by Ben Rehder ("Guilt Trip," "Flat Crazy" and "Buck Fever") set in the "Texas Hill Country and based on hunting and other good stuff."

Not quite in the category of "They're friends of mine, but ..." as they are getting great reviews all by their own, there are two young Texas journalists of whom I am immensely proud who have new books. I am connected to them through our having worked, during separate eras, at the Texas Observer, incubator of so much Texas talent.

Nate Blakeslee, who broke the extraordinary story "Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town," is a reminder of why investigative journalism at every level is so important. Blakeslee's story of how he and few other crusaders pulled off the near-impossible by getting a bunch of innocent black people freed from Texas prison is wonderful.

An equally arresting voice in fiction, Karen Olsson, has a novel, "Waterloo," that is the definitive wry, hip Austin novel. Years ago, another Observer alum, Billy Lee Brammer, wrote the classic Texas political novel "The Gay Place" about Austin -- fascinating to see the city through time and different eyes.

For children on your list, the Great and Invaluable Eden Lipson, now retired from The New York Times, points out not only is there a new Harry Potter, but no self respecting bookstore will be out of it. "The Lightning Thief" is an adventure for kids in the mid grades by Rick Riordan -- a boy with ADD turns out to be the son of the sea god Poseidon.

For the picture-book crowd, there is the hilarious "The Problem With Chickens" by Bruce McMillan and illustrated by Gunnella. How wonderful that so many good writers are doing children's books. Carl Hiaasen's new one is "Flush," and it is truly good enough for "all ages."

Finally, a classic picture book, "D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths," by Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire, has been reissued, and it's a companion to their book of Greek myths.

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=20061

[Saundra Hummer]

Merry Christmas to all
Joe Conason - The New York Observer
12.15.05 - On Nantucket, the Christmas season begins in earnest on the day after Thanksgiving. Sometime before sundown, Main Street is closed off to automobiles and people gather in front of the old bank building at the top of the street. At precisely 5 p.m., a switch is thrown to light the trees that line the town streets. Then the kids from the high school lead everyone in singing traditional carols. This charming event, which offends nobody, is especially popular with young families.

Thanks to the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce, which sponsors the tree-lighting and caroling, Christmas is alive and well on the Massachusetts island, summer home to the family of Senator John Kerry and just across the sound from the Kennedy compound. To my knowledge, none of the liberal elitists on the island has tried to abolish the holiday festivities in the public square.

It's just a single example, of course, from just one little place. But if the birth of Jesus can be celebrated on Nantucket without undue controversy, then perhaps the Fox News Channel's blowhards and political preachers have exaggerated (or even invented) the notion of a "war on Christmas" for their own purposes.

Now why would they do that?

Claiming to defend Christmas from the dark forces of secularism is an easy way to separate the rubes from their money, either by soliciting contributions or by selling books about the awful "conspiracy" against the national holiday. Jerry Falwell has been cashing in on this multimillion-dollar business for a long time, and others like James Dobson have joined him. The booty is substantial, and even a television personality like Bill O'Reilly -- despite his own somewhat compromised adherence to Christian morals -- is eligible for the crusade.

And don't discount the political reasons behind the hype. At a moment when the nation is turning away from the Bush Presidency and pondering the corruption of Congress, this seasonal crisis provides an urgently needed distraction. Forget about the war in Iraq and the lobbyists who are buying the government. The "liberals" are trying to abolish Christmas!

Like many paranoid fantasies, this Fox fraud is not entirely imaginary, although the quality of reporting on that network dictates extreme caution about accepting its version of events. On a few occasions, officials concerned about trespassing the boundary between church and state, and managers worried about offending customers who don't happen to share the Christian faith, have displayed excessive z