some further info...
http://www.cqs.com/opmadcow.htm
ICI's ex-chemical weapon insecticide causes BSE & CJD Cover-up ...
Organophosphates Implicated In Mad Cow Disease
Cover-up: Insecticide causes Mad Cows & nvCJD
by Fintan Dunne
Research Kathy McMahon
ICI's nerve gas insecticide triggers BSE & human CJD
If Mark Purdey is right we are in big trouble. We are destroying our brains
with insecticides.
His groundbreaking research into the cause of BSE in cattle and new variant
CJD in humans, has been sidelined by United Kingdom officials. They
attribute both diseases to ingestion of prion protein found in
contaminated beef. But Purdey has evidence the government's anti-parasite
campaigns unleashed a chemical holocaust for cattle resulting in BSE, and
that human CJD is accelerated by the same chemical effects.
Could a chemical be that deadly? For fear of attack by Saddam Hussein, most
Israeli hospitals have antidotes to a deadly nerve gas developed by Nazi
chemists which contains organophosphate (OP) -- the same compound found in
the insecticides suspected of driving BSE and CJD. The vast bulk of the
cattle found staggering around in British fields with their brains burned
out, have been treated for warble-fly with a constituent of nerve gas.
The CJD and BSE symptoms also mirror 'manganese madness', an irreversible
fatal neuro-psychiatric degenerative syndrome that plagued manganese
miners in the first half of the last century. Could manganese and
organophosphate be causing these diseases?
Cambridge scientist David R. Brown is hot on the trail. His recent research
has shown that the prion proteins linked to BSE can bond destructively with
manganese found in animal feeds or mineral licks. His latest, as yet
unpublished work has found a tenfold increase in the metal manganese in
brains of CJD victims.
All this is fully consistent with the Purdey hypothesis. These
manganese-tipped prions could be the principal cause of the neurological
degeneration seen in BSE. But manganese is only the bullet --
organophosphate insecticide is the high-velocity gun. It fires manganese
into the brain by depleting copper which the manganese then replaces.
Purdey says the manganese-tipped prions set off lethal chain reactions
that neurologically burn through the animal. Phosmet organophosphate has
been used at high doses in British warble fly campaigns. Privately,
scientists will confirm that prions in the bovine spine -- along which
this insecticide is applied -- can be damaged by ICI's Phosmet
organophosphate insecticide. But few will state it publicly or publish it
as scientific finding. In 1996, former ICI subsidiary Zeneca sold the
phosmet patent to a PO Box company in Arizona called Gowan -- just one
week before the UK government admitted to a link between BSE and nvCJD.
Bonding the prion
Cambridge University prion biochemist, David R. Brown is dismissive of the
science behind the infectious model of BSE. He terms it "a very limited
amount of science by a few assumed -- reputable scientists." He insists
there is "no evidence an infectious agent is present in either meat or
milk."
"Simple tests on udder walls of cows -- which could easily detect an
infectious prion -- have not been done, why I don't understand."
A number of researchers have found that organophosphate (OP) in systemic
warble fly insecticide can deform the prion molecule, rendering it
ineffective at buffering free radical effects in the body. Worse still,
the prion is then partial to bond with manganese and become a 'rogue'
prion. A chain reaction whereby rogue prions turn others to rogues also,
can explain the bovine spongiform disease mechanism.
Brown showed how prion protein bonds benignly with copper, but lethally with
manganese. Even natural variations in relative environmental availability of
manganese versus copper can trigger prion degradation.
Chickens notoriously excrete most of the supplements fed to them --
including manganese. And their manganese-rich excreta have been blended
into cattle feed in the UK.
Scientist and organic farmer, Mark Purdey gave evidence to the UK BSE
inquiry, that warble fly insecticide was the cause of the disease. The
scientist wheeled out to rubbish Purdey's evidence -- Dr. David Ray, later
turned out to have been receiving funding from the insecticide
manufacturer ICI.
A lobby group that includes Bayer, Monsanto, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche and
Schering-Plough was behind the effort to discredit Purdey. In December 1999,
the same Dr. David Ray was appointed to the UK Veterinary Products Committee
(VPC) -- a government body that licences animal medicines.
Purdey has been consistently denied even exploratory funding to extend his
privately supported research. Yet the Purdey chemical poisoning model
matches with the epidemiological spread of CJD clusters in humans. It also
predicts the incidence of BSE-type diseases in animals. The accepted
infectious model fits neither.
The pharmaceutical industry has key motives to deny the chemical source of
BSE and CJD, because a spotlight on chemicals would expose the role the
insecticides in Alzheimer's -- another neurodegenerative disease. That might
lead to claims which would dwarf those from BSE and CJD litigants. In fact,
two leading brain researchers into CJD and Alzheimers have died in
suspicious circumstances in recent years.
In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency is already
reviewing Phosmet's safety. And the Centers for Disease Control in the US
has recently conducted experiments on mice that confirm the
organophosphate risk.
According to Purdey, not only is the EC beef slaughter campaign futile --
because BSE disease is mostly non-infectious, but unless the underlying
chemical cause is addressed, BSE will simply reappear from chemical
causes. A new warble fly campaign is already underway in France using the
organophosphate insecticide.
His greater concern is that some lotions for scabies and head lice are now
priming children and adults for CJD and Alzheimers in later life, and that
manganese in unleaded petrol may prove as deadly as the lead it replaced.
Shining a light on spongiform
Speaking from his rural English Somerset farm -- as plans forge ahead for
the European cattle cull, Purdey asks: "Why does CJD degeneration in
humans begin in the retina, and why are CJD disease clusters found in high
altitude
locations?"
The question is rhetorical, and Purdey has an eye-opening answer. He argues
that the prion molecule acts as a shock-adsorber of damaging energy from
ultraviolet rays and other oxidizing agents.
Once this prion defence system is rendered ineffective by organophosphates,
these oxidizing effects have an unmediated impact on tissues. Eventually, UV
radiation damages the retina and oxidative stress destroys the brain tissues
of CJD patients. This theory would expect to find higher CJD incidence in
mountain regions -- where UV radiation levels are elevated. That prediction
holds true.
A similar but accelerated mechanism could be driving BSE. ICI's Phosmet
organophosphate warble fly insecticide -- applied on the backs of animals
along the spinal column, similarly degrades prions. "Systemic versions of
the insecticide are designed to make the entire cow carcass toxic to
warble fly," explains Purdey. "Unfortunately it's toxic to prions too --
especially those prions located just millimeters from the point of
application."
Since first postulating an environmental -- rather than infectious - --
theory of spongiform diseases, Purdey has built evidence from around the
world that explains and predicts the incidence in humans and animals: a
cluster of CJD in Slovakia, Eastern Europe -- around a manganese plant;
Rocky Mountain deer with Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), who were found to
be eating pine needles rich in manganese; the futile slaughter of sheep in
Cyprus -- only for BSE to reemerge within years.
"The reappearance of BSE in Cyprus obviously points to an environmental
cause," says Purdey, who is sanguine when reflecting on the condemnation of
him by mainstream scientists.
>From this research, any prudent person would conclude there is a significant
risk attaching to the use of organophosphate in humans. Preparations for
head lice and scabies are known to be overused in practice and might be
priming users for CJ disease.
Purdey believes his bias for field work is the key to his success. He
bemoans the "reductionism" of much lab-centered science. "I have travelled
the world to investigate known clusters of spongiform disease - --
something mainstream researchers don't seem remotely interested in doing."
"I suppose they have mortgages and kids who need to go to university," he
muses. "Privately, some were agreeing with me, but then they would
denounce me publicly. It was quite strange really."
The money trail
Critical scientists like Purdey are unlikely to prevail. The pharmaceutical
industry holds most research purse strings, and would hardly energetically
explore an avenue of research that could expose them to litigation for
causing BSE. The official theory is lavishly funded, alternative theories
rarely, if at all.
There are more explosive implications to his -- and other's latest research.
Purdey says similar organophosphate-induced protein deformation could also
underlie Alzheimer's and related diseases. If that were true, the litigation
fallout would destroy some pharmaceutical giants, and a lot of very
influential noses would be out of joint.
Disturbingly, Purdey and other brain researchers seem to have had an undue
share of unfortunate accidents. Purdey's house was burned down and his
lawyer who was working with him on Mad Cow Disease was driven off the road
by another vehicle and subsequently died. The veterinarian on the case
also died in a car crash -- locally reported as: 'Mystery Vet Death
Riddle.'
Dr. C.Bruton, a CJD specialist -- who had just produced a paper on a new
strain of CJD -- was killed in a car crash before his work was announced to
the public. Purdey speculates that Bruton might have known more than what
was revealed in his last scientific paper.
In 1996, leading Alzheimer's researcher Tsunao Saitoh, 46 and his
13-year-old daughter were killed in La Jolla, California, in what a
Reuters report
described as a "very professionally done" shooting.
What Alzheimer's Disease, Mad Cow Disease, and CJD have in common, is
abnormal brain proteins and a putative link to organophosphates. Other
neurodegenerative diseases and even Gulf War syndrome among returning
veterans has been attributed, in part to the insecticide. But the
sidelined scientists' suspicions are still largely ignored.
In their favour at the moment, is a growing unease on the part of the
public. As BSE forges on and Governments panic, Science may be out to
lunch on BSE, compromised by bovine spongythinking myopathy.
Mark Purdey funds his own research, testing/labs/travel to cluster sites.
Donations to his research fund will help him carry on his work. Mark Purdey
Research Fund, High Barn Farm, Elworthy, Nr Taunton, Somerset TA4 3PX, UK.
http://www.cjdalert.com
Note from Jonathan Campbell
If organophosphates are indeed the causal factor in BSE and nvCJD, the
agrochemical giants such as Monsanto, Syngenta, and Aventis have more to
fear than litigation. As the toxic effects and persistence of
organochlorine
pesticides became known, the agrochemical industry shifted to
organophosphates, which represent the majority of insecticides and
herbicides in use today. They are the underpinning of highly mechanized,
pesticidal agriculture, which is used to grow more than 90% of U.S.
produce. Most non-organic produce today has measurable residues of
organophosphate pesticides. Evidence of danger of these widely-used
chemicals is a serious threat to a cornerstone of U.S. agribusiness.
Additionally most of the revenue and sales advantage of genetically
modified crops - such as Roundup-Ready Soybeans - are based on the
widescale use of organophosphorus herbicides such as Roundup and Liberty
(Basta). Serious health concerns regarding this class of pesticides would
place the genetic engineering of crops into question.
Jonathan Campbell, Alternative Health Consultant
Natural Therapies for Chronic Illness
36 Hartwell Ave., Littleton, MA 01460
Phone: 978-486-4140
http://www.cqs.com
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Subject: [pjnews] Convicted Felons Program Voting Machines
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http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html
Con Job at Diebold Subsidiary
10:05 AM Dec. 17, 2003 PT
SAN FRANCISCO -- At least five convicted felons secured management
positions at a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, according to
critics demanding more stringent background checks for people responsible
for voting machine software.
Voter advocate Bev Harris alleged Tuesday that managers of a subsidiary of
Diebold, one of the country's largest voting equipment vendors, included a
cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions and
a programmer jailed for falsifying computer records.
The programmer, Jeffrey Dean, wrote and maintained proprietary code used
to count hundreds of thousands of votes as senior vice president of Global
Election Systems, or GES. Diebold purchased GES in January 2002.
According to a public court document released before GES hired him, Dean
served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money
and tampering with computer files in a scheme that "involved a high degree
of sophistication and planning."
"You can't tell me these people passed background tests," Harris, author
of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, said in a phone
interview.
Diebold spokesman Michael Jacobsen emphasized that the company performs
background checks on all managers and programmers. He said many GES
managers -- including Dean -- left at the time of the acquisition.
"We can't speak for the hiring process of a company before we acquired
it," Jacobsen said. He would not provide further details, saying company
policy bars discussion of current or past employees.
The former GES is Diebold's wholly owned subsidiary, Global Election
Management Systems, which produces the operating system that touch-screen
voting terminals use.
Dean could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) announced a bill last week that would
require stringent background checks on all electronic voting company
employees who work with voting software. The bill, which Boxer plans to
introduce in January, would toughen security standards for voting software
and hardware, and require touch-screen terminals to include printers and
produce paper backups of vote counts by the 2004 presidential election in
November.
Harris and Andy Stephenson, a Democratic candidate for secretary of state
in Washington, conducted a 10-day investigation in Seattle and Vancouver,
where the men were convicted. Harris and Stephenson released the findings
in a 17-page document online and at a news conference in Seattle.
Also Tuesday, Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed announced legislation
that would require electronic voting machines in the state to produce a
paper trail. If the legislature approves it, touch-screen machines in the
state would be required to produce paper receipts by 2006.
Voters would get to see but not touch or remove the receipts, which would
be kept in a county lock box. Computer programmers say software bugs,
hackers or electrical failures could cause more than 50,000 touch-screen
machines used in precincts nationwide to delete or alter votes. California
Secretary of State Kevin Shelley said last month that touch-screens in the
nation's most populous state must provide paper receipts by 2006.
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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17329
Space Wars: Apocalypse Soon?
Bill Berkowitz, WorkingForChange.com
December 5, 2003
October was a busy month for two U.S. Lieutenant Generals, and they
weren't even in Iraq. Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin hit the headlines
when it was discovered that he had been visiting fundamentalist Christian
churches across the country delivering speeches sprinkled with anti-Muslim
bigotry. Dressed in full military regalia, Lt. Gen. Boykin equated the
"war on terrorism" with the "war against Satan," disparaged Islam, and
claimed that President Bush was "appointed by God."
While Lt. Gen. Boykin's remarks had an Apocalypse Now vibe to them, the
other Lieutenant General -- Lt. Gen. Edward Anderson, a deputy commander
of US Northern Command -- was more focused on Apocalypse Soon: He told an
audience at a geospatial intelligence conference in New Orleans that war
in space was, well, pretty much inevitable.
Lt. Gen. Boykin's defenders claimed that he's a "true believer" who was
merely exercising his free speech rights. Critics argued that Boykin's
anti-Muslim remarks made him a poor choice to be part of the new secretive
Pentagon squad set up to coordinate intelligence on terrorists and hunt
down Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and other high-profile targets. As of
this writing Lt. Gen. Boykin's fate has yet to be decided.
Lt. Gen. Anderson's remarks stirred up only a few headlines, caused a
slight rumble on the Internet, and then drifted off into the
media-saturated ether.
In this day and age, anti-Muslim-war-against-terrorism speechifying trumps
warnings of real wars just about every time.
China's Space Program: The Irritability Factor
The New Orleans conference was held about the same time China became only
the third country to put a man into space. When asked about this
development, Lt. Gen. Anderson told his audience that in his view, "it
will not be long before space becomes a battleground."
"Our military forces ... depend very, very heavily on space capabilities,"
Lt. Gen. Anderson, who was formerly a Deputy Commander-in-Chief of US
Space Command, said. The Chinese "can see that one of the ways that they
can certainly diminish our capabilities will be to attack the space
systems."
At the same conference, former defense department official Rich Haver
pointed out that the day when the US commonly uses space as a launching
pad for all types of exotic weapons is not that far off. Haver, who worked
for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld before becoming the vice president
for intelligence strategy at Northrop Grumman Mission Systems, told the
conferees: "I believe space is the place we will fight in the next 20
years."
While "there are executive orders that say we don't want to do that...
[and] there's been a long-standing US policy to try to keep space a
peaceful place... we have in space assets absolutely essential to the
conduct of our military operations, absolutely essential to our national
security," Haver added.
"When the true history of the Cold War is written and all the classified
items are finally unclassified," Haver continued, "I believe that
historians will note that it was in space that a significant degree of
this country's ability to win the Cold War was embedded."
Responding to a question about the Chinese space launch, Haver pointed out
that "the Chinese are telling us they're there, and I think if we ever
wind up in a confrontation again with any one of the major powers who has
a space capability we will find space is a battleground."
In mid-November, Chinese state media announced further plans to launch up
to 11 satellites in the next 14 months and to launch a second manned space
craft by 2005.
In some Washington circles, China has always been seen as a potential
military threat. Earlier this year, Aaron Friedberg, a China specialist
and Princeton University professor, was added to vice president Dick
Cheney's staff as deputy national security advisor and director of policy
planning. "He's a China-threat person without being hysterical about it,"
said John Gershman, an Asia specialist at New York University. "But his
appointment is a clear sign that the cooperation that has emerged between
the US and China on the war on terrorism and North Korea is entirely
tactical, and that Cheney is still inclined to see China as a strategic
competitor."
Friedberg, who has received nearly $300,000 from two conservative
foundations -- the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Lynde and Harry
Bradley Foundation -- wrote in a November 2000 piece for "Commentary"
magazine ("The Struggle for Mastery in Asia"), that "over the course of
the next several decades there is a good chance that the United States
will find itself engaged in an open and intense geopolitical rivalry with
the People's Republic of China (PRC)." Economic competition could give way
to a military conflict if "a single catalytic event," occurred "such as a
showdown over Taiwan," which "could transform the U.S.-China relationship
virtually overnight."
Friedberg was a co-signer of the 1997 founding charter of Bill Kristol's
Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which among other things
called for a new "'Reaganite' policy of military strength and moral
clarity."
In the fall of 2002, the Washington Times' Bill Gertz wrote of a report
sent to Congress by the Pentagon which claimed China was developing
"exotic weapons" including "high-technology arms" such as "laser weapons
and radio-frequency bombs, to boost its [China's] ability to successfully
carry out warfare against the United States and other advanced military
powers."
But the US may not only have China's space program to contend with. In
early November, the European Union published a 60-page white paper titled
"A New European Frontier for an Expanding Union," urging the allocation of
more resources on space technologies.
"Space is not only an adventure, it is also an opportunity. Europe cannot
afford to miss out," the white paper read. According to European Research
Commissioner Philippe Busquin, Europe faces two real risks if it does not
adopt a new approach to space policy: "Europe may run the risk of
declining as a space power and space companies could also suffer because
of weak commercial markets, and critical knowledge and skills could be
permanently lost to Europe."
Booting up the Chinese threat is as old as, well, China itself.
Conservatives and neoconservatives have long been wary of China and
apprehensive about its superpower potential. Lev Navrozov, who founded the
Center for the Survival of Western Democracies in 1978, recently wrote of
his intent to establish "a unique Chinese geostrategic research institute
employing the most sophisticated Chinese scientists, scholars and thinkers
from among the Chinese emigre dissidents in the United States" whose
"purpose is to convince the public that China is a geostrategic successor"
to the former Soviet Union.
And Charles R. Smith, President and CEO of SOFTWAR, a consulting company
specializing in cyber technology and security issues, and a columnist for
the right wing NewsMax.com, recently charged that the Chinese space
program "is designed for war" and Chinese leaders will be sharing its
"space images with its allies, including North Korea."
Seeking the Strategic High Ground
Since the beginning of armed conflicts armies have struggled to control
the high ground to more easily rain down death upon their adversaries.
>From the Reagan Administration onward, the US has been developing a
space-based missile defense system -- the Strategic Defense Initiative,
also known as "Star Wars" -- that would employ laser weaponry orbiting the
earth to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. While billions have been
spent on testing nuclear physicist Edward Teller's dream-child, many
scientists claim that not much has been concretely accomplished.
During the first Gulf War, the US "used sophisticated satellite technology
to pinpoint Iraqi targets" which gave it "an unprecedented view of the
battleground, showing every move that the Iraqi armies were making during
the war," writes Kevin Bonsor in a piece called "How Space Wars Will
Work." "Satellite imagery became the main source of information on the
Iraqi army during the war" and the Global Positioning System (GPS) -- a
constellation of satellites orbiting Earth -- "was used by soldiers on the
ground to determine their bearings."
Now, writes Bonsor, "The new high ground is space." According to Bonsor,
the U.S. Space Command's Vision for 2020 report recommends "that space
weapons must be developed to protect U.S. satellites, and other space
vehicles, as other countries develop the ability to launch spacecraft into
space."
Lt. Gen. Anderson's message at the New Orleans confab may have been
surprising in its directness, but he wasn't staking out new ground. Two
years ago, he told the House Armed Services Committee that "We must
prepare now to ensure our continued access to space and deny space to
others if necessary."
Back in 1996, Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Space Command, Joseph W. Ashy,
was quoted in Aviation Week and Space Technology: "Some people don't want
to hear this, and it sure isn't in vogue, but-absolutely -- we're going to
fight in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to fight
into space. . . . We will engage terrestrial targets someday -- ships,
airplanes, land targets -- from space."
A year later, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space, Keith R.
Hall, speaking at the National Space Club said, "With regard to space
dominance, we have it, we like it and we're going to keep it."
Bill Berkowitz writes for Working Assets
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http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/04/open-mikulan.php
Coffee, Tea or Handcuffs?
An Australian journalist gets a taste of Department of Homeland Security
hospitality
by Steven Mikulan
LA Weekly, Friday 19 December 2003
Sue Smethurst enjoys traveling. �It�s one of the things about my job that
I absolutely love,� says the 30-year-old Australian, who works as an
associate editor for the women�s magazine New Idea. She doesn�t even mind
flying. �It�s one of the great pleasures of the world to be able to turn
off your cell phone and be where no one can annoy you.�
But when her Qantas flight from Melbourne, Australia, touched down at LAX
around 8 a.m. on Friday, November 14, Smethurst found herself
nightmarishly annoyed � by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Smethurst was supposed to continue to New York and on Monday interview
singer Olivia Newton-John. Smethurst had honeymooned in Manhattan last
year
and was looking forward to a long, free weekend �having a good walk
through Central Park, getting a decent bowl of chicken soup and going
Christmas shopping � all those gorgeous New York things.� Better still,
her six-hour layover in L.A. would allow her to have lunch with her
American literary agent.
�I had a room booked at the Airport Hilton, where I was going to my leave
bags, shower and get a cup of coffee.�
But first she had to clear LAX�s immigration check-in, which she reached
after 20 minutes in line. An officer from the DHS�s newly minted Customs
and Border Protection (CBP) bureau studied the traveler�s declaration form
Smethurst had filled out on the plane.
�Oh, you�re a journalist,� he noted. �What are you here for?�
�I�m interviewing Olivia Newton-John,� Smethurst replied.
�That�s nice,� the official said, impressed. �What�s the article about?�
�Breast cancer.�
When Smethurst tells me this, she pauses and adds, �I thought that last
question was a little odd, but figured everything�s different now in
America and it was fine.� What she didn�t know was that her assignment and
travel plans, along with the chicken soup and stroll through Central Park,
had been terminated the moment she confirmed she was a journalist.
Fourteen hours later, she was escorted by three armed guards onto the 11
p.m. Qantas flight home.
�I want to say right off that I adore America and love Americans,�
Smethurst says. Still, she remains perplexed and emotionally bruised by
what followed in Terminal Four. The CBP agent who read Smethurst�s
traveler�s questionnaire took her to a secondary inspection area 30 feet
away and told her to wait, then left for half an hour. He returned with
additional uniformed staff who, professionally and pleasantly enough,
asked more questions.
What sort of stories did she write? What kind of magazine was New Idea?
Where was it published? What was its circulation? Does it print
politically sensitive articles? When would her interview appear? Who would
be reading it?
�I laughed,� Smethurst recalls, �because we�re a cross between Good
Housekeeping and People magazine. The most political thing we�d likely
print was Laura Bush�s horoscope.�
The polite interrogation continued. Who was her father? His occupation?
Her mother�s maiden name and occupation? What were their dates of birth,
where did they live?
The agents gravely nodded at Smethurst�s replies and left once more,
promising to return. When they came back half an hour later, one of the
officers offered Smethurst a cup of airport coffee.
�I thought at that stage something was quite wrong,� Smethurst says, �so I
asked the man with the coffee if there was some problem.�
�I will tell you when there�s a problem,� he abruptly snapped, according
to Smethurst. Then he pointed to a nearby sign: Your Silence Is
Appreciated
At about noon, CBP informed Smethurst she would be denied entr�e into the
United States: While Australian tourists visiting the United States are
visa-waived for 90 days, working journalists need a special I-Visa, which
Smethurst had not been aware of and did not possess. She had, after all,
flown into LAX on the same passport eight times previously without
incident. Now she was being asked to raise her right hand and swear that
her answers had been truthful, then was fingerprinted and photographed �
every time she comes to America, her swiped passport will bring up this
documentation of her rejection. As Smethurst�s inked fingers were rolled
onto the government form, she noticed its heading: �Criminal.�
Eventually she was escorted under armed guard to a pay phone to make the
call she vainly believed would clear everything up and allow her to stay
in the country. Then, while conversations were occurring among her
husband, editor and consul officers in L.A., Smethurst�s baggage was
thoroughly searched and a makeup bag temporarily confiscated. She was then
handcuffed and marched through the airport to another terminal, where
LAX�s main detention center is located.
After the phone call she pleaded for food, having now been away from home
nearly 24 hours. Smethurst offered money for a snack to be brought to her
� French fries, potato chips, anything � but was refused.
�Would it be possible to get a cup of tea?� she asked. This too was
denied, because it could be used as a weapon � someone, it was explained,
had recently thrown hot coffee into an agent�s face. When she requested a
cup of cold tea, she was similarly refused, although no one could explain
to her how a cup of cold water could become weaponized.
Finally, around 6 p.m., a �detention meal� was pulled from a fridge,
consisting of an orange, fruit-box drink and a roll that, Smethurst says,
�I could play golf with.�
For a while she sat in the main detention center, unable to eat the food,
as eight armed guards watched TV. Then one of the staff returned with a
bag of takeout and began eating a hamburger and fries in front of her.
�At that stage,� she says, �I just lost the plot completely and threw the
roll into the bin in front of me with sheer, utter frustration.�
The CBP would later call this gesture a �tantrum�; Smethurst, in turn,
claims that she was thoroughly body searched by female staff each time she
was moved from one part of LAX to another, and that she broke down in
tears several times, swearing to her captors that she was not a criminal,
had done nothing wrong and should be allowed in the country. She also says
one sympathetic staff member told her she�d simply had bad luck in getting
the agent she did at the first customs station, since the I-Visa rule was
enforced at the discretion of agents. Smethurst could have entered the
country by simply declaring herself a tourist on her traveler�s form � a
routine practice among reporters entering the U.S.
Eventually, Smethurst�s release was won by the Consul General�s Office.
The consulate also gained one other concession � the cup of tea she�d
begged for. It was prepared by a senior CBP official whom Smethurst
thought was the kindest American she�d met that day.
�It was the best cup of tea I�d ever had,� she says. �I didn�t waste a drop.�
There is, naturally, an official version that differs from Sue Smethurst�s
description of the events that day, but a spokesman for the Homeland
Security Department�s Customs and Border Protection bureau said he did not
want to �spend time on he-said, she-said charges.�
�She did become abusive,� CBP spokesperson Michael Fleming told me,
however. �We tried to calm her down. Handcuffing is a standard procedure
because sometimes good people can do potentially violent things. It�s not
our intent to parade passengers on a perp walk � Sue Smethurst is not a
criminal. It�s important for journalists to know to enter the U.S. on
assignment they cannot apply under the visa-waiver program. They have to
do their homework.�
When Smethurst returned to Melbourne, camera crews were waiting � all
major Australian media outlets reported her ordeal. The story was treated
as an example of bureaucratic arrogance run amok, because many parts of
the world are still outraged by what happens at American airports to
foreigners � and to many Americans. (Last September, the CBP at LAX
detained the Australian-born wife of a U.S. Navy sailor for five days,
while also briefly denying her infant daughter food and medical
attention.) Smethurst says she�s received hundreds of messages from fellow
Australians claiming similar treatment at the hands of U.S. immigration
officials and knows of two fellow journalists who were sent back to
Australia. When Smethurst�s editor, who planned to visit the United States
on business, inquired about obtaining an I-Visa, she was told it would not
be necessary. She is going to get one anyway.
Smethurst says U.S. ambassador Tom Schaeffer privately apologized to her
for her treatment, but will not do so in public. Not that it matters much
� the only U.S. press coverage of Smethurst�s ordeal was found in an
Atlanta Constitution squib culled from the Australian Associated Press.
Before November 14, she and her husband had planned to return to America
to celebrate their one-year wedding anniversary, but, as she learned,
everything�s different now in America.
�We decided to stay in Australia and celebrate here,� she says. �There was
always the chance we could have got the same customs officer if we flew to
America.�
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Subject: [pjnews]
Secret Resignation Letters of Bush Administration Officials
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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17309
Good-bye, Mr. President: The Secret Resignation Letters
By Arianna Huffington, AlterNet
December 3, 2003
(Author's Note: I've been working around the clock on my new book,
"Fanatics, Fools and Alpha Males," which will be published in March by
Miramax Books. In the spirit of the season, I'm sending you a succulent
slice from the book. It's a collection of resignation letters written by
disaffected members of the Bush administration who so disagreed with
administration policies that they preferred the uncertainty of the
unemployment line to toeing the party line.
I've also taken the liberty of including excerpts from what I imagine the
first drafts of these letters might have looked like.
So thanks to these unsung heroes.)
---------------
Mike Dombeck, Forest Service chief, resigned March 27, 2001, after four
years on the job:
What he wrote in his resignation letter: "It was made clear in no
uncertain terms that the administration wants to take the Forest Service
in another direction ..."
What Mike Dombeck wrote in the first draft of his resignation letter: "It
was made clear in no uncertain terms that the administration needs to kiss
a little logging-industry ass, having gotten nearly $300,000 in donations
during the 2000 election (10 times more than Al Gore). Mr. President,
after all that bark-bussing and timber-tonguing, it's a wonder you didn't
get splinters in your lip or a very painful STD (Sequoia Transmitted
Disease).
Fact: Before the U.S. Forest Service approves a timber sale on federal
land, loggers are currently required to study the impact on endangered
animals and salmon runs. The Bush White House is pushing to overturn both
of these requirements.
John Brown, Ph.D., was a Foreign Service officer for nearly 25 years,
having served in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev and Belgrade. He resigned
March 10, 2003.
What he wrote in his resignation letter: "I cannot in good conscience
support President Bush's war plans against Iraq. The president has failed
to: explain clearly why our brave men and women in uniform should be ready
to sacrifice their lives in a war on Iraq at this time; to lay out the
full ramifications of this war, including the extent of innocent civilian
casualties; to specify the economic costs of the war for the ordinary
Americans; to clarify how the war would help rid the world of terror; to
take international public opinion against the war into serious
consideration."
What John Brown wrote in the first draft of his resignation letter: Come
to think of it, the above probably is his first draft. After 25 years as a
diplomat, he had the good sense to mentally edit out words like
"monumentally stupid" and "worst White House decision since the Bay of
Pigs."
Fact: Since the start of the U.S. war in Iraq, 511 soldiers have been
killed and 2,424 have been wounded.
Bruce Boler, an EPA state water quality specialist, resigned from his post
Oct. 23, 2003, because his bosses at the EPA accepted the findings of a
controversial study that concluded that Florida wetlands discharge more
pollutants than they absorb.
What he wrote in his resignation letter: "... ultimately the politics of
southwestern Florida have proven stronger than the science ..."
What Bruce Boler wrote in the first draft of his resignation letter: "This
report, the people who wrote it and my superiors at the EPA are all
obviously off their collective rocker. Next thing you know, they'll be
telling us that auto emissions are actually reducing global warming.
Congratulations, Mr. President, you've just given greedy Florida
developers lucrative tax credits for improving water quality by, get this:
replacing pristine natural wetlands with golf courses, strip malls and gas
stations. I'm sure they'll be sure and reward your brother Jeb
accordingly."
Fact: In January 2003, the White House recommended creating a new category
of "isolated" waters that wouldn't be subject to the Clean Water Act.
According to environmentalists, if the measure is adopted, hundreds of
industries won't need permits to dump their potentially toxic sludge and
waste into 20 percent of the nation's wetlands and 60 percent of streams
that only flow intermittently.
Isam al-Khafaji, a member of the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development
Counsel, resigned July 9, 2003.
What he wrote in his resignation letter: "I feared my role with the
reconstruction council was sliding from what I had originally envisioned �
working with allies in a democratic fashion � to collaborating with
occupying forces."
What Isam al-Khafaji wrote in the first draft of his resignation letter:
"Rather than working with allies in a democratic fashion, I'm
collaborating with a fanatical administration that has lied about Iraq's
'weapons of mass destruction,' the Saddam/al-Qaida connection, and Jessica
Lynch's gun-toting 'heroics.' The Bush White House is more concerned with
the free flow of cheap oil than restoring power, water or democracy in
Iraq. I'd go on, but the candle in my bombed hut just went out ..."
Fact: Since the president declared "Mission accomplished" in Iraq, the
number of violent deaths in Baghdad has increased 114 percent.
Eric Schaeffer, director of the EPA Office of Regulatory Enforcement,
resigned Feb. 27, 2002.
What he wrote in his resignation letter: "I can not leave without sharing
my frustration about the fate of our enforcement actions against power
companies that have violated the Clean Air Act ... We are fighting a White
House that seems determined to weaken rules we are trying to enforce."
What Eric Schaeffer wrote in the first draft of his resignation letter: "I
can't leave without sharing my frustration, Mr. President. Your recent
proposal to amend the new-source-review component of the Clean Air Act is
� how can I say this? � stupendously moronic. It will, among other
outrages, allow a coal plant in Monroe, Michigan that already emits more
than a hundred thousand tons of choking sulfur dioxide, nearly 46,000 tons
of nitrous, and 17-and-a-half million tons of ozone destroying carbon
dioxide into the air, to emit about 40,000 more tons of sulfur dioxide a
year. That may not seem like a lot, sir, but the 300 or so people who'll
die prematurely from those pollutants are from Michigan � one of your
precious blue states. Betcha didn't think of that, huh?"
Fact: In the 2002 presidential election, oil and gas companies, two of the
leading sources for environmental pollutants, donated nearly $25 million
to political candidates, 80 percent of which went to Republicans. In
return for his 10 percent cut of that bounty, President Bush has been
working hard to systematically weaken clean air standards.
John Brady Kiesling, a 20-year veteran of the Foreign Service, whose last
job was that of political counselor, U.S. Embassy, Athens, resigned on
Feb. 27, 2003.
What he wrote in his resignation letter: "Until this administration it had
been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president, I
was also upholding the interests of the American people. I believe it no
more. I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my
conscience with my ability to represent the current administration. I have
confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting."
What John Brady Kiesling wrote in the first draft of his resignation
letter: "I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self
correcting ... and that President Bush will be thrown out of office in
2004 when the American people discover that he stole the 2002 election,
got us into a quagmire akin to Vietnam, turned the largest government
surplus in history into the largest deficit in history, couldn't find
Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, and ordered the assassination of
beloved comic actor John Ritter. Okay, I got carried away with that last
one. I think."
Fact: The $87 billion President Bush has appropriated to fund the war in
Iraq could instead have been used to pay the salaries of 1.2 million
school teachers for a year, the college education of 1.5 million students,
or built 900,000 affordable homes.
Karen Kwiatkowski, office of the undersecretary of defense, Near East
Bureau, resigned on July 1, 2003.
What she wrote in her resignation letter: "While working from May 2002
through February 2003 in the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for
Policy, Near East South Asian and Special Plans in the Pentagon, I
observed the environment in which decisions about post war Iraq were made
... What I saw was aberrant, pervasive, and contrary to good order and
discipline ... If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of
'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post
Hussein occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps,
one need look no further than the process inside the office of the
Secretary of Defense."
What Karen Kwiatkowski wrote in the first draft of her resignation letter:
"Don Rumsfeld is an idiot. Don Rumseld is a megalomaniac. If we lose this
war, blame Don Rumsfeld. I hate Don Rumsfeld. Kill Don Rumsfeld dead dead
dead; maybe with a blunt object like a ball-peen hammer or a ... Wait,
where was I? Oh yeah: Don Rumsfeld is a duplicitous charlatan, Don
Rumsfeld is ..."
Fact: When Donald Rumsfeld was considering a run for the White House in
1998, an article about him in the Chicago Tribune listed "helping to
re-open US relations with Iraq" when he served as Ronald Reagan's special
envoy to the Middle East as one of his career achievements. According to
the State Department, while Rumsfeld was opening relations with Iraq,
Saddam Hussein was actively using chemical weapons to systematically
murder thousands of Kurds.
Christine Todd Whitman, chief administrator at the EPA for two and a half
years, Former New Jersey governor, resigned on May 20, 2003.
What she wrote in her resignation letter: "As rewarding as the past two
and half years have been for me professionally, it's time for me to return
to my home and husband in New Jersey ... I leave knowing that we have made
a positive difference and that we have set the Agency on a course that
will result in continued environmental improvement."
What Christy Whitman wrote in the first draft of her resignation letter:
"When you honored me by asking me to join your Cabinet as administrator of
the Environmental Protection Agency, I didn't know the title would be
ironic. I naively assumed the post would have something to do with
protecting the environment, as opposed to protecting the bottom line of
your campaign contributors. I thought that was Don Evans' job over at
Commerce. If I am ever to sleep at night again, I have no choice other
than to send you this letter. I remember the lump I felt in my throat back
in 1973 when Elliot Richardson resigned his Cabinet post rather than
acquiesce to Richard Nixon's demand that he fire Watergate prosecutor
Archibald Cox. I had the same reaction seven years later when Cyrus Vance
also took a principled stand and resigned as secretary of state in protest
over President Carter's military action in Iran.
"'You would not be well served in the coming weeks and months,' he wrote
to Carter, 'by a secretary of state who could not offer you the public
backing you need on an issue and decision of such extraordinary
importance.' My feelings exactly. As Richardson told Nixon: 'Mr.
President, it would appear that we have a different perception of the
public interest.'
"And since I cannot face the prospect of looking my children in the eye
and explaining why I stood by while the president I served was selling out
their health, the health of their children and the health of our planet, I
respectfully submit my resignation � and bid you goodbye."
__________________
Arianna Huffington is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of nine
books. Her most recent book is "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed
and Political Corruption are Undermining America" (Crown).
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Subject: [pjnews] A Soldier's Return, to a Dark and Moody World
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see also:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1230-01.htm
Army's Suicide Rate has Outside Experts Alarmed
http://tinyurl.com/2fmds
Army Drops Cowardice Charge Vs. Soldier
The Army dropped a charge of dereliction of duty against a Special Forces
interrogator who was accused of cowardice, but the soldier's military
career is still in limbo. Staff Sgt. Georg-Andreas Pogany, 32, was
awaiting word from prosecutors on whether the case was over or if he still
faced a court-martial, his lawyer said Monday.
Pogany, an Army interrogator assigned to the 10th Special Forces Group,
was charged with cowardice Oct. 14 after suffering what he described as a
panic attack from seeing a mangled body of an Iraqi man who had been cut
in half by American gunfire in Iraq. After he asked for counseling,
Pogany's commanders sent him back to Fort Carson to face a court-martial
on a cowardice charge, which can be punishable by death. The Army later
replaced it with the lesser dereliction-of-duty charge, which could have
put Pogany behind bars for six months...
---------------------
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1230-02.htm
Published on Tuesday, December 30, 2003 by the New York Times
A Soldier's Return, to a Dark and Moody World
by Jeffrey Gettleman
BLAIRSVILLE, Pa., � Jeremy Feldbusch joined the Army to travel the world.
Now the only place he can go by himself is the 40 steps from his bed to
the reclining chair in the living room.
The stucco walls guide him, past the bathroom, kitchen and closet, past
the photographs of him in football jacket and wrestling singlet, past the
coffee table, where he sometimes stubs his toe. At last, he finds his
chair.
"Mom!" he yelled on a recent day. "I want a drink of some drinky stuff!"
"How about water?" his mother said back.
"No! Mountain Dew!"
"O.K., Jeremy, O.K."
Sgt. Jeremy Feldbusch, a fit, driven, highly capable Army Ranger, left
home in February knowing the risks of combat. Two months later, he came
home blind.
A growing number of young men and women are returning from Iraq and trying
to resume lives that were interrupted by war and then minced by injury.
Sergeant Feldbusch, a moody 24-year-old, is one of them, back in a little
town in western Pennsylvania, in a little house overlooking trees and
snow-blanketed hills he cannot see.
"What happened to my plans to become an officer? Gone," Sergeant Feldbusch
said. "Can I ever jump in my truck again and just take off? No. Do I
always have to be with my mom or dad now? Yep."
Since the war started, more than 2,300 American soldiers in Iraq have been
hurt in combat, many by artillery shells and homemade bombs that spray
shrapnel. Bulletproof vests and helmets protect vital organs. But as the
insurgency continues, doctors say that severe facial injuries, along with
wounds to the arms and legs, are becoming a hallmark of this war.
"There's that little area between where the helmet ends and the body armor
starts," said Dr. Jeffrey Poffenbarger, an Army neurosurgeon. "And we're
seeing a lot of guys getting hit right there, right in the face."
Back home, one little piece of metal can turn an entire household upside
down. Charlene Feldbusch stopped working to take care of her son. She rubs
cream on his face in the morning, helps him pick out his clothes, fixes
him meals and gives him pills at night so he does not shake.
His father, Brace, started writing a book about him. "He's been such an
inspiration to me, accomplishing more at 24 than I have my entire life,"
said Brace Feldbusch, a former coal miner who lost two fingers to a coal
cart before he lost his job. He ticked off the chapters, his son's
greatest moments: winning the state freestyle wrestling championship;
bench-pressing 405 pounds; graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, a
biology major, the only member of the family to finish college; becoming
an Army Ranger.
His two brothers, Shaun, 25, and Brian, 17, sometimes feel left out.
"But they understand our entire world has changed," Ms. Feldbusch said.
"Somebody has to be with Jeremy all the time. But that's O.K. I'm his mom.
And that's what moms do."
During the two months Jeremy Feldbusch spent recovering at Brooke Army
Medical Center in San Antonio, his parents lived at his bedside. Charlene
Feldbusch remembers one day seeing a young female soldier crawling past
her in the corridor with no legs and her 3-year-old son trailing behind.
Ms. Feldbusch started to cry. But not for the woman.
"Do you know how many times I walked up and down those hallways and saw
those people without arms or legs and thought, Why couldn't this be my
son? Why his eyes?"
Artillery shells make a certain sound when they are coming right at you.
Not a looping whistle, but a short shriek.
On April 3, Sergeant Feldbusch, a 6-foot-2-inch, thickly built mortar man,
heard the shriek. He and his platoon of Rangers were guarding the Haditha
Dam, a strategic point northwest of Baghdad along the Euphrates River,
when a shell burst 100 feet away and a piece of red hot shrapnel hit him
in the face. The last thing he remembers was eating a pouch of chicken
teriyaki.
The inchlong piece of steel, part of the artillery shell's casing, sliced
through his right eye, tumbled through his sinuses and lodged in the left
side of his brain, severely damaging the optic nerve of his left eye and
spraying bone splinters throughout his brain.
Two weeks later, at the Brooke Army Medical Center, doctors removed the
shrapnel and reconstructed his face with titanium mesh and a lump of fat
from his stomach in place of his missing eye, so the hole would not cave
in.
For five weeks, Sergeant Feldbusch remained in a coma. When he came out,
it was still black.
"I could hear my parents' voices," he said. "And I thought, What are they
doing here? Am I dreaming? What the hell is going on?"
His mother knelt by his bedside and sang softly into his ear, "When I wish
upon a star."
Then she asked him, "Jeremy? Who do you love?"
True to form, he whispered, "Brace." He was joking.
Two weeks after he came out of the coma, his parents broke the news. He
was being awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. But there was very
little chance he would see again.
"I thought there's no way this is happening to me, there's no way I'm
going to go through life as a blind man," Sergeant Feldbusch said.
One day, as he lay in bed with tubes and wires and needles sticking out of
him like he was some sort of science project, his father looked at him and
said, "Maybe God thought you had seen enough killing."
Jeremy responded, "But Dad, why did he have to take my eyes?"
The inch-long piece of shrapnel not only took his sight and dulled his
sense of taste and smell, but it took some of his brain, too. It left him
quick to lose his temper and acutely sensitive to pain. When he got out of
the hospital, it hurt his skin when the wind blew.
It also left him prone to seizures. Right before Christmas, he had his third.
"We're just holding on," said his father. "It's like we're living in a
bubble."
His moods flash like the bits of color that sometimes glitter in the mine
shaft he lives in. Sometimes he sees red, blue, a bright yellow. Sometimes
he is angry, then sad, then suddenly playful.
On a recent night, Brace, 49, asked: "In your mind, Jeremy, if there's an
image, if there's a picture in there, buddy, what do you see?"
His son growled back: "I see you getting off your butt and going to the
store and getting me some icy-pops. I'm hungry."
Lately, his parents say, he has been more sarcastic.
This month, he was invited to speak to a sixth-grade class. His mother
told him the children would like to see his uniform. Instead, he wore
sweat pants.
One boy asked about the weather in Iraq. Another asked Sergeant Feldbusch
if he had made any new Iraqi friends.
"I didn't make any Iraqi friends," he said.
And at the end of the talk, the school principal asked, "Jeremy, can you
say something in Iraqi?"
Sergeant Feldbusch replied, "Something in Iraqi."
The children looked at the principal, who stared at Sergeant Feldbusch who
grinned back at her.
"That's just how I've always been, a wisecracker," he explained later.
But then he said, rubbing his finger on the pink splotch by his right eye:
"When you look at me, you see this little scar. But people forget that I
had this piece of metal go through my eye and bounce up and down in my
face and get stuck in my brain."
Dr. Poffenbarger, who operated on Sergeant Feldbusch, explained that his
personality may have been affected by damage to the brain's frontal lobe,
which controls social skills and behavior.
"When you get a frontal lobe injury, you tend to be more emotionally
aggressive," Dr. Poffenbarger said. "A lot of young men with these
injuries seem to be angry."
Charlene Feldbusch, 47, said she was concerned about "what's going to come
out in Jeremy."
"I know he's a big-hearted person," she said. "But it's just that now
he's, he's," she searched for a word she could live with. "Different."
Sergeant Feldbusch said his attitude was evolving. "I'm fine with it now,"
he said. "I'm going to learn Braille. I'm going to get a cane. I'll
survive. There's more to life than seeing. "
Even in his dreams, he no longer sees. And he has stopped trying to
picture faces.
"When I was first in the hospital, I tried to think of what the doctors
and nurses all looked like," he said. "But then I stopped. I'm blind. I
figured why am I doing this? I'm never going to see them."
He went on: "It's not that I don't allow myself to get upset. I don't
think about it. I had a job. I got hurt. Now I'm blind. My day is my day
now."
He spends most of his time in bed or slouched in the reclining chair in
the corner of the living room, absorbing his favorite television shows
like "Sanford and Son" and the news. At first, he had a lot of visitors
and friends. Blairsville, an old coal-mining town of 3,600 people, even
had a parade for him this summer and the mayor proclaimed Sept. 20 Jeremy
Feldbusch day.
He talks about going back to school and getting a master's degree. And
hitting the weights again. He used to be really into that.
But the antiseizure medications make him sleepy. He naps a lot.
"Yeah, I get bored. And I miss the guys," he said. "Ever since I was 5, I
was part of some team. Now I'm alone."
Sometimes that gets him into trouble. This summer he slipped off the deck.
He also slammed his face into a door frame one night, nearly knocking
himself out.
But he had no problem sawing down the family's Christmas tree last week,
after his father got it started for him. And when the first snow of the
season came, he stood on the lawn with his mother and held out his hand.
Once he retires and receives his medical discharge, Sergeant Feldbusch
will be eligible for veterans' benefits that will most likely exceed his
current $1,800-a-month paycheck.
On a recent night, his family took him to a wrestling meet. He sat at the
edge of the mat with his father, who described each twist, turn and body
slam. The gym was alive with the squeak of shoes and the hot press of a
full crowd.
"Dad, what's going on now?" Sergeant Feldbusch asked.
"Well, Jerm, the kid with the tattoo is on top and got this boy in a
figure four or something," Brace said. "The other kid's nose is bleeding."
"I'm rooting for the bleeder, then," Sergeant Feldbusch announced.
A minute later the bleeder was on his back. Some girls in the crowd
screamed for him to get up.
"What's going on, Dad, what's he doing?" Sergeant Feldbusch asked.
Before he could answer, the referee smacked his hand flat like a pancake
on the mat. The bleeder had been pinned.
The boy ran out of the gym crying. Brace shook his head.
"See, you got to take winning well and you got to take losing well," Brace
said. "Look at Jeremy. He's got every reason to sit in a corner and be
depressed. But he's not."
"Whatever, Dad," Sergeant Feldbusch said. "Who's next?"
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Subject: [pjnews] Public Broadcasting Under Siege
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http://www.commoncause.org/news/default.cfm?ArtID=270
Public Broadcasting Under Siege!
$800,000 buys two seats on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's board!
December 23, 2003
Contact:
Mary Boyle
202.736.5770
Like public television, which gives gifts to those who donate to its
pledge campaigns, the Bush Administration has rewarded two major
Republican donors with seats on the nine-member board of the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting. Cheryl Halpern and Gay Hart Gaines and their
respective families have contributed more than $816,000 to Republican
causes over the past 14 years.
�But even more troubling,� said Common Cause President Chellie Pingree,
�are the agendas they bring with them to the CPB board.� Both Halperin,
who was confirmed by the Senate on Dec. 9, and Hart Gaines, whose
nomination is pending, have stated views or espoused causes that call into
question their qualifications to serve on a board whose mission is to
promote and fund public television and radio programming.
That is the conclusion of Common Cause�s latest report, �Bush�s $800,000
Pledge Break.�
During her confirmation hearing in November, Halpern indicated that she
would welcome empowering CPB board members to intervene in program content
when they felt a program was biased. Gaines was an ardent supporter of
Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA), who as House Speaker in 1994 proposed cutting
all federal assistance to public TV.
While it is not unusual for presidents to appoint supporters to the CPB
board, Pingree stressed that public television�s mission demands that
board members are committed to preserving public broadcasting�s
independence.
�Public broadcasting serves as a source of information that millions of
citizens rely on for diverse viewpoints, stimulating discussion and
hard-hitting investigative journalism,� Pingree said. �At a time when
commercial broadcasting often serves up larger and larger doses of
�infotainment,� public broadcasting�s longstanding tradition of serious
news and public affairs reporting and its freedom to report the news
without interference must be preserved and strengthened.�
The report follows:
The Bush Administration has rewarded two major Republican donors with
seats on the nine-member board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Cheryl Halpern and Gay Hart Gaines and their respective families have
contributed more than $816,000 to Republican causes over the past 14
years.
�But even more troubling,� said Common Cause President Chellie Pingree,
�are the agendas they bring with them to the CPB board.� Both Halpern, who
was confirmed by the Senate on Dec. 9, and Hart Gaines, whose nomination
is pending, have stated views or espoused causes that call into question
their qualifications to serve on a board whose mission is to promote and
fund public television and radio programming.
During her confirmation hearing in November, Halpern indicated that she
would welcome giving CPB board members the authority to intervene in
program content when they felt a program was biased. Gaines was an ardent
supporter of Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA), who as House Speaker in 1994
proposed cutting all federal assistance to public TV.
While it is not unusual for presidents to appoint supporters to the CPB
board, Pingree stressed that public television�s mission demands that
board members are committed to preserving public broadcasting�s
independence.
�Public broadcasting serves as a source of information that millions of
citizens rely on for diverse viewpoints, stimulating discussion and
hard-hitting investigative journalism,� Pingree said. �At a time when
commercial broadcasting often serves up larger and larger doses of
�infotainment,� public broadcasting�s longstanding tradition of serious
news and public affairs reporting and its freedom to report the news
without interference must be preserved and strengthened.�
The President appoints CPB board members to six-year terms. No more than
five members may be from the same political party, but it is possible for
members of one party to dominate the board if there are vacancies.
According to its 2002 annual report, CBP is a private nonprofit
corporation established by Congress in 1967, which receives an annual
appropriation from Congress, representing about 15 percent of public
broadcasting�s revenues. CPB provides financial support to more than 1,000
public TV and radio stations throughout the country.
CPB�s primary goals, according to its mission statement, are �to encourage
the development of programming that involves creative risks and that
addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly
children and minorities.� The board is also supposed to serve �as a
catalyst for innovation in the public broadcasting industry.�
Together, Halpern and members of her family have given more than $324,000
to Republican candidates and national party committees since 1989. Halpern
has served on the CPB board since August 2002, when she won a temporary
appointment by President Bush. On Dec. 9, however, Halpern was formally
confirmed by the Senate, and will serve on the CPB board until 2008.
Halpern stirred controversy in the public TV community for comments at her
confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee on Nov. 4.
When Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) criticized Bill Moyers, the host of public
television�s �Now,� as �the most partisan and nonobjective person I know
in media of any kind,� Halpern agreed.
She left the impression, according to the trade publication Current, that
the CPB needs greater authority to intervene when public television
programs show bias. �There has to be recognition that an objective,
balanced code of journalistic ethics has got to prevail across the board,
and there needs to be accountability,� Halpern told the Committee. Current
noted that Halpern seemed to suggest that biased reporting ought to be
punished.
Halpern is a longtime Republican activist and chaired the Republican
Jewish Coalition (formerly the National Jewish Coalition) for eight years.
She was a $100,000 donor to the Republican National Committee in the late
1980s and a member of George Herbert Walker Bush�s �Team 100.� Halpern
previously served on the board overseeing the Voice of America, Radio and
TV Marti, and Radio Free Europe.
Bush nominated Gaines to the CPB board on Nov. 17. Her appointment,
which would expire in 2010, is pending before the Senate. Gaines and
members of her family have given nearly $492,000 to Republican federal
candidates and national party committees since 1989. Gaines, an interior
designer, raised money for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), and
chaired Gingrich�s political committee, GOPAC, whose goal was to win the
House for Republicans. According to published accounts, Gaines, named
GOPAC chairman in 1994, traveled around the country, recruiting charter
members who donated $10,000 each to join the group. At the same time that
Gaines was raising money for Gingrich�s GOPAC, Gingrich was pushing
Congress to cut all federal funds to public TV, reportedly telling his
supporters that public TV represented Americans �paying taxes
involuntarily to subsidize something which told them how they should
think.�
Gaines also is a trustee emeriti of the conservative Hudson Institute.
Before working for GOPAC in the 1990s, Gaines chaired the board of the
conservative commentator William Buckley�s National Review Institute,
dedicated to promoting conservative causes.
�I�m thrilled about the nomination,� Gaines told the Palm Beach Daily
News. �I never wanted to be an ambassador and have to leave the country.
I always wanted to stay in America and work for this country. So this
opportunity is perfect for me.�
---------------
ACTION:
Common Cause will not let this issue slip by without public scrutiny. We
need your help to bring this to the public's attention. We must not let
partisan insiders wrest control of public broadcasting from balanced board
members and threaten the integrity of the CPB from within. Please send a
generous contribution today to help us protect the fairness of public
broadcasting!
Click here to donate to Common Cause:
http://capwiz.com/afr/utr/1/LTYBCOPFVS/NHINCOTBKH/
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What to Say About 2003 (Editorial)
Published on Wednesday, December 31, 2003
by the Madison Capital Times (Wisconsin)
What can be said about a year in which George Bush abandoned more than 200
years of American diplomatic and military precedent to launch what he
acknowledged to be a pre-emptive war against a country that posed no
realistic threat to the United States or to American interests?
What can be said about a year when the Bush administration poisoned
relations between the United States and nations with which we have been
our friends and allies since Revolutionary War times?
What can be said about a year when, as the nation's manufacturing
industries stumbled under the weight of a record trade deficit, the Bush
administration began negotiating a Free Trade Area of the Americas
agreement that promised to shutter even more U.S. factories and drive even
more family farmers off the land?
What can be said about a year when even conservative jurists said the
executive and legislative branches had gone too far in undermining civil
liberties, environmental protections and corporate regulations?
What can be said about a year when, even as Americans complained in louder
voices than ever before about the lack of diversity in the media, the
Federal Communications Commission voted to lift controls on media
consolidation and monopoly?
What can be said about a year when, after a decade of neglect by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture of lessons from abroad and obvious warning
signals, mad cow disease was found in an animal on a Washington state
dairy farm?
What can be said about a year when mad president disease continued to
infect the White House, as George Bush served another year in position for
which he was not chosen by the majority of American voters?
What can be said about a year when Dick Cheney continued to take care of
business for Halliburton?
What can be said about a year when Don Rumsfeld approved
defense-contractor war profiteering at levels so extreme that even some of
his Republican allies grimaced?
What can be said about a year when the most lamentable lawyer ever to
enter the Department of Justice, John Ashcroft, continued to serve as the
attorney general?
What can be said about 2003?
Perhaps the best that can be said of the year that will pass into history
at midnight is this: There are only a few hours left.
But we would like to say something else.
For all of the frustrations of 2003, it was, as well, a year of
exhilaration, a year when the people began to stir.
2003 saw the rise of a vigorous anti-war movement that spread far beyond
the usual bases of activism to involve millions of Americans - in places
like Baraboo, Mount Horeb and Viroqua - in defense of American values.
Bush may have gotten his war, but he also inspired an unprecedented level
of citizen involvement in foreign policy issues. And that activism is not
going away.
2003 saw family farmers, union members and environmentalists from
Wisconsin join their peers from around the world in Cancun, Mexico, for
protests that played a significant role in upsetting plans by the World
Trade Organization to dismantle protections for farmers, workers and
communities.
2003 saw close to 3 million Americans contact the FCC and Congress to
object to the FCC's attempt to lift media ownership caps. As the year came
to a close, close to 2,000 activists from across the United States and
around the world converged in Madison to hear Bill Moyers' rousing call
for a national movement to reform the media so that it nurtures democracy,
not just the corporate bottom lines of media conglomerates.
2003 was a year when millions of Americans found their activist voices.
And if those voices were not heard fully in the year that is passing, we
hope and believe that they will be heard in the year to come.
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Subject: [pjnews] 10 Good Things About a Bad Year
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Published on Wednesday, December 31, 2003 by Alternet
10 Good Things About a Bad Year
by Medea Benjamin
No two ways about it, 2003 was a demoralizing year for those of us working
for peace and justice. With George Bush in the White House, Arnold
Schwarzenegger in the California State House, and Paul Bremer ruling Iraq,
it was a chore just to get out of bed each morning. But get out of bed we
did, and we spent our days educating, strategizing, organizing and
mobilizing. As we greet the new year, let�s remember and celebrate some of
our hard-fought victories in a time of adversity.
1. We organized the most massive, global protests against war the world
has ever seen. On February 15 alone, over12 million people came out on the
streets in over 700 cities in 60countries and on every continent. So
impressive was this outpouring of anti-war sentiment that the New York
Times, not known for hyperbole, claimed there were now two superpowers:
the US and global public opinion.
2. Over the last few months, mainstream Americans have been buying
progressive books�by the millions. Authors such as Michael Moore, Al
Franken, Molly Ivins, Paul Krugman and David Corn have seen their books
soar to the New York Times bestsellers list. With humor and biting exposes
of the Bush administration, these authors helped our movement gain legions
of new converts. No more preaching to the choir this year!
3. When the World Trade Organization met in Cancun in September to promote
global rules that give even greater power to transnational corporations,
they were met by well-coordinated opposition from countries in the global
south, hundreds of non-governmental organizations, and thousands of
activists. When our movement�s sophisticated inside-outside strategy
forced the talks to collapse, there was �gloom in the suites and dancing
in the streets.� And as a counter to these corporate-dominated global
institutions, the fair trade movement had a stellar year.
4. The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, proved that people power
is alive and well. Sparked by the Bolivian president�s plan to privatize
and export the nation�s natural gas, an astounding grassroots movement of
peasants, miners, workers, and indigenous people poured into the streets
to demand his resignation. After five weeks of intense protests and a
government crackdown that left 70dead, Sanchez de Lozada was forced to
resign. Now that�s regime change!
5. The silver lining in the budget crisis affecting the states throughout
this nation is that from Louisiana to Texas to Michigan�and even in Arnold
Schwarzenegger�s California�state governments are cutting prison budgets
by releasing non-violent drug offenders. The year has been marked by a
steady move toward treatment instead of incarceration and a greater
understanding that drug abuse should be handled in the doctors� office,
not the prison cell.
6. For so long, celebrities have put their careers above their beliefs.
This year witnessed a �coming out� of all types of celebrities on all
manner of progressive issues. Jay-Z and Mariah Carey railed against the
racist Rockefeller drug laws, Bono and Beyonce Knowles called for the
world to fight AIDS, and a host of celebs such as Sean Penn, Susan
Sarandon and Laurence Fishbourne courageously took a stand against the
invasion of Iraq.
7. Progressives now have a powerful new tool for organizing: the internet.
E-activism through venues such as MoveOn, Working Assets, and Meetup.com
have allowed ordinary people to challenge big money and powerful
institutions. We raised millions of dollars to run ads, we�ve confronted
corporate-dominated institutions like the Federal Communications
Commission, and e-activism has allowed an anti-war candidate, Howard Dean,
to become a frontrunner in the 2004 elections.
8. In an unprecedented outpouring of local opposition to the assault on
our civil liberties, over 200 cities, towns, counties, and states across
the country have passed resolutions against the Patriot Act. In fact, the
outcry has been so profound that plans for a successor act, dubbed Patriot
Act II, that would further broaden federal investigatory powers, have been
scuttled.
9. While eclipsed by the war in Iraq, the corporate scandals that topped
the headlines in 2002 continued in 2003,with indefatigable New York State
Attorney-General Eliot Spitzer exposing the trading abuses in the mutual
funds industry. The Enron, WorldCom and accounting scandals produced some
positive legislation against corporate crime and forced institutional
investors like pension funds to become more active. And anti-corporate
crusaders joined with peace activists to expose the obscene war
profiteering of Halliburton and Bechtel�with more exposes to come in 2004!
10. Despite the conservative takeover of the courts, this year produced
several landmark rulings we can be proud of. The Supreme Court upheld
affirmative action, giving a sweeping victory to the University of
Michigan and colleges all over the country. It struck down sodomy laws
criminalizing gay sex, affirming the constitutional right to privacy. The
Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that gays should be able to marry. The
Appeals Court ruled that the US military could not detain American citizen
Jose Padilla as an �enemy combatant�, and in an even more significant
decision, found that all 600 detainees at Guantanamo Bay should be granted
access to lawyers.
There are many more�the immigrants� freedom march that crisscrossed the
nation to counter the anti-immigrant backlash, the amazing youth movement
that is bringing new culture and vibrancy to organizing, the renewed
women�s activism through groups like Code Pink, the awarding of the Nobel
Peace Prize to an Iranian women Shirin Ebadi. And each one of us could add
to the list.
So while we lament the present state of the world and the present occupant
in the White House, just remember that even in the gloomiest days of 2003,
we kept slugging away�and sometimes even winning. Now let�s move on to
score the BIG victory in 2004 by sending George Bush back to Crawford.
Medea Benjamin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is co-founder of Global Exchange
and CodePink: Women for Peace.
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As the new year begins and we take a moment to look forward to the future
as well as reflect back on the past, this poem by Emmanuel Ortiz-- penned
on the one year anniversary of September 11th-- seemed appropriate.
Scott
A MOMENT OF SILENCE, BEFORE I START THIS POEM
Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me in a moment of
silence in honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you to offer up a moment of silence for all of
those who have been harassed, imprisoned, disappeared, tortured, raped, or
killed in retaliation for those strikes, for the victims in both
Afghanistan and the U.S.
And if I could just add one more thing...
A full day of silence for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have
died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces over decades of
occupation. Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result
of an 11-year U.S. embargo against the country.
Before I begin this poem, two months of silence for the Blacks under
Apartheid in South Africa, where homeland security made them aliens in
their own country Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete,
steel, earth and skin and the survivors went on as if alive. A year of
silence for the millions of dead in Viet Nam - a people, not a war - for
those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it. A year of silence
for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of a secret war ... ssssshhhhh
.... Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead. Two
months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia, whose names, like
the corpses they once represented, have piled up and slipped off our
tongues.
Before I begin this poem,
An hour of silence for El Salvador ... An afternoon of silence for
Nicaragua ... Two days of silence for the Guetmaltecos ... None of whom
ever knew a moment of peace in their living years. 45 seconds of silence
for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas 25 years of silence for the hundred
million Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any
building could poke into the sky. There will be no DNA testing or dental
records to identify their remains. And for those who were strung and swung
from the heights of sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and
the west... 100 years of silence...
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half of right
here, Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears. Names now reduced to innocuous
magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness ...
So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust
Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same And the rest of us
hope to hell it won't be. Not like it always has been
Because this is not a 9-1-1 poem
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.
This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written And if this
is a 9/11 poem, then
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York,
1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored
This is a poem for interrupting this program.
And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children Before I start this poem
we could be silent forever Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.
If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit
If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses and the
Playboys. If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful people
have gathered You want a moment of silence
Then take it
Now,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand In the space between
bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence
Take it.
But take it all
Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.
- Emmanuel Ortiz 9.11.2002
Emmanuel Ortiz is a third generation Chicano/Puerto Rican/Irish-American
community organizer and sometimes spoken-word artist. He is currently the
coordinator of Guerrilla Wordfare, a Twin Cities-based grassroots project
bringing together artists of color to address socio-political issues and
raise funds for organizing in communities of color, through art as a tool
of social change. He is a staff member of the Resource Center of the
Americas, of which americas.org is a program.
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Subject: [pjnews] Decision 2004: ABD vs. ABBA
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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17470
Decision 2004: ABD vs. ABBA
By Don Hazen, AlterNet
December 30, 2003
Howard Dean�s powerful momentum has made him the person to beat for the
Democratic nomination for president in 2004. He has shocked many of the
pundits who had dismissed him, infuriated the other candidates
(particularly with his attacks on their Washington insider status), and
generally freaked out the party establishment. As a result Dean has become
"The Target,� attacked from all directions with verbal body blows, karate
chops, kicks to the groin and an occasional wild haymaker.
Most of the attacks on Dean have come from what can be called the Anybody
But Dean (ABD) party led by other Democratic candidates, notably Joseph
Lieberman, Al Sharpton, Richard Gephardt and John Kerry. In their
increasingly desperate effort to derail the Dean candidacy, Dean�s
opponents have escalated their attacks to a level that could hand the Bush
campaign powerful tools for victory in 2004, should Dean be the nominee.
In fact, as the New York Times reported on December 26, the Bush team
believes that Dr. Dean�s rivals are �doing a great job� for the current
President's re-election campaign. Republican strategists say that if Dean
is nominated, they will portray him as "reckless, angry and pessimistic,"
while keeping the President's message upbeat. �They plan to use the
Democrats' words to attack Dean in their ads, meanwhile keeping Bush
personally above the fray."
Dr. Dean is the frontrunner because he has been able to establish himself
as the candidate of change, and it has made him a lightening rod. How
seriously the relentless attacks will weaken him has become a big question
for the Democrats and independents who are more concerned about dumping
Bush than about backing or blocking any individual Democrat. This is the
ABBA Party � as in Anyone But Bush Again.
As Robert Greenwald, producer and director of the acclaimed documentary
�Unprecedented; The Real Truth Behind Iraq,� put it, "I do worry that the
Democrats are not thinking about the big picture and November in their
aggressive efforts to really nail Dean." Some worry that the oft-repeated
charges among Democrats that Dean is too liberal, too impulsive, or
otherwise hard to elect will create a defeatist, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Democratic candidates seem to have joined a number of pundits in working
to establish a caricatured image of Dean that might be hard to overcome in
November.
Leading the anti-Dean charge is Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who is
25 percent behind in the polls in neighboring New Hampshire�s primary.
Kerry is positioning himself as the Dean alternative through constant
attacks on Dean�s character. In a major speech Dec. 27, according to
Patrick Healy in the Boston Globe, Kerry borrowed from the Robert Frost
poem, "The Road Not Taken," arguing that "two roads are diverging" for
Democrats in the presidential race � "a road of confusion and
contradiction" marked by "simple answers and the slip of the tongue,"
pursued by Dean, and "the road of strength and principle," by Kerry.
"New Hampshire's decision comes down to this: A choice between a candidate
who, for all his anger, is on the wrong track economically and has no
experience on the major security issues of the day, or a steady and
consistent hand with experience in growing our economy and balancing the
budget, and making America more secure," Kerry said. "It's a choice
between anger and answers."
The other members of the ABD party are attacking Dean regularly as well.
Al Sharpton has attacked Dean on race issues, Lieberman (along with Kerry)
on Dean�s more pragmatic stance on Israel, Gephardt on Dean�s ability to
beat Bush and his inexperience in foreign policy. Underlying all the
attacks, though, are zingers aimed at character issues.
Dean is clearly unhappy with the situation , criticizing his party's
national chairman, Terry McAuliffe, for not intervening to tone down the
debate. Jodie Wilgoren of the New York Times reported that, while on the
road in Iowa, Dean said, "If we had strong leadership in the Democratic
Party, they would be calling those other candidates and saying, 'Hey look,
somebody's going to have to win here.' Dean also suggested he didn�t
control the legions of young people who have been brought into the fold as
part of his campaign, should he not get the nomination, providing further
fodder for his opponents."
Immediately the four ABD leaders pounced on Dean, launching a new round.
John Kerry�s comments were typical: "Listening to Howard Dean's comments
yesterday makes me wonder if he's worried about our party's chances for
victory or his own personal political future," the senator said. "No one
who really cares about the future of the Democratic Party would make such
a divisive and threatening statement."
With the democratic establishment letting the Dean pummeling go forward,
it may take a grassroots effort to halt the bloodbath. While the �regime
change movement� led by MoveOn.org, the Sierra Club, union-funded groups
and others, is loath to take the side of any candidate, they may be left
with a badly wounded candidate when they are ready to swing into action.
The message to the other candidates can be: focus your attacks on Bush,
and offer a positive vision of how you will be an alternative to the
current administration. Coincidentally, this actually seems to be what the
voters want, at least the Democratic primary voters.
The vociferous and seemingly coordinated nature of the attacks on Dean,
and the absence of any intervention by the Democratic establishment, are
raising questions as to what exactly is at play behind the scenes. Is it,
as one top national union organizer suggested, that some of the Democratic
candidates would rather see a second term for Bush than Howard Dean in the
White House.
In any case, it is hard to even keep up with all the slings and arrows
Democrats have been firing at Dean. Sharpton, for example, made the
hard-to-grasp charge that former Vice President Al Gore�s endorsement of
Dean smacked of "bossism." He also said that �Dean is anti-black" and
strongly implied that Jesse Jackson, Jr. is an �Uncle Tom.� Black
Commentary reported that at the time, Sharpton �was in meltdown, furious
that Jesse Jackson Jr. had endorsed Howard Dean and that many black
Democrats were supporting other candidates.�
Anti-Dean attacks further escalated in mid-December, when former
Congressman Edward Feighan and others close to Richard Gephardt put
television ads on the air in South Carolina and New Hampshire that
included these lines: �Americans want a President who can face the dangers
ahead, but Howard Dean has no military or foreign policy experience. And
Howard Dean cannot compete with George Bush on foreign policy. It is time
for the Democrats to think about that � and think about it now.� Of
course, George Bush had no foreign policy experience as Governor of Texas
either, and a lot of Democrats question whether he's learned much. But
that wasn't part of the ads' message.
Much of the national media appears to be echoing the messages of the
attacking Democrats. Yes, a couple of months ago he was on the covers of
both Time and Newsweek, in the same week. But the media�s message has
always coupled the success of Dean�s insurgent, Internet-fueled campaign
with the limits and dangers of his candidacy. �Hot-headed and potentially
unelectable� was and continues to be the media mantra. As least as often
as he is identified as a medical doctor and former governor of Vermont, he
is described as loose-lipped, irritable and a potential McGovern-style
disaster in the making for the Democratic Party.
Perhaps the most revealing moment of the ABD Party mentality and the
media�s collusion came in a televised debate in New Hampshire in November.
In an unconscionable moment of media bias, Ted Koppel asked who among the
candidates thought Dean was electable. Instead of emphasizing Bush's
weaknesses and how all the Democrats were electable, offering a vastly
better choice, the Democratic candidates sat on their hands, allowing
Koppel the cheap laugh when, reportedly, Dean alone raised his.
The Democratic candidates, the media and perhaps the Bush people seem to
be ignoring what seems inarguable: Dean has been the candidate of change
from the onset, and their attacks add emphasis to that status. He staked
out clear positions where the voters were most angry: the rush to war, a
tin-eared imperial presidency, a faltering economy, corrupt cronyism and
an overall feeling of powerlessness. He stood up for something. In a
climate of powerful models of voter frustration � most notably Arnold
Schwarzenegger's election as governor of California � Dean captured the
mantle of change, and he's just tightened his grip since then.
Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi suggests that the broadsides against Dean
do not appear to be sticking so far. Trippi reminded the Times that the
attacks on Dean supposedly planned by the Bush team may backfire. He notes
that they haven't worked so well for Dean's Democratic rivals: �Where have
we gone? From zero to 31 percent in the latest ABC poll.� Dean himself
said in late December that the attacks won't help in the long run, since
Bush will eventually use the criticisms in his ads. "But in the short run
I think it makes them (the other candidates) look smaller."
In addition, much of the Democratic rhetoric ignores a fundamental
principle of communications, the media frame. When you attack who your
opponent is and what he says, particularly without presenting a clear
vision of your own, you simply reinforce that opponent's message by
repeating his words and ideas. This effect clearly seems to be part of
what has catapulted Dean into such a strong position as his campaign
enters 2004.
Meanwhile, Dean remains the candidate asking the toughest questions and
garnering the most media attention as a result. Over the past two weeks,
his frankness has been re-characterized by his opponents, and by the
media, as so-called "loose lips."
For example, he recenly drew fire for stating that �the capture of Saddam
hasn�t made us safer.� In retrospect his comments appear prescient; the
Christmas time Orange Alert still in effect did not signal any reduction
in the administration's fears of terrorists. American soldiers continue to
die in Iraq � four on Christmas Day alone � while terrorist bombs killed
many in Israel, Afghanistan and, particularly, in Pakistan, in the past
week. A recent national poll showed that 79 percent of Americans do not
believe the invasion and occupation of Iraq have made us safer.
However, the potential truth of Dean's observation did not inhibit Joe
Lieberman from spitting out this slander immediately after Hussein's
capture: "If Howard Dean had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in
power today, not in prison, and the world would be a more dangerous
place." Similarly, Dean recently pointed out that Israel would have to
remove a large number of settlements in the Occupied Territories to
achieve peace, prompting a Democratic outcry against what was described as
an anti-Israeli position. The fact that it mirrored official policy during
the Clinton administration was conveniently forgotten.
The Democratic establishment attacked him even more fiercely in September,
when he had the temerity to call on the United States to take a more
"even-handed role" as the chief mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. His comments prompted House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and
dozens of other top Congressional Democrats to write an open letter
criticizing Dean for his statements. As Stephen Zunes wrote in a recent
AlterNet article (http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17438), "To
have virtually the entire Democratic House leadership openly criticize a
policy statement made by their own frontrunner appears unprecedented."
Dean also wondered aloud during a radio interview that there may be some
truth to rumors that the Bush administration knew more than they have
admitted about 9/11 before it occurred, noting the administration�s
secrecy about the investigation of the attacks invariably leads to such
speculation. Senator Kerry pounced on this comment as part of his
withering attack on Dean in a key speech in New Hampshire. "When he
spreads unfounded rumors about the administration having prior warnings of
Sept. 11 and then passes it off because someone had posted it on the
Internet, it leaves Americans questioning judgment and sense of
responsibility," Kerry said. Yet as BuzzFlash.com noted, the Dean
comments, from the Diane Rehm show (http://www.wamu.org/dr/index.html),
were clearly above board:
Howard Dean: "Yes, there is a report which the president is suppressing
evidence for, which is a thorough investigation of 9-11."
Diane Rehm: "Why do you think he is suppressing that report?
Howard Dean: "I don't know. There are many theories about it. The most
interesting theory that I've heard so far � which is nothing more than a
theory, it can't be proved � is that he was warned ahead of time by the
Saudis. Now who knows what the real situation is? But the trouble is, by
suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kind of theories,
whether they have any truth to them or not, and eventually, they get
repeated as fact. So I think the president is taking a great risk by
suppressing the key information that needs to go to the Kean Commission."
Each of these "loose lips� comments may reveal Dean as smarter and more
adroit than either the pundits or his opponents are noticing. In each
instance, he continues to stake out ground as the candidate willing to ask
the tough decisions, state the difficult truths, and make the necessary
changes. These comments also help to solidify his party and primary base.
Many liberal and progressive Democrats have been wary of Dean, who,
contrary to the media image, is more centrist than liberal on a range of
issues. These Kucinich Democrats, along with some Kerry supporters have
moved over to Dean, as they see the party establishment trying hard to
derail the guy who many see as willing to tackle Bush head on, hence
provide the clear alternative.
The impact the orchestrated attacks will have on Dean will play out over
time. They seem to strengthen Dean in the Democratic primaries, but the
general election is something else altogether, and Dean understands this.
As he told New York Times, "I have to broaden the message. I know that and
I was starting to do it. But you can�t do it if everyday Joe Lieberman is
calling you incompetent and John Kerry is whining about something else.
There is not much sense in broadening the message, if I�m not the
nominee."
Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.
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Subject: [pjnews] Mad Cow USA: The Nightmare Begins
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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17466
Mad Cow USA: The Nightmare Begins
John Stauber, AlterNet
December 30, 2003
When Sheldon Rampton and I wrote our 1997 book, "Mad Cow USA: Could the
Nightmare Happen Here?", it received favorable reviews from some
interesting publications such as the Journal of the American Medical
Association, New Scientist, and Chemical & Engineering News. Yet although
the book was released just before the infamous Texas trial of Oprah
Winfrey and her guest Howard Lyman, for the alleged crime of "food
disparagement," the book was ignored by the mainstream media, and even
most left and alternative publications failed to review it.
Apparently many people who never read it at the time bought the official
government and industry spin that mad cow disease was just some hysterical
European food scare, not a deadly human and animal disease that could
emerge in America. In March, 1996, when the British government reversed
itself after ten years of denial and announced that young people were
dying from the fatal dementia called variant CJD -- mad cow disease in
humans -- the United States media dutifully echoed reassurances from
government and livestock industry officials that all necessary precautions
had been take long ago to guard against the disease.
Those who did read "Mad Cow USA" when it was published in November, 1997,
however, realized that the United States assurances of safety were based
on public relations and public deception, not science or adequate
regulatory safeguards. We revealed that the United States Department of
Agriculture knew more than a decade ago that to prevent mad cow disease in
America would require a strict ban on "animal cannibalism," the feeding of
rendered slaughterhouse waste from cattle to cattle as protein and fat
supplements, but refused to support the ban because it would cost the meat
industry money.
It was the livestock feed industry that led the effort in the early 1990s
to lobby into law the Texas food disparagement act, and when an uppity
Oprah hosted an April 1996, program featuring rancher-turned vegan
activist Howard Lyman, she and her guest became the first people sued for
the crime of sullying the good name of beef. Oprah eventually won her
lawsuit, but it cost her years of legal battling and millions of dollars.
In reality, the public lost, because mainstream media stopped covering the
issue of mad cow disease. As one TV network producer told me at the time,
his orders were to keep his network from being sued the way Oprah had
been.
In the six years since the publication of "Mad Cow USA," Sheldon Rampton
and I have spoken out in media interviews, at conferences of United States
families who had lost relatives to CJD, and we saw our book published in
both South Korea and Japan. Our activism won us some interesting enemies,
such as Richard Berman, a Republican lobbyist who runs an industry-funded
front group that calls itself The Center for Consumer Freedom. Berman is a
darling of the tobacco, booze, biotech and food industries, and with their
funding he issued an online report depicting us as the ring leaders of a
dangerous conspiracy of vegetarian food terrorists out to destroy the
United States food system. Last week alone he issued two national news
releases attempting to smear us.
Of course, he had an easier time attacking us before the emergence of mad
cow disease in America. I was saddened but not surprised when mad cow
disease was finally discovered in the United States. When the first North
American cow with the disease was found last May in Canada, I told
interviewers that if the disease was in Canada, it would also be found in
the United States and Mexico, since all three NAFTA nations are one big
free trade zone and all three countries feed their cattle slaughterhouse
waste in the form of blood, fat and rendered meat and bone meal. In fact,
in North America calves are literally weaned on milk formula containing
"raw spray dried cattle blood plasma," even though scientists have known
for many years that blood can transmit mad cow type diseases.
(This is why if you try to donate your blood to the Red Cross, you will be
rejected if you spent significant time in Britain during the height of its
mad cow epidemic. Britain is afraid that humans with mad cow disease may
have contaminated the British blood supply, and they do not use its own
blood plasma since as yet no test can adequately screen blood for mad cow
disease.)
The United States has spent millions of dollars on PR convincing Americans
that mad cow could never happen here, and now the USDA is engaged in a
crisis management plan that has federal and state officials, livestock
industry flacks, scientists and other trusted experts assuring the public
that this is no big deal. Their litany of falsehoods include statements
that a "firewall" feed ban has been in place in the United States since
1997, that muscle meat is not infective, that no slaughterhouse waste is
fed to cows, that the United States tests adequate numbers of cattle for
mad cow disease, that quarantines and meat recalls are just an added
measure of safety, that the risks of this mysterious killer are miniscule,
that no one in the United States has ever died of any such disease, and on
and on.
The latest spin is to blame the United States mad cow crisis on Canada. On
Saturday, December 27, with no conclusive proof whatsoever, the United
States Department of Agriculture announced that the mad cow in Washington
state had actually entered the United States years ago from Canada. This
set off an understandable howl from the Canadian government, and by Sunday
the United States was forced to back off somewhat, but clearly the PR ploy
is to get Americans thinking that this is Canada's problem, not ours.
Even if Canada does turn out to be the source of America's first case of
mad cow disease, numerous questions remain: How many other infected cows
have crossed our porous borders and been processed into human and animal
food? Why are United States slaughterhouse regulations so lax that a
visibly sick cow was sent into the human food chain weeks before tests
came back with the mad cow findings? Where did the infected byproduct feed
that this animal ate come from, and how many thousands of other animals
have eaten similar feed?
Since the announcement of United States mad cow disease our phones have
rung off the hook with interview requests. The New York Times noted that
"The 1997 book 'Mad Cow USA', by Sheldon Rampton and John C. Stauber, made
the case that the disease could enter the United States from Europe in
contaminated feed." Articles in the New York Times also cited other
warnings from Consumer Union's Michael Hansen, and Dr. Stanley Prusiner,
the Nobel Prize-winning researcher who this week called the current United
States practice of weaning calves on cattle blood protein "stupid." All of
this would be very vindicating, except for one problem: the millions of
dollars that the government and industry are spending on PR to pull the
wool over the public's eyes might just succeed in forestalling the
necessary steps that now, at this late date, must still be taken to
adequately deal with this crisis.
The good news is that those steps are rather simple and understandable. We
should ship Ann Veneman and her smartest advisors to Britain where they
can copy the successful feed and testing regulations that have solved the
mad cow problem in Europe. Veneman and her advisors should institute a
complete and total ban on feeding any slaughterhouse waste to livestock.
You may think this is already the case because that's what industry and
government said they did back in the summer of 1997. But beside the cattle
blood being legally fed back to cattle, billions of pounds of rendered
fat, blood meal, meat and bone meal from pigs and poultry are rendered and
fed to cattle, and cattle are rendered and fed to other food species, a
perfect environment for spreading and amplifying mad cow disease and even
for creating new strains of the disease.
The feed rules that the United States must adopt can be summarized this
way: you might not be a vegetarian, but the animals you eat must be. The
United States must also institute an immediate testing regime that will
test millions of cattle, not the 20,000 tested out of 35 million
slaughtered in the past year in the United States. Japan now tests all
cattle before consumption, and disease experts like Dr. Prusiner recommend
this goal for the United States. And of course, no sick "downer" cows,
barely able to move, should be fed to any humans. These are the type of
animals most likely to be infected with mad cow and other ailments --
although mad cows can also seem completely healthy at the time of
slaughter, which is why testing all animals must be the goal.
Ann Veneman and the Bush administration, unfortunately, currently have no
plans to do the right thing. The United States meat industry still
believes that the millions of dollars in campaign contributions doled out
over the years will continue to forestall the necessary regulations, and
that soothing PR assurances will convince the consuming public that this
is just some vegetarian fear-mongering conspiracy concocted by the media
to sell organic food. Will the American public buy this bull? It has in
the past. Much depends on journalists and what they are willing to
swallow. It looks to me as if papers such as the Wall Street Journal and
New York Times are finally putting some good investigative reporting teams
onto this issue, and that may undercut and expose PR ruses such as the
"blame Canada campaign."
What I can predict is that the international boycott of United States
beef, rendered byproducts, animals and animal products will continue, and
this will apply a major economic hurt to meat producers big and small
across the country. Will their anger turn against the National Cattlemen's
Beef Association, the Animal Feed Industry Association and other lobbies
that have prevented the United States from doing the right thing in the
past? Or will this become some sort of nationalistic food culture issue,
with confused consumers and family farmers blaming everyone but the real
culprits in industry and government?
We must continue to advocate for the United States to do the right thing:
Follow the lead of the European Union nations, ban all "animal
cannibalism," and test more or all animals. In the meantime, if you want
safe American beef, search out products that are certified organic and
guaranteed not to be fed slaughterhouse waste such as calf formula made
from cattle blood. An excellent source of information on the web is the
site of the Organic Consumers Association.
Our book, "Mad Cow USA," is temporarily unavailable until a paperback copy
is released later in 2004. However, you can get the book in its entirety
for free through the website of our Center for Media & Democracy. Simply
go to http://www.prwatch.org and click on the cover of "Mad Cow USA."
You'll be taken to http://www.prwatch.org/books/mcusa.pdf where you can
download for free the entire book -- and read the warnings that went
unheeded then, and are still being ignored by government regulators and
industry.
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Subject: [pjnews] Checking back on Vieques
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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17465
Vieques Aftermath
Kate M. Levin, The Nation
December 25, 2003
A recent issue of National Geographic Traveler featured a list of its Top
Five Caribbean hot spots for the year. Number one is Cuba, the perfect
destination if you love those "faded Commie icons," as the magazine put
it. Their second favorite is the Puerto Rican island-municipality of
Vieques, which was, until recently, a bomb-testing zone for the US Navy.
Last month, two tourists, perhaps acting on a tip from the glossy mag's
feature, visited a Vieques beach. They found, in addition to the stunning
natural beauty they'd been promised, something unexpected: a small
cylindrical detonator with two wires dangling from it. Navy specialists
confiscated the object, inspected it, declared that it was an explosive of
nonmilitary origin and destroyed it.
Their response was hardly a surprise to Vieques residents, according to
Roberto Rabin of the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques.
Viequenses have come to expect denials and deflections from the Navy on
the issue of environmental contamination. They have, Rabin says, "a long
history of dealing with the Navy's mistruths."
The Navy's departure from the island last May was a bittersweet victory
for those who had fought for decades to make it a reality. There was
jubilation at having defeated the Goliath which, in 1941, expropriated
three-fourths of Vieques's land and displaced half the population. And
there was deep satisfaction in expelling the killers of David Sanes, the
civilian guard killed by an errant Navy bomb in 1999.
But the celebration was tainted by fear for Vieques's future. For
sixty-two years, the Navy pummeled the island with millions of pounds of
bombs, missiles, depleted-uranium bullets, napalm and Agent Orange. But
the toxic threat to Viequenses didn't end when the Navy stopped bombing.
Some Navy bombs never exploded when fired, dropping instead into the
shallow ocean water and remaining there, lying on the coral reef or
resting on the ocean floor. These live bombs leak contaminants and pose an
explosive threat to fishers and divers. How, then, does the Navy -- which
promised, in a Memorandum of Agreement issued upon leaving the island, to
assume responsibility for environmental cleanup -- plan to deal with the
unexploded bombs lying in Vieques's waters?
It doesn't, according James Barton, a former senior technician with the
Navy's Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit. The Navy, Barton explains, has
procedures for the safe removal of unexploded bombs on land -- but not
underwater. So it has traditionally taken two approaches to unexploded
underwater bombs: blowing them up in place or, as Barton puts it, "leaving
them there and learning to live with them." The former option is not
viable for Vieques; detonating bombs would mean the destruction of the
area's ecosystem, including its delicate coral reef. The leave-them-be
choice, however, is hardly preferable: "If left there," says Barton, "the
casing of the bombs will deteriorate, gradually contaminating the
surrounding environment."
A 2001 New York Times article titled "For the Future of Vieques, Look to
Hawaii" noted the parallel between the cases of Vieques and Kahoolawe, the
Hawaiian island also used for decades as a Navy bombing target. The bombs
stopped falling there in 1990, and three years later, a $460 million,
decade-long Navy cleanup effort began. But when Kahoolawe was officially
transferred back to Hawaii this past November 12, only 71 percent of the
land ordnance had been cleared. When asked what became of the unexploded
underwater bombs resting off Kahoolawe's shore, Barton, who was involved
in the cleanup while he was still with the Navy, states flatly, "They just
left them there."
Culebra, another tiny Puerto Rican island, offers an additional parallel.
It, too, has precious coral reef, exquisite tropical beaches and waters
sprinkled with explosives and artillery. Culebra, a Navy bombing range
until 1975, has been waiting nearly three decades for decontamination. "We
still have many bombs here in Culebra and are trying to get the Navy to
clean them," Culebra's deputy mayor said last May.
One of the greatest frustrations for Viequenses has been the Navy's
evasion of a fundamental question -- just how toxic is the material lying
in the munitions junkyards off the coast of the island? The question is
hardly a trivial one. The cancer rate for Viequenses is 27 percent higher
than it is for mainland Puerto Ricans; elevated rates of heart disease,
asthma and diabetes plague the island's population (who number around
9,300) as well. Though links are difficult to prove, many health
researchers in Puerto Rico and the United States argue that a correlation
exists between contamination from the bombing and the high incidence of
disease among Viequenses.
A few years ago, motivated largely by growing health concerns in Vieques,
the Puerto Rican government asked the Navy to investigate one particularly
littered area of ocean. The site, just off of Vieques's eastern shore,
contained hundreds of barrels of an unknown, leaking material, along with
a dilapidated target ship.
The Navy's conclusions, presented to a Puerto Rican Senate committee in
December of 2002, were dismissed by the incensed committee chairman as
"defective." The reason? The study didn't test the contents of any of the
barrels, but nonetheless declared them innocuous. Nor did the Navy mention
that the decaying ship, the USS Killen, had been used in atomic tests
prior to being used as a bombing target.
The government of Puerto Rico then commissioned a new study of the site,
which was performed last summer by Barton and Dr. James Porter, a coral
reef expert from the University of Georgia. Their findings, including the
results of toxicological tests, will soon be released by the Puerto Rican
government.
Vieques need not be another Kahoolawe, as new technology promises an
alternative to the Navy's traditional approach to unexploded ordnance.
After retiring from the Navy bomb squad, Barton founded a company,
Underwater Ordnance Recovery, Inc., that has developed techniques to
remove bombs from sensitive waters nondestructively. His method removes
the bombs with an unmanned platform, then employs one of several safe
disposal techniques: defusing them, detonating them somewhere sufficiently
far from inhabited areas or burying them in deep sea. The Puerto Rican
government, Barton says, supports nondestructive removal as a viable
option for cleanup -- but it is the Navy that needs convincing. He hopes
to do so this coming March, at the first official exhibition of his
technology, to which the Navy has been invited.
Whether the Navy will break with its long history of environmental
negligence remains to be seen. So far, it has yet to abandon its pretense
of responsible eco-friendliness. "We pride ourselves on environmental
stewardship," Navy spokesperson Lieutenant Commander Cappy Surette said in
a phone interview, "and the Navy is taking a cautious and meticulous
approach to the cleanup effort in Vieques." For the sake of the people of
Vieques, one hopes that this is true--but it would be a radical departure
from the Navy's behavior thus far.
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This is a bit of a departure from the type of material I usually
distribute on this list. It's more of a "think piece" (and a quite
lengthy one at that), so I was initially a bit reluctant to send it out.
There are some interesting observations, however, so I thought some of you
take something from it.
Scott
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/15/1071336859827.html
Sydney Morning Herald
December 15, 2003
In "Stupid White Men" and "Bowling For Colombine", Michael Moore
introduced millions of readers and moviegoers worldwide to some of
America's ills: guns, corrupt politicians, fearful citizens, unchecked
corporations, crumbling social services. These are big problems for a
nation that plays such a dominating international role.
Understanding them is one thing, but what can be done to fix them?
In his unpublished manuscript, The IHO Syndrome, Julien Ninio suggests the
best way to understand America's ailments is to study their symptoms, in
the same way a doctor examines a patient - and that the diagnosis is of a
disease that can be cured by both Americans and non-Americans.
In the five excerpts here, Ninio examines America's self-image: the
"cradle of democracy", the "land of plenty", the "beacon of justice", the
"best way of life", the "land of the free". He finds gaps between the
self-image and the reality, which he calls the "symptoms" of the disease.
He argues that the symptoms can be traced to a powerful cocktail of
ignorance, hypocrisy and obedience - the "IHO syndrome". As a cure for
this disease, Ninio proposes that people replace ignorance with knowledge,
hypocrisy with sincerity and obedience with resistance.
* Both French and American, Julien Ninio has an MBA from Harvard. He was a
financial markets trader in Tokyo and a start-up CEO in San Francisco. He
left the United States for Australia six weeks after the September 11
attacks and now lives in Sydney.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt from The IHO Syndrome, chapter 2: The cradle of democracy
One man, 68 votes
American democracy had deep flaws long before the 2000 election. For
instance, each of our 50 States elects two of the country's 100 senators.
Wyoming's 500 000 residents elect two senators. California has 68 times
the population of Wyoming; its 34 million residents also elect two
senators. This means each Wyoming resident has 68 times more weight than a
Californian in choosing the country's 100 senators. Instead of 'one man
one vote', we have 'one man 68 votes'. Because of the many low density
conservative States in the middle of the country, this one issue has a
major influence on the tone of our national debate. It gives conservatives
a voice out of proportion with their numbers. It also gives them an unfair
weight in questions the Senate settles without input from the House of
Representatives, like confirming federal judges. (For laws, the House of
Representatives balances the Senate somewhat because we elect its members
in proportion to population.) To make matters worse, the high cost of
senatorial campaigns gives us a Senate that resembles a millionaires'
club. The 100 members of the 108th Senate include at least 40
millionaires--taking the low end of official financial disclosures that
exclude the value of senators' homes.[1] The 100 senators include 86 men,
59 law school graduates, no Hispanics and no blacks, a composition that
hardly mirrors the population.[2]
Apologists for our system of two senators per State say that the citizens
of each State should have equal weight in one of the houses. Under the
same logic, others could say that the citizens of each gender, religion or
ethnicity should have equal representation in one of the houses: 50
senators chosen by men, 50 chosen by women; or 20 chosen each by whites,
blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans. We could end up with four
houses: one giving each citizen equal weight (the House of
Representatives); one giving each State equal weight (the Senate); one
giving each gender equal weight; one giving each race equal weight. Taking
even more groupings (like age, religion, favourite colour), houses would
multiply; the houses would never agree, laws would never get passed. There
is nothing magical about the division of the citizenry into States rather
than races, genders or any other grouping, nothing that justifies
upsetting plain democracy to give one man 68 votes. If we chose all
members of Congress democratically, could the more populous States outvote
the less populous States? Sure, just like today whites can outvote blacks.
One man one vote, the many outvote the few--that is called 'democracy'.
Even if some view the design of Congress as compatible with a form of
democracy, one glance at our voter turnout should convince them that our
democracy has broken down in practice. Only half of eligible Americans
ever vote in a typical election, a performance that earns us the 140th
spot out of 163 nations that held elections in the 1990s.[3] And those who
vote do not represent the population, since our likelihood to vote
increases in direct proportion to income and education. Only one in four
of our lowest earners bothers to vote.[4] In America, the poor seem to
view elections as civic exercises that concern others.
This may shock our democratic instincts. A ruler who looks after the rich
may help them with secondary needs like acquiring condos at the mountain,
but a ruler who looks after the poor can help them with basic needs like
food and housing, so the poor should have the most reason to vote. When
they don't, we cannot just take easy shots at their education, we must
look for deeper reasons.
One reason lies in the position low earners occupy in our culture. Status
proceeds mostly from wealth: Low earners have no wealth and no status.
>From our youngest age, we learn that we must look out for ourselves, that
we must focus on 'getting ahead', so we train our attention on the rich.
If a middle class boy ever thinks of poverty, he probably views it as
another place to board the American dream's mighty train, and he forgets
about it at once. From reading magazines and watching television, a low
earner in America could conclude she exists only as a derogatory epithet
like 'white trash', or as a crime statistic if she has black skin. She
feels not like a valued member of society, but more like a broken machine
that contributes nothing to the economy, like a dispensable piece of
humanity to be thrown in jail, fed to the army, or left to fester in her
juices. The national debate bypasses her, so she feels like a foreigner in
her own land. Foreigners do not vote: Why should she?
And if she did vote, who should she vote for? Our political system has two
major parties, and neither represents the interests of low earners.
Democrats stand at Republicans' left elbow, but they represent neither the
poor nor even anyone who earns less than upper middle class wages. Of the
40 millionaires in the Senate, 18 (including the five richest) are
Democrats. Republicans could not have dismantled social services like
Clinton did over eight years: Democrats would have protested. When
Democrats demolished our social services, we lacked a major party to their
left, a force strong enough to stop them.
The adjective activist serves to dismiss anyone to the left of the
Democrats, like students who knocked on doors to create grassroots support
for Nader in the 2000 election. In a well-ordered society, only 'radicals'
could possibly want to campaign for or against anything. Fearing
association with 'radicals', Democrats have expelled the more progressive
from their ranks. This partly explains American politics' continuous shift
to the right. By now, the Democratic Party represents what every foreign
country calls the right: the party that cuts back social services and
makes cosy deals with big business, as opposed to the party that campaigns
for job security and longer vacations. I do not say that the people who
vote Democrat all embrace right wing views--indeed many of them lean
frankly to the left; I say that the party they vote for promotes right
wing policies instead of the social policies of the traditional left.
Things might settle in the middle if the same dynamics operated on
Republicans. But Republicans embrace extreme-right views instead of
evading them, and indeed by now the Republican Party represents what every
foreign country calls the extreme right: the party whose politicians
cannot have a rational debate, the party whose leaders want to drive the
population to church, keep women out of abortion clinics, shut the
borders, silence opponents, and bomb brown people.
We call our low earners disenfranchised as though they suffered from a
mysterious disease we can do nothing about, but the word describes a
precise condition: No one represents the poorest Americans. Voting means
choosing between the right and the extreme right. It makes as much sense
to low earners as flipping coins, so they abstain; in practice, our system
robs them of their voting rights.
Symptoms
Instead of elections 'by the people', we have a system of 'one man 68
votes' in the Senate, and elections that only concern half of the
population.
Notes
1. Sean Loughlin & Robert Yoon, 'Millionaires populate US Senate',
CNN.com, 13 June 2003, [9 September 2003].
2. Mildred L. Amer, Membership of the 108th Congress: a profile,
Congressional Research Service, 8 May 2003.
3. For the ranking of average voter turnouts in the 1990s, see the
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance's website
at [27 July 2003]. In the eight US presidential elections between 1972 and
2000, voter turnout ranged between 49 and 55 per cent. Only 49 per cent of
the eligible voters turned out for the presidential election in 2000. In
1998, a non-presidential year, only 35 per cent came out to the polls. [27
July 2003].
4. Twenty-eight per cent of the lowest earners (adults with family incomes
of $5000 or less) reported voting in 2000, compared to 51 per cent for
those earning between $25 000 and $35 000, and 72 per cent for those
earning more than $75 000. Twenty-seven per cent of Americans who never
finished junior high school reported voting, compared to 50 per cent for
high school graduates, 70 per cent for college graduates and 76 per cent
for those with a master's degree. US Census Bureau, 'Voting and
registration in the election of November 2000', tables 5 & 8, available at
[27 July 2003].
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt from The IHO Syndrome, chapter 6: The land of the free
Expensive silence
Americans have a legal right to speak more freely than most people on
earth. Our Constitution's first Amendment guarantees that 'Congress shall
make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech'. We pride ourselves on
our right of free speech and scoff at those who strike speech they
dislike.
Yet no country has completely free speech, not even us. First, I have no
right to walk into your bedroom and whisper in your ear, because my right
of free speech conflicts with your right of privacy. Our laws consist not
of absolute rules that interlock in a formal system like middle-school
geometry, but of variable rules that weave a system of compromise. Second,
we do not treat all speech equally. We protect speech differently
depending on its type--obscene, commercial, political. We ban child
pornography always; we ban commercial speech when government can show it
violates an 'important' interest; we can ban any speech when government
sees 'compelling interest' to do so.[1] Even in free speech land, we
accept that speech can harm, like any other action, and that we should
sometimes suppress it.
In fact, we long forbade the category of speech called seditious, speech
that criticises the government. Under the 1917 Espionage Act, we sent
five-time presidential candidate Eugene Debs to jail for making an
anti-war speech. Under the 1940 Smith Act, we sent a dozen leaders of the
American Communist Party to jail for teaching the Marxist doctrine in the
United States--and we outlawed the party. Apart from these two famous
examples, we prosecuted thousands of dissidents over nearly 200 years. In
1964, we finally revoked the 1798 Sedition Act that made it illegal to
speak or write critically about the government, allowing us to meet the
minimal condition for a democratic society for the first time.[2] We have
enjoyed our present level of free speech only for a short period, and we
can easily lose it.
To control speech, lawmakers now act more subtly than by just yanking
rights away. They reduce speech by playing with the balance of rights, by
granting government agencies rights that interfere with our right of free
speech. For instance, in return for our freedom of speech, the government
has a 'freedom to listen'. The recent USA Patriot Act allows government to
wiretap us and search our apartments without proving our 'probable
involvement' in a crime. The USA Patriot Act also allows government to
monitor our emails and the web sites we visit. If an FBI agent worries
about a letter you wrote to the editor, he can now order your travel
agent, your doctor and your librarian to turn over your records without
telling you. The FBI can ask bookstores and libraries to turn over the
list of people who bought or borrowed certain books. The USA Patriot Act
does not restrict our speech directly. You can say whatever you like, but
the FBI can come and bully you if it dislikes whatever you say.[3] If the
government has a right to sift through our underwear every time we speak
out, we may have a kind of right of free speech, but a weak one, not one
we should brag about.
Pursuing truth
Officially, our system of speech laws aims to promote truth. Does our
system work? To answer that, we need to take a closer look at the
philosophy behind it. Our judges claim that our system serves the pursuit
of truth by allowing speech to 'compete in the marketplace of ideas'.[4]
This means that if you disagree with what I say, you can fight my speech
with more speech. This system helps a weak truth-teller who fights a
powerful liar, at least compared to a system that deters the truth-teller
from even expressing herself. If a woman wants to distribute pamphlets
that criticise a fast food chain, she has more freedom to do so in America
than in England. In England, the food chain's lawyers could spend an hour
drafting a libel lawsuit, then sit back. To defend herself, the woman
would have to prove each of her accusations; defending the lawsuit could
keep her in court for years. Knowing that, the woman may never distribute
the pamphlets: English corporations deter critical speech by their ability
(and willingness) to sue. In America, in a libel lawsuit, the fast-food
chain would have to prove that the woman wrongly accused them--the food
chain would have to fight the woman's speech with more speech. Assuming
the woman's pamphlet only contained truthful accusations, in this case our
system favours the pursuit of truth, at least compared to England. In
America, the woman has the full opportunity to express the truth.
Still, our marketplace of ideas far from guarantees that truth prevails.
The woman stands at a great disadvantage compared to the fast food chain,
which can spend millions of dollars publicising its side of the story
through advertising and public relations. The woman can distribute
pamphlets at various restaurants every day after work for fifteen years,
but her efforts will not weigh much in the balance. News companies will
likely not publicise her story for fear of losing advertising deals with
the fast food chain. Thanks to public television, the woman would stand a
better chance of publicising her story in England. In this respect, the
English system does a better job of promoting the truth.
In our marketplace of ideas, where speech supposedly competes with speech
in the pursuit of truth, the woman's truth will probably lose in the end.
Why? Because our marketplace philosophy makes beautiful sentences but no
practical sense. Markets do not produce truth. Markets produce winners. In
the commercial markets, products compete on quality, price, brand,
advertising, design, and more.[5] The product with the best design (the
equivalent of an idea's truth) does not always win, as we know from famous
standards wars, like Betamax v VHS for video and 'QWERTY' v 'DSK' for
keyboards. In the marketplace of ideas, speech competes on the basis of
simplicity, appeal, source, loudness, truth, and much more. The speech
with the most truth does not always win, otherwise the creationist
movement could not survive.
In fact, the most truthful speech often stands at a marked disadvantage,
because as our saying goes, truth is unpopular. The pursuit of truth
depends not just on a dissident's right to express herself, but also on
the number of newspapers in which she can speak. One day, try to advance
an unpopular idea in the mainstream media, and see how far you go. Six
corporations control three quarters of the news we consume, and news
companies all cater to the same general constituency--advertisers.[6] You
will have an easier time expressing an unpopular opinion in the English
media, whose range of viewpoints blows away our official purple-to-mauve
spectrum. Unlike most democratic countries, we have no public television
channel independent of commercial interests, so in the marketplace of
ideas, some truthful ideas have no forum in which to get aired. In the
marketplace of ideas, speech competes, but far from fairly. Money often
determines the winner. If an unpopular truth ever wins, it does so not
thanks to the system's design, but to the stubbornness of its proclaimers,
and to the public's occasional insistence on knowing. Free speech means
neither true speech nor fair speech.
Once we see this, we can better understand why some countries take
different positions on speech. Some countries decide that they best
promote truth not by allowing everyone to compete in the marketplace of
ideas, but by banning certain kinds of speech they regard as harmful. We
accept the idea of banning speech in the case of child pornography, or
when the government sees 'compelling interest', so it is only a matter of
where to draw the line. To promote truth, some countries may ban schools
from teaching accounts of human existence other than evolution. To promote
truth, some countries may ban their citizens from publishing books that
deny the Holocaust happened. This classic debate divides us from the
French. Our government protects speakers, leaving listeners to protect
themselves from harmful speech by choosing from alternate sources of
speech, if available. The French government protects listeners by killing
harmful speech before it happens. Somehow, they fail to see how allowing
Nazi apologists to compete in the marketplace of ideas promotes truth. On
both sides, most people regard holocaust denial as garbage, so the debate
hinges on policy rather than quality. We should reflect on that before
bashing other designs. Whatever the benefits of our 'marketplace of ideas'
for citizens, and these benefits are real, they do not include the
automatic promotion of truth. Markets are dominated by forces. Only by
chance do these forces coincide with virtue, good design, or truth.
Our attitudes further erode the pursuit of truth. First, many of us never
exercise the right of free speech we cherish so much. Second, we have
developed awesome skills at silencing critics. We shout at them, we
intimidate them, we threaten them, we fire them, we ignore them. Some say
we even kill them.[7] A man whose job depends on the assent of others
understands this, so he does not say the words that would get him shouted
at, threatened, fired, or ignored. Sometimes, this amounts to
self-censorship, but not always, as we adjust by developing filters that
guard us from thinking critical thoughts and wanting to criticise.
...
When the towers went down in New York, we had a chance to look in the
mirror. Immediately, we asked: What have we done? Why us? The attack made
no sense in our view of the world, where America presides as the planet's
righter of wrongs. For the entire day of the attacks, news programs showed
countless Americans asking why anyone would want to hurt us. Then at night
Bush appeared and gave a final, abstract answer: 'America was targeted for
attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in
the world'. After that, few dared use their right of free speech to
suggest more concrete reasons anyone could resent our country. We rallied
behind Bush. Those who hated him for stealing the presidency now carried
him to the top of the polls. We turned our criticism sensor all the way
up, and stoned anyone who whispered the least doubt about the official
answer--'they hate our freedoms'. The irony should not be missed: We took
away their freedom to disagree with the claim that others hate us for our
freedoms. Two weeks after the attacks, essayist Susan Sontag provoked an
outburst of outrage when she wrote a piece that contained a single
suggestion for her compatriots--to think: 'Let's by all means grieve
together. But let's not be stupid together'.[8] Her suggestion marked her
as insensitive and unpatriotic. In times like these, we cannot engage in
cold analysis; we must respect other people's feelings, we must respect
their wishes neither to think nor to hear contrary views.
A dictator could leave us our right of free speech, because it serves a
mostly ornamental role. Subtle but effective devices of coercion ensure
that anyone who speaks up finds herself out of the game. We would impress
the dictator; rather than employing dedicated censors, we use the high-end
in censorship technology, a decentralised system that spreads the job of
silencing critics among the entire population. A man who comes up with a
thought outside the purple-to-mauve spectrum, finding himself alone, will
likely conclude his logic has gone astray. A woman with enough confidence
to speak green or brown becomes not a journalist, but a dissident, and few
will hear her. For those to whom it matters the most, the freedom of
speech often reduces to a freedom to shout at walls.
Symptoms
Despite free speech laws, we have lies and silence instead of truth.
Notes
1. Courts review laws that restrict commercial speech on a standard of
'intermediate scrutiny'. Recently, corporations and some Supreme Court
judges have argued that courts should raise the standard to that of
'strict scrutiny', allowing all commercial speech unless the government
can show 'compelling' reasons to restrict it. This would grant
corporations a right to lie to the public in speech not directly connected
to a sale, speech like press releases (but excluding advertising). See
which discusses the free speech issues surrounding the 2003 Supreme Court
case Nike v Kasky.
2. Noam Chomsky makes this point, citing legal scholar Harry Kalven, in
Understanding power: the indispensable Chomsky, edited by Peter Rounds
Mitchell & John Schoeffel, The New Press, 2002, p. 270, footnotes
available at [14 July 2003].
3. The Progressive collects examples of the 'New McCarthyism' on its
website at [15 August 2003]; stories abound of FBI visits to individuals
who read, say or display something that hints at a critical view of the
government.
4. I paraphrase. In his dissent to Abrams v United States, 250 US 616, 630
(1919), Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said 'the best test of
truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the
competition of the market'.
5. For instance, loudness unpacks into money, access to media, and the
speaker's willingness to speak in the first place, which hinges on her
capacity to avoid persecution from her government, her boss and her
neighbours.
6. The Executive Director of Media Alliance in San Francisco contends that
five or six big media companies control 75 to 80 per cent of Americans'
media diets. (AOL Time Warner, The Walt Disney Company, Bertelsmann AG,
Viacom, News Corporation and Vivendi Universal.) See Dan Fost, 'FCC close
to easing media caps', San Francisco Chronicle, 12 May 2003. FCC
Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy points out that the big six own only a
quarter of the broadcast and cable channels and that if they get three
quarters of our attention, 'that means they're doing a pretty good job of
catching eyeballs'. See for charts and links about the concentration of
media ownership.
7. An official report from our 94th Congress documents the FBI's role in
the assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton as part of the
COINTELPRO counterintelligence program. Chomsky, supra, chapter 4, note
33. In 1999, the family of Martin Luther King brought a civil wrongful
death suit against co-conspirators and presented evidence linking the FBI,
CIA and other federal agencies to the civil rights leader's assassination.
The jury found for the King family, but the verdict barely made the news.
William Pepper reports on this case in An act of state: the execution of
Martin Luther King, Verso Books, January 2003.
8. The New Yorker, 24 September 2001.
continued...
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continued...
Excerpt from The IHO Syndrome, chapter 13: Sincerity
Rote Hypocrisies
To create a climate of sincerity, we must not only challenge obvious
hypocrisies but also demolish some hypocrisies so solidly entrenched in
our culture we no longer notice them. This section highlights several
common hypocrisies that hide within our economic and political debate.
Survival of the brainwashed
To justify letting the poor fester in their juices, some invoke the
'survival of the fittest', as though these words stood for an
incorruptible law in human society, on a par with the law of gravitation
in physics. From the idea in biology that organisms best equipped to
tackle their environment have a better chance to reproduce and thus to
survive over generations (the fittest survive), these social Darwinists
derive the claim that humans have a moral right to abandon the most
vulnerable among them. Can you follow the logic? I can't. How does an
argument about the breeding of organisms over thousands of generations
relate to 280 million Americans? How does an observation about chances of
survival pertain to how anyone should behave? Do the unfit deserve their
unfitness, and should we punish them for it?
'Fitness' depends mostly on the luck of winning the genetic or geographic
lottery at birth. 'Unfit' stands for 'oppressed', it just sounds more
polite. A society can use the fitness argument to justify any
oppression--slavery, racism, genocide. The social Darwinists take a
group's lowly status in society as proof of their 'unfitness'--the group
cannot cope with the harsh conditions of society. They conclude that
society has every right to oppress the group. 'Survival of the fittest'
means: This group cannot overcome our oppression, so we should continue to
oppress them. Under this argument, any man could become a victim of the
'survival of the fittest'--society only needs to start kicking him in the
face, then when the man can no longer get up, comment he cannot survive in
our harsh world, and kick him twice as hard as a result. Time after time,
when one points out America's social inequities, the privileged spout
their dictum like trained parrots: 'It's the survival of the fittest!' It
takes a special blend of indoctrination, self-importance and lack of
critical thinking to say something that absurd, the kind of blend one can
perhaps only acquire in a university (not that all university graduates
possess that blend). The notion of 'survival of the fittest' is not fit to
survive in our political debate.
Hood Robin
To eliminate poverty, we follow the principle of Hood Robin: We take money
from the poor and give it to the rich. You see, since the time of Robin
Hood, we have discovered that we help the poor best by taking from them
instead of giving to them. We implement this principle by dismantling
social programs to save money then funnelling that money to the rich
through tax cuts. To kick the economy out of recessions, we take even more
from the poor and give even more to the rich. While the poor would spend
all their cash, circulating money through the economy, the rich just let
their extra cash sit in bank accounts. Apparently, we stimulate the
economy better by letting more money sit around. The mechanics of this do
not make intuitive sense, but politicians and sophisticated journalists
have convinced us that this works in an upside down kind of way--a bit
like the paradox about the French, who eat lots of greasy food but live
longer. An average person may not understand this, but an average person
does not have a PhD in nutrition or economics. PhD or not, only on drugs
or under hypnosis can anyone believe we will solve poverty by taking money
from the poor. In our fight to root out rote hypocrisies, we must hang
Hood Robin from the highest branch.
'Culture of fear': wrong disease
Rulers throughout history have used fear as a tool to control the
population. Our rulers understand this tool's mechanics. Using techniques
of propaganda, deception and intimidation which they have refined to an
art, they aim to keep us ignorant, because ignorance breeds fear, and fear
produces obedience.
In America, the art of governing and running companies consists partly in
taking more and more from people while keeping us frightened and isolated,
in coming as close as possible to that line where we might think of
resisting, without ever crossing it. Since many of us have no information
besides the official story and no communities besides our families where
to discuss issues, government and corporations easily drive fear into our
minds through threats both real and absurd, real in the case of the risk
of losing our jobs, absurd in the case of potential attacks by puny
foreign despots.
When we worry about losing our job, we obey the boss; when we worry about
foreign attacks, we panic at the ballot box and elect the most
authoritarian candidate. Our rulers have managed to create hysteria time
and time again: over communist spies stealing our atomic secrets, over
Russia, Nicaragua, Libya, Iran, black criminals, crack cocaine, anthrax,
Iraq.
Some pin most of our woes on a 'culture of fear'. That kind of
interpretation of the world leaves us powerless because we cannot attack
something like a 'culture of fear'. We cannot tell our rulers to please
stop frightening us: Why should they listen, fear makes us more obedient,
that's why they chose to frighten us in the first place. We cannot tell
the media to stop scaring us: Why should they listen, hysteria sells more
newspapers. On the other hand, we can attack the main causes of fear:
ignorance and the lies that produce ignorance. By fighting ignorance and
hypocrisy, our confusion falls, we gain confidence in our grasp of the
world, and our rulers' scarecrows cease to scare us. We stand a better
chance of solving our woes if we worry about a 'culture of ignorance'
(though I do not suggest using such a provoking phrase) rather than a
'culture of fear'.
We can do nothing about fear but we can do something about ignorance and
hypocrisy--we can fight the IHO syndrome. The longer we explain our ills
by a 'culture of fear', the longer we delay curing them. In the end, the
very notion of 'culture of fear' benefits our government and corporations:
As long as we diagnose diseases we can do nothing about, everyone
continues business as usual. 'Culture of fear' threatens to become a
convenient concept entrenched in our political debate, a hypocrisy elites
can repeat without fear of causing any change to the established order. We
must deflate the 'culture of fear' like every other rote hypocrisy. Next
time someone blames our problems on the 'culture of fear', point out the
fear's causes, show him he has diagnosed the wrong disease.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt from The IHO Syndrome, chapter 15: Resistance
Downshifting
We feel powerless to affect policies. To fight powerlessness, we must
change the dynamics between the three main poles of power in society:
people, corporations and government. We have at least that power - through
a thorough program of resistance.
What does resisting mean? Not revolution, not aimless defiance, but a plan
we can implement in our daily lives, a plan to reduce the power of
corporations and government and to increase our own. First, it means
resisting our roles in American society--refusing to work harder and buy
more without pausing to ask what would really make us happy. Second, it
means breaking the isolation by immersing ourselves in our communities and
organising groups where we can discuss society's issues. Third, when our
groups reach critical mass, it means pushing through large changes to our
political system--acquiring tools of government by the people for the
people, acquiring the true democracy that will allow us to decide policy.
Resistance starts with refusing to fulfil our economic role as isolated
economic agents, as workers and consumers blindly trying to maximise our
income and property. We can never fully pull out of the economy because we
will always have to touch money, unless we move to isolated communities
based solely on sharing or barter, in which case we will also have pulled
out of society and lost the ability to affect it.[1] But we can pull out
of the economy gradually by consuming less and working for goals other
than money, a process some call 'downshifting'. True, those who work just
so they can afford the bare necessities cannot downshift--they can neither
consume less nor work less. But they should at least benefit when others
downshift, first because better jobs gradually become available as others
leave well-paid jobs, second because when fewer people need to earn high
salaries, the wage pressure on basic workers abates. I describe the
process of downshifting knowing full well it can apply only to half of the
population.
Refusing to buy
Consuming less seems simple enough, but a few tricks can make the process
easier and painless--in fact, enjoyable.
First, before you buy anything, ask yourself one question: Will I use it
this month? If not, do not bother buying it now; in a month, you will have
forgotten about it.
Second, don't replace products that work. Keep that pair of sneakers until
it wears out; drive your car until it falls apart. Refuse to replace your
computer every three years, stop upgrading your software and operating
system. When did you last appreciate an improvement in word processing
technology? If you learn a basic upkeep routine, your computer should last
you ten years.[2]
Third, find alternatives to buying. Borrow your neighbour's power drill.
Share rides to town or take the bus. Exchange plumbing work for apple
pies. Swap houses instead of paying for overpriced weekend getaways.
Borrow books from the library. Learn how to cook and invite people over
instead of dining out. Bring coffee to work in a vacuum bottle, bring your
lunch in a box. Use pay phones again, disconnect your cell phone.
Fourth, resist marketers. Embrace reverse advertising: If you see an ad,
make a mental note not to buy the product; if you see a particularly cute
or clever ad, underline your mental note in mental red marker. Refuse to
be someone's target: If you fall outside marketers' lifestyle clusters,
advertisers can no longer manipulate you. Refuse to serve as a human
advertisement: Decline free shirts inscribed with logos, or erase them;
buy no clothes with identifiable branding.[3]
Fifth, just say no to your kids, no matter how much they ask for that
latest gizmo or special brand of clothes. They will not only survive, they
will reshuffle their priorities and grow in directions other than those
planned by marketers.
Sixth, if you have to buy, buy ethically. Let products with excessive
packaging rot on the shelf rather than in the landfill. If activists
accuse a company of mistreating workers or destroying the rainforest,
assume the company guilty until proven innocent, and cross yourself off
its customer list. Read nutrition labels and boycott companies that try to
poison you with artificial flavours, colours and preservatives. Buy from
small companies that do the best job of convincing you of their ethics. If
you go wrong, you help a small-time crook instead of a large one. If you
cannot buy from small companies, undermine our large corporations by
buying Japanese.
Seventh, pay cash. Cancel five of your credit cards, leave the last one at
home, take cash out once a week.
Last but not least, set a monthly budget that amounts to half or even a
third of what you normally spend after rent or mortgage. Compute how much
that allows you each day. If money used to burn through your pockets, you
will feel a violent shock in the first week. A small budget forces you to
think about every buying decision and look at every price. When stores do
not display prices, you will have to ask how much things cost. You may (or
you may not) find this the greatest initial hurdle: Worrying that people
will call you 'cheap' when you ask the price of a pastry or when you
decline to buy the pastry after hearing its price. But you will quickly
overcome such intimidation, real or perceived, and when you do, you will
feel better for standing up to merchants and refusing to get robbed.
Nothing is so cheap that you should have to pay double its fair price.
Your basic rights in any commercial transaction include asking the price
and deciding whether to part with your cash. You should not have to sign
blank checks anymore than a merchant should let you decide a product's
price.
Staying within budget may challenge you but it may also reward you. At
first you may think the task impossible because you will have to deny
yourself things you once bought mechanically--you may even suffer
withdrawal from overpriced coffee drinks. With resolve, you will quickly
break those mechanical buying habits, and 'not buying' will replace
'buying' as the norm. Your new habits will make you appreciate luxury
again. After a few months of abstinence, if a friend treats you to a nice
restaurant, you will savour the meal as much as you did long ago, before
pricey meals became commonplace. Your smaller budget will incite you to
seek free events and free hobbies. You may take more walks, rediscover an
old guitar, spend more time with friends, attend free lectures: Almost
immediately, you will find that spending less forces you to do things that
make you happy. After a while, you may find yourself spending even less
than your budget; you will have shed the consumer skin that corporations
and government spent so much to graft onto you. You will have refused half
of your official economic duties--buying more. Corporations and government
will have lost much of their power over you.
Refusing to work
To further reduce corporations' and government's power over you, you must
resist the other half of your economic role - working hard to maximise
your income. This could mean cutting your hours at your current job or
moving to a lower paid job you enjoy more. Once you consume less, you need
less income, so you should find it easier to work for less.
You may already enjoy your job. But unless you deeply care about the
software that allows people to manage their stock portfolios with their
cell phones, do not make it your life's purpose to propagate that
software. Refuse to fight someone else's battles. Fight your own.
Some shrink at making the change because they have no dream waiting to be
pursued. If you have not yet identified your dream, you will not find it
by spending long days at the office. Cut your hours in half if you can.
That will not only create a good job for someone else, but also give you
time to think. With extra time on your hands, you may soon overflow with
ideas. If not, run a series of experiments: Volunteer your time with
several non-profits; enrol in a philosophy class; learn to play the
guitar; attend meetings at your town council; with two friends, take
mindless jobs in a retail chain with the goal of creating a union.
Eventually you will hit on something you like. You cannot worry that
finding out what you like will be too hard. Finding out is half the fun.
If you never try, you will never find out.
Some resist switching to more enjoyable but lower paid jobs because they
want to get rich first, before moving on to the things that make them
happy. If this applies to you, I suggest you reconsider your strategy.
First, if your end goal is to maximise your happiness, you are wasting
precious time you could spend doing the things that make you happy.
Second, you may never switch. I know many people who set wealth goals for
themselves and continued to work long after they reached the magic number.
As the years went on, they became used to a 'higher standard of living'
and had to keep saving more; as they settled into their careers, they
gradually wrote off their dreams as youthful utopias. Third, you may never
have a chance to enjoy your nest egg. I once hired a young lawyer who had
just made partner after paying his dues with years of long hours and hard
work. Months later I heard he had died from cancer--he never had a chance
to enjoy the fruits of his labour. Fourth, you may never get rich despite
all your hard work. Consider this lesson from Japan. I moved there in
1988; around that time, the Nikkei stock index peaked at 38,000; when I
left in 1993, it had fallen to 20,000; I assumed it would gradually
recover, but ten years on it hovers around 8000. A Japanese man who took a
high-pressure job at a prestigious company after graduating from
university in 1988--pegging his fortunes on the economy and the stock
market--basically lost fifteen years of his life. Think about what this
means for us. Economies do not have to grow, stock markets do not have to
rise. If you think our economy could plausibly stagnate for one, two or
three decades, should you stay in a job you don't especially like, a job
you chose primarily because it could make you rich if the economy grew?
No. Waiting to get rich may last a lifetime. Find a job you really like.
If you have always dreamed of becoming a teacher, become one now. In a few
years, if we realise we have entered a period of long-term stagnation,
people will kill for that kind of job.
...
Notes
1. Even members of remote tribes that still cling to traditional ways in
Papua New Guinea now need money to purchase some essential items.
2. A few tips to save you money on computers. Open-source software may
soon eliminate your need to buy commercial software. In the meantime, find
a configuration that works and stick to it. Keep all the CDs for the
operating system and software installed on your computer. In five years,
when you replace your hard drive, reinstall the same operating system and
software. (Upgrades suck up memory and disk space, bringing older
computers to their knees.) For a twice-yearly maintenance routine that
cleans up and speeds up your PC, learn to do the following: (1) backing up
your data, (2) uninstalling programs you don't need, (3) purging the list
of programs that run at start-up, (4) removing spyware, (5) cleaning your
registry, (6) defragmenting your disk.
3. For more on this topic, see Naomi Klein, No logo, Picador, 2000, and
the magazine Adbusters.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt from The IHO Syndrome, chapter 15: Resistance
Constitutional Dreaming
Constitutions can make fascinating reading, especially when read together
as a group of documents with similar ambitions--like a collection of love
poems by different authors. They range widely in style. A constitution's
style may first reflect the drafters' personalities more than national
traits, but as that style frames national debates over the years, at
length it must influence the national character. Compare these excerpts:
Greek men and Greek women have equal rights and obligations . . . Respect
for and protection of human dignity constitute the primary obligation of
the State.
We [the Japanese people] desire to occupy an honoured place in an
international society striving for the preservation of peace, and the
banishment of tyranny and slavery, oppression, and intolerance for all
time from the earth. We recognise that all peoples of the world have the
right to live in peace, free from fear and want.
The personal, economic and cultural welfare of the individual shall be
fundamental aims of public activity [in Sweden]. In particular, it shall
be incumbent upon the public administration to secure the right to work,
housing and education, and to promote social care and social security and
a good living environment.
The French people hereby solemnly proclaim their dedication to the Rights
of Man . . . France is an indivisible, secular, democratic, and social
Republic . . . National sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise it
through their representatives and by means of referendums.
All Spaniards have the right to enjoy decent and adequate housing . . .
Everyone has the right to education . . . The public authorities shall
guarantee the defence of the consumers and users . . . The public
authorities shall concern themselves with the rational use of all natural
resources for the purpose of . . . protecting and restoring the
environment . . . The public authorities shall implement a policy of . . .
integration of those who are physically, sensorially, or mentally
handicapped . . . The right of workers to strike in defence of their
interests is recognised.
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several
States which may be included within this Union, according to their
respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole
Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of
Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
(United States)
To read these lines, I feel that our most intense national debates arise
from questions other countries solve in their constitutions' first
paragraphs. Because we wade about in problems whose solutions other
countries take as starting points for their societies, we cannot even
begin to address problems that govern the quality of people's lives. Our
Constitution throws us into a market arena where corporate bylaws sort out
winners from losers, instead of a human community where the principle of
government 'for the people' assures all citizens they will never want for
food, shelter or medicine.
We have a landowners' constitution that reads like the rules to a country
club or a sweepstakes:
If any bill shall not be returned by the President within ten days
(Sundays excepted) ...
And they shall make a list of all the persons voted for . . . which list
they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the
government . . . directed to the President of the Senate . . . [who]
shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open
all the certificates . . .
This document has served a purpose, but after 300 years of tearing and
pulling, it has run threadbare and we can barely patch it up. In 1787,
Washington advised us to change the Constitution: 'People can decide with
as much propriety on the alterations and amendment [to the Constitution]
which shall be found necessary as ourselves, for I do not conceive that we
are more inspired, have more wisdom or possess more virtue than those who
will come after us'. Jefferson agreed: 'Some men look at constitutions
with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them . . . too sacred to be
touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than
human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment . . . [As] manners
and opinions change with the change of circumstance, institutions must
advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man
to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilised society
to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors'.[3]
We need principles that serve people, not rules about sealed envelopes. We
have amended the section about 'free persons' and 'three fifths of other
persons', but they remain intact at the beginning of our Constitution - a
disgrace--because we have never 'restated' it. No one can read the
Constitution's first few lines, with their barbarous mention of 'free
persons' and 'other persons', and think that the document can have much
relevance to modern America. To start governing for the people we should
stop arguing over the holes in a crumbling parchment, and draft a new
constitution. Good models abound; with a bit of cut-and-paste, we could
quickly find ourselves back on the road to civilisation. Difficult?
Trivial. Countries adopt new constitutions all the time.
Some will invoke our 'duty' to show reverence to the present Constitution.
I assure them that we would not hurt the Constitution's feelings by laying
it to rest. Our feelings for people take priority over our feelings for a
document. We owe nothing to a piece of paper; we owe it to ourselves and
our children to provide the conditions for a good life. The supreme law of
the land must evolve to serve people's needs. The longer we keep the
Constitution in its present shape, the more it becomes like a cult. We
need not even trash the present document. We can use it to write a final
Amendment that passes on the baton to a New Constitution, thus allowing
the old one to take on a ceremonial role and retire gracefully.
I write this, conscious that this change may not happen during my
lifetime. Then again it may happen in the next decade. I have one
certainty: Our present Constitution will eventually disappear. How could
it not? Surely no one imagines it surviving 15,000 years, the time that
has passed since early humans painted bisons in European caves. Why not
precipitate the inevitable? We should at least start to contemplate the
question.
Notes
1. Mike Salvaris, 'Community and social indicators: how citizens can
measure progress', Institute for Social Research (Australia), November
2000, Appendix A-4.
2. Noam Chomsky, Understanding power: the indispensable Chomsky, edited by
Peter Rounds Mitchell & John Schoeffel, The New Press, 2002, p. 329, and
chapter 9, note 11.
3. The Jefferson quote comes from a Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 1816,
quoted in Leonard Roy Frank, editor, Quotationary, Random House Webster's,
1998.
Comments? Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Copyright � 2003. Julien Ninio.
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http://villagevoice.com/issues/0353/mondo1.php
Village Voice
December 31, 2003 - January 6, 2004
Mondo Washington
by James Ridgeway
Slaughterhouse Politics:
Ranchers Fought Rules That Might Have Prevented Mad Cow
WASHINGTON, D.C.�When it comes to politics you just can't beat the
cattlemen for bellyaching. They are forever running around Washington,
wanting to pay lower fees for overgrazing the public range or demanding
cutbacks in environmental laws that might actually slightly intrude on
their operations, and like everyone else under the big Republican tent,
babbling on about the wonders of the "free market."
In what will surely rank as cattle ranchers' biggest and stupidest p.r.
campaign, some Amarillo ranchers sued Oprah because in 1996 she had Howard
Lyman, a former rancher and food activist, as a guest on her show. The
ranch owners think Lyman is a dangerous nut. He told Oprah how the beef
men were feeding cattle ground up bits and pieces of other cattle,
including stuff from sick cows, and warned it was only a matter of time
before Mad Cow Disease hit the U.S.
The cattlemen flipped out. Paul Engler, owner of Cactus Feeders Inc. filed
suit, claiming that Oprah and Lyman hurt the cattle futures market and
charging that they violated a Texas law that forbids "knowingly making
false statements" about agricultural business. Claiming a right to free
speech, Oprah won, but the beef men nonetheless insisted you could rest
assured that Mad Cow could never come to the U.S.
It is unclear whether the government's ban on "downers," animals that
can't walk, from going into the food supply will actually keep this meat
from being consumed. Downers may well end up being fed to other animals.
And the USDA's testing program applies to only a few thousand head of
cattle, when there are millions of animals going into the feed supply.
Currently the USDA tests some 20,000 animals a year out of 29 million
steers and heifers slaughtered.
Since 1997 the government has supposedly been implementing a ban on the
use of animal parts in food supplements given to cattle. Factory farming
necessitates weaning the calf from the mother shortly after birth and
feeding it protein supplements, which often contain parts of other cattle
and other animals. But on January 31, the Washington Post reported that
the General Accounting Office, the organization which carries out
investigations for Congress, has criticized enforcement of the ban as lax.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What the cattlemen detest most is the meat inspection system. The story of
how Upton Sinclair muckraked the slaughterhouses some one hundred years
ago and Teddy Roosevelt jumped in and fixed them all up is pretty much
fiction. The simple fact is the meat inspection system isn't any good and
anybody who even attempts to stand up to the Big Boy ranchers does so at
his or her peril. Look what happened to Bill Lehman, who throughout the
early 1990s worked as a meat inspector at Sweetgrass, Montana, a busy port
of entry for Canadian beef. By his own count, Lehman himself rejected "up
to 2.3 million pounds of contaminated or mislabeled imports annually." The
reasons, according to Lehman, included "pus-filled abscesses, sticky
layers of bacteria leaving a stench, obvious fecal contamination, stains,
metal shavings, blood, bruises, hair, hide, chemical residues, salmonella,
added substances, and advanced disease symptoms."
After some children died from an E. coli outbreak in the 90s, Lehman told
about his work: "I merely walk to the back of the truck. That's all I'm
allowed to do. Whether there's boxed meat or carcasses in the truck, I
can't touch the boxes. I can't open the boxes. I can't use a flashlight. I
can't walk into the truck. I can only look at what is visible in the back
of the trailer." He told one interviewer how he did his inspections: "I've
just inspected over 80,000 pounds of meat (boxed beef rounds and boxed
boneless beef briskets) on two trucks. I wasn't running or hurrying
either. One was bound for Santa Fe Springs, California, the other for San
Jose, California. I just stamped on their paperwork 'USDA Inspected and
Passed' in 45 seconds."
The revelations by Lehman, who died in 1998, drove the ranchers and their
USDA buddies nuts. They said he was a troublemaker and, because he thought
free-trade laws made matters worse, a protectionist. He was ordered to
retire, face being fired or transfer to another location. He retired,
saying he was "just tired of the whole thing." But he fought the USDA
until he died.
But Lehman was far from the only critic. "Adequate inspection on the
border has been lacking for years, said Mike Callicrate, an outspoken
Kansas rancher, especially on the topic of the USDA's Food Safety and
Inspection Service.
What many people don't understand is how minimal meat inspection is.
Here's a typical instance, described by an Iowa farmer: He buys cows or
heifers at auction, where they have been certified as having met health
requirements�not because of first-hand inspection but because of the
seller's history as a "good guy." The farmer proceeds to feed the cattle
corn, sometimes with a vegetable-based additive, and in two years sells
them to a feed lot or maybe a local butcher. There is no check on the
health of the animals. Approval for sale is again based on the history of
the farm. What about sick cows? Say a cow falls down�he's called a
"downer." According to this farmer, a vendor often is called; he'll send a
truck to pick up the animal, kill it (if it is still alive), and sell the
parts into the meat system. If the farmer spots a sick cow in his herd, he
gets rid of it quick as he can. He doesn't go through the rigmarole of
testing it through a veterinarian, which takes time and costs money. He
just gets rid of the animal and keeps mum about what happened.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Weak laws and weak enforcement are only part of the reason for the
slipshod inspection system. It's a fact that farmers and ranchers are
under terrific pressure to make a go of it. As Al Krebs, an activist who
edits the Ag Biz Examiner, told the Voice, "If dairy farmers were getting
a fair price for what they produce, they probably wouldn't feel it
necessary to squeeze every last penny out of their herd, such as sending
'downers' off to the marketplace." Dairy farmers in the Seattle-Tacoma
area are getting as little as $1 per gallon for their milk when it
probably costs about $1.40 to produce that gallon, says Krebs, and the
farmers may have to carry a debt of anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 per
cow. But, he points out, consumers in the Seattle-Tacoma area were paying,
as of last July, $3.52 per gallon for whole milk, the highest prices
anywhere in the nation.
The beef industry is more centralized. The actual economics of beef
production are determined not by any free market, but by a highly
concentrated industry. Four meatpackers�IBP, ConAgra, Excel (a subsidiary
of Cargill), and National Beef�control 85 percent of the market. Work in
the slaughterhouses can be extremely dangerous, and it's hardly worth it.
An investigation by Mother Jones a couple of years ago found that
slaughterhouses pay among the lowest wages and have turnover rates so high
that every year practically the entire work force has to be hired anew.
Most of the workers are illegal immigrants who often don't speak English
and can't read.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This screwed-up system does produce the desired results once in a while:
Bad meat is found and then recalled. Or is it?
A study by the Center for Public Integrity, a D.C. watchdog group, found
that only 43 percent of all meat products recalled by their manufacturers
from 1990-1997 was recovered. The rest of the meat�some 17 million
pounds�was eaten by unsuspecting consumers. Yet Congress fought off
efforts by the Secretary of Agriculture during that time to get the
authority to issue mandatory recalls of contaminated meat.
The investigation found that during the 1990s the highly exclusive meat
business spent $41 million financing political campaigns of Congress
members, more than one third of them from House or Senate agriculture
committees. Among them: the majority and minority leaders of the Senate
(Trent Lott and Tom Daschle), the speaker of the House and the House
minority leader (Newt Gingrich and Dick Gephardt), and six past or present
chairmen or ranking minority members of the Senate and House agriculture
committees.
The cattle industry during that period employed 124 lobbyists to work the
Hill, 28 of them previously either lawmakers or aides to lawmakers. And it
worked. "During the escalating public health crisis of the past decade,"
the Center reported, "the food industry has managed to kill every bill
that has promised meaningful reform." In lieu of any serious rulemaking,
the Clinton administration struck a weak-ass deal with the industry to
allow cattlemen to do their own inspections and label their records "trade
secrets" so the public can't look at them.
And the problem goes even beyond the threat that contaminated meat poses
to public health. Our so-called factory farm system is a major pollutant;
massive feedlots foul our water sources around the country. An EPA report
from March '98 noted: "Agricultural practices in the United States are
estimated to contribute to the impairment of 60 percent of the nation's
surveyed rivers and streams; 50 percent of the nation's surveyed lakes,
ponds, and reservoirs; and 34 percent of the nation's estuaries."
The late Ed Abbey had it right when he declared, "The rancher�with a few
honorable exceptions�is a man who strings barbed wire all over the range;
drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds; drives off elk and antelope and
bighorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie dogs; shoots eagles, bears, and
cougars on sight; supplants the native grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed,
povertyweed, cow shit, anthills, mud, dust, and flies. And then leans back
and grins at the TV cameras and talks about how he loves the American
West."
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Subject: [pjnews] Home Depot: Do-It-Yourself Bush Fundraising Store
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Home Depot: America's Do-It-Yourself Bush Fundraising Store?
President Bush, after a major fundraiser in Baltimore on December 5, made
a stop at a nearby Home Depot to talk about the economy. But the site
confused some people, so much so that the Baltimore Sun ran an article
entitled "A Presidential Mystery," which concluded that "nobody seems to
know why" he was going to the Home Depot.
Well, a little digging provided the answer to this mystery: Home Depot is
a major contributor to President Bush's campaigns . Home Depot executives,
employees and their families have given more than $1.5 million to the GOP
since 1999, most of it in "soft money," before that practice was outlawed
last year. The company's political action committee has also already
contributed $31,000 directly to the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign.
And guess what? Buried in two small paragraphs on page 710 of the massive,
stalled energy bill is a measure that would lift a tariff on Chinese-made
ceiling fans - with Home Depot being the largest retailer of said fans.
The measure, inserted during a closed-door conference committee and
undebated in either house of Congress, would save Home Depot and other
smaller companies about $48 million, at taxpayer expense, of course. Other
fun facts uncovered by Public Citizen:
- Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli, who flew up from Atlanta on Dec. 5 to
join Mr. Bush, has made at least three trips to the White House since
2001.
- Home Depot's #2 person, Executive Vice President Francis Blake, left his
job as Bush's deputy energy secretary in 2001 to work for Home Depot.
- Karen Knutson, wife of Home Depot's top in-house lobbyist Kent Knutson,
was a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, and deputy director
of Cheney's secret energy task force.
As noted by Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch,
"The president has managed to turn policy pronouncements into free PR for
his most generous political supporters."
Perhaps you are unwilling to make your hardware and related purchases at a
chain that is helping to undermine democracy - pumping money into an
Administration that puts contributors' profits ahead of the public
interest and then looking for paybacks at taxpayer expense. If so, and you
would like to let Home Depot CEO Nardelli know about it, you can contact
them by pointing your browser here:
http://www.citizen.org/redirect.cfm?ID=1
Please pass this email on to your friends and colleagues! To subscribe to
our White House For Sale listserve, which provides information about
President Bush's fundraising activities and paybacks to major
contributors, go to: http://www.whitehouseforsale.org/listserv_signup.cfm
For more information about Public Citizen, visit http://www.citizen.org ,
and to support our work protecting our health, safety and democracy go to
http://www.citizen.org/join/index.cfm?src=lpcmem
Thank you, and happy holidays!
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Subject: [pjnews] Gore Vidal on the State of the Union
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"Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale. Whoevery
raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be our next president.
This is corruption on a major scale."
--Gore Vidal, Interiewed by Marc Cooper in the L.A. Weekly, Dec. 2003
UNCENSORED GORE VIDAL: The complete interview
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/52/features-cooper.php
It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn�t born in an earlier time and
somehow stumbled into America�s Constitutional Convention. A man with his
views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been
quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of
incensed Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics
and prolific writers, Gore Vidal.
When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set off a mighty
chain reaction as he positioned himself as one of the last standing
defenders of the ideal of the American Republic. His acerbic comments to
L.A. Weekly about the Bushies were widely reprinted in publications around
the world and flashed repeatedly over the World Wide Web. Now Vidal is at
it again, giving the Weekly another dose of his dissent, and, with the
constant trickle of casualties mounting in Iraq, his comments are no less
explosive than they were last year.
This time, however, Vidal is speaking to us as a full-time American. After
splitting his time between Los Angeles and Italy for the past several
decades, Vidal has decided to roost in his colonial home in the Hollywood
Hills. Now 77 years old, suffering from a bad knee and still recovering
from the loss earlier this year of his longtime companion, Howard Austen,
Vidal is feistier and more productive than ever.
Vidal undoubtedly had current pols like Bush and Ashcroft in mind when he
wrote his latest book, his third in two years. Inventing a Nation:
Washington, Adams, Jefferson takes us deep into the psyches of the
patriotic trio. And even with all of their human foibles on display �
vanity, ambition, hubris, envy and insecurity � their shared and
profoundly rooted commitment to building the first democratic nation on
Earth comes straight to the fore.
The contrast between then and now is hardly implicit. No more than a few
pages into the book, Vidal unveils his dripping disdain for the crew that
now dominates the capital named for our first president.
As we began our dialogue, I asked him to draw out the links between our
revolutionary past and our imperial present.
MARC COOPER: Your new book focuses on Washington, Adams and Jefferson, but
it seems from reading closely that it was actually Ben Franklin who turned
out to be the most prescient regarding the future of the republic.
GORE VIDAL: Franklin understood the American people better than the other
three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles � slaveholders and plantation
owners. Alexander Hamilton married into a rich and powerful family and
joined the upper classes. Benjamin Franklin was pure middle class. In
fact, he may have invented it for Americans. Franklin saw danger
everywhere. They all did. Not one of them liked the Constitution. James
Madison, known as the father of it, was full of complaints about the power
of the presidency. But they were in a hurry to get the country going.
Hence the great speech, which I quote at length in the book, that
Franklin, old and dying, had someone read for him. He said, I am in favor
of this Constitution, as flawed as it is, because we need good government
and we need it fast. And this, properly enacted, will give us, for a space
of years, such government.
But then, Franklin said, it will fail, as all such constitutions have in
the past, because of the essential corruption of the people. He pointed
his finger at all the American people. And when the people become so
corrupt, he said, we will find it is not a republic that they want but
rather despotism � the only form of government suitable for such a people.
But Jefferson had the most radical view, didn�t he? He argued that the
Constitution should be seen only as a transitional document.
Oh yeah. Jefferson said that once a generation we must have another
Constitutional Convention and revise all that isn�t working. Like taking a
car in to get the carburetor checked. He said you cannot expect a man to
wear a boy�s jacket. It must be revised, because the Earth belongs to the
living. He was the first that I know who ever said that. And to each
generation is the right to change every law they wish. Or even the form of
government. You know, bring in the Dalai Lama if you want! Jefferson
didn�t care.
Jefferson was the only pure democrat among the founders, and he thought
the only way his idea of democracy could be achieved would be to give the
people a chance to change the laws. Madison was very eloquent in his
answer to Jefferson. He said you cannot [have] any government of any
weight if you think it is only going to last a year.
This was the quarrel between Madison and Jefferson. And it would probably
still be going on if there were at least one statesman around who said we
have to start changing this damn thing.
Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the
Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time were effectively young
America�s two parties. More than 200 years later, do we still see any
strands, any threads of continuity in our current body politic?
Just traces. But mostly we find the sort of corruption Franklin predicted.
Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale. Whoever
raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be the next president.
This is corruption on a major scale.
Enron was an eye-opener to naive lovers of modern capitalism. Our
accounting brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt, on the
take. With the government absolutely colluding with them and not giving a
damn.
Bush�s friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could just as well
start some new company tomorrow. If he hasn�t already. No one is punished
for squandering the people�s money and their pension funds and for
wrecking the economy.
So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible fruit. No one
wants to do anything about it. It�s not even a campaign issue. Once you
have a business community that is so corrupt in a society whose business
is business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of
authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA PATRIOT Act
is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with � even using much of the
same language. In one of my earlier books, Perpetual War for Perpetual
Peace, I show how the language used by the Clinton people to frighten
Americans into going after terrorists like Timothy McVeigh � how their
rights were going to be suspended only for a brief time � was precisely
the language used by Hitler after the Reichstag fire.
In this context, would any of the Founding Fathers find themselves
comfortable in the current political system of the United States?
Certainly Jefferson wouldn�t. But what about the radical centralizers, or
those like John Adams, who had a sneaking sympathy for the monarchy?
Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the parliament, could
offer democracy. But he was no totalitarian, not by any means. Hamilton,
on the other hand, might have very well gone along with the Bush people,
because he believed there was an elite who should govern. He nevertheless
was a bastard born in the West Indies, and he was always a little nervous
about his own social station. He, of course, married into wealth and
became an aristo. And it is he who argues that we must have a government
made up of the very best people, meaning the rich.
So you�d find Hamilton pretty much on the Bush side. But I can�t think of
any other Founders who would. Adams would surely disapprove of Bush. He
was highly moral, and I don�t think he could endure the current
dishonesty. Already they were pretty bugged by a bunch of journalists who
came over from Ireland and such places and were telling Americans how to
do things. You know, like Andrew Sullivan today telling us how to be. I
think you would find a sort of union of discontent with Bush among the
Founders. The sort of despotism that overcomes us now is precisely what
Franklin predicted.
But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious administrations in
your lifetime, from Truman�s founding of the national-security state, to
LBJ�s debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to
tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you
really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more
rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?
No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT
Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public
nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance.
An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof?
No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the
president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer,
and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new
wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to
another place not even organized as a country � like Tierra del Fuego or
some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The
Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they
would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional
Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.
So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of
the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the
Founders?
No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and Ashcroft would
have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at
all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part
in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would
feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans � most
Americans would not think of them as citizens.
Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?
I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over
everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have
despotism. We have no due process.
Yet you saw in the �60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under the
weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with the discontent
over how the war in Iraq is playing out, don�t you get the impression that
Bush is headed for the same fate?
I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over
outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It�s often these
small things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its
teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her
husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other
CIA agents. This resonates more than Iraq. I�m afraid that 90 percent of
Americans don�t know where Iraq is and never will know, and they don�t
care.
But that number of $87 billion is seared into their brains, because there
isn�t enough money to go around. The states are broke. Meanwhile, the
right wing has been successful in convincing 99 percent of the people that
we are generously financing every country on Earth, that we are
bankrolling welfare mothers, all those black ladies that the Republicans
are always running against, the ladies they tell us are guzzling down
Kristal champagne at the Ambassador East in Chicago � which of course is
ridiculous.
And now the people see another $87 billion going out the window. So long!
People are going to rebel against that one. Congress has gone along with
that, but a lot of congressmen could lose their seats for that.
Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be re-elected next year?
No. At least if there is a fair election, an election that is not
electronic. That would be dangerous. We don�t want an election without a
paper trail. The makers of the voting machines say no one can look inside
of them, because they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isn�t
their job to count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the
cure for cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all three owners
of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush
administration. Is this not corruption?
So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with these balloting
machines. He can�t lose.
But Gore, aren�t you still enough of a believer in the democratic
instincts of ordinary people to think that, in the end, those sorts of
conspiracies eventually fall apart?
Oh no! I find they only get stronger, more entrenched. Who would have
thought that Harry Truman�s plans to militarize America would have come as
far as we are today? All the money we have wasted on the military, while
our schools are nowhere. There is no health care; we know the litany. We
get nothing back for our taxes. I wouldn�t have thought that would have
lasted the last 50 years, which I lived through. But it did last.
But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper ballots and have
them counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will be swept from
office. He�s made every error you can. He�s wrecked the economy.
Unemployment is up. People can�t find jobs. Poverty is up. It�s a total
mess. How does he make such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But
the people around him are not. They want to stay in power.
You paint a very dark picture of the current administration and of the
American political system in general. But at a deeper, more societal
level, isn�t there still a democratic underpinning?
No. There are some memories of what we once were. There are still a few
old people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last time we
had a government that showed some interest in the welfare of the American
people. Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care
only about the welfare of the rich.
Is Bush the worst president we�ve ever had?
Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other
presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so
put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before.
And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.
How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?
I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush
ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner
or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they
will come after us. And it won�t be pretty.
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Published on Sunday, January 4, 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle
Quarantining Dissent
How the Secret Service Protects Bush from Free Speech
by James Bovard
When President Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service
visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up "free
speech zones" or "protest zones," where people opposed to Bush policies
(and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined. These zones
routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential sight and
outside the view of media covering the event.
When Bush went to the Pittsburgh area on Labor Day 2002, 65-year-old
retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign
proclaiming, "The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many
of us."
The local police, at the Secret Service's behest, set up a "designated
free-speech zone" on a baseball field surrounded by a chain-link fence a
third of a mile from the location of Bush's speech.
The police cleared the path of the motorcade of all critical signs, but
folks with pro-Bush signs were permitted to line the president's path.
Neel refused to go to the designated area and was arrested for disorderly
conduct; the police also confiscated his sign.
Neel later commented, "As far as I'm concerned, the whole country is a
free-speech zone. If the Bush administration has its way, anyone who
criticizes them will be out of sight and out of mind."
At Neel's trial, police Detective John Ianachione testified that the
Secret Service told local police to confine "people that were there making
a statement pretty much against the president and his views" in a
so-called free- speech area.
Paul Wolf, one of the top officials in the Allegheny County Police
Department, told Salon that the Secret Service "come in and do a site
survey, and say, 'Here's a place where the people can be, and we'd like to
have any protesters put in a place that is able to be secured.' "
Pennsylvania District Judge Shirley Rowe Trkula threw out the disorderly
conduct charge against Neel, declaring, "I believe this is America.
Whatever happened to 'I don't agree with you, but I'll defend to the death
your right to say it'?"
Similar suppressions have occurred during Bush visits to Florida. A recent
St. Petersburg Times editorial noted, "At a Bush rally at Legends Field in
2001, three demonstrators -- two of whom were grandmothers -- were
arrested for holding up small handwritten protest signs outside the
designated zone. And last year, seven protesters were arrested when Bush
came to a rally at the USF Sun Dome. They had refused to be cordoned off
into a protest zone hundreds of yards from the entrance to the Dome."
One of the arrested protesters was a 62-year-old man holding up a sign,
"War is good business. Invest your sons." The seven were charged with
trespassing, "obstructing without violence and disorderly conduct."
Police have repressed protesters during several Bush visits to the St.
Louis area as well. When Bush visited on Jan. 22, 150 people carrying
signs were shunted far away from the main action and effectively
quarantined.
Denise Lieberman of the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri
commented, "No one could see them from the street. In addition, the media
were not allowed to talk to them. The police would not allow any media
inside the protest area and wouldn't allow any of the protesters out of
the protest zone to talk to the media."
When Bush stopped by a Boeing plant to talk to workers, Christine Mains
and her 5-year-old daughter disobeyed orders to move to a small protest
area far from the action. Police arrested Mains and took her and her
crying daughter away in separate squad cars.
The Justice Department is now prosecuting Brett Bursey, who was arrested
for holding a "No War for Oil" sign at a Bush visit to Columbia, S.C.
Local police, acting under Secret Service orders, established a
"free-speech zone" half a mile from where Bush would speak. Bursey was
standing amid hundreds of people carrying signs praising the president.
Police told Bursey to remove himself to the "free-speech zone."
Bursey refused and was arrested. Bursey said that he asked the police
officer if "it was the content of my sign, and he said, 'Yes, sir, it's
the content of your sign that's the problem.' " Bursey stated that he had
already moved 200 yards from where Bush was supposed to speak. Bursey
later complained, "The problem was, the restricted area kept moving. It
was wherever I happened to be standing."
Bursey was charged with trespassing. Five months later, the charge was
dropped because South Carolina law prohibits arresting people for
trespassing on public property. But the Justice Department -- in the
person of U.S. Attorney Strom Thurmond Jr. -- quickly jumped in, charging
Bursey with violating a rarely enforced federal law regarding "entering a
restricted area around the president of the United States."
If convicted, Bursey faces a six-month trip up the river and a $5,000
fine. Federal Magistrate Bristow Marchant denied Bursey's request for a
jury trial because his violation is categorized as a petty offense. Some
observers believe that the feds are seeking to set a precedent in a
conservative state such as South Carolina that could then be used against
protesters nationwide.
Bursey's trial took place on Nov. 12 and 13. His lawyers sought the Secret
Service documents they believed would lay out the official policies on
restricting critical speech at presidential visits. The Bush
administration sought to block all access to the documents, but Marchant
ruled that the lawyers could have limited access.
Bursey sought to subpoena Attorney General John Ashcroft and presidential
adviser Karl Rove to testify. Bursey lawyer Lewis Pitts declared, "We
intend to find out from Mr. Ashcroft why and how the decision to prosecute
Mr. Bursey was reached." The magistrate refused, however, to enforce the
subpoenas. Secret Service agent Holly Abel testified at the trial that
Bursey was told to move to the "free-speech zone" but refused to
cooperate.
The feds have offered some bizarre rationales for hog-tying protesters.
Secret Service agent Brian Marr explained to National Public Radio, "These
individuals may be so involved with trying to shout their support or
nonsupport that inadvertently they may walk out into the motorcade route
and be injured. And that is really the reason why we set these places up,
so we can make sure that they have the right of free speech, but, two, we
want to be sure that they are able to go home at the end of the evening
and not be injured in any way." Except for having their constitutional
rights shredded.
The ACLU, along with several other organizations, is suing the Secret
Service for what it charges is a pattern and practice of suppressing
protesters at Bush events in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Michigan,
New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas and elsewhere. The ACLU's Witold Walczak
said of the protesters, "The individuals we are talking about didn't pose
a security threat; they posed a political threat."
The Secret Service is duty-bound to protect the president. But it is
ludicrous to presume that would-be terrorists are lunkheaded enough to
carry anti-Bush signs when carrying pro-Bush signs would give them much
closer access. And even a policy of removing all people carrying signs --
as has happened in some demonstrations -- is pointless because potential
attackers would simply avoid carrying signs. Assuming that terrorists are
as unimaginative and predictable as the average federal bureaucrat is not
a recipe for presidential longevity.
The Bush administration's anti-protester bias proved embarrassing for two
American allies with long traditions of raucous free speech, resulting in
some of the most repressive restrictions in memory in free countries.
When Bush visited Australia in October, Sydney Morning Herald columnist
Mark Riley observed, "The basic right of freedom of speech will adopt a
new interpretation during the Canberra visits this week by George Bush and
his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. Protesters will be free to speak as
much as they like just as long as they can't be heard."
Demonstrators were shunted to an area away from the Federal Parliament
building and prohibited from using any public address system in the area.
For Bush's recent visit to London, the White House demanded that British
police ban all protest marches, close down the center of the city and
impose a "virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil
disruption of the visit by anti-war protesters," according to Britain's
Evening Standard. But instead of a "free-speech zone," the Bush
administration demanded an "exclusion zone" to protect Bush from
protesters' messages.
Such unprecedented restrictions did not inhibit Bush from portraying
himself as a champion of freedom during his visit. In a speech at
Whitehall on Nov. 19, Bush hyped the "forward strategy of freedom" and
declared, "We seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom
brings."
Attempts to suppress protesters become more disturbing in light of the
Homeland Security Department's recommendation that local police
departments view critics of the war on terrorism as potential terrorists.
In a May terrorist advisory, the Homeland Security Department warned local
law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who "expressed dislike
of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government." If police vigorously
followed this advice, millions of Americans could be added to the official
lists of suspected terrorists.
Protesters have claimed that police have assaulted them during
demonstrations in New York, Washington and elsewhere.
One of the most violent government responses to an antiwar protest
occurred when local police and the federally funded California
Anti-Terrorism Task Force fired rubber bullets and tear gas at peaceful
protesters and innocent bystanders at the Port of Oakland, injuring a
number of people.
When the police attack sparked a geyser of media criticism, Mike van
Winkle, the spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center
told the Oakland Tribune, "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if
you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being
fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at
that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a
terrorist act."
Van Winkle justified classifying protesters as terrorists: "I've heard
terrorism described as anything that is violent or has an economic impact,
and shutting down a port certainly would have some economic impact.
Terrorism isn't just bombs going off and killing people."
Such aggressive tactics become more ominous in the light of the Bush
administration's advocacy, in its Patriot II draft legislation, of
nullifying all judicial consent decrees restricting state and local police
from spying on those groups who may oppose government policies.
On May 30, 2002, Ashcroft effectively abolished restrictions on FBI
surveillance of Americans' everyday lives first imposed in 1976. One FBI
internal newsletter encouraged FBI agents to conduct more interviews with
antiwar activists "for plenty of reasons, chief of which it will enhance
the paranoia endemic in such circles and will further service to get the
point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."
The FBI took a shotgun approach toward protesters partly because of the
FBI's "belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented
because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission
of act which might be criminal," according to a Senate report.
On Nov. 23 news broke that the FBI is actively conducting surveillance of
antiwar demonstrators, supposedly to "blunt potential violence by
extremist elements," according to a Reuters interview with a federal law
enforcement official.
Given the FBI's expansive definition of "potential violence" in the past,
this is a net that could catch almost any group or individual who falls
into official disfavor.
James Bovard is the author of "Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom,
Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil." This article is adapted from
one that appeared in the Dec. 15 issue of the American Conservative.
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Subject: [pjnews] anti-Bush television ads to be selected
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>From Moveon.org:
With over 2.9 million votes cast, we're proud to announce the finalists in
the "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest. These ads have been selected by the
rating public from among over 1,000 ads submitted. They're potent,
poignant, and funny - it's a great mix. They perfectly capture the
grassroots approach to politics we're pioneering together.
If you're in the New York area next Monday (1/12), please join us at Bush
in 30 Seconds Live, an awards show to celebrate these ads and announce the
winner. The show will be hosted by Janeane Garofalo and include
performances and presentations by Margaret Cho, Moby, Chuck D, John
Sayles, and other special guests. With comedy, music, and some of the best
political ads the world has ever seen, it'll be a great night. And thanks
to a few generous donors who are covering the costs, every cent you pay
for tickets will go toward our $10 million campaign to expose Bush's
policies in swing states.
You can get tickets now online for $35, $75, and $150 at:
http://www.moveonvoterfund.org/b30slive.html
We also have some special packages for donors of $1,000 or more.
Without further ado, the finalists are:
CHILD'S PAY
by Charlie Fisher of Denver, CO
IN MY COUNTRY
by Harry Katatsakis, Derek Rittenhouse, Chris Wight of New York, NY
POLYGRAPH
by Rich Garella, Adam Feinstein of New York, NY
BRING 'EM ON
by Mike Cuenca of Lawrence, KS
WHAT ARE WE TEACHING OUR CHILDREN?
by Fred Surr, Ted Page, Janet Tashjian of Needham, MA
IMAGINE
by Mark Vicente of Los Angeles, CA
HUMAN COST OF WAR
by Brian Wilkinson of White Plains, NY
WAKE UP AMERICA
by Lisa M. Rowe of Hollywood, CA
DESKTOP
by David Haynes of Dallas, TX
ARMY OF ONE
by Penny Little, Nick Green, Michael Stinson, Julie Stigwart of Isla
Vista, CA
BANKRUPT
by Adam Klugman, Dave Adams of West Linn, OR
HOOD ROBBIN'
by Nathania Vishnevsky of Foster City, CA
LEAVE NO BILLIONAIRE BEHIND
by Andrew Boyd of Brooklyn, NY
BUSH'S REPAIR SHOP
by Eric Martin of Silver Spring, MD
GONE IN 30 SECONDS
by Eric Blumrich of Montclair, NJ
You can view all of the ads on the "Bush in 30 Seconds" website:
http://www.bushin30seconds.org/
Due to popular demand, we're also adding three new categories for the
contest: Funniest Ad, Best Youth Market Ad, and Best Animation. If you
register, you'll be able to vote on the finalists in each of these
categories starting on Thursday. You can register at:
http://www.bushin30seconds.org/runoff/index.html
We're also working on making the top 250 ads available online indefinitely.
For everyone who submitted an ad or participated in the voting process,
thanks for making Bush in 30 Seconds an incredible grassroots phenomenon.
With this kind of creativity on our side, President Bush's policies don't
stand a chance.
Sincerely,
--Adam, Carrie, Eli, James, Joan, Noah, Peter, Wes, and Zack
The MoveOn.org Team
January 5th, 2003
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Subject: [pjnews] GOP Smear Campaign Against Moveon.org
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fwd...
Dear MoveOn member,
As the New Year begins, we'd rather be talking about positive things, and
there are plenty of good things happening. But MoveOn.org has come under
attack from the Republican National Committee (RNC), which has launched a
campaign of malicious misinformation to divert attention from the
creativity and power of the Bush in 30 Seconds contest. We need your help
to make sure the media don't fall for it.
RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie launched the attack on "Fox News Sunday," and
the RNC followed it with press releases and calls to reporters. The
charges centered on two ads posted on the Bush in 30 Seconds website which
compared President Bush's tactis with those of Adolf Hitler. Mr. Gillespie
repeatedly referred to the ads as 'the MoveOn ad' or 'MoveOn's ad,'
implying that we had sponsored or perhaps even commissioned the ad. And he
also claimed that we might spend $7 million to run it on TV.
This is a lie. MoveOn.org hasn't sponsored such an ad, and we never would
-- we regret the appearance of these ads on the Bush In 30 Seconds site.
The two ads in question are from more than a thousand posted by members of
the public, and they were voted on by MoveOn members through December
31st. Obviously the few hundred of you who viewed these ads agreed that
they were not worthy of further broadcast or recognition, because they got
low ratings. Yesterday we announced the 15 finalists -- all good,
hard-hitting and fair appraisals of the Bush record, in the judgment of
the members and others who rated them. The two offending ads can only be
found one place now -- on the RNC website!
When we've explained this to journalists, most have understood that this
is a game of gotcha politics, not news. But even our statement for the
press below, which goes through the entire process in detail, hasn't
stopped the right wing from working this angle as hard as they can.
That's why we're asking you to please watch for stories on this as they
appear, and let us know. Call the news outlet yourself and give them hell
for falling victim to such political baloney. I've attached our statement,
which fully explains the situation, below. Then please let us know so we
can contact the outlets directly.
You can help us track inaccurate reporting on this story at:
http://moveon.org/smear/?id=2234-1914492-QHsLRRUXWO86JJ2s94wNYw
Second, we need you to get the press back on the right track. After you've
corrected the negative accounts, write an upbeat letter to your local
paper about the exciting and positive aspects of the contest and the
finalists. These ads reflect the courage, hope, and deep patriotism of our
membership. They're creative, passionate, and totally unlike most of the
political ads that are out there. And perhaps most importantly, they were
picked in a democratic way. Now that's a story.
The finalists are online at:
http://www.bushin30seconds.org/
By sharing that URL with your friends, family, and colleagues, you can
help to make sure that the RNC isn't successful in stealing our finalists'
glory.
Not only is the RNC campaign deceptive, it's also totally disingenuous.
Yesterday, the New York Post ran a long opinion column focusing
exclusively on how much Presidential Candidate Howard Dean resembles
Hitler, even calling him "Herr Howie." Of course, the RNC hasn't issued a
condemnation of that. When close RNC ally Grover Norquist repeatedly
compared taxing the wealthy with the Holocaust in an interview on NPR, the
RNC was muted. And in 2002, the RNC and its allies were silent when
supporters of President Bush actually aired TV ads morphing the face of
Senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee as a result of wounds sustained in
Vietnam, into Osama bin Laden. Given such a transparently partisan track
record, the RNC's moral outrage doesn't mean a whole lot.
Obviously, MoveOn.org and its 1.7 million members are now on the
right-wing radar. They are going to do everything they can do to silence
us, and we simply won't let it happen. Smear tactics and campaigns of
misinformation have no place in American democracy.
Sincerely,
--Adam, Carrie, Eli, James, Joan, Noah, Peter, Wes, and Zack
The MoveOn.org Team
January 6th, 2003
P.S. Here's the statement we released to the press yesterday, which
explains the whole situation.
-----------
Statement by Wes Boyd, Founder of MoveOn.org Voter Fund:
The Republican National Committee and its chairman have falsely accused
MoveOn.org of sponsoring ads on its website which compare President Bush
to Adolf Hitler. The claim is deliberately and maliciously misleading.
During December the MoveOn.org Voter Fund invited members of the public to
submit ads that purported to tell the truth about the President and his
policies. More than 1,500 submissions from ordinary Americans came in and
were posted on a web site, bushin30seconds.org, for the public to review.
None of these was our ad, nor did their appearance constitute endorsement
or sponsorship by MoveOn.org Voter Fund. They will not appear on TV. We do
not support the sentiment expressed in the two Hitler submissions. They
were voted down by our members and the public, who reviewed the ads and
submitted nearly 3 million critiques in the process of choosing the 15
finalist entries.
We agree that the two ads in question were in poor taste and deeply regret
that they slipped through our screening process. In the future, if we
publish or broadcast raw material, we will create a more effective
filtering system.
Contrast this with the behavior of the RNC and its allies when supporters
of President Bush used TV ads morphing the face of Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA)
into that of Osama Bin Laden during the 2002 Senate race.
MoveOn.org and the MoveOn.org Voter Fund exist to bring the public into
the political process and produce a more fact-based election process. We
regret that the RNC doesn't seem to embrace the same goals.
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Subject: [pjnews] Good News for Women in 2003
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http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040112&s=pollitt
Subject to Debate by Katha Pollitt
Good News for Women
[from the January 12, 2004 issue of The Nation]
There was plenty of gloomy news for women in 2003. American women make
just under 80 cents on the male dollar for full-time, year-round work. We
lost Carolyn Heilbrun, Carol Shields, Rachel Corrie, Nina Simone and
Martha Griffiths. Russia tightened its abortion laws; in Slovakia Romani
women were sterilized without their permission; Iraqi women were freed
from Saddam but confined to their houses by crime and Islamic
fundamentalists. The Globe ran a slutty cover photo of Kobe Bryant's
accuser. The New York Times reported that women are having painful and
potentially crippling surgery on their toes in order to fit into their
Manolos and Jimmy Choos, while in China, where short people are subject to
major discrimination, they are undergoing excruciating operations to
lengthen their legs. What's the matter with people? Don't answer that.
Still, it's the end of the year, so let's break out the champagne for good
news around the world for women in 2003--accomplishments, activism, bold
deeds and grounds for hope.
1. Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize. The Iranian feminist and human
rights crusader is the first Muslim woman to receive this honor. The
ayatollahs are furious!
2. Hormone replacement therapy was further debunked. Instead of protecting
you from Alzheimer's, it doubles your risk. The unmasking of HRT is a
major triumph for the women's health movement, which has claimed for
decades that its supposed benefits are drug-industry hype. You can read
all about it in Barbara Seaman's devastating expos�, The Greatest
Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth.
3. Antiwar activism got a feminist edge. The Lysistrata Project saw 1,029
productions of Aristophanes' hilarious, bawdy comedy performed all over
the world on March 3. Code Pink took on Bush--and Schwarzenegger--with
nervy humor.
4. Barbara Ransby's moving and invaluable Ella Baker and the Black Freedom
Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision illuminated a behind-the-scenes
heroine of the civil rights struggle. As Ransby showed, there are other,
more egalitarian ways to move forward than by playing follow the leader.
5. A Department of Education commission rejected energetic efforts to
water down Title IX, the main legal vehicle promoting equality for women's
athletics in schools; the Supreme Court didn't overturn affirmative
action.
6. Some movies had leading female characters who were not wives,
girlfriends, prostitutes or assassins: Whale Rider, Bend It Like Beckham,
Sylvia, Mona Lisa Smile. Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation got raves.
Older women were beautiful and sexy in Swimming Pool, starring the
ever-fabulous Charlotte Rampling, and in Something's Gotta Give, where
57-year-old Diane Keaton gets to choose between grumpy-old-man Jack
Nicholson and boy toy Keanu Reeves.
7. One in four people in Ireland saw The Magdalene Sisters, the movie that
exposed the lifelong virtual consignment to hard labor in convent
laundries of Irish girls who fell afoul of the church's harsh double
standard of sexual morality by, for example, being raped.
8. Afghan women set the gold standard for courage with major conferences
in Kandahar and Kabul to push for women's rights in the new constitution.
At the loya jirga, 25-year-old delegate Malalai Joya electrified the world
when she accused the mujahedeen who control the assembly of destroying the
country in the early 1990s.
9. In Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws
criminalizing gay sex. The Massachusetts Supreme Court, headed by a woman,
ruled that the state Constitution required that gays should be able to
marry.
10. Amina Lawal, condemned to death by stoning by a Nigerian Sharia court
for having sex out of wedlock, was set free on appeal.
11. Prodded by an ACLU lawsuit, Michigan stopped drug-testing welfare
recipients (only 7.8 percent came up positive, by the way--the same as at
your office) as well as applicants.
12. Jessica Lynch showed herself a real heroine by refusing to go along
with the propaganda parade.
13. Seventy-eight-year-old Essie Mae Washington-Williams confirmed
longstanding rumors that she is the daughter of racist Senator Strom
Thurmond and his family's 16-year-old black maid, Carrie Butler. That
Strom died at 100, reputation intact, definitely proves that God does not
exist.
14. In New York, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the
2001 ruling in Nicholson v. Scoppetta that child services can't take away
the children of battered women.
15. Louise Gl�ck, who has written poems that are burned into my brain,
became Poet Laureate, only the ninth woman to hold the post in the past
sixty-six years.
16. Desperately poor women in Nigeria's Niger Delta staged militant
demonstrations--including stripping--against Shell, demanding that the
company employ locals and share the wealth with the community. They won!
17. An FDA panel gave the thumbs-up to making emergency contraception an
over-the-counter drug. Teen pregnancy, still too high, has hit a historic
low.
18. Under heavy attack from women, DaimlerChrysler abandoned its
sponsorship of the Lingerie Bowl, a pay-per-view Super Bowl halftime event
involving models playing full-contact football in their underwear. Turns
out women buy cars too.
19. Lieut. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, who thinks Allah is an idol and
that God put Bush in the White House, quoted his ex-wife as follows: "I
don't love you anymore, you're a religious fanatic, and I'm leaving you."
20. The Dixie Chicks survived. Pro-war crowds stomped on their records,
Clear Channel refused to give them airplay and Christopher Hitchens called
them "f**king fat slags." But they're still singing to sold-out crowds,
and they're still great.
Hoping you are the same,
Happy New Year!
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Subject: [pjnews] Mentally ill inmate put to death
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http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/dll/singleton_executed.html
Arkansas: Mentally ill inmate put to death
Medical �treatment� prepares execution
By Kate Randall
8 January 2004
Death row inmate Charles Singleton, 44, died by lethal injection at the
Cummins Unit Prison near Varner, Arkansas on Tuesday, January 6. Singleton
was convicted of the 1979 stabbing death of Mary Lou York, and had spent
23 years on death row.
Members of the Northwest Arkansas Chapter of the Arkansas Coalition to
Abolish the Death Penalty held a candlelight vigil outside the Washington
County Courthouse as the execution approached. Singleton�s short,
incoherent final statement was read out before the lethal chemicals were
administered: �The blind think I�m playing a game. They deny me, refusing
my existence, but everybody takes the place of another. I will come forth
as you go.�
Members of Mary Lou York�s family attended the execution. If any relatives
of Charles Singleton had decided to attend, under Arkansas law they would
have been held at a roadblock a mile from the prison�s entrance and denied
the right to witness their loved one being put to death.
Singleton, who was also known as Victor Ra Hakim, had been diagnosed as
suffering from schizophrenia. A 1986 Supreme Court decision, Ford v.
Wainwright, bars execution of the mentally insane�those who cannot
understand the reality of, or reason for, their punishment. In Singleton�s
case, authorities got around this prohibition by obtaining a court order
to forcibly medicate him to render him temporarily mentally competent�in
order to be put to death.
The symptoms of Charles Singleton�s mental illness were obvious and
myriad. By the late 1980s he had begun to suffer delusions, such as that
his cell was possessed by demons and that his thoughts were being stolen
as he read the Bible. He described himself variously as the �Holy Ghost�
and �God and the Supreme Court.� He expressed the belief that execution
was simply a matter of stopping his breathing, and that a judge could
restart it again�clearly a lack of understanding of the nature of
execution.
By the early 1990s Singleton was regularly taking anti-psychotic drugs. If
he failed to take his medication, or it needed to be increased or changed,
his symptoms would worsen. He was subsequently put on an involuntary
medication regime. A 1990 US Supreme Court ruling (Washington v. Harper)
allows state authorities to �treat a prison inmate who has a serious
mental illness with antipsychotic drugs against his will, if he is
dangerous to himself or others and the treatment is in his medical
interest.�
Singleton�s symptoms subsided and Arkansas officials set an execution
date. His lawyers argued, however, that it could not be in their client�s
interest to be forcibly medicated to prepare him for execution, and his
death sentence was stayed awaiting a decision. In October 2001, a
three-judge panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the
death sentence should be commuted to life in prison.
However, in February 2003, a full-court ruling of the 8th Circuit held
that Arkansas authorities could forcibly medicate Singleton to prepare him
for the death chamber. They wrote: �Singleton presents the court with a
choice between involuntary medication followed by an execution and no
medication followed by psychosis and imprisonment,� adding remarkably,
�Eligibility for execution is the only unwanted consequence of the
medication� (emphasis added).
Dissenting, Judge Gerald Heaney wrote: �I believe that to execute a man
who is severely deranged without treatment, and arguably incompetent when
treated, is the pinnacle of what [former Supreme Court] Justice [Thurgood]
Marshall called �the barbarity of exacting mindless vengeance�� [in Ford
v. Wainwright].... Underneath this mask of stability, he remains insane.
Ford�s prohibition on executing the insane should apply with no less force
to Singleton than to untreated prisoners.�
The European Union, as well as Amnesty International and other human
rights groups, petitioned Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to commute
Singleton�s sentence to life in prison, but he refused. The 8th Circuit�s
ruling stood, and after having evaded execution on six previously
scheduled dates, Singleton was put to death on Tuesday.
Amnesty International condemned the execution: �While more than half the
world has abolished the death penalty in law or in practice, the United
States has allowed Charles Singleton to be executed�a man who suffers from
irrefutable mental illness. Global standards of decency prohibit the
execution of �persons who have become insane.� Singleton was said to be
�seriously deranged without treatment� and �arguably incompetent with
treatment.�... The execution of the mentally ill is another example of the
arbitrary and unfair manner in which the death penalty system is
administered.�
The United States is one of the few industrialized countries which
continue to permit the barbaric practice of capital punishment. Not only
does it allow the death penalty, but it allows the ultimate punishment to
be meted out against foreign nationals, those convicted for crimes
committed as juveniles and�as demonstrated by Charles Singleton�s case�the
mentally ill.
Execution of the mentally ill is the most extreme manifestation of a
system in which US jails and prisons are teeming with inmates with
psychological problems. As psychiatric institutions in recent decades have
shut down, throwing patients into the streets, more and more of these
individuals have found themselves arrested, prosecuted by an increasingly
punitive judicial system and incarcerated. Experts estimate that somewhere
between 200,000 and 400,000 persons with mental illnesses are confined in
US prisons.
An estimated 5 percent of the general US population suffers from mental
illness. However, a National Commission on Correctional Health Care report
to Congress in March 2002 presented these shocking estimates of the
prevalence of mental illness among prisoners on any given day:
* 2.3-3.9 percent of inmates suffer schizophrenia or other psychotic
disorder;
* 13.1-18.6 percent have major depression;
* 2.1-4.3 percent are suffering bipolar disorder (manic episode);
* 8.4-13.4 percent have dysthymia (mild depression);
* 22.0-30.1 percent suffer from an anxiety disorder;
* 6.2-11.7 percent are victims of post-traumatic stress disorder.
These are indices of a virtual epidemic of mental illness, calling for a
crisis intervention of medical and psychological professionals. They are
also an expression of the tragic impact of a complex combination of social
and economic factors�in no small way exacerbated by the stresses pervading
American life.
However, the response on the part of police and judicial authorities to
this crisis is to increasingly criminalize the mentally ill. Those who
find their way to prison are often misdiagnosed and untreated. In a cruel
twist, in Charles Singleton�s case, the authorities pushed for his
�treatment� in order to send him to his death.
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Subject: [pjnews] Bully goes to war =?iso-8859-1?q?=96_blames_God_?=
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1118424,00.html
The Bush administration will today be accused of "systematically
misrepresenting" the threat posed by "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction"
in a comprehensive report on post-war findings.
The report, by four experts on weapons proliferation at the respected
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is likely to reignite calls
for acommission to look into the government's pre-war intelligence claims.
According to the report, the absence of any imminent threat from Saddam
Hussein's chemical or nuclear programmes was "knowable" before the war.
There was greater uncertainty over biological weapons but no evidence
strong enough to justify war.
--- [snip] ---
--------------------
Excerpt of a report from a former "human shield" who returned to Baghdad
for a visit recently:
> Yesterday we took the children to an amusement park and zoo here in
Baghdad. It must have been a beautiful here before the war. It's a
huge, huge place with lakes and waterways . But I have never seen such
sad animals. There was one lion who was crying all the time, tears
literally running down its face. I could not even take a picture.
Mostof the animals in the Zoo were killed or starved to death during the
war. I could never imagine that you could see the depression and
sadness on the face of an animal. But I did here at the Baghdad Zoo.
[by way of Tom Cahill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]
--------------
--> If you pass this comment along to others -- periodically but not
repeatedly -- please explain that Commentaries are a premium sent to
Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet and that to learn more folks can consult ZNet
at http://www.zmag.org
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-12/25landau.cfm
Bully goes to war � blames God
January 05, 2004
By Saul Landau
�Missed you at Bible study.� � Bush to White House speechwriter David Frum
(Jack Beatty, �In the Name of God,� Atlantic March 5, 2003)
The bully on the block always had guys who did the fighting for him. He
would falsely accuse a weaker kid of planning some horrible conspiracy and
then unleash the tough guys � as a pre-emptive move, of course. On my
block, the bullies had the same MO. But not one of them got into an actual
fight with anyone who might inflict pain on them. They picked on kids who
would not fight back.
When a possible retaliator appeared, the bully would summon his surrogates
to administer the beating � in his name. I recall several Irish Catholic
bullies, egged on by a bigoted parish priest, invoking God�s name to
justify the beatings they inflicted on me and other Jewish victims. �We�re
kicking your ass cause you killed our Lord.�
Now the born-again bully occupies the White House. He picks on weak
targets, taunts them � �bring �em on � gets others to fight for him and
then serves turkey to his proxy warriors on Thanksgiving. But worse than
his addiction for playing dress up for photo ops, he has made bullying
into official U.S. policy. As president, you have the forum to conjure up
threats, report them as certainties and then order the armed forces to
fight them.
Go back to January 29, 2002, when George W. Bush in his State of the Union
address vowed, �We will not permit the world�s most dangerous regimes to
threaten us with the world�s most destructive weapons.� No, Bush did not
plan a pre-emptive strike against Russian, Chinese or even Israeli nuclear
arsenals. He clarified his intentions by identifying North Korea, Iran and
Iraq as �the axis of evil� � weak states. And he had no intention of doing
the fighting himself. He never has.
Given his religious �forces of good and evil� fervor innuendo combined
with the ignorance of the world � �I may not know where Bosnia is, but�� �
that informs the President�s policy decisions, I think Bush might very
well �hear� voices from above. He doesn�t feel compelled to read, or
listen for long to those with knowledge in order to establish a firm basis
for his judgments. He simply makes decisions. That�s what leaders do, he
told biographer Bob Woodward (Bush at War).
Rather, the supposedly wise counselors whose jobs consist of imparting
sound information and advice to the commander in chief simply twist
information and analysis to suit his �religious� whims � like invading
Iraq. Actually, some of the National Security Magi � Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and his Department colleagues Richard Perle,
Douglas Feith � thought that such a move would establish the basis for
remaking the Middle East � maybe the whole world.
Some of them even have rather strong financial motives for such worldly
renovation (I mention Vice President Cheney�s connections to Halliburton,
National Security Adviser Rice�s links to Chevron and of course Perle�s
multiple involvements with defense companies that allowed him to �do well
by doing good�).
For Bush, the spiritual advisers may well have mattered more. The Rev.
Billy Graham and the theocratic leaders of the Christian soldiers, Pat
Roberston and Jerry Falwell, take seriously the idea that God looks with
special care at U.S. politics. After all, Falwell divined, He may have
chosen Clinton to warn us against sin, just as he picked Bush to lead us
out of temptation and into war in the Middle East.
Graham, one of the self-anointed celestial surveyors, as Eduardo Galeano
calls him, understands that �paradise is none too roomy � no more than
fifteen hundred square miles. The chosen will be few. Now guess which
country has bought up all the entrance tickets?� (Galeano La Jornada,
March 19, 2003).
God has made his entrance in U.S. politics on earlier occasions as well.
In 1898, He allegedly told President William McKinley to seize the
Philippines � in order to spread His religion there. McKinley told White
House reporters that after spending a sleepless night pondering a decision
over whether or not to invade the Philippines, God intervened and helped
him make the decision to go to war.
Bush has intimated that God chose him to be President � whether or not he
won the election. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence
General William Boykin repeated that assertion and declared in June in an
Oregon speech, �The enemy is a guy named Satan.�
If only the majority in the civilized world would understand that war in
Iraq meant more than conquering a country with lots of oil, run by a
serious black hat! Do good Christians around the world not recall � at
least through reading � the story of the crusades, God�s unfinished
business in converting Muslims to Christianity? The tens of millions who
took to the streets to demonstrate against the war did not understand that
Bush made war for God�s peace, not just for a piece of Iraq.
Only by appealing to the apocalyptic of Biblical prophecy could the
Bushies have justified a pre-emptive war. One of the most ardent war
hawks, Richard Perle, who resigned on March 27, 2003 as chair of the
Defense Policy Board but remained a member, finally admitted in public
that the Administration had no casus belli, no legal recourse to wage war,
while dismissing legalities as inapplicable.
In the November 20 Guardian, Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger quoted
Perle telling an Institute of Contemporary Arts audience in London: �I
think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right
thing.� Perle�s belated honesty flies in the face of official White House
statements � prepared by the legal staff � that avers that existing UN
Security Council resolutions on Iraq justified the intervention.
Article 51 of the UN Charter allows for an act of �individual or
collective self-defense, if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the
United Nations.� For Perle and his neo-conservative allies, such a formula
under �international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam
Hussein alone.�
Indeed, such a legalistic course would have proven �morally unacceptable,�
according to Perle. The problems the Bushies faced in making war on Iraq,
Perle insisted, came down to the non-existence of a �practical mechanism
consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein.�
Since international law proved defective as an excuse to invade Iraq, the
old weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaeda ploys served the
cause. Bush�s legal beagles resorted to the old �sovereign authority to
use force� notion to �defend� the United States from the threat posed by
mighty Iraq. Hitler and Tojo used preventive war as Germany and Japan�s
justification to launch World War II. Prior to the start of the Nuremberg
trials in the post war period, Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson,
speaking at the International Conference on Military Trials, August 12,
1945, underlined the fallacy of pre-emptive war.
�We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen
leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started
it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes
of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will
justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as
an instrument of policy.�
Adding to such dicta about preventive war, President Dwight D. Eisenhower
in 1953 said that Hitler invented �preventive war.� Ike dismissively said:
�Frankly, I wouldn�t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and
talked about such a thing.�
Iraq did disobey some UN resolutions. But the Bush-Blair war against Iraq
literally shreds the international legal system. It amazes me how the
media ignore the fact that Israel has disavowed more UN resolutions than
any other country � with U.S. backing. The faithful do not look for
consistency, for to do so would be to question God�s will. So, the fact
that Israel has grabbed Palestinian land for the last thirty-six years and
possesses a nuclear weapon stockpile does not concern those to whom God
has instructed to dispatch the evil Saddam.
In the 21st Century, a President came to power � he was not really elected
� with a mission that most literate political types thought had vanished
in the volumes of law and experience. As the concept of imperialism became
anachronistic, an imperial bully took advantage of the bully pulpit.
Bush told James Robinson, according to Paul Harris in the November 2, 2003
New York Observer: �I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can�t
explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going
to happen... I know it won�t be easy on me or my family, but God wants me
to do it.�
So, with God as Bush�s key adviser, where does that leave Karl Rove � and
the rest of us?
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Subject: [pjnews] White House Seeks Secrecy on Detainee
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0109-07.htm
Published on Friday, January 9, 2004 by Agence France Presse
Bush Led Meetings Like "Blind Man," Says Former Treasury Secretary
WASHINGTON - US President George W. Bush led cabinet meetings "like a
blind man in a room full of deaf people," former Treasury secretary Paul
O'Neill said in portions of a television interview.
O'Neill, whom Bush fired in December 2002, explained that there was a lack
of dialogue between the president and his top aides, either as a group or
individually, CBS reported on its Internet site.
The former insider told the network in an interview to be broadcast
January 11 that the president asked him no questions during their first
one-on-one meeting.
"I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to
engage (him) on. ... I was surprised it turned out me talking and the
president just listening. ... It was mostly a monologue," O'Neill was
quoted as saying...
[snip]
----------------------
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/scotus_detainee
"People can be arrested, thrown in jail and have secret court proceedings,
and we know absolutely nothing about it."
White House Seeks Secrecy on Detainee
By GINA HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - In an extraordinary request, the Bush administration asked
the Supreme Court on Monday to let it keep its arguments secret in a case
involving an immigrant's challenge of his treatment after the Sept. 11
terror attacks.
Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel wants the high court to consider whether the
government acted improperly by secretly jailing him after the attacks and
keeping his court fight private. He is supported by more than 20
journalism organizations and media companies.
Solicitor General Theodore Olson told justices in a one-paragraph filing
that "this matter pertains to information that is required to be kept
under seal."
Justices sometimes are asked to keep parts of cases private because of
information sensitive for national security or other reasons, but it's
unusual for an entire filing to be kept secret.
Lucy A. Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for
Freedom of the Press, said she was disappointed by the government's
request.
"The idea that there is nothing that could be filed publicly is really
ridiculous," she said. "It just emphasizes our point that we're living in
frightening times. People can be arrested, thrown in jail and have secret
court proceedings, and we know absolutely nothing about it."
The court will decide later whether to consider Bellahouel's appeal and at
the same time whether to allow the secret filing. Justices will be able to
review the government's private arguments.
Bellahouel, an Algerian who worked as a waiter in South Florida, came
under FBI scrutiny because hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi
dined where he worked in the weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
He was among hundreds of foreigners rounded up after the hijackings. The
government has refused to release names and information about the
detentions, arguing that a blanket secrecy policy is needed to protect
national security.
The Supreme Court rejected an appeal last year from newspapers that sought
information about the detentions. Bellahouel's case asks the justices to
consider whether the government violated the nation's long tradition of
open court proceedings.
Lower courts kept private the existence of the case. Olson's filing
deletes the name of the appeals court that ruled against Bellahouel.
Bellahouel, who is free on $10,000 bond, is known in court papers only as
M.K.B. Because of a mistake at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in
Atlanta, the M.K.B. records were briefly made public. A Miami legal
newspaper reported his identity and said that he was released after five
months, and after he had been taken to Alexandria, Va., to testify before
a federal grand jury.
The case is M.K.B. v. Warden, 03-6747.
___
Copy of appeal:
http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/scotus/mkbwarden62703cpet.pdf
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Saddam's Ouster Planned In '01?
Saturday, January 10, 2004
CBS News
The Bush Administration began laying plans for an invasion of Iraq,
including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's
inauguration in January of 2001 -- not eight months later after the 9/11
attacks as has been previously reported.
That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first
interview about his time as a White House insider. O'Neill talks to
Correspondent Lesley Stahl in the interview, to be broadcast on 60
Minutes, Sunday, Jan. 11 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a
bad person and that he needed to go," he tells Stahl. "For me, the notion
of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we
decide to do is a really huge leap."
O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the
main source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron
Suskind.
Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave
him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the
administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein
from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall --
including post-war contingencies like peacekeeping troops, war crimes
tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil.
"There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says
'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"
A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi
Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about
contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries and which ones have
what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says.
According to CBS News Reporter Lisa Barron in Baghdad, "The Iraqi National
Congress, an umbrella group of former exiles, says it's not surprised by
O'Neill's remarks. Spokesman Entifadh Qanbar tells CBS News that the Bush
administration opened official channels to the Iraqi opposition soon after
coming to power, and discussed how to remove Saddam. The group opened an
office in Washington shotly afterwards."
In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a
National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded.
"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The
president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill in the book.
Suskind also writes about a White House meeting in which he says the
president seems to be wavering about going forward with his second round
of tax cuts. "Haven't we already given money to rich people ... Shouldn't
we be giving money to the middle," Suskind says the president uttered,
according to a nearly verbatim transcript of an Economic Team meeting he
says he obtained from someone at the meeting.
O'Neill, who was asked to resign because of his opposition to the tax cut,
says he doesn't think his tell-all account in this book will be attacked
by his former employers as sour grapes. "I will be really disappointed if
[the White House] reacts that way," he tells Stahl. "I can't imagine that
I am going to be attacked for telling the truth."
O'Neill also is quoted saying in the book that President Bush was so
disengaged in cabinet meetings that he "was like a blind man in a roomful
of deaf people."
O'Neill is also quoted in the book as saying the administration's
decision-making process was so flawed that often top officials had no real
sense of what the president wanted them to do, forcing them to act on
"little more than hunches about what the president might think."
"It's revealing," said Stahl on The Early Show Friday. "I would say it's
an unflattering portrait of the White House and of the president -- and
specifically, about how they make decisions."
A lack of dialogue, according to O'Neill, was the norm in cabinet meetings
he attended. And it was similar in one-on-one meetings, says O'Neill. Of
his first such meeting with the president, O'Neill says, "I went in with a
long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage [him] on...I
was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just
listening...It was mostly a monologue."
On Friday, a White House official tried to brush off O'Neill's assessment
of President Bush's decision-making policies. "It's well known the way the
president approaches governing and setting priorities," says Spokeman
Scott McClellan. "The president is someone that leads and acts decisively
on our biggest priorities, and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."
CBS News Correspondent Mark Knoller reported Saturday that, as the White
House sees it, O'Neill's remarks are those of a disgruntled former
official, and it should not have come as a surprise to O'Neill that the
U.S. advocated Saddam's ouster.
In fact, a senior administration official tells CBS News it would have
been irresponsible not to plan for Saddam's eventual removal.
As for the charge that there were early plans to invade Iraq, Knoller says
the official calls that "laughable." Suggesting that O'Neill doesn't know
what he's talking about on this matter, the official told CBS News O'Neill
had enough problems in his own area of expertise.
Another senior administraiton official told CBS News Saturday, "No one
ever listened to the crazy things he said before, why should we start
now?"
Separately, McClellan added Saturday, "We appreciate his service. While
we're not in the business of book reviews, it appears the world according
to Mr O'Nneill is more about justifying his own opinions than looking at
the reality of the results we're achieving on behalf on the American
people.
"The president is going to continue to be forward-looking and focus on
building on the results we've achieved on the economy and efforts to make
the world safer and a better place."
A year ago, Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury
Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on
tax cuts.
Now, O'Neill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first
time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the
centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush
White House is run.
Entitled "The Price of Loyalty," the book by a former Wall Street Journal
reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author
their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and
documents.
But the main source of the book was Paul O'Neill. Correspondent Lesley
Stahl reports.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul O'Neill says he is going public because he thinks the Bush
Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made.
Will this be seen as a �kiss-and-tell" book?
�I've come to believe that people will say damn near anything, so I'm sure
somebody will say all of that and more,� says O�Neill, who was George
Bush's top economic policy official.
In the book, O�Neill says that the president did not make decisions in a
methodical way: there was no free-flow of ideas or open debate.
At cabinet meetings, he says the president was "like a blind man in a
roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top
officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president
might think."
This is what O'Neill says happened at his first hour-long, one-on-one
meeting with Mr. Bush: �I went in with a long list of things to talk
about, and I thought to engage on and as the book says, I was surprised
that it turned out me talking, and the president just listening � As I
recall, it was mostly a monologue.�
He also says that President Bush was disengaged, at least on domestic
issues, and that disturbed him. And he says that wasn't his experience
when he worked as a top official under Presidents Nixon and Ford, or the
way he ran things when he was chairman of Alcoa.
O'Neill readily agreed to tell his story to the book's author Ron Suskind
� and he adds that he's taking no money for his part in the book.
Suskind says he interviewed hundreds of people for the book � including
several cabinet members.
O'Neill is the only one who spoke on the record, but Suskind says that
someone high up in the administration � Donald Rumsfeld -- warned O�Neill
not to do this book.
Was it a warning, or a threat?
�I don't think so. I think it was the White House concerned,� says
Suskind. �Understandably, because O'Neill has spent extraordinary amounts
of time with the president. They said, �This could really be the one
moment where things are revealed.�"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not only did O'Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal
documents.
�Everything's there: Memoranda to the President, handwritten "thank you"
notes, 100-page documents. Stuff that's sensitive,� says Suskind, adding
that in some cases, it included transcripts of private, high-level
National Security Council meetings. �You don�t get higher than that.�
And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council
meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.
�From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was
a bad person and that he needed to go,� says O�Neill, who adds that going
after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months
before Sept. 11.
�From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can
do to change this regime,� says Suskind. �Day one, these things were laid
and sealed.�
As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National
Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that
questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.
"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The
president saying �Go find me a way to do this,�" says O�Neill. �For me,
the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do
whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.�
And that came up at this first meeting, says O�Neill, who adds that the
discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting
two days later.
He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. �There are memos. One of
them marked, secret, says, �Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,�" adds Suskind, who
says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of
2001.
Based on his interviews with O'Neill and several other officials at the
meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops,
war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq's oil wealth.
He obtained one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled
"Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts," which includes a map of
potential areas for exploration.
�It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40
countries. And which ones have what intentions,� says Suskind. �On oil in
Iraq.�
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore
Administration for being too interventionist: "If we don't stop extending
our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're
going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I'm going to
prevent that."
�The thing that's most surprising, I think, is how emphatically, from the
very first, the administration had said �X� during the campaign, but from
the first day was often doing �Y,�� says Suskind. �Not just saying �Y,�
but actively moving toward the opposite of what they had said during the
election.�
The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of
taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through
Congress.
But O'Neill thought it should have been the end. After 9/11 and the war in
Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice
president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that
O'Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.
�Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand,� says Suskind. �He says, �You
know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term
elections, this is our due.� � O'Neill is speechless.�
�It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use
the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society,� says
O�Neill. �And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and
fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction.�
Did he think it was irresponsible? �Well, it's for sure not what I would
have done,� says O�Neill.
The former treasury secretary accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of not
being an honest broker, but, with a handful of others, part of "a
praetorian guard that encircled the president" to block out contrary
views. "This is the way Dick likes it," says O�Neill.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, the White House was losing patience with O'Neill. He was
becoming known for a series of off-the-cuff remarks his critics called
gaffes. One of them sent the dollar into a nosedive and required major
damage control.
Twice during stock market meltdowns, O'Neill was not available to the
president: He was out of the country - one time on a trip to Africa with
the Irish rock star Bono.
�Africa made an enormous splash. It was like a road show,� says Suskind.
�He comes back and the president says to him at a meeting, �You know,
you're getting quite a cult following.� And it clearly was not a joke. And
it was not said in jest.�
Suskind writes that the relationship grew tenser and that the president
even took a jab at O'Neill in public, at an economic forum in Texas.
The two men were never close. And O'Neill was not amused when Mr. Bush
began calling him "The Big O." He thought the president's habit of giving
people nicknames was a form of bullying. Everything came to a head for
O'Neill at a November 2002 meeting at the White House of the economic
team.
�It's a huge meeting. You got Dick Cheney from the, you know, secure
location on the video. The President is there,� says Suskind, who was
given a nearly verbatim transcript by someone who attended the meeting.
He says everyone expected Mr. Bush to rubber stamp the plan under
discussion: a big new tax cut. But, according to Suskind, the president
was perhaps having second thoughts about cutting taxes again, and was
uncharacteristically engaged.
�He asks, �Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax
cut's gonna do it again,�� says Suskind.
�He says, �Didn�t we already, why are we doing it again?�� Now, his
advisers, they say, �Well Mr. President, the upper class, they're the
entrepreneurs. That's the standard response.� And the president kind of
goes, �OK.� That's their response. And then, he comes back to it again.
�Well, shouldn't we be giving money to the middle, won't people be able to
say, �You did it once, and then you did it twice, and what was it good
for?�"
But according to the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove
jumped in.
�Karl Rove is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. �Stick to
principle. Stick to principle.� He says it over and over again,� says
Suskind. �Don�t waver.�
In the end, the president didn't. And nine days after that meeting in
which O'Neill made it clear he could not publicly support another tax cut,
the vice president called and asked him to resign.
With the deficit now climbing towards $400 billion, O'Neill maintains he
was in the right.
But look at the economy today.
�Yes, well, in the last quarter the growth rate was 8.2 percent. It was
terrific,� says O�Neill. �I think the tax cut made a difference. But
without the tax cut, we would have had 6 percent real growth, and the
prospect of dealing with transformation of Social Security and
fundamentally fixing the tax system. And to me, those were compelling
competitors for, against more tax cuts.�
While in the book O'Neill comes off as constantly appalled at Mr. Bush, he
was surprised when Stahl told him she found his portrait of the president
unflattering.
�Hmmm, you really think so,� asks O�Neill, who says he isn�t joking.
�Well, I�ll be darned.�
�You're giving me the impression that you're just going to be stunned if
they attack you for this book,� says Stahl to O�Neill. �And they're going
to say, I predict, you know, it's sour grapes. He's getting back because
he was fired.�
�I will be really disappointed if they react that way because I think
they'll be hard put to,� says O�Neill.
Is he prepared for it?
�Well, I don't think I need to be because I can't imagine that I'm going
to be attacked for telling the truth,� says O�Neill. �Why would I be
attacked for telling the truth?�
White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the book on Friday
and said "The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our
biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."
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Subject: [pjnews] Nader Running on Empty
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see also:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0110-01.htm
Nader Says a Run Would Benefit Democrats
Should Ralph Nader Run in 2004? Let Him Know What You Think
http://www.naderexplore04.org/survey/survey_start.php
------------------
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9697
Running On Empty
by Normon Solomon
Ralph Nader plans to announce this month whether he'll be running for
president in 2004. Some believe that such a campaign is needed to make a
strong political statement nationwide. But if Nader does run this year,
what kind of support�in the form of volunteers, resources and votes�could
he reasonably expect?
Results of a nationwide survey, released in late December, provide a stark
look at the current inclinations of people who've been part of his
electoral base. After receiving about 11,000 responses from readers on a
core e-mail list, the progressive online magazine AlterNet reported back:
"While 27 percent of you voted for Nader in 2000, only 11 percent say you
would vote for him in 2004."
This year, Nader would be lucky to receive 1 million votes�a far cry from
his 2000 total of 2.8 million.
Dire as the AlterNet numbers are for a prospective Nader run, they
probably overstate the extent to which he would retain voters from 2000.
The survey tally came before Nader publicly ruled out being a Green Party
nominee in 2004. Last time, one of the main reasons given for supporting
Nader as the Green presidential candidate was a desire to build a truly
progressive party. This year, many who buy such reasoning may opt for the
Green Party's presidential candidate rather than get behind an independent
Nader campaign.
Hours before Nader made public his decision not to seek the Green Party's
nomination in 2004, the national coordinator of the Independent
Progressive Politics Network, Ted Glick, commented in an essay: "It is
hard for me to see how such a decision would work for Nader." Glick went
on: "Who does he expect to attract to an independent campaign other than
Greens? I know of no moves to leave the Democratic Party on the part of
any bloc of Blacks, Latinos, labor, women or any other progressive
constituency. The Reform Party is virtually defunct. I assume Ralph is not
going to try to attract large numbers of disaffected Republican
conservatives as his petition gatherers and organization builders. Who
else is there?"
If he goes ahead for 2004, Ralph Nader will be in conflict with countless
allies who have stood alongside him in many battles�including his previous
presidential campaigns. Unlike the Democratic Party loyalists who attacked
him (often with cheap shots) in the mainstream media during 2000, many
people who now oppose a Nader campaign in 2004 have no allegiance to the
Democrats and do not shrink from confronting corporate power or espousing
principled yet unpopular causes.
Eight years ago, I spoke at a news conference in California supporting the
launch of Nader's presidential campaign. Four years ago, in venues
including national TV and radio, I criticized the sparse quantity and
defamatory quality of mainstream media coverage of his 2000 presidential
campaign. This year, I have no intention of supporting Nader if he runs.
The prospect of a Nader-in-2004 campaign is enticing to relatively few
people. "I see no evidence of the 1995 and 1999 groundswells that drew
Nader into presidential politics twice," Micah Sifry wrote in December
2003. A longtime observer and analyst of third-party movements, Sifry is
also on target when he explodes the myth that a presidential campaign
necessarily brings a focus on issues: "Hope is not a plan. The Libertarian
Party nominates a presidential candidate every four years, but that
doesn't get its issues onto the agenda."
Along with the clearly diminished support for a Nader run this year, a
parallel question also looms: How would such a campaign help to defeat
George W. Bush?
While Nader may talk about opening up a second front against Bush, there
is no plausible scenario where a Nader candidacy actually increases the
likelihood of a Bush defeat. At best, a Nader campaign would have no
effect on whether Bush loses. And the fact remains that a presidential
campaign by Nader�who has vocally rejected the idea of campaigning only in
"safe states"�could help Bush win.
Like it or not, in 2004 the only candidate who can serve as an electoral
tool for ousting Bush from the White House will be the Democratic nominee.
The imperative of dislodging him requires that we build a broad coalition
to vote Bush out.
Progressives have ample reasons to be angry at a Democratic Party
leadership that has betrayed its mass constituencies on war, civil
liberties, trade, economic justice and other issues. But while such
emotions can and should fuel the engine of political transformations, rage
should not be at the steering wheel.
Right now, for progressive Americans, the principal enemy is the gang led
by the likes of Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. There's an apt saying
attributed to an ancient Chinese military strategist: "In a struggle with
your enemy, don't do what you most want to do. Do what he least wants you
to do." And right now, what the Bush-Cheney-Rove gang least wants to see
is a united front to turn them out of office.
For generations of Americans, it is not hyperbolic to say that this
administration is by far the worst in their lifetimes. As bad as the
Democratic Party hierarchy continues to be, the right-wing Republicans now
in power are a significant order of magnitude worse�whether the realm is
militarism abroad or civil liberties at home.
Consider a recent statement by Joel Kovel, a former Green Party candidate
for senator from New York: "Tens of millions of people, including a lot of
radicals, believe that Bush's men are moving to rip up the Constitution
and fundamentally restructure the American republic to destroy the slim
chance of democratic renewal upon which green electoral politics, along
with much else, rests."
Kovel's point goes to the reality of conditions that would be faced by a
presidential campaign offering any would-be progressive alternative in
2004, whether Nader or whoever. After noting a few of the policies
implemented with a vengeance by the Bush regime, Kovel wrote:
These are qualitative shifts, the way quantitative changes become
qualitative after a while, then create new configurations. It is very weak
reasoning to point out how awful the Democrats are, how corporate, etc.,
and neglect to realize that a rogue faction of the ruling class,
represented by the Bushies, can break loose even from the traditional
Republican party, and set out to change the fundamental structures
themselves. That is how republics can turn into dictatorships. Will it
happen? Well, I don't know; nobody does. Is it more likely now than ever
before? Oh yes, yes, and will become even more so if Bush gets in again.
A 2004 strategy that focuses on voting Bush out should not mean the left
folds into the Democratic Party. Progressives ought to be clear about
what's wrong with the party's nominee and platform while acting on the
dire need to rid the world of President Bush.
A position of independence should guide political activism that
steadfastly opposes pro-corporate policies whether they come out of a
Republican or Democratic White House. This year, Nader could play a major
constructive role in consolidating and mobilizing a progressive base for
the years ahead. Imagine Nader-led super rallies aimed at retiring Bush
while building independent political power on the left.
The regime of George W. Bush has made a compelling case for an imperative:
He must not return to the White House for another term in January 2005.
And we have a responsibility to see that he doesn't.
Does Ralph Nader sufficiently grasp such concerns in 2004? For several
decades, he demonstrated enormous strategic savvy. Hopefully, he has not
become tone deaf at this pivotal moment in history. We'll soon find out.
______________________
Norman Solomon is the author of The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media. He
writes Media Beat, a nationally syndicated column.
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0111-01.htm
Published on Sunday, January 11, 2004 by Time Magazine
Confessions of a White House Insider:
A book about Treasury's Paul O'Neill paints a presidency where ideology and
politics rule the day
by John F. Dickerson
[excerpted]
[...] From his first meeting with the President, O'Neill found Bush unengaged
and inscrutable, an inside account far different from the shiny White House
brochure version of an unfailing leader questioning aides with rapid-fire
intensity. The two met one-on-one almost every week, but O'Neill says he had
trouble divining his boss's goals and ideas. Bush was a blank slate rarely
asking questions or issuing orders, unlike Nixon and Ford, for whom O'Neill
also worked. "I wondered from the first, if the President didn't know the
questions to ask," O'Neill says in the book, "or if he did know and just not
want to know the answers? Or did his strategy somehow involve never showing
what he thought? But you can ask questions, gather information and not
necessarily show your hand. It was strange." In larger meetings, Bush was
similarly walled off. Describing top-level meetings, O'Neill tells Suskind that
during the course of his two years the President was "like a blind man in a
roomf!
ul of deaf people."
In his interview with TIME, O'Neill winces a little at that quote. He's worried
it's too stark and now allows that it may just be Bush's style to keep his
advisers always guessing. In Suskind's book, O'Neill's assessment of Bush's
executive style is a harsh one: it is portrayed as a failure of leadership.
Aides were left to play "blind man's bluff," trying to divine Bush's views on
issues like tax policy, global warming and North Korea. Sometimes, O'Neill
says, they had to float an idea in the press just to scare a reaction out of
him. This led to public humiliation when the President contradicted his top
officials, as he did Secretary of State Colin Powell on North Korea and
Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman on global
warming. O'Neill came to believe that this gang of three beleaguered souls�only
Powell remains�who shared a more nonideological approach were used for window
dressing. We "may have been there, in large part, as cover," he tel!
ls Suskind.
If the President was hard to read, the White House decision-making process was
even more mysterious. Each time O'Neill tried to gather data, sift facts and
insert them into the system for debate, he would find discussion sheared off
before it could get going. He tried to build fiscal restraint into Bush's tax
plan but was thwarted by those who believed, as he says, that "tax cuts were
good at any cost." He was losing debates before they had begun. The President
asked for a global-warming plan one minute and then while it was being
formulated, announced that he was reversing a campaign pledge to cut carbon
dioxide emissions and pulling out unceremoniously from the Kyoto global-
warming treaty, short-circuiting his aides' work. The President was "clearly
signing on to strong ideological positions that had not been fully thought
through," says O'Neill. As for the appetite for new ideas in the White House,
he told Suskind, "that store is closed."
[...]
A White House that seems to pick an outcome it wants and then marshal the facts
to meet it seems very much like one that might decide to remove Saddam Hussein
and then tickle the facts to meet its objective. That's the inescapable
conclusion one draws from O'Neill's description of how Saddam was viewed from
Day One. Though O'Neill is careful to compliment the cia for always citing the
caveats in its findings, he describes a White House poised to overinterpret
intelligence. "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and
looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country," he
tells Suskind. "And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was about
finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine.
Go find me a way to do this.'"
Cheney helped bring O'Neill into the Administration, acting as a shoehorn for
O'Neill, who didn't know the President but trusted the wise counselor beside
him. So it was perhaps fitting that Cheney would take O'Neill out. Weeks after
Bush had assured O'Neill that rumored staff changes in the economic team did
not mean his job was in peril, Cheney called. "Paul, the President has decided
to make some changes in the economic team. And you're part of the change," he
told O'Neill. The bloodless way he was cut loose by his old chum shocked
O'Neill, Suskind writes, but what came after was even more shocking. Cheney
asked him to announce that it was O'Neill's decision to leave Washington to
return to private life. O'Neill refused, saying "I'm too old to begin telling
lies now."
Suskind's book�informed by interviews with officials other than O'Neill�is only
a partial view of the Bush White House. Bush's role on key topics like
education, stem-cell research and aids funding is not explored. Bush's role as
a military leader after 9/11 is discussed mostly through O'Neill's effort to
stop terrorist funding. Bush comes across as mildly effective and pleased with
O'Neill's work. The book does not try to cover how Bush engaged with his war
cabinet during the Afghan conflict or how his leadership skills were deployed
in the making of war. On the eve of the Iraq war, however, O'Neill does tell
Suskind that he marvels at the President's conviction in light of what he
considers paltry evidence: "With his level of experience, I would not be able
to support his level of conviction."
[...]
Loyalty is perhaps the most prized quality in the White House. In the book,
O'Neill suggests a very dark understanding of what happens to those who don't
show it. "These people are nasty and they have a long memory," he tells
Suskind. But he also believes that by speaking out even in the face of
inevitable White House wrath, he can demonstrate loyalty to something he
prizes: the truth. "Loyalty to a person and whatever they say or do, that's the
opposite of real loyalty, which is loyalty based on inquiry, and telling
someone what you really think and feel�your best estimation of the truth
instead of what they want to hear." That goal is worth the price of
retribution, O'Neill says. Plus, as he told Suskind, "I'm an old guy, and I'm
rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me."
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see also: http://tinyurl.com/34l93
2003 Bad Year for Press Freedom
-------------------
Los Angeles Times
Calendar Section
01/11/04
By Reed Johnson, Times Staff Writer
You dislike us. You really dislike us. Or maybe the harsher truth is, we've
begun to dislike ourselves.
Let's admit it: We in the mainstream media deserve some of this rancor and
resentment after the year we've had. Jayson Blair's serial falsehoods, the New
York Times management crackup, the Washington Post's gung-ho reporting (and
later re-reporting) of the Pfc. Jessica Lynch rescue, media mogul Conrad
Black's financial faux pas, CBS' leveraging of a Michael Jackson interview and
entertainment special - the list of snafus in 2003 goes on and on.
No wonder so many people have been taking us to task: pundits, bloggers,
journalism school professors and politicians right up to and including the
president of the United States, who told Brit Hume of Fox News that he rarely
reads newspapers because "a lot of times there's opinions mixed in with news."
Instead, Bush revealed, he relies on "people on my staff who tell me what's
happening in the world." Not only are mainstream media untrustworthy, Bush
implied, but also largely irrelevant.
The leader of the free world isn't alone in his meager estimation of the fourth
estate. It's no secret that the public's faith in the mass media has been
slipping for years, that journalists today are regarded by many Americans as
predatory, biased, out of touch with readers, motivated by personal agendas,
complacent and complicit with the corporate and governmental powers that be.
In a poll of 1,201 adults conducted last summer by the Pew Research Center for
the People & the Press, 56% of those surveyed said news organizations "often
report inaccurately," 62% thought the media "try to cover up mistakes" and 53%
believed the media "are politically biased." Seventy percent also said the
media were "influenced by the powerful," and 56% said journalists don't care
about the people they report on. Most of these negative numbers have held
steady for some time, although public perceptions of the media improved briefly
after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
What's striking today is how many media insiders and observers agree that the
profession is falling down on the job. Bookstands teem with teeth-gnashing
titles testifying to the media's alleged moral vacuousness, lack of fairness
and independence, or sheer incompetence: "Journalistic Fraud: How the New York
Times Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted"; "Off With Their
Heads: Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media &
Business"; "Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception - How the Media Failed to Cover
the War On Iraq"; "Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and
Advertisers Mislead Us"; "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the
News."
(Rule of thumb: Any book about the media with a subtitle of five or more words
probably won't be flattering.)
Many of these new books, along with stacks of newspaper columns and magazine
articles, are being written not by Beltway spin-meisters and hard-core
ideologues but by veteran journalists, career newsmen and -women who've come to
some grim conclusions about their industry, its owners and its practitioners.
Are they raising red flags or merely grinding axes? Do the mainstream media's
problems go beyond politics, beyond the transgressions of individual reporters,
beyond the increasing pressures of the bottom line?
The crucible of war
In the months of the buildup, invasion and aftermath of the Iraq war, the
criticism has grown louder. Wars are a kind of crucible, and although many
courageous journalists have risked their lives to produce first-rate work from
the battlefront, the Iraq conflict also provoked intense scrutiny of how the
mass media does its job. The spectacle of Geraldo Rivera drawing a map in the
sand of his location (and that of the U.S. troops he was covering), Peter
Arnett giving an interview to Iraqi state television (and his subsequent firing
by NBC) and, above all, the controversial practice of "embedding" reporters
with military units all raised questions about the media's reliability,
judgment and independence.
Possibly adding to the media's difficulties was the public's conflicted view of
the proper role of the press, particularly in times of crisis. According to the
same Pew poll, 70% of those surveyed said it was a good thing for the media to
have "a pro-American" viewpoint. Yet 64% said they favored "neutral" rather
than "pro-American" coverage of the war on terrorism. Even so, 46% of
respondents thought some news organizations were "becoming too critical of
America," while 25% said they were becoming "too pro-American."
Some of the fiercest criticism of the coverage of the war has come from inside
the business. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John Burns of the New York Times
blasted unnamed fellow correspondents in Baghdad for bribing officials of
Saddam Hussein's ministry of information with sweetcakes and $600 mobile phones
before the Iraq invasion. His remarks reverberated in newsrooms across the
country. "There is corruption in our business," Burns was quoted as saying in
the new book "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq." "We need to get back to
basics."
CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour lamented what she saw as the media's
reluctance to ask tough questions and press the Bush administration on the
existence of weapons of mass destruction. "I think the press was muzzled, and I
think the press self-muzzled," Amanpour told CNBC talk show host Tina Brown.
"I'm sorry to say that, but certainly television - and perhaps to a certain
extent my station - was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers
at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in
my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did."
Amanpour's remarks drew a swift rebuke. A Fox representative tartly replied
that it was "better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than spokeswoman
for Al Qaeda." Jim Walton, president of CNN Newsgroup, praised Amanpour as "one
of the world's foremost journalists" but repudiated her comments, saying they
did "not reflect the reality of our coverage." Another high-profile
correspondent, Ashleigh Banfield of NBC, was publicly reprimanded by her bosses
when she criticized U.S. television networks for soft-pedaling the war's
horrors, in an April 25 speech at Kansas State University.
Such blunt self-criticism may be emblematic of a more widespread anxiety within
the profession. "It's like a couple people are struck with this Tourette's
syndrome of truth and then they go back into their regular roles," says
Kristina Borjesson, a former Emmy Award-winning reporter-producer for CBS and
editor of a recently published collection of essays, "Into the Buzzsaw -
Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press." "The psychological term
is 'displacement reaction': Somebody who actually does say it [the truth] gets
attacked and is marginalized."
Beyond bias
Much recent criticism of the media falls along conventional political fault
lines - that the press is either too "liberal" or too "conservative." In the
years since Sept. 11 the criticism also has been politically polarized: We're
not patriotic enough. We're not skeptical enough. We're anti-American traitors.
We're flunkys for the White House and the Pentagon.
Historically, the media's response has been that when everybody's criticizing
them, they must be doing something right. But not everyone buys that rationale.
Journalist and media critic Danny Schechter says conservative accusations of a
liberal-media "boogeyman" have deflected attention from more fundamental
questions about how corporate consolidation has affected the way the media do,
or fail to do, their job. "I think the media has gone from being a complaint,
something that people grumble about, to being an issue," says Schechter, a
former producer for CNN and ABC News who now runs the media issues network
Mediachannel.org.
Neither does Schechter believe that some conservative Washington cabal is
responsible for what he regards as the media's inadequate scrutiny of the Bush
administration's rationale for the Iraq war - despite his belief that the
current White House has exhibited "a very top-down, hierarchical, controlled
approach to information." As he writes in his recently published book,
"Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception": "Crude censorship is not the main
problem today. The media is."
The terrorist attacks and their aftermath laid bare the media's failure to
inform the American public, Schechter says. In the months leading to Sept. 11,
while former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman were warning through a
commission that America was vulnerable to a massive terrorist attack, TV
stations and newspapers were atwitter about shark attacks, Robert Blake and the
like. "What we had was a growing lack of awareness about the rest of the
world," Schechter says. "When you have a situation where people don't have
context and don't have background, it makes it much easier to manipulate their
emotions."
In other words, both the conservatives who rail about Peter Jennings and the
New York Times and the liberal progressives who rail about George W. Bush and
John Ashcroft may be missing a larger point. It is the mass media themselves
that have become what Schechter calls a WMD, a "weapon of mass deception," a
problem of bipartisan urgency.
"The Left is sort of responding to a world that isn't even here anymore,"
Schechter says. "They tend to look at power as being government power, whereas
the real power shift has been from the public to the private, which operates
more subtly, with much less accountability, more in the shadows. The government
is not the driver. Market values are the driver."
Schechter and others say the potential for conflict between journalistic
independence and bottom-line imperatives could be seen in the recent push by
media conglomerates to expand the number of local TV and radio stations that
one company can own in a single market. In June, the Federal Trade Commission
passed rules that would allow a single TV network to own enough stations to
reach 45% of the nation's viewers. Capitol Hill lawmakers, under pressure from
the public and the National Assn. of Broadcasters, sought to keep the former
cap of 35%. (The proposed changes are on hold pending the outcome of a case
before the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.)
Geneva Overholser, former editor of the Des Moines Register and teacher at the
University of Missouri School of Journalism, listed the FCC rules change saga
as one of her top two nominees for "missed" stories of 2003. "Happily, the
public got word of this issue despite the media, and Congress responded,"
Overholser wrote in a recent column for Poynteronline, a Web publication of the
Poynter Institute, the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based nonprofit center for the
study of journalism. It was "impossible not to see a connection between
corporate support for the changes, and newsroom failure to cover them," she
added.
In fact, a number of news organizations covered this story extensively, but as
Schechter points out, "most of the coverage was in the business pages. It
wasn't considered like a public interest issue."
Finding the fires
During the late 1960s and early '70s the United States was arguably more
politically polarized than it is now, over the Vietnam War, civil rights and
the era's sexual, generational and cultural upheavals. Rather than retreating
from the fray, the media waded in and broke such crucial stories as the
Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal. As Philip Weiss, a columnist for the
weekly New York Observer, notes in an essay in "Into the Buzzsaw," the
Washington Post ran with the Watergate story despite vehement criticism from
the political establishment and "a sharp drop in its stock price when it took
on [President Richard] Nixon."
"Would any publication display such sang-froid today?" Weiss writes. "I think
it's extremely doubtful." It is instead on the Internet and in the "fringe
press," he asserts, that wide-open debate today takes place.
For some observers, there remains a crucial chicken-and-egg question about
whether the mainstream media are taking their cues from an apathetic political
culture that has grown less inquisitive and conscientious, if no less
adversarial, than it was 30 years ago.
Mark Danner, a writer and professor at UC Berkeley's graduate school of
journalism, believes "the press has much to answer for" for "its surprising
reluctance to question some of the major decisions" that were made in the
aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, particularly the rationale for war with
Iraq. However, he says, "I'm reluctant to lay all of this at the foot of the
press. It's very hard when Congress lies down, as it did, for the press to
stand there alone and raise questions."
What's to be done? Unfortunately, Schechter says, there's no easy solution. But
he believes that giving up on the mass media and disengaging from them is no
answer. "I think we need to build more awareness of the media role and how it's
changed and what its impact is," he says. "We need to be more interventionist
on these issues." Through his work with Mediachannel.org, he says, he's trying
to "build a bridge between the independent media world and the mainstream media
world."
Borjesson thinks it's important to make more foreign reporting and a wider
range of world views available to Americans. "Our press is very provincial,"
she says. "There is not sufficient reporting on what we do in other countries,
what we do and how it can affect us."
However, she cautions, the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a
politically well-connected few has become a global problem, as witness the
enormous power wielded by Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime
minister and media magnate.
"You have to consider real news that serves the democracy kind of like a public
utility," Borjesson says. "And you would not want the bottom line to get in the
way of your receiving electricity or clean water. Well, in a sense, real
information on what the arena of power is doing either nationally or
internationally, on behalf of all of us, on behalf of the people, that's almost
like a utility."
Danner says the media's problems have to do with "institutional forces that are
much too large for any individual reporters or group of reporters to deal
with." Besides, "the press is uniquely terrible at self-scrutiny," he says. "So
you get a kind of sheepish or wry dismissal of the general dissatisfaction. And
the dissatisfaction is real."
Sometime in the future, the media may look back on 2003 as the year when a
number of warning bells were sounded. But as an industry it seems we're still
trying to agree on how to locate the fires, let alone how to put them out.
"The alarms went off loud and clear, but we should be looking not necessarily
to the houses where the alarms went off," Danner says. "It would be salutary if
the alarms sent us in a different direction, which is toward these broader
trends in polarization, in corporatization, in tabloidization - to use a lot of
ugly words - that really do have the underlying effect on what we see and what
we read."
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The New York Times
8 January 8, 2004
U.S. Withdraws a Team of Weapons Hunters From Iraq
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from
Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for
military equipment, according to senior government officials.
The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the
administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to
uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House
cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.
A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical and
biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group,
which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of
hundreds of millions of dollars. But that team is "still waiting for
something to dispose of," said a survey group member.
Some of the government officials said the most important evidence from the
weapons hunt might be contained in a vast collection of seized Iraqi
documents being stored in a secret military warehouse in Qatar. Only a
small fraction have been translated.
A report published Wednesday in The Washington Post cited a previously
undisclosed document that suggested that Iraq might have destroyed its
biological weapons as early as 1991. The report said investigators had
otherwise found no evidence to support American beliefs that Iraq had
maintained illicit weapons dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991 or
that it had advanced programs to build new ones.
The report also documented a pattern of deceit that was found in every
field of special weaponry. It said that according to Iraqi designers and
foreign investigators, program managers exaggerated the results they could
achieve, or even promised results they knew they could not accomplish --
all in an effort to appease Saddam Hussein. In some cases, though, they
simply did it to advance their careers, the report said, or preserve jobs
or even conduct intrigues against their rivals.
Senior intelligence officials acknowledged in recent days that the weapons
hunters still had not found weapons or active programs, but in interviews,
they said the search must continue to ensure that no hidden Iraqi weapons
surfaced in a future attack.
"We worry about what may have happened to those weapons," Stuart Cohen,
the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said in an
interview broadcast late Tuesday on the ABC News program "Nightline."
"Theories abound as to what may have happened."
The search for Iraqi weapons remains "the primary focus" of the survey
group, a senior Defense Department official said. But he acknowledged that
most of the dozens of new linguists and intelligence analysts to join the
team had recently been given assignments related to combating the Iraqi
insurgency rather than to the weapons search.
David Kay, the head of the survey group, made it known last month that he
might leave his post. Government officials said Wednesday that he had not
reached a decision but that both he and his top deputy, Maj. Gen. Keith
Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency, were in Washington, in part to
discuss what direction the hunt should take.
"I am sure that if they had found important evidence, we would know about
it," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on
the House Intelligence Committee, who has said the administration
exaggerated the Iraqi threat.
Bill Harlow, the top spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, said
Wednesday that "the team needs to compete its work, and no one should jump
to any conclusions before it has an opportunity to examine all of the
circumstances."
American intelligence officials who described the seized documents said
they hoped the documents might eventually help to unravel the mystery of
whether Iraqi weapons remained hidden or whether they were destroyed long
before what the Bush administration initially portrayed as a mission "to
disarm Iraq."
In the television interview, Mr. Cohen, who as vice chairman of the
National Intelligence Council led the team that formally concluded in
October 2002 that Iraq possessed both chemical and biological weapons,
insisted that "it is too soon to close the books on this case."
A report to be released Thursday by the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace has concluded that it was unlikely that Iraq could
have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of
chemical and biological weapons and related production facilities that
American officials claimed were present "without the United States
detecting some sign of this activity."
Through their spokesmen, Dr. Kay and General Dayton have declined repeated
requests for interviews.
The cache of Iraqi documents cover subjects extending far beyond illicit
weapons, according to senior military officials, and are so voluminous
that, if stacked, they would rise 10 miles high, according to estimates by
senior government officials.
The warehouse in Qatar has become the center of work by the Defense
Intelligence Agency to translate and analyze the documents, the officials
said.
The 400-member team withdrawn from Iraq, known as the Joint Captured
Materiel Exploitation Group, was primarily composed of technical experts
and was headed by an Australian brigadier, Defense Department officials
said. Its work included searching weapons depots and other sites for
missile launchers that might have been used with illicit weapons, the
officials said, and it was withdrawn "because its work was essentially
done."
"They picked up everything that was worth picking up," one official said.
The weapons disposal team still in place, known as Task Force D/E, for
disablement and elimination, has been used to collect suspicious material,
although none has proved to be part of any illicit weapons program.
In an interim report in October, Dr. Kay acknowledged that his team had
failed to find illicit weapons or active weapons programs in Iraq, but
said they had discovered evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to develop
such weapons and might have retained the capacity to do so.
Dr. Kay has not said when he intended to issue his next report, and that
remains a subject of debate within the administration, government
officials said.
American intelligence officials, including Mr. Cohen, have vigorously
defended their estimates of Iraq's weapons program, saying the evidence
was strong, credible and backed up by a number of sources. But staff
members of the Senate and House intelligence agencies are preparing
reports suggesting that the administration and intelligence agencies had
seriously overestimated the nature of the threat posed by illicit Iraqi
weapons.
Ms. Harman said in a telephone interview that she expected that Dr. Kay,
appointed last June 11 as a special adviser to George J. Tenet, the
director of central intelligence, was probably stepping down, a
development that she said would be "very disappointing."
"I have to believe that if they were about to pounce on a large stockpile
of chemical or biological weapons, he would be there for the
announcement," Ms. Harman said.
-----------------
January 10, 2004
Section A; Page 12; Column 4; Editorial Desk
To the Editor:
Re "U.S. Withdraws a Team of Weapons Hunters From Iraq, Saying That Its
Work Is Done" (news article, Jan. 8):
With Saddam Hussein in American custody, weapons inspectors should have
full access to Iraqi scientists and Iraqi weapons sites.
If there are banned weapons in Iraq, now is the time to search for them.
Right? Then why is the Bush administration pulling out a 400-member team?
After all, it was only 11 months ago that Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell told the United Nations that "there can be no doubt that Saddam
Hussein has biological weapons" and "our conservative estimate is that
Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons
agent."
When will the Bush administration concede that the justification for the
Iraq war was based on false information -- either faulty intelligence or,
worse, fabricated intelligence?
MICHAEL J. SHANAHAN
Absecon, N.J., Jan. 8, 2004
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Subject: [pjnews] Those WMDs: Bush's Case Weakens Further
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http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=1168
The Nation, 8 January 2004
Those WMDs: Bush's Case Weakens Further
by David Corn
When will George W. Bush say, "We were wrong on Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction"?
The evidence--or lack of evidence--continues to mount suggesting that Bush
and his aides made false statements about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction before the war. Remember all that alarmist rhetoric? In an
October 2002 speech, Bush said Iraq had a "massive stockpile" of weapons
of mass destruction. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed "there is no doubt
that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction...that he is
amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against
us." In his famous presentation to the United Nations Security Council,
Secretary of State Colin Powell declared, "Our conservative estimate is
that Iraq, today, has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical
weapons agent."
Conservative estimate? None of these claims have come close to panning
out. And it's not because--as some Bush-backers have suggested--Saddam
Hussein was so good at hiding the stuff or because he managed to ship his
arsenal to Syria before US troops came knocking. An extensive Washington
Post front-page article
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60340-2004Jan6.html)
published on January 7 and written by reporter Barton Gellman (and based
on interviews with US weapons hunters and Iraqi weapons scientists and
heretofore publicly unavailable Iraqi documentation) details the
tremendous gap between the Bush rhetoric and the reality. It's not that
Hussein was not interested in chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
But Gellman found that Iraq's programs in these areas were either in
suspension or far from advanced and that--most important of all--they were
not even close to producing actual weapons. The two key paragraphs of his
piece read:
"[U.S. weapons] investigators have found no support for the two main fears
expressed in London and Washington before the war--that Iraq had a hidden
arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public
statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have
discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents....The investigators
assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume
production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learned to make it last
longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program,
described as a 'grave and gathering danger' by President Bush and a
'mortal threat' by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state
left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s."
"A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition
investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a
nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S.
analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and
industry, supported by observations on the ground, describe factories and
institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by twelve years of conflict,
arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's
biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal
strife, bled by schemes for personal gain, and handicapped by deceit up
and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the
investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not
possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the
scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War."
This is a far cry from the Bush administration's prewar shout that Hussein
was neck-deep in WMDs. And in the months since the fall of Baghdad, White
House officials have continued to insist that Hussein had unconventional
weapons and that eventually, as Bush put it, "the facts will show the
world the truth" about Iraq's WMDs. The facts keep running against Bush.
On January 8, the Carnegie Endowment on International Piece released a
report, WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications
(http://www.ceip.org/files/projects/npp/resources/iraqintell/home.htm)
that complements Gellman's article. It notes that Iraq's nuclear arms
program had been suspended for years and that Iraq had focused on
preserving a dual-use chemical weapons capability and perhaps a similar
capability concerning biological weapons. (Preserving a dual-use
capability--worrisome, yes--is much different from amassing a stockpile.)
The Carnegie paper also reports that Iraqi nerve agents had lost most of
their potency and that Iraq's large-scale chemical weapons production
capabilities had been destroyed by the Persian Gulf War and U.N.
inspections.
Perhaps the Carnegie paper can be dismissed as the I-told-you-so product
of policy wonks who were opposed to the war and who had favored more
intrusive inspections. But the administration's own actions indicate there
isn't much there there in Iraq. Today The New York Times reports
(http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/international/middleeast/08WEAP.html)
that the administration has withdrawn 400 members of its weapons-hunting
team in Iraq--a signal there isn't that much work for them. And the chief
weapons hunter in Iraq, David Kay, has said he may well leave his job
soon--another sign that a big score is not anticipated.
Two nights ago, Stuart Cohen, the vice chairman of the National
Intelligence Council who supervised the production of a prewar National
Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq had chemical and biological
weapons, went on Nightline to defend the CIA's work on Iraq's WMDs. He
said he "remained convinced that the work we did was well-grounded." But
he also said "we judged that [Hussein] did not have nuclear
weapons--indeed, would not have them until very late in the decade." That
was not how Bush, Cheney and company depicted the supposed nuclear threat
from Hussein. Their remarks made it seem as if Hussein had a major program
under way. Cohen did add that the CIA analysts worried they might have
been underestimating Hussein's nuclear capabilities (which now seems
wrong), but still Bush and his aides turned the analysts' prudent concern
into melodramatic assertions, exclaiming that they did not want a mushroom
cloud to be the smoking-gun evidence that Hussein had a nuclear weapons
program.
Still, Cohen stuck to the administration line that the WMD hunters need
more time in Iraq to pursue those elusive (or illusive?) WMDs of Hussein
and that "it's too soon to close the books on this case." One wonders how
much time the administration will grant itself before reaching a
conclusion.
At the end of the show, Nightline host Ted Koppel asked Cohen "how much of
a threat" Iraq had posed to the United States. Cohen replied: "We, as I
said, indicated that he did not have nuclear weapons. And that while he
was in violation of UN resolutions, his missiles could not have reached
that far. We were concerned about unmanned aerial vehicles. And at least
theoretically, there was a concern at the possibility that unmanned aerial
vehicles could be brought within reach of the United States and used. We
were also concerned about unconventional delivery of chemical and
biological weapons. The ability of Iraqi intelligence agencies to,
perhaps, bring something in undetected and use it." Note that Cohen did
not mention that "we" were "concerned" that Hussein would slip a weapon of
mass destruction to al Qaeda. That was the heart of Bush's case for
war--yet now Cohen does not even refer to it as a worry. Of course, the
CIA should have been "concerned" about the theoretical possibilities Cohen
mentioned--although U.S. Air Force intelligence had discounted the threat
from unmanned aerial vehicles. But Bush presented a dire, concrete threat
assessment to the public, not theoretical concerns.
Koppel closed his interview with Cohen by asking whether the "dangers"
that may have existed a year ago were greater or lesser now: "What has
happened that would make those dangers any less, if those weapons are
still in the hands of people who are not well disposed toward the United
States?" Put aside for the moment that there remains no proof "those
weapons" even existed. Here's how Cohen answered: "We worry about what may
have happened to those weapons. Theories abound as to what may have
happened....But I still worry about when we might first...come across
those weapons is when they're used or when we find them in an arms bazaar
some place."
That sounds as if the chief CIA official on the Iraq WMD issue does not
believe that the war in Iraq has made the United States safer or that
Bush's war has done much to protect the nation from the threat it was
supposed to eradicate. The war, Cohen suggests, may have even led to the
dispersal of "those weapons"--that is, if they existed in the first place.
(Note to Howard Dean: start quoting Cohen.)
As of now there is no clear evidence the weapons were there--and no
indication Bush is ready to concede he hyped the threat, knowingly or not.
The case continues to grow that the Iraqis' denials about WMDs (as
incomplete as they were) were closer to the truth than the assertions of
the president of the United States.
_________________
David Corn's new book, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics
of Deception (Crown Publishers) is on the New York Times Bestseller's
List. For more info, check out the book's official website at
http://www.bushlies.com.
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http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/7690067.htm
Mon, Jan. 12, 2004
Army War College report blasts war on terrorism
By Thomas E. Ricks
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON - A scathing new report published by the Army War College
broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on
terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in
Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead
to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.
The report, by visiting professor Jeffrey Record, who is on the faculty of
the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., warns that as a
result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point."
It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global
war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the
al-Qaida terrorist network.
"(T)he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is
dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly ... its
parameters should be readjusted," Record writes.
Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign "is strategically
unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate
U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute
security."
Record, a veteran defense specialist and author of six books on military
strategy and related issues, was an aide to former Sen. Sam Nunn when the
Georgia Democrat was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In discussing his political background, however, Record noted that in 1999
while on the staff of the Air War College, that he published work critical
of the Clinton administration.
His essay, published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies
Institute, carries the standard disclaimer that its views are those of the
author and don't necessarily represent those of the Army, the Pentagon, or
the U.S. government.
But retired Army Col. Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., the director of the Army
War College's Strategic Studies Institute, whose Web site carries Record's
56-page monograph, hardly distanced himself from it.
"I think that the substance that Jeff brings out in the article really,
really needs to be considered," he said.
Publication of the essay was approved by the Army War College's
commandant, Maj. Gen. David H. Huntoon Jr., Lovelace said.
He said he and Huntoon expected the study to be controversial, but added,
"He considers it to be under the umbrella of academic freedom."
Larry DiRita, the top Pentagon spokesman, said he had not read the Record
study. He added: "If the conclusion is that we need to be scaling back in
the global war on terrorism, it's not likely to be on my reading list
anytime soon."
Many of Record's arguments, such as the contention that Saddam Hussein's
Iraq was deterred and did not present a threat, have been made before by
critics of the administration.
Iraq, he concludes, "was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of
necessity against" al-Qaida.
But it is unusual to have such views published by the War College, the
Army's premier academic institution.
In addition, the essay goes further than many critics in examining the
Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism.
Record's core criticism is that the administration is biting off more than
it can chew. He likens the scale of U.S. ambitions in the war on terrorism
to Hitler's overreach in World War II.
"A cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable
number," he writes. "The Germans were defeated in two world wars ...
because their strategic ends outran their available means."
He scoffs at the administration's policy, laid out by Bush in a November
speech, of seeking to transform and democratize the Middle East.
"(T)he potential policy payoff of a democratic and prosperous Middle East,
if there is one, almost certainly lies in the very distant future," he
writes. "The basis on which this democratic domino theory rests has never
been explicated."
The essay concludes with several recommendations. Some are fairly
noncontroversial, such as increasing the size of the Army and Marines
Corps, a position that appears to be gathering support in Congress.
But Record also says the United States should scale back its ambitions in
Iraq and be prepared to settle for a "friendly autocracy" there rather
than a genuine democracy.
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Subject: [pjnews] US to Develop Airline Passenger Profiling System
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see end of e-mail for suggested actions to take...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8504-2004Jan11.html
U.S. to Push Airlines for Passenger Records
Travel Database to Rate Security Risk Factors
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A01
Despite stiff resistance from airlines and privacy advocates, the U.S.
government plans to push ahead this year with a vast computerized system
to probe the backgrounds of all passengers boarding flights in the United
States.
The government will compel airlines and airline reservations companies to
hand over all passenger records for scrutiny by U.S. officials, after
failing to win cooperation in the program's testing phase. The order could
be issued as soon as next month. Under the system, all travelers passing
through a U.S. airport are to be scored with a number and a color that
ranks their perceived threat to the aircraft.
Another program that is to be introduced this year that seeks to speed
frequent fliers through security lines in exchange for volunteering
personal information to the government.
The two new initiatives will augment a system introduced last week to
fingerprint and photograph millions of foreign visitors on arrival in the
United States.
Privacy and consumer advocates worry that both programs could be
discriminatory because they subject airline passengers to different levels
of scrutiny. Certain travelers, such as non-U.S. citizens, could face
additional questioning under the program known as CAPPS 2, or the second
version of the Computer Assisted Passenger PreScreening Program, some
organizations say. Business travelers who typically pay high prices for
their seats will likely get an easier pass through security in the
"registered traveler" program.
Privacy advocates say they are most concerned about CAPPS 2, which would
replace the airlines' existing computer screening system. The TSA believes
the current system is based on old assumptions about terrorists, flagging
passengers, for instance, who paid with cash or bought one-way tickets.
Passengers targeted for additional screening commonly find an "SSS" or
"***" designation on their boarding pass.
The TSA said the new computerized system is to provide a more thorough
approach to screening passengers. It will collect travelers' full name,
home address and telephone number, date of birth and travel itinerary. The
information will be fed into large databases, such as Lexis-Nexis and
Acxiom, that tap public records and commercial computer banks, such as
shopping mailing lists, to verify that passengers are who they say they
are. Once a passenger is identified, the CAPPS 2 system will compare that
traveler against wanted criminals and suspected terrorists contained in
other databases.
The two-step process will result in a numerical and color score for each
passenger. A "red" rating means a passenger will be prohibited from
boarding. "Yellow" indicates that a passenger will receive additional
scrutiny at the checkpoint and a "green" rating paves the way for a
standard trip through security. Also factored into one's score will be
intelligence about certain routes and airports where there might be
higher-rated risks to security.
Although it is unclear how many passengers would fit into each category,
the TSA said its best estimation is that 5 percent of the traveling public
will be flagged yellow or red, compared with an estimated 15 percent of
passengers who are flagged under the current version of CAPPS 1.
The registered traveler program, also known as "trusted traveler," has
been a favorite of the airline industry since the terrorist attacks in
2001. The first leader of the Transportation Security Administration
declined to pursue the idea, saying he worried that terrorists in "sleeper
cells" could establish themselves as trusted residents over a period of
years and later exploit their status to hijack planes.
Now under new leadership, the TSA is to begin testing the program at
selected airports with $5 million in Congressional funding. Officials say
the program could enhance security because the pool of those who need to
be assessed would be reduced by the background checks each passenger would
undergo. The agency declined to say how the program would work except that
it would be voluntary and that registered passengers would not skip
security screening altogether.
"It's not as though the person who goes through the checkpoint won't be
going through a basic level of screening," said David M. Stone, the TSA's
acting administrator.
But privacy experts are skeptical. Registered traveler is "going to create
two classes of airline travelers," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the
technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union, an
organization that opposes both programs. Registered traveler, he said,
"has no security benefits." Terrorists will learn one way or another how
to "game" the system, he said.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security started a visa-tracking
program that the ACLU and other groups also deemed discriminatory.
International airports and ports began digitally fingerprinting and
photographing foreign visitors from certain countries in the Middle East,
Asia, Africa and South America when they enter the country on a visa,
although most European countries are exempt from the program.
"These kinds of dragnet systems are feel-good but cost-inefficient," said
Richard Sobel, a privacy policy researcher at Harvard Medical School. "The
government would do much better using resources to better identify people
and deter people who might cause some harm than to use resources devoted
to the 99 percent of people who are innocent."
Under one proposal advocated by the major U.S. airlines, passengers who
submit an application to the TSA would receive a special card or other
identification, if they're approved. At the airport, they would show the
card at the security checkpoint or ticket counter and submit to a
handprint or fingerprint to verify their identity. Then, the passenger
could walk through a checkpoint area dedicated to members of the program.
The airline industry argues that a registered traveler program would not
create a class system but would simply reduce wait times for all
passengers. "The thing that really frustrates people is not the fact that
someone goes through [the security line] more quickly," said Jim May,
chief executive officer at the Air Transport Association, the airline
industry's lobbying organization. "It's the people who don't prepare
themselves and go through security and tie up the whole line. They're the
people who really aggravate those people who are trying to catch a plane."
In the push forward on CAPPS 2, U.S. officials said the TSA is to soon
begin forcing the airlines to turn over their passenger reservation lists.
No airline responded to the agency's initial request for the documents
last fall. U.S. carriers have been reluctant to turn over the data because
of negative publicity association with the program.
The TSA's first airline partner to test CAPPS 2, Delta Air Lines, backed
out of the agreement after privacy advocates put up a Web site encouraging
passengers to boycott the airline. The European Union, whose passengers
would also be rated and screened, have said the system would violate EU
privacy laws, but it has allowed the TSA to use passenger data for testing
purposes.
The final blow came in September last year, when JetBlue Airways was sued
in several states by passengers after the airline admitted it had turned
over passenger data for a military project related to aviation security.
The TSA has since been unable to find an airline to help the agency test
CAPPS 2 and might now have to resort to coercion to get the reservation
data.
Homeland Security officials said some elements of CAPPS 2 and the U.S.
VISIT program for fingerprinting and photographing foreigners will overlap
because both systems compare passengers against the same terrorist and
criminal watch lists. The U.S. VISIT also aims to ensure that visitors do
not overstay their visas. U.S. officials said they are considering merging
the two programs.
Nuala O'Connor Kelly, the chief privacy officer at Homeland Security, said
if the databases are merged, the government would impose strict rules
about which agencies can use the passenger information and how it could be
used.
"We want these programs to be efficient to the extent it makes them more
efficient to have them rolled together, we will be looking at that," Kelly
said.
But Kelly acknowledged that there will be several hurdles to clear. The
U.S. government has not said how long it will keep data on U.S. VISIT
travelers. Information on most passengers screened by CAPPS 2 can be held
only for "a matter of days," she said.
------------------
http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=12108&c=39
Oppose the new airline passenger profiling system
Take Action! Act Now to Stop the CAPPS II Program!
CAPPS II could create a permanent blacklist.
Innocent people have already been stopped and banned from flying because
their name appeared on government "no fly" lists -- and have been unable
to clear their names in the federal bureaucracy. This national system
would only increase the delays and blacklist even more innocent Americans
-- regular people traveling for work or vacations.
CAPPS II will invade your privacy and be rooted in secrecy.
The most intrusive and dangerous element of the program - the construction
of an infrastructure for conducting background checks and maintaining
dossiers on people who fly - would depend on shadowy intelligence/law
enforcement databases. The use of these secret databases would remove
meaningful public oversight and control over these un-American background
checks.
CAPPS II will not make us any safer.
Terrorists will learn how to circumvent the system. Identity thieves could
easily sidestep this check by presenting a false driver's license or
passport, undercutting the system's entire mission. And the constant false
alarms might divert the attention of airport security officers from
legitimate threats to security.
__________________
Take Action! Urge your Members of Congress to oppose this dangerous program.
Go here to get more information and to send free faxes to your Members of
Congress:
http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=12108&c=39
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Subject: [pjnews] White House seeks control on health, safety
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http://snipurl.com/3r71
White House seeks control on health, safety
Sunday, Jan. 11 2004
The Office of Management and Budget wants to have the final say on
releasing emergency declarations to the public.
By Andrew Schneider
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
WASHINGTON - Under a new proposal, the White House would decide what and
when the public would be told about an outbreak of mad cow disease, an
anthrax release, a nuclear plant accident or any other crisis.
The White House Office of Management and Budget is trying to gain final
control over release of emergency declarations from the federal agencies
responsible for public health, safety and the environment.
The OMB also wants to manage scientific and technical evaluations - known
as peer reviews - of all major government rules, plans, proposed
regulations and pronouncements.
Currently, each federal agency controls its emergency notifications and
peer review of its projects.
But the OMB says peer review policies in various agencies vary
dramatically. And a senior OMB official says his office has been ordered
by Congress to take "a greater role in evaluating what the agencies do."
On Friday, a nonpartisan group of 20 former top agency officials sent a
letter to the OMB asking the White House watchdog agency to withdraw its
proposal, saying it "could damage the federal system for protecting public
health and the environment."
One of the signers, David Michaels, said: "It goes beyond just having the
White House involved in picking industry favorites to evaluate government
science. Under this proposal, the carefully crafted process used by the
government to notify the public of an imminent danger is going to first
have to be signed off by someone weighing the political hazards."
Michaels, a former assistant secretary for environment, safety and health
at the Department of Energy, is now a research professor at George
Washington University's School of Public Health. He added: "OMB is not a
science agency. The ramifications of it attempting to insert itself into a
time-proven system of having the most knowledgeable scientists available
evaluate proposed policy or regulations is a disaster in the making."
In addition to Michaels, the letter is signed by two former Environmental
Protection Agency administrators, a former secretary of labor, two former
heads of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a former
assistant labor secretary in charge of mine safety and health, and 13
other former senior officials of both political parties.
The letter, obtained by the Post-Dispatch, referred to a Nov. 18
conference sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences on the OMB's
plan.
"Speaker after speaker warned that implementation of this proposal would
lead to increased costs and delays in disseminating information to the
public and in promulgating health, safety, environmental and other
regulations, while potentially damaging the existing system of peer
review," the letter said.
Forging a final plan
John Graham, administrator of the OMB's Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs, said the just-concluded public comment period has been
constructive.
"We will be using these comments to prepare a final peer review policy
that is as objective and workable as possible," Graham said.
Federal agencies have until Thursday to submit comments on what they think
about having their authority stripped.
There is wide concern among those in the science offices at the EPA and
Occupational Safety and Health Administration that their agencies'
responses will be based more on political realities than on the genuine
merits of the OMB's proposal.
Even those critical of the OMB's plan agree with the need for peer review.
The practice, which has been accepted for decades, demands that before
scientific, medical or technical findings can be determined to be
effective and safe for use or published in professional journals, they
must be evaluated for merit by other specialists in the same field.
Industry has not been shy about denouncing government's system of peer
review as unfair, especially when regulators determined that their
pharmaceutical product, chemical or process must be tightly controlled
because of possible danger to the public or environment. And the White
House has been equally open about its desire to reduce the regulatory
burden on industry.
Graham said revising peer review "is a major priority for this
administration."
The OMB was created in 1970 to evaluate all agency budget, policy,
legislative, regulatory and management issues on behalf of the president.
Question of neutrality
Many in the scientific community worry that the OMB's selection process
for reviewers will taint impartiality.
"The proposed peer review selection criteria would severely and
unnecessarily restrict an agency's access to the most qualified
expertise," said Dr. Jordan Cohen, president of the Association of
American Medical Colleges.
In lengthy comments to the OMB, Cohen and a co-signer, Robert Wells,
president of the 60,000-member Federation of American Societies for
Experimental Biology, also questioned the OMB's proposed involvement in
screening emergency public health announcements.
They offered examples of recent events from one agency - the Food and Drug
Administration - where a delay caused by the OMB could have been
dangerous. Among them:
An emergency termination of a clinical trial of anti-arrhythmic drugs
"that was not beneficial, but in fact dangerous."
An announcement that hormone replacement therapy for post-menopausal women
was causing adverse effects.
Last October's halting of a clinical trial of a cancer drug to reduce the
rate of breast cancer recurrence.
"We see no public benefit from mandating an additional layer of OMB
interposition, peer review and public comments that, at best, would have
delayed these announcements for untold months," said the comments from the
groups, which represent more than 100 medical and scientific societies.
Michael Taylor, former deputy commissioner at the FDA under the first Bush
administration, warned that the OMB's involvement in the dissemination of
information on "imminent health hazards" is dangerous.
Taylor cited the severe November hepatitis outbreak from contaminated
green onions at a Mexican fast food restaurant near Pittsburgh.
"OMB's proposal says it gets to weigh in on any agency statement that
would have a significant impact on an industry. Any FDA warning or recall
would have that nationwide impact. So should the FDA commissioner have to
go to John Graham for permission to warn people about the possible danger
from tainted green onions?" Taylor asked.
"That's what the plan calls for, and it's not just FDA, it's all agencies
involved with health and safety."
"Speed is often essential," Taylor said. "If you discover that a heart
valve is defective and killing people and can't issue a recall until the
White House has weighed in on the issue, people could die."
Peer review issue
Graham is aware of the controversy.
"We understand that concerns have been raised about how the proposed
(plan) addresses emergencies," said the administrator, who added that his
department's view on the issue will be explained in a final version of the
plan.
The OMB's actions are needed, according to a senior OMB official, because
"federal agencies have inconsistent peer review policies."
Some, like the Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Department of Agriculture,
have no formal peer review policy. But others such as the EPA and FDA have
detailed policies for the mandatory evaluations, he said.
"Even agencies that have peer review polices have not been found to
implement them consistently," the official said.
The National Resources Defense Council calls the OMB's effort a blatant
end run to "achieve what could not be achieved through the intense
campaigns to lobby to Congress to weaken pollution and safety standards."
So said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the 1 million-member
environmental organization.
"The integrity of the science used to support regulatory decisions would
be compromised, perhaps beyond repair," Sass said.
But the OMB says it has been ordered by Congress to take a greater role in
evaluating what the agencies do.
"Congress, in the Information Quality Law, required OMB to engage in
oversight of the information quality activities of federal agencies," the
senior OMB official said. "Peer review is one of the critical activities
agencies use to assure quality control of information during
pre-dissemination review."
Emergency declarations
The OMB's attempt to take control of the release of emergency information
surprises even its critics.
There were headlines across the country when the EPA's inspector general
confirmed that the White House's Council on Environmental Quality had
forced downplaying of actual hazards from the collapse of the World Trade
Center buildings. And the OMB was faulted in congressional hearings for
preventing the EPA from declaring a public health emergency regarding
asbestos contamination in Libby, Mont.
"Incredibly, OMB's response to this widespread criticism about political
interference in public health decisions is to come right out and
explicitly propose to take authority over release of emergency information
away from health, safety and environmental officials and transfer it into
the hands" of John Graham, said Winifred De Palma, regulatory affairs
counsel for Public Citizen.
The consumer advocacy organization was founded by Ralph Nader in 1971.
"OMB has no statutory or other express legal authority to impose this type
of control on the agencies," De Palma said. "If the plan is implemented,
it will mean that political considerations, and not public health, will be
the administration's primary concern in the deciding whether to release
health and safety information to the public in emergency situations."
Lauded by industry
In public statements on its proposal, the OMB did not cite specific cases
where the existing peer review didn't work.
The agency referred reporters to the comments of the American Chemical
Council, which listed six examples where it said EPA's peer review of
certain chemicals were flawed. For example, it criticized a 2000 EPA
evaluation specifying hazards of diisononyl phthalate, a plasticiser used
in soft vinyl children's products.
The EPA evaluation "ignored the primate data indicating that the effects
seen at high doses in rodents do not occur in primates," the council
wrote.
Since his confirmation, Graham, who has a doctorate from Harvard, has been
a target for criticism from Public Citizen and other interest groups
worried about his strong ties to industry.
Before joining the Bush administration, Graham headed the Harvard Center
for Risk Analysis. Its research, funded mostly by corporations, is often
widely praised by industry and denounced by some public interest groups.
Graham has written or edited books on the problems of government peer
review.
Two of Graham's own studies on the safety of cell phones and driving and
the value of automotive air bags for children are called scientific
whitewash by some critics and praised as an unbiased evaluation by those
in the automotive and cell phone industry.
"Although peer review does take time and hard work, it ultimately
strengthens public health and environmental protection by better ensuring
that rules will have the intended effect and are legally sound," said
Graham, explaining the value of the proposal.
