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In This Edition
Seymour M. Hersh highlights, "The General's Report."
Welcome one and all to "Uncle Ernie's Issues & Alibis."
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 Open The Pod Bay Doors, HAL By Ernest Stewart I support the left, though I'm leaning to the right. But I'm just not there when it's coming to a fight. Politician ~~~ Cream Up in the air Junior Birdmen, Up in the air Boy Scouts too! ~~~ The Junior Birdmen Song ~~~ Happy Happy Joy Joy Happy Happy Joy Joy Happy Happy Joy Joy Happy Happy Joy Joy Happy Happy Joy Joy Happy Happy Joy Joy Happy Happy Joy Joy Joy! The Happy Happy Joy Joy Song ~~~ Stinky Whizzleteats ~~~ Ren & Stimpy "I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you." That reminded me of how Bush and the Dems reacted when the Dems took control of the House and Senate. The Rethuglicans who had controlled all three branches of Government and had dictated everything to the Dems and America suddenly wanted to be bi-partisan. A 180-degree turn from their former selves. That, of course, wasn't all. The Dems who had pledged to stop the war and impeach Bush and Cheney did neither but hemmed and hawed about why the campaign promises had to be abandoned. Even before Pelosi became house leader she said impeachment was off the table. As I pointed out to her Bush's many, many acts of treason, sedition, war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against the Constitution, crimes against the Bill Of Rights, theft of the treasury, torture, the breaking of treaties, and his use of signing statements and concentration camps must surely equal a blow job? Not to mention the fact that she and all the other politicians from both parties have sworn to up hold and protect the Constitution and not to do so is an act of treason! The war will go on in Iraq until the oil runs out in about 100 years and Bush and Cheney will retire with tens of billions of dollars stolen from out of your pockets, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer! Not directly, of course, but laundered through no-bid contacts from Bechtel, Nixon/Goebbels, Blackwater mercenaries, Halliburton and their many subsidiaries. In fact, everybody in the military/industrial complex made a killing like never before and kicked back billions to the Junta as well as both the RNC and the DNC! And both groups have left the American people out in space to die without a helmet. Perhaps it's time that we got off our fat American arses and do like ole Dave did, kick ass, take names and take control of our ship of state? In Other News I see where our Junior Birdmen attacked a school in Afghanistan and couldn't believe they killed school children and their teachers. That's right, folks; they knew it was a school full of children and bombed it anyway. The teachers, of course, were quickly labeled insurgents. The Air Farce spokesmen couldn't believe that there would be students inside a school, on a school day and then blamed the insurgents a.k.a. the teachers for forcing the children to be there when our Junior Birdmen blasted the school and mosque into a hole in the ground. Perhaps they heard that Osama, (y'all remember Osama?) was going to be there lecturing the children on dental hygiene? Pity our gallant war criminals who blew the kids into tiny bits couldn't have their own children along with the children of the Pentagoon officials that sent them on that mission blown to tiny bits as well. Don't you wonder if that would still be then collateral damage if done by China, Russia or Israel? Can you imagine the field day that CNN, Fox Spews, MSNBCLSD and the rest would have if it happened in America. In fact, I'm willing to bet that would knock Paris and other important news items right off the screen for a minute or two. But since the kids were brown skinned and Muslim you'll never hear about it from the mainstream media. Besides it was only a little collateral damage, wasn't it? The important thing is we're fighting for Democracy, so what if a few eggs were broken, eh? Oh and if you buy that last statement there is this bridge that I own in Brooklyn that you might want to buy too? Makes you proud to be an American doesn't it? Oh that red stuff on your hands, America, is the blood of the million or so innocents that we've spilled in your war; not Bush's war against reality but yours. You are responsible for those tiny broken bodies as much as the Junta and the Congress. YOU let them get away with it. You're murders ALL! If Bush and Congress want a war perhaps we should bring it to them? What happens if the collateral damage is your children, your babies, your loved ones? Then what America? ***** There's good news tonight America! Thanks to your generous contributions I now have just enough to pay off all of our bills until next June. Thanks to the efforts of Elizabeth, John and Laser Bob, we thank you! For the double efforts of Callie who donated twice when it looked like we might not raise all the money needed, thank you, thank you! For Dr. Phil who donated three times we say thank you, thank you and thank you, my brother! Not to mention the one that I can't mention but have to mention anyway, whom we'll refer to as super G, who filled up all the corners as it were and pushed us over the top. Thank you so very much G! A handful of heroes have stood up for the truth and said no to the war. Will you give us your support, too? United we stand America, divided we fall, so please join with me to keep the fight for our freedoms going. If you'd like to help us in the fight you may send a check or postal money order made out to Ernest Stewart. Or you can send cash if you prefer. Place it in an envelope (and in the case of cash, wrap it in a sheet of paper) and send it to: Ernest Stewart PO Box 751 Wayne, Michigan 48184-0751 Thank you all so very much! ***** The new "W" theatre trailer is up along with the new movie poster and screen shots from the film. They are all available at the all-new "W" movie site: http://wthemovie.com. Both trailers are on site and may be downloaded; the new trailer can be seen with Flash on site. You can download in either PC or Mac formats. I'm in the new trailer as myself but don't blink or you'll miss me! Also the W theatre trailer can be seen on You Tube. ******************************************** We get by with a little help from our friends! So please help us if you can...? Donations ******************************************** So how do you like the 2nd coup d'etat so far? And more importantly, what are you planning on doing about it? Until the next time, Peace! (c) 2007 Ernest Stewart a.k.a. Uncle Ernie is an unabashed radical, author, stand-up comic, DJ, actor, political pundit and for the last 6 years managing editor and publisher of Issues & Alibis magazine. In his spare time he is an actor, writer and an associate producer for the new motion picture "W." |
 The General's Report How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties. By Seymour M. Hersh On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week, revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal. If there was a redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army's initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found: Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees ... systemic and illegal abuse. Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld's senior military assistant. Craddock's daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba's two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, "Craddock just said, very coldly, 'Wait here.'" In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were "only Iraqis." Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in. "Here ... comes ... that famous General Taguba - of the Taguba report!" Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, "I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting." In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. "Could you tell us what happened?" Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, "Is it abuse or torture?" At that point, Taguba recalled, "I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, 'That's not abuse. That's torture.' There was quiet." Rumsfeld was particularly concerned about how the classified report had become public. "General," he asked, "who do you think leaked the report?" Taguba responded that perhaps a senior military leader who knew about the investigation had done so. "It was just my speculation," he recalled. "Rumsfeld didn't say anything." (I did not meet Taguba until mid-2006 and obtained his report elsewhere.) Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. "Here I am," Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, "just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this." As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, "He's looking at me. It was a statement." At best, Taguba said, "Rumsfeld was in denial." Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld's conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually read it. (Schoomaker later sent Taguba a note praising his honesty and leadership.) When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, "I don't want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?" Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld's office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint. On January 13, 2004, a military policeman named Joseph Darby gave the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D.) a CD full of images of abuse. Two days later, General Craddock and Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, the director of the Joint Staff of the J.C.S., were e-mailed a summary of the abuses depicted on the CD. It said that approximately ten soldiers were shown, involved in acts that included: Having male detainees pose nude while female guards pointed at their genitals; having female detainees exposing themselves to the guards; having detainees perform indecent acts with each other; and guards physically assaulting detainees by beating and dragging them with choker chains. Taguba said, "You didn't need to 'see' anything - just take the secure e-mail traffic at face value." I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba's report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their "extremely sensitive nature.") Taguba said that he saw "a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee." The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. "It's bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women's panties," Taguba said. On January 20th, the chief of staff at Central Command sent another e-mail to Admiral Keating, copied to General Craddock and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq. The chief of staff wrote, "Sir: update on alleged detainee abuse per our discussion. DID IT REALLY HAPPEN? Yes, currently have 4 confessions implicating perhaps 10 soldiers. DO PHOTOS EXIST? Yes. A CD with approx 100 photos and a video - CID has these in their possession." Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, "it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge." As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, "I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them"; at the House hearing, he said, "I didn't see them until last night at 7:30." Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said: There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime after January 13th ... I don't remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March... . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn't proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn't know, and you didn't know, and I didn't know. "And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are," Rumsfeld said. Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld's testimony was simply not true. "The photographs were available to him - if he wanted to see them," Taguba said. Rumsfeld's lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, "Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There's no way he's suffering from C.R.S. - Can't Remember Shit. He's trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves." It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials. "The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects - 'We're here to protect the nation from terrorism' - is an oxymoron," Taguba said. "He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they've dragged a lot of officers with them." In response to detailed queries about this article, Colonel Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman, said in an e-mail, "The department did not promulgate interrogation policies or guidelines that directed, sanctioned, or encouraged abuse." He added, "When there have been abuses, those violations are taken seriously, acted upon promptly, investigated thoroughly, and the wrongdoers are held accountable." Regarding early warnings about Abu Ghraib, Colonel Keck said, "Former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has stated publicly under oath that he and other senior leaders were not provided pictures from Abu Ghraib until shortly before their release." (Rumsfeld, through an aide, declined to answer questions, as did General Craddock. Other senior commanders did not respond to requests for comment.) During the next two years, Taguba assiduously avoided the press, telling his relatives not to talk about his work. Friends and family had been inundated with telephone calls and visitors, and, Taguba said, "I didn't want them to be involved." Taguba retired in January, 2007, after thirty-four years of active service, and finally agreed to talk to me about his investigation of Abu Ghraib and what he believed were the serious misrepresentations by officials that followed. "From what I knew, troops just don't take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups," Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. "These M.P. troops were not that creative," he said. "Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box." General Taguba is a slight man with a friendly demeanor and an unfailingly polite correctness. "I came from a poor family and had to work hard," he said. "It was always shine the shoes on Saturday morning for church, and wash the car on Saturday for church. And Saturday also for mowing the lawn and doing yard jobs for church." His father, Tomas, was born in the Philippines and was drafted into the Philippine Scouts in early 1942, at the height of the Japanese attack on the joint American-Filipino force led by General Douglas MacArthur. Tomas was captured by the Japanese on the Bataan peninsula in April, 1942, and endured the Bataan Death March, which took thousands of American and Filipino lives. Tomas escaped and joined the underground resistance to the Japanese before returning to the American Army, in July, 1945. Taguba's mother, Maria, spent much of the Second World War living across the street from a Japanese-run prisoner-of-war camp in Manila. Taguba remembers her vivid accounts of prisoners who were bayonetted arbitrarily or whose fingernails were pulled out. Antonio, the eldest son (he has six siblings), was born in Manila in 1950. Maria and Tomas were devout Catholics, and their children were taught respect and, Taguba recalls, "above all, integrity in how you lived your life and practiced your religion." In 1961, the family moved to Hawaii, where Tomas retired from the military and took a civilian job in logistics, preparing units for deployment to Vietnam. A year after they arrived, Antonio became a U.S. citizen. By then, as a sixth grader, he was delivering newspapers, serving as an altar boy, and doing well in school. He went to Idaho State University, in Pocatello, with help from the Army R.O.T.C., and graduated in 1972. As a newly commissioned second lieutenant, he was five feet six inches tall and weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. His Army service began immediately: he led troops at the platoon, company, battalion, and brigade levels at bases in South Korea, Germany, and across America. (He married in 1981, and has two grown children.) In 1986, Taguba, then a major, was selected to attend the College of Naval Command and Staff at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. While there, he wrote an analysis of Soviet ground-attack planning that became required reading at the school. He was promoted, ahead of his peers, to become a colonel and then a general. On the way, Taguba earned three master's degrees - in public administration, international relations, and national-security studies. "I'll talk to you about discrimination," he said one morning, while discussing, without bitterness, his early years as an Army officer. "Let's talk about being refused to be served at a restaurant in public. Let's talk about having to do things two times, and being accused of not speaking English well, and having to pay myself for my three master's degrees because the Army didn't think I was smart enough. So what? Just work your ass off. So what? The hard work paid off." Taguba had joined the Army knowing little about his father's military experience. "He saw the ravages and brutality of war, but he wasn't about to brag about his exploits," Taguba said. "He didn't say anything until 1997, and it took me two years to rebuild his records and show that he was authorized for an award." On Tomas's eightieth birthday, he was awarded the Bronze Star and a prisoner-of-war medal in a ceremony at Schofield Barracks, in Hawaii. "My father never laughed," Taguba said. But the day he got his medal "he smiled - he had a big-ass smile on his face. I'd never seen him look so proud. He was a bent man with carpal-tunnel syndrome, but at the end of the medal ceremony he stood himself up and saluted. I cried, and everyone in my family burst into tears." Richard Armitage, a former Navy counter-insurgency officer who served as Deputy Secretary of State in the first Bush term, recalled meeting Taguba, then a lieutenant colonel, in South Korea in the early nineteen-nineties. "I was told to keep an eye on this young guy - 'He's going to be a general,' " Armitage said. "Taguba was discreet and low key - not a sprinter but a marathoner." At the time, Taguba was working for Major General Mike Myatt, a marine who was the officer in charge of strategic talks with the South Koreans, on behalf of the American military. "I needed an executive assistant with brains and integrity," Myatt, who is now retired and living in San Francisco, told me. After interviewing a number of young officers, he chose Taguba. "He was ethical and he knew his stuff," Myatt said. "We really became close, and I'd trust him with my life. We talked about military strategy and policy, and the moral aspect of war - the importance of not losing the moral high ground." Myatt followed Taguba's involvement in the Abu Ghraib inquiry, and said, "I was so proud of him. I told him, 'Tony, you've maintained yourself, and your integrity.' " Taguba got a different message, however, from other officers, among them General John Abizaid, then the head of Central Command. A few weeks after his report became public, Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in the back seat of a Mercedes sedan with Abizaid. Abizaid's driver and his interpreter, who also served as a bodyguard, were in front. Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet warning: "You and your report will be investigated." "I wasn't angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me," Taguba said. "I'd been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia." The Investigation Taguba was given the job of investigating Abu Ghraib because of circumstance: the senior officer of the 800th Military Police Brigade, to which the soldiers in the photographs belonged, was a one-star general; Army regulations required that the head of the inquiry be senior to the commander of the unit being investigated, and Taguba, a two-star general, was available. "It was as simple as that," he said. He vividly remembers his first thought upon seeing the photographs in late January of 2004: "Unbelievable! What were these people doing?" There was an immediate second thought: "This is big." Taguba decided to keep the photographs from most of the interrogators and researchers on his staff of twenty-three officers. "I didn't want them to prejudge the soldiers they were investigating, so I put the photos in a safe," he told me. "Anyone who wanted to see them had to have a need-to-know and go through me." His decision to keep the staff in the background was also intended to insure that none of them suffered damage to his or her career because of involvement in the inquiry. "I knew it was going to be very sensitive because of the gravity of what was in front of us," he said. The team spent much of February, 2004, in Iraq. Taguba was overwhelmed by the scale of the wrongdoing. "These were people who were taken off the streets and put in jail - teen-agers and old men and women," he said. "I kept on asking these questions of the officers I interviewed: 'You knew what was going on. Why didn't you do something to stop it?' " Taguba's assignment was limited to investigating the 800th M.P.s, but he quickly found signs of the involvement of military intelligence - both the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, commanded by Colonel Thomas Pappas, which worked closely with the M.P.s, and what were called "other government agencies," or O.G.A.s, a euphemism for the C.I.A. and special-operations units operating undercover in Iraq. Some of the earliest evidence involved Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan, whose name was mentioned in interviews with several M.P.s. For the first three weeks of the investigation, Jordan was nowhere to be found, despite repeated requests. When the investigators finally located him, he asked whether he needed to shave his beard before being interviewed - Taguba suspected that he had been dressing as a civilian. "When I asked him about his assignment, he says, 'I'm a liaison officer for intelligence from Army headquarters in Iraq.' " But in the course of three or four interviews with Jordan, Taguba said, he began to suspect that the lieutenant colonel had been more intimately involved in the interrogation process - some of it brutal - for "high value" detainees. "Jordan denied everything, and yet he had the authority to enter the prison's 'hard site' " - where the most important detainees were held - "carrying a carbine and an M9 pistol, which is against regulations," Taguba said. Jordan had also led a squad of military policemen in a shoot-out inside the hard site with a detainee from Syria who had managed to obtain a gun. (A lawyer for Jordan disputed these allegations; in the shoot-out, he said, Jordan was "just another gun on the extraction team" and not the leader. He noted that Jordan was not a trained interrogator.) Taguba said that Jordan's "record reflected an extensive intelligence background." He also had reason to believe that Jordan was not reporting through the chain of command. But Taguba's narrowly focussed mission constrained the questions he could ask. "I suspected that somebody was giving them guidance, but I could not print that," Taguba said. "After all Jordan's evasiveness and misleading responses, his rights were read to him," Taguba went on. Jordan subsequently became the only officer facing trial on criminal charges in connection with Abu Ghraib and is scheduled to be court-martialled in late August. (Seven M.P.s were convicted of charges that included dereliction of duty, maltreatment, and assault; one defendant, Specialist Charles Graner, was sentenced to ten years in prison.) Last month, a military judge ruled that Jordan, who is still assigned to the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, had not been appropriately advised of his rights during his interviews with Taguba, undermining the Army's allegation that he lied during the Taguba inquiry. Six other charges remain, including failure to obey an order or regulation; cruelty and maltreatment; and false swearing and obstruction of justice. (His lawyer said, "The evidence clearly shows that he is innocent.") Taguba came to believe that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq, and some of the generals assigned to the military headquarters in Baghdad had extensive knowledge of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib even before Joseph Darby came forward with the CD. Taguba was aware that in the fall of 2003 - when much of the abuse took place - Sanchez routinely visited the prison, and witnessed at least one interrogation. According to Taguba, "Sanchez knew exactly what was going on." Taguba learned that in August, 2003, as the Sunni insurgency in Iraq was gaining force, the Pentagon had ordered Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander at Guantánamo, to Iraq. His mission was to survey the prison system there and to find ways to improve the flow of intelligence. The core of Miller's recommendations, as summarized in the Taguba report, was that the military police at Abu Ghraib should become part of the interrogation process: they should work closely with interrogators and intelligence officers in "setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees." Taguba concluded that Miller's approach was not consistent with Army doctrine, which gave military police the overriding mission of making sure that the prisons were secure and orderly. His report cited testimony that interrogators and other intelligence personnel were encouraging the abuse of detainees. "Loosen this guy up for us," one M.P. said he was told by a member of military intelligence. "Make sure he has a bad night." The M.P.s, Taguba said, "were being literally exploited by the military interrogators. My view is that those kids" - even the soldiers in the photographs - "were poorly led, not trained, and had not been given any standard operating procedures on how they should guard the detainees." Surprisingly, given Taguba's findings, Miller was the officer chosen to restore order at Abu Ghraib. In April, 2004, a month after the report was filed, he was reassigned there as the deputy commander for detainee operations. "Miller called in the spring and asked to meet with me to discuss Abu Ghraib, but I waited for him and we never did meet," Taguba recounted. Miller later told Taguba that he'd been ordered to Washington to meet with Rumsfeld before travelling to Iraq, but he never attempted to reschedule the meeting. If they had spoken, Taguba said, he would have reminded Miller that at Abu Ghraib, unlike at Guantánamo, very few prisoners were affiliated with any terrorist group. Taguba had seen classified documents revealing that there were only "one or two" suspected Al Qaeda prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Most of the detainees had nothing to do with the insurgency. A few of them were common criminals. Taguba had known Miller for years. "We served together in Korea and in the Pentagon, and his wife and mine used to go shopping together," Taguba said. But, after his report became public, "Miller didn't talk to me. He didn't say a word when I passed him in the hallway." Despite the subsequent public furor over Abu Ghraib, neither the House nor the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings led to a serious effort to determine whether the scandal was a result of a high-level interrogation policy that encouraged abuse. At the House Committee hearing on May 7, 2004, a freshman Democratic congressman, Kendrick Meek, of Florida, asked Rumsfeld if it was time for him to resign. Rumsfeld replied, "I would resign in a minute if I thought that I couldn't be effective... . I have to wrestle with that." But, he added, "I'm certainly not going to resign because some people are trying to make a political issue out of it." (Rumsfeld stayed in office for the next two and a half years, until the day after the 2006 congressional elections.) When I spoke to Meek recently, he said, "There was no way Rumsfeld didn't know what was going on. He's a guy who wants to know everything, and what he was giving us was hard to believe." Later that month, Rumsfeld appeared before a closed hearing of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which votes on the funds for all secret operations in the military. Representative David Obey, of Wisconsin, the senior Democrat at the hearing, told me that he had been angry when a fellow subcommittee member "made the comment that 'Abu Ghraib was the price of defending democracy.' I said that wasn't the way I saw it, and that I didn't want to see some corporal made into a scapegoat. This could not have happened without people in the upper echelon of the Administration giving signals. I just didn't see how this was not systemic." Obey asked Rumsfeld a series of pointed questions. Taguba attended the closed hearing with Rumsfeld and recalled him bristling at Obey's inquiries. "I don't know what happened!" Rumsfeld told Obey. "Maybe you want to ask General Taguba." Taguba got a chance to answer questions on May 11th, when he was summoned to appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Under-Secretary Stephen Cambone sat beside him. (Cambone was Rumsfeld's point man on interrogation policy.) Cambone, too, told the committee that he hadn't known about the specific abuses at Abu Ghraib until he saw Taguba's report, "when I was exposed to some of those photographs." Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, tried to focus on whether Abu Ghraib was the consequence of a larger detainee policy. "These acts of abuse were not the spontaneous actions of lower-ranking enlisted personnel," Levin said. "These attempts to extract information from prisoners by abusive and degrading methods were clearly planned and suggested by others." The senators repeatedly asked about General Miller's trip to Iraq in 2003. Did the "Gitmo-izing" of Abu Ghraib - especially the model of using the M.P.s in "setting the conditions" for interrogations - lead to the abuses? Cambone confirmed that Miller had been sent to Iraq with his approval, but insisted that the senators were "misreading General Miller's intent." Questioned on that point by Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, Cambone said, "I don't know that I was being told, and I don't know that General Miller said that there should be that kind of activity that you are ascribing to his recommendation." Reed then asked Taguba, "Was it clear from your reading of the [Miller] report that one of the major recommendations was to use guards to condition these prisoners?" Taguba replied, "Yes, sir. That was recommended on the report." At another point, after Taguba confirmed that military intelligence had taken control of the M.P.s following Miller's visit, Levin questioned Cambone: LEVIN: Do you disagree with what the general just said? CAMBONE: Yes, sir. LEVIN: Pardon? CAMBONE: I do. Taguba, looking back on his testimony, said, "That's the reason I wasn't in their camp - because I kept on contradicting them. I wasn't about to lie to the committee. I knew I was already in a losing proposition. If I lie, I lose. And, if I tell the truth, I lose." Taguba had been scheduled to rotate to the Third Army's headquarters, at Fort McPherson, Georgia, in June of 2004. He was instead ordered back to the Pentagon, to work in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs. "It was a lateral assignment," Taguba said, with a smile and a shrug. "I didn't quibble. If you're going to do that to me, well, O.K. We all serve at the pleasure of the President." A retired four-star Army general later told Taguba that he had been sent to the job in the Pentagon so that he could "be watched." Taguba realized that his career was at a dead end. Later in 2004, Taguba encountered Rumsfeld and one of his senior press aides, Lawrence Di Rita, in the Pentagon Athletic Center. Taguba was getting dressed after a workout. "I was tying my shoes," Taguba recalled. "I looked up, and there they were." Rumsfeld, who was putting his clothes into a locker, recognized Taguba and said, "Hello, General." Di Rita, who was standing beside Rumsfeld, said sarcastically, "See what you started, General? See what you started?" Di Rita, who is now an official with Bank of America, recalled running into Taguba in the locker room but not his words. "Sounds like my brand of humor," he said, in an e-mail. "A comment like that would have been in an attempt to lighten the mood for General Taguba." (Di Rita added that Taguba had "my personal respect and admiration" and that of Rumsfeld. "He did a terrific job under difficult circumstances.") However, Taguba was troubled by the encounter, and later told a colleague, "I'm now the problem." Deniability A dozen government investigations have been conducted into Abu Ghraib and detainee abuse. A few of them picked up on matters raised by Taguba's report, but none followed through on the question of ultimate responsibility. Military investigators were precluded from looking into the role of Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders in the Pentagon; the result was that none found any high-level intelligence involvement in the abuse. An independent panel headed by James R. Schlesinger, a former Secretary of Defense, did conclude that there was "institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels" for Abu Ghraib, but cleared Rumsfeld of any direct responsibility. In an August, 2004, report, the Schlesinger panel endorsed Rumsfeld's complaints, citing "the reluctance to move bad news up the chain of command" as the most important factor in Washington's failure to understand the significance of Abu Ghraib. "Given the magnitude of this problem, the Secretary of Defense and other senior DoD officials need a more effective information pipeline to inform them of high-profile incidents," the report said. Schlesinger and his colleagues apparently were unaware of the early e-mail messages that had informed the Pentagon of Abu Ghraib. The official inquiries consistently provided the public with less information about abuses than outside studies conducted by human-rights groups. In one case, in November, 2004, an Army investigation, by Brigadier General Richard Formica, into the treatment of detainees at Camp Nama, a Special Forces detention center at Baghdad International Airport, concluded that detainees who reported being sodomized or beaten were seeking sympathy and better treatment, and thus were not credible. For example, Army doctors had initially noted that a complaining detainee's wounds were "consistent with the history [of abuse] he provided... . The doctor did find scars on his wrists and noted what he believed to be an anal fissure." Formica had the detainee reëxamined two days later, by another doctor, who found "no fissure, and no scarring... . As a result, I did not find medical evidence of the sodomy." In the case of a detainee who died in custody, Formica noted that there had been bruising to the "shoulders, chest, hip, and knees" but added, "It is not unusual for detainees to have minor bruising, cuts and scrapes." In July, 2006, however, Human Rights Watch issued a fifty-three-page report on the "serious mistreatment" of detainees at Camp Nama and two other sites, largely based on witness accounts from Special Forces interrogators and others who served there. Formica, asked to comment, wrote in an e-mail, "I conducted a thorough investigation ... and stand by my report." He said that "several issues" he discovered "were corrected." His assignment, Formica noted, was to investigate a unit, and not to conduct "a systematic analysis of Special Operations activities." The Army also protected General Miller. Since 2002, F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo had been telling their superiors that their military counterparts were abusing detainees. The F.B.I. complaints were ignored until after Abu Ghraib. When an investigation was opened, in December, 2004, General Craddock, Rumsfeld's former military aide, was in charge of the Army's Southern Command, with jurisdiction over Guantánamo - he had been promoted a few months after Taguba's visit to Rumsfeld's office. Craddock appointed Air Force Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, a straight-talking fighter pilot, to investigate the charges, which included alleged abuses during Miller's tenure. "I followed the bread-crumb trail," Schmidt, who retired last year, told me. "I found some things that didn't seem right. For lack of a camera, you could have seen in Guantánamo what was seen at Abu Ghraib." Schmidt found that Miller, with the encouragement of Rumsfeld, had focussed great attention on the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was believed to be the so-called "twentieth hijacker." Qahtani was interrogated "for twenty hours a day for at least fifty-four days," Schmidt told investigators from the Army Inspector General's office, who were reviewing his findings. "I mean, here's this guy manacled, chained down, dogs brought in, put in his face, told to growl, show teeth, and that kind of stuff. And you can imagine the fear." At Guantánamo, Schmidt told the investigators, Miller "was responsible for the conduct of interrogations that I found to be abusive and degrading. The intent of those might have been to be abusive and degrading to get the information they needed... . Did the means justify the ends? That's fine... . He was responsible." Schmidt formally recommended that Miller be "held accountable" and "admonished." Craddock rejected this recommendation and absolved Miller of any responsibility for the mistreatment of the prisoners. The Inspector General inquiry endorsed Craddock's action. "I was open with them," Schmidt told me, referring to the I.G. investigators. "I told them, 'I'll do anything to help you get the truth.' " But when he read their final report, he said, "I didn't recognize the five hours of interviews with me." Schmidt learned of Craddock's reversal the day before they were to meet with Rumsfeld, in July, 2005. Rumsfeld was in frequent contact with Miller about the progress of Qahtani's interrogation, and personally approved the most severe interrogation tactics. ("This wasn't just daily business, when the Secretary of Defense is personally involved," Schmidt told the Army investigators.) Nonetheless, Schmidt was impressed by Rumsfeld's demonstrative surprise, dismay, and concern upon being told of the abuse. "He was going, 'My God! Did I authorize putting a bra and underwear on this guy's head and telling him all his buddies knew he was a homosexual?'" Schmidt was convinced. "I got to tell you that I never got the feeling that Secretary Rumsfeld was trying to hide anything," he told me. "He got very frustrated. He's a control guy, and this had gotten out of control. He got pissed." Rumsfeld's response to Schmidt was similar to his expressed surprise over Taguba's Abu Ghraib report. "Rummy did what we called 'case law' policy - verbal and not in writing," Taguba said. "What he's really saying is that if this decision comes back to haunt me I'll deny it." Taguba eventually concluded that there was a reason for the evasions and stonewalling by Rumsfeld and his aides. At the time he filed his report, in March of 2004, Taguba said, "I knew there was C.I.A. involvement, but I was oblivious of what else was happening" in terms of covert military-intelligence operations. Later that summer, however, he learned that the C.I.A. had serious concerns about the abusive interrogation techniques that military-intelligence operatives were using on high-value detainees. In one secret memorandum, dated June 2, 2003, General George Casey, Jr., then the director of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, issued a warning to General Michael DeLong, at the Central Command: CIA has advised that the techniques the military forces are using to interrogate high value detainees (HVDs) ... are more aggressive than the techniques used by CIA who is [sic] interviewing the same HVDs. DeLong replied to Casey that the techniques in use were "doctrinally appropriate techniques," in accordance with Army regulations and Rumsfeld's direction. The Task Forces Abu Ghraib had opened the door on the issue of the treatment of detainees, and from the beginning the Administration feared that the publicity would expose more secret operations and practices. Shortly after September 11th, Rumsfeld, with the support of President Bush, had set up military task forces whose main target was the senior leadership of Al Qaeda. Their essential tactic was seizing and interrogating terrorists and suspected terrorists; they also had authority from the President to kill certain high-value targets on sight. The most secret task-force operations were categorized as Special Access Programs, or S.A.P.s. The military task forces were under the control of the Joint Special Operations Command, the branch of the Special Operations Command that is responsible for counterterrorism. One of Miller's unacknowledged missions had been to bring the J.S.O.C.'s "strategic interrogation" techniques to Abu Ghraib. In special cases, the task forces could bypass the chain of command and deal directly with Rumsfeld's office. A former senior intelligence official told me that the White House was also briefed on task-force operations. The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who "didn't think the photographs were that bad" - in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, "Guys on the inside ask me, 'What's the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?'" A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the "basic strategy was 'prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.'" A recently retired C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen years in the clandestine service, told me that the task-force teams "had full authority to whack - to go in and conduct 'executive action,'" the phrase for political assassination. "It was surrealistic what these guys were doing," the retired operative added. "They were running around the world without clearing their operations with the ambassador or the chief of station." J.S.O.C.'s special status undermined military discipline. Richard Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, told me that, on his visits to Iraq, he increasingly found that "the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the field would say, 'I don't care what he says. I'm going to do what I want.' We've sacrificed the chain of command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT" - the global war on terrorism. "You're painting on a canvas so big that it's hard to comprehend," Armitage said. Thomas W. O'Connell, who resigned this spring after nearly four years as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, defended the task forces. He blamed the criticisms on the resentment of the rest of the military: "From my observation, the operations run by Special Ops units are extraordinarily open in terms of interagency visibility to embassies and C.I.A. stations - even to the point where there's been a question of security." O'Connell said that he dropped in unannounced to Special Operations interrogation centers in Iraq, "and the treatment of detainees was aboveboard." He added, "If people want to say we've got a serious problem with Special Operations, let them say it on the record." Representative Obey told me that he had been troubled, before the Iraq war, by the Administration's decision to run clandestine operations from the Pentagon, saying that he "found some of the things they were doing to be disquieting." At the time, his Republican colleagues blocked his attempts to have the House Appropriations Committee investigate these activities. "One of the things that bugs me is that Congress has failed in its oversight abilities," Obey said. Early last year, at his urging, his subcommittee began demanding a classified quarterly report on the operations, but Obey said that he has no reason to believe that the reports are complete. A former high-level Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned "to back off" on the investigation, because "it would spill over to more important things." A spokesman for Warner acknowledged that there had been pressure on the Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to it - insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May 7th testimony, for example, to the Secretary's great displeasure. An aggressive congressional inquiry into Abu Ghraib could have provoked unwanted questions about what the Pentagon was doing, in Iraq and elsewhere, and under what authority. By law, the President must make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and inform the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush Administration unilaterally determined after 9/11 that intelligence operations conducted by the military - including the Pentagon's covert task forces - for the purposes of "preparing the battlefield" could be authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, without telling Congress. There was coördination between the C.I.A. and the task forces, but also tension. The C.I.A. officers, who were under pressure to produce better intelligence in the field, wanted explicit legal authority before aggressively interrogating high-value targets. A finding would give operatives some legal protection for questionable actions, but the White House was reluctant to put what it wanted in writing. A recently retired high-level C.I.A. official, who served during this period and was involved in the drafting of findings, described to me the bitter disagreements between the White House and the agency over the issue. "The problem is what constituted approval," the retired C.I.A. official said. "My people fought about this all the time. Why should we put our people on the firing line somewhere down the road? If you want me to kill Joe Smith, just tell me to kill Joe Smith. If I was the Vice-President or the President, I'd say, 'This guy Smith is a bad guy and it's in the interest of the United States for this guy to be killed.' They don't say that. Instead, George" - George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A. until mid-2004 - "goes to the White House and is told, 'You guys are professionals. You know how important it is. We know you'll get the intelligence.' George would come back and say to us, 'Do what you gotta do.'" Bill Harlow, a spokesman for Tenet, depicted as "absurd" the notion that the C.I.A. director told his agents to operate outside official guidelines. He added, in an e-mailed statement, "The intelligence community insists that its officers not exceed the very explicit authorities granted." In his recently published memoir, however, Tenet acknowledged that there had been a struggle "to get clear guidance" in terms of how far to go during high-value-detainee interrogations. The Pentagon consultant said in an interview late last year that "the C.I.A. never got the exact language it wanted." The findings, when promulgated by the White House, were "very calibrated" to minimize political risk, and limited to a few countries; later, they were expanded, turning several nations in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia into free-fire zones with regard to high-value targets. I was told by the former senior intelligence official and a government consultant that after the existence of secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe was revealed, in the Washington Post, in late 2005, the Administration responded with a new detainee center in Mauritania. After a new government friendly to the U.S. took power, in a bloodless coup d'état in August, 2005, they said, it was much easier for the intelligence community to mask secret flights there. "The dirt and secrets are in the back channel," the former senior intelligence officer noted. "All this open business - sitting in staff meetings, etc., etc. - is the Potemkin Village stuff. And the good guys - like Taguba - are gone." P> In some cases, the secret operations remained unaccountable. In an April, 2005, memorandum, a C.I.D. officer - his name was redacted - complained to C.I.D. headquarters, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, about the impossibility of investigating military members of a Special Access Program suspected of prisoner abuse: [C.I.D.] has been unable to thoroughly investigate ... due to the suspects and witnesses involvement in Special Access Programs (SAP) and/or the security classification of the unit they were assigned to during the offense under investigation. Attempts by Special Agents ... to be "read on" to these programs has [sic] been unsuccessful. The C.I.D. officer wrote that "fake names were used" by members of the task force; he also told investigators that the unit had a "major computer malfunction which resulted in them losing 70 per cent of their files; therefore, they can't find the cases we need to review." The officer concluded that the investigation "does not need to be reopened. Hell, even if we reopened it we wouldn't get any more information than we already have." Consequences Rumsfeld was vague, in his appearances before Congress, about when he had informed the President about Abu Ghraib, saying that it could have been late January or early February. He explained that he routinely met with the President "once or twice a week ... and I don't keep notes about what I do." He did remember that in mid-March he and General Myers were "meeting with the President and discussed the reports that we had obviously heard" about Abu Ghraib. Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President's failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career. In January of 2006, Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the Army's Vice-Chief of Staff. "This is your Vice," he told Taguba. "I need you to retire by January of 2007." No pleasantries were exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for years, and, Taguba said, "He offered no reason." (A spokesperson for Cody said, "Conversations regarding general officer management are considered private personnel discussions. General Cody has great respect for Major General Taguba as an officer, leader, and American patriot.") "They always shoot the messenger," Taguba told me. "To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal - that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do." Taguba went on, "There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff" - the explicit images - "was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this." He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.
"From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service," Taguba said. "And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable."
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 Crocodile Tears By Uri Avnery WHAT HAPPENS when one and a half million human beings are imprisoned in a tiny, arid territory, cut off from their compatriots and from any contact with the outside world, starved by an economic blockade and unable to feed their families? Some months ago, I described this situation as a sociological experiment set up by Israel, the United States and the European Union. The population of the Gaza Strip as guinea pigs. This week, the experiment showed results. They proved that human beings react exactly like other animals: when too many of them are crowded into a small area in miserable conditions, they become aggressive, and even murderous. The organizers of the experiment in Jerusalem, Washington, Berlin, Oslo, Ottawa and other capitals could rub their hands in satisfaction. The subjects of the experiment reacted as foreseen. Many of them even died in the interests of science. But the experiment is not yet over. The scientists want to know what happens if the blockade is tightened still further. WHAT HAS caused the present explosion in the Gaza Strip? The timing of Hamas' decision to take over the Strip by force was not accidental. Hamas had many good reasons to avoid it. The organization is unable to feed the population. It has no interest in provoking the Egyptian regime, which is busy fighting the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother-organization of Hamas. Also, the organization has no interest in providing Israel with a pretext for tightening the blockade. But the Hamas leaders decided that they had no alternative but to destroy the armed organizations that are tied to Fatah and take their orders from President Mahmoud Abbas. The US has ordered Israel to supply these organizations with large quantities of weapons, in order to enable them to fight Hamas. The Israeli army chiefs did not like the idea, fearing that the arms might end up in the hands of Hamas (as is actually happening now). But our government obeyed American orders, as usual. The American aim is clear. President Bush has chosen a local leader for every Muslim country, who will rule it under American protection and follow American orders. In Iraq, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan, and also in Palestine. Hamas believes that the man marked for this job in Gaza is Mohammed Dahlan. For years it has looked as if he was being groomed for this position. The American and Israeli media have been singing his praises, describing him as a strong, determined leader, "moderate" (i.e. obedient to American orders) and "pragmatic" (i.e. obedient to Israeli orders). And the more the Americans and Israelis lauded Dahlan, the more they undermined his standing among the Palestinians. Especially as Dahlan was away in Cairo, as if waiting for his men to receive the promised arms. In the eyes of Hamas, the attack on the Fatah strongholds in the Gaza Strip is a preventive war. The organizations of Abbas and Dahlan melted like snow in the Palestinian sun. Hamas has easily taken over the whole Gaza Strip. How could the American and Israeli generals miscalculate so badly? They are able to think only in strictly military terms: so-and-so many soldiers, so-and-so many machine guns. But in interior struggles in particular, quantitative calculations are secondary. The morale of the fighters and public sentiment are far more important. The members of the Fatah organizations do not know what they are fighting for. The Gaza population supports Hamas, because they believe that it is fighting the Israeli occupier. Their opponents look like collaborators of the occupation. The American statements about their intention of arming them with Israeli weapons have finally condemned them. That is not a matter of Islamic fundamentalism. In this respect all nations are the same: they hate collaborators of a foreign occupier, whether they are Norwegian (Quisling), French (Petain) or Palestinian. IN WASHINGTON and Jerusalem, politicians are bemoaning the "weakness of Mahmoud Abbas". They see now that the only person who could prevent anarchy in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank was Yasser Arafat. He had a natural authority. The masses adored him. Even his adversaries, like Hamas, respected him. He created several security apparatuses that competed with each other, in order to prevent any single apparatus from carrying out a coup-d'etat. Arafat was able to negotiate, sign a peace agreement and get his people to accept it. But Arafat was pilloried by Israel as a monster, imprisoned in the Mukata'ah and, in the end, murdered. The Palestinian public elected Mahmoud Abbas as his successor, hoping that he would get from the Americans and the Israelis what they had refused to give to Arafat. If the leaders in Washington and Jerusalem had indeed been interested in peace, they would have hastened to sign a peace agreement with Abbas, who had declared that he was ready to accept the same far-reaching compromise as Arafat. The Americans and the Israelis heaped on him all conceivable praise and rebuffed him on every concrete issue. They did not allow Abbas even the slightest and most miserable achievement. Ariel Sharon plucked his feathers and then sneered at him as "a featherless chicken". After the Palestinian public had patiently waited in vain for Bush to move, it voted for Hamas, in the desperate hope of achieving by violence what Abbas has been unable to achieve by diplomacy. The Israeli leaders, both military and political, were overjoyed. They were interested in undermining Abbas, because he enjoyed Bush's confidence and because his stated position made it harder to justify their refusal to enter substantive negotiations. They did everything to demolish Fatah. To ensure this, they arrested Marwan Barghouti, the only person capable of keeping Fatah together. The victory of Hamas suited their aims completely. With Hamas one does not have to talk, to offer withdrawal from the occupied territories and the dismantling of settlements. Hamas is that contemporary monster, a "terrorist" organization, and with terrorists there is nothing to discuss. SO WHY were people in Jerusalem not satisfied this week? And why did they decide "not to interfere"? True, the media and the politicians, who have helped for years to incite the Palestinian organizations against each other, showed their satisfaction and boasted "we told you so". Look how the Arabs kill each other. Ehud Barak was right, when he said years ago that our country is "a villa in the jungle". But behind the scenes, voices of embarrassment, even anxiety, could be heard. The turning of the Gaza Strip into Hamastan has created a situation for which our leaders were not ready. What to do now? To cut off Gaza altogether and let the people there starve to death? To establish contacts with Hamas? To occupy Gaza again, now that it has become one big tank trap? To ask the UN to station international troops there - and if so, how many countries would be crazy enough to risk their soldiers in this hell? Our government has worked for years to destroy Fatah, in order to avoid the need to negotiate an agreement that would inevitably lead to the withdrawal from the occupied territories and the settlements there. Now, when it seems that this aim has been achieved, they have no idea what to do about the Hamas victory. They comfort themselves with the thought that it cannot happen in the West Bank. There, Fatah reigns. There Hamas has no foothold. There our army has already arrested most of Hamas' political leaders. There Abbas is still in power. Thus speak the generals, with the generals' logic. But in the West Bank, too, Hamas did win a majority in the last elections. There, too, it is only a matter of time before the population loses its patience. They see the expansion of the settlements, the Wall, the incursions of our army, the targeted assassinations, the nightly arrests. They will explode. Successive Israeli governments have destroyed Fatah systematically, cut off the feet of Abbas and prepared the way for Hamas. They can't pretend to be surprised. WHAT TO DO? To go on boycotting Abbas or to provide him with arms, to enable him to fight for us against Hamas? To go on depriving him of any political achievement or to throw him some crumbs at long last? And anyway, isn't it too late? (And on the Syrian front: to go on paying lip service to peace while sabotaging all the efforts of Bashar Assad to start negotiations? To negotiate secretly, despite American objections? Or continue doing nothing at all?) At present, there is no policy, and no government which could determine a policy. So who will save us? Ehud Barak? Barak's victory in this week's Labor Party leadership run-off has turned him almost automatically into the next Minister of Defense. His strong personality and his experience as Chief of Staff and Prime Minister assure him of a dominant position in the restructured government. Olmert will deal with the area in which he is an unmatched master - party machinations. But Barak will have a decisive influence on policy. In the government of the two Ehuds, Ehud Barak will decide on matters of war and peace. Until now, practically all his actions have had negative results. He came very close to an agreement with Assad the father and escaped at the last moment. He withdrew the Israeli army from South Lebanon, but without speaking with Hizbullah, which took over. He compelled Arafat to come to Camp David, insulted him there and declared that we have no partner for peace. This dealt a death blow to the chances of peace, a blow which still paralyzes the Israeli public. He has boasted that his real intention was to "unmask" Arafat. He was more of a failed Napoleon than an Israeli de Gaulle. Will the Ethiopian change his skin, the leopard his spots? Hard to believe. IN THE dramas of William Shakespeare, there is frequently a comic interlude at tense moments. And not only there. Shimon Peres, the person who in 55 years of political activity had never won an election, did the impossible this week: he got elected President of Israel. Many years ago, I entitled an article about him "Mr. Sisyphus", because again and again he had almost reached the threshold of success, and success had evaded him. Now he might feel like thumbing his nose at the gods after reaching the summit, but - alas - without the boulder. The office of the president is devoid of content and jurisdiction. A hollow politician in a hollow position. Now everybody expects a flurry of activity at the president's palace. There will certainly be peace conferences, meetings of personalities, high-sounding declarations and illustrious plans. In short - much ado about nothing. The practical result is that Olmert's position has been strengthened. He has succeeded in installing Peres in the President's office and Barak in the Ministry of Defense. In the short term, Olmert's position is assured.
And in the meantime, the experiment in Gaza continues, Hamas is taking over and the trio - Ehud 1, Ehud 2 and Shimon Peres are shedding crocodile tears.
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 Tantrums Of Mass Destruction Or The Enduring Beauty Of Ugly Truth In Praise of the Shabby-Ass Human Glory of Every Day Resistance By Phil Rockstroh Recent news reports have revealed that the Bush Administration has bestowed upon itself the right to grant itself absolute power if "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions" might come to pass. Actually, the hypothetical catastrophes stated above sound very much like the veritable calamities inflicted upon the nation by the Bush presidency itself. Worse, at present, many of our Democratic representatives are showing their outrage regarding the disastrous policies of the administration -- by agitating to bomb Iran. Regarding such circumstances, Eric Fromme warned, "the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it." Ergo, we witness these collective pathologies play out in the perpetual aggression of American foreign policy, the exploitation inherent in our corporate workplaces, marketplaces, and healthcare practices and the exponentially expanding destruction of the environment. How, then, can we begin to alter these seemingly ineluctable circumstances? First off, don't give the elites credit for being more intelligent than they are. Ruthlessness, striving and cunning should not be mistaken for intelligence. The only real accomplishment of the present day ruling class has been to transform their self-justifying lies into a form of performance art. In reality, they have left private institutions bloated and public ones bankrupt. And left us, as a people, directionless and bereft of hope. But that is not the totality of the situation: We must muse upon our own complicity in creating this cultural catastrophe. We've all been employed as landscapers on this blood-sodden deathscape. At present, in our alienation and attendant passivity, our plight is analogous to that of so-called "crib babies," those socially and emotionally arrested, orphaned children who were left to languish in indifferent institutions. Culturally, we seem devoid of the ability to respond to each other, to create a just society -- or even envisage one. Such is the extent of our alienation and it is reflected in the media clowns and confidence artists who comprise our (misnomer alert) leadership. We can produce slick, television-friendly self-promoters -- i.e. Thompson and Obama -- but we can't rebuilt New Orleans or devise an exit strategy from Iraq. Creating mass media is not tantamount to creating society. When we live in an era wherein image trumps reality, it follows that an infantilized populace will be transfixed by the shiny objects of media culture -- that the tiny dramas of shallow celebrities will work like crib mobiles to distract us from the deep anguish of being a species standing before the crumbling edifice of paradigm collapse. If media culture seems so unreal, it is because it is a reflection of our chronic alienation -- our systemic disengagement from communal involvement; so profound is our alienation -- not only from our environment -- but also from our inner lives that we pose a danger to ourselves and others -- which is, of course, the clinical criteria describing those unfortunate souls whose sanity has deteriorated to the point in which they require institutionalization. Conversely, a populace being in possession of an inner life would prove a dangerous development to the one percent who hold ninety percent of the nation's wealth -- those who prosper from our alienation and its attendant apathy. It is a given these corrupt elitists will try to maintain our estrangement from our inner realities -- because if we were to be roused to awareness insurrection would result. Being internally colonized by consumerism, we have lost the ability to imagine meaningful change, because our inner lives are no longer our own. Benumbed by our complicity in corporate blanding, by means of ceaseless branding, our inner beings, rather than resembling a teeming, vital polis of meaningful engagement, now seem closer in resemblance to the cold florescent light-flooded shelves of off-the-interstate convenience stores. Impulse and shallow need -- in other words -- utter desperation -- has usurped the deepening eros of communal engagement. Hence, the thronging avenues of imagination, personal and collective, have been replaced by a soul-numbing proliferation of Starbucks and Banana Republic outlets that serve palliative remedies masking the pain of our powerlessness to alter the tragic trajectory of the times. All transpiring as the sky burns and Arctic glaciers melt into rising seas -- and we're driven to distract ourselves from descending dread by means of another latte buzz, shopping excursion, the unreality of Reality TV, and the pathetic pandering of a political class of shallow hacks who are themselves powerless before their Thanatotic addiction to power. Such are the colic nightmares of us cultural crib babies. What comes of this degree of alienation? Violence (from shooting sprees to perpetual war). Addiction (from mindless consumerism to prisons overcrowded with drug users). Magical thinking (from neo-con fantasies of global dominance to Christian End Time hallucinations). Paranoia (The abiding delusion that little brown people cross our borders in order to take our jobs, force us to speak their language, and blow up our malls ... after, of course, they've swept the floors and scrubbed the toilets). Depression (from wide-spread use of anti-depressants to the massive demoralization that reveals itself in pandemic levels of social apathy). What if the media were to begin to chronicle this collective nervous breakdown? What if we became unable to avert our gaze from the tragedies of our time? What if we were induced to not only stare into the abyss -- but were grabbed by the lapels by it? Then, I suspect, our apathy would grow unpalatable. We'd choke on our fetid self-justifications; swallowing our rationalizations would prove about as appetizing as eating a foot-long hotdog inside a slaughterhouse. At some point, try driving out into the American countryside (as I've spent the last six months doing). See for yourself the drought-desiccated Everglades and Okefanokee swamps ablaze, where clouds of smoke are enswathing the states of the Deep South like a death shroud. Walk through the splintered, toxic rubble of New Orleans. Although do not go to gawk, but to grieve -- and rage --and then meditate on how we came, as a people, to abandon an entire American city. Then continue, as I did, down Interstate 10, onward through the concrete-encased, "heat dome" of the stripmall archipelago that is Houston; its ugly, ad hoc architecture glazed in the Greenhouse Gas-trapped infernos known as weather in Sun Belt cities. Then proceed out into the West Texas prairielands and approach the areas where enormous, industrial livestock holding pens and slaughterhouses are located. Places, where exploded-from-high-speed-impact carcasses of swarms of black flies stipple your windshield, where the reek of death cannot be masked, even if you possess a car-deodorizer the size of Arkansas. In these places, you'll find the reek of empire; as well as, the reason the people of the world have turned their faces away from us in revulsion. This stench permeates the air of our nation and clings to the fabric of our lives. Moreover, although George Bush is a veritable idiot savant in the art of creating the stench of death, our Little Prince of Putrefaction is not taking the reek back to Texas with him when we're finally rid of him. No, it is our own essence now. Iconography-wise: Let's lose the imagery of noble and lofty bald eagles: rotting road kill should be proclaimed our national animal. Yes, we're powerless before the enormity of the age -- but we cross the line into complicity when we're oblivious to our own individual stake in it. At this point, we can no longer afford the luxury of retreating to our comfort zones. Tears must scald our eyes; horrific visions should haunt our nights. The hour has come when we must wrestle with the demon of our own indifference who gains his sustenance and strength from the bribes, large and small, we accept from this death-sustained system. Worse yet, our pathologies are embodied in our infant/tyrant leadership who throw global-wide tantrums of mass destruction because as a people we have forgotten how to give ourselves over to the eros of engaging the world by social and political involvement. How do we begin to restore ourselves and reclaim our nation? -- First, by remembering we're alive -- and that life is finite. The awareness of the urgency of the situation at hand will quicken one's pulse and the demon will lessen its grip as one's blood rises in mortification and outrage. How will we know we are turning the tide? -- When our listless sleepwalking gives way to participation mystique -- to vivid, waking dreams of living flesh. How will we know if we're losing? -- Simple: We will remain as we are, at present: bloodless, wane spirits imprisoned within our own clammy skin. This is the archetypal criteria at the root of the mythic imagery of raising the dead: The simple realization that one is alive within life; that the ennui engendered by the illusion of atomization has ended; and that one's individual dreams and longings -- and even one's flesh -- are not exclusively our own, but are part and parcel of the implicate order of a living planet. Accordingly, there is neither an omnipresent, ever-watchful Sky Daddy divinity above nor a Risen Son savior proffering redemption, yet there is engagement (action and inspiration) within the vastness of the world -- a redemption borne of risk that serves to re-animate a necrotic heart. In short, we so love the world we give ourselves to it. To do so, it is imperative we begin unshackling ourselves from the noxious orthodoxies of church, state, political party, and corporation, as well as from our own narcissistic strivings within those hierarchies of vampires and wean ourselves from the petty perks we garner from group approval and institutional bribes. Accordingly, the first step is an awareness of the problem and a willingness to reveal it in all its shabby-ass human glory -- even if the implications of doing so are ugly -- even if to do so will be to risk scorn in one's personal life and reversals in one's professional standing. Years ago, I heard the tale of a fellow, a struggling artist, who had bought an old, dilapidated house. Upon moving in, he discovered the place was infested with cockroaches. Worse, the house sat close to railroad tracks and when trains trundled by, shaking the house, its floors, walls, and ceilings literally seethed with agitated cockroaches. Since no amount of bug spray could lessen the massive infestation, the artist began zapping the bugs with glow-in-the-dark spray paint. Later, when friends dropped by in the evening and a train rumbled down the adjacent tracks, he would switch off the lights and all present were dazzled by the moving, organic mobile of scuttling, multi-colored lights he created. At present, this is where we find ourselves as a people: powerless before the ugliness of the age. Therefore, we have little choice other than to light the ugliness up and turn the objects of our revulsion (personal and collective) into something resembling the truth of art. What will we gain?
Only this: the enduring beauty of ugly truth -- one of the few balms available within the agonies of a dark and ugly age.
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Take Bush's recent attempt to shove Michael Baroody into the chairmanship of the Consumer Products Safety Commission. This watchdog agency is supposed to protect the public from manufacturers who make shoddy products that harm or kill people. So - is Baroody a noted consumer advocate?
Hardly! He's the top lobbyist for the National Association of Manufacturers! Yes, he represents the very makers of the dangerous and deadly products the agency is supposed to guard against. With this appointment, Bush was not merely putting the fox in the henhouse - he was trying to deliver the hens directly to the fox's den!
To make this obvious conflict of interest even stinkier, the NAM came up with an under-the-table scheme to subsidize Baroody's salary at the consumer agency, promising to hand him a forget-me-not of $150,000. The Bushites knew about this payment - yet saw nothing even slightly unethical about it.
Luckily, senators did. When it became clear that Baroody would not be confirmed, he withdrew his name. Did Bush & Company finally see the light? Of course not! The White House responded with a snippy attack on the critics of this insulting appointment, saying that senators had "rushed to judgment." Well, thank goodness they did - someone needed to show some good judgment. Meanwhile, the head of the NAM had a little hissy fit, whining loudly that there and been an "unprincipled smear campaign waged against Mike."
The reason Bush and buddies are so clueless is that they are eaten up with corporate arrogance and avarice. They possess a stunning sense of entitlement, leading them to treat our government as their private plaything. What they need is to have a good kindergarten teacher assigned to refresh each of them on the basics of playground ethics.
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All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are swiftly placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton terms "atrocity-producing situations." In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke or driving down a street means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress leads troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage that soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen as supporting the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral one. It is a leap from killing-the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm-to murder-the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.
The American killing project is not described in these terms to the distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract of glory, honor and heroism, of the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. The press, as in most wars, is slavishly compliant. The reality of the war-the fact that the occupation forces have become, along with the rampaging militias, a source of terror to most Iraqis-is not transmitted to the American public. The press chronicles the physical and emotional wounds visited on those who kill in our name. The Iraqis, those we kill, are largely nameless, faceless dead. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a regrettable but necessary virtue.
The reality and the mythic narrative of war collide when embittered combat veterans return home. They find themselves estranged from the world around them, a world that still believes in the myth of war and the virtues of the nation.
Tina Susman in a June 12 article in the Los Angeles Times gave readers a rare glimpse into this side of the war. She wrote about a 17-year-old Iraqi boy killed by the wild, random fire unleashed by American soldiers in a Baghdad neighborhood following a bomb blast. These killings, which Iraqis say occur daily, are seldom confirmed, but in this case the boy was the son of a local Los Angeles Times employee.
Iraqi physicians, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study last year in the British medical journal The Lancet. The study estimated that 655,000 more people than normal have died in Iraq since coalition forces invaded the country in March 2003. This is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech last December.
Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence. The remaining deaths occurred from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 additional violent deaths per day throughout the country.
Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated last year that U.S. troops had killed "tens of thousands" of innocent Iraqis through accidents or reckless fire.
Official figures have ceased to exist. The Iraqi government no longer releases the number of civilian casualties and the U.S. military does not usually give reports about civilians killed or wounded by U.S. forces.
"It's a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance," Alaa Safi told the Los Angeles Times. He said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.
War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it "the lust of the eye" and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in primal impulses we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the power to give or annihilate life. Armed units become crazed by the frenzy of destruction. All things, including human beings, become objects-objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.
Human beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighborhoods with high-powered explosives, and convoys tear through Iraq, speeding freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in firepower that obliterates landscapes and villages. The moral universe is turned upside down. No one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of barbarity, pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence.
It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men and women into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy. All feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist gratuitous slaughter. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.
Military machines and state bureaucracies, which seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war and speak the truth. Besides, the public has little desire to puncture the mythic, heroic narrative. The essence of war, which is death, is carefully masked from view. The few lone journalists who attempt to speak the truth about war, to describe the experience of constantly being on the receiving end of American firepower, soon become pariahs, no longer able to embed with the military, dine out with officials in the Green Zone or get press credentials. And so the vast majority of the press lies to us, although not overtly; it is the lie of omission, but it is a lie nonetheless.
The veterans who return, even if they do not speak about the atrocities they have committed or witnessed in Iraq, will spend the rest of their lives coping with what they have done. They will suffer delayed reactions to stress. They will endure, as have those who returned from Vietnam, a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The high priests of our civic religion, from politicians to preachers to television pundits, who promised them glory and honor through war betrayed them.
War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal is seeping into the ranks of the American military. It is bringing us a new wave of enraged and disenfranchised veterans who will never again trust the country that sent them to war.
We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds. We give them uniforms with colored ribbons for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our demented civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak. This is our nation's idolatry of itself.
Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits-there are few people in pulpits worth listening to. The prophets are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and find the courage to speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must hear and digest in order to know ourselves. These veterans, the ones who dare to tell the truth, have seen and tasted how war plunges us into barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies, if we take the time to listen, which alone can save us.
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Boo-hoo! I made Tim Griffin cry.
He cried. Then he lied.
You remember Tim. Karl Rove's right hand (right claw?) man. The GOP's ragin' cagin' man.
Griffin is the Rove-bot exposed by our BBC Newsnight investigations team as the man who gathered and sent out the infamous 'caging' lists to Republican state chairmen during the 2004 election.
Caging lists, BBC discovered, were used secretly as a basis to challenge the right to vote of thousands of citizens - including the homeless, students and soldiers sent overseas. The day after BBC broadcast that the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, sought our evidence on Griffin, Tim resigned his post as US Attorney for Arkansas. That job was a little gift from Karl Rove who made room for his man Griffin by demanding the firing of US prosecutor Bud Cummins.
Last week, our cameras captured Griffin, all teary-eyed, in his humiliating kiss-off speech delivered in Little Rock at the University of Arkansas where he moaned that, "public service isn't worth it."
True. In the old Jim Crow days in Arkansas, you could get yourself elected by blocking African-Americans. (The voters his caging game targeted are - quelle surprise! - disproportionately Black citizens.)
But today, Griffin can't even get an unemployment check. When he resigned two weeks ago following our broadcast, the cover story was that the voter persecutor-turned-prosecutor had resigned to work for Presidential wannabe Fred Thompson. But when Thompson's staff was asked by a reporter why they would hire the 'cagin' man,' suddenly, the 'Law and Order' star decided associating with Griffin might take the shine off Thompson's badge, even if it is from the props department.
Griffin, instead of saying that public service "isn't worth it," should have said, "Crime doesn't pay." Because, according to experts such as law professor Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 'caging,' when used to target Black voters' rights, is a go-to-prison crime.
By resigning, Tim may not avoid the hard questions about caging - or the hard time that might result. When I passed the first set of documents to Conyers (a real film noir moment, in a New York hotel room near midnight), the soft-spoken Congressman said that, resignation or not, "We aren't done with Mr. Griffin yet..."
Tears Not Truth
Back in Little Rock, when asked about caging, Rove's guy linked a few fibs to a few whoppers to some malefactious mendacity. That is, he lied.
"I didn't cage votes. I didn't cage mail," Griffin asserted.
At the risk of making you cry again, Tim, may I point you to an email dated August 26, 2004. It says, "Subject: Re: Caging." And it says, "From: Tim Griffin - Research/Communications" with the email tgriffin@rnchq.org. RNCHQ is the Republican National Committee Headquarters, is it not, Mr. Griffin? Now do you remember caging mail?
If that doesn't ring a bell, please note that at the bottom is this: "ATTACHMENT: Caging-1.xls". And that attachment was a list of voters.
In last week's pathetic farewell, Mr. Griffin averred that the accusation he was involved in caging voters, "Goes back to one guy - whose name I won't mention." (FYI, Mr. Griffin: My mother calls me, "Gregory.")
Yes, I first reported the story for BBC London - back in 2004 which, as Griffin correctly noted, it was ignored by my US press colleagues until, as Tim put it, "I became embroiled in the US Attorney thing." By 'the US Attorney thing,' I assume you are referring to your involvement in firing and smearing honest prosecutors and grabbing one of their salaries for yourself.
You say, Mr. Griffin, that the unmentionable reporter, "Made [it] up out of whole cloth." You flatter me, Mr. Griffin. We could not possibly be so creative at The Beeb as to construct the thousands of names of voters on your caging lists.
And by the way, we don't have just one of your "caging" emails, but scores of them.
I want to take this opportunity to thank you for sending them to us - even if that was not your intent. You copied your caging missives to 'bdoster@georgewbush.org.' Mr. Doster was Chairman of the Florida Bush campaign - but that address was not his but John Wooden's pretending to be the Bush campaigners. Wooden then sent your notes to me.
Rove in Range
By the way, Mr. Griffin, if you want an explanation of 'caging voters,' just read an email dated February 5, 2007 by...Tim Griffin.
In that email, Griffin references the Bush campaigns mailing out thousands of letters. The letters returned ('caged') as undeliverable were used as the GOP's supposed evidence that these were "thousands of fraudulent voter registrations." These voters were subject to challenge. However, these caging lists of "fraudulent" addresses, like the 2000 "felon" lists which in fact contained no felons, contained no fraudulent voters. But that wouldn't necessarily save them from the massively successful Republican voter-challenge campaign.
During the appearance he made in Arkansas last week, Griffin said he'd never heard of 'caging.' "I had to look it up," he said. Griffin discovered that "caging" is "a direct mail term."
I don't doubt Griffin's ignorance. Griffin's just a good ol' boy, a former military lawyer, who wouldn't know direct mail terminology from a hole in the ground. Until he went to work for the RNC.
So where did Tim get this direct mail term he used in his emails? Well, before Karl Rove signed on with George W. Bush, he owned Karl Rove & Co ....a direct mail firm. Rove made millions making up lists of voters, doing more 'caging' than a zoo-keeper.
Am I saying caging-expert Rove had something to do with the allegedly illegal caging games of his boy Griffin? Does a bear...?
Mr. Griffin wouldn't answer BBC's requests for comment. So I suggested to an Arkansas local, Luther Lowe, a former army reservist and himself a victim of a challenge to his vote, that at the Little Rock send-off for Griffin, he ask the fallen US Attorney about Rove's involvement in caging. Lowe did so, politely. Griffin wove, ducked, blathered and blubbered. But wouldn't answer.
Maybe a subpoena would encourage a Griffin response. And a grant of immunity from the Conyers committee. That's Rove's nightmare. Because unless Griffin joins Alberto Gonzales in Club Amnesia, Griffin has a lot to tell us about Mr. Rove and targeting Black voters.
Will he? It's not Conyers' style to hunt down Rove. The congressman is not, despite what Republicans say, a partisan hit man. He is, however, one tenacious legislator who told me he would like his committee, "to follow where the evidence leads."
But that's not necessarily going to happen. Conyers told me he sees the evidence in the prosecutor firing investigation leading to the much bigger, nastier issue of voter suppression - in simpler terms, fixing elections.
Unfortunately, many on his committee from both parties see the hearings as limited to the single issue of the firing of prosecutors. They want to scrutinize the elephant's trunk but refuse to acknowledge it's attached to an elephant: election rigging. Racially poisoned, direct-mail driven, computer implemented election rigging.
But Conyers may get there yet, to the issue of elections manipulation. I didn't get that from the Chairman (too circumspect to let his future intensions slip out). I got it from the Big Bubba. When I ran into Ol' Silver Eyes himself at an Air America soiree, Bill Clinton (man, he's gotten thin!) told me, "When we really get going on these prosecutor hearings, when we really dig deep, we're going to get right to the issue of voter suppression."
But what do you mean "we," Bill? Conyers is dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has an abiding concern and painful experience with illegal vote suppression of all types: caging, purging, challenging, lynching. But whether Conyers can convince his committee, mostly members of the Congressional White Caucus, to "dig deep" on vote suppression, is an open question.
In the meantime, Conyers has convinced his committee to drop subpoenas on Harriett Miers (the lady tight with Griffin, Rove and, notably, George W. Bush) and Sara Taylor, Rove's Gal Friday. Conyers, methodically, determinedly, is circling in on Rove, "Bush's Brain," a man known to surrender the corpses of his allies in place of his own (eh, Mr. Libby?). No wonder Griffin's in tears.
So here's a hanky, Mr. Griffin. This unnamable reporter would rather you save your tears for Randall Prausa. The African-American soldier was on active military duty when he ended up on one of your caging lists, what you term a suspected 'fraudulent' voter subject to GOP challenge because he was not home to get his fraudulent, 'Welcome, voter,' letter from the GOP.
Can you guess, Mr. Griffin, why Prausa wasn't at home? Well, unlike Messrs. Rove and Bush, Prausa was serving his country overseas.
And that's what caging is all about. If you're Black, you get shipped to Baghdad and you lose your vote. Mission Accomplished, Mr. Griffin. Mission Accomplished, Mr. Rove.
The confidential Griffin e-mail, "Subject: Re: Caging," is reproduced in Greg Palast's New York Times bestseller
Also: Catch the film of Randi Rhodes and Greg Palast on "Bush's and Giuliani's favorite vultures," the men with connections to the Bush Administration who have siphoned off the money meant for Africa's poorest. Video online here.
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The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll results vividly show a population incredibly dissatisfied with their nation's political system. In other countries in other times such a depressing level of confidence in government would send a signal to those running the government that a major upheaval is imminent. But not here in the USA. Why?
First, here are the highlights of the poll that surveyed 1,008 adults from June 8-11, with a margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.
A whopping 68 percent think the country is on the wrong track. Just 19 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction - the lowest number on that question in nearly 15 years. And most of those with the positive view are probably in the Upper Class.
Bush's approval rating is at just 29 percent, his lowest mark ever in the survey. Only 62 percent of Republicans approve, versus 32 percent who disapprove. Take Republicans out of the picture and a fifth or less of Americans have a positive view of Bush.
Even worse, only 23 percent approve of the job that Congress is doing. So much for that wonderful new Democratic control of Congress. Bipartisan incompetence is alive and well.
On the economic front, nearly twice as many people think the U.S. is more hurt than helped by the global economy (48 to 25 percent). Globalization does not spread wealth; it channels it to the wealthy, making billionaires out of millionaires.
I have long asserted that Americans live in a delusional democracy with delusional prosperity and these and loads of other data support this view. There is a super wealthy and politically powerful Upper Class that is literally raping the nation. Meanwhile, the huge Lower Class continues to lose economic ground while their elected representatives sell them out to benefit the Upper Class. Yet no rational person thinks that a large fraction of the population is ready to rise up in revolt against the evil status quo political-economic system that so clearly is not serving the interests of the overwhelming majority of Americans. Why not?
For a nation that was built on a revolt against oppressive governance by the British, something has been lost from our political DNA. We apparently no longer have the gene for political rebellion. It has been bred out of most of us. And those of us that urge a Second American Revolution are seen as fringe, nutty subversives.
Part of the genius of our contemporary ruling class elites is that they have engineering a state of political and economic oppression that paradoxically is still embraced by the Lower Class. The rational way to understand this is that ordinary, oppressed Americans are in a deep psychological state of self-delusion. Despite all the empirical, objective evidence of a failed government, they fail to see rebellion opportunities. Many still believe they live in the world's best democracy. But across all elections considerably less than half the citizens even bother to vote anymore. Yet, as the new NBC/Journal poll results show, people are cognitively aware of just how awful the political-economic system is. Yet they are not feeling enough pain to seriously consider rebellion. And it is visceral pain that must drive people to the daring act of rebellion.
Why is there insufficient pain for revolution? This is a deadly serious issue. What is historically unique about America is that even the most oppressed and unfairly treated people are distracted by affordable materialism, entertainment, sports, gambling, and myriad other aspects of our frivolous, self-absorbed culture. Even failed school and health care systems do not drive people, paying enormous sums to fill up their SUVs, to rebellion. So, Americans are aware of their oppression, but the power elites have successfully drugged them with a plethora of pleasure-producing distractions sufficient to keep them under control. We are free to bitch, but too weak to revolt. The Internet has provided a release valve for some pent up anger and frustration. But it too has mostly become another source of distraction, rather than an effective tool for rebellion.
Though these new poll statistics make news, those in control of the political-economic system are not afraid that the population is on the verge of retaking their constitutionally guaranteed sovereign power and take back their nation. Thousands of people like me keep writing books and articles and creating protest groups and events. Those in power just find new, ingenious ways to keep the population distracted - if not through pleasure, then certainly through fear of terrorism. Growing economic insecurity also contributes to self-paralysis, as do never-ending political lies.
What a system.
Even as the population has growing awareness of the dire condition of their nation, the move by the politically powerful on the right and left continues to seek a new immigration law that will solidify the selling out of America. Business interests want more of those fleeing Mexico and other nations to keep wages low. Instead of Mexicans rising up in rebellion against their oppressive government and economic system they escape to the USA. But Americans have no such viable escape solution. Though global warming will certainly make Canada increasingly attractive.
So what do Americans have - other than a terribly bleak future? Where is hope in our dismal world?
In a bizarre twist of history that further illustrates just how impotent Americans have become, virtually all citizens are either unaware of or unreceptive to the ultimate escape route that the Framers of our Constitution gave us. They anticipated that Americans could become quite dissatisfied with the federal government. They feared that the political system could become incredibly corrupted by moneyed interests. They were right.
So here we sit over 200 years after our nation was created unwilling to use what is explicitly given to us in Article V of the Constitution - the option to have a convention outside the control of Congress, the President and the Supreme Court to make proposals for constitutional amendments. Do we really believe in the rule of law? If so, then we should understand that the supreme law of the land - what is in our Constitution - is the ultimate way to obtain the deep political and government reforms to restore true democracy and economic fairness to our society.
Make no mistake: an Article V convention has been stubbornly opposed by virtually all groups with political and economic power. This is most evidenced by the blatant refusal of Congress to obey the Constitution and give us an Article V convention, even though the single explicit requirement for a convention has been met. This fact alone should tell rational people that they are being screwed and oppressed. The rule of law is trumped by the rule of delusion. Our lawmakers are lawbreakers.
Come learn more about the effort to get an Article V convention and become a member. Do not keep witnessing the unraveling of American society, voting for lesser evil candidates, and believing the propaganda that putting different Democrats or Republicans in office will actually improve things for most of us. Choose peaceful rebellion by using what our Constitution gives us. Fight self-delusion.
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 Alliance With Atrocity Bush's Terror War Partners in Ethiopia By Chris Floyd The New York Times paints a pretty picture of George W. Bush's bosom pals in Ethiopia, in an important story that once again gives the howling lie to the Bushists' pretensions of advancing freedom and democracy in their world-encircling Terror War. Of course, the story itself, by Jeffrey Gettleman, is marred by the usual uncritical acceptance of Administration spin on its key role in aiding the Ethiopian dictatorship's aggression in Somalia, and ignores entirely the American airstrikes during the invasion that killed scores of civilians (and are still going on in the Somali hinterland). This is not surprising, given that Gettleman's last big piece from the region was a truly odious bit of propaganda hackwork that essentially painted the victims of the aggression as greedy, worthless, anarchic trash who got what was coming to them. (See "The Lies of the Times: NYT Pushes Bush Line on Somalia.") Still, the new article is a vast improvement on its predecessor, employing a journalistic device that is increasingly rare in the higher circles of the coporate media: reportage. Gettleman has actually gone to the Ogaden desert to talk with victims of the Ethiopian dictatorships's savage internal repression. He actually details Ethiopia's brutal crackdown on its nascent democracy movement, and its strangling of free elections in 2005 -- and even compares it to the murderous Chinese reaction to the historic Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. (Of course, Bush only increased American military aid to Ethiopia after the 2005 repression -- just as his father never let the Tiananmen massacre derail his courtship of China's leaders, which has paid off so handsomely for America's ruling family, with fat Chinese contracts for son Neil and lucre aplenty for George I's brother, Prescott Jr., long-time head of the Chinese-American Chamber of Commerce. Who wants to bet that Ethiopia will soon adopt Neil's latest wheeze, a"computer learning" gizmo he is marketing with business partners like Boris Berezovsky and Sun Myung Moon? For more on the Warbuckian Bushes, see "Uncle Sugar" and "Buried Treasure.") So let's give credit where it's due. Although Gettleman downplays the American partnership with Ethiopia's conquest of Somalia -- and takes 40 paragraphs before he mentions that the European Commission is now investigating Bush's partner for war crimes "in connection to hundreds of Somali civilians killed by Ethiopian troops" -- he does bring in a Democratic congressman to decry the U.S. military alliance with Ethiopia, and its bitter fruit in Somalia. I believe this is the first time I've seen such a criticism aired by an elected official in a story from the major corporate media since the attack on Somalia last December. What's more, the Timesman admirably puts the suffering of the persecuted ethnic Somalis of Ethiopia's Ogaden desert front and center in the story. And he makes an explicit connection between the perpetrators of these atrocities and their staunch supporters in the Bush Administration: In village after village, people said they had been brutalized by government troops. They described a widespread and longstanding reign of terror, with Ethiopian soldiers gang-raping women, burning down huts and killing civilians at will. It is the same military that the American government helps train and equip - and provides with prized intelligence. The two nations have been allies for years, but recently they have grown especially close, teaming up last winter to oust an Islamic movement that controlled much of Somalia and rid the region of a potential terrorist threat. Of course, even in making this connection, which ties the Bush Administration directly to the atrocities detailed in the story, Gettleman still totes White House water by retailing, as unqualified fact, the baseless charge that the overthrown Somali regime was a "potential terrorist threat" -- and thus a legitimate target for the Terror War treatment. (Then again, you could say that any group or any person is a "potential" terrorist threat. If that's your basis for "intervention," then you can invade, detain or kill anyone you like. Which, as we have often pointed out here, is actually the operating philosophy of the Bush Regime.) But let's brush aside Gettleman's knee-jerk spin, and return to the facts and testimonies he unearths. Anab, a 40-year-old camel herder who was too frightened, like many others, to give her last name, said soldiers took her to a police station, put her in a cell and twisted her nipples with pliers. She said government security forces routinely rounded up young women under the pretext that they were rebel supporters so they could bring them to jail and rape them. "Me, I am old," she said, "but they raped me, too." ...Human Rights Watch issued a report in 2005 that documented a rampage by government troops against members of the Anuak, a minority tribe in western Ethiopia, in which soldiers ransacked homes, beat villagers to death with iron bars and in one case, according to a witness, tied up a prisoner and ran over him with a military truck. ...[Ethiopia's] leaders...had promised to let some air into a very stultified political system during the national elections of 2005, which were billed as a milestone on the road to democracy. Instead, they turned into Ethiopia's version of Tiananmen Square. With the opposition poised to win a record number of seats in Parliament, the government cracked down brutally, opening fire on demonstrators, rounding up tens of thousands of opposition supporters and students and leveling charges of treason and even attempted to kill top opposition leaders, including the man elected mayor of Addis Ababa. As everywhere in the world where violence and repression flourish, women have been particular victims. (Of course, given the Administration's proven track record of callous disregard for the world's most vulnerable women, the fate of the Ogaden women is not likely to trouble the White House very much.) Asma, 19, who now lives in neighboring Somaliland, said she was stuck in an underground cell for more than six months last year, raped and tortured. "They beat me on the feet and breasts," she said. She was freed only after her father paid the soldiers ransom, she said, though she did not know how much. Ambaro, 25, now living in Addis Ababa, said she was gang-raped by five Ethiopian soldiers in January near the town of Fik. She said troops came to her village every night to pluck another young woman. "I'm in pain now, all over my body," she said. " I'm worried that I'll become crazy because of what happened."
As Gettleman notes, the struggle in the Ogaden was simply ignored by the Bush Adminstration -- until a rebel Ogaden faction staged a bloody attack on an oilfield in Ethiopia last April. Raping women and beating villagers to death, that's just background noise; but messing with the sacred crude -- now, that's serious. So now the Bush administration is seriously considering Ethiopia's oft-repeated request for Washington "to add the Ogaden National Liberation Front to its list of designated foreign terrorist organizations." That could open the spigot to even more U.S. military aid for the dictatorship, and perhaps even bring America's secret Terror Warriors -- such as the Special Forces units operating in Somalia today -- into the Ogaden.
After all, for America's war-profiteering ruling family, and its many like-minded barons among the respectable elite, you can never have too many killing fields to play upon -- just as your proxies can never be brutal enough to forfeit your aid...as long as they keep doing your bidding.
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 Is WP's Cohen Dumbest Columnist? Granted it would be quite a competition, but is Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen the dumbest columnist ever? By Robert Parry In his June 19 op-ed, Cohen joined the latest Inside-the-Beltway craze, the neoconservative media riot over the 30-month jail sentence facing former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. From reading the column , it does appear that Cohen has the skills at least to master and recite the litany of talking points that the neocons have compiled to make their case about the injustice of Libby going into the slammer for committing perjury and obstruction of justice. Cohen accuses special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald of violating longstanding Justice Department guidelines on when to bring a case; he denounces the trial - over Libby's lying about his role in unmasking covert CIA officer Valerie Plame - as "a mountain out of a molehill"; he asserts that there was no "underlying crime"; he even pokes fun at Americans who thought the invasion of Iraq might have been a bad idea. "They thought - if 'thought' can be used in this context - that if the thread was pulled on who had leaked the identity of Valerie Plame to Robert D. Novak, the effort to snooker an entire nation into war would unravel and this would show . . . who knows? Something," Cohen wrote. Yet, beyond a talent for reprising the conventional wisdom from Washington dinner parties, it is hard to tell what justifies Cohen's long career as a political columnist. On nearly every major development over the past couple of decades, Cohen has missed the point or gotten it dead wrong. For example, during the Florida recount battle in 2000, Cohen cared less about whom the voters wanted in the White House than the Washington insiders' certainty that George W. Bush would be a uniter, not a divider. "The nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse," Cohen wrote. "That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush." Cohen also joined the Washington herd in the disastrous stampede for invading Iraq. After Secretary of State Colin Powell's deceptive Iraq War speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, Cohen mocked anyone who still dared doubt that Saddam Hussein possessed hidden WMD stockpiles. "The evidence he [Powell] presented to the United Nations - some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail - had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them," Cohen wrote. "Only a fool - or possibly a Frenchman - could conclude otherwise." Misplaced Enthusiasm It took Cohen another three years before he recognized that his enthusiasm for the war had been misplaced. On April 4, 2006, as the U.S. death toll reached into the thousands and the Iraqi death toll soared into the tens of thousands, Cohen wrote, "those of us who once advocated this war are humbled. It's not just that we grossly underestimated the enemy. We vastly overestimated the Bush administration." In normal work settings, incompetence - especially when it is chronic and has devastating consequences - justifies dismissal or at least demotion, maybe a desk in Storage Room B where Cohen could sit with his red stapler, but without access to a word processor. Yet, in the strange world of Washington punditry, success is measured not in being right but in keeping one's opinion within the parameters of the capital's respectable opinion, even if those judgments are atrociously wrong. As for the Plame case, Cohen seems to be living in the propaganda dreamscape of the still-influential neocons, not in the real world where the disclosure of Plame's identity caused actual damage, destroying her undercover career as a CIA officer and putting in jeopardy the lives of foreigners who worked with her investigating weapons proliferation. Plus, the motive behind the leaking of Plame's identity was not "gossip," as Cohen asserts, but a White House-orchestrated campaign to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for telling the truth about his 2002 fact-finding mission to Africa. Wilson's findings helped the U.S. intelligence community debunk false claims about Iraq attempting to buy yellowcake uranium from Africa. Despite warnings from the CIA, however, President George W. Bush cited Iraq's supposed uranium shopping during his 2003 State of the Union Address, making it a key part of the case to invade Iraq. When Wilson went public with his story in July 2003, the Bush administration sought to discredit him by suggesting that his Africa trip was just a junket arranged by his CIA wife. One White House official told a reporter from the Washington Post that the administration had informed at least six reporters about Plame. The official said the disclosure was "purely and simply out of revenge." That was a revelation that special prosecutor Fitzgerald corroborated in his investigation. Libby's Role Also, contrary to Cohen's column, Libby, as Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, was a central figure in this anti-Wilson smear campaign. Libby briefed two reporters - Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper - about Plame's identity and brought press secretary Ari Fleischer into the leak operation. Though it turned out that other senior administration officials, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and his friend, White House political adviser Karl Rove, were the successful ones in getting a journalist, Robert Novak, to publish Plame's identity, it wasn't for the lack of Libby trying to get Plame's identity into the press. Nor is it accurate to say that there was no underlying crime. It is illegal to willfully disclose the identity of a covert CIA officer - and the administration officials involved were well aware that her identity was classified. Leaking classified material also can be - and often is - treated as a crime. But this was a conspiracy that involved both the President and Vice President, presenting extraordinary obstacles for prosecution. The President and the Vice President, through delegation of authority from the President, have broad power to declassify information. Indeed, some constitutional experts would argue that the President can declassify any information he wishes, and it's known that Bush did so in the Plame matter at least to the degree that he cleared some parts of a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate for Libby and others to use in briefing reporters. It remains unclear whether Bush and/or Cheney specifically approved leaking Plame's identity - since their interviews with prosecutor Fitzgerald remain secret - but their involvement would have made prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 or the Espionage Act extremely difficult if not impossible. Bush and Cheney also appear to have played a role in the cover-up of the Plame leak after a criminal investigation began in September 2003. Though Bush knew a great deal about the get-Wilson campaign (having declassified information for it), he claimed to know nothing and disingenuously urged his subordinates to say what they knew. "I want to know the truth," Bush said on Sept. 30, 2003. "If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true." However, since the various conspirators knew that Bush already was in the know, they would have read his comments as a signal to lie, which is what they did. Rove issued a false statement through the White House press office denying any involvement. That prompted Libby to seek help from Cheney. As Libby's lawyer Theodore Wells disclosed in the trial's opening remarks, Libby's complaint was that "they're trying to set me up; they want me to be the sacrificial lamb." 'The Pres' In response to Libby's appeal, Cheney penned a message to the press secretary demanding equal treatment for Libby. "Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy the Pres that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence of others," Cheney wrote to press secretary Scott McClellan. In the note, Cheney initially ascribed Libby's sacrifice to Bush but apparently thought better of it, crossing out "the Pres" and putting the clause in a passive tense. Complying with Cheney's wishes on Oct. 4, 2003, McClellan added Libby to the list of officials who have "assured me that they were not involved in this." So, the evidence is that not only was there a high-level administration conspiracy to leak Plame's identity but there was an equally high-level conspiracy to cover up the truth. Libby got nailed because he failed to shift away from the cover stories when the investigation grew serious following Fitzgerald's appointment in December 2003. Rather than a wild-eyed prosecutor on a rampage, Fitzgerald actually appears to have been a very cautious prosecutor who chose not to pursue what would have been a deserving but politically disruptive case against Bush, Cheney and other government conspirators implicated in both leaking classified material and participating in a cover-up. But all this is missed by Cohen. In his June 19 column, he does reiterate his current position that the Iraq War was a mistake. He also acknowledges that lying under oath is a bad thing to do. But - blinded by the pervasive neocon talking points - he refuses to see the larger scandal. "I have come to hate the war and I cannot approve of lying under oath - not by Scooter, not by Bill Clinton, not by anybody," Cohen wrote. "But the underlying crime is absent, the sentence is excessive and the investigation should not have been conducted in the first place. This is a mess. Should Libby be pardoned? Maybe. Should his sentence be commuted? Definitely." There was a time when the Washington Post aggressively pursued cover-ups of government wrongdoing. Not that long ago, during the Clinton administration, a favorite pearl of Washington wisdom was: "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up." But that was then and this is now. Today, the Post editorial page and its prized columnists, like Cohen, eagerly join in cover-ups and happily bash anyone who won't go with the Washington flow. So, the question remains, is Cohen just a clueless incompetent when he berates Fitzgerald for the "train wreck" of the Libby conviction or is this columnist really a clever guy who is very skilled at knowing how to stay on the gravy train of modern Washington journalism?
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Hillary Clinton's Labor Problem June 16, 2007 | There must be moments when the leaders of America's labor movement mutter the dark lament of the late Rodney Dangerfield, because so often they "get no respect" from the same Democratic politicians who depend on union endorsements and funding. This week they could certainly feel that way, after voicing their "concern" over the actions of a huge union-busting public relations company headed by Sen. Hillary Clinton's top political strategist, Mark Penn -- and getting no satisfactory response. The prodigious Penn, a pollster and counselor to the Clintons since 1995, has risen to the commanding heights of the public relations and research business over the three decades since he entered politics. Having started in a tiny, two-man polling operation in a New York City mayoral campaign, he is now the CEO of Burson-Marsteller Inc., one of the planet's largest P.R. shops, with corporate clients ranging from Microsoft to Shell Oil and Pfizer. For progressive voters, those connections should raise questions about Penn's dominant role in the Clinton campaign, especially because he has reportedly boasted about the business benefits of his political power. Smart, skillful and tenacious, Penn is also the ultimate expression of a long-standing trend among political consultants -- that is, claiming to serve the public interest during election years while selling their connections and knowledge to special interests every year. For him and many of his colleagues, the affluence that accrues to influence shapes their attitudes (and their advice to candidates). They tend to reject populism and almost any position that might lead to conflict with their corporate benefactors. The problem with Penn came to a head over the past few weeks when reporter Ari Berman explored his career and the unsavory history of Burson-Marsteller in the pages of the Nation, including themes that had previously been raised by Mark Schmitt in the American Prospect. (Here I should disclose that I am the director of the Nation Institute Investigative Fund, which provided research support for Berman's article.) Among the most controversial aspects of Penn's firm's business, from the liberal perspective at least, come under the category of "labor relations," a traditional euphemism for suppressing workers and thwarting their right to organize. Before Penn scrubbed his firm's Web site, it advertised this specialty and noted the firm's capacity to confront "Organized Labor's coordinated campaigns whether they are in conjunction with organizing or contract negotiating." Not the most graceful wording, but the idea is clear enough. And in practice, as Berman reported, Burson executives have used these skills against two major unions seeking to organize workers at Cintas, the nationwide uniform-supply company, which may be the single most ambitious union drive in North America today. So here was a conflict of interest that seemed both direct and salient. Sen. Clinton is a declared supporter of labor rights who often tells workers that she is on their side. Besides, she badly wants the support of the Teamsters and UNITE HERE, the unions seeking to organize the Cintas employees, not to mention all the other labor organizations that might help her win the nomination and the presidency. But on the issue of workers rights, her top advisor has been on the other side. Or has he? Penn said that he had nothing to do with the Cintas account, even though he is Burson's CEO. Moreover, he took offense at the implication that he might be anti-union. He recalled that his father had helped to organize the poultry workers union in Queens, N.Y., where he grew up. Unsurprisingly, his indignation and sentimentality did little to persuade union officials of his sincerity. They know very well that Penn is among the leading figures in the Democratic Leadership Council, whose budget is underwritten by major corporations and whose policies favor business over labor. Even the lunchboxes at DLC conferences display corporate logos. On June 6, in response to Berman's story, Teamster president James Hoffa and UNITE HERE president Bruce Raynor sent a letter to Clinton about Penn, expressing their "distress" over his firm's role in "the effort to undermine workers right to organize at Cintas, a campaign our unions are involved in, [which] is particularly disheartening." Their letter went on to say that they "do not want to see you or the Democratic Party embarrassed. We look forward to hearing back from you on this matter." Other labor leaders, such as AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and Service Employees International Union president Andrew Stern, have privately told the Clinton campaign of their misgivings about Penn. Whatever Hoffa, Raynor and their colleagues may have wanted to hear, it is hard to imagine they were satisfied with the Clinton campaign's response via Penn. Essentially, he replied that he hadn't done anything against labor. He didn't step down from his executive position at Burson (as even Karl Rove did in 1999 when he sold his consulting firm to work for George W. Bush's presidential campaign), not even temporarily. He certainly didn't order Burson to cease all union-busting activities. He merely "recused" himself from work on the Cintas account, which he insisted he had never worked on anyway, citing a convenient "conscience clause" available to all Burson executives who might find a particular account morally repugnant. (It isn't clear whether activating the conscience clause means giving up a share of revenues derived from the repulsive activities, or merely bestowing a patina of moral hygiene on the dirty money.) In fairness to Penn, his friends say that he was "hurt" by the stories linking him to his company's anti-union consulting; and he says that he feels "strong personal sympathy" toward labor. How he squares that with serving as CEO of a union-busting P.R. firm only he can explain. Meanwhile, the labor leaders have done little to register their outrage at this brushoff. The UNITE HERE and Teamsters Web sites feature heart-rending stories about the abusive and dangerous working conditions at Cintas, where a Tulsa, Okla., laundry worker was killed horribly last March when a conveyor belt dragged him into a superheated dryer. But neither site includes a word about the Penn controversy or the union presidents' letter to Clinton. Evidently the labor leaders don't think their members need to know about this issue (unless they happen to read the New York Times, which covered the matter in its June 5 edition).
Obviously Penn and Clinton felt no fear in blowing them off, assuming that they would retreat without demanding satisfaction. Unless and until labor worries more about demanding loyalty from its supposed friends -- and less about embarrassing sometime political allies -- both its leaders and its members, and those it seeks to represent, will keep getting the Dangerfield treatment.
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 The Liberal Voice By ERIC ALTERMAN On June 4 a federal appeals court concluded that the FCC's eagerness to charge exorbitant fines for accidental obscenities broadcast over the air was "arbitrary and capricious" and "devoid of any evidence that suggests a fleeting expletive is harmful, let alone establishes that this harm is serious enough to warrant government regulation." It was a rare and smashing victory for freedom of expression. Right-wing Republican FCC chair Kevin Martin said he was considering appealing all the way to the Supreme Court. In the good old days, before one of Janet Jackson's breasts made its way onto network TV during the 2004 Super Bowl, the FCC was leveling obscenity fines of less than half a million in 2003 and only $48,000 in 2000. But the fines for Jackson's on-camera areola alone came to $550,000--giving Jackson's exposed chest a net worth of more than a million dollars (plus the still-undisclosed value of her nipples, which had remained concealed). That year FCC fines for dirty words and exposed butt cheeks skyrocketed to nearly $8 million. Then-FCC chair Michael "Son of Colin" Powell explained that this was prompted by a "dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes," citing an exponential increase in citizen complaints. This spring's case related in part to Bono's extemporaneous exclamation "fucking brilliant!" on NBC during the 2003 Golden Globes. In its decision the court referred to the fact that President Bush and Vice President Cheney had, in recent times, been heard using "variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced 'sexual or excretory organs or activities.'" (Next thing you know, it'll be legal to shoot your friends in the face.) Yes, fellow Americans, thanks in part to the potty-mouths of Bush and Cheney, we've won the right to curse, accidentally, on the public airwaves. And a good thing, too, because aside from all the sensible reasons this ought to be so, it turns out that virtually all of the opposition to so-called indecency on the public airwaves is as imaginary as the PBS animated bunny rabbit Buster, who scandalously visited a lesbian couple, upsetting Education Secretary Margaret Spellings two years ago. An enterprising reporter for MediaWeek noted that according to FCC records, 99.8 percent of the complaints in 2003 were filed by L. Brent Bozell's Parents Television Council. Harnessing a technology it calls an entertainment tracking system, which logs "every incident of sexual content, violence, profanity, disrespect for authority and other negative content," including "even those minor swears," the PTC e-mails its members "offensive" video clips together with ready-made outraged letters to the FCC. Presto, an anti-"indecency" campaign. But before liberals break out the Cristal, it might be a good time to re-examine our reflexive mocking of the prudery of those who object to the content they find streaming into their homes. You don't need to be a Christocrat to dislike the kinds of cultural messages communicated to children, teens and the rest of us through American entertainment culture. For instance, when Justin Timberlake ripped off Jackson's top, liberals mocked conservative hysteria over a single partially exposed breast. I did too. Far more objectionable was that Timberlake ripped off Jackson's clothing in what social critic Robert Wright described as "an act of stylized male sexual aggression, an apparent preamble to rape." This ought to offend all of us, particularly liberals, particularly parents. Much of talk-radio is also a free-fire zone for verbal violence against women. Shock jocks Opie and Anthony recently featured a guest joking about raping and punching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the face and other such acts on Laura Bush. Liberals are no strangers to condemnation of things that all sensible people reject; would it be so difficult to pay more attention to the outrages against what used to be called "common decency" by those who encourage attacks on our wives, daughters, sisters and mothers? Similarly, the disrespect for women, for our collective humanity, in so much "gangsta rap" shouldn't be censored but should be condemned by those of us who think of our wives, daughters, sisters and mothers as something other than "ho's" and "bitches." Hollywood producers and rap artists who celebrate violence against women should be shunned and condemned by liberals every bit as much as right-wing talk-radio is reviled for its racism, sexism and homophobia. And what about the role of greedy corporations in glorifying antisocial behavior in teens and other impressionable people? Why, for instance, do we not protest when retailers plaster the subways with posters for the teen clothing line State Property Wear, which distinguishes itself with hidden pockets and gun holsters, as if to teach teens to admire jailed drug-dealing thugs and murderers? Why do we sit quietly by as the fashion industry fosters anorexia in young girls, sexualizes preteens and promotes the look of spaced-out junkies? Where is the liberal moral voice, I ask you, when it might be most useful? *****
I mourn the passing of my friend, and valued contributor to this magazine, Richard Rorty, who died June 8 at 75 of cancer. Like his role model John Dewey, whose pragmatist precepts he did so much to revive here and in Europe, Rorty was not only America's most influential philosopher but also a public intellectual, dedicated to the highest ideals of America's founding and its unfulfilled potential. His 1998 book Achieving Our Country forced many on the left--particularly in the academy--to reconsider what it meant to participate meaningfully as intellectuals in the life of the country. His faith in democracy, in the possibility of national self-improvement and in the vital role to be played in that drama by the reformist left will remain an inspiration to those of us who labor in the vineyards he so conscientiously tended.
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 The Rise Of Tajikmanbashi Totalitarian Lunacy Returns to Central Asia By Ted Rall DUSHANBE, Tajikistan -- On Boxing Day 2006 the world lost its last old-school dictator. The eccentric rule of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenbashi (Head of All Turkmen) the Great and President-for-Life, was Turkmenistan's national obsession, blending benevolence (he banned smoking and the death penalty), state terrorism (political rivals bearing fresh torture scars confessed to all manner of perversion before vanishing) and megalomania (his scattered memoir-cum-quasi-religious manifesto, the Ruhnama, was the only book on the curriculum of Turkmen primary schools and universities). Niyazov's excesses epitomized the tragedy of the Central Asian republics. All but one are ruled by corrupt, iron-fisted Soviet-era party bosses who funneled their nations' natural resources into numbered offshore accounts while their people suffered desperate poverty and political repression. Turkmenbashi's successor has taken tentative steps to lead Turkmenistan toward rationality, restoring Internet access and reopening medical clinics. A few hundred miles east, however, Emomalii Rahmon is feverishly constructing a cult of personality to rival the dead Turkmen tyrant's. Previously the colorless leader of Central Asia's poorest and most remote republic, Rahmonov -- he recently dropped the Slavic "ov" suffix as part of a nationalist campaign to erase lingering Russian influence -- is subjecting mountainous Tajikistan to bizarre edicts and egomaniacal rants that recall the deceased Turkmenbashi. Call Him Tajikmanbashi Tajikistan is an odd place even by the standards of exotic Central Asia. Unlike the other Stans, its dominant ethnic group is Persian, not Turkic. You'd think there'd be nothing to fight over -- Tajikistan doesn't have oil or gas -- yet it disintegrated into civil conflict after the Soviets left. In 1997, after at least 100,000 Tajiks had died, the factions formed a fragile unity government under Rahmon and invited the Russians back. Today the Russian unit assigned to patrol Tajikistan's border with northern Afghanistan still calls itself Soviet. Life has been loopy since 1991. Old Soviet-era statues vanish and reappear without explanation. When castings of Efim Shatalov and Nikolay Tomin, Red Army generals who brought Tajikistan into the Soviet fold during the 1920s, disappeared from the streets of Kulob recently, it prompted a betting pool over their immediate and long-term fates. President Rahmon is ramping up the weirdness. First the leader of this anarchic high-altitude refuge of Afghan opium smugglers and Taliban-trained Islamist guerrillas went after schoolchildren, simultaneously banning miniskirts and headscarves as symbols of secular and Islamic excess. Students are no longer allowed to drive to school or carry cell phones. Then he announced a campaign against conspicuous consumption by Tajiks "for the sake of progress, prosperity and the prestige of the nation" and to reduce poverty. The anti-extravagance campaign has since gone into overdrive. Gold fillings, ubiquitous relics of Soviet-era dental care, have been banned as ostentatious. The number of guests at private events, Rahmon announced recently, would be subject to legal limits: 200 at weddings, 100 at funerals and 60 at circumcision ceremonies. "Often such events, which are mainly held by state officials, businessmen and religious figures, resemble competitions," he said. Noting that wedding guest lists can hit the 1,000 mark, Rahmon claimed that 500,000 cows and sheep had been slaughtered in the small country during 2006, at a total cost of $1.2 billion, or 50 percent of the Tajik GDP. (This is almost certainly false.) Another provision of Rahmon's anti-consumption drive makes it illegal to serve food at weddings or burial ceremonies. There's also a strict new four-car limit at weddings. Micromanaging the minutiae of citizens' daily lives, a hallmark of totalitarian regimes, was characteristic of the Turkmen government under Niyazov. As images of his face proliferated on billboards, the national currency and even a brand of vodka, Turkmenbashi banned music and beards. In the six months since Niyazov's death, Rahmon appears to be taking Tajikistan down the same road, into increased isolation. Rahmon has written a series of books that have become the core curricula of Tajik schools. "Tajikistan in the Mirror of History" (2006), the latest volume, is described as a "spiritual present to the nation of Tajikistan from the head of the state."
"The subject matter and style of Rahmon's tomes have prompted comparisons to the Ruhnama, the spiritual guide of the deceased despot of Turkmenistan," reports EurasiaNet.
As with Niyazov, the Western news media will almost certainly find Rahmon's excesses amusing (should it ever take notice). However, Rahmon's emerging personality cult is serious business. Not only is his country enjoying increased geopolitical importance (due to its control of water sources that feed oil-rich states like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and its use as a staging ground by Iran and China), it's home to 7 million people who deserve better.
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 Dr. Holsinger throws the gay switch
Dear Doktor Holsinger, Congratulations you have just been awarded the 'Vidkun Quisling Award!' Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, Ralph Nader, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Sammy (the coat-hanger) Alito. Without your lock-step calling for the repeal of the Constitution, your support of our two coup d'etats, your cure for the homosexual disease, Iraq and these many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Medical Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account! Along with this award there will be an Iron Cross 1st class with emerald clusters presented by our glorious Fuhrer Herr Bush at a gala celebration at "der Wolf's Lair;" formally "Rancho de Bimbo," on 07-01-2007. We salute you Herr Doktor Holsinger, Sieg Heil!
Signed, Heil Bush |
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Remarks in New Hampshire over the weekend at the "Democracy Fest," sponsored by Democracy for America.
It is normally expected that, when given an opportunity to speak, I will talk about campaign finance reform and, more specifically, about how the public financing of campaigns can cut the threads of the big-money puppet show.
But today I would like to talk about unauthorized immigration, which has nothing to do with the big-money corruption of our political system, except for everything.
Unauthorized immigration seems to be a big issue right now with our Republican candidates, as they are well-known to be the "law and order party." That, after all, is why they are insisting that Scooter Libby pay the full price for his perjuries and obstructions of justice. They are for law and order, with the normal exceptions of the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution, especially its Bill of Rights. But we know what they mean: When they say they are for law and order, they are talking mostly about keeping down the uppity poor folk. They are certainly not talking about the big corporations, hotel companies, agribusiness giants and retailers who employ millions of unauthorized immigrants but who make up for that sin many times over with their large campaign donations.
But I do not come here to talk about corrupting campaign donations and the need for public campaign financing. I come to talk of unauthorized immigration and a little about corn and something about tortillas. I call it unauthorized immigration, not illegal, because I don't want to use words that confuse my Republican friends.
By the way, in saying that Republicans are very interested in the immigration issue, I do not mean to imply that it is less important for any of us.
If you will look around the grocery store check-out lines and notice the widening measurements of our fellow citizens, we can certainly see for ourselves the problem of having too much cheap labor around to do all our yardwork and housework for us. By my calculations, the roughly three billion pounds of extra weight now being carried on the hips of working-age American citizens is roughly equivalent to the combined weight of the unauthorized immigrants now in our communities. The math is clear and persuasive. Cheap labor is bad for everybody.
But why are so many people risking their lives to come into our country now? When did this big rush begin?
It began when Mr. Clinton approved NAFTA - the North American Free Trade Agreement - and when he militarized our southern border at the same time. Prior to these combined actions, families crossed the border very commonly and casually, especially during harvest seasons. After harvest, they would go home to Mexico or Central America because that's where they lived with their families in quite happy communities.
When the border was militarized, it became too risky to go back and forth. So they stayed.
Why did Mr. Clinton militarize the border? He did so because NAFTA was about to pull the rug out from under Mexico's small family farms. We flooded Mexico with cheap corn - exports that we now subsidize to the tune of some $25 billion a year. Congress gives that money of ours to a handful of agribusiness giants. Of course, I am not here to tell you why Congress does that, and what might be done to stop it, such as with the public financing of campaigns. But they do it, and Mexican family farmers cannot compete.
In the years since NAFTA was signed, half of Mexico's small farms have failed. The only kind of farming that can now compete in Mexico is big agribusiness, which does not employ as many people. Tortillas in Mexico now contain two-thirds imported corn, and they are three times as expensive at retail level than before NAFTA. The people have less money, and the cost of food is rising. We have done that. Our precious senators and congressmen and their corporate cronies have enforced that raw and cruel exploitation in our names.
The result of undermining Mexican farms, as Clinton expected, was a rising flood of poor people moving from rural areas into Mexico's big cities, which have become so poor and overcrowded that all one can do is dream of going north across the border.
Now, if any Democratic candidates for president would like to show a little courage and intelligence, let them address the real cause of our flood of unauthorized immigrants. Will Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama or Mr. Edwards or any of the other candidates face down the agri-gangsters who are behind this problem? Probably they will not, so long as Iowa has a major primary.
Let me say that I am not ranting and raving in the least about these new Americans. When Mexico owned Texas and everything west of Texas, and when Mexico cut off migration across its borders into Texas, our people kept coming anyway - crossing illegally in search of opportunities for their families. When Mexico got upset by this, we trumped up false reasons for a war, and we illegally took those lands. If that wasn't enough law and order for you, we also conducted unfettered genocide against the region's native people. So let's not stand on any moral high ground regarding that southern border.
The people coming across the border today, with the usual exceptions, are family people with an incredible work ethic. Personally, I welcome them. I congratulate them for their courage and their dedication to their families. I want them to stay and become citizens, or, if some prefer, to return to their homeland at a time when there is international justice and a decent chance for prosperity at home.
I regret what the political corruption of our system has done to their farms and their communities back home. It is not the people's fault - it is the fault of corrupt leaders of both parties and both nations. We must speak this truth to these powerful people, even to those presidential candidates whom we otherwise admire.
So, candidates Clinton, Edwards, Obama and the rest: Do you understand the reasons why immigration numbers are growing? Are you smart enough to understand the situation? Are you brave enough to do something - to even say something - about it? Or is the truth too big for you?
All of us in this room have a duty to be good citizens and good Democrats. And that means we must ask the toughest questions, so that the interests of the people - the people of our nation and of the world - will be served. Isn't that what we're here for?
And do you see why I do not need to harp on campaign finance reform, to cut the puppet strings that allow these cruelties to continue? I didn't have to say a word about that, because you understand it. You understand what must be done in regard to the public financing of federal and state campaigns. And that only begins the reforms we require in this challenging new age.
Thank you. |
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What kinds of hoops does one have to jump through in order to get an embed in Iraq? If you would like to know, here are some interesting insights into the embed process. And right now, I'm under severe time constraints to try to get re-embedded in Iraq ASAP, which leaves me without the usual options to play bureaucratic games that I usually have. My window of time for this assignment is severely limited by my commitment to be in Africa by mid-July. So. In order to fit this embed in, I've got to leave for Iraq ASAP if I am to go at all.
If this is war and war is hell, then the war on Iraq must be a rather Kafkaesque hell!
If you should happen to have any influence with CPIC, please do what you can to help me get embedded as soon as possible -- tomorrow would be great but I'd settle for within the next five days. The contact e-mail address for the Combined Press Information Center (CPIC) in the Green Zone is mnfi.mediaembed@iraq.centcom.mil. Thanks.
FYI, here is a copy of my latest request to CPIC, which includes a timeline that will give you an idea of what kind of bureaucratic hoops I am talking about:
Please help me to embed ASAP. I must leave for Iraq immediately if I am to return by July 5 at the latest. Thank you for your help.
Here is a record of my attempts to embed, both within the Green Zone and outside of the Green Zone (Exhibit 1): P
July 6, 2006: I filed my original embed application with CPIC Baghdad.
July 8, 2006: I was informed by CPIC that OpEd News (with an internet circulation of 800,000) was not a viable news service, that I was considered to be a blogger and that "bloggers" were not allowed to embed. "Unfortunately, Jane, the policy about bloggers still stands. Unless you can get accreditation from a news service or other form of news media (newspaper, magazine, wire service, etc.), this embed is not going to happen," CPIC wrote.
July 9, 2006: The editor of OpEd News explained carefully to CPIC that OpEd News was indeed a genuine news service. The editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet also wrote a letter to CPIC stating that I would be representing the Planet, a genuine print newspaper with a circulation of 50,000 readers.
July 10, 2006: I got an e-mail from CPIC: "I'll be honest with you, Jane. Multi-National Corps-Iraq (the major ground component command that owns the vast majority of combatants in theater) is not interested in embedding you."
July 20, 2006: I then contacted Senator Barbara Boxer, and a member of her staff wrote CPIC the following e-mail on my behalf: "Ms. Stillwater contacted our office regarding a concern that she is not being allowed to be a journalist in Iraq because she wrote for a progressive news service. Please look into her concerns at your earliest convenience and keep me informed of any updates."
July 21, 2006: CPIC replied to Senator Boxer that, "After reviewing Ms. Stillwater's request for an embed, I denied Multi-National Force-Iraq credentialing and support based upon her work being opinion-based, rather than factual reporting, and that she is not backed by an organization that can be held responsible for her journalistic standards or, more importantly, her welfare in case of emergency. This does not stop Ms. Stillwater from entering Iraq commercially and providing for herself, but it does prevent her from being embedded with troops, using MNF-I facilities and covering MNF-I activities."
January 20, 2007: I again wrote to CPIC, once again requesting an embed:
Since my last request to you in July of 2006, I have had at least 25 articles published in various publications and, as you have stated, my articles are indeed opinion-based but they are also fact-based as well -- in the grand old journalistic tradition of the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc. I deeply regret to be placed in a position to have to say this to you but, while I admit that I do tend to give homilies and homey examples in order to help my readers to better understand complex political situations, I do not lie.
In addition, several media organizations have offered to sponsor me in your program and to take responsibility for my views -- as well as to act on my behalf in case of emergencies. Please reconsider your decision. I promise upon embedding in Iraq to tell "The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". Plus with my access to over one million readers, embedding me will greatly be of help to our troops in Iraq.
I am enclosing a list of media outlets that have published my written efforts so that you can have an idea regarding the scope of my work. I am also enclosing URLs for articles I have written on India and Afghanistan. Please reconsider my application. I can be ready to leave at your earliest convenience. Thank you for reconsidering my request and I look forward to meeting you in Baghdad soon.
List of publications I have written for:
American Conservative Union Foundation
January 23, 2007: I contacted Congresswoman Barbara Lee in order to enlist her support in my efforts to embed.
January 25, 2007: My weekly column in the Black Commentator appeared, entitled Why I am not in Iraq:
I should be in Iraq. I should be in Baghdad. I should be sending back eye-popping stories to The Black Commentator about how our money is being misused, mismanaged, misspent and morally misdirected to kill women and children whose only crimes are to be born in an oil-rich country and to not be born the same color as George W. Bush.
Bush had no business invading Iraq. Now he has killed 665,000 (and still counting) Iraqis and 3,020 (and still counting) U.S. soldiers in cold blood. If he can kill them without any conscience, what's to keep him from killing us next?
Yes, I've been sidetracked from observing the occupation and reporting back to you exactly what is going on over there. And who has sidetracked me? Who is keeping me from reporting to you from Iraq? Let me tell you. It is extremely difficult to get to Iraq as a reporter unless you are officially sanctioned and "embedded" by the U.S. military. Knowing this, I dutifully applied through the proper channels for embedding media personnel in Iraq and wrote to the U.S. Army CentCom in Baghdad. "I want to go over there so that I can tell our readers exactly what is going on in Iraq," I said.
"Sorry,"K they wrote back. "We don't embed bloggers." So. The Black Commentator doesn't count as real journalism? Nor does Counterpunch, OpEd News, CLG News, Issues & Alibis, Aljazeerah.info, the Online Journal or TruthOut? It's only when the New York Times lies through its teeth to America that it's real? Yeah, sure you're sorry. Me too.
Then I wrote to Senator Barbara Boxer to see if she could help me to embed. But it's been four or five months now and I haven't heard back. "Senator, I need your help," I wrote. "They are not letting me into Iraq. Apparently you do not get allowed over there unless you promise to write what they want you to write -- about how well the illegal occupation, killing, torture, bombing, napalming, hanging, embezzling, etc. is going and how Bush has to Stay the Course as long as there is one drop of oil left in Iraq...." And you know that I can't make that promise.
But I will promise this: I will do every single thing humanly possible to stop this insane and bloody "war" on the people of Iraq. And on Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Darfur, Somalia and anywhere else where there is power or land or oil that the Bush murderers covet.
Martin Luther King Jr. risked his life to stop the war on Vietnam. We must follow his example. Why? Because our future is at stake here. We cannot afford to be sidetracked again.
PS: "In the future...they can do it to us." What am I talking about! They already have. Perhaps I should just go embed in New Orleans...or South Central.
March 7, 2007: I broadened my search for an embed in order to give CPIC more flexibility in finding one for me: "Regarding my recent embed request, yes, I would also be interested in the Army Corps of Engineers."
March 12, 2007: My embed seems to be actually happening, according to CPIC: "I've just sent a follow up on your approval."
March 13, 2007: The Lone Star Iconoclast also sponsors me, thus removing all obstacles to my embed that CPIC has asked for so far:
Multi-National Force-Iraq, ATTN: Combined Press Information Center
The Iconoclast hereby provides accreditation for Jane Stillwater, who represents a bona fide media organization. The Iconoclast is a weekly newspaper published since the year 2000.
Journalist Jane Stillwater works for this organization as a freelance journalist/photojournalist. The Iconoclast accepts responsibility for the actions and journalistic standards of Jane Stillwater to include all stories and opinions produced for other media or public outlets and web log entries while embedded with the U.S. Military under Multi-National Forces Iraq during the period of March - April 2007 in Iraq, to cover human interest stories and to be embedded according to whichever units are available during this time.
The Iconoclast acknowledges and understands that the United States Government is not responsible nor is liable for the actions of Jane Stillwater resulting in death, injury or declared missing while embedded with the U.S. Military in a hostile combat environment. Jane Stillwater assumes full responsibility through The Iconoclast in providing her own medical and life insurance coverage while in a hostile combat environment. The Iconoclast hereby accepts responsibility in assisting or providing notification of next of kin and any necessary arrangements that will facilitate the general welfare of Jane Stillwater.
//Signed// W. Leon Smith
March 18, 2007: Getting a bit desperate for final embed approval, I once again wrote my congresswoman and my senator. "Here is an update on my efforts to try to embed in Iraq, hopefully leaving on March 29, 2007. When I talked with MNFI Baghdad this morning, they said that they were still reviewing my application. With only ten days to go before I am scheduled to leave for Iraq, this doesn't give me much wiggle room to book my flight, etc. so I was wondering if you could give me a little help."
March 19, 2007: I received an encouraging e-mail from CPIC which stated, "Jane, my apologies for the delay..."
March 23, 2007: I tried to broaden my embed options again by offering to embed in Kuwait at a troop training and staging airbase. I received a reply from Kuwait that it was too early to embed there before I went to Iraq but that it was very possible to get an embed in Kuwait on my way back:
Maam, I guess that I understood the date you were talking about. At this time March 29th is way too early to know if you can embed in Kuwait . We have to have your paperwork first and then create a decision memo. This can take a couple of days and then it has to be approved by the command here. Are you still planning on transiting to Iraq? I was wondering how long you were going to be in Iraq because maybe we can work something out when you come back. I am sorry about the misunderstanding and did not realize that you were talking so soon, I figured you would go to Baghdad and then come back through and cover Kuwait. I apologize for the misunderstanding but like I said this process to embed here in Kuwait takes a bit and 6 days from now is not nearly enough time to get the command to sign off on this.
March 23, 2007: Joe Garifoli, a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle, contacted me, stated that the Chronicle wanted to do a story on me. Joe then offered to help me get embedded, and his efforts seemed to produce results -- he was told that everything looked good and so, based on what they had told Joe, I booked a flight to Kuwait.
March 25, 2007: I learned from a reporter who was already in Iraq that all I had been told about bloggers not being allowed to embed just wasn't true. "Jane, you've been lied to. The Army has let a blogger live at Camp Liberty near Baghdad. His name is Michael Yon. He is only a blogger and he has been embedded for over one year. They give him an office and everything."
March 29, 2007: The San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page story on my efforts to embed. "As Stillwater waited for her plane at the airport Wednesday, the Army was still trying to find a unit in which to embed her. 'Oh, yeah, her application looks fine,' said...a media embedding coordinator for Iraq. 'We're just trying to find a unit anywhere that will take her. There's a lot of people out there now.'" However, that day I left for Iraq, still not certain of having an embed -- not just within CPIC and the Green Zone but with an actual unit -- even after almost a whole year of trying to obtain one.
March 30 -- April 17, 2007: Upon arriving in Kuwait, I was flown to Baghdad and housed in CPIC. Things were looking great! I was going to get stories and be embedded outside the Green Zone and everything! And then I went to John McCain's press conference and asked him a hard question about Bush's plans to invade Iran. And the next day I also asked a hard question at General Caldwell's press conference regarding troop pull-outs. And after that, although CPIC started talking constantly about searching for an embed outside the Green Zone for me, no embed ever appeared. Other reporters came and went but I just continued to wait and haunt the CPIC offices, asking them several times a day if they would please find me an embed.
NPR had also arranged to take me into the Red Zone as did CNN. But right after the McCain conference, even those invitations suddenly dried up.
Finally I started looking for my own embeds and scored one with the Iraq Army. But then it too suddenly melted away. I also contacted CPIC supervisor Lt. Col. Garver and General Petraeus' office, etc. and was assured that my not getting an embed was unusual but that they would find me one. But none ever materialized. And whenever a reporter went out on an embed outside the Green Zone, I'd talk with CPIC about letting me go along. Their answer was always negative, citing the short notice of my requests. Finally someone told me that it was not CPIC's fault that I wasn't getting any embeds and that CPIC was merely following orders. The U.S. embassy itself was blocking my embeds. And other reporters told me that they had been warned off of talking to me as well.
And when I finally returned to the Kuwait airbase, guess what? My embed there had also magically disappeared.
Despite all these limitations placed on me, all the articles that I did manage to write from Iraq and Kuwait were featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Lone Star Iconoclast, Issues & Alibis, the Berkeley Daily Planet and OpEd News as well as numerous other media outlets. Associated Press, the BBC and the Times of London ran articles about me.
April 17, 2007: I returned home to Berkeley and was interviewed on television by ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox News.
May 1, 2007: I e-mailed CPIC that, "Someone just offered to sponsor another trip to Iraq for me so I am asking you to try to get the embed process going so that I could embed in one of the JSSs in Baghdad." Then I called CPIC to verify but was informed by phone that it was too late to get an embed for May so I changed my embed request date to June 16.
May 5, 2007: I wrote CPIC, "Sorry that my May embed request came too late to be shopped around but attached please find my embed request for June 16, 2007 to July 7, 2007. I am requesting to embed in a Baghdad JSS and/or the Baghdad Red Zone. And I would also like to embed with [a unit] in Anbar province as well if there is time. I have talked with the [unit commander] and he has okayed the embed. Thanks again for all of your help."
CPIC then informed me that there were no embeds available for me after June 16 because I had requested my embed "too early".
May 6, 2007: I sent the following e-mail to CPIC: "Regarding my request for an embed in June, please let [your embed coordinator] know that not only has [one Anbar unit] offered to embed me but [another Anbar unit] has offered to embed me as well.... I am also still interested in a JSS embed in Baghdad. Thanks again."
May 14, 2007: I wrote the Anbar unit commander again, requesting he write to CPIC regarding my June embed.
May 16, 2007: I again e-mailed CPIC, once again asking for an embed.
May 22, 2007: I gave up on CPIC and tried embedding with the Navy, writing their public affairs officer in Bahrain that, "I haven't embedded with the Navy before -- have only been embedded with the Army through CPIC. I write for a variety of media outlets including OpEd News, the Lone Star Iconoclast, the Berkeley Daily Planet and the San Francisco Chronicle. I am enclosing a copy of my embed application FYI and will also cc this e-mail to CPIC. Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.
May 25, 2007: The Navy sounded really helpful. "Jane, please complete the attached embark form and return to me as a .doc attachment (meaning please don't embed it in an email). I can offer you a carrier embark for sometime after 16 Jun as per your note below. If you can spend up to 4 days here I can also get you aboard some of the smaller combatant ships which are conducting maritime operations in the Gulf. From Kuwait, you'll have to catch either mil air or com air into Bahrain -- embarks to our ships originate out of Bahrain."
May 29, 2007: Suddenly the Navy started citing regulations regarding various hurdles to embedding me -- ones that are certainly on the books but are apparently ignored with regards to many reporters -- especially conservative bloggers: "Jane, There are some issues with theatre clearance for Kuwait and Qatar, the transit hubs for mil air. ARCENT in Kuwait does not do theatre clearance for transiting media -- only media that's embedding with them. So, in order for you to transit to Bahrain via Kuwait, CPIC needs to do a theatre clearance for you."
The Navy PAO in Bahrain went on to state, "Media is only allowed to remain on Kuwait for 48 hours in transit, so unless you have a guaranteed flight to Bahrain or a theatre clearance from CENTCOM, ARCENT Kuwait will be unable to bring you [here] for billeting if you're delayed. Please also ensure theatre clearance covers your entire visit to the region." These rules, as far as I can tell by talking with other reporters, are not often enforced.
May 30, 2007: I wrote to the Navy that I did have orders to fly on military aircraft. Immediately CPIC sent me the following e-mail, apparently panicked that I had orders that would let me back into Iraq: "Hello Jane, I have been in contact with [the Navy PAO] about your interest in embedding with a carrier group off the coast of Kuwait. I just want to clarify a couple of things before you move forward with your request with the Navy --The CPIC Badge is only good for media wanting to report on Coalition forces in Iraq and not off the waters of Kuwait. [the Navy PAO] also said that you had military orders dated 31 August 2007 for travel using Mil Air. Could you please tell me who issued you these orders? Our office issued you travel orders in April but they are only good for travel between Iraq and Kuwait. We also don't provide travel orders with such long expiration dates since they are primarily used for traveling around in Iraq, and travel between Iraq and Kuwait."
May 30, 2007: Still searching for an embed, I wrote to [the second Anbar unit commander] again and cc-ed my e-mail to CPIC: "I am looking for an embed in Iraq some time between June 14, 2007 and July 4, 2007. Please let me know if you have any available slots for during that time. Thank you very much." I have now started cc-ing everything to CPIC just to see how fast they can manage to kill my embed requests.
June 1, 2007: CPIC then e-mails me that there are no embeds in all of Baghdad during my requested time-frame. In all of Baghdad there are no embeds during the last part of June? CNN, ABC and Fox can't get embeds either? They are not allowing press into Baghdad any more? Or is it only me? Age discrimination? Sex discrimination? It can't because of my reporting, described by one reporter this way: "Jane's unpretentious, no-bull style of writing really stands out. Other (mostly right-wing) bloggers have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan, but few have written anything worth reading."
With regard to my travel orders, I informed CPIC that they are contained in a Memorandum for Record dated 30 MAR 07 and state that "...this travel is authorized within or outside the United States during the period of the conflict. This memorandum expires on 31 August 2007" in accordance with DoD 4515.13R, Chapter 9, JFTR VOL.I, Appendix E, Part I, Paragraph E.8 and AM.C124101V14 dated 1 April 2003, paragraph 21.9."
I also made another request for an embed. "Please see what you can do to get me an embed with a unit under CPIC's jurisdiction as well during the time frame that I will be in that theatre - approximately June 14 to July 4.... Thank you in advance for any help you can give me in settling this matter in the best interest of all parties concerned."
June 7, 2007: I received an affirmative reply from Anbar province: "We'll see what happens. I put a package together and set it up to my immediate boss, the Regimental Combat Team commander. He's good to go with you coming so I sent his endorsement to higher headquarters to let them know that you are good with us. The endorsement needs to go up several more levels before I get a definitive thumbs-up. I'll keep you posted."
June 15, 2007: I got an e-mail from Anbar advising me that I should "tell CPIC that [a Regimental Combat Team] in western al anbar will accept your embed," but that they weren't hopeful that it would happen. As of this date, I have no embeds lined up, no possibility of being embedded and only a long list of e-mails indicating how, when and where my embed requests have all been stone-walled despite my having jumped through every kind of hoop that the Department of Defense has asked me to jump through and despite my impressive journalistic credentials.
--- Joe Heller ---  |
There's colors on the street
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
I see a woman in the night
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
We got a thousand points of light
Keep on rockin' in the free world, 
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Parting Shots...
 THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Today I want to take a minute to gab atcha about the new bipartisan immigration bill which I'm betting the farm will be the only part of my legacy that isn't a big sloppy shit sandwich. Now for some mysterious reason, lots of folks don't like my policy - and a big chunk of my base is even trying to get it killed in Congress. Luckily, it's not the all-important Corporate Gazillionaire Plutocracy part of my base. No, it's just the piss-ignorant, dirt-poor, trailer trash KKK Bible zombie part of my base. And me and Karl Rove know how to play them like a cheap jew's harp. [Thumbs Up.] That's why today, I just wanted to issue a friendly reminder to all those millions of red state Rush Limbaugh fans who have worshipped me without question for the past seven years: Folks, we've been together through a lot. And you've stood by me through it all. Through the illegitimate election of 2000. Through the double-dip recession. Through the terror attacks of 9/11TM. Through Enron. Through the botched war in Afghanistan and failed hunt for Osama bin Laden. Through the clusterfuck kickoff to the Iraq war in 2003. Through the Patriot Act and illegal wiretapping of innocent Americans. Through "Mission Accomplished." Through Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and a policy of torture. Through Katrina. Through failed Social Security reform. Through Armstrong Williams & Jeff Gannon. Through Terri Schaivo. Through Tom Delay. Through Mark Foley. Through Scooter Libby. Through $3.00 gas. Through Walter Reed. Through "the Surge". Through Alberto Gonzales. And now even through 3500 US troops killed in Vietraq. And after all that, the thing it takes to get you folks pissed at me is letting a few million Mexi-Ricans pour over our borders and steal your jobs so you can't afford to put Ramen on the table? Well, I think I understand your problem. On one hand, you correctly accept that I'm practically Jesus. But on the other hand, you can't help but feel a surge of simple-minded, paranoid racist hatred every time you hear one of those dirty Spics yammering away in that nonsense gibberish of theirs - when even Star Trek nerds know that English is the only language in the universe. So yeah, I know, it's awful confusing for y'all. That's why today, I just wanted to shoot out a quickie reminder to you folks that should clear everything up: I am your divinely appointed ruler. God picked me. Never question my (His) opinions. Immediately resume being the obedient brainwashed hicks I know and love. Or you will rot in Hell. [Thumbs Up.] I have spoken.
Thank you. |
Issues & Alibis Vol 7 # 25 (c) 06/22/2007
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