Published on Friday, April 7, 2006 by FindLaw

The Truth About Lewis "Scooter" Libby's Statements to the Grand Jury Claiming the President Authorized a Leak of Classified Information
The President and Vice President Are Not In the Clear Yet

by John Dean


Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has now revealed in court filings bombshell information that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby told the grand jury investigating the leak of Valerie Plame-Wilson's covert CIA identity. According to Fitzgerald's filings, Libby said that he was authorized by the President and Vice President to leak classified information to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

This revelation has been accompanied by a number of public misstatements, which call for correction. The most blatant of these is the claim that Fitzgerald's filing indicates that the President authorized the release of Valerie Plame's covert status at the CIA. In fact, the document is conspicuously silent on this fact. The filing does indicate that the President authorized the release of classified information, but it was different information - a National Intelligence Estimate that had been classified pursuant to an executive order.

In addition, conventional wisdom - if that label fits the consensus information that is surfacing on radio and television news shows - has it that this information does not reveal that the President or Vice President did anything illegal. But that claim, too, is not necessarily accurate.

At a minimum, the filing indicates that the President and Vice President departed radically, and disturbingly, from long-set procedures with respect to classified documents - and that the Vice President, in particular, exceeded his declassification authority. And it may indicate that they, too, ought to be targets of the grand jury.

Libby's Grand Jury Testimony Regarding Valerie Plame

As readers will likely be aware, Fitzgerald indicted Libby for obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to federal investigators. In response, Libby has repeatedly sought discovery of government information that he argues is relevant to his defense. On April 5, Fitzgerald's office filed a response to Libby's third effort at discovery of such information.

In his response, Fitzgerald treated Libby's request as a mere fishing expedition, a fairly typical response by a party who does not want to give up discovery. But Fitzgerald also revealed crucial new information about his investigation and findings in opposing Libby's request.

Fitzgerald's filing noted that the "evidence will show that" that Op Ed "was viewed in the Office of the Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq."

Undercutting Wilson's Credibility with Classified Information

Plainly, Fitzgerald believes Libby lied, and this will be the central issue at his forthcoming trial. Fitzgerald contends that the evidence will show that contrary to Libby's statements to investigators and the grand jury, not only did Libby know of Valerie Plame's work at the CIA before he spoke to journalist Tim Russert, but Libby also used that information as part of the effort to discredit Wilson's Op Ed.

According to Fitzgerald, Libby "undertook vigorous efforts to rebut" Wilson because "Vice President Cheney, defendant's immediate superior, expressed concern to defendant regarding whether Mr. Wilson's [CIA-sponsored] trip [to Africa to determine if Iraq was getting uranium from Niger] was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife."

This disclosure about Wilson's wife, according to Fitzgerald's filing, "was one way" to undercut the Op Ed - based on the hope it would be taken less seriously "if Mr. Wilson were perceived to have received the assignment on account of nepotism."

Another way to undercut the Op Ed was to use the top-secret information in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). A knowledgeable reporter like Judith Miller would understand that this information was the best judgment of the American intelligence community.

Fitzgerald reports that Libby "testified that he was specifically authorized … to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to Miller" because the information "was 'pretty definite' against Ambassador Wilson… and that the Vice President thought that it was 'very important' for the key judgments of the NIE to come out."

When Libby raised the problem of discussing the NIE with Miller because of its classified status, the filing reports that Libby "testified that the Vice President later advised him that the President had authorized" Libby to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE. (Emphasis added.)

The word "later" here, in the filing, is crucially ambiguous: Did the President authorized Libby's actions before Libby actually revealed the classified information to Miller, or afterward? The distinction may make a large difference in Libby's defense: If the authorization was retroactive, then Libby initially revealed classified information without permission to do so; thus, he would have reason to lie.

In addition, Cheney's counsel (now Chief of Staff) "opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document." (Emphasis added.)

Again, the language here is telling. The filing says that the President's actions "amounted to" declassification, not that the President had unilaterally declassified the material. To the contrary, it appears the material was not declassified for several days.

Can a President or Vice President Unilaterally and Selectively Declassify?

Assuming that Libby's testimony is accurate, did the President do anything wrong by so declassifying the NIE? Given the fact that the national security classification system is created by executive order of the president, it would appear logical that the president has authority to unilaterally and selective declassify anything he might wish. However, that is not the way any president has ever written the executive orders governing these activities. To the contrary, the orders set forth rather detailed declassification procedures.

In addition, there is law that says that when a president issues an executive order he must either amend that executive order, or follow it just as others within the executive branch are required to do. At present, we have so few facts it is difficult to know what precisely Bush did and how he did it, and thus whether or not this law is applicable. There is also the problem that no one has standing in court to challenge a president's refusal to follow his own rules. But voters may take note of the disposition of this administration to play by the rules, and put a Democratic Congress in place to keep an eye on the last two years of the Bush/Cheney presidency.

What is apparent, however, based on Fitzgerald's filing, is that no one other than Bush, Cheney, Libby and apparently Addington was aware of this unilateral and selective declassification - if, indeed, the NIE was declassified. The secrecy surely suggests cover-up. For example, Fitzgerald notes that Libby "consciously decided not to make [then Deputy National Security Adviser] Hadley aware of the fact that defendant [Libby] himself had already been disseminating the NIE by leaking it to reporters while Mr. Hadley sought to get it formally declassified." (Also, CIA Director George Tenet apparently was not aware of the partial declassification by Bush.)

Whatever authority Bush may or may not have had, however, it is crystal clear that Vice President Cheney did not have any authority to unilaterally and selectively declassify the NIE.

Recently, Cheney made the public claim (to Brit Hume of Fox News) that he had authority to declassify national security information. Learning of this, Congressman Henry Waxman asked the Congressional Reference Service of the Library of Congress, which issues non-partisan reports, whether Cheney was right. CRS found that the Vice President has limited declassification authority, generally speaking. And their report shows Cheney had no authority in this instance - only in situations where the Vice President had been the authority to classify the material in the first place, could the Vice President have the authority to unilaterally declassify it.

The Meaning of Libby's Revelations - and Their Possible Consequences

Libby's statements regarding the President are clearly hearsay; he was repeating to the grand jury what he claims Cheney told him. Accordingly, Bush is probably still protected by Cheney.

Presumably, Patrick Fitzgerald asked both Bush and Cheney about their actions when he interviewed them. But what they said, has yet to be revealed. If Cheney lied to protect himself, in the interviews, then he could also have lied to protect the President. Or Cheney could have opted to take the fall, and leave the President out of it.

Many commentators are dismissing this situation as run-of-the-mill presidential/vice presidential politics. But I believe it is more serious.

From a political perspective, separate from the illegality, there is the hypocrisy: The Bush Administration has prosecuted and sent to jail officials who leaked far less serious information - as I discussed in detail in a prior column. It is actively, and currently, threatening to prosecute others who have leaked information about the president's illegal electronic surveillance of Americans.

Beyond the hypocrisy, however, is what the President, Vice President, Libby and no doubt others did to destroy the career of Valerie Plame. Maybe the administration has quietly settled with the Wilsons, who seem to have dropped out of the public eye. This would have been wise, because as the facts unravel, it increasingly appears that administration officials did indeed attack Mr. Wilson for his speaking out; the leak of his wife's identity does indeed seem to have been done in harsh retribution. Such a violation of civil rights is a crime.

Finally, even if Bush and Cheney both get away clean of criminal charges, or even the suggestion of criminal conduct, this is still devastating for the Administration. Illegal or not, the President and Vice-President's actions, as recounted by Libby, are ugly in the extreme.

After all, Fitzgerald's filings indicate that, at a bare minimum, these highest of officials played fast and loose with declassification rules as part of a scheme to take an uncalled-for revenge against a critic who dared to question an Iraqi war justification. Even more damning, is that the critic turned out to be right: Weapons of mass destruction have never surfaced, no uranium was sold by Niger to Iraq, and the Administration's call to arms was bogus.

There will be more devastating revelations from the Libby case, I am certain. I have written of this matter in the past, and anticipate writing more in the future. The Commander-in-Chief-can-do-no-wrong veneer is wearing off, thankfully. For a nation that cannot hold its commander-in-chief responsible is something other than a democracy.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0407-25.htm

April 7, 2006

The People Speak

Are the elites listening? Of course not…

by Justin Raimondo


When even the pro-war London Telegraph starts having second thoughts about the wisdom of staying in Iraq, you know the War Party's goose is cooked:

"Three years after the original invasion, supporters of the war should assess the situation with pitiless clarity. Three years is more than enough time to have trained a new generation of police recruits and native soldiers.

"The continuing insurgency can no longer be regarded as a mopping-up exercise, or a prolongation of the military campaign. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether our troops are containing a civil conflict that would be occurring anyway, or whether they are in fact exacerbating the unrest by their presence.

"A bit of both, is the honest answer; but, with each day that passes, the truth tilts towards the latter. No one likes living in an occupied country. Even the kindest and most disinterested of foreign soldiers eventually become resented by all sides."

Written in response to a British poll that shows the majority of Tony Blair's long-suffering subjects have had it up to here, the Telegraph's editorialists pioneer new frontiers in disingenuousness: they aver "no one" intended to stay in Iraq indefinitely (except for the architects of those "enduring bases") and try to blame the stubbornness of our rulers in overstaying their welcome in Iraq on… the antiwar movement (!):

"Those who had marched against the invasion barely paused to touch up their placards before campaigning for the immediate evacuation of the troops. Their attitude drove some supporters of the war into a bloody-minded determination to see things through, almost regardless of the merits of the case."

As the occupation falls to pieces and Iraq dissolves into the chaos of civil war, the War Party's excuse is: "Noam Chomsky made us do it!" You can't get more pathetic than that.

Whatever. It doesn't matter what rationalization the laptop bombardiers conjure to make themselves feel better – what matters is that the War Party is in full retreat, stumbling and tripping over itself as its headlong flight turns into a rout.

Just as people who are just now beginning to speak out against the invasion and occupation were cowed by the overwhelming tide of war hysteria in the aftermath of 9/11, so the chickenhawks and their amen corner in the media are caught up in the backlash against the unfolding disaster. According to the YouGov poll, the Brits have passed the tipping point on the question of Iraq: 57 percent are now saying the war was a mistake to begin with. That's up 3 percent from the last poll. Fifty-five percent want the troops out.

In the U.S., too, public opinion has undergone a sea-change: opposition to the war has not only increased, but there is every indication that Americans are undergoing a fundamental shift in attitudes toward foreign affairs. A recent Pew poll showing that "isolationism" – defined in the poll as a foreign policy in which America "minds its own business" – is on the rebound is backed up and elaborated on by a just-released Yankelovich survey, in which the Bush administration's cherished goal of exporting "democracy" to the far corners of the globe comes in dead last in a list of preferred international objectives. And it isn't just liberals and Chomsky acolytes who scoff at this administration's grandiose scheme of "ending tyranny in our world," as the president put it in his second inaugural address. According to Yankelovich:

"Even among Republicans, only three out of ten favored pursuing it strongly. In fact, most of the erosion in confidence in the policy of spreading democracy abroad has occurred among Republicans, especially the more religious wing of the party. People who frequently attend religious services have been among the most ardent supporters of the government's policies, but one of the recent survey's most striking findings is that although these people continue to maintain a high level of trust in the president and his administration, their support for the government's Iraq policy and for the policy of exporting democracy has cooled."

The War Party's base is seriously eroding, and they can't maintain their present level of aggression – never mind launch new wars – with this level of public support. A new propaganda campaign – and, perhaps, a fresh provocation, some sort of Gulf of Tonkin-like incident – is going to be necessary in order to dispel the present mood and ratchet up the war hysteria once again.

What the War Party is counting on, in the end, is its ironclad control over the two-party system and its all-pervasive grip on Congress: this, they hope, will suppress the effects of widespread discontent and prevent popular antiwar sentiment from upsetting their future plans. They are counting on their well-organized and lavishly financed efforts to counter the rising tide of public opinion, and are hoping, at the very least, to keep the governing elites on their side. If no major party candidate offers the people a clear choice between war and peace, if the Democrats as well as the Republicans push a foreign policy of "preemptive" aggression and global intervention, then – they hope – the antiwar majority can be rendered impotent. No wonder they want to "export democracy" to the rest of the world – it's the system that keeps them in power, while masking their anti-majoritarian, anti-populist rule in the shiny raiment of democratic idealism. A more self-consciously cynical doctrine would be hard to invent.

Whether this will work is highly questionable, however: the skepticism of the public toward the pronouncements of government officials and their media scribes is reaching a new peak. Not since the dark days of the Nixon administration and the crimes of Watergate has public distrust of and contempt for our overlords reached such a peak. The spirit of rebellion – and even revolution – is in the air. Manning the battlements of Established Opinion, all the "experts" and Washington "insiders" are mobilizing en masse to tell us we can't just leave, reminding us of the "Pottery Barn" principle (you broke it, you buy it), and denouncing as "isolationist" anyone who tells it like it is. None of this may matter, however, as the tide of popular discontent gives way to massive anger: at some point, people decide to take matters into their own hands.

It isn't just us anti-interventionist ideologues, from The Nation to The American Conservative, who are calling for a swift withdrawal from Iraq and environs. And it isn't just about Iraq, either. The American people are clearly opposed to this administration's policy of "liberation." They want only to be liberated from the prospect of endless war culminating in national bankruptcy. They desire nothing less than a complete reevaluation of America's proper role in the world – and a turn away from Empire. They want their old Republic back, and pine for what Jeanne Kirkpatrick described at the end of the Cold War as "a return to normalcy." And one way or another, they shall have it. Any politician who dares to stand against this tide is likely to be swept aside and replaced as other, more compliant figures bend with the gale.



http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8820

Imagining the Unimaginable

Major Kong* Rides Again

by Hooman Majd
04.08.2006

According to an article by Seymour Hersh in next week's New Yorker, the Bush administration is considering the use of bunker-busting nuclear weapons against Iranian facilities as part of a military campaign to stop Iran from developing the capacity to build nuclear weapons. If true, and there's no reason to doubt Mr. Hersh's sources, then the U.S. is seemingly hell-bent on Super-Sizing the war in the Middle East. The use of nuclear bombs for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki (but more importantly against a non-nuclear country in a pre-emptive or preventative war) is unimaginable, but then again, imagining the unimaginable seems to be the Bush administration's strong suit. True, the nukes we're talking about aren't intended to be dropped on cities, and perhaps they would be unlikely to result in widespread radiation (since they presumably will explode underground, or at least one hopes) but they're still nukes, even without Slim Pickens riding them down to target.

The truth is that the administration of George Bush has never wanted a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis, at least not one short of complete capitulation by the Iranians, something that no analyst believes can or will happen. The Iraq war has certainly given pause to Mr. Bush and the neo-cons in and around his administration who want a piece of the Mullahs, but perversely as the situation deteriorates in Baghdad, it seems that Tehran is beginning to look like a good diversion. The IAEA chief, Mohammad El Baradei, despite U.S. urgings to the contrary, is visiting Iran next week to meet with Iranian leaders, still hoping to salvage a compromise deal. The U.S. would hardly object to Mr. El Baradei's trip unless it wants all options to fail so that the one option left (which we constantly remind the Iranians is still on the table, not getting stale) will be war.

Imagining the unimaginable: America slept (or shopped) through the unimaginable Bush administration lies that took us to Iraq. We slept and shopped successively through Guantanamo, the horrors of Abu Ghraib, rendition, illegal detentions, the Valerie Plame leak, and most recently illegal wiretaps on U.S. citizens. We're sleeping and shopping through administration claims that Iran is building weapons of mass destruction, the preposterous claim that Iran is supplying their Sunni arch-enemies al Qaeda with arms and bombs, that Iran is the world's foremost sponsor of terrorism, and that Iran, if allowed the technology to manufacture nuclear fuel, will not only make nuclear weapons but use them against us or our allies (or just hand them over to terrorists who will). No proof required, and hey, there's a sale on at Saks!

Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, someone unfortunately known for being so far outside the mainstream to be a little wacky, delivered a speech on Iran to an empty chamber (perhaps his fellow congressmen were out shopping) on April 5th. It's worth a read. And it comes from someone who although at times wacky, wasn't wacky enough to buy the administration's arguments for war with Iraq.

Imagine the unimaginable: George Bush becoming the first president to use nuclear weapons on another state since Harry Truman, and get this, without even declaring war.

*Slim Pickens' character in Dr. Strangelove


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hooman-majd/...bl_b_18727.html

Bush’s Bogus Theory of Absolute Power

by James Bovard, April 7, 2006


The Bush administration has a theory to explain why the Founding Fathers secretly intended for the president to have boundless power. Even though the new “unitary executive theory” is nowhere in the Constitution, White House officials continually invoke it to justify scorning federal law. The fact that the administration is getting away with this charade symbolizes how docile much of the American media and political opposition have become.

Earlier this year, members of Congress anguished publicly over how many of the original USA PATRIOT Act surveillance powers should be renewed. A bipartisan agreement was finally reached, giving the White House almost everything it wanted. As part of the deal to renew the Patriot Act, Bush administration officials agreed to provide Congress more details on how the new powers were being used.

However, Bush reneged in a “signing statement” quietly released after a heavily hyped White House signing ceremony on March 9. He decreed that he was entitled to withhold any information that would “impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive’s constitutional duties.” He announced that he would interpret any provision in the law obliging notifying Congress “in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information.”

In other words, any provision of the law that requires disclosure is presumptively null and void. The crux of the “unitary executive” is that all power rests in the president, and that “checks and balances” are an archaic relic. This is the same “principle” the Bush administration invoked to deny Congress everything from Iraqi war plans to the records of the Cheney Energy Task Force. Bush has invoked the “unitary executive” doctrine almost a hundred times since taking office, according to a study by Miami University professor Christopher Kelley.

One of the starkest statements of this theory came in the confidential August 2002 Justice Department/White House memo justifying torture. That memo revealed, “In light of the president’s complete authority over the conduct of war, without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president’s ultimate authority in these areas.” And even if Congress did try to explicitly restrain executive power, any such law would be unconstitutional because of the inherent power vested in the presidency, according to the memo. When he was White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales spoke of a “commander-in-chief override” to justify scorning the Anti-Torture Act.

The Bush administration’s sense of entitlement is obvious from the ongoing controversy over warrantless National Security Agency wiretaps of Americans. Such wiretaps are clearly prohibited by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Yet Bush declared that he is entitled to order such wiretaps because of the inherent authority of the presidency.

The administration’s attitude toward both the law and Congress was stark in the responses recently delivered to congressional questions on the scope and nature of the NSA warrantless wiretap program.

The basic answer to almost all the questions was, “None of your business.” Again and again, the White House declared that “decisions about what communications to intercept are made by professional intelligence officers.” Apparently, the job titles of the NSA officials automatically negate the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for a warrant before the feds can intrude.

The Bush administration has claimed that the wiretaps are “legal” because of the president’s duty to protect America. Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee asked, “What is the limiting principle of the president’s claimed inherent authority as commander in chief?”

The administration replied, “In light of the strictly limited nature of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, we do not think it a useful or a practical exercise to engage in speculation about the limits of the president’s authority as commander in chief.” There is no reason to accept that the program is strictly limited — because Bush in 2004 publicly declared that no wiretaps could be done without a court order. The administration has done nothing since then to signal greater respect for the truth. And Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s written responses to Senate Judiciary Committee questions hinted that there may be other surveillance programs not yet revealed to the public.

The Bush White House also asserted that the September 2001 “Authorization to Use Military Force” resolution passed by Congress after 9/11 entitled Bush to tap Americans’ phones. But if the authorization actually entitled the president to do whatever he thinks necessary on the home front, then Americans have been living under martial law for the last four and a half years.

At this point, Americans can only guess which laws Bush feels obliged to obey. According to Newsweek, Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, recently informed the Senate Intelligence Committee that Bush could order killings of suspected terrorists within the United States.

Americans cannot expect to have good presidents if presidents are permitted to make themselves czars. The “unitary executive” theory is simply another in a long series of intellectual cons crafted to trample freedom. The sooner that it is tarred and feathered and ridden out of Washington on a rail, the safer Americans’ remaining rights will be.


http://www.fff.org/comment/com0604b.asp

Published on Saturday, April 8, 2006 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Washington)

Want More Bush? Elect McCain.

by Helen Thomas


WASHINGTON - In his bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Sen. John McCain is moving to the right.

The Arizona Republican, who failed to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, is the most visible Republican on television, outside the White House, and seems to never pass up an opportunity to appear on Sunday talk shows.

All this appears to be part of his effort to transform his image as a maverick independent so that he can make his pitch to the conservative Republican base that will vote in the party's primaries and caucuses two years hence.

McCain's focus is on Southern states where he will have to show his dedication to the conservatives who dominate the GOP. He was scheduled to be the main speaker at the Lincoln Day dinner in Lakeland, Fla., on Saturday. Later this spring, he will deliver the commencement address at Liberty University at Lynchburg, Va., the school founded by evangelical leader Jerry Falwell.

Falwell has indicated there are still some bridges to mend with McCain, who had called Falwell "an agent of intolerance" in his first bid for the presidency in 2000.

Although Falwell has not endorsed McCain, he has said that the senator "could be the GOP's best hope" if Sen. Hillary Clinton is nominated to head the Democratic ticket in 2008.

Falwell also says McCain is in the process of "healing the breach with evangelical groups."

Asked to explain his change of attitude toward the evangelist on "Meet the Press" Sunday, McCain said: "I believe that the Christian right has a major role to play in the Republican Party. One reason (that) is so is because they're so active and their followers are. And I believe they have a right to be part of our party."

McCain also has gone out of his way to cozy up to President Bush after their bitter rift in the 2000 presidential campaign. McCain has said he does not look back in anger at old political battles. That's wise -- he's going to need Bush's backing in a presidential bid.

McCain also has taken other stands that should put him in good with Southern conservatives. Hailing from a military family -- his father and grandfather were admirals in the Navy -- he is a strong supporter of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and believes the number of U.S. troops there should be beefed up.

He is against abortion rights and gun-control laws and believes students should be taught the religion-oriented "intelligent design" theory of creation as well as the theory of scientific evolution.

His painful experience as a POW during the Vietnam War led him to buck the White House on the question of using torture to interrogate detainees and prisoners of war. Despite White House opposition, he triumphed with a 90-9 Senate vote on his anti-torture amendment to the defense appropriations bill.

Well, almost.

In signing the bill, the president issued a statement that under his constitutional authority as commander in chief, he did not have to abide by the anti-torture amendment. This is a dubious claim of presidential power that should be challenged.

McCain's political record is not entirely pristine. He was a member of the so-called Keating Five -- five senators linked to Charles Keating in the savings and loan scandals in 1991. But a special investigator found that McCain had not been substantially involved in influence peddling but criticized him and three others for "questionable conduct."

That searing experience may explain why McCain has been an avid advocate of campaign finance reform.

With his "hail fellow well met" persona and tendency to jaw with the media and pundits in the back of the campaign bus, he has created the impression in some quarters that he is a "moderate."

Forget it. His voting record speaks for itself.

McCain is working hard to prove his staunch conservative credentials as he woos the far right in his party.

If he wins the presidency, the country can expect a continuation of Bush's aggressive foreign policy and ultra-right domestic programs.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0408-23.htm

A Video: The Battle for America

http://www.current.tv/studio/media/684.htm

Wooo Hooo! Yeah!

Time to kick some bush butte'

Final Jeopardy

By Elizabeth de la Vega
TomDispatch.com

Sunday 09 April 2006


Asking the right question about the president's involvement in the CIA leak affair.


The latest in a parade of horrors emanating from the Bush administration appeared Thursday in the form of a revelation buried in papers filed in federal court by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in his investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, now under indictment on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, told the Grand Jury Fitzgerald convened that President Bush had - via Vice President Cheney - authorized him to disclose selected information from a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, which he did during a private breakfast meeting at the St. Regis Hotel on July 8, 2003.

On Friday, in a press conference that bore a striking similarity to Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" routine, President Bush's spokesman Scott McClellan dutifully responded to reporters' questions about the disclosure. No, the increasingly robotic McClellan said, the White House will not comment on an ongoing case. But, he assured the assembled journalists, the President can declassify whatever he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants. So, McClellan implied, it would have been perfectly legal for the President to have taken this action, which he could not, of course, comment on because this was an ongoing case (and so on).

Thus has begun a debate in our media whose starting questions usually run along the lines of: "Is what the President did legal?" or "Does the President have authority to declassify information at will?" (Given the President's failure to deny Libby's allegation, it has largely been accepted as true.) The answer to those questions has generally been: Yes, the President - as chief executive - has the authority to declassify information at will.

But it is not only in the TV game show world of Jeopardy! that the correct answer to a problem depends on the question asked. And, as it happens, those are simply not the right questions.

In order to decide what legal issues arise from a given set of facts - in other words, in order to frame the right questions - we first have to determine what the facts are. This is what we know, in summary, about the CIA leak case.

We know that Valerie Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson had been an extremely painful thorn in the side of the Bush administration long before he wrote the infamous July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald described as having been viewed "in the Office of the Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq."

In March of 2003, Wilson had become increasingly vocal in questioning the administration's reasons for war. In a Nation article and a March 2 appearance on CNN, as well as a March 4 panel on Ted Koppel's Nightline, Wilson argued that the White House wanted to invade Iraq, not because of weapons of mass destruction, but because it wanted to redraw the map of the Middle East. Wilson's criticisms coincided with those of David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, who was questioning the President's false and misleading arguments that aluminum tubes intercepted en route to Iraq had been meant for an Iraqi nuclear program.

Fueling the fire, on March 7, Mohammed El Baradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had flatly declared that there was no evidence the Iraqis were reconstituting a nuclear-weapons program, pointing out that neither the aluminum tubes claim nor the attempted-purchase-of-uranium-in-Niger claim were valid. Indeed, El Baradei explained, the documents relating to an attempted purchase of uranium were obvious forgeries. The next day, a "senior administration official" was quoted in the Washington Post as saying in response to El Baradei's statement, "We f?ll for it." Then Wilson appeared again on CNN and said, essentially, that the senior administration official was either lying or incompetent because analysts from several different intelligence agencies already knew of the forgeries.

Quite obviously, then, Joseph Wilson had the attention of the Bush administration as early as March 2003, long before he wrote the July 6 op-ed. And it was on March 23 that President Bush issued an amended executive order in which he claimed the right to expand Vice President Cheney's authority to declassify documents.

We also know that the President's glow from the "Mission Accomplished" spectacle had barely dimmed by May 6, 2003 when Joseph Wilson resurfaced in a Nicholas Kristof New York Times column which described "an unnamed former ambassador's" trip to Niger as casting doubt on the accuracy of the "sixteen words" relating to uranium procurements from Africa that had been in the President's State of the Union address that January. At this point, of course, Wilson would be seen as directly attacking both the President and the Vice President.

Moreover, throughout May and June, questions about the missing weapons of mass destruction increased in volume and intensity in the media and in press conferences. as did concerns about Joseph Wilson. Then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" on June 8 to rebut the charges, making her famous "maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency" comment about the CIA. By the end of June 2003, more than a dozen top administration officials, including Rice and Cheney, who were known to be the President's closest advisers, were intensely involved in dealing with the problem of Joseph Wilson and his allegations. Under the circumstances, it is impossible to believe that President Bush was either unaware of, or indifferent to, the issue. Clearly he was well aware of his slowly waning credibility, as evidenced by the surfacing of a new administration theme in June: the deriding of "revisionist historians" who were questioning the pre-war intelligence.

We also know that the debate about the Bush administration's grounds for war had been raging since before the war began. In fact, it had been raging since before Congress voted to authorize the war. We know now that the National Intelligence Estimate, which was prepared in early October 2002, contained numerous qualifiers and caveats that were omitted from the minimalist, unclassified "White Paper" version issued simultaneously. At the time, and up to the start of the war, numerous congresspersons and others had made public and private pleas to the administration to declassify the NIE so there could be a reasoned debate about the issues. But the administration had steadfastly refused, citing national security concerns, even though debate about the evidence for war - the aluminum tubes, the Niger uranium, the existence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda - continued both before and after the invasion.

What was different in June 2003 when the President evidently did decide to declassify bits of the NIE? The answer is: He was kicking off his reelection campaign. As Helen Thomas wrote on Friday, June 27, 2003, "President George W. Bush is trying to scoop up an historic $200 million at political fundraising events to kick off his reelection campaign." He had raised close to $10 million over the previous week and had more events "slated for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami and Tampa before the end of July."

A perfect storm looked to be forming: four months of criticism by Joseph Wilson, mounting questions and criticism about pre-war intelligence and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction - and the kick off to Bush's historic $200 million reelection campaign. That was the state of affairs on July 6, 2003 when Joseph Wilson's op-ed appeared. And as Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald put it in the filing revealed last week, "The evidence will show that [it] was viewed in the Office of the Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq."

Can anyone doubt, under these circumstances, that President Bush did in fact authorize Cheney to tell Libby to leak previously classified parts of the October 2002 NIE to Judith Miller? Of course not - especially when the White House's response has not been to deny it, but to say that the President can declassify whatever he wants at his whim.

There is, however, one remaining piece of the puzzle. Libby testified that he was specifically authorized to speak to Judith Miller by Cheney and to disclose "key judgments" from the NIE because the document was "pretty definitive" against what Wilson had said; and Cheney thought it was "very important" for the key judgments of the NIE to come out. Libby testified that he questioned Cheney about whether he could do this and the Vice President later came back and said the President had authorized it. According to Libby, Cheney told him to tell Miller that a "key judgment" of the NIE said that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure" uranium in Africa. Libby said he was also told by Cheney to disclose documents, including a brief abstract of the NIE's key judgments, which was one of the reasons the meeting was held at a hotel. Libby insisted that he not be named as a source: he wanted to be described as a "former Hill staffer." In addition, Libby testified, he discussed with Miller the contents of a still-classified CIA report - which Libby told Miller had been written by Joseph Wilson - that described a 1999 visit to Niger by a group of Iraqis who allegedly wanted to purchase uranium. Libby believed that only he, Cheney, and the President knew about the secret declassification; he did not reveal it to anyone during the formal declassification process that ensued.

Libby's account raises too many issues to address, not the least of which is that he had already spoken to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward about the still-classified NIE in June. Two other key issues, however, relate to the information Libby was instructed to disclose. First, the NIE Key Judgments did not say that the Iraqis were "vigorously trying to procure" uranium from Africa. They said nothing whatsoever about uranium procurements. The body of the NIE included some vague assertions about such procurement efforts, but even those had been repudiated by the CIA in October 2002. In addition, as President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Lewis Libby all knew, the documents supporting the assertions had been proved to be forgeries by both U.S. intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency. In other words, it is clear that this secret disclosure of unilaterally declassified material from the NIE. was at best seriously misleading, if not entirely false.

That the contents of another disclosed document had been written by Joseph Wilson, as Libby told Miller, was equally false and no less misleading, because Wilson did not write any report whatsoever after his trip to Niger. He orally reported his findings to the CIA.

Scott McClellan now says that this declassification and instantaneous disclosure was prompted by the public interest in contributing to the understanding of an ongoing debate. We know that is not true.

After all, before the war, the existence of a crucial debate about whether pre-war intelligence justified an invasion of Iraq was not considered sufficient cause to impel President Bush to decide to declassify the NIE. After the war, when no weapons of mass destruction were being found, the existence of debate about pre-war intelligence did not impel Bush to declassify the NIE. Even today, most of the NIE, including the one-page President's Summary, is not declassified.

We now have sufficient information to frame the Final Jeopardy! question. This is it:

Is a President, on the eve of his reelection campaign, legally entitled to ward off political embarrassment and conceal past failures in t?e exercise of his office by unilaterally and informally declassifying selected - as well as false and misleading - portions of a classified National Intelligence Estimate that he has previously refused to declassify, in order to cause such information to be secretly disclosed under false pretenses in the name of a "former Hill staffer" to a single reporter, intending that reporter to publish such false and misleading information in a prominent national newspaper?

The answer is obvious: No. Such a misuse of authority is the very essence of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States. It is also precisely the abuse of executive power that led to the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon.


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041006P.shtml

Published on Monday, April 10, 2006 by WorkingforChange.com

'L'etat, C'est Moi'


Bush Declares Himself Above the Law -- Has the First American Dictatorship Already Arrived?


by Geov Parrish


In 2003, while pledging to fire anyone in his administration found to have leaked the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Wilson to journalists, President George Bush intoned that he did not know of "anybody in my administration who leaked classified information."

Well.

Pick your favorite Bush quote on this topic; there are countless good ones, now that we learn that former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, when forced by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to testify under oath to save his own skin, fingered both Bush and his former boss, Dick Cheney. Libby testified that they both authorized the leaking of classified National Intelligence Estimate information on Iraq in July 2003 in order to defend the administration's decision to unilaterally invade Iraq. A president who has ordered the launching of widespread investigations to find leakers in the CIA and State Department, including the polygraphing of scores of intelligence professionals, the man who wants the NSA spying and CIA gulag whistleblowers prosecuted, is himself a leaker. And the same testimony revealed that Bush was aware at every step of the way of the ongoing campaign to publicly smear Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Wilson. Pick your sanctimonious Bush statements about that, too.

What. A. Freaking. Hypocrite.

And, as we've come to expect, a liar. Stop the presses. We're so accustomed to the lies of George Bush being uncovered after the fact, we don't even notice any longer.

And they thought Clinton's behavior brought disgrace to the Oval Office.

Beyond those obvious morsels, however, lies the disturbing legal rationale for the Bush/Cheney leak, offered up by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (naturally) and already arrived at Scott McClellan's mouth. The White House, tellingly, has not denied any of Libby's testimony (including the Wilson conspiracy). The leak was legal and proper, the defense goes, because the president's verbal authority is enough to declassify classified information, and by authorizing its release Bush automatically declassified it.

The White House is sticking to this story even though much of the cherry-picked NEI Iraq data was formally declassified ten days after the leak, so that the Bush administration could further defend its choice to invade. According to the White House, the later declassification shows that the NEI data wasn't all that important and that the leak didn't damage national security. But that misses the point. If Bush's word is enough to declassify classified information, why did the White House feel the need to "formally declassify" the material ten days later? Wasn't the deed already done, on Bush's sole verbal authority?

Now they're claiming that's the case, and the Bush NEI leak rationale follows an all-too-familiar theme: Bush cannot break the law, because Bush is the law. He can't leak a document, because if he says it's OK to release the document it's therefore by definition not a leak. Just like torture is illegal except when George says it's not. Or warrantless domestic wiretapping is illegal, except when he authorizes it.

Bush and the people around him appear to have genuinely believed, for at least the four and a half years since 9-11, that the President by definition is incapable of breaking the law. On his sole authority laws can be ignored, overridden, or changed. Even implicitly. Even retroactively, as when some unappetizing piece of this puzzle inadvertently comes to the public's attention.

Combine this with an administration more intent on secrecy and lack of transparency than any other in U.S. history, and you have a recipe for, well, a dictatorship. Which is exactly what it appears Bush and company believe they are operating in. Oh, of course, in normal times America is a democracy, but these aren't normal times, are they? Why? Because we're at war. Why are we at war? Because the President said so. How long will the war last? Several generations. After that, presumably, the Constitution will be in force again, and Congress and the courts can re-convene if they like.

Dictatorship.

The tendency will be for this leak headline, as with so many Bush scandals before it, to slip from the news after a few days, with the gutless Republican-controlled Congress rendered irrelevant and the Republican-appointed courts years away from final rulings on any of this nonsense. But the recurrent theme of a President and his administration which believe they are above the law -- Bush on his own say-so, and the rest of them acting on his presumed authority -- is more than a scandal. It is a direct challenge to the Constitution of the United States of America. You know, the "freedom" that politicians like Bush enjoy invoking when talking about the soldiers they're sending to kill and be killed in one or another illegal, pointless War On Brown People.

It is more evident than ever that this President and Vice President need to be impeached. Not because it is or isn't politically expedient; not even because their successors might be any better, or because it will be an advantage for one or another party in 2008. But because this sort of behavior in the most powerful job in the world must be punished, in the clearest possible manner. Justice demands it. Setting an example, to try to prevent similar abuses by future leaders from any party, demands it.

Otherwise, we might as well cancel that 2008 presidential election and be done with this farce we call an electoral process. Sooner or later, should Bush go unpunished, somebody in power is going to try to do exactly that sort of thing. When they do, they'll cite national security and the need for stable and experienced political leadership in a time of war, and when they do, they'll cite the precedents set by George Bush and permitted by the Congress, courts, and American public of his day. And our country's long, mostly successful experiment in representative democracy will be over.

Perhaps it already is.



http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0410-36.htm

April 11, 2006

Is Veneration of the Military Good for the Republic?

by Ivan Eland


Since the Vietnam War, in which returning draftees were shunned by much of American society, critics of U.S. foreign policy, including the Iraq war, have bent over backwards not to criticize U.S. military forces and sometimes have even praised soldiers’ willingness to fight for their country. And, of course, journalists and politicians have slathered nothing but praise on American boys and girls in Iraq. But this flattery is not good for the republic, and it’s not good for the troops.

The government of a free society hypocritically enslaved only one specific group in the population—young men—to fight in a needless war in Vietnam, a backwater country that was not strategic to the United States. Instead of apologizing for their government’s kidnapping of youth for this dangerous—and sometimes fatal—service, many segments of American society unjustly blamed these youthful victims for the war.

Out of guilt for this sorry episode in U.S. history, most Americans now go out of their way to praise the troops in Iraq, even if they are critical of the invasion or how the war is being conducted. But although many similarities exist between the Iraq and Vietnam wars, there is one critical difference. The draft was eliminated after the Vietnam War, and all of the troops fighting in Iraq are volunteers. The government thankfully no longer compels a narrow swath of society to fight and die in combat.

One of the main reasons that most of the American people have decided to passively oppose the Iraq war instead of joining active anti-war protests is that their children are no longer being involuntarily yanked from productive years of college and work onto the killing fields of war in a faraway land.

But shouldn’t Americans still be concerned about the death and dismemberment of young men who volunteered to “fight for all of us”? The answer is yes; all human life is precious. But the guilt of the rest of society for enjoying normal lives while young men and women bleed in Iraq should not stifle criticism of the military for its incompetent handling of the war or whitewash the choice that those enlistees made in the first place.

Any visit to the Pentagon between the end of the Vietnam War and the start of the Iraq War—and I made many—would at least partly explain why the U.S. military is losing another guerrilla war. The obvious ineptitude of the political appointees of the Bush administration, including the president, has obscured the bungling of the U.S. military in fighting the war. After the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army believed that it could have won the Vietnam War if the politicians hadn’t brought politics into it. And the solution to the problem of guerrilla war was that “we’re not going to fight these anymore.” A laudable goal to be sure, but the politicians didn’t cooperate—they have shown that they will involve the United States in guerrilla wars, which are inherently political.

After Vietnam, the Army went back to training for a large conventional war in Europe. Predictably, when the invasion of Iraq turned into a guerrilla war, the Army made the same mistakes it did in Vietnam. For example, it conducted “search and destroy” raids using excessive firepower, only to find that the local populace was in a hostile mood after their towns were destroyed and that the guerrillas had reinfiltrated after U.S. forces left the area. It should be shocking to Americans that even after the national trauma in Vietnam, their military bureaucracy wasn’t capable of institutional learning.

On an individual level, war critics must honestly acknowledge that the soldiers whose lives are at risk in Iraq made the choice to enlist in the military. It is true that many were convinced by military advertising that they were “serving their country.” In reality, they often serve their government—a distinction that is very important. Since World War II, the U.S. military has been used less in its traditional role of defending the republic and its citizens against potential threats and more in the new role of policing the U.S. global empire. To police the realm, the U.S. military has been configured offensively—not defensively—to fight brushfire wars in far-flung nations. The Department of Defense should be renamed the “Department of Offense,” the “Department of Imperial Defense,” or at least the “Department for the Defense of Other Nations.” Many young men who enlist know deep down that the United States runs an assertive foreign policy overseas and are happy to participate in it.

Does that mean that we should not mourn their deaths and disfigurement in a pointless, counterproductive war? No. Young people are impressionable and can easily be convinced by patriotic images and rhetoric into risking their lives for goals that would make George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the rest of the nation’s founders cringe. They are also persuaded by the lucrative pay and benefits (compared to most civilians with the same education and job experience) that the military dishes out to its personnel.

Many Americans, however, mourn the lives of the 2,350 American volunteers who have died in Iraq, but worry little about the 25,000-100,000 Iraqis who didn’t volunteer to make the ultimate sacrifice in a U.S. invasion of their home soil. In fact, the U.S. government doesn’t even bother to keep track of how many Iraqis have died in the war.

More important, the nation’s founders realized that an excessive veneration of the military was not good for a republic. The American republic was supposed to be the antithesis of the militarized societies of 18th century Europe. The glorification of the militarized U.S. foreign policy of the latter half of the 20th and early 21st centuries would make the founding generation roll over in their graves.



http://antiwar.com/eland/?articleid=8836

When Will Democrats Break With Bush?

by John Nichols

04/10/2006

In light of the news that President Bush authorized a top Administration aide to use previously classified information as part of an orchestrated political attack on a prominent critic of the Administration, a radio host asked me over the weekend: "What will it take to get Republicans to break with Bush? How bad will things have to get before they realize that he's a disaster for the country?"

I answered that, in small but significant ways, Republicans have been breaking with Bush for some time now. When the President travels to states around the country to pump up support for his war, he often does so without the accompaniment of GOP members of Congress who find that they are otherwise engaged on the days that the Commander in Chief drops by their hometowns. While most leading Republicans refuse to admit as much publicly, they are putting more and more distance between themselves and a President whose approval rating has dropped to Nixon-in-Watergate depths.

When Congress voted recently on whether to extend the Patriot Act, some of the loudest "no" votes came from conservative Republicans such as Don Young of Alaska and Butch Otter of Idaho, who argued with Democratic US Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin that the legislation was an assault on basic liberties and Constitutional standards. As but a handful of Senate Democrats and key House Democrats such as Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rahm Emanuel were lining up with the Bush Administration to curtail civil liberties, Texas Republican Ron Paul, perhaps the most consistent critic of the Patriot Act in the House, complained that "one prominent Democrat opined on national television that 'most of the 170-page Patriot Act is fine,' but that it needs some fine tuning. He then stated that he opposed the ten-year reauthorization bill on the grounds that Americans should not have their constitutional rights put on hold for a decade. His party's proposal, however, was to reauthorize the Patriot Act for only four years, as though a shorter moratorium on constitutional rights would be acceptable! So much for the opposition party and its claim to stand for civil liberties."

Perhaps even more significant than GOP opposition to the Patriot Act is the opposition from some of the most conservative Republicans in the House--including Paul, Walter Jones and Howard Coble of North Carolina, and John Duncan of Tennessee--to the war in Iraq. These Republicans, among others, are now among the most ardent and articulate Congressional critics of the Administration's policies in the Middle East.

Last week, Paul, Jones and a moderate Republican, Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland, joined with three Democrats--Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, Ike Skelton of Missouri and Marty Meehan of Massachusetts-–in a push to get the House to hold a daylong debate on the war, declaring that: "Americans deserve an open and honest debate about the future of US policy in Iraq by their Representatives in Congress." While the debate demand of these Republicans stalwarts was stymied by their party leadership in the House, it is notable that House Republican leaders chose not to block a March 16 amendment by US Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat from California, which put the House on record as opposing the construction of permanent US bases in Iraq. The decision not to fight Lee's amendment, which passed by an overwhelming voice vote, was a tacit acknowledgment by GOP leaders of the reality, pointed up in a recent University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) poll, that 60 percent of Republican voters oppose a permanent US presence in that country.

Indeed, while a predictable 80 percent of Democrats support moves to begin withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, according to the PIPA poll, a rather more remarkable 52 percent of Republicans now want Washington to begin bringing the troops home.

Although their President and Vice President and a few key Congressional leaders may still be clinging to neoconservative fantasies, Republicans who actually care about their country-–as well as Republicans who care about the political viability of their party at a time when a new Associated Press/Ipsos poll finds that Americans would prefer a Democrat-led House by the widest margin in recent history, 49 percent to 33 percent-–are indeed beginning to make meaningful breaks with Bush.

So the question of the moment is not "What will it take to get Republicans to break with Bush?" The question is: "What will it take to get Congressional Democrats to break with Bush?"

Despite mounting evidence not just of the President's unpopularity but of his reckless disregard for the law-–which was again confirmed by last week's news of former Cheney chief of staff I. "Scooter" Libby's testimony that Bush authorized distribution of previously classified data as part of a concerted effort to undermine the credibility of former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who had revealed that the "case" for going to war in Iraq was based on false premises-–most Congressional Democrats continue to resist calls to hold the President accountable.

An American Research Group poll conducted in March found that 70 percent of Democrats, 42 percent of independents and 29 percent of Republicans surveyed favor censuring Bush for authorizing wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining court orders. Yet Feingold's motion to censure Bush has drawn just two Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate, Barbara Boxer of California and Tom Harkin of Iowa.

The same American Research Group poll found that 61 percent of Democrats, 47 percent of independents and 18 percent of Republicans are supportive of moves to impeach Bush. Yet Representative John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has attracted just 33 co-sponsors for his resolution calling for the creation of "a select committee to investigate the administration's intent to go to war before Congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment." Most Democratic members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, along with Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders, have signed on. But House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and others in leadership positions remain aggressively critical of the initiative.

Where, at the very least, is the united Democratic support for Representative Maurice Hinchey's call for the expansion of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into White House leaks-–which produced the indictment of Libby and last week's revelation about the role of the President and Vice President-–to examine the motivations of all of those involved in the White House's political assault on Joe Wilson? Hinchey, a New York Democrat, has been on the case since last summer, when he got thirty-nine other House members to sign a letter he wrote to Fitzgerald calling for the expanded investigation. As Hinchey says, "Justice will not be served until all of these matters are fully addressed in the courts and in the Congress."

Hinchey's right. But the fundamental truth of American politics remains that justice will only be served when the opposition party moves, as a united force encouraged and supported by its leadership in the House and Senate, to demand accountability from this Administration. For most Democrats, that will demand something they have not yet been willing to make: a break from Bush. And Democrats had better be quick about making that break, unless they want their Republicans colleagues to beat them to the punch.


http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=76072

Published on Sunday, April 9, 2006 by the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Minnesota)

Why Our Small Town Called for Bush to be Impeached


The worst failing of any nation is for its citizens no longer to scrutinize their government.

by Dan Dewalt


On March 7, the townspeople of Newfane, Vt., crowded the 19th-century Union Hall for their annual town meeting -- one of America's last expressions of direct democracy. As the wood stove warmed the old hall, the voters dealt with town matters, and then turned to a resolution of national importance. When the debate ended, the Newfane citizens overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against President George W. Bush -- a vote also passed by four other Vermont towns that day.

Now as calls for impeachment begin to be heard across America, some, especially those in the elite media establishment, belittle our efforts, writing them off as merely political, spurious or at best premature. They ask, what right do small Vermont towns have to weigh in on a question of such magnitude? Who are we to cast our sights beyond the demands of our roads, bridges or annual school budget? As a Vermont citizen and a Newfane town selectman, I'd like to respond.

Vermonters are asking a different set of questions. We see boys and girls, men and women from across our state, falling one by one, to come home for somber burial or partial rehabilitation. We see that the torture of captives has become official administration policy, and as a result our nation is now reviled and despised across the globe. We see an administration that spies upon our Quaker pacifists in the name of fighting "terror." We see a crumbling national infrastructure, inept and underequipped to respond to natural disasters, and heavier financial burdens placed upon those who can least afford it, all because of the hundreds of billions of dollars being drained by this administration's failing effort to place its crusading imprint upon an unwilling people who had nothing to do with the terrorism that has been visited upon us.

A growing number of patriotic Americans from coast to coast have joined Vermonters in asking: If it's not a crime to lie to the nation about Iraq's ties to 9/11, and use those lies to instigate a war, contrary to international law, what is? If warrantless wiretapping of Americans, in direct violation of the FISA Act of 1978, is not a crime, what is? If breaking our treaty obligations with respect to the treatment of military and civilian prisoners -- obligations which, according to our Constitution, are to be the supreme law of the land -- is not a crime, what is?

We ask how any American loyal to the Constitution and the laws that make us a nation could not call for a complete congressional investigation into the alleged crimes of this administration. How can any American with a sense of morality, anyone who professes to adhere to religious principles, not insist that the deceit and the violence must cease?

Every day, our moral standing in the eyes of the world is further debased. Every day that we acquiesce to these actions of our government, we debase ourselves and make ourselves unfit to be called Americans.

The worst failing of any nation is for its citizens to no longer scrutinize their government. Today, whether because of apathy, distraction or exhaustion, we are not paying attention. It will be at our peril if our awakening comes only after the government has consolidated its hold on power, and we find that scrutiny is no longer an option.



http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0409-23.htm

Published on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

The Rise of Fascism in America

by Gary Alan Scott





Since the 1970’s, American businesses have grown larger and more monopolistic, helped along by deregulation, the repeal of anti-trust laws, and a steady transformation from manufacturing to capital management (dare I say, “capital manipulation”?). As Paul Bigioni puts it in his excellent essay entitled “The Real Threat of Fascism”: “If we are to protect ourselves from the growing political influence of Big Business, then our antitrust laws must be reconceived in a way which recognizes the political danger of monopolistic conditions.”

Bigioni continues by emphasizing that “Antitrust laws do not just protect the marketplace, they protect democracy.” It is well to remember that conditions like these led to fascism in both Germany and Italy in the 1930’s, and Bigioni points out that the transformation toward fascism occurred in both countries while they were still liberal democracies. In America, since at least 1971, the rich have gotten much, much richer and the poor have become poorer and far more numerous, largely because our government now sees its primary function as serving the interests of Big Business and its Big Money. As of 2003, according to a Congressional Budget Office report, the top one percent of households in America accounted for 57.5% of America’s wealth, up from 38.7% only twelve years earlier. And this does not take into account the last three years of the Bush tax-cuts. In the U.S. today, there are 374 billionaires, approximately 25,000 deca-millionaires ($10,000,000-$999,000,000) and 2.5 million millionaires; and this does not even take into account the wealth of corporations! Under such conditions, competition is minimized or thwarted, and capital is exalted over labor, the consummation of Marx’s contention that “Capital is dead labor.”

In every industry, huge monopolistic cartels dominate the playing field, following the spate of mergers and acquisitions throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s. To cite just two examples: (1) Four media giants (AOL-Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch’s NewsGroup) control everything we read, view, listen to, see at movie houses, and do at entertainment parks. Just four conglomerates, which have oh so much in common with one another, produce (for profit) every newspaper, magazine, major internet site, movie, cd, dvd, television program, and so on. The pressure to stay within fairly narrow bounds of covering and the fear of losing one’s job should one “think outside the box” is detailed succinctly in Danny Schechter’s March 27, 2006 column the title of which is taken from a line Edward R. Morrow utters in the movie “Good Night and Good Luck”: “The Fear is in the Room: Inside our Unbrave Media World”; Robert Fisk’s March 19 column, “The Farcical End of the American Dream”; and Bill Gallagher’s March 28th column, “There is No ‘Good News’ in Iraq."

To note one other example: if Wal-Mart were a country it would have the 19th largest economy in the world!

Do not be hoodwinked by labels here: there was nothing “socialist” about Hitler’s National Socialist Party, despite his clever employment of terms such as “volk” (the people or the folks), “heimat” (homeland), or the solidarity sounding “ein land” (one country)! Likewise, there is no genuinely human freedom in the free market, despite the intoxicating rhetoric of the neo-liberals. Bigioni quotes Thurman Arnold, the head of the Anti-trust section of the Justice Department in 1939:



And, of course, every cartel needs a strong leader, a commander-in-chief with an iron fist, And Arnold says that Hitler filled that role, but that if it had not been Hitler, it would have been someone else. (Americans today might draw an analogy: if it were not George W. Bush, the first M.B.A. President, who would serve as the front-man for Big Business, it would be someone else.) Bigioni writes, “Compulsory slave labor was the crowning achievement of Nazi labor relations.” By analogy, Employment-at-Will, the outsourcing of manufacturing and even service jobs, and the rejection of a living wage, is the crowning achievement of American labor relations. (See, for example, Harold Meyerson’s article, “Three Ideas to Radically Reorder Economy” (Providence Journal, March 24, 2006) and Princeton University Professor Alan Blinder’s article in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs. The disappearance of union jobs, outsourcing and downsizing has been the crowning achievement of American business relations over the past 30 years or so. The other factors contributing to what Bigioni calls “the fascist trajectory” includes low taxes, various forms of corporate welfare, the decimation of small businesses, and the ability of corporations to discharge obligations to employees, to the environment, and to the country as a whole.

In short, the United States is suffocating from the deleterious effects of Big Money interests in virtually every arena, from public political processes to the privatization of much of what belongs to all of us. Corporate advertising secures the pernicious effects. From time to time, one hears a call for public financing of elections, for truth in advertising, and for more regulation and oversight of lobbying activities, but on the whole, Americans seem glib about the way things are, supposing that this is the only way they can be.

The status quo breeds resignation in the citizenry, and this resignation, too, is in large part an effect of Big Business and its Big Money. It keeps ordinary folks and their common sense away from the political arena, which might otherwise force a change in the way things are done. Big Money does everything it can to sour people on political participation, so that the little guys who just don’t know what’s best for themselves or the country will leave matters of governance to the professional ruling class. To formalize this relatively recent reality, it would seem necessary to reword our Constitution to reflect those entities called “corporations,” which have now been deemed “persons” and whose capital is now regarded as a form of “speech.” (See, for example, Jeffrey Kaplan, “Uncivil Liberties: ACLU Defense of ‘Money=Speech’ Precedent Undermines Democracy.”) The United States has become a country “of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation.”

Public financing of elections and campaign expenditure limits are shouted down as communism or socialism, in a manner very similar to Big Money’s cries of “class warfare” when the population at large objects to additional giveaways to the richest few Americans. Big Money (representing a small, elite class) does everything in its power to prevent the American people from awakening to the fact that what it is seeing really is class warfare: warfare that is being waged from the top down, against the poor and what we used to call the “middle class,” which are now subsidizing Big Money interests that control the political agenda and its legislative processes.

The influence of Big Money on U.S. elections cannot be underestimated. (See, for example, Greg Palast’s “Jim Crow in Cyberspace” in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, the work on election fraud by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, and the recent articles by Warren Stewart “Do You Know How Your Vote Will be Counted?” and Fred Grimm “Election Official Hammered for Telling the Truth”. The problem with the role of money in a supposedly democratic country is not restricted to the many and all-too regular scandals—such as the Abramoff affair or the conviction of Randy “Duke” Cunningham—nor is the problem restricted to the corruption that has ensnared elected officials and exposed lobbyists as little more than bribes makers and bagmen. (See Geov Parrish, “That Old-Fashioned Corruption,” and Katrina vanden Heuvel’s, “Annals of Outrage I, II, and III) It is, rather, that money, as John McCain famously said, “is the mother’s milk of politics” (at least in the U.S. political system.) The need to raise money at every level, from city to state to federal offices, pollutes and perverts the democratic process.

The corruption is bipartisan; at present, the Republican Party enjoys greater favor with the corporate paymasters than does the Democratic Party, but both parties are “on the take”. It does little to assuage one’s concern for democracy that one party gets 55-60% of the paymasters’ money and the other only 40-45%. In a country that prides itself on being democratic, private money peddles its influence across the political spectrum.

To cite one illustrative example, Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen, an energy industry watchdog, reports that Big Oil and Gas doled out $55 million to various campaigns for legislative and executive seats since 2001. And why not, ExxonMobil alone made a profit of $36.1 billion in 2005, the most profit ever recorded by a U.S. corporation in a year, and a rate of return on investment of 46-59%. And what did these donations buy the industry? Among other things, when the executives of the top five oil and gas companies were called before Congress to testify about possible price-gouging and the prospect of a windfall profits tax, the five company representatives were not required to testify under oath!

Big Money and the future of Democracy in America

I suspect that everything I have just recounted is entirely by design: not by the design of our framers, but by the design of Big Money interests. The role of money ensures that only the wealthy and well-connected have any chance of influencing the political process or holding elected office at a significant level. In the 2004 election campaign, 549 people each raised $100,000 for Bush’s re-election, and John Kerry, too, relied on big donors on his side of the political equation. Thus, it was not by sheer coincidence that, in the 2000 presidential campaign, voters were given a choice between a Yale graduate, whose father had been President and whose grandfather was a Senator, and a Harvard graduate, whose father was a Senator. And in the 2004 presidential contest, the choice was even more narrow, between a multi-millionaire Yale “Skull and Bones” man and a billionaire Yale “Skull and Bones” man. Nepotism, like corruption, discourages most good Americans from participating in elections, to say nothing of running for office!

In 1968, I hung a poster on my bedroom wall that read: “Wanna Be President of the United States? First Find $25 Million”! Today, that wouldn’t buy a Senate seat or even a New York City Mayor’s job. I was shocked when John Corzine spent $63 million for a New Jersey Senate seat, but I was aghast when Michael Bloomberg spent $70 million to become the mayor of New York City. Corporations give money to both parties in staggering amounts, and what they do not give directly to their favorites, they spend on advertising to shape the public mind. The result is a net loss both for the public good and for democracy. It costs the corporations only a small fraction in contributions for what they gain through their wheel-greasing. I wonder how much the oil and natural gas lobby paid to secure that $9 billion in windfall profits that they stand to gain from the Bush administration’s plan for “royalty relief”. And that million dollar donation by the UAE to the Bush library in Crawford was surely just a down-payment on the ports deal they hoped to get!

It seems quaint nowadays to reflect back on the corporate culture of the 1960’s. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the following description in his1967 book, The New Industrial State, as quoted by Paul Krugman in his excellent October 20, 2002 New York Times Magazine article, “For Richer”:

“Management does not go out ruthlessly to reward itself---a sound management is expected to exercise restraint. . . With the power of decision goes opportunity for making money . . . Were everyone to seek to do so . . . the corporation would be a chaos of competitive avarice. But these are not the sort of thing that a good company man does; a remarkably effective code bans such behavior. Group decision-making insures, moreover, that almost everyone’s actions and even thoughts are known to others. This acts to enforce the code and, more than incidentally, a high standard of personal honesty as well.”

Does anyone believe that such a self-policing culture exists today? If the corporate scandals of the 1990’s taught us anything, it is that corporations no longer even aim to stay in business, a goal that used to temper their penchant for excess and bridge-burning. The cases of Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, WorldCom, Global Crossing, and many more perpetrators, should have made abundantly clear that there is no limit to corporate excess or insatiable greed, and, in the absence of federal and international regulations, it is usually the stockholders and the public at large who end up underwriting the thefts, cleaning up the pollution, and dealing with the displaced workforce. Most of this is not new. In fact, the seeds of corporate rule over America were sown by the 1971 ”Powell Memorandum.” And we need only think back to the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980’s, to recall another half a trillion dollar boondoggle that taxpayers had to underwrite. There have been plenty of books written about such scandals (see, for example, William S. Greider, Who Will Tell the People?, Arianna Huffingtom, Pigs at the Trough, Jim Hightower, Thieves in High Places, and David K. Johnston, Perfectly Legal, for starters.) Yet despite the recurrent malfeasance, little has been done to curb corporate excesses and outright frauds.

What is more, trans-national corporations need have no allegiance to the United States of America. They have offices in many countries and on many continents, and most of them have already shipped their profits offshore to avoid the patriotic duty of paying their fair share of U.S. taxes.

Remembering President Eisenhower’s Warning

Several commentators have recently reminded us of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s January 17, 1961 farewell address, warning of the threat posed by the “military-industrial complex”. Usually omitted from discussions of President Eisenhower’s warning is the less well-known fact that, until the final version of the speech, Eisenhower used the phrase, “military-industrial-congressional complex”. He is said to have deleted the reference to Congress from his final version to avoid offending legislators. But President Eisenhower regularly referred to “the triangle” and even to “the iron triangle” consisting of the military, the industries that profit from war, and the Congress, which is charged with declaring war, appropriating funding for wars (and everything else the federal government spends money on), and for exercising oversight functions of various kinds. According to University of Washington Emeritus Professor of engineering, public affairs, and social management, Edward Ward Wenk, Jr.:

“These three cornered fellowships coupled hungry defense contractors, ambitious military officers whose promotions rested on husbanding new defense systems, and members of Congress eager to steer new funds and job opportunities to their district.”

Eisenhower might have added “educational institutions” to the list, since universities conducted research for the Manhattan Project and institutions, such as UC Berkeley, which managed the Los Alamos laboratory (which produced the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) from its inception until last year, when the University put Los Alamos on the auction block and Bechtel secured the management contract. President Eisenhower’s speechwriter—whom Professor Wenk revealed to be Malcolm Moos—recalled that Eisenhower feared a “pathological influence of the military-industrial coalition beyond a healthy arm’s-length relationship, especially if the national psyche was prodded artificially by fear. A future chief executive might exploit political energies of the coalition to further a narrow and dangerous agenda” (Italics mine).

Professor Wenk, who served in the administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and who was the first incumbent in the post of science advisor to Congress during the Eisenhower administration, draws this conclusion in his March 17 article, “Ike’s Warning Reverberates Today” by saying: “I see coalitions increasingly entrenched. Failed weapons systems are seldom canceled. Auditing is cursory for moving and feeding troops; malperformance is accepted in the fog of war, and penalties for fraud uncollected. . .” “Influence of coalitions also has grown with the cost of political campaigns. Members spend half their time raising funds, rather than forging policy. . . In the absence of strong vigilance, their concern about a corporate state hatched by stealth might yet happen.”

Indeed, it may have already taken place.

It appears glaringly obvious these days that Congress has failed miserably in its oversight, appropriation, and war-declaration functions. This lack of oversight is apparent not only with respect to the Administration’s reckless adventure in Iraq, but also with regard to the passage of the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the muted response against policies condoning torture, the suspension of Habeas Corpus, the practice of “extraordinary rendition”, the warrantless wiretapping on American citizens, and the insuring of free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. What we have now is a military-industrial-Congressional complex indeed!

I nonetheless believe that most public officials begin their careers with a desire to serve the people and to make America better. I do not believe that members of Congress, or members of state legislatures, for that matter, run for office merely to enrich themselves. No, I think that most of them begin their political careers as genuine and sincere people. But the systemic role of money, as I have said, pollutes and perverts processes and people. It is a bit like boiling a frog. If you drop the frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out of the kettle; but if you drop the frog in lukewarm water and slowly increase the temperature, the frog will neither jump out of the kettle nor croak anymore.

And that is just what happens to far too many of our public servants and to the citizenry as a whole. It is ironic that Big Business tries to insure that government stays on the sidelines and pursues laissez faire policies, until Big Business needs the government (usually aided by the U.S. military) to make some country or region “safe” for its business interests. From making Cuba safe for the United Fruit Company, to securing access to Persian Gulf oil and South Asian gas, Big Business is always ready to have the government protecting its interests. One notes again and again, however, that such security is paid for by taxpayers, while the profits go straight into the corporate coffers. But beware, Big Business; for as Bigioni warns: “Just as monopoly is the ruin of the free market, fascism is the ultimate degradation of liberal capitalism.”



http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0412-32.htm

Dr. Gary Alan Scott is an associate professor of philosophy at Loyola College in Maryland and he is currently the Director of Loyola’s International Study Abroad Program in Leuven, Belgium. Email to: garyalanscott@yahoo.com

Published on Thursday, April 13, 2006 by Salon.com

The Slow-Motion Trap

His presidency was built on secrecy and, we now know, on lies. The more Bush struggles to free himself, the more his past deceptions bind him.


by Sidney Blumenthal


President Bush has been in search of himself for two and a half years. His voyage of self-discovery began on Sept. 30, 2003. Asked what he knew about senior White House officials anonymously leaking the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, he expressed his earnest desire to help special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald ferret out the perpetrators. "I want to know the truth," he said. "If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business."

Bush didn't stop there. He issued an all-points bulletin requesting help for the prosecutor. "And if people have got solid information, please come forward with it. And that would be people inside the information who are the so-called anonymous sources, or people outside the information -- outside the administration. And we can clarify this thing very quickly if people who have got solid evidence would come forward and speak out. And I would hope they would." The day before, the president had sent out his press secretary, Scott McClellan, to announce that involvement in this incident would be a firing offense: "If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration."

Last week, however, in a filing in his perjury and obstruction of justice case against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Fitzgerald revealed that Libby had been authorized by the president and vice president to leak parts of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to reporters.

The White House's initial response was for an anonymous "senior administration official" to leak to the New York Times that Bush had played "only a peripheral role in the release of the classified material and was uninformed about the specifics," as the Times reported. The White House source, trying to remove the president from the glare, fingered Cheney as the instigator.

On Monday, Bush appeared at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, where a graduate student asked him about his role in the leak of classified information. The president, who had once perplexedly said, "I want to know the truth," replied, "I wanted people to see the truth and thought it made sense for people to see the truth." Was blind but now he sees? Grace (or Patrick Fitzgerald) had led him home.

Bush acted in the beginning as an innocent injured party. He pretended to be utterly baffled by events. His feigned unawareness was intended to deflect attention from himself. His call to find those responsible was to ensure that the facts would never be known. When he was exposed, he donned a new guise. Instead of the seeker of truth, he became the truth teller.

But the classified information he authorized to be selectively leaked -- that Saddam Hussein was seeking to purchase yellowcake uranium in Niger for use in nuclear weapons -- was not the truth, and its release was intended to buttress a falsehood. Indeed, last week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told journalist Robert Scheer that the notorious 16 words in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address concerning Iraq's supposed efforts to buy uranium -- the claim that former ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger to investigate -- were bogus. "That was a big mistake," Powell said. "It should never have been in the speech. I didn't need Wilson to tell me that there wasn't a Niger connection. He didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. I never believed it." Thus, three years after the event, Powell finally admitted publicly that the president spoke falsely about the reason for war, that there were interested parties inside the administration determined to put false words in his mouth, and that the secretary of state, knowing this, lacked the power to stop it.

Bush as the man of truth offered a convoluted explanation of the declassification process. He retreated into technical legalisms that as the man of action he had disdained. "You're not supposed to talk about classified information, and so I declassified the document," he said at Johns Hopkins. "I thought it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches."

Once again, he offered a misleading statement. The completely irregular process of Bush's declassification, so unprecedented that Scooter Libby was unsure it was legal, was a badge of guilt. The declassification reflected a vengeful impulse against a critic and was an inadvertent confession of the fragility and tenuousness of Bush's case for war.

Fitzgerald's filing of April 5, the cue for Bush's latest theater of the absurd, provides previously lacking details of the narrative. Through Fitzgerald's further filings before the January 2007 trial of Scooter Libby, other crucial facts may yet emerge. In his prosecution of Libby, Fitzgerald is establishing indisputable facts about the history of the Bush presidency and its methods of operation.

Fitzgerald writes that the Office of the Vice President viewed Wilson's revelation of his mission to Niger and what he didn't find there "as a direct attack on the credibility of the vice president (and the president) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq." So, Fitzgerald continues, the White House undertook "a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against" Wilson that included as one of its elements outing the covert identity of his wife. The "concerted action" against Wilson was centrally organized and directed. The prosecutor writes that he has gathered "evidence that multiple officials in the White House discussed her employment with reporters prior to (and after) July 14 [2003]" -- the date her activities tracking weapons of mass destruction for the CIA were compromised by being publicized by conservative columnist Robert Novak. (Full disclosure: Joseph Wilson and I became friends when we worked together in the Clinton administration.)

While one part of the "concerted action" was to attempt to damage Wilson by attacking him through his wife, another was to manipulate the press to undermine Wilson's credibility. Cheney ordered Libby to act as the leaker. The plan, according to Libby's testimony, was to "disclose certain information in the NIE" to New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Libby and Miller had worked this way before when she had published a series of stories asserting that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD based on leaks she received and that were in circular fashion cited by the administration as authoritative reports by the "newspaper of record." Libby testified that he was directed to leak to her that the NIE "held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

In the setup for the leak, Fitzgerald writes, Cheney "advised defendant that the President specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE" and that that approval was a secret. Libby was a team player, but he was also anxious about a declassification that was "unique in his experience."

The formal rules for declassification were amended by Bush's Executive Order 13292 of March 25, 2003, on "Classified National Security Information." Under any circumstances the president has the authority, as he always has, to unilaterally declassify official secrets and intelligence "in the public interest." But a decision to declassify a document normally passes through the originating agency and then through the Office of the National Security Advisor. Then the document is stamped declassified and the declassified order is appended to the document.

None of these procedures was followed in this case, which is why Libby's antenna was gyrating. He sought the advice of Cheney's counsel, David Addington, Libby's close ally. In approaching Addington, Libby must have known what he would hear. Addington is the foremost legal advocate in the White House of the idea that the president should be unbound, unchecked, unfettered in his authority, whether in the torture of detainees, domestic surveillance or any other matter. Unsurprisingly, Addington "opined that presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document."

Only four people -- Bush, Cheney, Libby and Addington -- were privy to the declassification. It was kept secret from the director of central intelligence, the secretary of state and the national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, among others. Indeed, Hadley was arguing at the time for declassification of the NIE but was deliberately kept in the dark that it was no longer classified. Fitzgerald writes about Libby: "Defendant fails to mention ... that he consciously decided not to make Mr. Hadley aware of the fact that defendant himself had already been disseminating the NIE by leaking it to reporters while Mr. Hadley sought to get it formally declassified." Having Hadley play the fool became part of the game.

On July 8, Libby met with Miller. In a dance of mutual deception, Libby misrepresented the contents of the NIE, which Miller apparently accepted at face value, as she had accepted such leaks in the past. With an air of mystery, telling Miller she should identify him in her story as "a former Hill staffer," Libby vouched for a document some of whose information he knew to be false, failing to note that the NIE notably did not prove that Saddam was seeking uranium in Niger; on the contrary, the NIE contained a caveat from the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau saying that the rumors "do not, however, add up to a compelling case." For her part, Miller thought she was receiving classified, not declassified, material, as she wrote later in her post-prison account in the Times.

Ten days after their meeting, which did not result in a story, the already declassified NIE was formally declassified as though it had never been declassified. The date of its declassification in the official government record, in fact, reads July 18, 2003, not the date that Bush declassified it for the purpose of Libby's leaking.

After the launch of the federal investigation, Libby became frantic. He knew that he had leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's identity and that others had, too, and he wanted to be protected. Fitzgerald writes that "while the President was unaware of the role that the Vice President's Chief of Staff and National Security Adviser had in fact played in disclosing Ms. Wilson's CIA employment, defendant implored White House officials to have a public statement issued exonerating him." But there was no forthcoming statement. Libby implored Cheney "in having his name cleared." But Cheney did nothing for his henchman. In a White House that demands impeccable loyalty, loyalty was not being returned.

Libby not only knew that Hadley had leaked Plame's identity; he also knew that Karl Rove, the president's principal political advisor, had leaked her name to Novak. Libby linked himself to Rove in his desperate coverup. He gave press secretary Scott McClellan a handwritten note, almost in the form of a haiku. It read:

People have made too much of the difference in
How I described Karl and Libby
I've talked to Libby.
I said it was ridiculous about Karl
And it is ridiculous about Libby.
Libby was not the source of the Novak story.
And he did not leak classified information.

On Oct. 4, 2003, McClellan informed the White House press corps that Rove and Libby (and National Security Council staff member Elliott Abrams) were innocent of the charges of leaking Plame's name -- "those individuals assured me that they were not involved in this."

Then Libby appeared before the grand jury, where he several times claimed under oath that he learned about Plame's identity from reporters. On Oct. 28, 2005, he was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Fitzgerald's filing demolishes Libby's projected defense as a busy man with so many important matters of state on his mind that he just can't remember exactly who told him what about Plame. Here, in his own words, Libby recalls precisely his anxiety about the "unique" declassification and the others who leaked Plame's name. Libby may now wonder why he should play the fall guy, unless the scenario is to hope for a presidential pardon on the morning of Jan. 20, 2009, the day Bush leaves office.

President Bush, having previously play-acted as unknowing, is now engaged in the make-believe that he is helping people "see the truth." Yet the White House refuses to declassify the one-page summary of the NIE used to brief Bush. Presumably, it contains the caveats from various intelligence sources on Saddam's WMD, showing that the case remained unproved and shaky when Bush presented it as conclusive.

The White House also refuses to release the transcripts of Bush's and Cheney's testimony before the prosecutor. As witnesses they are not bound by any rule of secrecy and are free to discuss their testimony publicly. During the Watergate investigation, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that President Nixon had to turn over his secret audiotapes to the prosecutor. Fitzgerald obviously already has the White House transcripts. Only the public is uninformed of their contents. Why won't the White House release them now? Indeed, there is a precedent. On June 24, 2000, then Vice President Al Gore made public his testimony to the Justice Department investigation into campaign finance. (While Bush and Cheney insisted on giving testimony without being sworn under oath, they remain legally liable. Under Title 18, Section 1001 of the U.S. Code, anyone who testifies falsely in a federal inquiry may be fined and sentenced to five years in prison.)

Bush is entangled in his own past. His explanations compound his troubles and point to the original falsehoods. Through his first term, Bush was able to escape by blaming the Democrats, casting aspersions on the motives of his critics and changing the subject. But his methods have become self-defeating. When he utters the word "truth" now most of the public is mistrustful. His accumulated history overshadows what he might say.

The collapse of trust was cemented into his presidency from the start. A compulsion for secrecy undergirds the Bush White House. Power, as Bush and Cheney see it, thrives by excluding diverse points of view. Bush's presidency operates on the notion that the fewer the questions, the better the decision. The State Department has been treated like a foreign country; the closest associates of the elder President Bush, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, have been excluded; the career professional staff have been bullied and quashed; the Republican-dominated Congress has abdicated oversight; and influential elements of the press have been complicit.

Inside the administration, the breakdown of the national security process has produced a vacuum filled by dogmatic fixations that become more rigid as reality increasingly fails to cooperate. But the conceit that executive fiat can substitute for fact has not sustained the illusion of omnipotence.

The precipitating event of the investigation of the Bush White House -- Wilson's disclosure about his Niger mission -- was an effort by a lifelong Foreign Service officer to set the record straight and force a debate on the reasons for going to war. Wilson stood for the public discussion that had been suppressed. The Bush White House's "concerted action" against him therefore involved an attempt to poison the wellsprings of democracy.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0413-29.htm

George W. Bush IS a Liar

By Robert Parry
April 14, 2006


The White House is taking umbrage over new press reports that George W. Bush misled the American people on a key justification for invading Iraq. But Bush’s latest excuse – that he was just an unwitting conveyor of bad information, not a willful purveyor of lies – has been stretched thin by overuse.

Nevertheless, White House spokesman Scott McClellan lashed out at a Washington Post report that in May 2003, Bush described two Iraqi trailers as mobile biological weapons labs although two days earlier a Pentagon field investigation had debunked those suspicions in a report to Washington.

“The lead in the Washington Post left the impression for the reader that the President was saying something he knew at the time not to be true,” McClellan said on April 12, 2006. “That is absolutely false and it is irresponsible, and I don’t know how the Washington Post can defend something so irresponsible.”

But the truth is that Bush has been caught, again and again, relying on lies and distortions to confuse the American people about the Iraq War. Sometimes, he can blame U.S. intelligence agencies for the false information, but other times, he simply lies about facts that he personally knows.

For instance, just weeks after Bush made his false statement about the bio-labs, he also began rewriting the history of the Iraq War to make his invasion seem more reasonable.

On July 14, 2003, Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had barred United Nations weapons inspectors from Iraq when, in fact, they were admitted in November 2002 and given free rein to search suspected Iraqi weapons sites. It was Bush who forced the U.N. inspectors to leave in March 2003 so the invasion could proceed.

But faced with growing questions about his justifications for war in summer 2003, Bush revised this history, apparently trusting in the weak memories of the American people and the timidity of the U.S. press. At the end of an Oval Office meeting with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Bush told reporters:

“We gave him (Saddam Hussein) a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.”

In the following months and years, Bush repeated this claim in slightly varied forms as part of his litany for defending the invasion on the grounds that it was Hussein who “chose war,” not Bush.

Meeting no protest from the Washington press corps, Bush continued repeating his lie about Hussein showing “defiance” on the inspections. Bush uttered the lie as recently as March 21, 2006, when he answered a question from veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas.

“I was hoping to solve this (Iraq) problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “The world said, ‘Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.’ … We worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny the inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did. And the world is safer for it.”

The significance of this lie about the inspectors – when judging Bush’s proclivity to lie – rests on the fact that he can’t simply blame his advisers when cornered. Bush was fully aware of the U.N. inspectors and what happened to them.

'Downing Street Memo'

Indeed, documentary evidence shows that Bush was determined to invade Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 regardless of what U.S. intelligence could prove or what the Iraqis did.

For instance, the so-called “Downing Street Memo” recounted a secret meeting on July 23, 2002, involving British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top national security aides. At that meeting, Richard Dearlove, chief of the British intelligence agency MI6, described his discussions about Iraq with Bush’s top advisers in Washington.

Dearlove said, “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

At an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 31, 2003, Bush and Blair discussed their determination to invade Iraq, though Bush still hoped that he might provoke the Iraqis into some violent act that would serve as political cover, according to minutes written by Blair’s top foreign policy aide David Manning.

So, while Bush was telling the American people that he considered war with Iraq “a last resort,” he actually had decided to invade regardless of Iraq’s cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors, according to the five-page memo of the Oval Office meeting reviewed by the New York Times.

The memo also reveals Bush conniving to deceive the American people and the world community by trying to engineer a provocation that would portray Hussein as the aggressor. Bush suggested painting a U.S. plane up in U.N. colors and flying it over Iraq with the goal of drawing Iraqi fire, the meeting minutes said.

“The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours,” the memo said about Bush’s scheme. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Time to Talk War Crimes.”]

Regardless of whether any casus belli could be provoked, Bush already had “penciled in” March 10, 2003, as the start of the U.S. bombing of Iraq, according to the memo. “Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,” Manning wrote.

According to the British memo, Bush and Blair acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, nor were they likely to be found in the coming weeks, but that wouldn’t get in the way of the U.S.-led invasion. [NYT, March 27, 2006]

Ousting the Inspectors

So, Bush clearly knew that Hussein had permitted the inspectors into Iraq to search suspected weapons sites. Bush also knew that he was the one who forced the inspectors to leave so the invasion could proceed in March 2003.

“Although the inspection organization was now operating at full strength and Iraq seemed determined to give it prompt access everywhere, the United States appeared as determined to replace our inspection force with an invasion army,” the UN’s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, wrote in his memoir, Disarming Iraq.

In other words, neither the U.N. inspectors’ negative WMD findings nor the Security Council’s refusal to authorize force would stop Bush’s invasion on March 19, 2003. [For more on Bush's pretexts for war in Iraq, see Consortiumnews.com’s “President Bush, With the Candlestick…”]

By late May 2003, however, the failure of Bush's own inspectors to find any WMD, compounded by the stirrings of a bloody Iraqi insurgency, left Bush and his advisers scrambling to refurbish old justifications for the war and to cobble together some new ones.

The two trailers came in handy, even though the evidence was always clear that the equipment was to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, not biological agents.

Like other WMD evidence, however, the case of the trailers was stretched to serve Bush’s political needs. Despite the field report debunking the bio-war claims – sent to Washington on May 27, 2003 – the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a misleading “white paper” on the alleged bio-labs on May 28.

Bush began citing the trailers as the conclusive WMD proof on May 29, 2003. “Those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons are wrong,” Bush declared, referring to the mobile labs. “We found them.”

By June 1, 2003, after simply reading the “white paper,” I was able to post an analysis showing how shoddy and flimsy the CIA/DIA claims were. At the time, I was not aware of the field report, which had been stamped secret and shelved. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “America’s Matrix, Revisited.”]

The Plame Case

But even worse challenges to Bush’s credibility lay ahead. In June 2003, a former U.S. ambassador, Joseph Wilson, was briefing a few reporters about what he considered the administration’s twisting of intelligence on Iraq’s supposed pursuit of enriched uranium from Niger.

Bush had included the bogus Niger claim in his State of the Union Address in January 2003. But Wilson’s first-hand account of his assignment in 2002 to check out the Niger suspicions – and his conclusion that the evidence was weak – represented the first major assault on Bush’s pre-war intelligence from a mainstream government figure.

The White House struck back, organizing anti-Wilson leaks to friendly reporters. Privately, Bush declassified information that tended to bolster his Niger claim – even though by then its truthfulness had been discredited by U.S. intelligence agencies.

With President Bush’s clearance, Vice President Dick Cheney dispatched his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, to leak information to Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward on June 27, 2003. Libby approached New York Times correspondent Judith Miller on July 8 and Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper on July 12.

On July 14, 2003, the behind-the-scenes attack on Wilson surfaced in a column by conservative writer Robert Novak, who divulged that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA officer who had a hand in arranging Wilson’s trip to Africa, implying that Wilson’s investigative work in Niger had resulted from nepotism.

In a court filing nearly three years later, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald described the anti-Wilson campaign as a “concerted” effort by the White House to “discredit, punish or seek revenge against” a troublesome critic.

Ironically, the same day of Novak’s column, Bush introduced a new rationale for the war – his revisionist history that he was forced to invade because Saddam Hussein had refused to let the U.N. inspectors in. The White House apparently saw little danger in deceiving the Washington press corps about Iraq War intelligence, no matter how blatantly.

When the Plame affair exploded as a scandal in September 2003 – after the CIA complained that her exposure violated a law designed to protect the identity of intelligence agents – Bush escalated the deceptions.

Bush knew that he had authorized the declassification of some secrets on the Niger uranium from a National Intelligence Estimate and that those secrets were given to reporters to undercut Wilson. But Bush acted like he was clueless when the investigation began into how Wilson’s wife was exposed.

If Bush had wanted to be honest, he would have disclosed immediately that he had approved a plan to release information to reporters in order to discredit Wilson’s claims. Bush might have explained that he never intended that Plame’s identity be divulged, but he nevertheless had information that would help investigators solve the mystery.

Instead, Bush went out of his way to play dumb, while telling the American people that he wanted to get to the bottom of the story.

“If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,” Bush said on Sept. 30, 2003. “I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business.”

Perhaps, having gotten away with even more brazen lies – like claiming the U.N. inspectors were kept out of Iraq – Bush may have judged that he could pretty much tell the American people whatever came into his head.

Wiretap Lie

Sometimes, Bush lied even without a clear reason. For instance, during a campaign stop in Buffalo, N.Y., on April 20, 2004, Bush went out of his way to mislead his listeners on the question of whether he always got warrants when he conducted wiretaps.

“By the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order,” Bush said. “Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.”

Two years earlier, however, Bush had approved letting the National Security Agency use warrantless wiretaps to intercept international calls and other communications made by some Americans.

When Bush’s wiretap lie was exposed in December 2005, the White House insisted that Bush had not lied, that his comments related only to roving wiretaps under the USA Patriot Act, an excuse that Bush adopted as his own on New Year’s Day 2006.

“I was talking about roving wiretaps, I believe, involved in the Patriot Act. This is different from the N.S.A. program,” he said.

However, the context of Bush’s 2004 statement was clear. He broke away from a discussion of the USA Patriot Act to note “by the way” that “any time” a wiretap is needed a court order must be obtained. He was not confining his remarks to “roving wiretaps” under the Patriot Act. [For Bush’s 2004 speech, click here.]

Despite this history of Bush’s deceptions, White House spokesman McClellan still flies into a rage whenever news organizations note that Bush has said something that turned out not to be true.

After the Washington Post’s disclosure about Bush’s bogus bio-war claims, McClellan called the article unfair and noted that Bush made his comments in response to a question, not in a formal speech.

“I saw some reporting saying he had gone out and given a speech about it, and that’s not true,” McClellan said. “I saw some reporting talking about how this latest revelation … was an embarrassment for the White House. No, it’s an embarrassment for the media that is out there reporting this.”

McClellan said the White House also demanded and got an apology from ABC News for suggesting that Bush touted the supposed bio-lab findings while knowing that the CIA/DIA “white paper” was bogus.

“I talked to one network about it and they have … expressed their apologies to the White House,” McClellan said. “I hope they will go and publicly apologize on the air about the statements that were made, because I think it’s important, given that they had made those statements in front of all their viewers.”

Right-wing bloggers also rallied to Bush’s defense.

Yet, while it may be impossible to know exactly what’s in a person’s head when something false is stated – whether the person thinks it’s true or knows it’s false – Bush’s record of deception shouldn’t earn him much benefit of the doubt from the American people.

When apologies start for misleading the public on matters of war and peace over the past several years, George W. Bush should be standing near the front of the line.


http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/041306.html

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_697.shtml

For Jim......part of our American landscape







Neil Young sets his sights on Bush

He is country rock's biggest icon, and he is angry. Recorded in secret, his forthcoming album savages the war in Iraq. One track says it all: 'Impeach the President'

By Andrew Buncombe

Published: 17 April 2006


It started as a rumour - gossip shared by fans on internet chat sites. Could it true, they asked? Could Neil Young, a cultural lodestone for a generation of country rock fans, really be turning his attention to President George Bush and the war in Iraq? Now Young himself has confirmed it. Not only has he recorded an entire album about the conflict, but in one of the songs he spells out who he thinks is to blame for the ongoing chaos and violence and what the consequences for that person should be. That track is called "Impeach the President".

"I just finished a new record - a power trio with trumpet and 100 voices," the 60-year-old says in a ticker-tape message posted at the bottom of his official website. "Metal folk protest? It's called Living with the War."

Further details about the album came from Jonathan Demme, the film maker who produced the recently released documentary Heart of Gold about the singer-songwriter. "Neil just finished writing and recording - with no warning - a new album called Living With War," he told the music magazine Harp by e-mail. "It all happened in three days ... It is a brilliant electric assault, accompanied by a 100-voice choir, on Bush and the war in Iraq ... Truly mind blowing. Will be in stores soon."

Those who have followed Young's twisting career, stretching over more than four decades - from the psychedelia-tinged rock of the folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield in the Sixties, his joining up with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, his huge solo success in 1972 with Harvest, as well as the experimentation of the Eighties and finally his return to country rock - may be a little surprised by Young's decision to launch such a blunt political assault against the Bush administration.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the al-Qa'ida attacks on the US of 11 September 2001, it seemed that Young had taken the side with the President and supported the steps he was taking in the so-called "war on terror". Having written a song, "Let's Roll", to honour the passengers on board United Airlines' Flight 93 who apparently fought with the hijackers and forced the plane to crash-land in rural Pennsylvania rather than letting them use it to target the White House, he announced his support for the Patriot Act. The Act, which gave law-enforcement bodies a whole range of new powers, was condemned by many campaigners as an assault on civil liberties. Young said at the time he thought the legislation was necessary.

Speaking at an awards banquet in Hollywood where he had received the Spirit of Liberty award by the liberal campaign group People for the American Way, Young announced: "To protect our freedoms it seems we're going to have to relinquish some of our freedoms for a short period of time." But now it appears that for whatever reason, the Canadian-born singer's support for President Bush has run it's course and that his latest incarnation is as a protest singer. He has joined list of musicians such as the Dixie Chicks, Lou Reed, Dave Matthews, Steve Earle and REM who have used their platforms to speak out against the war or the administration in general. His song urging that Mr Bush be impeached reportedly accuses him of "lying" and features a rap with the President's voice set against the choir singing "flip-flop" - an accusation Mr Bush and other Republicans aimed at John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, during the 2004 election campaign.

Meanwhile the lyrics to the new album's title track include the words: "I'm living with war right now, And when the dawn breaks I see my fellow man, And on the flat screen we kill and we're being killed again, And when the night falls I pray for peace, Try to remember peace."

Whilst details of the 10-song recording are still incomplete - it is known that he is accompanied by Chad Cromwell on drums, Rick Rosas on bass and Tommy Bray on trumpet - a further insight into what to expect has come from the California-based musician Alicia Morgan, who was recruited to be part of the 100-strong choir. In an entry on her blog on Friday she wrote: "Have you, like me, been recalling the great protest songs of the Sixties, and wondered where the new protest songs are? Yesterday, I found out." She said she and the other singers read off the lyrics as they flashed onto a giant screen, with cheers of approval coming up from the choir. With the main tracks having been previously recorded, Young himself directed the backing singers. "Turns out the whole thing is a classic beautiful protest record. The session was like being at a 12-hour peace rally," she said.

"Every time new lyrics would come up on the screen, there were cheers, tears and applause. It was a spiritual experience ... We finished the session by singing an a cappella version of "America the Beautiful" and there was not a dry eye in the house." She added: "I've never been at a recording session that was more like being at church. Heck, I've never been to a church that was more like a church than that session." Speaking from Sherman Oaks, California, yesterday Morgan told The Independent that many people liked Neil Young because he "pisses everybody off".

She said: "I have always enjoyed his music and respected him. People have told me he used to be a Reagan supporter but I don't think he is bound by any ideology other than his own. He writes and sings about whatever is going on in his life. Sometimes it's political - sometimes it's not."

Asked if she thought Young had enjoyed the 12-hour session, at which they completed the 10 tracks, she added: "Very much so." Young, who has served on the board of Farm Aid, fellow singer Willie Nelson's project to help rural Americans, for more than 20 years, is not the first person to have suggested the impeachment of Mr Bush. With his approval ratings in the low 30s, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold has sought to have Congress pass a motion to censure the President, though the effort has received only limited support from Mr Feingold's Democratic colleagues.

Meanwhile Mr Bush can apparently do nothing to shift his ratings, the worst for a president in second term since the days of Richard Nixon, for whom, incidentally, Young also wrote a song. Young, who has said he has previously voted for the Republicans, was apparently inspired to write the words for the song "Campaigner" - originally called "Requiem for a President" - after watching television news about Nixon's wife suffering a stroke and seeing the broken president arrive at the hospital. In the song he wrote: "I am a lonely visitor, I came too late to cause a stir, Though I campaigned all my life towards that goal."

Songs of shame

By Geneviève Roberts

* ROLLING STONES

Despite being famously apolitical, the band launched an attack on George Bush in their latest album, A Bigger Bang. The track "Sweet Neo Con" contains the lyrics: "You call yourself a Christian, I call you a hypocrite/You call yourself a patriot, Well I think you're full of "expletive deleted"."

Despite Jagger saying: "It's not aimed personally at President Bush. It wouldn't be called 'Sweet Neo Con' if it was," Stones fans were not convinced, especially as Jagger had previously said of the tune: "It is direct. Keith said: 'It is not really metaphorical. I think he's a bit worried because he lives in the US. But I don't."

* EMINEM

In 2004, rap artist Eminem urged fans to vote against George Bush in the US election by issuing a music video specifically to criticise the Iraq war. The lyrics for "Mosh": "Let the President answer on high anarchy, strap him with an AK-47, let him go fight his own war," accompanied a video depicting a US soldier arriving home from Baghdad, to be told he must return.

* DIXIE CHICKS

"Not Ready to Make Nice", to be released in the US in May, is an attack on people who sent the Texan band death threats after they criticised Mr Bush. Singer Nathalie Maines, performing in London on the eve of the Iraq war, said: "Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." Many US radio stations dropped the band and their CDs were smashed.

* GEORGE MICHAEL

In 2002, he released the single "Shoot the Dog", which featured a cartoon video of Tony Blair and Mr Bush's poodle on the White House lawn. The backlash was so forceful - the New York Post called him a "past-his-prime pop pervert" - that Michael feared he would not be able to return to the US.

It started as a rumour - gossip shared by fans on internet chat sites. Could it true, they asked? Could Neil Young, a cultural lodestone for a generation of country rock fans, really be turning his attention to President George Bush and the war in Iraq? Now Young himself has confirmed it. Not only has he recorded an entire album about the conflict, but in one of the songs he spells out who he thinks is to blame for the ongoing chaos and violence and what the consequences for that person should be. That track is called "Impeach the President".

"I just finished a new record - a power trio with trumpet and 100 voices," the 60-year-old says in a ticker-tape message posted at the bottom of his official website. "Metal folk protest? It's called Living with the War."

Further details about the album came from Jonathan Demme, the film maker who produced the recently released documentary Heart of Gold about the singer-songwriter. "Neil just finished writing and recording - with no warning - a new album called Living With War," he told the music magazine Harp by e-mail. "It all happened in three days ... It is a brilliant electric assault, accompanied by a 100-voice choir, on Bush and the war in Iraq ... Truly mind blowing. Will be in stores soon."

Those who have followed Young's twisting career, stretching over more than four decades - from the psychedelia-tinged rock of the folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield in the Sixties, his joining up with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, his huge solo success in 1972 with Harvest, as well as the experimentation of the Eighties and finally his return to country rock - may be a little surprised by Young's decision to launch such a blunt political assault against the Bush administration.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the al-Qa'ida attacks on the US of 11 September 2001, it seemed that Young had taken the side with the President and supported the steps he was taking in the so-called "war on terror". Having written a song, "Let's Roll", to honour the passengers on board United Airlines' Flight 93 who apparently fought with the hijackers and forced the plane to crash-land in rural Pennsylvania rather than letting them use it to target the White House, he announced his support for the Patriot Act. The Act, which gave law-enforcement bodies a whole range of new powers, was condemned by many campaigners as an assault on civil liberties. Young said at the time he thought the legislation was necessary.

Speaking at an awards banquet in Hollywood where he had received the Spirit of Liberty award by the liberal campaign group People for the American Way, Young announced: "To protect our freedoms it seems we're going to have to relinquish some of our freedoms for a short period of time." But now it appears that for whatever reason, the Canadian-born singer's support for President Bush has run it's course and that his latest incarnation is as a protest singer. He has joined list of musicians such as the Dixie Chicks, Lou Reed, Dave Matthews, Steve Earle and REM who have used their platforms to speak out against the war or the administration in general. His song urging that Mr Bush be impeached reportedly accuses him of "lying" and features a rap with the President's voice set against the choir singing "flip-flop" - an accusation Mr Bush and other Republicans aimed at John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, during the 2004 election campaign.

Meanwhile the lyrics to the new album's title track include the words: "I'm living with war right now, And when the dawn breaks I see my fellow man, And on the flat screen we kill and we're being killed again, And when the night falls I pray for peace, Try to remember peace."

Whilst details of the 10-song recording are still incomplete - it is known that he is accompanied by Chad Cromwell on drums, Rick Rosas on bass and Tommy Bray on trumpet - a further insight into what to expect has come from the California-based musician Alicia Morgan, who was recruited to be part of the 100-strong choir. In an entry on her blog on Friday she wrote: "Have you, like me, been recalling the great protest songs of the Sixties, and wondered where the new protest songs are? Yesterday, I found out." She said she and the other singers read off the lyrics as they flashed onto a giant screen, with cheers of approval coming up from the choir. With the main tracks having been previously recorded, Young himself directed the backing singers. "Turns out the whole thing is a classic beautiful protest record. The session was like being at a 12-hour peace rally," she said.
"Every time new lyrics would come up on the screen, there were cheers, tears and applause. It was a spiritual experience ... We finished the session by singing an a cappella version of "America the Beautiful" and there was not a dry eye in the house." She added: "I've never been at a recording session that was more like being at church. Heck, I've never been to a church that was more like a church than that session." Speaking from Sherman Oaks, California, yesterday Morgan told The Independent that many people liked Neil Young because he "pisses everybody off".

She said: "I have always enjoyed his music and respected him. People have told me he used to be a Reagan supporter but I don't think he is bound by any ideology other than his own. He writes and sings about whatever is going on in his life. Sometimes it's political - sometimes it's not."

Asked if she thought Young had enjoyed the 12-hour session, at which they completed the 10 tracks, she added: "Very much so." Young, who has served on the board of Farm Aid, fellow singer Willie Nelson's project to help rural Americans, for more than 20 years, is not the first person to have suggested the impeachment of Mr Bush. With his approval ratings in the low 30s, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold has sought to have Congress pass a motion to censure the President, though the effort has received only limited support from Mr Feingold's Democratic colleagues.

Meanwhile Mr Bush can apparently do nothing to shift his ratings, the worst for a president in second term since the days of Richard Nixon, for whom, incidentally, Young also wrote a song. Young, who has said he has previously voted for the Republicans, was apparently inspired to write the words for the song "Campaigner" - originally called "Requiem for a President" - after watching television news about Nixon's wife suffering a stroke and seeing the broken president arrive at the hospital. In the song he wrote: "I am a lonely visitor, I came too late to cause a stir, Though I campaigned all my life towards that goal."

Songs of shame

By Geneviève Roberts

* ROLLING STONES

Despite being famously apolitical, the band launched an attack on George Bush in their latest album, A Bigger Bang. The track "Sweet Neo Con" contains the lyrics: "You call yourself a Christian, I call you a hypocrite/You call yourself a patriot, Well I think you're full of "expletive deleted"."

Despite Jagger saying: "It's not aimed personally at President Bush. It wouldn't be called 'Sweet Neo Con' if it was," Stones fans were not convinced, especially as Jagger had previously said of the tune: "It is direct. Keith said: 'It is not really metaphorical. I think he's a bit worried because he lives in the US. But I don't."

* EMINEM

In 2004, rap artist Eminem urged fans to vote against George Bush in the US election by issuing a music video specifically to criticise the Iraq war. The lyrics for "Mosh": "Let the President answer on high anarchy, strap him with an AK-47, let him go fight his own war," accompanied a video depicting a US soldier arriving home from Baghdad, to be told he must return.

* DIXIE CHICKS

"Not Ready to Make Nice", to be released in the US in May, is an attack on people who sent the Texan band death threats after they criticised Mr Bush. Singer Nathalie Maines, performing in London on the eve of the Iraq war, said: "Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." Many US radio stations dropped the band and their CDs were smashed.

* GEORGE MICHAEL

In 2002, he released the single "Shoot the Dog", which featured a cartoon video of Tony Blair and Mr Bush's poodle on the White House lawn. The backlash was so forceful - the New York Post called him a "past-his-prime pop pervert" - that Michael feared he would not be able to return to the US.

Published on Tuesday, April 18, 2006 by The Australian

Lock Him Away to Stop the Next War

by Phillip Adams


We cannot wait any longer for the impeachment of George W. Bush. Far more efficient to have Bush certified. There is no need for further debate on his mental state. The US President is bonkers.

Having turned the White House into a madhouse, having taken more lunatic positions on more issues than any head of state since GeorgeIII (are they, perchance, related?). GWB needs a long rest and a change of medication. And it shouldn't be too hard to guide him into a padded cell. Just tell him it's the presidential bomb shelter.

Let's examine the symptoms of his mental decline. First, Bush convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. This is something the poor fool might have believed, given a tenuous grasp of geography, history and political reality. He then began to hallucinate about weapons of mass destruction, despite the evidence of Hans Blix and a multitude of others that there weren't any. And he finally organised a tatty little alliance to join him in the silliest war since Vietnam, one guaranteed to recruit terrorists in unprecedented numbers.

Like Vietnam, the Iraq war was launched with presidential lies. Like Vietnam, the Iraq war descended into a moral and military quagmire. And if Iraq seems to be less of a stuff-up, consider this fact: it's taken just three years in Iraq for US deaths to equal the body count after six years in Vietnam.

Little wonder six retired senior generals have joined ranks with the American public in condemning the war, or that the guru of neo-conservatism, Francis Fukuyama, has broken ranks with the likes of Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol in denouncing it. Or that many in the Republican hierarchy have joined left-wing critics denouncing the invasion as a mistake and a failure, calling for immediate withdrawal.

When Bush was re-elected in 2004, this column suggested the President would go on to blast Iran or have the job done by Israeli surrogates. Both scenarios were dismissed as absurd and alarmist. Now journalist Seymour Hersh's revelations of a US plan to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities, perhaps with nuclear bunker-blasters, are causing national and international dismay. They've also provoked anger among the Pentagon's highest-ranking officers already enraged by Donald Rumsfeld's stewardship of the Iraq invasion and occupation. Given Rumsfeld's clear contempt for their opinions, they might well feel mutinous should he and the Commander-in-Chief show further signs of strategic insanity. But would that prevent air strikes by the Israelis? Given the sabre-rattling by that ratbag in Tehran, what could hold Israel back?

Bush is attempting to hose things down, but the world recalls his endlessly repeated mantra before the invasion of Iraq. Military intervention wasn't inevitable, just an option.

Now bleeding in the polls with mid-term elections looming, isn't it possible that Bush might go for broke? Double or nothing? A final, desperate throw of the dice?

Condoleezza Rice might join the Pentagon in trying to talk him down. So, one hopes, would Tony Blair and John Howard. But did Bush listen to reasoned argument last time? With a reckless, irrational President, you've the perfect set-up for the tail to wag the dog. As with 9/11, here's an opportunity for reality to follow a Hollywood script.

Last week I discussed this scenario with Fukuyama. His initial response was that Bush's political situation is too perilous for such a tactic, that the US public and its media wouldn't tolerate another Iraq. But bombing Iran's nuclear facilities could be characterised as surgical. It might not need troops on the ground and would certainly seem more relevant to the war on terror than the neo-con adventure in Iraq. Fukuyama conceded that such a strategy was possible.

And that possibility is more than enough. A lame-duck President with the eagle as his symbol once again takes the role of hawk. With his presidency a total mess, what's there to lose? So it's time to certify the President. Yes, you'd have to certify his equally deranged Vice-President as well. And toss in Rumsfeld to keep them company. Along with anyone else in the administration, the Congress, the Senate or the Australian parliament mad enough to think Iraq a sane decision.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0418-28.htm

Walking the White House Plank

By Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian UK

Wednesday 19 April 2006

White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, departs as the investigation into Karl Rove enters into a serious new phase.
The resignation of the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, is an event of almost complete insignificance except insofar as the beleaguered White House presents it as an important change. Meanwhile, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, under siege from dissenting ex-generals demanding his firing for arrogant incompetence, stays.

McClellan is a flea on the windshield of history. On the podium, he performed his duty as a slow-flying object swatted by a frustrated and flustered press corps. Inexpressive, occasionally inarticulate and displaying a limited vocabulary, his virtue was his unwavering discipline in sticking to his uninformative talking points, fending off pesky reporters, and defending the president and all the president's men to the last full measure of his devotion. Inside the Bush White House, he was a non-player, a factotum, the instrument of Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist and deputy chief of staff. McClellan played no part in the inner councils of state. He was the blank wall erected in front of the press to obstruct them from seeing what was on the other side. McClellan's stoic façade was unmatched by a stoic interior. He was a vessel for his masters, did whatever he was told, put out disinformation without objection, and was willing to defend any travesty. He is the ultimate dispensable man.

Events that could truly shake the Bush White House to its foundation, however, may be discerned elsewhere. On Monday, in Chicago, a jury found former Republican governor George Ryan guilty of 18 counts of corruption. His trial was the climax of a nine-year investigation that had yielded 75 convictions, including some of the most powerful figures in the Republican party of Illinois. The federal investigation, dubbed Operation Safe Roads, began by looking into bribery for driver's licenses. Over time, prosecutors systematically uncovered broader and deeper patterns of corruption reaching up to the governor's office. Patiently, they built their cases until they reached the top.

The United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who conducted this painstakingly thorough prosecution, Patrick Fitzgerald, is also the special prosecutor in charge of the investigation into the leaking of the identity of the covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame Wilson. So far, he has indicted I. Irving "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Two weeks ago, Fitzgerald filed a motion before the federal court in the Libby case stating that his investigation had proved that the White House engaged in "concerted action" from "a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against" former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who revealed that the rationale of the Iraq war was based on false information that the White House knew was bogus. Fitzgerald declared further that he had gathered "evidence that multiple officials in the White House" had outed his wife's clandestine identity to reporters as an element of revenge.

Last week, on April 12, Libby counter-filed to demand extensive documents in the possession of the prosecutor. His filing, written by his lawyers, reveals that he intends to put Karl Rove on the stand as a witness to question him about his leaking of Plame's name to reporters and presumably his role in the "concerted action" against Wilson.

In his request for documents from Rove's files, Libby dropped mention of Rove's current legal status.

For months, Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has assured the press that his client, who was believed to be vulnerable to indictment for perjury, is in the clear. But Libby insisted that he was entitled to "disclosure of such documents" in Rove's files "even if Mr. Rove remains a subject of a continuing grand jury investigation".

Karl Rove is a subject of Fitzgerald's investigation - this is the headline buried in Libby's filing.

In white-collar criminal investigations, individuals who fall under the gaze of a prosecutor fit into one of three categories: witness, subject or target. Rove's attorney has suggested that Rove is simply a witness. But that is untrue. He is a subject. A subject is someone the prosecutor believes may have committed a crime and is under investigation. If the prosecutor decides he has accumulated sufficient evidence to prove guilt, he will change the designation of that person from subject to target and then indict him or her.

Having successfully completed his most extensive investigation and prosecution, ending with the conviction of former Governor Ryan, Patrick Fitzgerald returns to the unresolved case before him. The federal grand jury considering his evidence began meeting again this morning. Karl Rove remains a subject--for now.


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041906R.shtml

Published on Wednesday, April 19, 2006 by TruthDig

Bush's Nutty Nuclear Braggadocio

by Robert Scheer


There is one clear standard by which President Bush has asked, over and over, to be judged: his ability to keep us safe from rogue nations or terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, by any rational definition of that standard, his 5-year administration has been an abysmal failure.

The quandary in which Bush finds himself regarding Iran’s apparent quest for nuclear weapons is only the latest example in an astonishing series of national security blunders.

First, he vacationed while a crescendo of intelligence warnings of imminent terrorist attack blossomed into the spectacle of Sept. 11, 2001. Then, he allowed the mastermind of those attacks, Osama bin Laden, to escape while diverting U.S. resources into Iraq to save the world from Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent WMDs. Now, tied down in Iraq’s civil strife, Bush holds no high cards in a dangerous poker match with Iran.

A once swaggering president, who so convincingly wielded a bullhorn and modeled a flight suit, now has assumed the pretzel pose of a supplicant attempting to cajole our old enemy in Tehran into dropping its nuclear ambitions while simultaneously initiating talks with Iran aimed at bailing us out in Iraq. After the fiasco of using the blunt instrument of military force to “democratize” Iraq, Bush now resorts to mild talk of U.N. sanctions on Iran, the very weapon he had derided in relation to quarantining Hussein. Bush’s nutty nuclear braggadocio on Tuesday — “all options are on the table” — was a sign of weakness, not strength, hobbled as he is by various self-created impediments.

One is that he has lost the trust of Americans, foreign leaders and even many Republicans by lying about Iraq — crying wolf, in essence — and then fumbling the occupation. Another invasion would be a tough sell, both here and abroad.

Two, Iran is, as Republican Sen. Richard Lugar put it subtly, “part of the energy picture.” In other words, they export gobs of oil. U.S.-Iran tension already has sent crude prices above $70 a barrel. “I believe, for the moment, we ought to cool this one,” Lugar warned the White House. “We need to make more headway diplomatically to be effective.”

Three, the United States is highly dependent upon Iran-trained Shiite religious factions in Iraq for what is left of the tattered welcome mat Bush & Co. told us to expect when we came to overthrew Hussein. Key Iraqi Shiite leaders have stated they would support Iran, in the event of a U.S. attack.

Cozying up to the Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq is a bargain with the devil, born of weakness, the pattern for this president. To find another example, look no further than the source of Iran’s latest claimed breakthrough in the pursuit of weapons-grade uranium. Last week, Iran’s confrontational president disclosed that his regime is “presently conducting research” on P-2 centrifuge technology that would allow quicker uranium enrichment. Nuclear experts, according to the New York Times, fear this is a serious indication that Tehran, as long suspected, has obtained P-2 technology from Pakistan, thanks to the global black-market nukes operation run for years by Abdul Qadeer Khan, “the father” of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. U.N. inspectors in Iran also found instructional bomb-making sketches thought to have been supplied by Khan, who is now under “a loose form of house arrest,” according to the Times.

The grim irony in all this is that Pakistan never has been held accountable by the United States for Khan’s black-market nuclear proliferation racket, even though such a bold scheme could not have thrived without significant support from Pakistan’s powerful military leaders. Of course, Khan, who was pardoned by Pakistan’s military dictator, doesn’t have to worry that Bush is going to order the CIA to spirit him to Guantanamo Bay for some rough Dick Cheney-approved interrogations. Pakistan, like Saudi Arabia, is a tight ally of the White House, despite having previously supported Bin Laden’s old Afghan friends, the Taliban. Indeed, the Bush administration was so eager to secure the friendship of Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, it perversely ended the boycott imposed on that country in response to its development of a nuclear weapon.

There you have it — Hussein, who did not have a nuclear-weapons program and was fundamentally at odds with Bin Laden, now sits in prison, while the dictator of nukes-’R’-us Pakistan and the theocrats of Iran have had their power immeasurably strengthened by Bush’s policies. Go figure. Actually, it would appear the public already has, explaining why our fearless leader has fallen so far in the polls.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0419-22.htm

Published on Wednesday, April 19, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

It's Called Mad For A Reason, You Fool!

by Joyce Marcel


He slices, he dices, he juliennes! Just look at that tomato! Now how much would you pay for such a president? But wait, there's more!

Bush came into office ready to attack Iraq. He lied through his teeth about his reasons - who is sure, even today, what his deepest ones might be? He turned the national tragedy of 9/11 into a false raison d'être, threw the Middle East into turmoil, made Iraq a training ground for terrorists, corrupted the soul of our nation with lies and torture, and began to squander its wealth.

But wait, there's more! Now he wants to nuke Iran.

Given the growing awareness that Bush and his cronies are really crazy enough to try it, retired top U.S. military officials are developing consciences. They are speaking out against the war in Iraq using words like "unnecessary" and "the worse strategic mistake in American history." They are calling the Bush administration's behavior "self-deluding, derelict in its duty, negligent and irresponsible." Even former Secretary of State Colin Powell told journalist Robert Scheer that he never believed Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat. "Now he tells us," Scheer sneered.

But wait, there's more!

These same top retired military officers are falling all over themselves calling for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Former Major General Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training Iraqi troops after the U.S. invasion, described him as "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically." This unprecedented behavior is almost rational enough to make a military coup seem desirable.

Yet our president defends Rumsfeld, saying his "energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period. He has my full support and deepest appreciation."

And wait, there's more!

Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, who a few years ago broke the story that Bush was planning to invade Iraq - a story that made no sense at the time, since America had been attacked by Saudi religious madmen - now reports that the U.S. already has soldiers on the ground in Iran. Also, the Air Force is practicing "over the shoulder" bombing, a maneuver designed to deliver nuclear weapons. And - here's the coup de grace - Bush and the neocons believe that once we nuke them, Iranians will welcome us with flowers.

Bush casually discredited Hersh's story in a recent speech at Johns Hopkins University. "What you're reading is wild speculation," he said, insisting that his promise to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons "doesn't mean force necessarily. In this case it means diplomacy."

Which is pretty much what he said right up until the day we attacked Iraq. Hersh was right then and, God help us, he's probably right now.

So now what would you pay for this president?

No one wants an Iran with nuclear weapons, true, but the best estimate from the international nuclear community is that the country is still five to ten years away from having them. Why fight now?

Because Bush is running out of time. The most frightening quote in Hersh's article is from a government consultant who says the president believes he must do "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do," and "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy."

Stop a nuclear confrontation by having a nuclear confrontation? I wouldn't exactly use the word "courage." It's called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) for a reason, you presidential fool! Get it? Mutual? We destroy them, they destroy us? Mutual. MAD!

But no, An anonymous member of the U. S. House of Representatives told Hersh that Bush "has a messianic vision." I guess if you believe in Armageddon, you can't be blamed for wanting to jump-start it.

True, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a far-right religious terrorist and all-around nut job who wants to bomb Israel into the sea and would love a chance to confront America. But as a Pentagon advisor told Hersh, "The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen." Duh!

And still there's more!

Minus the flowers and the dancing in the streets, what could be the possible results of multiple bombing attacks, including nuclear ones, on Iran?

Mushroom clouds. Radiation in the winds. Mass casualties. Contamination. Assured nuclear proliferation. Possibly an Iran-China alliance - and China not only has the bomb, but the missiles to deliver it. An army of suicide bombers.

Add major Shiite uprisings in Iraq and Iranian retaliation on the "exposed oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates," Hersh said.

And -wait for it! - at the very least, $150-plus barrels of oil for the foreseeable future.

Hezbollah, which has been quiet for the past few years, could be drawn in. And there's always al-Qaida. Remember them? Terrorist attacks all over the world could result.

All that's left are lies and illusions masquerading as foreign policy. Now how much would you pay? Is anyone offering a set of Ginzu knives? How about a Pocket Fisherman or a Bamboo Steamer? Why isn't there any amazing TV offer? Why aren't the operators standing by?

Bush is playing chicken with nuclear weapons. How can we stop him? Millions around the world took to the streets to protest his invasion of Iraq, yet he remained superior, patronizing and implacable.

The best we can do now is raise our voices in the loudest of protests and then elect as many Democrats as possible to Congress in the upcoming election - especially candidates who have served in Iraq.

Let's hope an activist Democratic Congress will start impeachment proceedings and stop this president before he slices, dices and julliennes America along with the rest of the world.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0419-30.htm

Published on Thursday, April 20, 2006 by the Boulder Daily Camera (Colorado)

White House in Collapse

by Marianne Means


White House chief of staff Andrew Card, President Bush's efficient longtime confidant and right-hand man, voluntarily left the pinnacle of power on Friday with his head held high, surrounded by bipartisan applause.

He departed just in time. Immediately things not only turned sour but went public.

The White House is crumbling internally. President Bush seems bewildered, no longer in charge. He wanders around the country talking about health savings accounts and other small-bore projects that mean little to most people. Nobody is listening.

After months of presidential bravado about ignoring sagging polls and public opinion, Card finally provided the opening to force an acknowledgment that Bush's troubled presidency needs a make-over.

The problems are not of Card's making. They are the president's own, primarily because of the hash the administration has made of Iraq. And fears have escalated with scare stories about secret White House plans for a possible nuclear attack on Iran's new nuclear facilities.

Shuffling personnel is not the answer; changes in policy are. But that's the hard part. There's no indication yet that Bush is prepared to go that far.

Card's replacement, Joshua Bolten, who was head of the Office of Management and Budget, is not exactly a fresh face, although he bravely said he wants a 'fresh start."

The inner circle did not expand one inch.

It budged, in fact, even less than President Jimmy Carter's administration after his mid-term epiphany, during which he suddenly sacked several Cabinet members. The public did not notice anything different, except the names. Carter was not re-elected.

The talk about so-called fresh figures nowadays mostly revolves around familiar GOP faces, particularly tired old former members of Congress who are now lobbyists. What the president calls "the game of musical chairs" does not seem to include outreach to outsiders who might provide a different ideological approach.

Replacing John Snow as Secretary of Treasury is the most likely Cabinet-level change, but the argument that he is an inadequate messenger of administration economic policy simply reflects the search for a vulnerable scapegoat. The president's persistent push for bigger and bigger tax cuts that go mostly to the rich at a time of record federal deficits is not factually defensible by any official with genuine economic credentials.

But Snow may be tossed overboard, just to show that the Bush political house is being cleaned, even if that move doesn't make real sense. What will be really interesting is which partisan dummy is next willing to sell his or her credentials for the Treasury title and the inevitable ensuing embarrassment.

The basic underlying political problem, however, is the mismanagement of the Iraq war and its continuing violence. Thus the military operation is naturally attracting the most scrutiny. And that means a critical analysis of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The rebellious retired generals who called recently for Rumsfeld's resignation have provoked a political firestorm.

Most of them served in Iraq and their complaints about the "casualness and swagger" with which the administration rushed to war are taken very seriously. The White House went into high damage-control mode, with the president vigorously defending Rumsfeld and the secretary himself insisting he would not quit under pressure.

Bush allies tried the usual diversionary tactics, pointing out the essential nature of civilian control of the military and carping at the generals for not speaking publicly while on active duty.

The issue is not the principle of civilian control of the military, but the way this particular civilian has exercised his control. And of course the military is obligated to be loyal to the leadership while in uniform; it is only when they have retired are they free to speak their minds.

Rumsfeld and the president insisted that field commanders were always free to speak up if they thought higher troop levels were needed to quell the Iraqi insurgency. The mess, you see, is not their fault.

But the retired generals say that is not the case, that dissent has been stifled and troops were put in unnecessary jeopardy by misjudgments in Washington.

Senate Democrats are crying for a symbolic vote of confidence in Rumsfeld. It is not clear what impact such a vote would have. But it might get bipartisan support. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said there is "a real question about his (Rumsfeld's) capacity to lead" in view of the generals' criticism.

So long as the Iraq war goes badly, Rumsfeld will continue to be a political target. The difficulty, however, is that he is ultimately an employee; the man who holds the ultimate power to wage war cannot be fired. Alas, voters lost that opportunity in 2004 and must suffer the consequences through 2008.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0420-30.htm

These are the times that try men's souls."

- Thomas Paine, "The American Crisis", 1777


Published on Thursday, April 20, 2006 by the Editor & Publisher

A Crisis Almost Without Equal

by Craig Mitchell


No matter which party they generally favor or political stripes they wear, newspapers and other media outlets need to confront the fact that America faces a crisis almost without equal in recent decades.

Our president, in a time of war, terrorism, and nuclear intrigue, will likely remain in office for another 33 months, with crushingly low approval ratings that are still inching lower. Facing a similar problem, voters had a chance to quickly toss Jimmy Carter out of office, and did so. With a similar lengthy period left on his White House lease, Richard Nixon quit, facing impeachment. Neither outcome is at hand this time.

The alarm should be bi-partisan. Many Republicans fear their president's image as a bumbler will hurt their party for years. The rest may fret about the almost certain paralysis within the administration, or a reversal of certain favorite policies. A Gallup poll this week revealed that 44% of Republicans want some or all troops brought home from Iraq. Do they really believe that their president will do that any time soon, if ever?

Democrats, meanwhile, cross their fingers that Bush doesn’t do something really stupid -- i.e. prematurely nuke Iran -- while they try to win control of at least one house in Congress by doing nothing yet somehow earning (they hope) the anti-Bush vote.

Meanwhile, a severely weakened president retains, and has shown he is willing to use, all of his commander-in-chief authority, and then some.

No wonder so many are starting to look for a way to shorten or short-circuit the extended crisis period. Republicans demand a true shake-out at the White House. This week at Vanity Fair online, Carl Bernstein is calling for a Watergate-style congressional probe of possible high crimes and misdemeanors. Even Neil Young is weighing in with a soon-to-be-released song that urges, “Let’s impeach the president -- for lying.”

But rather than push impeachment for partisan reasons, the Democrats will actually put it off -- for partisan reasons. An unpopular president helps their drive for votes in November, and everything else is secondary.

So let’s assume, as Nixon might put it, that we do have George Bush to kick around for another almost-three-years. How worried should we be about the possible damage he might inflict -- and what can the press do about it?

Consider Thomas Friedman’s column in The New York Times today, and its implications.

Friedman, who still supports the Iraq war, opens by declaring that given a choice between a nuclear Iran and an attack on that country engineered by the White House, he would choose the former. That’s how little he trusts the diplomatic and military chops of Bush, Rumsfeld, Condi and Co. He cites “the level of incompetence that the Bush team has displayed in Iraq, and its refusal to acknowledge any mistakes or remove those who made them.”

But then he goes on: “I look at the Bush national security officials much the way I look at drunken drivers. I just want to take away their foreign policy driver's licenses for the next three years. Sorry, boys and girls, you have to stay home now -- or take a taxi. ... You will not be driving alone. Not with my car.”

The problem -- the crisis -- is that Bush and Co. likely WILL be driving the “car” for 33 more months.

Friedman knows this: “If ours were a parliamentary democracy, the entire Bush team would be out of office by now, and deservedly so. ... But ours is not a parliamentary system, and while some may feel as if this administration's over, it isn't. So what to do? We can't just take a foreign policy timeout.”

Perfectly said. Again, the crisis, even if he didn’t call it that: “We can’t just take a foreign policy timeout.”

Friedman, however, is very late in doubting the competence of this crew, and he still backs away from the scary wider view. What to do? he asks. He suggests that Rumsfeld depart, of course, and then he gets into specifics of how diplomacy might work re: Iran. That leaves hanging the reality of Bush continuing to serve as Master and Commander of the Iraq war and all other foreign policy into 2009.

I don’t have a solution myself now, although all pleas for serious probes, journalistic or official, of the many alleged White House misdeeds should be heeded. But my point here is simply to start the discussion, and urge that the media, first, recognize that the crisis—or, if you want to say, impending crisis -- exists, and begin to explore the ways to confront it.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0420-25.htm

The Worst President in History?

By Sean Wilentz
Rolling Stone

Friday 21 April 2006

One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush.

(Illustration by Robert Grossman)

George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty - and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton - a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole - a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled - and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating - reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled - nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success - flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.

Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt - about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.

How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties - Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush - have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures - an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.-

The Credibility Gap

No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.

The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to the television age - a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility gap," meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 - a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton - a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."

Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's inner circles. But Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections - but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff - a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition - represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.

Bush at War

Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well - including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk's favor - much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.

The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson's idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.

Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.

No other president - Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War - faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies - including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill - suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal to."

All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq - an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered - the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy - yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops - accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."

When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.

Bush at Home

Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that "we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.

The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts - a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.

The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever - with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush - sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner" - insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!

The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing - a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states - including Utah, one of Bush's last remaining political strongholds - have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws - a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe - has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.

The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions - over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more - have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history."

Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science - dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."

The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them - much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.

Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called "the rich and powerful" from bending "the acts of government to their selfish purposes." Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New Orleans" won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.

Presidential Misconduct

Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington's has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law - most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's resignation.

Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers - HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger - left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.

The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon - a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison - investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest advisers.

History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.

By contrast, the Bush administration - in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" - threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases - using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.

Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law - that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.

The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" - a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.

Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history.

The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious - much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.

No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents - Harry Truman was one - who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."

Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president.



http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042006J.shtml

Published on Friday, April 21, 2006 by FindLaw.com

If Past Is Prologue, George Bush Is Becoming An Increasingly Dangerous President

by John Dean


President George W. Bush's presidency is a disaster - one that's still unfolding. In a mid-2004 column, I argued that, at that point, Bush had already demonstrated that he possessed the least attractive and most troubling traits among those that political scientist James Dave Barber has cataloged in his study of Presidents' personality types.

Now, in early 2006, Bush has continued to sink lower in his public approval ratings, as the result of a series of events that have sapped the public of confidence in its President, and for which he is directly responsible. This Administration goes through scandals like a compulsive eater does candy bars; the wrapper is barely off one before we've moved on to another.

Currently, President Bush is busy reshuffling his staff to reinvigorate his presidency. But if Dr. Barber's work holds true for this president -- as it has for others - the hiring and firing of subordinates will not touch the core problems that have plagued Bush's tenure.

That is because the problems belong to the President - not his staff. And they are problems that go to character, not to strategy.

Barber's Analysis of Presidential Character

As I discussed in my prior column, Barber, after analyzing all the presidents through Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, found repeating patterns of common elements relating to character, worldview, style, approach to dealing with power, and expectations. Based on these findings, Barber concluded that presidents fell into clusters of characteristics.

He also found in this data Presidential work patterns which he described as "active" or "passive." For example, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were highly active; Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan were highly passive.

Barber further analyzed the emotional relationship of presidents toward their work - dividing them into presidents who found their work an emotionally satisfying experience, and thus "positive," and those who found the job emotionally taxing, and thus "negative." Franklin Roosevelt and Reagan, for example, were presidents who enjoyed their work; Thomas Jefferson and Richard Nixon had "negative" feeling toward it.

From these measurements, Barber developed four repeating categories into which he was able to place all presidents: those like FDR who actively pursued their work and had positive feelings about their efforts (active/positives); those like Nixon who actively pursued the job but had negative feelings about it (active/negatives); those like Reagan who were passive about the job but enjoyed it (passive/positives); and, finally, those who followed the pattern of Thomas Jefferson -- who both was passive and did not enjoy the work (passive/negatives).

Interestingly, the category of presidents who proved troublesome under Barber's analysis is that of those who turned out to be active/negatives. Barber placed Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in this class.

In my prior column, I found that the evidence is overwhelming that George W. Bush is another active/negative president, and the past two years, since making that initial finding, have only further confirmed my conclusion.

Because active/negative presidencies do not end well, it is instructive to look at where Bush's may be heading.

Bush's "Active/Negative" Presidency

Recent events provide an especially good illustration of Bush's fateful - perhaps fatal - approach. Six generals who have served under Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld have called for his resignation - making a strong substantive case as to why he should resign. And they are not alone: Editorialists have also persuasively attacked Rumsfeld on the merits.

Yet Bush's defense of Rumsfeld was entirely substance-free. Bush simply told reporters in the Rose Garden that Rumsfeld would stay because "I'm the decider and I decide what's best." He sounded much like a parent telling children how things would be: "I'm the Daddy, that's why."

This, indeed, is how Bush sees the presidency, and it is a point of view that will cause him trouble.

Bush has never understood what presidential scholar Richard Neustadt discovered many years ago: In a democracy, the only real power the presidency commands is the power to persuade. Presidents have their bully pulpit, and the full attention of the news media, 24/7. In addition, they are given the benefit of the doubt when they go to the American people to ask for their support. But as effective as this power can be, it can be equally devastating when it languishes unused - or when a president pretends not to need to use it, as Bush has done.

Apparently, Bush does not realize that to lead he must continually renew his approval with the public. He is not, as he thinks, the decider. The public is the decider.

Bush is following the classic mistaken pattern of active/negative presidents: As Barber explained, they issue order after order, without public support, until they eventually dissipate the real powers they have -- until "nothing [is] left but the shell of the office." Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon all followed this pattern.

Active/negative presidents are risk-takers. (Consider the colossal risk Bush took with the Iraq invasion). And once they have taken a position, they lock on to failed courses of action and insist on rigidly holding steady, even when new facts indicate that flexibility is required.

The source of their rigidity is that they've become emotionally attached to their own positions; to change them, in their minds, would be to change their personal identity, their very essence. That, they are not willing to do at any cost.

Wilson rode his unpopular League of Nations proposal to his ruin; Hoover refused to let the federal government intervene to prevent or lessen a fiscal depression; Johnson escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam while misleading Americans (thereby making himself unelectable); and Nixon went down with his bogus defense of Watergate.

George Bush has misled America into a preemptive war in Iraq; he is using terrorism to claim that as Commander-in-Chief, he is above the law; and he refuses to acknowledge that American law prohibits torturing our enemies and warrantlessly wiretapping Americans.

Americans, increasingly, are not buying his justifications for any of these positions. Yet Bush has made no effort to persuade them that his actions are sound, prudent or productive; rather, he takes offense when anyone questions his unilateral powers. He responds as if personally insulted.

And this may be his only option: With Bush's limited rhetorical skills, it would be all but impossible for him to persuade any others than his most loyal supporters of his positions. His single salient virtue - as a campaigner - was the ability to stay on-message. He effectively (though inaccurately) portrayed both Al Gore and John Kerry as wafflers, whereas he found consistency in (over)simplifying the issues. But now, he cannot absorb the fact that his message is not one Americans want to hear - that he is being questioned, severely, and that staying on-message will be his downfall.

Other Presidents - other leaders, generally - have been able to listen to critics relatively impassively, believing that there is nothing personal about a debate about how best to achieve shared goals. Some have even turned detractors into supporters - something it's virtually impossible to imagine Bush doing. But not active/negative presidents. And not likely Bush.

The Danger of the "Active/Negative" President Facing A Congressional Rout

Active/negative presidents -- Barber tells us, and history shows -- are driven, persistent, and emphatic. Barber says their pervasive feeling is "I must."

Barber's collective portrait of Wilson, Hoover, Johnson and Nixon now fits George W. Bush too: "He sees himself as having begun with a high purpose, but as being continually forced to compromise in order to achieve the end state he vaguely envisions," Barber writes. He continues, "Battered from all sides . . . he begins to feel his integrity slipping away from him . . . [and] after enduring all this for longer than any mortal should, he rebels and stands his ground. Masking his decision in whatever rhetoric is necessary, he rides the tiger to the end."

Bush's policies have incorporated risk from the outset. A few examples make that clear.

He took the risk that he could capture Osama bin Laden with a small group of CIA operatives and U.S. Army Special forces - and he failed. He took the risk that he could invade Iraq and control the country with fewer troops and less planning than the generals and State Department told him would be possible - and he failed. He took the risk that he could ignore the criminal laws prohibiting torture and the warrantless wiretapping of Americans without being caught - he failed. And he's taken the risk that he can cut the taxes for the rich and run up huge financial deficits without hurting the economy. This, too, will fail, though the consequences will likely fall on future presidents and generations who must repay Bush's debts.

What We Can Expect From Bush in the Future, Based on Barber's Model

As the 2006 midterm elections approach, this active/negative president can be expected to take further risks. If anyone doubts that Bush, Cheney, Rove and their confidants are planning an "October Surprise" to prevent the Republicans from losing control of Congress, then he or she has not been observing this presidency very closely.

What will that surprise be? It's the most closely held secret of the Administration.

How risky will it be? Bush is a whatever-it-takes risk-taker, the consequences be damned.

One possibility is that Dick Cheney will resign as Vice President for "health reasons," and become a senior counselor to the president. And Bush will name a new vice president - a choice geared to increase his popularity, as well as someone electable in 2008. It would give his sinking administration a new face, and new life.

The immensely popular Rudy Giuliani seems the most likely pick, if Giuliani is willing. (A better option for Giuliani might be to hold off, and tacitly position himself as the Republican anti-Bush in 2008.) But Condoleezza Rice, John McCain, Bill Frist, and more are possibilities.

Bush's second and more likely, surprise could be in the area of national security: If he could achieve a Great Powers coalition (of Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, and so on) presenting a united-front "no nukes" stance to Iran, it would be his first diplomatic coup and a political triumph.

But more likely, Bush may mount a unilateral attack on Iran's nuclear facilities - hoping to rev up his popularity. (It's a risky strategy: A unilateral hit on Iran may both trigger devastating Iran-sponsored terrorist attacks in Iraq, with high death tolls, and increase international dislike of Bush for his bypass of the U.N. But as an active/negative President, Bush hardly shies away from risk.) Another rabbit-out-of-the-hat possibility: the capture of Osama bin Laden.

If there is no "October Surprise," I would be shocked. And if it is not a high-risk undertaking, it would be a first. Without such a gambit, and the public always falls for them, Bush is going to lose control of Congress. Should that happen, his presidency will have effectively ended, and he will spend the last two years of it defending all the mistakes he has made during the first six, and covering up the errors of his ways.

There is, however, the possibility of another terrorist attack, and if one occurred, Americans would again rally around the president - wrongly so, since this is a presidency that lives on fear-mongering about terror, but does little to truly address it. The possibility that we might both suffer an attack, and see a boost to Bush come from it, is truly a terrifying thought.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0421-26.htm

Published on Friday, April 21, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times

A 4-Star Defense of the Republic

by Rosa Brooks


When six recently retired generals criticized Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraq war and urged his resignation, the Bush administration reacted as if the generals had announced an impending military coup. Within days, administration loyalists were suggesting that the generals had been disloyal not merely to Rumsfeld but to American democracy itself.

The dissenting generals seemed almost surprised by the speed and savagery of the administration's counteroffensive. Maybe they had assumed that their combat records and decades of service would protect them. Or maybe they had been lulled into a false sense of security by the administration's floundering Iraq policies and assumed that Rumsfeld and his White House backers were just too distracted and incompetent to go after a few courteous, highly decorated critics. But the generals should have known that this administration can be ferociously competent when there's something really important — like President Bush's poll numbers — at stake.

On the right, the key talking point in the War Against the Generals quickly emerged: "Civilian control of the military." It was an effective line of attack, and so clever that even many who ought to have known better were suckered. The Washington Post editorial board on Tuesday, for instance, fell for it hook, line and sinker, worrying that the retired generals were threatening "the essential democratic principle of military subordination to civilian control…. If [the generals] are successful in forcing Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, they will set an ugly precedent."

They even had me nodding along there for a few minutes. After all, every student of recent history knows that if you dilute civilian control of the military, you end up with fascism or a Latin American-style military junta. Because constant security threats are necessary to maintain the power and credibility of a military regime, a nation that lacks civilian control of the military gets ensnared in unending, pointless wars, often against an increasingly vaguely defined threat. Gradually, the broader society becomes militarized. Dissenters are denounced as cowards or traitors, and domestic surveillance becomes common. Secret military courts and detention systems begin to supplant the civilian judicial system. Detainees get tortured, and some end up mysteriously dead after interrogation.

We definitely wouldn't want that kind of regime to control the United States, would we?

It was at this point that I got the joke — because, dear reader, we're already well on the way to having that kind of regime. If Rumsfeld thought he could get away with calling himself Il Generalissimo, don't you think he'd do so in a heartbeat?

In the looking-glass world the Bush administration has brought us, it's the civilians in the White House and the Pentagon who have been eager to embrace the values normally exemplified by military juntas, while many uniformed military personnel have struggled to insist on values that are supposed to characterize democratic civil society.

Iraq is only one of the many issues on which military personnel have stood up against foolish or immoral administration policies. In 2003, the three generals and one admiral who collectively head the JAG Corps of the various services wrote strongly worded internal memos opposing the administration's authorization of interrogation techniques that border on or constitute torture. Navy Rear Adm. Michael Lohr, for instance, condemned the techniques as "inconsistent with our most fundamental values." In January 2005, five retired generals filed an amicus brief in a case before the Supreme Court opposing the administration's argument that suspects tried by military commissions are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. Many more examples could be cited.

The claim that the six dissenting generals are betraying the principle of civilian control over the military is both silly and sinister. It's silly because polite, reasoned criticism from retired generals is just free speech, a very far cry from "forcing" the Defense secretary out. And it's sinister because civilian control is a means of safeguarding democracy, not an end in itself. When that gets forgotten, the phrase becomes just another way to stifle dissent.

Military officers must obey all lawful commands and refrain from using "contemptuous words" about their civilian leaders. But when officers take the military oath, they also pledge to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, [and] bear true faith and allegiance to the same."

That's a hard oath, because bearing "true faith" to the Constitution requires military personnel to speak out, regardless of the cost, when they think our civilian leaders have gone beyond the pale. Both our democracy and the lives of the soldiers who fight in our name depend on it. If officers remain silent when our military policies go terribly wrong, there's little the rest of us can do to set things right again.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0421-23.htm

Published on Saturday, April 22, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Overthrow


by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman


Hawaii
Cuba
Philippines
Puerto Rico
Nicaragua
Honduras
Iran
Guatemala
South Vietnam
Chile
Grenada
Panama
Afghanistan
Iraq

What do these 14 governments have in common?

You got it.

The United States overthrew them.

And in almost in every case, the overthrow can be traced to corporate interests.

In Hawaii, the sugar companies didn't want to pay export duties -- so they overthrew the queen of Hawaii and made it part of the United States.

In Guatemala, United Fruit wanted Arbenz out.

Out he went.

In Chile, Allende offended the copper interests.

Allende -- dead.

In Iran, Mossadegh offended major oil interests.

Mossadegh out.

In Nicaragua, Jose Santos Zelaya was bothering American lumber and mining companies.

Zelaya -- out.

In Honduras, an American banana magnate organized the coup of the Honduran government.

And on down the list.

Democratic Party critics charge that the Bush administration is ripping the United States from a long history of diplomacy by violently overthrowing governments.

Not true, says former New York Times foreign correspondent Stephen Kinzer.

Kinzer says that in fact the opposite is true.

"Actually, the United States has been overthrowing governments for more than a century," Kinzer said in an interview.

He documents this in a new book: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Times Books, 2006).

Overthrow is the third in a series of regime change books by Kinzer.

His previous two: All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2003), and Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (1982).

Together, they would make a remarkable "regime change" boxed set for the holidays.

Kinzer left the Times last year. He says that the parting was "perfectly amicable" -- although he doesn't sound convincing when he says this.

What is clear is that Kinzer is not comfortable with establishment rationales for the American imperial project.

This became clear during an interview Kinzer gave on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross earlier this month.

Gross tried to get Kinzer to concede that if we hadn't overthrown these governments, the Soviets would have taken over, or today, radical Islam will take over.

Kinzer didn't give an inch.

For example, Gross said that had we not overthrown these 14 governments, "the Soviets might have won the Cold War."

"I don't think that's true at all," Kinzer responded. "In the first place, the countries whose governments we overthrew, all countries that we claimed were pawns of the Kremlin, actually were nothing of the sort. We now know, for example, that the Kremlin had not the slightest interest in Guatemala at all in the early 1950s. They didn't even know Guatemala existed. They didn't even have diplomatic or economic relations."

"The leader of Iran who we overthrew was fiercely anti-communist. He came from an aristocratic family. He despised Marxist ideology."

"In Chile, we always portrayed President Allende as a cat's paw of the Kremlin. We now know from documents that have come out that the Soviets and the Chinese were constantly fighting with him and urging him to calm down and not be so provocative towards the Americans. So, in the first place, the Soviets were not behind those regimes. We completely overestimated the influence of the Soviet Union on those regimes."

When Gross asked Kinzer what he thought of the "spread of radical Islam," Kinzer didn't hesitate.

"We sometimes like to think that our interventions in these countries don't have effects, but when we break down the doors of foreign countries and impose our own leaders, as we did in Iran and as we've recently done in Iraq, we outrage a lot of people," Kinzer said. "We like to think that everybody will soon calmly come to realize that by rational standards, this was a good thing to do. But that doesn't happen. We are not able to change cultures as easily as we are able to change regimes."

The United States had a hand in many other overthrows, but Kinzer limited his cases to those where the United States was the primary mover and shaker.

So, for example, while the United States played a role in the overthrow of Lumumba in the Congo, Kinzer says that it was primarily an operation by Belgium on behalf of large Belgian mining interests.

This might be the most important book to read as the United States approaches a showdown with Iran.

President Bush says he's trying to bring democracy to Iran.

In fact, Iranians had democracy once.

And we crushed it.

Kinzer is on tour promoting his book.

And he's got a gig at Northwestern University in Chicago, where he lives.

He's teaching a course in regime change.



http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0422-24.htm

I don't know, DWB04... Is there a pattern forming here? Are we in the middle east to remove a dictator and establish the blessings of democracy, liberty and freedom for the Iraqi people... or is it just all about global corporate greed and world enslavement? Is our intent honorable or sinister? Gee, I hope the rest of the world doesn't notice what imperialist malignancies we are ... they could all get mad at us... and bomb us all back into the stone age.

Published on Saturday, April 22, 2006 by The Nation

Attack Iran, Ignore the Constitution

by Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith


During the 2004 election, George W. Bush famously proclaimed that he didn't have to ask anyone's permission to defend America. Does that mean he can attack Iran without having to ask Congress? A new Congressional resolution being drafted by Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon, can be a vehicle to remind Bush that he can't.

Bush is calling news reports of plans to attack Iran "wild speculation" and declaring that the United States is on a "diplomatic" track. But asked this week if his options included planning for a nuclear strike, he repeated that "all options are on the table."

The President is acting as if the decisions that may get us into another war are his to make and his alone. So the Iran crisis poses not only questions of military feasibility and political wisdom but of Constitutional usurpation.

Bush's top officials openly assert that he can do anything he wants--including attacking another country--on his authority as Commander in Chief.

Last October, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked by members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee whether the President would circumvent Congressional authorization if the White House chose military action against Iran or Syria. She answered, "I will not say anything that constrains his authority as Commander in Chief."

When pressed by Senator Paul Sarbanes about whether the Administration can exercise a military option without an authorization from Congress, Rice replied, "The President never takes any option off the table, and he shouldn't."

The founders of the American Republic were deeply concerned that the President's power to make war might become the vehicle for tyranny. So they crafted a Constitution that included checks and balances on presidential power, among them an independent Congress and judiciary, an executive power subject to laws written by Congress and interpreted by the courts, and an executive power to repel attacks but not to declare or finance war.

But the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, as laid out in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States and reiterated in 2006, claims for the President the power to attack other countries--like Iran--simply because he asserts they pose a threat. It thereby removes the decision of war and peace from Congress and gives it the President. It is, as Senator Robert Byrd put it, "unconstitutional on its face."

Congressional Response

DeFazio is now preparing a resolution underscoring the fact that the President cannot initiate military action against Iran without Congressional authorization. He is seeking support from other House members.

"The imperial powers claimed by this Administration are breathtaking in their scope. Unfortunately, too many of my colleagues were willing to cede our constitutional authorities to the President prior to the war in Iraq. We've seen how that turned out," DeFazio told The Nation. "Congress can't make the same mistake with respect to Iran. Yet the constant drumbeat we're hearing out of the Administration, in the press, from think tanks, etc., on Iran eerily echoes what we heard about Iraq.

"It likely won't be long until we hear from the President that he can take pre-emptive military action against Iran without Congressional authorization, which is what he originally argued about Iraq. Or that Congress has already approved action against Iran via some prior vote, which he also argued about Iraq," DeFazio said. "That is why it is so important to put the Administration, my colleagues and the American people on notice now that such arguments about unilateral presidential war powers have no merit. Our nation's founders were clear on this issue. There is no ambiguity."

There is considerable evidence that military action against Iran has already started. Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner (ret.) told CNN that "the decision has been made and military operations are under way." He said the Iranian ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency recently told him that the Iranians have captured dissident units "and they've confessed to working with the Americans." Journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker that "American combat troops are now operating in Iran." He quotes a government consultant who told him that the units were not only identifying targets but "studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds."

Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio has written to Bush, noting, "The presence of US troops in Iran constitutes a hostile act against that country" and urged him to report immediately to Congress on all activities involving American forces in Iran.

Bipartisan Concern

Concern about presidential usurpation of the war power is not just a partisan matter. Former Vice President Al Gore this year joined with former Republican Congressman Bob Barr to express "our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger." As Gore explained, "In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power."

One of the stunning revelations of recent news stories is that top military brass are strongly opposed to the move toward military strikes. The Washington Post quotes a former CIA Middle East specialist that "the Pentagon is arguing forcefully against it." According to Hersh's reporting in The New Yorker, the Joint Chiefs of Staff "had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran."

The Bush Administration is putting military officials in a position where they will have to decide whether their highest loyalty is to the President or to the country and the Constitution. Lieut. Gen. Gregory Newbold (ret.), who recently called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has criticized the US military brass for its quiescence while the Bush Administration pursued "a fundamentally flawed plan" for "an invented war." Now he is calling on serving military officers to speak out.

The "generals' revolt" has not publicly targeted the plans to attack Iran. But its central critique concerns Rumsfeld's disregard for the military's evaluation of the costs of the Iraq War and the scale of commitment it would require. If a similar disregard of the costs of an attack on Iran aren't already the subtext of their action, it certainly is a logical concomitant.

The American people are by now deeply skeptical of Bush's reliability in matters of war and peace. In a recent Los Angeles Times poll, 54 percent of respondents said they did not trust President Bush to "make the right decision about whether we should go to war with Iran," compared with 42 percent who did. Forty percent said the war in Iraq had made them less supportive of military action against Iran. But Americans are being systematically deprived of any alternative view of the Iranian threat, the consequences of American policy choices or the real intentions of the Bush Administration.

Smoking Gun, Mushroom Cloud

Congress and the military allowed the Bush Administration to bamboozle the country with false information and scare talk prior to the Iraq War--and they share responsibility for the resulting catastrophe. Now we're hearing again about a smoking gun that will be a mushroom cloud. It's up to Congress and the military to make it clear that the President does not assume monarchical power over questions of war and peace.

Congress and the American people--who should make the decision about war and peace--haven't even heard the forceful arguments of military officials against military strikes. Calling those Pentagon officials to testify--and protecting them against Administration reprisals--would be a good place to start.

Colonel Gardiner, who specializes in war games and conducted one for Harper's magazine that simulated a US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, concluded, "It's a path that leads to disaster in many directions." Unless preceded by a UN endorsement or an imminent Iranian attack, it's also aggression, a war crime under international law and the UN Charter. If Bush or his subordinates have already ordered military operations in Iran, it should be considered a criminal act.

The DeFazio resolution could provide a rallying point for a coalition to act pre-emptively to put checks and balances on the Bush Administration's usurpation of constitutional powers. Indeed, the growing evidence that the United States is already conducting military operations in Iran demonstrates the urgency of placing limits on executive power. Anyone who wants to avoid national catastrophe should get busy defending it. Otherwise, George Bush's legacy may be: "He bombed Iran, and the collateral damage wiped out the Constitution."


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0422-22.htm

My instinct and my intellect inform me that it may be the latter Maus...I think we could find a few who thought their intentions were honorable, but history records otherwise. What is perhaps the worst thing is that so many Americans are unable to accept our errors. If you can't recognize errors you won't change.

Published on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Dying For Nixon, Dying For Bush

by Paul Rogat Loeb


"I didn't want to die for Nixon," said a man I met recently in a Seattle park. He'd served on military bases in a half dozen states, then had a car accident just before being shipped to Vietnam. "The accident was lucky," he said. "It was a worthless war and I didn't want to go."

I agreed. I admired those who fought in World War II, I said. We owe them the debt of our freedom. But to die for Nixon's love of power, his fear of losing face, his deception and vindictiveness-to die for him was obscene. Nixon's war, the man said, had nothing noble about it. And neither did Iraq.

What does it mean to die in a war so founded on lies? Bush may lack Nixon's scowl, but he's equally insulated from the consequences of profoundly destructive actions. He came to power riding on the success of Nixon's racially divisive "Southern Strategy," which enshrined the Republicans as the party of backlash. He won reelection by similarly manipulating polarization and fear. Like Nixon, he's flouted America's laws while demonizing political opponents. His insistence that withdrawing from Iraq would create a world where terrorists reign echoes Nixon's claim that defeat in Vietnam would leave the U.S. ''a pitiful, helpless giant.''

While Bush assures our soldiers they fight for Iraqi freedom, and to "make America safer for generations to come," 82 percent of Iraqis, according to a British Ministry of Defense poll, say they're "strongly opposed" to the presence of American and British troops, and 45 percent justify attacks against them. This creates what psychologist Robert Jay Lifton calls "an atrocity-creating situation." Lifton first used the phrase during Vietnam. He now uses it to describe a "counterinsurgency war in which US soldiers, despite their extraordinary firepower, feel extremely vulnerable in a hostile environment," amplified by "the great difficulty of tracking down or even recognizing the enemy." This sense of an environment out of control has seeded the ground for Abu Ghraib and for massacres, at the villages of Haditha and Mukaradeeb, already being compared to My Lai. Former Army sniper Jody Blake recently described his unit keeping extra spades on their vehicles so that if they killed innocent Iraqis in response to an Improvised Explosive Device attack, they could throw one next to them to make it appear those killed were preparing a roadside bomb.

Last December Bush called the Iraqi election "a watershed moment in the story of freedom." But if our invasion and occupation has created a watershed moment, it's one yielding rivers of resentment and bitterness that may poison the global landscape for decades to come. And when Bush talks of promoting freedom, the world sees the freedom of America to do whatever we please, no matter how many nations oppose us. America's Vietnam-era leaders made much of their embrace of freedom as well, while overthrowing elected governments from Brazil to Chile to Greece. The war they waged in Southeast Asia killed two to five million Vietnamese, plus more deaths in Laos and Cambodia. And as with Iraq, those making the key decisions were profoundly insulated: Out of 234 eligible sons of Senators and Congressmen, only 28 served in Vietnam, only 19 saw combat, only one was wounded and none were killed. In Iraq, as we know, the chickenhawks led the march to war, and the sole Congressman or Senator with a son who initially served was Democrat Tim Johnson, who the Republicans still attacked as insufficiently patriotic. The sons of Republican Senator Kit Bond and three Republican congressmen have joined him since, but like Bush and his cohorts, most who've made this war possible have never been intimately touched by it.

Counting Eisenhower's first deployment of soldiers and CIA agents in support of the French, the United States fought in Vietnam for over twenty years. We've been in and out of Iraq for nearly forty, since the 1963 coup when the CIA first helped the Baath Party overthrow the founder of OPEC. (And intervening in Iran since our 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected of Mohammed Mossadegh, where we replaced him with the dictatorial Shah). With this administration promising no immediate end in sight, Bush now tells us it will be up to "future presidents" even to consider withdrawing our troops. Who wants to be the last man or woman to die for George Bush?


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0425-20.htm

Published on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

When in the Course of Human Events…

by Sally Burnell


When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

– Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776


These majestic words are the preamble to the document that created our country and once and for all separated us from our colonial masters, Great Britain. Every summer, we celebrate this date with fireworks, backyard barbeques, parades, festivals and all other manner of summer celebration. We pause to remember those great men who took such an enormous risk to gather in the heat of a Philadelphia summer to sign this document that would forever sever the bonds of colonialism and would propel us forward into a brave new world, a new country unlike any ever created, where all people would be considered to be created equal, where freedom and liberty would be the hallmarks by which we were governed, and where the citizens had the right to redress of grievances from their government, a government that they could potentially overthrow if they found it to be in violation of its basic tenets.

We have reached an age wherein our government has become a tyrannical one, where dissent is discouraged, where religion is rapidly becoming the state, where our basic civil rights are being curtailed, and where our freedoms are being challenged in the name of a so-called “War on Terror." It would seem that few people realize how perilous our situation has truly become. We have three more years of this administration and if things continue unchanged along their current path, we will find ourselves in a country we no longer recognize. Already, it is beginning to look that way. We look more and more like the countries we say that we are fighting, where fundamentalist regimes keep a tight grip on their people and where dissent is not permitted. We have what could easily pass for state television, where propaganda is spewed out by screeds who command far too much attention and who seem to have limitless air time and money to buy it. We have proposed amendments to our Constitution that would ban things rather than extend rights. Only once in our country’s long history has any Constitutional amendment banned anything, and even then, it didn’t last.

We have an atmosphere of intolerance for anything that doesn’t fall into a narrow definition – if you are gay or in need of an abortion, don’t even think of saying so. Our once cherished standards for human rights are being trammeled on by a few extremists who feel that the only way to fight and win a War on Terror is to practice the same kinds of tactics as our enemies. Our good name overseas is gone, and we find ourselves isolated in the world community and regarded as some kind of rogue state. We are in more danger now of a terrorist attack on our soil than we were before 9/11. Had we practiced more cultural sensitivity and worked to wean ourselves off of Middle East oil decades ago, this entire episode might well have been avoided in the first place. So here we are, in the opening years of the 21st century, in a country that has, essentially, been hijacked by a few extremists bent on forwarding their agenda, and what used to pass for an opposition party seems to be scrambling to move more toward the center and become a “lite” version of them rather than come out in full throated opposition. Fear has emasculated the once mighty Democratic Party.

So what are we to do about all this? Sit back, wring our hands and lament the loss of our country, or do what our forebears did and demand a change of government when the one we have has slid into tyranny? Times were that the dreaded “I” word, that being “Impeachment”, was only spoken by a few of us who knew that this was a tool written into our Constitution that guaranteed us the right to a redress of grievances and a change of government. Even the Declaration of Independence tells us that we should declare the causes which impel us to the separation of political bands which connect us. Those causes have been made more than clear and it’s time now to do something about it. We can no longer sit idly by and sigh and hope that something will happen someday. That someday can’t come soon enough. We can’t afford another three years of this disastrous administration. The time is now to come together and speak with one voice. Two hundred and thirty years ago this summer, our forebears took a great leap into the unknown by their actions. Change is scary, sure, but we must demand a change for the better and dispatch this administration home to Texas and Wyoming to their hallowed “ranchettes” to play cowboy to their hearts content while we go about the business of repairing the damage that they have done to our sacred country.

What better time than now, approaching the 230th anniversary of our country?


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0425-31.htm

Published on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

The Ten Worst Corporations of 2005

by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman


2005 was a good year for bad corporations.



There were no U.S. elections to worry about, with their troubling possibility of politicians running on the popular platform of curbing corporate power.

There were corporate scandals and corporate crime and violence galore, but none that rated the ongoing banner headlines of Enron and WorldCom.

Indeed, the ongoing prosecutions of individuals associated with corporate financial scandals enabled Big Business and its apologists to claim there had actually been a crackdown on corporate crime.

All leaving corporations free to buy legislation, profiteer, pollute, poison, and mistreat workers without restraint.

Benefiting from the spike in oil prices associated with the tragedy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, ExxonMobil recorded the most profitable year any company has ever achieved.

Thirty years ago, when the oil giants profiteered in the wake of the first oil embargo, almost half the U.S. Senate voted to break up the integrated oil companies. In 2005, just 40 of 435 members of the House of Representatives were willing to co-sponsor the leading legislation calling for a much more modest approach, imposing a windfall profits tax on the oil companies. Eight members of the Senate co-sponsored the leading windfall profits bill there.

In the U.S. Congress, corporations were able to ram through limitations on victims’ rights to sue corporate perpetrators (mislabeled class action “reform”), the NAFTA-expanding Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and an energy bill that deregulates electric utilities and actually gives tax breaks to the oil industry, among many other government gifts.

Perhaps nothing revealed Big Business’s cockiness more than the Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations’ efforts to undermine the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Sarbanes-Oxley imposes very modest anti-fraud requirements on corporations. It was the only reform legislation passed after the Enron and related financial scandals.

These corporations will never stop on their own.

Asked to comment on a recent Harris poll that found 90 percent of people in the United States believe corporations have too much power in Washington, D.C., Hank Cox, a spokesperson for the National Association of Manufacturers, replies, “That’s a perception fostered by the news media and the entertainment industry, and if they really had any idea of how little power corporations have they would be astounded.”

The corporations will never give up power, unless forced to do so by the people.

Where to start?

No better place than the 10 worst corporations of 2005, presented herewith in alphabetical order:

BP

In November 2005, BP said that it expects to spend as much as $8 billion in alternative-energy projects, including solar, wind, hydrogen, and carbon-abatement technology, over 10 years.

It is running two-page ads in major U.S. newspapers touting itself as a leader in alternative energy.

This is part of a high-energy campaign to cover up BP’s dirty tricks that flow from its oil business.

To do so, it has to cover up its shoddy operations on the North Slope of Alaska, where it is seeking to bust open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, and its reckless operations at its refineries around the globe.

In March, 15 workers were incinerated, and more than 170 injured, following an explosion at BP’s sprawling refinery in Texas City, Texas.

It was the third fatal accident at the Texas City BP facility in the last four years.

In September 2004, two workers were burned to death and another was seriously injured.

In 2001, a maintenance worker at the facility died after falling into a tank that had been shut down. Nationwide, BP’s facilities have had more than 3,565 accidents since 1990, ranking first in the nation, according to a 2004 report by the Texas Public Interest Research Group (TexPIRG).

BP has admitted it was at fault in the Texas City explosion. “We regret that our mistakes have caused so much suffering,” said Ross Pillari, president of BP Products North America, after the company had completed an interim investigation in May.

“We apologize to those who were harmed and to the Texas City community,” said Pillari. “ We cannot change the past or repair all the damage this incident has done. We can assure that those who were injured and the families of those who died receive financial support and compensation. Our goal is to provide fair compensation without the need for lawsuits or lengthy court proceedings.”

There is a case to be made that BP engaged in criminal reckless homicide, or involuntary manslaughter. To prove this, the District Attorney in Galveston County, where the deaths occurred, would have to find that BP and its executives consciously disregarded “a substantial and unjustifiable risk that a death will occur.”

We believe that the families of the dead deserve a full-blown reckless homicide investigation by the District Attorney in Galveston County.

When asked about this, Mohamed Ibrahim, the first assistant district attorney in Galveston County, told us that his office had opened no such criminal investigation into the BP matter. “We have no reason to believe at this point that it was anything but an unfortunate industrial accident,” Ibrahim said.

“If OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] came to us and said it was a result of criminal recklessness, we would look at an investigation,” he added.

In September, OSHA fined the company $21 million for violating federal OSHA law. There was no criminal referral. Lesser workplace crimes this year have resulted in criminal convictions against smaller companies. BP gets off because it is a large multinational?

On the North Slope of Alaska, BP continues to muscle the political machinery to get its way.

Its reckless operations there — including unreported oil spills — will someday end up in an environmental disaster, long predicted by oil industry critic Charles Hamel.

BP is eager to portray itself as the good guy oil company, but it is not eager to answer tough questions.

In October, U.S. News and World Report held a press conference to announce “America’s Best Leaders 2005.”

The press event was paid for by BP.

BP’s guy at the door wouldn’t let us in.

No questions about corporate crime allowed.

Delphi

“I want you to view what is happening at Delphi as a flash point, a test case, for all the economic and social trends that are on a collision course in our country and around the globe,” Delphi CEO Steve Miller told BusinessWeek in October.

Miller’s view of how those trends should be resolved: with a leveling down of worker wages to the lowest common denominator, and provision of huge windfalls for executives.

In October, Miller took his company into bankruptcy, with the explicit purpose of trashing the social contract between unionized auto workers in the United States and the auto industry. He proposed slashing worker wages from $27 an hour to a mere 10 bucks.

In a fit of staggering arrogance, Miller and Delphi simultaneously proposed huge bonuses for company executives.

Delphi is the world’s largest auto parts supplier. In a strange arrangement, it was spun off from General Motors in 1998. Roughly half of its business remains supplying GM. Many critics say GM separated Delphi for the purpose of dumping unwanted expenses on the new company. But GM agreed to guarantee certain Delphi obligations — including healthcare and pension costs — in the event the new company was unable to meet them.

Delphi enters bankruptcy not in any severe financial crisis, but having experienced steady losses over the last several years.

In its bankruptcy filings, the company stated that three problems are driving down revenues: the wages and benefits guaranteed under existing union contracts, declining sales from GM, Delphi’s main buyer, and rising commodity prices. Through bankruptcy, it sought to address only the first issue — that is, to attack the living standards of its workers.

Delphi workers have reacted with predictable dismay and anger. “It’s difficult to see our middle-income jobs go away like this,” said Ron Garrett, 54, who has worked at Delphi’s Dayton facility for 21 years. “It’s very tough to see them go out the door.” Workers have picketed and demonstrated against Delphi’s proposals.

Their outrage has been stoked by the executive compensation plan Delphi has proposed in bankruptcy court.

Although Steve Miller has touted the fact that he has agreed to accept a salary of just $1 a year (he also received a signing bonus of $3 million after taking over the company in the summer, and $750,000 in salary before making the $1 pledge, and is due an unspecified bonus from the board of directors when the company emerges from bankruptcy), the executive class at Delphi will make out great.

Delphi has proposed in bankruptcy court through a “Key Employee Compensation Plan” that executives be given $43 million in incentive bonuses during the two years the company expects to undergo reorganization, that the top 500 executives pocket $88 million when the company emerges from bankruptcy, and that the top 600 get 10 percent of the shares of the post-bankruptcy Delphi.

Rationales for this?

Well, the company argued in bankruptcy court, “many of the company’s incentive-based compensation programs failed to provide salaried and executive workforce with total compensation that is competitive with the industry norm.”

Got that?

Because the company did poorly, executives made less money. The new plan is intended to remedy this perceived inequity.

Unfortunately, Delphi proposes the opposite deal for its workers.

Also, “the commencement of a bankruptcy case heightens employee concerns regarding possible job loss, and often increases employee responsibilities, creates longer hours, and imposes other burdens of an employer’s status as a debtor-in-possession.” In the dire time of bankruptcy, the company needs the “continued efforts and loyalty” of its executives, so they need big bonuses.

Workers’ “continued efforts and loyalty” are apparently thought available on the cheap.

Dupont

So, we kill Stanley Tookie Williams for killing four people.

And we fine DuPont $16.5 million for two decades’ worth of covering up company studies that showed it was polluting drinking water and newborn babies with an indestructible chemical that causes cancer, birth defects and other serious health problems in animals.

Sounds like rough justice to us.

A public interest group in Washington, D.C., the Environmental Working Group (EWG), brought the disaster to the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

And the EPA sued DuPont in a civil action in July 2004.

No crime here, right?

EWG reported on the case of Glenn Evers.

Evers was a DuPont employee of 22 years, one of the company’s top technical experts and the chair of an invitation-only committee of its 40 best scientists and technical experts.

He holds six patents, and his work has, to date, made the company an estimated $250 million in after-tax profits. Evers was, by his own description, a dedicated “company man.”

According to EWG, he was also the company’s top chemical engineer involved with designing and developing new uses of grease-resistant, or perfluorinated, chemical-based coating for paper food packaging.

Chemicals from these coatings and related sources are now in the blood of 95 percent of people in the United States.

DuPont has claimed that it does not know how the chemicals got there — and that it is not aware that the company’s product is responsible.

“If we had any reason to believe that [there] was a safety issue for fluorinated telomers-based product, we wouldn’t have commercialized them,” DuPont Director of Planning and Technology Robert Ritchie told the Wilmington News Journal in 2003.

But Glenn Evers told EWG how his former employer hid for decades that it was polluting people’s blood with a hyper-persistent chemical associated with the grease-resistant coatings on paper food packaging. (For a complete history, see www.ewg.org.)

The EPA boasted that the $16.5 million fine was the largest administrative fine it has ever levied under a weak toxic chemical law.

But as EWG noted, the fine is less than half of 1 percent of DuPont’s after-tax annual profits from the Teflon product when averaged over the 20-year cover-up.

“What’s the appropriate fine for a $25 billion company that for decades hid vital health information about a toxic chemical that now contaminates every man, woman and child in the United States?” asked EWG President Ken Cook. “What’s the proper dollar penalty for a pollutant that will never break down, and now finds its way into polar bears in the Arctic and human babies in their mothers’ wombs? We’re pretty sure it’s not $16 million, even if that is a record amount under a federal law that everyone acknowledges is extremely weak.”

We’re pretty sure it’s not just a fine.

The poison is in the blood of 95 percent of people in the United States.

How many cancers has it caused?

ExxonMobil

Here is what ExxonMobil has to say about global warming:

ExxonMobil recognizes that although scientific evidence remains inconclusive, the potential impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on society and ecosystems may prove to be significant.
And this:

The earth has experienced a warming trend in global surface air temperatures during the twentieth century, but the cause of this trend and whether it is abnormal remain in dispute. Although recent temperatures are elevated, they are not unprecedented in the geological record, which shows considerable variation as well as previous periods that were as warm as or warmer than today.
Here is what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-affiliated grouping of 1,800 of the world’s climatologists — often needled for the extraordinarily cautious language it employs — says about global warming:

The Earth’s climate system has demonstrably changed on both global and regional scales since the pre-industrial era, with some of these changes attributable to human activities.
Globally, it is very likely that the 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in the instrumental record (since 1861).

There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.

Recent regional changes in climate, particularly increases in temperature, have already affected hydrological systems and terrestrial and marine ecosystems in many parts of the world.

The rising socio-economic costs related to weather damage and to regional variations in climate suggest increasing vulnerability to climate change.

The projected rate of warming [over the twenty-first century] is very likely to be without precedent during at least the last 10,000 years.

The impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately upon developing countries and the poor persons within all countries, and thereby exacerbate inequities in health status and access to adequate food, clean water and other resources.

Unfortunately, so far, the cynical, profit-motivated, short-term and self-interested views of ExxonMobil have mattered more than the evidence-based perspective of the IPCC.

That’s because the most profitable corporation on Earth has lots of political power and is skilled at amplifying its views, and the climatologists do not and are not.

ExxonMobil has funded dozens of front groups, think tanks, industry associations, corporate-friendly research centers, and purportedly independent scientists to spread its denialism. Greenpeace has documented the company’s support for a web of more than 100 organizations — from the American Council on Science and Health to the Washington Legal Foundation — that work to cast doubt on global warming science and likely consequences.

It hasn’t hurt ExxonMobil to have a (failed) oilman and the former head of Halliburton, an oil services company, as president and vice president of the richest, most powerful and biggest greenhouse-gas-emitting country, the United States. The company was not without influence during the Clinton administration, but has been able to gain complete access and shape policy during the Bush era, in ways large and small.

ExxonMobil, for example, in 2002 urged the Bush administration to push to have Dr. Robert Watson removed as chair of the IPCC, according to company documents obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Soon after, the Bush administration announced its opposition to the respected scientist who ExxonMobil said had a “personal agenda,” and a new chair was selected.

The company has also collaborated with the administration on the basic denialism project. A former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute and chief of staff of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, Philip Cooney, resigned in June 2005 after the New York Times revealed he had edited government reports to challenge the link between carbon emissions and global warming. A week later, Cooney was on ExxonMobil’s payroll.

ExxonMobil is not just fiddling while the world burns. The company is raking in record profits — more than $36 billion in 2005, the highest ever earned for a single company in one year — as it benefited especially from the spike in oil prices after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Given the company and the oil industry’s obscene profits, many are calling for a windfall profits tax. (If just 3 percent of ExxonMobil’s 2005 profits were taxed and invested in solar energy technology development, it would constitute a quintupling of the U.S. government solar R&D budget.)

But lubricated with oil industry cash, the Bush administration and Congress have chosen what might generously be called a different path. In July, the Congress passed an energy bill that showered tax breaks and other goodies on the industry — more than $4 billion worth, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

ExxonMobil is completely unashamed about this state of affairs. Outgoing CEO Lee Raymond testified before Congress about gas price hikes and industry super-profits in November. “If we are to continue to serve our consumers and your constituents, corporate and government leaders alike cannot afford to simply follow the ups and downs of energy prices,” he told a Senate Committee. The basic message: don’t tax us more, we need the huge earnings to find more oil to meet rising energy demand. Alternative energy is nice, but not serious.

Of course, it is not only by blocking efforts to address global warming that ExxonMobil is making the world a worse place.

It continues to stonewall on paying roughly $5 billion to fishing communities and Native Alaskans in punitive damages assessed for the impact of the Exxon Valdez spill.

It is lobbying hard for the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

And through a major oil development and pipeline in Chad, it is funding a dictatorial government that is using oil money to buy weapons. Amnesty International says that the ExxonMobil-led consortium operating the Chad project negotiated a deal enabling the oil companies “to effectively sidestep the rule of law in Chad and Cameroon, and limits the ability of those countries to develop effective human rights protection for their citizens over the next several decades.”

For more details on ExxonMobil’s sordid performance, see ExposeExxon.org, a website maintained by a coalition of environmental and public interest groups seeking to pressure ExxonMobil to “shed its past as an irresponsible oil company.”

Ford

One block from the White House, on Washington, D.C.’s 15th Street, Northwest, embedded in the sidewalk, in front of The Old Ebbitt Grill, is a bronze medallion honoring the life of Booker T. Washington.

The medallion has a picture of Booker T. and reads:

“As an influential African American, living in a time of escalating segregation, Booker T. Washington negotiated a course between accommodation and progress in advocating greater civil rights for blacks. His philosophy of ‘request’ not ‘protest’ allowed him to gain the respect of presidents and politicians, but sometimes alienated those of his own race. Washington believed education was a cornerstone for the advancement of blacks and his efforts to raise money for his beloved Tuskegee Institute helped secure its well-deserved reputation as a leading educational institution for African Americans.”
“My life work is the promotion of education of my race.”

— Booker T. Washington
Sponsored by Ford Motor Company

The Booker T. medallion is one of a growing list of U.S. volunteer pioneers being honored by the Points of Light Foundation.

Ultimately, the medallions will form a mile-long pathway in the heart of Washington, D.C.

There are now 20 medallions embedded on the sidewalks of 15th Street and G Streets in downtown Washington.

The monument — known as The Extra Mile — was dedicated on October 14, 2005 with great fanfare in a ceremony attended by former President George Bush and many extended family members of the honorees.

Each medallion is sponsored by a major U.S. corporation.

The one honoring Cesar Chavez, co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America, was also made possible by Ford Motor Company.

His plaque reads in part: “Under his leadership of nonviolent protest, the UFW was able to secure improved wages and benefits, more humane living and working conditions, and better job security for some of the poorest workers in America.”

Obviously, the company is no fan of Cesar Chavez — or Booker T. for that matter.

Ford is doing it to buff its image, as they say.

Why?

For one, officials in New Jersey are calling for an investigation of the company for environmental crimes.

It turns out that over a period of years, Ford Motor Company dumped millions of gallons of paint sludge into a now-residential area of northern New Jersey.

The paint sludge was from the Ford Motor Co.’s factory in Mahwah, once the largest auto assembly plant in the nation, according to an investigative report published in October in the Bergen Record.

The Record has put out a series of investigative reports on the dumping. They are compiled at www.toxiclegacy.com.

According to the series, before closing in 1980, the plant spat out six million vehicles and an ocean of contaminants — including enough paint sludge to fill two of the three tubes of the Lincoln Tunnel.

Millions of gallons of paint sludge were dumped in the remote section of Ringwood, which is now a residential area.

Children played in it.

Streams washed over it.

And early this year, New Jersey officials announced some cancer rates in the area are unusually high.

Tests commissioned by the Record found lead, arsenic, and xylenes in the sludge — some at 100 times the levels the government considers safe.

The Record found that Ford repeatedly dumped in poor communities and failed to clean up its mess.

Reporters with the Record dug up documents showing that Ford executives knew as early as 34 years ago that its waste had contaminated a stream that feeds the Wanaque Reservoir.

The documents show that the company tried to evade responsibility by presenting tainted land as a “gift” to the state, the paper reported.

The Record interviewed truckers who hauled Ford’s waste — they say that mob-controlled contractors dumped anywhere they could get away with.

They bribed, threatened, even murdered to maintain control of Ford’s waste, the paper reported.

Millions of gallons of hazardous waste vanished in their hands.

According to the Record, Ford says its dumping in Ringwood was legal.

Ford says others dumped in Ringwood and share responsibility for the pollution.

Well, let’s have a federal prosecutor decide.

There are points of light. (www.extramile.us)

And there are points of darkness.(www.toxiclegacy.com)

Getting cheap publicity by putting your name on a plaque is one thing.

Paying for the human and environmental wreckage you’ve caused in northern New Jersey is something else. (Not to mention matching your rhetorical concern with climate change and environmental well-being with company actions that help take the planet off the SUV-hardened fast track to planetary overheating. See www.jumpstartford.com.)

In honor of Booker T., we “request” that the U.S. Attorney in Newark take seriously the New Jersey hazardous waste case and open a criminal investigation of the company.

Halliburton

Try as we might, we couldn’t keep Halliburton off a list of the worst companies two years running.

The company has effectively made a business model of crooked dealings with the U.S. government. Getting caught, over and over, doesn’t seem to affect things much.

Here are the company’s lowlights for the year, via HalliburtonWatch: January 10: Halliburton admitted that it expanded economic relations with Iran despite the Bush administration’s insistence that the nation finances terrorism.

February 8: The U.S. Army agreed to pay Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary nearly $2 billion for work that nobody can prove ever took place. Army auditors determined in 2004 that 43 percent of the $4.5 billion requested by Halliburton under a major contract could not be verified under normal accounting procedures. Despite recommendations to withhold 15 percent of payment from Halliburton, the Pentagon decided to pay the company what it requested. “This is indeed great news for KBR,” said Andy Lane, chief operating officer of Halliburton, in a news release. “The Army and KBR have agreed to continue working closely together to resolve any remaining billing issues.”

March 2: The U.S. Justice Department opened a criminal inquiry into possible bid-rigging on foreign contracts by Halliburton, the company revealed. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said “information has been uncovered” that former employees of KBR “may have engaged in coordinated bidding with one or more competitors on certain foreign construction projects and that such coordination possibly began as early as the mid-1980s.” These bribes involve contracts in Nigeria, and occurred in the 1990s, when Vice President Cheney headed Halliburton.

March 14: Pentagon auditors found another $108 million in overcharges by Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary for provision of oil in Iraq, according to a disclosure by Representative Henry Waxman, D-California.

March 16: The Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will investigate complaints by one of its engineers who said the agency purposely tampered with environmental science in order to shield a lucrative drilling technique, pioneered by Halliburton and known as hydraulic fracturing, from pollution laws.

April: the State Department issued a report concluding that Halliburton’s repair work in Iraqi oil fields is plagued by serious cost overruns and “poor performance.”

June 29: At a Congressional hearing, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, then the senior contracting specialist with the Army Corps of Engineers, testified, “I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR [Halliburton’s subsidiary] represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career.” In August, Greenhouse would be demoted for her testimony.

At the hearing, Representative Waxman released a previously secret military audit criticizing an extra $1.4 billion in “questioned” and “unsupported” expenditures by Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary in Iraq.

July 22: Halliburton announced that its KBR division, responsible for carrying out Pentagon contracts, saw profits jump 284 percent during the second quarter of the year.

September 8: The Washington Post reported that former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Joseph Allbaugh, now a lobbyist for Halliburton, is in Louisiana helping his clients obtain disaster relief contracts.

But Allbaugh insisted he’s not in Louisiana seeking contracts for clients. “I don’t do government contracts,” he told the Post. Instead, he said he’s “just trying to lend my shoulder to the wheel, trying to coordinate some private-sector support that the government always asks for.”

September 15: Senator Frank Lautenberg, D-New Jersey reiterated his call for Vice President Dick Cheney to forfeit his continuing financial interest in Halliburton. Lautenberg points out that Cheney’s Halliburton options are worth more than $9 million. Cheney insists he has no ongoing financial entanglement with Halliburton because he will donate the profits from stock sales to charity.

September 20: Former KBR employees and water quality specialists Ben Carter and Ken May told HalliburtonWatch that KBR knowingly exposes troops and civilians to contaminated water from Iraq’s Euphrates River. One internal KBR email provided to HalliburtonWatch says that, for “possibly a year,” the level of contamination at one camp was two times the normal level for untreated water.

October: Senator Mary Landrieu, D-Louisiana, charged that a Halliburton subcontractor had hired as many as 100 undocumented immigrants to clean up areas damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The president of the subcontractor, Alabama-based BE&K, is Retired U.S. Navy Admiral David Nash. Nash was head of the U.S. office in Baghdad which handed out Iraq contracts. “There is no connection between the hurricane-related work we are doing in Mississippi and Louisiana and Nash’s involvement in Iraq,” a BE&K spokesperson told Reuters.

November 15: Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary and its subcontractors illegally abuse immigrants and undocumented workers in hurricane-damaged areas of the Gulf Coast, Roberto Lovato of Salon.com reported.

In an article titled “Gulf Coast Slaves,” Lovato writes of his travels throughout the storm-ravaged region where KBR’s cleanup contracts currently amount to $124.9 million.

He observed “squalid trailer parks where up to 19 unpaid, unfed, and undocumented KBR site workers inhabited a single trailer for $70 per person, per week.” Many suffer from work-related health problems, including diarrhea, sprained ankles, cuts, and bruises acquired while working for KBR. Halliburton denies violating labor laws, but immigration enforcement officials discovered undocumented workers at the Belle Chasse facility in October.

November 19: The Washington Post reported that a criminal investigation of Army practices that allegedly favored Halliburton over competitors during the pre-war contract award process has been referred to the Department of Justice (DOJ). This probe follows on allegations made by Army Corps of Engineers whistleblower Bunnatine Greenhouse.

In a written statement to the Post, Halliburton said it “continues to cooperate fully with the Justice Department’s investigation of certain issues pertaining to our work in Iraq.” “As the investigation is ongoing, it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time.”

December 2: The Army Corps of Engineers paid $38 million in bonuses to Halliburton for oil transport and repair in Iraq even though the Pentagon’s own auditors declared $169 million in costs for the work to be “unreasonable” and “unsupported,” Representative Henry Waxman revealed.

December 27: The Chicago Tribune reported that Pentagon contractor trade groups are blocking a Pentagon proposal prohibiting defense contractor involvement in human trafficking for forced prostitution and labor. The contractors do not want to be responsible for trafficking undertaken by their subcontractors. Halliburton subsidiaries have been linked to trafficking-related controversies.

After the Tribune reported in October on the kidnapping of a dozen Nepali men and their transport to work for Halliburton subcontractors in Iraq, Halliburton said it was not responsible for the recruitment or hiring practices of its subcontractors.

The U.S. Army, for its part, said questions about alleged misconduct “by subcontractor firms should be addressed to those firms, as these are not Army issues.”

KPMG

It is all about perception, isn’t it?

KPMG was charged in August with one felony count of conspiracy.

The Attorney General of the United States said that KPMG “has admitted to criminal wrongdoing in the largest-ever tax shelter fraud.”

Yet, there was no conviction. There was no plea agreement.

For individuals, partners, or executives who commit major crimes — yes. If there is a crime, there is an indictment. And there is a plea agreement. Or there is a trial.

But for major U.S. corporations or other large entities, like KPMG, if you commit a crime, you get a prosecution deferred.

Now, it’s almost automatic.

Ask Skadden Arps partner Robert Bennett. He’s the king of deferred prosecutions.

At the insistence of Bob Bennett, KPMG gets a deferred prosecution agreement.

Why?

Because if you indict KPMG, you might drive it out of business, à la Arthur Andersen.

But no matter, you can charge the company with a felony. And the Attorney General can get on national television and say that KPMG has admitted to criminal wrongdoing.

The U.S. Attorney in New York wanted to pursue criminal charges. But he was overruled by his higher ups at the Justice Department.

There is no doubt about it. KPMG engaged in criminal wrongdoing. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said so. But because of possible “collateral consequences,” there is no conviction.

Corporate crime is now crime without conviction.

It’s all about perception.

What collateral consequences? What law says that if you are convicted of a crime, you are driven out of business?

When reporters walked into the seventh floor conference room at the Justice Department for the press conference announcing the KPMG deal, they were handed a number of documents.

They were handed the Justice Department press release.

This informed us that KPMG has admitted to criminal wrongdoing and agreed to pay $456 million in fines, restitution and penalties as part of an agreement to defer prosecution of the firm.

The press release also informed us that “in the largest criminal tax case ever filed, KPMG has admitted that it engaged in a fraud that generated at least $11 billion in phony tax losses which, according to court papers, cost the United States at least $2.5 billion in evaded taxes.”

Reporters were also handed a tough statement by IRS Commissioner Mark Everson. “Simply stated, if you had a multi-million dollar tax liability, KPMG would find a way to wipe it out even when the firm’s own experts thought the transactions would not survive IRS scrutiny,” Everson said. “The only purpose of these abusive deals was to further enrich the already wealthy and to line the pockets of KPMG partners.”

“Since the income tax first came into being under President Lincoln during the Civil War, the wealthy have always paid more than average citizens,” Everson said. “But not according to KPMG. KPMG’s actions were a direct assault on our progressive system of income taxation, and, left unchecked, would have badly eroded the faith of hard working, taxpaying Americans in the fairness of government itself.”

“At some point such conduct passes from clever accounting and lawyering to theft from the people,” Everson said. “We simply can’t tolerate flagrant abuse of the law and of professional obligations by tax practitioners, particularly those associated with so-called blue chip firms like KPMG that, by virtue of their prominence, set the standard of conduct for others. Accountants and attorneys should be the pillars of our system of taxation, not the architects of its circumvention.”

They can’t tolerate this grand theft, but they did.

If they didn’t tolerate it, they would have indicted KPMG and forced a guilty plea.

Reporters were also handed an indictment of eight KPMG partners and an outside tax attorney. These were the nine individuals behind the crime, prosecutors said.

The entity gets a deferred prosecution for criminal activities. It must pay $456 million in fines and restitution. But there is no loss of freedom to operate.

The individuals face a loss of freedom. That’s what prison is all about.

Why the double standard?

True, the entity must hire a monitor, in this case, former Securities and Exchange Commissioner Richard Breeden.

But who pays Breeden? KPMG.

How much? KPMG decides.

KPMG’s public response to the deferred prosecution makes clear the firm does not view the deal as imposing serious punishment (let alone deterrence). It was as if the company was required to stay after school for a day.

“KPMG LLP is pleased to have reached a resolution with the Department of Justice. We regret the past tax practices that were the subject of the investigation. KPMG is a better and stronger firm today, having learned much from this experience,” said KPMG LLP Chair and CEO Timothy P. Flynn. “The resolution of this matter allows KPMG to confidently face the future as we provide high quality audit, tax and advisory services to our large multinational, middle market and government clients.”

What documents were reporters not handed at the Justice Department news conference?

They were not handed a 10-page, single-spaced statement of facts that laid out the criminal activity in detail. And they were not handed the information charging KPMG with a felony. They came only later, after the Attorney General was asked, Where’s the charging document against KPMG?

Roche

Until recently, Swiss drug maker Roche’s sales of Tamiflu were doing dismally. (Roche makes the drug on license from the patent holder, the San Francisco-based company Gilead.)

In 2001, sales of Tamiflu, an anti-viral intended to alleviate the flu, were $76 million. Health advocates criticized the drug as offering few benefits, and encouraged people concerned about the flu to instead get a flu shot.

Then along came avian influenza, and the threat of an outbreak of bird flu among humans. There is no available vaccine for bird flu, and Tamiflu appears to be the best available pharmaceutical defense for those exposed to the disease.

For now, avian flu is not communicative among humans. More than 150 people have been infected with bird flu since 2003, when the first bird-to-human transmission was recorded, and more than half of those infected have died.

Many public health experts believe that an outbreak among humans is virtually inevitable.

An outbreak could have extremely dire consequences. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control reports that, a “‘medium-level’ pandemic could cause 89,000 to 207,000 deaths, 314,000 to 734,000 hospitalizations, 18 to 42 million outpatient visits, and another 20 to 47 million people being sick. Between 15 percent and 35 percent of the U.S. population could be affected by an influenza pandemic, and the economic impact could range between $71.3 and $166.5 billion.” The illness and death toll would be much worse in developing countries.

Slowly, the message has begun to penetrate government officials’ and the public’s consciousness, and governments are, very belatedly, looking to stockpile Tamiflu in advance of a potential outbreak.

That has provided a windfall for Roche. 2005 sales of Tamiflu are expected to top $1 billion.

It has also created a bit of a problem for Roche, because it cannot make enough Tamiflu to meet demand.

Given the public health urgency of stockpiling the drug, Roche could have simply announced that it would license other companies to manufacture it, conditioned on payment of a reasonable royalty.

Instead, it chose a different course.

With no prospect of the company satisfying growing demand, it announced that it would not license others to produce the medicine. Nor could others easily make the drug, the company claimed. It said that the manufacturing process was extremely complicated and dangerous, and that the key ingredient to make the drug was in short supply.

As it turned out, all of these claims turned out to be deeply misleading, or worse.

As late as October 13, Roche insisted that it would not license the product to competitors, and that it was too complicated for them to make. These claims deterred officials at the World Health Organization from pushing for compulsory licenses enabling competitors to manufacture Tamiflu. (“There will be no way in the next two years a company would be able to produce generic Tamiflu,” the head of WHO’s influenza program said on October 6.)

Roche “fully intends to remain the sole manufacturer of Tamiflu,’’ company spokesperson Terry Hurley told reporters. He said that the company would not reveal production figures, on the grounds that such information was “commercially sensitive.” All drug makers are able to track other manufacturers’ sales through commercial databases — but the information is not made available to public officials. Hurley also offered the company line on the complexity of making the drug. Manufacturing Tamiflu involves 10 complicated steps, and would take two-to-three years for a new entrant, he alleged.

But October 13 would be the last day Roche could make these claims.

On October 14, the New York Times reported that the Indian drug maker Cipla had reverse-engineered the drug two weeks earlier, and would have small commercial quantities available by early 2006.

With the spread of bird flu being reported daily, countries in Southeast Asia, where the epidemic among birds originated, started clamoring for the right to acquire greater quantities of Tamiflu. Following Cipla’s announcement, many other firms soon said they could produce the drug as well.

Taiwan’s National Health Research Institutes announced it had figured out how to synthesize Tamiflu in September — in 18 days.

In Thailand, the Government Pharmaceutical Organization announced in November that it had capacity to manufacture 1 million Tamiflu tablets in 10 days.

Roche’s claim that making Tamiflu involved a dangerous and potentially explosive step also was revealed to be an exaggeration. Reported the Wall Street Journal: “that step — which involves a chemical reaction with sodium azide, whose explosive potential has made it the common choice in automobile air bags — turns out to be relatively routine, according to some pharmaceutical executives and scientists familiar with the chemistry. Although it is still dangerous, the process is well within the abilities of university chemistry labs, let alone the world’s top generic-drug makers, these scientists say.”

The shortage of a key ingredient in Tamiflu also proved a chimera. The drug is made with shikimic acid, which is found in the Chinese plant star anise (used as a spice in Chinese cooking). The limited supply of star anise placed a constraint on how much Tamiflu could be made, Roche had claimed. But it turns out that a Michigan State University professor had developed a technique to make shikimic acid without star anise — and that Roche had been using the technique under license for years.

With it increasingly plain that dozens of generic companies were capable of manufacturing Tamiflu, Southeast Asian countries were prepared to issue compulsory licenses to enable new manufacturers to start making the product.

With its posture of “fully intend[ing] to remain the sole manufacturer of Tamiflu” no longer tenable, Roche announced it would license other companies to make the drug. In December, it said it would enter intense negotiations with a dozen firms.

Many countries, it turned out, did not need to seek a license from Roche, compulsory or otherwise. As countries began moves to authorize generic competition by issuing compulsory licenses, Roche explained that Tamiflu was not patented in those countries. The governments themselves did not know what was patented, and Roche had conveniently let them operate under misperceptions that patents had been granted. This occurred in the Philippines and Indonesia, among other countries.

While production is expanded — and in addition to the generic entrance into the market, Roche has announced it has increased its manufacturing capacity 10 times over — there remains a shortfall to meet the stockpiling standard urged by many public health officials. The U.S. stockpile, for example, is sufficient to provide medications to less than 2 percent of people in the United States — about a tenth the coverage recommended by public health officials.

“Roche has had plenty of time to figure out what its options are regarding the licensing of the patents,” says James Love, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Consumer Project on Technology. “There are too many potential suppliers to undertake individual negotiations with each company. Roche needs to simply identify the relevant terms it will impose on generic suppliers and offer open licenses to anyone who can comply.”

If Roche refuses such an approach, says Love, “governments should issue the appropriate compulsory licenses in order to assure the competitive generics sector they can legally sell generic copies of the drug.”

Suez

One of the continuous challenges of Big Business is to develop stories that explain why the private sector is good and efficient and the public sector is bad, wasteful, and incompetent.

Given the scandals, criminality, and wastefulness that pervades so much of corporate activity, this is no easy matter. It certainly poses a major challenge for Suez, the French services giant that is one of the world’s largest private water companies.

Suez has been a leading purveyor and beneficiary of the global trend of water privatization — the selling off of public water systems to private entities, or the turning over of control and management of public systems to corporations such as Suez.

In negotiations over the World Trade Organization’s services agreements, Suez has worked through trade associations to ensure that the European Union works to pry open water service markets around the world to private and foreign corporations.

And the company has worked hand in glove with the World Bank to encourage developing countries to turn control over their water systems to private business.

However, Suez walks a fine line on the public-private divide. The company wants to extract profits from water service provision, but it wants to limit its investment obligations and maintain strong public bodies that can impose high prices on consumers, and make them pay. And, if and when things go bad, it wants to blame public agencies.

Thus Suez Chair and CEO Gerard Mestrallet talks not about privatization, but “public-private partnerships.”

“The success of public-private partnerships rests primarily on a sharing of roles between those parties whose skills are best suited to fulfilling them,” he says. “It is perfectly clear that the decision-makers in these arrangements are the public authorities, and whether or not they seek the expertise of the private sector is entirely their decision.”

To those who complain about the failure of Suez and other companies to expand and provide water service to the poor and lower-income groups, Mestrallet’s line is clear: blame the public sector. “At present, 95 percent of water services worldwide are provided by the public sector, so it is hardly the fault of the private sector if 1.2 billion people have no access to water and 2 billion people have no sanitation services.”

Things look a little different in the municipalities and regions where Suez has had responsibility for water provision, however.

As Public Citizen’s Water for All Campaign (now part of a new organization, Food and Water Watch) shows in an April 2005 corporate profile, Suez has raised service charges, underinvested and mismanaged water projects around the globe. City after city has found out the hard way what exactly Suez has in mind by “public-private partnership.”

In El Alto, Bolivia, mass demonstrations in January 2005 led the Bolivian government to cancel a water privatization contract with Aguas del Illimani, of which Suez is a major shareholder. “The Suez contract is a classic example of ‘ring fencing,’ where the contract obligates service delivery only in specific areas of the city,” explains the Water for All Campaign in its report. “What is termed the ‘served area’ in the Suez contract focuses water service provision on profitable customers and removes obligation from extending service to the newest and most marginal settlements — the areas most in need of improvements.” For those who did seek new connections, the price was $445, more than eight times the monthly minimum wage. With the contract cancelled, Suez is threatening to sue Bolivia for $90 million in lost investments and future profits.

In Atlanta, the Suez subsidiary United Water signed a 20-year deal to operate the city’s water system. Maintenance backlogs accumulated, with broken water lines sometimes taking two months to fix. United Water improperly billed the city. Although privatization was supposed to avert a rate hike, combined water and sewer bills rose by about 25 percent. After only five years, Atlanta opted out of the contract.

In Manila, the Philippines, pressure by the World Bank led the government to privatize the water system to two concessions, one led by Suez, in 1997. Within five years, water rates for Manila residents had tripled. Both the Suez and other concession won contract amendments that would weaken their performance requirements. Still, because the value of the Philippines peso dropped sharply with the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Suez wanted steeper rate increases. When the Manila authorities refused — the drop in the exchange rate of the peso didn’t mean Manila residents had more pesos to spend — Suez sought to renegotiate or abandon the contract. The company claims it is owed hundreds of millions of dollars by the Manila water authority, while the government claims Suez owes it money.
“Suez, the world’s largest water corporation, places profit over the human right to water,” says Wenonah Hauter of Food and Water Watch.

W.R. Grace

What does it take to get federal prosecutors to indict an asbestos company for endangering the health of the community?

If 2005 is any guide, it takes activist citizens who pressure their elected officials to “do something” to bring justice.

It takes conscientious federal officials who shrug off bureaucratic inertia and demand that justice be done.

And first and foremost, it takes editors and reporters who are willing to stay with a story.

One such reporter is Andrew Schneider, now deputy assistant managing editor for investigations at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Before moving to St. Louis, Schneider was a reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where, in 1999, he broke the story of how W.R. Grace’s vermiculite mine was killing its workers and residents.

He has written a couple hundred stories about Grace since then and was in Billings, Montana for the February announcement of the indictment against Grace.

With David McCumber, Schneider is the author of An Air That Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana, Uncovered a National Scandal.

Schneider told us that federal prosecutors and witnesses were “terrified” that Bush administration corporate connections would derail the indictment.

Prosecutors and witnesses were “terrified that it was going to be derailed at any moment,” Schneider said.

“They worried about Vice President Dick Cheney, who of course had his relationship with Halliburton, which had $4.3 billion worth of asbestos claims against them,” Schneider said. “They worried about his influence in killing off this prosecution. They worried about the asbestos legislation on the Hill that President Bush has been touting. Bush wins the election and goes on the stump talking about the poor corporations that have been bankrupted by these bogus cases. And that frightened the hell out of the investigators and a couple of the prosecutors.”

The criminal charge against W.R. Grace and seven of its current or former executives represents the first time in the history of the industry that criminal charges have been filed against an asbestos manufacturer for endangering the lives of residents.

And Schneider says the Grace indictment may well serve as a blueprint for prosecutors in other areas of the country to criminally prosecute Grace for endangering the lives of residents in their jurisdictions.

“How widespread it will be, I don’t know,” Schneider said. “But I know there is a great deal of interest from prosecutors in what actually went down. I’m just basing that on the number of calls that I received from prosecutors in different states.”

The indictment handed down against Grace in Billings charged the company and seven current and former Grace executives with knowingly endangering residents of Libby, Montana, and concealing information about the health affects of its asbestos mining operations.

Federal officials alleged that Grace and its executives, as far back as the 1970s, attempted to conceal information about the adverse health effects of the company’s vermiculite mining operations and distribution of vermiculite in the Libby, Montana community.

The seven individual and one corporate defendant were also accused of obstructing the government’s cleanup efforts and wire fraud.

Federal officials said that approximately 1,200 residents in the Libby area have been identified as suffering from some kind of asbestos-related abnormality.

Schneider says that more than 200 Libby residents have died from asbestos-related disease.

“We will not tolerate criminal conduct that is detrimental to the environment and human health,” stated Thomas Sansonetti, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division.

“A human and environmental tragedy has occurred in Libby,” said William Mercer, U.S. Attorney for the District of Montana. “This prosecution seeks to hold Grace and its executives responsible for the misconduct alleged.”

W.R. Grace operated a vermiculite mine in Libby, Montana from 1963 to 1990, as part of its Construction Products Division, which was headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Vermiculite was used in many common commercial products, including attic insulation, fireproofing materials, masonry fill, and as an additive to potting soils and fertilizers.

The vermiculite deposits in Libby were contaminated with a form of asbestos called tremolite.

Studies have shown that exposure to asbestos can cause life-threatening diseases, including asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma.

Federal officials alleged that health studies on residents of the Libby area show increased incidence of many types of asbestos-related disease, including a rate of lung cancer that is 30 percent higher than expected when compared with rates in other areas of Montana and the United States.

The government claims that the defendants, beginning in the late 1970s, obtained knowledge of the toxic nature of tremolite asbestos in its vermiculite through internal epidemiological, medical and toxicological studies, as well as through product testing.

Despite legal requirements under the Toxic Substances Control Act to turn over to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the information they possessed, “W.R. Grace and its officials failed to do so on numerous occasions.”

In addition to charging that the company concealed information from EPA, the indictment alleges that W.R. Grace and its officials also obstructed the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) when it attempted to study the health conditions at the Libby mine in the 1980s.

Despite their knowledge of the hazards of asbestos, the company and executives “distributed asbestos-contaminated vermiculite and permitted it to be distributed throughout the Libby community” by allowing workers to leave the mine site covered in asbestos dust, allowing residents to take waste vermiculite for use in their gardens and distributing vermiculite “tailings” to the Libby schools for use as foundations for running tracks and an outdoor ice skating rink.

And after W.R. Grace closed the Libby mine in 1990, it sold asbestos-contaminated properties to local buyers without disclosing the nature or extent of the contamination. One of the contaminated properties was used as a residence and commercial nursery.

In response to the groundbreaking series of articles in 1999 by Schneider documenting the hazards posed the Grace mine, “W.R. Grace and its officials continued to mislead and obstruct the government by not disclosing, as they were required to do by federal law, the true nature and extent of the asbestos contamination.”

Ultimately, the Libby mine and related W.R. Grace properties were declared a Superfund site by EPA, and as of 2001, EPA had incurred approximately $55 million in cleanup costs. If convicted, the defendants face up to 15 years imprisonment on each endangerment charge, up to five years imprisonment on each of the conspiracy and obstruction charges, and 10 years on prison on the wire fraud charge.

W.R. Grace could face fines of up to twice the gain associated with its alleged misconduct or twice the losses suffered by victims.

Federal officials alleged that Grace enjoyed at least $140 million in after-tax profits from its mining operations in Libby. Grace also could be ordered to pay restitution to victims.

Grace denies the charges. In a company statement released after the indictment was handed down, Grace said it “categorically denies any criminal wrongdoing.”

“As a company and as individuals, we believe that one serious illness or lost life is one too many. That is why we have taken so seriously our commitment to our Libby employees and the people of Libby,” the company said.

“The entire W.R. Grace team is supportive of the citizens of Libby. We hope that our continued and dedicated support for their long-term health care, combined with their characteristic strength and determination, will help them through these difficult times.”



Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. Mokhiber and Weissman are co-authors of On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction of Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press).

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0425-21.htm

http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/152892/

WWJD

Peace Takes Courage

America's Blinders

By Howard Zinn
The Progressive

April 2006 Issue

Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?

The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans - members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen - rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq. A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell's presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his "evidence": satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled "Irrefutable" and declared that after Powell's talk "it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction."

It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don't know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil," but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Woodrow Wilson - so often characterized in our history books as an "idealist" - lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.

Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was "a military target."

Everyone lied about Vietnam - Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991 - hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq's taking of Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil?

A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught.

We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was "we the people" who established the new government after the Revolution. When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times.

Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn't talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, "Father of the Constitution," said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like "national interest," "national security," and "national defense" as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that - not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor - is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there - the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be "checks and balances" - do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

The deeply ingrained belief - no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general - that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to "pledge allegiance" (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with "liberty and justice for all."

And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the "Star-Spangled Banner," announcing that we are "the land of the free and the home of the brave." There is also the unofficial national anthem "God Bless America," and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation - just 5 percent of the world's population - for his or her blessing. If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values - democracy, liberty, and let's not forget free enterprise - to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world. It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this "the American century," saying that victory in the war gave the United States the right "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around the world was "the calling of our time." Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: "The values you learned here . . . will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities."

What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in prison - more than two million.

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice.


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042506F.shtml

Published on Wednesday, April 26, 2006 by the Baltimore Sun

The Long War Posture

by Gregory D. Foster


The American public is being lulled into a false sense of insecurity. And insecurity, constructed or real, is what gives those in power - our purported protectors - their self-righteous aura of indispensability.

President Bush; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace; the head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John P. Abizaid; and the recently released Quadrennial Defense Review, among other authoritative purveyors of received wisdom, all warn us that we're embroiled in - and destined to be further subjected to - what is to be known as a Long War.

It would be one thing if such semantic legerdemain reflected revelatory strategic insight or a more sophisticated appreciation of the intrinsic nature of postmodern conflicts and enemies. But that is not the case. In fact, it's hard to avoid the cynical view that America's senior military leaders are willfully playing public relations handmaiden to their political overlords at the expense of a naive, trusting citizenry.

Even as Long War rhetoric artfully circumvents such politically discomfiting terminology as "insurgency," its underlying message should be clear: We dutiful subjects should be quietly patient and not expect too much (if anything) too soon (if at all) from our rulers as they prosecute their unilaterally proclaimed war without end against ubiquitous evil.

The intent of the message is to dull our senses, to dampen our expectations, to thereby deaden the critical, dissenting forces of democracy that produce political turbulence and impede autocratic license. Being warned here amounts to being disarmed - intellectually and civically.

For the unsuspecting among us, this is what adopting and institutionalizing a Long War posture actually means:

• It will give permanency to the manufactured state of collective fear and emergency that provides pretext for the further imperialization of the presidency.

• It will thereby extend the self-marginalization of a cowardly Congress that is shamelessly willing to waive its constitutional prerogatives rather than stand up to a self-anointed wartime commander in chief.

• It will have a "cry wolf" effect by numbing the public, which is tired of the permanent state of false emergency, to real threats and emergencies when they arise.

• It will provide a defensible excuse for those in power to indefinitely postpone any meaningful demonstration of conclusive results, and thus full accountability, in their expanding martial forays abroad (except, of course, when it is politically expedient to declare that a successful end is at hand in a particular situation).

• It similarly will provide an excuse for the continued neglect of other critical national (especially "soft" domestic) priorities - Social Security, health care, education, the environment - in favor of war's overriding importance.

• It will aggravate the undisciplined, unchecked practice of prolonged deficit spending that threatens to produce severe economic stagnation and budgetary crisis, especially as baby boomers become eligible for retirement.

• It will perpetuate the use of "emergency" supplemental military spending to circumvent the checks of the regular budget process and surreptitiously pad a bloated, gluttonous defense budget.

• It will lend continuing tacit legitimacy to the regularized use of force as a first (rather than a last) resort, diminishing the legitimacy and desirability of time-consuming, seemingly less decisive diplomacy.

• It will further blur the lines of demarcation between war and peace, domestic and international, military and police, criminal justice and intelligence, normalcy and emergency. The blurring of lines among military, police and intelligence activities will make the military less accountable to civilian authority.

• It will further threaten civil liberties, marginalize dissent and dissenters as unpatriotic, heighten government secrecy at the expense of transparency and engender continuing media self-censorship, all in the name of necessity, urgency and clear and present danger.

• It will perpetuate the self-serving Pentagon mythology of defense transformation by fostering the misleading impression that the rhetorical commitment to the Long War is matched by an underlying reality of overhaul in military missions, structures and capabilities.

• It will accentuate the alienation of the military from society in two ways: first, by reinforcing the belief of those in uniform that they are especially at risk and making undue sacrifices on behalf of a soft, lazy, unappreciative public; second, by exacerbating recruiting shortfalls and the attendant prospect of an increasingly unrepresentative force.

America's ruling elite has once again opted for rhetorical contrivance and the politics of fear over the bold, creative strategic leadership expected of the world's self-proclaimed only superpower.

Mesmerized by their own illogic, they have failed to recognize that perpetual war can never lead to the ideal state of perpetual peace that Immanuel Kant spoke of over two centuries ago. It can only drain us of all we are and possess.

Gregory D. Foster is a professor at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at the National Defense University. The views expressed are his own. His e-mail is fosterg@ndu.edu.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0426-24.htm

Published on Friday, April 28, 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle

Let Us Now Spit Upon The Earth
You Can Do it the Old Way, or You Can Do it Like Bush -- With Smirks, Mountain Bikes and Oil

by Mark Morford


Look, see those tire marks? That ungainly footprint? Feel that breath of humid doom upon your skin? Yes, the president was just here. Up in Napa Valley, riding his official Trek Mountain Bike One over the rocks and down the trails and through the cool California mud, a small army of handlers and Secret Service agents and emergency medical personnel by his side and/or rumbling along behind him in big black SUVs. It was very cute, in a fingernail-yanked-with-pliers sort of way.

It was Earth Day weekend. The president talked about how mountain biking helped him "settle his soul" and "burn off excess energy when you're living life to its fullest," which apparently means blindly running your nation into a bloody flaming wall at full speed like a drunk NASCAR driver on Ambien. He talked about how he enjoyed mountain biking because it had such minimal impact on the pristine, wild surroundings. Shockingly, lightning did not strike him dead on the spot.

Later on, the prez talked up the need for wildly implausible hydrogen-powered cars to the California Fuel Cell Partnership, a group who, if they had a drop of integrity and brains among them, didn't believe a single word he said.

Bush on Earth Day. It's like Satan talking up the joys of Easter. It's like Paris Hilton chatting about treating the planet with humility and grace. It's like Jerry Falwell gushing about his love of Brokeback Mountain, Eli Lilly extolling the virtues of meditation and green tea. It is, in a word, embarrassing. Humiliating. Intellectually bludgeoning. And hypocritical in a way, and at a depth, that is as nauseating to stomach as the testosterone levels at a Duke lacrosse frat party.

This much we know: Bush is, it has been widely noted, the worst environmental president in modern America history. He has done more to eliminate protections and pollute the air, sell off national forests, whore the waterways, drill for oil and eviscerate pollution regulation than any president on the books. His environmental record is abysmal, shameful, and includes installing two of the worst secretaries of the interior in history, the abominable Gale Norton and now her male counterpart Dirk Kempthorne, who have turned around and reduced protections and sold off more forestland to private concerns -- oil, timber, coal, you name it -- since the Harding administration.

And of course, we are the only "enlightened" nation in the world to publicly spit upon the Kyoto Treaty, a landmark global pact to reduce CO2 emissions that is still only considered the first baby step in tackling the very, very dire problem of global warming.

Bush is, after all, a failed oilman. He has done all he can to ensure we will be dependent on the black death for the next two decades, minimum, which is, not surprisingly, the average remaining life span of his favoritest CEO cronies in the oil business. Serve the masters first, the Saudi sheiks second, the American people about, oh, 157th. It is the BushCo way.

No matter. Up in Napa, the president talked about connecting with nature, about getting his heart rate up by getting out there and challenging himself against the rugged terrain. Nature, of course, was unimpressed, sort of neutral on the whole thing, Bush just another animal scratching tracks on her incredibly resilient skin. Nature has a Zen-like quality about such things -- or perhaps more like Vishnu-Brahma-Shiva, creator and preserver and destroyer, watching it all, shrugging, sighing, taking the long view. If nature could talk, she would tell Bush he will be worm food very soon, and by the way, the worms are furious. She would then go back to watching the baby giraffes play in Africa.

There is no beauty in American political policy toward the Earth. There is no poetry or grace or true heart in how politicians -- especially Republican politicians -- view our natural commodities, no respect unless it is based on fear, unless it is begrudging and resentful, like when a hurricane makes a mockery of the president's feeble and unconvincing attempts to prove he cares. Has it always been this way? Maybe. But some leaders are far, far worse than others.

This is perhaps the most frightening thing about the Bush visit, about him having the nerve, the sheer vulgar gall to discuss the quality of his soul while biking through a natural habitat his administration so violently works to defile. It is this: He actually meant it. Bush was probably genuinely heartfelt about enjoying his ride through our troubled trees. He thinks he is attuned and connected. He thinks nature is nifty and calming. And, simply put, there is no more dangerous a leader on the face of the earth who, in every policy and every law and every action, abuses and distorts and molests the world around him, and yet who can turn on an ideological dime and calmly glorify that very thing which he helps destroy.

Recall former Spokane Mayor Jim West, big scandal just recently, an outspoken and homophobic über-Republican on the outside, a guy who helped pass anti-gay legislation in Washington state and railed against gay rights in public, but who happily turned around and for over 20 years solicited 18-year-old boys in gay chat rooms at night and offered them free candy, T-shirts, sex, jobs. Bush is just like that. Abuse your issue openly during the day, screw it at night. And worst of all, give not a single thought to the brutal dichotomy.

Are there levels to hypocrisy? Degrees? Rings of hypocritical hell? It would appear so. After all, there are the common varieties of minor hypocrisies most of us live with every day, like claiming a deep concern for the planet but still using plastic bags and shopping at Target and enjoying a long summer drive. Like swooning over super-cute animals but never considering giving up our cool leather jackets and smokin' snakeskin boots. Like loathing obnoxious cell phone users but never thinking we might actually, you know, be one.

Hypocrisy is, verily, the American national pastime. It is part of our national character. But there is a point where hypocrisy takes a turn toward the abusive, toward the spiritually debilitating. It becomes less like livable hypocrisy and more like a mental condition, a barely functional psychosis.

And right now, we are, it seems, living smack in the middle of a decade of just such madness, led by a bumbling and confused, tepid little devil himself, happily biking through the trees as the forest groans.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0428-27.htm

Dubya Agonistes

By Robert Fox
The Guardian UK

Friday 28 April 2006


The negative report by the International Atomic Energy Authority on Iran's coming clean about its nuclear intent should be sending a chill down the global spine. In her best schoolma'am mode, Condoleezza Rice warns that "in order to be credible, the security council, of course, has to act".

Of course, she expects the UN to do nothing, and her remark is Bush-speak for: "Watch it; we're going to bomb you if you don't watch out - and probably we will even if you do watch out." She is echoing Cato in the Roman senate two millennia back: "Delenda est Carthago" ("Carthage must be destroyed") and nothing short of fire destruction and regime change would do for the arch-enemy Hannibal and his WMD.

It is now evident that the US is planning some kind of military strike against known, and suspected nuclear sites in Iran, with some kind of covert operation to overthrow President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is a high-risk option, as the US military have made plain to their president, and they're not keen to do it too soon. "But Bush cannot allow Iran to go nuclear on his watch. And the chances of diplomacy succeeding in this are nil," the respected military historian and New York Times correspondent Michael R Gordon said in London this week.

Ahmadinejad has said with a somewhat impious turn of phrase, he does not "care a damn" what the UN or others may do to thwart his peaceful nuclear ambitions.

The US air force have unsubtly being putting it about that they have new super-weapons that can do the job and get into the underground facilities at Natanz, Bushir and Tehran. There is the a tactical nuclear missile, the B61-11, and the satellite-guided BLU-28 bunker buster. There have been more magic weapons talked up by the US military than in the whole canon of Harry Potter stories. They never quite do what they say on the tin.

Seymour Hersh has pointed out in his New Yorker article about the military plans that the intelligence on Iran's weaponry is about on a par with that on Iraq in early 2003, in fact slightly worse. The chances are that a US strike would miss, and cause thousands of casualties. The Shia militias across Iraq would declare war, and the British troops in Amara and Basra, and even in Afghanistan, would be in the firing line. Worse still, hitting Iran is an even bet for triggering a global energy crisis.

The impasse on Iran shows a lack of imagination on all sides. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, despite his irritating bombast, is not the sole proprietor of Iran Inc; there are enough ayatollahs, army commanders and secular politicians on the street to give him a hard time. Moreover, developing nuclear weapons is notoriously difficult and often shambolic: look at Libya and Iraq's programme that had to be ditched in 1991.

The fear is that if nobody else will take action to stop Iran getting the bomb, the Israelis will feel they must, and soon. This is why the Americans are planning a campaign: they don't want Israel going it alone. Tony Blair is silent, as he was in the last few weeks of the run-up to war in Iraq in March 2003, having decided much earlier than advertised that he would go in with the Americans.

For President Bush, non-action is no option - a view that will be hardened by reverses in the mid-term elections in November. If it means bringing the temple down around his, and our, ears, so be it. Dubya Agonistes.


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042906H.shtml

Editor's Note: This perspective comes from an Ohio Republican. Michael A. Fox served as a member of the Ohio House of Representatives for 23 years and is currently a County Commissioner in Butler County, Ohio. Conservative on most issues, Fox has come to realize that the war in Iraq is about feeding our oil addiction and it doesn't sit well with him. He raises his voice eloquently against "trading the bodies of our young people for barrels of oil." As more and more Americans from both the right and the left discover that the current energy crisis is not temporary but permanent, the political ground underneath many different issues, from the environment to foreign policy, will shift.
--kw/TO


Bodies for Barrels: Betrayal and Energy Dependence

By Michael A. Fox
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

America's energy problems are not, as President Bush recently declared, because Americans have an "addiction to oil." Our energy problems stem from the failed leadership of two political parties - Democrats and Republicans.

For over thirty years presidents and congresses from both parties have had an addiction to playing politics and courting the special interests who fund their next election cycle - all at the expense of our national security.

They have betrayed us. America felt the first shock wave of energy dependence with the oil embargo of 1973. The lessons from that experience were clear - our nation and our economy could be brought to its knees by a handful of hate-filled lunatics in the Middle East; a lesson ignored by both parties. Since then, leaders from each party periodically paid lip service to energy independence, making symbolic moves designed to reassure the public that making America energy independent was important. But neither party ever made it a priority. Neither party has provided continuous and determined leadership to secure our national security by securing our energy independence.

The result? Never in our history has our country been more vulnerable to foreign influence and economic attack from our enemies. The neglect and betrayal by both parties has led us to an unspoken yet horrifically real and hollow energy and foreign policy that reduces us to trading the bodies of our young people for barrels of oil.

Like many Americans I trusted the President. I believe that he is a good and decent man. But like presidents before him, he cannot even seem to envision a policy that leads to energy independence. When he delivered his State of the Union Address a few weeks ago, I cringed when I heard him brag that "Since 2001, we have spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable alternative energy sources - and we are on the threshold of incredible advances." He announced the creation of an "Advanced Energy Initiative - a 22 percent increase in clean energy research." Big deal, like going to a gun fight with a toy knife.

Suggesting that we can somehow do anything meaningful to achieve energy independence by increasing our five year investment in research by roughly $200 million per year is laughable. To put this investment in energy independence in perspective, consider that since 2001 Americans have spent $200 billion dollars on pet food - 20 times more on buying pet food than the federal government spends on energy research.

Here's the essence of our energy policy. Imagine this: you pull into a gas station and tell the attendant to fill up the gas tank. It comes time to pay and the attendant asks "Which of your children do you want to sacrifice in payment." Which child must die? Ridiculous? How is that different than what we are doing in the Middle East?

The invasion of Iraq, the stationing of our 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean, the posting of our troops at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars annually throughout the Middle East is about protecting the oil fields of Saudi Arabia - our so-called ally who has provided funding for most of the terrorist groups that stir anti-American hatred throughout the world.

America invests hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of young people's lives and mangled bodies each year to make sure each of us can fill up our tank when we need it - bodies for barrels. But what if we had to trade our child (as so many have been called to do) for a full tank of gas?

Wouldn't we demand an alternative solution like a responsible energy policy that is as important to us as the Manhattan Project was during World War II or putting a man on the moon was in the 60s? I believe we would - and we should.

If it is financially sustainable for our nation to spend what some estimate will be a trillion dollars in the Iraqi War before we're finished, then why is it so outlandish to expect that we make an equal investment of national and financial resources to energy independence? If we are willing to ask our young people to sacrifice and die or get maimed so we can top off our tanks, then why are we not equally willing to commit our nation to energy independence?

Our nation's energy vulnerability is an outrageous betrayal by both parties - Democrats and Republicans. In the coming days you will see a frenzy of proposals coming from both Democrats and Republicans in the Congress. These proposals will continue to cascade until the November election and then we'll go back to business as usual.

These gestures are nothing more than symbolic gestures. The public needs more than symbols from our leaders; we deserve solutions. America has the ingenuity, intellectual infrastructure, spirit and knowledge to come through this crisis as we have others in our history.

Across America there are young minds teeming with ideas that deserve research funding so they can help us end our reliance on foreign energy. There are ideas that will enable us to conserve more energy, get more efficiency out of our engines and industrial enterprises and lead to alternative sources heretofore not even considered.

The missing ingredients are and always have been, leadership, vision, and will. Money follows vision. Our political leaders need to articulate a simple vision and actually mean it - energy independence.

Here's a start. As Congress currently debates a measure that will provide increased funding for the Iraq War why not adopt a policy that says: "Not one more dollar should be spent on the Iraq War or securing the oil fields and shipping lanes of the world unless an equal dollar is spent on research to secure our energy independence?" If it is important enough to spend a dollar sending a young man or woman to war then it is important enough as a nation to spend an equal dollar eliminating the threat that causes them to lay down their life.

America needs political leadership that looks beyond the next election and beyond the favor of oil and multinational corporate interests. There is nothing that America cannot achieve if we commit ourselves to a vision and support it with the full will and might of our nation. What happened to the days when our political leaders had the courage to do what is right and had the will to set politics aside to protect our national security?

There is nothing more important to America's future than securing energy independence. Without it, our children and grandchildren are likely to see wars of incomprehensible destruction. President Eisenhower once said that "the only way to win World War III was to prevent it."

We are at the threshold or Armageddon and the fuse that is likely to set it off is energy dependency, nations warring to secure scarce resources. Our ability to avoid the incomprehensible horror of World War III depends on our energy independence. Continued energy dependence will mean continued war. America can do better than an energy policy that trades the bodies of our young people for barrels of oil. In order to do this, each American has to stand ready to make whatever sacrifice is required to become energy independent.

Why not give research a chance? Why not give America's brilliance and innovative spirit a chance? Why not enlist the creativity and intellectual fire-power of our young people's minds and back it with the full might of our nation's wealth?

If we must, in the short run, spend billions of dollars to send our young people into battle to secure the oil our economy needs then let's match those expenditures with equal amounts going into laboratories and university research centers to find the solutions to our energy dependence.

How can our leaders send someone's child to battle knowing that the circumstances that make their sacrifice necessary are driven by the unwillingness of our nation to make the sacrifices that must be made to avoid the war we send them to fight? How can any congressman, senator, or president send someone's child to battle without being able to look them in the eye and tell them with conviction and truth that we will match their sacrifice with the courage, force of will, and resources to become energy independent?

Our leaders are the stewards of freedom and thus far they have betrayed the trust of the American people. On the day President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the speech he was to have delivered contained these words:



His words ring true today, and unless our national leaders break the bonds of energy dependence, the walls of freedom will come tumbling down.

Our leaders have been asleep at their posts. It's time that they wake up and rise to the challenge of our time. It's time for them to make some tough choices and break our chain of dependence. It is time for them to muster the courage to do whatever is necessary to make sure that not one American son our daughter is sent to battle to fight for a barrel of oil.

For me the choice is easy. What I don't understand is why our national leaders cannot see it. For the sake of our children, our future, and the security of America, it's time we force them to see the challenge and act.


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042906Y.shtml

DWB04... You never cease to amaze me with your posts...

outstanding article -
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042906Y.shtml

"Galbraith for President"

by John Nichols


Had it not been for the accident of his birth in Iona Station, Ontario, John Kenneth Galbraith, the greatest public intellectual of the second half of the American century, would surely have been considered presidential timber. As it was, the man whose Canadian birth barred him from seeking the nation's highest office had to settle for shaping every presidency since that of Franklin Roosevelt – either as a trusted counselor to the occupant of the Oval Office, a wise critic or, as was frequently the case, both.

One of the last veterans of the Roosevelt's epic first term – during which he worked with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration – he would go on to advise FDR's National Defense Advisory Committee and then to serve as an administrator of the Office of Price Administration, where the man who was as quick with a quip as he was with economic charts and tables noted that he ''reached the point that all price fixers reach -- my enemies outnumbered my friends."

It will be his epigrams, his one-liners and his sharp asides that many of his friends will miss most about Ken Galbraith, who has died at age 97. The genius of the economics professor so long associated with Harvard and with most of the good – or at least tolerable – presidencies of the 20th century, was that he was never so impressed by his immense knowledge or his powerful positions that he could not find a humorous, and sometimes cutting, phrase with which to note the obvious.

When he was one of President Kennedy's most trusted aides – and, ultimately, the ambassador to India – Galbraith was dispatched to Vietnam to survey the country to which Kennedy was being advised by others to dispatch military forces. Galbraith, who tried harder than just about anyone else to avert the turn toward quagmire, sent back a memo in which he reflected on the difficulty of distinguishing "friendly jungle" from "Vietcong jungle" and asked, "[Who] is the man in your administration who decides what countries are strategic? I would like to...ask him what is so important about this real estate in the Space Age."

As Galbraith biographer Richard Parker noted in his essential review of his subject's attempt to prevent Cold War hawks from convincing Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson from expanding U.S. military involvement in southeast Asia, it was in the fall of 1961 that, "Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, then Ambassador to India, got wind of their plan--and rushed to block their efforts. He was not an expert on Vietnam, but India chaired the International Control Commission, which had been set up following French withdrawal from Indochina to oversee a shaky peace accord meant to stabilize the region, and so from State Department cables he knew about the Taylor mission--and thus had a clear sense of what was at stake. For Galbraith, a trusted adviser with unique back-channel access to the President, a potential US war in Vietnam represented more than a disastrous misadventure in foreign policy--it risked derailing the New Frontier's domestic plans for Keynesian-led full employment, and for massive new spending on education, the environment and what would become the War on Poverty. Worse, he feared, it might ultimately tear not only the Democratic Party but the nation apart--and usher in a new conservative era in American politics."

(Parker's recent biography, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics [Farrar, Straus & Giroux], is necessary reading, as are Galbraith's own books, particularly 1958's The Affluent Society, with its Keyneseian indictment of "private wealth and public squalor" in American life, and 1992's brilliant The Culture of Contentment, which offers what is still the best explanation of the contemporary crisis in its observation that, "The long years of high budget deficits when they were not needed made it seemingly impossible to initiate stimulating public expenditures when they were now needed. The celebrated tax reductions for the upper-income brackets and the accompanying economics in welfare distribution had substituted the discretionary spending of the rich for the wholely reliable spending of the poor.")

The wittiest and wisest of "the best and brightest," Galbraith broke early and publicly with President Johnson over what had become the Vietnam War and helped the influential liberal group he had co-founded decades earlier, Americans for Democratic Action, move toward an opposition stance that confirmed that even Cold War liberals recognized the madness of engaging in a long-term ground war in southeast Asia.

Galbraith would serve as a distinguished father figure for the anti-war movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, lending his towering presence to student protests and the campaigns of insurgent Democratic presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972. Over the ensuing years, he would remain a steady critic of the imperial endeavors that would rob the U.S. treasury of the resources that could have built the great society.

Several years ago in a valedictory essay that drew together the vital themes of his long career as both an economist and as the Cassandra who warned of the overwhelming costs of misguided foreign policy , Galbraith observed, "We cherish the progress in civilisation since biblical times and long before. But there is a needed and, indeed, accepted qualification. The US and Britain are in the bitter aftermath of a war in Iraq. We are accepting programmed death for the young and random slaughter for men and women of all ages. So it was in the first and second world wars, and is still so in Iraq. Civilised life, as it is called, is a great white tower celebrating human achievements, but at the top there is permanently a large black cloud. Human progress dominated by unimaginable cruelty and death. Civilisation has made great strides over the centuries in science, healthcare, the arts and most, if not all, economic well-being. But it has also given a privileged position to the development of weapons and the threat and reality of war. Mass slaughter has become the ultimate civilised achievement.

"The facts of war are inescapable - death and random cruelty, suspension of civilised values, a disordered aftermath," Galbraith continued. "Thus the human condition and prospect as now supremely evident. The economic and social problems here described can, with thought and action, be addressed. So they have already been. War remains the decisive human failure."

The clarity of his vision led several generations of insurgent political strategists to imagine a "Galbraith for President" candidacy, only to be jarred back to reality by the fact that, while Galbraith had been a U.S. citizen since the 1930s, the Constitutional bar on foreign-born candidates disqualified the most attractive contender from consideration. Few political realities frustrated Allard K . Lowenstein, the boldest advocate for a 1968 Democratic primary challenge to Johnson than the fact that Galbraith, his friend and frequent ally, could not be the candidate. George McGovern, who made no secret of his esteem for Galbraith, would have been delighted to make the former Roosevelt aide and Kennedy ambassador his vice presidential running mate in 1972 – a selection that surely could not have hurt, and might well have helped, the Democratic cause of that year. And how amusing it would have been in 1984 if the mentally agile 76-year-old Galbraith had been the Democratic nominee against his doddering 73-year-old contemporary, Ronald Reagan. As it was, he would be boomed by liberals now and again over the decades as a potential candidate for the Senate from his adopted home state of Massachusetts. But it was never to be, perhaps because Galbraith's healthy ego told him that he was best suited for the top job.

Galbraith professed to be amused by the "Galbraith for President" talk, as he was by Canadian suggestions that he might want to come back and serve as that country's prime minister. But he did, with tongue planted only slightly in cheek, imply an interest in presidential politics that was more than merely academic. When the 200th anniversary of the Constitution was celebrated in 1987, American Heritage magazine asked prominent Americans to suggest how they would amend the founding document. Galbraith's reply: "My answer is obvious: That clause that excludes Canadians and others of foreign birth from the Presidency and, possibly, from the Vice-Presidency as well. My whole life was altered, as also, quite clearly, was the history of the Republic. Henry Kissinger, I cannot doubt, vociferously agrees."

A quite serious law professor Jonathan Turley would suggest some years later that Galbraith provided the classic argument for elimination the Constitutional restriction that "denied the nation some of our best and brightest."

When Austrian-born actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California in 2003, there was a flurry of talk about amending the Constitution in order to allow Americans who had been born beyond the nation's borders to be seek the presidency. It seemed at the time that the best argument for the measure was the fact that Galbraith, at 94, was still physically fit, intellectually exceptional and as committed as ever to the liberal ideals that had powered the most successful Democratic presidencies – a combination that made him far more qualified not only than the current occupant of the Oval Office but than most of the Democrats who aspired to it.

With Galbraith's passing, we are left with one less counter to his observation that, "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." Thankfully, we are left, as well, with John Kenneth Galbraith's wisest piece of political advice; his suggestion that: "In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong."

When Democrats nominate a presidential candidate who is as capable as Galbraith was of articulating that sentiment, the liberalism that our late economist so loved will indeed be resurgent.


http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=80925

Published on Monday, May 1, 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle

Fighting the Hostile Takeover

by David Sirota

Amid all the consultant-packaged rhetoric about America being the "greatest democracy in the world," it often seems impossible to figure out exactly who controls our government. But every now and then, the public gets a fleeting glimpse into who is really running the show.

We get to see how there no longer is a boundary between Big Business and government, and how our politicians are wholly owned subsidiaries of Corporate America. We get to see, in short, exactly how our government has been the victim of a hostile takeover.

Last month, in three little-noticed stories buried in the business press, the hostile takeover was on full display. The first story was a tiny one buried on the inside pages of the Wall Street Journal about how the U.S. Treasury Department worked hand in hand with IBM to kill bipartisan pension legislation in 2003. The bill would have outlawed pension schemes employed by IBM and other big companies that give workers less than they were originally promised. The report noted that at the time, "a Treasury official disclosed nonpublic information to IBM and failed to report expenses paid by a lobbyist for a pension-industry trade group" -- all while allowing the company to circulate documents on Capitol Hill claiming the U.S. Treasury officially was working with IBM to kill the legislation. Clearly, the behavior ran afoul of the lobbying laws supposedly creating a boundary between business and government. But as the Journal went on to note, "The Justice Department didn't pursue criminal or civil charges in the matters because they didn't meet the agency's 'prosecutorial threshold.' " The legislation was ultimately killed. In effect, a major federal agency -- in this case the Treasury Department -- was the victim of the hostile takeover, serving as an arm of Corporate America, rather than a regulator.

A few weeks later, the well-respected trade publication Manufacturing & Technology News reported that the Bush administration continues to refuse to fully release a congressionally mandated report on the effects of outsourcing. Federal law required the White House to release the Commerce Department report well before the election in 2004. But the report "was delayed for clearance by the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress due to the controversial nature of the subject," the publication noted in an earlier story. Put another way, the White House and its corporate benefactors who were profiting from outsourcing didn't want to even talk about the pesky issue during the president's re-election campaign.

The only thing made public was a 12-page summary, released after the election, which "focuses on the allegedly positive impacts for the U.S. economy of the offshore outsourcing." The original report's findings from career civil service professionals was scrubbed from this shortened summary, and instead "quoted research conducted by organizations and individuals that have been funded by corporations that benefit from shifting jobs overseas." Again, a major federal agency -- in this case the Commerce Department -- was the victim of a hostile takeover.

Now, just a week ago, Business Week reported that companies are beginning to use America's bankruptcy laws not only to avoid fulfilling their pension, wage and health-care promises to workers, but to actually wholly eliminate U.S. jobs and ship them overseas. You may recall that last year, every bought-off Republican and Democrat in Washington was running around trumpeting the credit-card industry-written bankruptcy bill. They claimed that it would put an end to bankruptcy "abuse" -- but all it did was gut bankruptcy protections for individual citizens, while deliberately preserving critical loopholes for Big Business. It was the hostile takeover of Congress, whereby corporate-campaign donors convinced lawmakers to stiff their own constituents -- and then brag about it.

Not surprisingly, the corporate loopholes are being exploited. The magazine reports that Delphi CEO Robert "Steve" Miller -- the same guy trying to cut workers' pay by 40 percent while preserving executives' multimillion-dollar pay packages -- "wants to use the bankruptcy courts to drastically slash Delphi's U.S. presence, thus freeing it up to focus on its already vast overseas production." Delphi would be allowed to get out of its labor contracts, and slash its U.S. workforce by more than 70 percent -- all while preserving (and perhaps increasing) its workforce in cheap overseas labor markets. Additionally, as Business Week notes, if Miller gets his way and is able to use bankruptcy laws as a means to outsource jobs, other companies are expected to follow suit.

The fact that these examples received so little attention is no commentary on their significance. It is, instead, a commentary on how mundane the hostile takeover of our political system has become. It is no longer big news when our own elected representatives aid and abet monied interests that are trying to crush ordinary citizens. Only when we start to consider it big news -- and fight this takeover -- will we finally get a political system that starts working for the public good.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0501-21.htm

Published on Monday, May 1, 2006 by the Columbus Free Press (Ohio)

The New Totalitarianism Defines Desperate Neo-Con End Game

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman


As the Bush/neo-con kleptocracy disintegrates in a toxic cloud of military defeat, economic bankruptcy, environmental disaster and escalating mega-scandal, its attack on basic American freedoms---its "New Totalitarianism"---has escalated to a desperate new level, including brutal Soviet-style prosecutions against non-violent dissidents and an all-out offensive for state secrecy, including an attack on the internet.

In obvious panic and disarray, the GOP right has focussed on one basic strategy---kill the messengers. While it slaughters Americans and Iraqis to "bring democracy" to the middle east, it has made democracy itself public enemy Number One here at home.

The New Totalitarianism has become tangible in particular through a string of terrifying prosecutions against non-violent dissenters, an attack on open access to official government papers, and the attempted resurrection by right-wing "theorists" of America's most repressive legislation, dating back to the 1950s, 1917 and even 1797.

Bush's universal spy campaign is the cutting edge of the assault. The GOP Attorney-General has told Congress both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln engaged in electronic wiretapping. He has deemed the Geneva war crimes accords a "quaint" document and treats the Bill of Rights the same way.

Evidence of no-warrant spying on thousands of US citizens continues to surface. Like all totalitarian regimes, this one believes its best defense is to terrorize its citizenry by intruding, Big Brother-like, into all facets of personal life. Inevitably, it is moving prosecute whoever reveals that spying is going on, including a KGB-style search for the hero who leaked Bush's warrantless wire-tap program.

Along with spying comes official secrecy. The Bush regime is reclassifying millions of pages of harmless, marginal documents to prevent public scrutiny. It demands access to the papers of the deceased investigative reporter Jack Anderson so they can be reclassified. It has moved to prosecute reporters, government officials and even lobbyists who have use documents in ways the administration doesn't like.

In Ohio, the official secrecy has entered the state level. Governor Bob Taft, the first sitting criminal governor in Ohio history, is moving to classify thousands of pages of state policy papers. Taft recently admitted to four misdemeanor crimes involved with Tom Noe, a Republican hack now under both state and federal indictment.

Noe can't explain the whereabouts of some $15 million in state funds he supposedly invested. Taft says any documents that allow him to make policy are "privileged." As critics point out, if an aide hands him even a copy of a published newspaper, it becomes covered under "executive privilege" in the first time in Ohio history, and its "mis-use" can be a crime.

Should the trend expand, US citizens could find themselves shut out of access to even the most rudimentary official information at all levels, down to the smallest town.

Simultaneously, prosecutions against dissenters have dramatically escalated. Taft walked away from his convictions with a small fine and an apology. But a community organizer here has been sentenced to 119 days in jail for speaking out at a Columbus School Board meeting. A severe diabetic, Jerry Doyle has been temporarily turned away from his jail sentence due to life-threatening health problems. But authorities intend to imprison Doyle while Taft walks free.

Ironically, Doyle was initially charged with trespassing at the podium although he had an authorized speaker's slip. He was complaining about a school official, Sheri Bird-Long who stole some $200,000 from the school system, pleaded guilty to one felony count of having an unlawful interest in a public contract and one misdemeanor count of unauthorized use of property, a theft-related offense. Unlike Doyle, Bird-Long got no jail time upon conviction.

In Cleveland Heights, Carol Fisher has been charged with a major felony for putting posters on public lamp-posts. The posters are critical of the Bush attack on Iraq. Fisher, who is committed to non-violence, was assaulted by local police who ordered her to take down the posters, then threw her down on the ground and charged her with felonious assault.

"I am 53 years old," she says, "not exactly a spring chicken. A hand comes down to push my chin against the concrete. By this time there are four cops on the scene. My hands are tightly cuffed behind my back. They lift me up and shove me onto a parkbench and shackle my legs. I am still calling out, telling people what this is about."

Fisher says the police cursed her, shouding "Shut up or I will kill you!...I am sick of this anti-Bush "expletive deleted"!...You are definitely going to the psyche ward." Fisher now faces years in prison and the loss of her livelihood.

Such gratuitous, mean-spirited and overtly repressive prosecutions against non-violent dissenters have proliferated throughout the Bush era, in which ordinary citizens with moderate bumper stickers or t-shirts have been turned away from or arrested at public events.

The clear and present purpose is to spread a climate of totalitarian fear aimed at reversing the sacred American freedoms embodied in the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

The campaign runs in tandem with the attack on academic discourse coordinated by David Horowitz and other haters of open debate. In the guise of seeking "balance," the rightist campaign aims to purge liberals from the liberal arts.

It parallels the industry-centered attempts to clamp down on the internet, which has been the sole grassroots source of reliable information and dissenting opinion in the US for years.

With total corporate domination of the major media, only the internet and a few talk radio shows and liberal magazines have kept alive the American tradition of a free press. Predictably, the administration is using a corporate front to shut off this last source of open "diablog."

Bush has taken the same tack against science itself. As Joe Stalin exiled and killed researchers whose fact-based conclusions seemed to contradict the Party line, so the GOP attacks the overwhelming consensus among climatologists that global warming is real. With true Orwellian flare, the administration disappears official research (and researchers) whose data say the oil barons who define Team Bush must curb their emissions.

The repression has reached new theoretical levels. In recent weeks, right-wing journals such as the National Review have featured articles demanding enforcement of ancient legislation outlawing "sedition." With the US now "at war," the right-wingers say it is perfectly fine for Bush to arrest and imprison those who advocate peace. In particular they cite repressive legislation used in the 1950s to clamp down on "known Communists." They also cite acts passed in 1917, during World War I, and the Sedition Act, passed under John Adams in 1797.

These laws in essence gave the Chief Executive power to imprison American citizens at will. Woodrow Wilson used them to jail Eugene V. Debs and thousands more who resisted US intervention in Europe. Debs was sentenced to ten years in federal prison for urging resistance to a war opposed by a significant majority of the American people (Debs ran for president from his Atlanta prison cell in 1920 and got nearly a million votes). Some dissenters were arrested for carrying posters that quoted Wilson's own writings in favor of peace. Opponents of the military draft were routinely jailed without trial. A "Red Scare" was used as cover to smash the Socialist Party and radical labor movement, debilitating the American left for decades to come.

John Adams's Sedition Act had similar aims. Its reign was brief and less destructive. But according to the New Totalitarians, it remains in force, and should be used to crush opponents of Bush's Iraq attack.

The neo-cons have taken particular aim at generals and other officers who have criticized the Bush military strategy, if it can be called that. The critiques have merely underscored the astonishing incompetence of the Bush junta. They reflect the highest order of courage and patriotism.

But such honor and honesty comprise the New Totalitarianism's worst nightmare. With indictments flowing deep into the kleptocracy, the most anti-democratic of all American regimes has just two tactics. The first is to create a culture of fear while silencing the dissenters, by all means necessary.

The second is to rig voting machines and strip voter rolls to guarantee that no matter how deep dissent actually carries in this country, it will have no tangible impact on who holds the reins of power. In tandem comes the deliberate shrinking of the electorate through repressive ID requirements and digitized voter registration lists. Thus far up to ten percent---some 500,000 voters---have been stripped from the registration rolls in Democratic areas of Ohio alone.

Today Bush's popularity has sunk to about a third of the population, a level similar to Hitler's percent of the vote when the Nazis took power in 1933. The GOP neo-cons have clearly realized that they can only hold power with old-fashioned thuggery and high-tech Tammany.

Having lost the public debate on its suicidal military, economic, environmental and social policies, all-out repression and stolen elections are the two remaining pillars of the New Totalitarianism.



http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0501-31.htm

Published on Tuesday, May 2, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Why Impeachment is Essential

by Bill C. Davis



Say it and you’re told it won’t happen.

There’s a conscious rage and an unconscious self-defeating deference to the absoluteness of the power that caused the rage. Whether we know it or not we are devastated by that realization.

Impeachment: Impossible – stop thinking about it. Translated: We don’t matter. They know it and we know it. The “leaders” that perhaps, and in not a few minds, most likely, rigged two national elections, quite possibly allowed 9/11, definitely invaded Iraq and lied to do so, depleted the US treasury – or more specifically, redistributed the treasury to internal, private and corporate allies, sanctioned torture and domestic spying – those people can never be impeached or even investigated.

If we felt we owned the house, we’d say get out. But we don’t feel we own the house. We are reduced to squatters, who will grumble and pay fees for the plot of land allowed us, but we know now the land isn’t ours. We know the government and its treasury isn’t ours. So when someone says impeach – ie. evict – the response, even from the people who say it, is - not gonna happen.

But impeachment is essential. It is the remedy for, if one believes in it, the national soul. I think there is such a thing and it has material and physical manifestations. When it’s sick it demonstrates symptoms – when it’s healthy it yields harvests.

A legal and constitutional purge will return the sense of citizen ownership and spiritual health that was robbed along with election 2000. With that first theft all other thefts flowed. No - the clock can’t be turned back – dead soldiers can’t be brought back to life – flesh and blood limbs won’t grow back – the money to war profiteers most likely won’t be returned to the treasury – but the national soul, spirit, libido – whatever name we give the invisible American essence – that can be resuscitated and revived. And for that to begin to happen – impeachment is essential.

We are being surrounded by a world that doesn’t trust us anymore. They aren’t all hostile to us – they’ve lost faith in the power of the American people – and right to the point, as evidenced by comments such as “he should be impeached but it’s not going to happen” - we have lost faith in our own power.

It’s not personal. It’s not about how much we are embarrassed by or don’t like Bush. It has nothing to do with individual animosity and everything to do with collective power. When exit polls don’t match the official tally it doesn’t automatically mean that the time honored system of exit polls is suddenly unreliable, or that, as we were told, spouses were afraid to admit in front of each other who they voted for. It means something darker and more challenging. The American people did not take the challenge – we did what the coup expected we would do and we have been doing it ever since – until now.

We are at the “until now” moment. Democratic party leaders are uncomfortable talking about it. They think strategy. Impeachment is not a strategy. It’s a citizen action – a national correction – a collective redemption – an honest recall. It may happen city by city – state by state – but the body politic has the right, need, obligation to impeach.

"It’ll be over soon," is not good enough. "We’re at war," is no excuse. The war, as is now apparent, does not need, does not have, the president’s attention or wisdom. His job on that front is done – he sent the troops in. That was his role as defined by the Constitution and commandeered by criminality. The war is no longer his to orchestrate or end so if he goes, the war won’t notice, except in one way.

Extremist forces may not change their agenda toward us but the angry disappointed moderate elements may reconsider. Proving to that section of the world population that America is of, by and for the people will encourage them to act as blockades against violent reactionary elements. Impeachment could well be the secret weapon in our national defense. Impeachment could be the ultimate bunker buster that will purge the leadership that the world wants to get at, through us. Impeachment could move us from being collateral targets to active citizens.

The well-protected architects of this government’s suicidal policies are indifferent to what makes us safe. Anyone who talks so much about keeping us safe reveals something quite opposite. What are they trying to convince us of? And why do we believe them?

At the protest at inauguration 2001 there were mink coats, Stetson hats and lots of parties with lots of beef – and in the streets a feeling of free fall. It was just gonna happen – all of it – whatever lurked behind the front called GW Bush was going to happen even after we knew the majority didn’t ask for it. The free fall is still going on but instead of waiting for the hard landing – we can take the land and instead of falling on our backs, we can stand. But to do that – impeachment is essential.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0502-28.htm

Gimme That Old-Time Geopolitics

By Jim Lobe
TomPaine.com

Tuesday 02 May 2006


However much President George W. Bush's "Freedom Agenda" asserted itself into U.S. foreign policy in the wake of the Iraq invasion three years ago, traditional geopolitics - and the realpolitik that goes with it - is making a remarkably strong comeback.

From the energy-rich Gulf of Guinea, across the Islamic Middle East to Central Asia, the Bush administration has pretty much dropped its democratic pretences in favour of stability - and the "friendly" autocrats who can provide it, especially those with plentiful oil and gas resources and strategically - placed real estate vis-à-vis emerging foes, be they Russia, Iran or China.

The latest evidence took the form of the appearance Friday at the White House of Azerbaijan's president, Ilham Aliyev, whose party's sweeping victory in last November's parliamentary elections was widely denounced by western observers as fraudulent.

"We talked about the need for the world to see a modern Muslim country that is able to provide for its citizens, that understands that democracy is the wave of the future," Bush said at a brief photo-opportunity. "And I appreciate your leadership, Mr. President."

The photo-op was cut off before reporters could ask any questions about precisely what Aliyev's "understanding" of democracy might be, let alone Azerbaijan's placement as one of the world's most corrupt nations, according to the latest rankings by Transparency International.

Bush's warm words were a reminder of the visit here in mid-April of another corrupt - albeit far more brutal and long-ruling - dictator, Equatorial Guinea's President Teodoro Obiang Nguema.

While Obiang was unable to penetrate the White House gates, he did get a warm and remarkably public reception from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who praised her guest as "a good friend" of the United States.

Rice, whose outspoken - if largely rhetorical - championship of Bush's "freedom agenda" has recalled Joan of Arc's crusade for the French Dauphin, failed even to utter the words "democracy" or "human rights' during her appearance with Obiang.

What Aliyev and Obiang have in common, of course, is the fact that their nations' territory sits atop billions of barrels of hydrocarbons at a time when global supply is stretched very thin; the United States is more dependent than ever on external supplies; and presidential public approval ratings appear increasingly tied to the price of gasoline and home heating oil.

The same can be said of Kazakhstan, a major oil producer, whose president, Nursultan Nazarbayev - like Aliyev, an exemplar of the kind of corruption and autocracy that has dominated Central Asia since even before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 - will receive Dick Cheney on one of the vice president's extremely rare ventures outside U.S. borders this coming week.

Nazarbayev, whose election to a third seven-year term with 91 percent of the vote last December was also denounced by western observers, has ruled Kazakhstan since 1989. His security services - if not he personally - have been implicated in the apparent murders of two opposition leaders since the elections. Cheney, according to one government source, is expected-among other things-to renew a standing invitation to Nazarbayev to the White House.

In these exchanges, which have strong military, as well as diplomatic, implications, Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl sees a 'tipping point" that amounts to a "retreat from (Bush's) 'freedom agenda' ," particularly in the Caucasus and Central Asia where Washington finds itself in an escalating competition for influence - especially over the outward flow of oil and gas - with Russia.

'At the heart of Bush's democracy doctrine was the principle that the United States would abandon its Cold War-era practice of propping up dictators - especially in the Muslim world - in exchange for easy access to their energy resources and military cooperation," according to Diehl.

But "the race for energy and an increasingly bare-knuckled contest with Moscow for influence over its producers have caused the downgrading of the democracy strategy", he wrote, noting that Azerbaijan's proximity to Iran and the existence of a fairly significant Azeri minority in Iran might also help explain Washington's willingness to ignore Aliyev's autocratic peccadilloes.

That downgrading, however, is hardly confined to the former Soviet states, as is clear from Washington's unexpectedly public embrace of Obiang.

Indeed, the most spectacular pullback so far has been in the Arab world - the major focus of the freedom agenda - where Hamas's unexpected sweep of the Palestinian elections in January capped a string of strong showings by Islamist parties in Egypt, Lebanon, the Gulf and, most discouragingly, Iraq.

Those victories, as well as last month's forced exile of an Afghan Christian who faced a possible death sentence for having converted from Islam, has spurred a major rethink by key Bush constituencies - including the Christian Right and some prominent pro-Israeli neo-conservatives, if not by key administration officials - of the wisdom of aggressive democracy promotion in a part of the world where many people have serious problems with U.S. foreign policy.

In recent weeks, that has translated into a number of subtle policy changes that the administration has preferred not to highlight. Thus, after almost three years of applying maximum pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad - apparently in hopes of bringing about "regime change" - U.S. officials have recently begun praising Damascus' cooperation in halting infiltration of Islamists into Iraq.

Similarly, last year's high-profile pressure on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to implement democratic reforms and ease up on the opposition appears to have dissipated. For example, last week's harsh crackdown against protesters - who turned out in support of two judges accusing the government of election fraud - elicited scarcely a peep from Washington, which said it was merely "disappointed" by the extension Monday of a much-despised 25-year-old emergency decree.

Similarly, the shelving by King Abdullah of Jordan-or for that matter, of reform plans by a number of Gulf states - of an ambitious reform agenda has ruffled few feathers here, particularly in light of reports that Hamas's victory next door has boosted the popularity and organising efforts of the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Meanwhile, back in Central Asia, Washington is vigorously promoting the construction of a proposed pipeline project that would transport gas from Turkmenistan - whose regime's bizarre, Stalin-era cult of personality has made it impossible for Bush to substantially upgrade ties - to India as a substitute for a much cheaper Iran-Pakistan-India link.

The move underscores the degree to which Bush's declaration 17 months ago that the "ultimate goal" of U.S. policy was "ending tyranny in our world" has been cast aside in the interests of old-fashioned geopolitics.



http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050206D.shtml

Remember Kent State
May 4, 2006

Message from a Vet of My Lai Time
"Our Descent Into Hell Has Begun"

By TONY SWINDELL

A few weeks ago we got a friendly letter from Tony Swindell, a newspaper editor in Sherman, Texas. "Begin paying attention," Swindell urged, ''to stories from Iraq like the very recent one about U.S. Marines killing a group of civilians near Baghdad. This is the next step in the Iraq war as frustration among our soldiers grows -- especially with multiple tours.

''I served with the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, and My Lai was not an isolated incident. We came to be known as the Butcher's Brigade, and we also were the birthplace of the Phoenix Program. The brigade commander and a battalion commander were charged with murdering civilians (shooting them from helicopters, recorded in some of my photos), although both skated. If you recall from his autobiography, Colin Powell served briefly with the 11th in Duc Pho before going to division HQ in Chu Lai.

''The atrocities against Iraqi civilians are slipping under the media radar screen, but they're going to explode in America's face not too long from now and dwarf the Abu Ghraib (sic) incident. That was a fraternity beer bust by comparison. The Ft. Sill episode [described in JoAnn Wypijewski's piece from April, "The Army Slays Its Own."] is another one of the same storm clouds on the horizon. I sincerely fear for our country.''

We asked Swindell to expand these thoughts. Here's his powerful response. AC/JSC

In Iraq, our descent into hell, our "Apocalypse Now" moment, has begun. First there was Gitmo, then the global rendition program, then Abu Ghraib, then the pulverizing of Fallujah, and now trigger-happy raids that are filling multitudes of sandy graves with men, women and children. Has "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" become the mission in Babylon? Can't anyone remember Vietnam, where we left behind more than a million dead civilians? In Iraq, we've way past the half-million mark, probably the million mark, if you count the 1990s sanctions. Are the American people as blind and deaf as they seem? Don't we see ourselves walking through the gates of hell and can't we hear the doors clanging shut on our country?

Who am I to say all this, you might ask. Fair enough, I reply. So let me tell you a story about monstrous crimes and tragedies from my generation about to be repeated in Iraq in front of the whole world. First, understand that a single soldier can't be expected to grasp the total criminality of war because his whole universe is a tiny place right in front of his nose. So he can stay alive. If he knew everything that was going on, he would be heartbroken, and if he also knew why, he would go insane.

The narrowness of his vision is exactly how even the best and most humane soldier unwillingly becomes a monster, and the people who create war know this. Out of grief and rage, with the stench of his buddy's shredded flesh in his nostrils, the soldier stops asking questions and then begins making up his own rules with a rifle. He has touched the heart of darkness and there's no going back ever. Embracing the whore called war destroys morality, and doing all this in a dishonorable cause compounds the damage.

That's why we who have been there must speak out forcefully. If it requires a stiff punch in the mouth to jump-start some addled neocon brains, so be it. And for anyone who gets their political truth from self-inflating whoopee cushions like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, it will come none too soon. To remain silent this time risks the loss of everything that our country stands for.

The story I want to tell you begins on a miserably hot day in February, 1969, as I watched U.S. Army Col. John W. Donaldson put a cup of rice wine mixed with blood to his lips and drink deeply. No matter that the concoction was alive with heartworms, Donaldson never flinched. At the time, I was serving as an army combat correspondent attached to the 11th Light Infantry Brigade and my job that day was to follow Donaldson around, snapping picture after picture of the macabre festivities unfolding in front of my eyes. He was the brigade commander at a bloody punching bag called LZ Bronco next to the village of Duc Pho. The brigade base camp was part of the Americal Division, headquartered to the north in Chu Lai.

The colonel and a large contingent of other brigade and division officers were guests of honor at a Tet festival in the Montagnard village of Ba To in the central highlands southwest of Chu Lai. Nearby was a Special Forces A Team camp, an ominous triangular fortress bristling with 105 mm cannon at each corner firing flechette rounds. A snake couldn't have crawled through the maze of sharp barbed and razor tape wire surrounding the compound, and dozens of claymore mines were set in the walls. A claymore at close range will instantly render you into your constituent molecules.

The Montagnard village and A Team camp had been hit hard by concentrated North Vietnamese forces earlier in the week, and Donaldson's presence was in part a thumb in the eye to enemy commanders licking their wounds in nearby triple canopy jungle. The landscape gave me chills, because the beautiful, green-dappled hills all around the village were pockmarked with hundreds of fresh artillery and bomb craters exposing the bright red soil. I couldn't get the image of the Jolly Green Giant with a bad case of acne out of my mind. While topless Montagnard women spruced up the area with totems and bright banners to cover attack damage, a sacrificial water buffalo calf was slowly being prodded to death with a spear by the local village chief. It took about half an hour before the calf sagged to its knees in exhaustion, at that point too weak to even cry out. The chief then cut the calf's throat above a large earthen jug to catch the pulsing blood while another villager poured rice wine and stirred.

Unknown to the visitors, the Montagnards had earlier tortured to death three North Vietnamese captives and partook of their blood in the company of Special Forces A Team troopers. These unfortunate had been impaled through their anuses with bamboo poles and given the same spear prodding. Later, their bodies were staked out along enemy infiltration trails as a mortal warning to the enemy.

This day became my own personal "Apocalypse Now" moment, a full decade before the Francis Ford Coppola's movie was released. Not long before, we became personally aware that soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, had rampaged in My Lai when military police ransacked our hooch looking for evidence and then hauled Rusty Calley off in handcuffs. Meanwhile, Tiger Teams were creating ruthless, bloody havoc across the Batangan Peninsula against suspected enemy cadre. Brutality against civilians was standard operating procedure. Because of the Pacification Program mass relocations, entire swathes of the countryside began to resemble the Missouri Burnt District during the Civil War.

The Phoenix Program was in full swing, and it was the horror to end all horrors. I had earlier tagged along on a Phoenix mission directed by the ARVN National Police, and will spare you the details. Trust me, you do not want to know what was being done. Standing there and watching Donaldson drink from the cup, the profound symbolism of all that was wrong in this place hit me like a blow in the face. Ironically, an anti-war rag called the Overseas Weekly or Overseas latched onto one of my pictures and captioned it, "Army Brass Drinks Blood In Pagan Ceremonies".

By February 1969, morale in the brigade had hit rock bottom because of horrific casualties caused primarily from booby traps, and an entire battalion had been stood down as non-functional. The North Vietnamese were endlessly blasting our firebases with 122 mm rocket artillery, and LZ Bronco was soon to be hit more than 200 times during a famous assault that came to be called "Duc Pho Burning". Mutinies, insubordination and fragging of officers became commonplace. Soldiers cracked and a few committed suicide. One grunt over the edge opened fire into the POW compound, killing a number of captured enemy. Col. Donaldson and a battalion commander, two of the highest-ranking officers in the brigade, were charged with murdering civilians from helicopters while the My Lai investigation was still underway. A young Major Colin Powell assigned to the 11th Brigade ­ who was well acquainted with Donaldson ­ wrote in his autobiography about being stunned by what he saw going on in the 11th. Perhaps, he had experienced his own "Apocalypse Now" moment.

There's a numbness in my guts as I see the same nightmares becoming reality again in Iraq, and I wonder what's happened to America's soul. Is this what we want, another generation suckled on the poison of another renegade leadership? Gooks have become ragheads, every adult male is an insurgent eligible for torture, and every Iraqi home filled with men, women and children is a free-fire zone. Even places of worship get flattened. Once again, we've been marched into another lunatic asylum in the Twilight Zone.

How did it happen? Why did we sit on our hands and let our leaders initiate an unprovoked proxy war? A mushroom cloud over Cleveland delivered by a pipsqueak Iraq that couldn't even get an airplane in the air or a dilapidated tank outside its own borders without throwing a track? Gimme a break. How could the average John Doe let himself be deceived into believing that Saddam Hussein was really a threat?

With Iran now in the crosshairs, I pray that our national amnesia is wearing off. I know that from coast to coast a growing number of people ­ especially many combat veterans like myself ­ feel helpless, confused, frightened, and completely out of the loop. Three years into Iraq, why do we still keep hearing the same refrain, pre-emptive war into the next generation? On and on and on it goes, but unfortunately our emperors in Washington treat middle Americans asking hard questions like bill collectors at a funeral or, publicly skewer them as extremists and traitors. And don't even think about asking about Israeli involvement in the disaster that Dubya calls a Middle Eastern policy.

I listen in vain to hear the voices of young Americans who will be directly and immediately affected. Current events in the Middle East should be a paramount issue, but, inexplicably, the kids are completely nonchalant. Raised on the Internet and X-Boxes, maybe Iraq is just another Hollywood-style media production to them. But, I'm going to make a prediction. Our salvation will come when Selective Service notices begin arriving in mailboxes, and make no mistake, they are coming. I predict that young voices will soon become the loudest against empire as the hip-hoppers, the teeny boppers and the slackers rudely discover that involuntary combat means no video games or boom boxes, no marathon beer busts, and certainly no teenaged girls in thong bikinis.

We in the older generation can help things along. First, turn off the televisions and study a little American history, like the parts repeatedly warning us about foreign entanglements and passionate attachments. Really think about what kind of America we're handing to our children. Organize geezer squads to buttonhole politicians, and enlist a slacker cavalry to rain e-mail on every bureaucrat in sight. Let them all know we don't care about the new world order and its Manifest Corporate Destiny. Tell Washington that unprovoked, pre-emptive wars go against the grain of everything that's American, and we're no longer going to give it the Good Homicidal Seal of Approval.

While we're at it, let's make a sincere effort to tell elected representatives, loud and clear at every opportunity, that we want our government back from the political and corporate lobbies. Give the entire bureaucratic structure the message that we want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth on anything that affects our lives fast, before another bullet is fired or bomb dropped in anger. The U.S. State Department especially needs this message drummed into their heads until they all have tinnitus.

Don't leave out the Billy Grahams, Jerry Falwells, and Pat Robertsons, (comma) and their legions of religious robots. Ask these Bible thumpers a simple question: brother, who would GEE-zus bomb, torture, rape and murder? While they choke on their own hypocrisy, direct them to the Book of John in the New Testament for a theology refresher. Christ wasn't called the Prince of Peace for nothing.

Constantly remind anyone who'll listen to you that the American Revolution blossomed with a ferocious commitment to keep a new continent free from two thousand years of empires, monarchies, feudal dictatorships, and armed religious institutions held in power by brute force and the doctrine of might makes right. People like Washington, Jefferson and Franklin instead shouted no, RIGHT makes might. That timeless concept was an invincible weapon against King George's Redcoats and it is just as powerful against nuclear weapons and carrier battle groups.

Yes, it will take guts, but what's our alternative? Either we start living up to our own ideals or the world will very soon compel us to do it. If, that is, they even think we're worth saving.

FYI, my unit was given an entire chapter in the Time Life Vietnam War collection about combat photos and correspondents. In a nutshell, we went everywhere ­ with grunts, recon, Special Forces, combat engineers, artillery, wherever combat was anticipated. We pretty much served as the army's eyes, kept track of action and casualty info and passed it along, etc. As a result, we had a good handle on things. Our unit was almost totally made up of experienced combat soldiers who joined the unit after service in the bush. It takes a little sand to be able to concentrate on your camera while people are shooting at you with automatic weapons or high explosive rounds. I got shot down once on a combat assault against the North Vietnamese in the 1st Huey into a landing zone so I could take pictures of the grunts coming in. In all, I participated in more than 30 full-scale combat missions, and several more aboard Medevac flights. My buddies in the unit had equally harrowing experiences, with one taking an AK round through the lens of his camera. I think all of us each earned four battle stars in 11 months, which gave a 4-week early release from Vietnam. We all had nicknames, and mine was Torch.

http://counterpunch.org/

Published on Thursday, May 4, 2006 by the Boston Globe

Why Kent State is Important Today

by Michael Corcoran


Thirty-six years ago today, Ohio National Guardsmen shot 13 college students at Kent State University who were protesting US incursions into Cambodia as part of the Vietnam War. Nine victims survived, including one who is confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Four students -- Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, Bill Schroeder, and Sandy Scheuer -- were killed.

The students were unarmed, and the closest was more than 60 feet away from the Guard at the time of the shooting. There was no warning shot; the National Guard never issued an apology; and no one ever spent a day in jail for the killings despite the fact that the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, appointed by President Nixon in 1970, found the shootings to be ''unwarranted and inexcusable."

Yearly, since the tragedy, Kent State students, alumni, and others have met on the anniversary of the shooting to reflect and remember. Alan Canfora, who was shot by the Guard, says, ''The students today act as the conscience of the college, and the country . . . just like the students did in 1970."

This year's memorial will come, as the last three have, in the midst of a war that has become increasingly divisive. While the memory of Kent State and other violent clashes from that time between protesters and authorities did not deter the incumbent president from leading the country into another unpopular war, it is important to honor Kent State's spirit of dissent and what it taught about the bloody consequences of intense division.

Halfway across the country, the lessons of Kent State are taught each semester in debate classes at Emerson College. J. Gregory Payne, associate professor of organizational and political communication and a Kent State historian, has been teaching students about history, advocacy, and rhetoric through the lens of Kent State for decades.

According to Payne, remembering this tragedy is important because ''Kent State is not about the past -- it's about the future."

Consider the similarities: In 1970, just as today, we had an unpopular president carrying out an unpopular war for questionable reasons.

Richard Nixon and George W. Bush embody many of the same divisive characteristics. Bush tells the world: ''You are with us or you are with the terrorists." Nixon's public statement after the shootings blamed the students: ''When dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy."

Again our civil liberties are being threatened. Bush has ordered the wiretapping of US citizens without a warrant and holds detainees indefinitely without trial; Nixon was spying on student activists and what he called ''domestic radicals."

But, perhaps the most telling comparison is the sharp division within the nation, both then and now. Americans are now, as we were then, split to the core on matters of war and peace, life and death, and cultural values. The President's Commission concluded it was ''the most divisive time in American history since the civil war." Bill Schroeder's parents received signed letters after the shooting saying, among other things, that their ''riot-making, communist son" deserved to die.

Today antiwar protesters are unfairly discredited by the administration as they were in 1970. When Cindy Sheehan took antiwar positions after her 24-year-old son, Casey Sheehan, died in Iraq, she was smeared by pundits like Bill O'Reilly, who said she was a pawn of ''far-left elements that are using her" and that Sheehan was ''dumb" enough to let them do it.

Of course, the absence of a draft now and its presence then may explain why the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War had a greater intensity then it does now. Still, as the protests in New York City last week indicate, the longer the war in Iraq drags on, the more vehement the opposition seems to get.

Musicians, once again, are singing songs of dissent. Last Friday Neil Young, who in 1970 wrote ''Ohio" in reaction to the shootings, began streaming a new antiwar album ''Living with War" for free on his website. Days later, Pearl Jam also released an album made up entirely of protest music.

My generation can't ignore the lessons of Kent State. The same mindset and failure in leadership that led National Guardsmen to fire at students of the same age and from the same Ohio hometowns is similar to what led US soldiers to torture detainees in Iraq.

Kent State should remind us of what happens when a grossly misguided war divides a country. If we can speak candidly and openly about our history and our present -- even the worst elements of it -- then we can ensure that the lives lost on May 4, 1970, were not in vain.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0504-20.htm