Milton's Areopagitica and the Modern First Amendment

by Vincent Blasi

Vincent Blasi, Corliss Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties at Columbia Law School, was a Fellow of the National Humanities Center in 1993-94 and 1995-96. This essay, which derives from a seminar presentation at the Center in the spring of 1996, is an edited and expanded version of the third annual Ralph Gregory Elliot First Amendment Lecture that Professor Blasi delivered at Yale Law School in March 1995.



The traditional liberal argument for free speech is now under fire from several directions. Critics from the left, the center, and the right find simplistic the claim that unregulated expression promotes the search for truth, the project of self-government, the autonomy of individuals, or the control of concentrated power. Even if free speech does serve these values to a considerable degree, critics say, there are costs associated with liberty that are not sufficiently recognized or valorized in the standard liberal accounts. Liberalism is seen as too doctrinaire, too optimistic about human capacities and intentions, too complacent, too inattentive to questions of responsibility and virtue. It is condemned, moreover, as elitist in its regard for intellectual inquiry and disregard for faith, affection, tradition, security, and sense of place. The liberal view of the First Amendment is said to ignore the badly skewed distribution of communicative power, the impact of technology, and the harm speech can do to a person's or group's civic standing and self-esteem.

Some or all of these criticisms may be true, but we cannot evaluate them if the liberal tradition regarding free speech is known only in its reductionist version, stripped of its moorings in actual historical struggles, flattened out by accumulated summation and extraction.

Few liberal arguments for free expression have suffered more from this reductionism than John Milton's 1644 tract, Areopagitica. In some respects the foundational essay of the free speech tradition, Areopagitica is a subtle, richly textured polemic that displays not only the wit, eloquence, and dense, evocative imagery one expects from its author but also considerable political and theological sophistication, as well as cunning and passion born of Milton's active engagement in the revolutionary struggles of his day. Yet modern lawyers encounter the essay primarily in two of its passages:








Together, these excerpts can be read to encapsulate much of what seems wrong with the liberal case for free speech: both an undue faith in the value and power of reason and a smug, unacknowledged intolerance at the root. But Milton's tract is more complicated than this, and so is the tradition it helped to spawn.

A fuller acquaintance with the Areopagitica, particularly with its context and some of its neglected themes, can bring to the fore certain arguments for freedom of expression that have not been given their due in recent years, and push to the rear other arguments that have received excessive attention from defenders and critics alike. Of course, no matter how perceptive and how astute, no seventeenth century pamphlet will answer all the objections that critics writing in the 1990s can muster. Such a work nevertheless can interrogate a later age. It can ask modern critics of the free speech tradition to confront, as by and large they have yet to do, some of the enduring concerns about censorship that Milton expressed.


When King Charles I was forced by financial exigencies to convene the Long Parliament in November of 1640, he set in motion a political dynamic that led to civil war less than two years later and his own beheading within the decade. One of the first actions of the new Parliament was to abolish the Court of Star Chamber, the infamous offshoot of the King's Privy Council which had served as the principal forum for calling to account political opponents, religious dissenters, and those who defied crown-granted monopolies of the printing trade. The abolition of Star Chamber meant, in effect, suspension of the licensing system that had been in operation for over a century, a regulatory hiatus that was more a byproduct of the attack on royal prerogative than a deliberate policy in favor of a free press.

The immediate result was a flourishing of political and religious ideas the likes of which England had never before experienced. Tudor and early Stuart licensing had been variable though sometimes draconian, often corrupt, and usually porous. The elimination in 1641 of the institutions of press control caused a dramatic increase in both the volume of advocacy and the range of views expressed. By one count, the number of pamphlets published during the year 1640 was 22; in 1642 it was 1,966.

In this atmosphere of excited disputation among antiroyalist factions, King Charles raised his standard at Nottingham in August of 1642. Civil war was at hand. The royalist prospect was by no means bleak. Throughout the year 1642, as various schemes for accommodation failed, about two-fifths of the House of Commons and most of the Lords chose to side with the King. The early skirmishes of the war were indecisive. In mid-1643 the parliamentary armies suffered serious setbacks. Those who believed the parliamentary cause to be the work of divine providence began to have doubts.

Concerned both about disunity in its own ranks and the effectiveness of Crown propaganda, Parliament in June of 1643 decided to reinstate government control over printing. A small number of master printers was authorized to operate presses. Those who held printing patents were enlisted, through their trade organization the Stationers' Company, to search out and bring to justice all who printed without a license. The economic self-interest of monopoly privilege was thus united with the demand for religious and political conformity.

Specialized licensers were appointed to examine writings in specified categories. Four censors were named, for example, to scrutinize law books, three for books of philosophy and history, one for "mathematics, almanacks, and prognostications." Parliament served as the enforcement agency, usually through its committees. Not only miscreant authors and printers but also licensers who had been too permissive were subject to imprisonment.

During the period of low military morale when the Licensing Order was enacted, the leaders of Parliament decided they could no longer postpone coming to grips with the volatile religious issues they had to that point shrewdly kept off the agenda for fear of dividing the antiroyalist coalition. Now, however, they needed a Scottish alliance. In return for lending their military resources to the parliamentary cause, the Scots wanted a religious settlement in England along strict Presbyterian lines, a prospect that drew mixed reviews among the rank and file in Parliament. Though many members considered themselves Presbyterians, most were unsympathetic to the severe Calvinist theology and the theocratic subordination of secular institutions that were features of Scottish Presbyterianism.

In the hope of generating a mutually acceptable religious settlement, Parliament created the Westminster Assembly, a convocation of 120 English clerics, thirty laymen from the Lords and Commons, and eight Scottish representatives. Debate in the Assembly proceeded continuously for months at a high level of piety and prolixity. Intense and bitter disagreements persisted, however, on such issues as congregational autonomy and toleration. The fierce disputes within the Assembly spilled over into the House of Commons, the pulpits, the army camps, and the streets, and generated some notable essays on the subject of religious toleration. Several of these were published in violation of the Licensing Order of 1643.

For more than two years, John Milton did not participate in these fundamental debates. True, in 1641, at the age of thirty-two, he did put on hold his carefully prepared career as a poet and joined in the pamphlet warfare that swirled around him, sacrificing what he termed his "calm and pleasing solitariness" to embark in "a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes." He became a controversialist, however, only to attack the pretensions, ignorance, venality, and laziness of the Anglican bishops. The five pamphlets he devoted to that worthy cause certainly display a poison pen and a capacity for animus, but show no deep interest in the theological questions that were tearing apart the Westminster Assembly and the wider Puritan nation. Once the Church of England was disestablished and its bishops expelled from the House of Lords, Milton turned his attention instead to an issue of small general but immense personal concern: the legitimate grounds of divorce.

In Oxford in the summer of 1642 he had met and quickly married the vivacious, attractive teen-age daughter of one of his father's debtors. Mary Powell, seventeen years Milton's junior, was accustomed to a large household and an active social life. She seems to have had little in common with her studious, devout, and brilliant husband. Her family was royalist. After a month or so of living with Milton in London, she deserted him and rejoined her parents. War broke out shortly thereafter, and Mary remained in the royalist stronghold of Oxford for the next three years.

This was a shattering experience for a man of Milton's pride and idealism, particularly because an important strain of Puritan theology viewed marital love as a manifestation of the love of God. Although his wife eventually returned and bore four children by him (dying in childbirth with the last), Milton's travail prompted him to examine whether a marriage could properly be terminated for incompatibility alone, without the adultery required by law and almost everyone's understanding of the Scriptures. James Holly Hanford nicely summarizes the thesis of Milton's 1643 pamphlet The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce:

His main plea is that incompatibility of temper is a more vital impediment to the higher objects of marriage than any other, and that the will of the parties should therefore be admitted as decisive for the continuance or dissolution of the bond. . . . The principle is in perfect accord with Milton's whole philosophy. It was because he thought nobly of marriage as a spiritual rather than a merely physical union that he resented the common idea that it was dissoluble only on physical grounds. The idea of an external compulsion, binding two human beings together when mutual love and sympathy had departed, was repellent to his reason and excited him to eloquent and passionate denunciation.

In the course of his divorce analysis, developed over the next two years in a much expanded second edition as well as three subsequent tracts, Milton produced arguments concerning the nature of truth, the grip of custom, and the principle of consent that he would draw upon in his later polemics, including Areopagitica.

The immediate consequence of his effort, however, was to mark him in the eyes of English and Scottish Presbyterians as a dangerous radical with licentious sympathies. One minister went so far as to make these accusations the subject of a sermon preached before the House of Commons. The boldness and singularity of Milton's views on divorce cannot be denied, but the sexual innuendo was manifestly unfair and deeply hurtful to him. Whatever else one might wish to accuse Milton of, a lack of personal discipline or an affinity for others who succumb to their impulses is surely wide of the mark. His views on divorce derived from his idealism and sense of Christian duty, not any form of libertinism. The calumny that his divorce pamphlets engendered almost certainly contributed to Milton's conclusion, at the heart of Areopagitica, that the newly ascendant Presbyterians in the Westminster Assembly and Parliament were as bigoted and potentially oppressive as the hated Anglican hierarchy whose overthrow had been the first priority of the Puritan revolution. As he later put it in a sonnet: "New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large."

Milton apparently tried to get The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce licensed for publication. When approval was denied, he published his tract in defiance of the law. Only one of his subsequent divorce pamphlets appeared with a licenser's imprimatur. It is possible that his experience with the censor prompted his polemic against licensing. It is also possible that he wrote Areopagitica at the behest of the journeymen printers of the City of London. This politically active group, with whom Milton was in contact, saw its livelihood threatened by the prospect of strict enforcement of the Licensing Order for the benefit of the limited number of master printers favored by Parliament with monopoly privileges. The argument of Areopagitica seems to reflect both of these influences, as well as Milton's growing interest in church-state relations and toleration.


The Areopagitica is addressed to Parliament and adopts the form of an oration, written rather than spoken, following the rules of classical rhetoric. In his choice of title Milton alludes to an analogous written oration of Isocrates presented in 355 B.C. to the Athenian Ecclesia, advocating a return of certain powers to the aristocratic Council of the Areopagus. Abiding by the precepts of rhetorical form, Milton announces the four divisions of his argument urging Parliament to reconsider its decision to censor. He will first trace the idea of licensing to its inventors, "those whom ye will be loath to own." Second, he will discuss "what is to be thought in general of reading, whatever sort the books be." His third point will be that the Licensing Order cannot possibly achieve its intended objective, such are the practical barriers to effective implementation. Fourth, he will assess the costs of this scheme to learning and to national religious and political renewal.

Milton's primary goal in tracing the lineage of licensing is to identify the practice with Roman Catholicism. He contends that except for one period during the later Roman Empire, the regulation of speech in ancient and medieval times was infrequent, irregular, and never comprehensive. Only in 1418, with the Vatican's campaign to suppress the writings of Wycliffe and Huss, precursors of the Reformation, did systematic censorship begin, culminating some years later in the infamous persecutions of the Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition. Playing further on the anti-Catholic sentiments of his audience, Milton observes that even as carried over to England and implemented by Anglican bishops, licensing was "so apishly Romanizing, that the word of command ['the imprimatur'] still was set down in Latin."

In addition to establishing the Catholic connection, the historical narrative serves a variety of purposes. Licensing is portrayed as a relatively recent expedient, eschewed throughout history by enlightened states, and always characterized by selective enforcement for ulterior ends. Papal censors, for example, did not "stay in matters heretical" but asserted authority over "any subject that was not to their palate."

Milton's second point concerns the value of reading. Early in the essay he calls books "the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them." Later he describes how Moses, Daniel, Paul, and the great theologians of early Christianity profited from reading heathen authors. In response to the objection that bad ideas will extend their influence if allowed to circulate freely, he argues that heretical notions can always find ways to spread without reliance on the written medium. What checks the spread of sin is the strength and will of the populace, fortified by knowledge, including knowledge of evil gained by reading. Throughout the tract Milton speaks of how the freedom to encounter a wide range of ideas can strengthen the character and improve the judgment of the reader.

In developing his third point, that the Licensing Order cannot possibly achieve its desired end, Milton adopts the posture of a modern pragmatist. The licensing of books must be seen for what it is, a partial and thus necessarily ineffectual effort to prevent wrongdoing. For control to be effective, all the sources of sin must be addressed: songs, dances, lutes, whispers at balconies, food and drink, wanton clothing, temptations to idleness. Parliament's gesture in licensing books resembles "the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his park gate."

The last and longest of the four parts discusses the "manifest hurt" that licensing causes. Here Milton makes several claims, many of which depend on the proposition that vigorous disputation is good for both the individual soul and the elect nation. He is particularly concerned that religious and intellectual energy not be stifled, for he viewed passivity and its twin, conformity, as vices of the first order. Licensing, he feared, would encourage both. "Hereafter," he laments, "the only pleasant life" will be "in higher matters to be ignorant and slothful."

His desire to maintain disputational vigor leads Milton to what is perhaps his boldest claim. Rather than treating the recent effusion of radical religious ideas as a threat to the Reformation, he asserts that the sectaries have much to contribute to the collective search for salvation. He describes London as "the mansion house of liberty" filled with "pens and heads . . . revolving new notions and ideas . . . reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement." Where the Presbyterians discern "fantastic terrors of sect and schism," Milton sees "the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city." Despite the intensity of his own religious convictions, he seems actually to celebrate disagreement: "Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making." He views the sects as deserving of more than toleration and respect. He accords them a vital role in the nation's religious renewal: "There must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built."

Among those salutary "many schisms and many dissections" Milton does not, of course, include Catholicism. He does not consider that belief system to be among the "strong and healthful commotions," the "neighboring differences" that "need not interrupt the unity of spirit." The limited range of his tolerance, disconcertingly narrow to the modern reader, Milton justifies by the necessity of civil order. He notes that Catholic doctrine does not accept "civil supremacies" and does not tolerate other religions. Twenty-nine years later, in his last pamphlet, he was still railing about how the Pope "absolves the people from their obedience to [civil rulers]" and sends his "spies and agents, bulls and emissaries .. . to destroy both king and parliament."

Milton's apologists remind us of a nightmare that gripped large numbers of Englishmen for much of the seventeenth century. The unspeakable carnage of the Thirty Years War on the Continent (in its twenty-seventh year in 1644) they feared could be merely a prologue to the militant Counter-Reformation's designs on the sceptered isle. Prominent among the object lessons they studied was the Venetian Interdict of 1606, by which the Vatican formally asserted civil authority over the political community many English republicans took as their model. The leader of the Venetian resistance on that occasion, Fra Paolo Sarpi, Milton extols as "the great unmasker" of papal persecution. (Sarpi's disparaging history of the Council of Trent was much acclaimed in England at the time.) Milton also recounts in Areopagitica how during his journey to Italy in the late 1630s he had the opportunity to speak with a good friend of Sarpi's whom the redoubtable Venetian friar had tried to protect from the reach of Rome. "There it was," says Milton, "that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought." The Guy Fawkes conspiracy to blow up Parliament in 1605, the aborting of which is commemorated in England to this day, was yet another source of anxiety over a potential Catholic takeover.

It would be a mistake, however, to view his attitude toward Catholics as wholly grounded in national security concerns. Milton denied toleration to Catholics because he thought that they had nothing to contribute to the quest for spiritual truth. He believed in progressive revelation. "The light which we have gained was given us," he tells his countrymen, "not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge." "Searching what we know not, by what we know .. . closing up truth to truth"--this is how he describes the process that religious liberty is meant to foster.

"By what we know." For Milton, one thing "we know" is the utter falsity of Roman Catholic teachings. Those who reject the supremacy of Scripture and affirm the authority of an earthly spiritual hierarchy, those who insist on "crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men," those persons cannot possibly be a part of what Milton calls the "brotherly search after truth."

He does not claim to have found the true way to worship God. In fact, he derides the liturgical certitude emanating from the Westminster Assembly. "Anyone," he says, "who thinks we are to pitch our tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect of reformation that the mortal glass wherein we contemplate can show us .. . that man by this very opinion declares that he is yet far short of truth." But Milton does claim that progressive revelation has shown some beliefs to be false, and they include the fundamental tenets of the Catholic religion. As Ernest Sirluck, editor of the Yale Press edition of Areopagitica, concludes: "We may think Milton's proscription of Roman Catholicism unnecessarily severe, but we cannot think it is inconsistent with the principles upon which he based his plea for toleration."


Both grounds for the Catholic exception, the civil and the religious, make the Areopagitica seem especially dated. So what does this seventeenth century polemic have to say to a modern world no less divided and confused than Milton's, and a good deal more complicated due to technological, demographic, and intellectual developments he could hardly have imagined? Specifically, what part of the liberal tradition that we have inherited, and now must evaluate, can be clarified by attending to Milton's arguments and characterizations?

In attempting to answer this question, I want to begin with an important and extended admonition: We must not try to secularize Milton. Religious conviction was central to his thought and to that of his audience. And I do not mean the type of rationalistic, latitudinarian religious conviction that may explain the tolerationist positions of later thinkers such as Jefferson and Madison, and perhaps even John Locke. Milton read the Bible (in Hebrew and Greek) for several hours every day. He wrote an ambitious theological treatise. When his political world lay in ruins at the Stuart Restoration, a regression welcomed by the very English people in whom he had once placed so much trust, Milton's undespairing response was to complete the Christian epic for which he is best known, to "assert eternal providence, and justify the ways of God to men." Those of us who do not share his profound theological convictions may be able to profit from some features of his thought, and perhaps even employ them for our own purposes. But such a venture in intellectual scavenging must be undertaken with caution and awareness.

Let me specify three significant ideas in Areopagitica--the list could be much longer--that a modern reader might be tempted to draw upon in fashioning a secular argument for the freedom of speech but would be wrong to do so. In each instance, the meaning of the idea and the source of its appeal in Milton's day was so much a function of its religious underpinnings that the secular counterpart can draw no sustenance from Milton's thought.

One idea is that truth is strong and will prevail without the help of the censor's coercive assistance. This is the point of the famous "winds of doctrine" passage with its striking, if unfortunate, wrestling metaphor. Elsewhere in the tract Milton proclaims that truth "needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defenses that error uses against her power." Surely his assertion regarding the likely consequences of freedom was an important part of his case, but we must realize that Milton's sweeping generalization about the strength of truth was not offered in the spirit of empirical demonstration, nor even of didactic history. Milton was simply affirming, once again, his faith in divine providence.

"For who knows not," he says, "that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty." He concedes that in turbulent times "false teachers are then busiest in seducing." Not to worry: "God then raises to his own work men of rare abilities and more than common industry .. . to go on some new enlightened steps in the discovery of truth." Even the limits of human understanding he attributes to the divine plan: "for such is the order of God's enlightening his church, to dispense and deal out by degrees his beam, so as our earthly eyes may best sustain it." Truth in Milton's cosmos is destined to prevail in due time, for a reason that can have no secular analogue.

A second feature of Milton's thought that First Amendment votaries have no business using concerns what may be the most significant step in any truth-based argument for the freedom of speech. This is the claim that the endeavor of seeking to know the truth--or to put it in less grandiose terms, to improve one's understanding--has special priority. Modern liberals are often challenged on this point, and some have not resisted the urge to enlist Milton in their defense. Several of the most eloquent passages of the Areopagitica exalt the importance and dignity of learning. With his absurd yet endearing exuberance at full throttle, Milton describes authors as "laboring the hardest labor in the deep mines of knowledge." He asserts that "a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." He calls truth "our richest merchandise." Nor is Milton's admiration for truth seekers confined to rare persons with unusual gifts like his own. In the London of 1644, he exults, "all the Lord's people are become prophets." He plays the patriotism card in a revealing way. "England," he says, "is a nation .. . prone to seek after knowledge," a "nation .. . acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse."

Like his faith in the strength of truth, Milton's belief in the priority of truth seeking derived from his theology. The great project that summoned the matchless talents of the English people was, in his words, "the reforming of Reformation itself." Recall his picture of London, the "mansion house of liberty" with its citizens "sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas." In the very same sentence, Milton specifies why these energetic thinkers are so hard at work: "to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching Reformation." Individually no less than collectively, the virtue of "fearless scouting into the regions of sin and falsity" is to discover God's will and to do God's work, to achieve salvation, to run "for that immortal garland," to experience the spiritual struggle of "the true warfaring Christian."

I do not claim that Milton's prodigious intellectual curiosity had no secular dimension. He was a man of the Renaissance as well as the Reformation. The finest Latinist in England, he knew Virgil and Ovid almost by heart. His interest in the astronomical discoveries of his age was keen and even finds expression in the pages of Paradise Lost. He wrote a lengthy history of England and a brief history of Russia.

But much as Milton valued many forms of secular knowledge, the argument of Areopagitica is for a purposive liberty: the Christian Liberty of the Puritan saint searching after God's partially revealed truth. Milton was a Christian perfectionist, not a utilitarian. "God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person," he says, "more than the restraint of ten vicious." That is why for Milton the search for understanding is not to be balanced against the material harms it may cause--harms he fully acknowledges.

A third idea in Milton that has achieved some undeserved modern currency is that exposure to falsity is conducive to the appreciation of truth. Erroneous opinions he characterizes as "dust and cinders" that "may yet serve to polish and brighten the armory of truth." A "discreet and judicious" reader can use bad books "to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate." More than two hundred years after Milton wrote, John Stuart Mill was to build his Essay On Liberty around a secular reformulation of these notions.

I have no doubt of the validity of this line of argument. In fact, I regard as possibly the two most important pages I have ever read the passage in On Liberty in which Mill argues, from Cicero, that a person should strive to understand his opponents' ideas with greater imagination and sympathy than he devotes to knowing his own. If every advocate and every scholar would only reread those pages before entering the lists, the world would be a better place.

The thought is magnificent, but it is not Milton's. However important falsity may be to the search for truth, or foolishness to the search for wisdom, or exaggeration to the search for accuracy, or radicalism to the search for moderation, Milton's argument in Areopagitica provides scant reason for a secular appreciation of uncongenial ideas. For Milton was not in pursuit of either capacious sensibility or dialectical facility, though in fact he possessed both. What he valued was the ability to resist temptation. Self-discipline in the service of God, an integral component of Christian Liberty, is for him the overriding objective of the freedom he urges upon the English nation. "That which purifies us is trial," he says, "and trial is by what is contrary." "[B]ooks freely permitted" are means, he asserts, "both to the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth." That is why "the high providence of God .. . gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety." "Trial" and "exercise"--the imagery is physical, even martial. Milton's concern here is Christian discipline and fortitude, not intellectual curiosity.

I could, if necessary, demonstrate further how thoroughly Milton's conception of truth is bound up in his religious convictions--how, for example, his emphasis on the fallibility of human judgment, rooted in the fallen condition of postlapsarian man, has little in common with modern skepticism, or how his temperamental respect for radical, seemingly bizarre ideas derived from his belief that in millennial times the Word of God can emanate from the most unlikely sources. My principal point should be clear: Those parts of Milton's argument in Areopagitica that rest heavily on his claims and assumptions regarding truth--its nature, its strength, its function, its importance--cannot rightly be employed to make the secular case for the freedom of speech. Furthermore, the limits Milton recognized to the principle of toleration, so much a product of his view of truth, cannot inform the modern project of defining the boundaries of expressive freedom.


So what is left? Can the Areopagitica help us at all as we struggle to interpret the modern First Amendment? I think so.

"If it were seriously asked," begins Milton's pamphlet The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, "and it would be no untimely question .. . who of all teachers and masters that have ever taught have drawn the most disciples after him, both in religion and in manners, it might be not untruly answered Custom." Were Milton pressed to name the second most esteemed teacher through the ages, almost certainly he would have said Authority. Areopagitica is about more than religious truth: Milton's case for free expression depends in no small degree on his observation, repeated throughout the tract in a variety of figurations, that vitality is the defining quality of a political community, and that vitality cannot be maintained--stagnation will inevitably set in--if the prescriptions of Custom and Authority are allowed to go unchallenged. Milton's theology may be dated, or at least unconvincing to most moderns, but his grasp of political dynamics should command our attention.

Milton is often thought of as a dreamer, but he valued highly the art of shrewd observation. He was a close student and admirer of Machiavelli and adopted the Florentine as his mentor on the subject of how to write history. The Areopagitica is couched in the argot of political realism: "to sequester out of the world in Atlantic and Utopian polities which can never be drawn into use will not mend our condition," Milton states. Instead, he urges his countrymen to "ordain wisely .. . in this world of evil." In Book VIII of Paradise Lost, the angel Raphael counsels Adam: "be lowly wise .. . Dream not of other worlds."

The lowly wisdom of Areopagitica is considerable. Milton insists, for example, that the policy of licensing cannot be assessed without taking into account the capacities, incentives, working conditions, loyalties, and temperaments of the persons who will serve as licensers. "There cannot be," he says, "a more tedious and unpleasing journey-work, a greater loss of time levied upon [a man's] head, than to be made the perpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, ofttimes huge volumes .. . and in a hand scarce legible, whereof three pages would not down at any time in the fairest print." With such a job description, "we may easily foresee what kind of licensers we are to expect hereafter, either ignorant, imperious, and remiss, or basely pecuniary."

Milton asserts the inevitable futility of censorship and notes the pressure for more severe measures that such futility begets. Each failed regulatory venture will lead, he predicts, to additional such attempts "as will make us all both ridiculous and weary, and yet frustrate." Moreover, the effort to suppress dissident speakers often backfires, for as Bacon remarked, the "punishing of wits enhances their authority."

Still another practical feature of licensing he identifies is how responsibility for the censorial decision is often divided and accountability thereby evaded--a problem, we might believe, that also plagues the modern administrative state. "Sometimes," Milton says, "five imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the piazza of one title-page complementing and ducking each to other with their shaven reverences, whether the author, who stands by in perplexity at the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the sponge." This metaphor employs Catholic allusions--elsewhere he describes licensers as "glutton friars"--and so might be read to state only a particular grievance. It is important to the argument in Areopagitica, however, that Milton accuses the new Presbyterian censors of being as overweening and unaccountable, as "puffed up" as he puts it, as their precursors in Rome, Madrid, and Canterbury. "The episcopal arts begin to bud again," he laments, sounding like no one so much as Lord Acton.

Milton's observations concerning the corruptions of power deserve to be as numbingly familiar as they now are. No less valid, though less commonly acknowledged in the free speech controversies of our day, is his point that public order, public morality, and mutual respect among citizens cannot be achieved by coercive legislation alone. Effective control of evil and disorder, says Milton, must depend heavily on "those unwritten, or at least unconstraining laws of virtuous education, religious and civil nurture." These, as Plato recognized, are "the bonds and ligaments of the commonwealth, the pillars and sustainers of every written statute." A government that looks down upon its citizens, that dares "not trust them with an English pamphlet," will see those bonds and ligaments atrophy. The new Parliamentary censorship Milton calls a reproach to the common people, treating them as "giddy, vicious, and ungrounded .. . in such a sick and weak state of faith and discretion as to be able to take nothing down but through the pipe of a licenser."

Some modern critics might respond that whether or not the people on the streets of London in 1644 were indeed "an unprincipled, unedified laic rabble" likely to stagger at "the whiff of every new pamphlet," as Milton berates the Presbyterian censors for assuming, the targets of today's demagogues answer well to that description. Never before, such critics might add, have the technologies of mass communication made the susceptibilities of audiences so dangerous. These objections have some force, I do not doubt. We must remember, however, that this is exactly the argument that gripped the regulators of Milton's day. Then the new technology of mass communication was the unlicensed pamphlet, printed in bulk, in the vernacular, no longer confined to abstruse theological disquisitions. The new audience consisted of Hobbes' masterless men, many of them previously illiterate sectaries apparently receptive to the most disruptive religious and civil nostrums. The guardians of public order doubted whether a war could be fought and the Reformation completed if the masses were subject to such unscrupulous manipulation. Milton believed, on the other hand, that the war could be won and the Reformation advanced only by permitting the unsettling free thinking to flourish.

The disagreement was basic but it was not really empirical. Nor has it been in its many reenactments since Milton's time. There will always be demagogues; there will always be gullible masses; there will usually be new technologies; there will often be urgent and vulnerable social projects. How we resolve the great issues of freedom will not turn on how we calibrate the costs and benefits. The decision to embrace the freedom of speech is, as Milton well recognized, a decision to embrace a future that cannot be controlled or computed. In fact, observes Stanley Fish, the most incisive Milton scholar of our age but no kindred spirit in these matters, the future we embrace by protecting free speech we cannot even describe.

What we can say, and this seems to me the crux of Areopagitica, is that without a robust commitment to free-wheeling disputation, without a public culture permeated by the clash of opinions, it is impossible to sustain a vigorous, adaptive, resilient society, capable when occasion demands of acting on high purpose. Like Machiavelli before him, Milton was preoccupied with the question of political energy. He saw individual character as the key to collective energy. He valued strength of will, acuteness of perception, ingenuity, self-discipline, engagement, breadth of vision, perseverance; he detested rigidity, stasis, withdrawal, timidity, small-mindedness, indecision, laziness, deference to authority. "I cannot praise," he says, "a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary."

Responding to his adversaries who were asserting the need for more order, more standards, more authority, more closure in the realm of religious inquiry, Milton scornfully describes the "fruits which a dull ease and cessation of our knowledge will bring forth among the people." "How goodly and how to be wished were such an obedient unanimity as this, what a fine conformity would it starch us all into! Doubtless a staunch and solid piece of framework as any January could freeze together." "[F]aith and knowledge," he asserts, "thrives by exercise." Truth he likens "to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition."

Milton's regard for the active life was not just a cultural preference. He saw the stakes as greater than that. Political energy, he realized, is a sometime source of progress but also a frequent cause of strife and oppression. His crucial move was to conclude that harm, even the harm that flows from malignant political energy, can best be contained and repaired by a citizenry that is energized in a countervailing way: intellectually independent, morally engaged, politically astute, not afraid to speak out or to stand up. His views in this matter were shaped by his lifelong study of the problem of evil. As the creator of Satan in Paradise Lost, probably the most brilliant and destructive demagogue in the whole of English literature, Milton can hardly be accused of failing to appreciate how words can do harm. He did not believe, however, that the discovery of evil necessarily justifies the regulation of speech. In fact, Milton thought evil so pervasive, insidious, and perdurable a force in human affairs as to demand in response something more than the blunt instruments and formal gestures of the law. Evil can be combated, he was convinced, only from within: by the vigilance of a population accustomed to challenging authority; by the ingenuity and integrity that a licensing regime is bound to discourage; by the hard work of discerning, confronting, refuting, and choosing that censors seek to disburden citizens from having to undertake. "The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people." The statement comes not from Milton's pen but from Justice Brandeis' remarkable opinion in Whitney v. California. It would nevertheless fit perfectly in the Areopagitica.

This emphasis on character is at once the most distinctive and the most pervasive feature of Milton's argument for the liberty of printing. However, many proponents of the regulation of speech likewise invoke concerns relating to character. They regard liberty as an invitation to license, a source not of self-discipline but self-indulgence. We must, therefore, look more closely at Milton's conception of the relationship between character and censorship.

When Milton identifies the costs and risks of licensing, his choice of terms is revealing. He calls censorship a "discouragement," an "affront," a "dishonour and derogation to the author," a "servitude," a "disparagement," a "reproach," a "thraldom," "a particular disesteem," an "undervaluing and vilifying of the whole nation." He objects that every author is "mistrusted and suspected," made to "trudge to his leave-giver," and then, if all goes well, to "appear in print like a puny with his guardian," displaying "his censor's hand on the back of his title to be his bail and surety that he is no idiot or seducer." No doubt an author of his skill and dedication must have felt particular umbrage at having to submit to "the fearfulness or the presumptuous rashness of a perfunctory licensor." But whatever the role personal pique might have played in provoking Milton's challenge to the Licensing Order, there can be little doubt that he considered censorship to be corrosive of character because it places the government in the position of condescending to its citizens.

Exactly how, we might ask, is character threatened by the fact that a political regime distrusts its citizens and requires them to behave as supplicants? To Milton's mind, censorship undermines character by encouraging individuals to shirk their civic and religious responsibilities. The imagery of childhood is employed repeatedly in the Areopagitica. A writer forced to run the censor's gauntlet must thereby appear to his readers "a pupil teacher," an instructor "under the wardship of an overseeing fist." For a community to maintain its tenets and taboos by means of "law and compulsion" rather than "exhortation" is "to captivate under a perpetual childhood of prescription." "What advantage is it," Milton asks, "to be a man over it is to be a boy at school" if "serious and elaborate writings" are examined like "the theme of a grammar-lad under his pedagogue." Citizens who are treated like children will behave like children, he implies, and one thing we know children do surpassingly well is to let adults take on the unpleasant chores.

In an age so notable for its polemics, as well as for its exhilarating scientific and philosophical formulations, can it be that inquiry and disputation were seen as burdensome chores that many persons might seek to evade? Milton certainly thought so. Consider religion. Perhaps the most extended figure in the whole tract is that of the man who "finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many piddling accounts" that he "resolves to give over toiling, and to find himself out some factor to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs." To this surrogate the shirking principal "resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys, into his custody; and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion." Milton is unsparing in his satire of this evasion of religious responsibility:

He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him; his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped and sumptuously laid to sleep; rises, is saluted .. . his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop trading all day without his religion.

Preachers, too, are at risk of shirking their duties, living off old notes, "the gatherings and savings of a sober graduateship." By "forming and transforming, joining and disjoining variously, a little bookcraft and two hours meditation," the "easily inclinable" clergyman can cobble together a passable sermon, assisted as he might also be by "interlinearies, breviaries, synopses, and other loitering gear." However, "if his back door be not secured by the rigid licenser," if "a bold book may now and then issue forth and give the assault to some of his old collections in their trenches," such a preacher may have to do his own work, if only to "set good guards and sentinels about his received opinions." Even this would represent progress, according to Milton. "God send," he pleads, "that the fear of this diligence which must then be used do not make us affect the laziness of a licensing church."

Milton opposed censorship in large part because he placed legal regulation in the same category as reliance on factors and cribs: an effort to free ordinary citizens and worshippers from the salutary if onerous duty of ceaseless inquiry. If "the men be erroneous who appear to be the leading schismatics," he asks, "what withholds us but our sloth, our self-will, and distrust in the right cause, that we do not give them gentle meetings and gentle dismissions, that we debate not and examine the matter thoroughly with liberal and frequent audience; if not for their sakes yet for our own?"

Another character flaw nurtured by restrictions on free printing is "precipitant zeal," the impulse to rush to judgment. We "make no distinction," Milton complains, when encountering persons whom we fear "come with new and dangerous opinions." We "forejudge them ere we understand them." No other sentence in the Areopagitica has so much the quality of a personal plea: Milton's own opinions on divorce were forejudged, badly mischaracterized, and used to hold him up to ridicule. Being treated most unfairly as a licentious and irresponsible radical was very likely a formative experience for this exceptionally serious and disciplined young man. On the subject of forejudgment, he knew of what he spoke.

Licensing--indeed all regulation of speech--must employ forejudgment to some degree. It proceeds by categorization and incomplete characterization. Problems of proof distort judgment further. Speakers, moreover, have mixed and easily misunderstood motives. Ideas have layers and textures that resist legal classification. They have the capacity to breed but also a vulnerability to misappropriation, qualities that bedevil even well-intentioned efforts to predict their consequences. In his pragmatist mode Milton argues that the inherently indiscriminate nature of licensing invites both partisan abuse and rash judgment.

Because the regulation of printing typically is imbued with imprecision and futility, the act of licensing also has the character of a formal gesture, a regulatory show. Central to Milton's thought in several domains--religion, poetry, politics, education, marriage--was his disdain for reliance on forms. Those who would regulate writings judge them superficially for several reasons, but important among them is the fact that most of the time the censorship of ideas is not really meant to be a discriminating gesture. It is intended rather to be a formal discharge of regulatory responsibility or a public affirmation of conventional forms of authority and thought. This was Milton's understanding of the true nature of licensing and a major source of his contempt for the practice.

Milton saw formalism as a means of avoiding the challenges of a complex, changing, often deceiving and dispiriting world. If obeisance were an adequate means of coping and of seeking salvation, the avoidance implicit in formalism might not be a matter of the highest concern. But Milton believed that both survival and salvation require of humankind active choice. False appearances abound in life. Taken at face value, they will mislead. They are most likely to mislead a people not experienced at getting beneath formal surfaces and exercising the capacity for critical choice. Milton's poetry repeatedly forces the reader to make hard choices and tempts her to make wrong choices. Famously signaling his break with Calvinism, he asserts in Areopagitica: "Many there be that complain of divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions [puppet shows]."

That Milton built his argument for free printing around the importance of choice does not mean that he held an exalted view of the power of human reason. In 1644 the world seemed to him more complicated and inscrutable than he had previously appreciated. Apparently, he was experiencing disillusionment during this period as a result of his own poor judgment in choosing a marriage partner, the obtuseness and prejudice he encountered during the divorce controversy, and more generally the dashing of his hopes for a swift, decisive Reformation. Abandoning the apocalyptic tone of his earlier antiprelatical tracts, Milton says in Areopagitica: "It is not the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitring of a bishop and the removing him from off the presbyterian shoulders, that will make us a happy nation." Much more than such changes of form will be required, he now realizes. Only perseverance amid the temptation to despair, the courage to choose in the face of doubt and indeterminacy, will advance "the slow-moving reformation which we labour under." In the penultimate book of Paradise Lost, the archangel Michael explains to Adam why fallen man must endure so much suffering and injustice:

. . . good with bad
Expect to hear, supernal grace contending
With sinfulness of men, thereby to learn
True patience. . . .

Milton considered licensing a policy driven by impatience with complexity and difference, and as such a threat to the character of the English people. He embraced the freedom of speech so that his fellow citizens might hear "good with bad .. . thereby to learn true patience."

The virtue of patience belongs disproportionately to those who are capable of thinking in historical terms, as Milton most assuredly was. One of the reasons for valuing the freedom of speech is that it nurtures a nation's sense of history. When permitted a hearing and a place in the historical record, dissenting currents of thought can shape the future. When exposed to independent scrutiny in the court of history, even the most powerful rulers do not have a free hand. History, of course, will exist with or without the freedom of speech. But how a nation understands and uses its history is a vital dimension of the historical process itself. A people afraid of new ideas, trustful of censors and hostile to bold thinkers, will be left behind, he suggests, by the sweep of history. Such a people will lack both vision and the ability to learn from experience. Patriot (and historian) that he was, he did not want this to be the fate of the English nation, as he thought it had been in the fourteenth century when the nascent reformation offered by John Wycliffe was thwarted by the deadly combination of timidity, ignorance, and censorship.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Milton's historical imagination is his emphasis on the process of renewal. With his command of ancient, patristic, and medieval sources, he viewed both the Reformation and the parliamentary challenge to Stuart tyranny as efforts to recover forgotten wisdom and dissipated energy. The Areopagitica is replete with images of decay and reinvigoration. The process of renewal feeds, Milton believed, off the sense of purpose and possibility that "much arguing, much writing, many opinions" can help to engender. In this view, free speech is not primarily a mechanism for deliberation and persuasion so much as a phenomenon shaping the character and aspirations of the population. Contrary to the common scholarly assumption, Areopagitica may not have been written with the ambition, seemingly quixotic, of persuading the Long Parliament to repeal the Licensing Order. Milton knew the reigning Presbyterian faction to be intransigent on the issue of censorship and ill disposed to him because of his views on divorce. The tract may instead have been aimed primarily at the Cromwellian Independents in Parliament and the army, in the hope that future agents of renewal would not lose their enthusiasm for toleration once they gained the reins of power.

Although in 1644 Milton already might have seen himself as writing for a more propitious future time, it was not until 1660 that events tested to the utmost his resolve to embrace the historical perspective. In none of his writings does he better express his belief in the importance of speech than in the closing words of The Ready and Easy Way To Establish a Free Commonwealth, a pamphlet written in anguish to protest the headlong rush of the strife-weary English people to restore the Stuart monarchy. Blind, betrayed by his countrymen and even by his erstwhile hero Cromwell, eligible for execution on account of his polemics in defense of the regicide, his great epic poem nowhere near finished, Milton remained unbowed. Risking his freedom and possibly his life, he challenged the ascendant royalists by issuing an uncompromising indictment of monarchical government. As other republicans were busy trimming to protect their positions against the impending Restoration, Milton defiantly reaffirmed his commitment to the "good old cause," finding succor in the prospect of eventual political renewal:

Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to, but with the prophet, "O earth, earth, earth!" to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay, though what I have spoke should happen .. . to be the last words of our expiring liberty. But I trust I shall have spoken persuasion to abundance of sensible and ingenuous men, to some perhaps, whom God may raise of these stones to become children of reviving liberty.

Whether speaking of responsibility, fore-judgment, the worship of form, perseverance, the courage to choose, impatience, or renewal, Milton emphasizes the inner person. Censorship, he says, leads only to "the forced and outward union of cold and neutral, and inwardly divided minds." More than the ideas lost or the causes squelched, such minds were for him the chief casualty of licensing.

Milton's extraordinary linking of energy and character might be viewed as still another product of his religious convictions. Active, alert, introspective, unremitting spiritual struggle was a fundamental tenet of Puritanism in all of its many varieties. Strength of will and personal integrity were high on the list of Puritan virtues. Religious ritual was problematic for Puritans because they thought that idols, shrines, and ceremonies encouraged too formal and passive an approach to spiritual engagement. Moreover, the controversy over free printing may have captured Milton's imagination because many of the most theologically probing, eloquent Puritan preachers of his day had to publish their sermons in order to support themselves, having been blocked by the ecclesiastical hierarchy from enjoying the financial security of a congregational assignment. A religiously deracinated Milton, if such a creature can even be imagined, might have valued initiative and integrity and connected those qualities with free speech, but this is idle speculation of the sort Milton eschewed and derided. Unquestionably, he gained his regard for both energy and character from his experience as a devout Puritan living during what he perceived to be a pivotal stage of the Reformation.

A scavenger of Areopagitica looking for ideas to inform a secular interpretation of the First Amendment need not discard the notions of energy and character simply because of their religious provenance in Milton's mind. Unlike his view of truth, so dependent on the backstop of divine providence and so intertwined with the postlapsarian quest for purgation, Milton's concern for the maintenance of energy has meaning and urgency quite independent of its religious underpinnings. His judgment that collective energy derives from individual strength has direct secular application, as does his perception that individual strength seldom flourishes in a culture dominated by deference, fear, or the exaltation of form.

Milton was not shy about applying to the realm of secular politics his observations regarding energy and character. Areopagitica both begins and ends with the observation that while "errors in a good government and in a bad are equally almost incident," what distinguishes a wise ruler is the ability to perceive and correct errors, to accept criticism and to change. The epigraph, loosely translated from Euripides' Suppliant Women, proclaims that advice from private citizens can contribute to the process of governmental adaptation and self-correction. That he should accord a pagan author such prominence is noteworthy.

A modern proponent of grass-roots democracy, an Alexander Meiklejohn perhaps, might want to draw from Milton's reference to political accountability a view of free speech as a fundamentally democratic procedure. That would be a mistake. Milton's interest in the forms of civil governance was no deeper than his interest in the forms of church governance, which is to say not deep at all. He favored whatever form he believed at the moment would most respect the principle of toleration. This might be in turn a mixed constitution in the ancient mode, a supreme Parliament broadly representative of the gentry class, a distinctly unrepresentative regicide Rump, or a Lord Protector with a New Model Army. He was not a democrat, except in the peculiar sense that he believed each citizen must exercise sovereignty over his own mind and must use that mind to help energize the society and hold its leaders accountable. In one of his regicide pamphlets, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton does indeed argue that political authority derives from the consent of the governed. That hardly brands him as a devotee of participatory democracy, as the slightest acquaintance with the controversial literature of his day makes plain.

But could a latter-day defender of the principle of free speech build upon Milton's ideas to urge that something like "democratic deliberation," with all of its modernist implications of participation and equality, now be seen as the way to preserve energy and build character? Were this line of reasoning followed, freedom of speech would not be justified by its direct contributions to individual character and social dynamics. Rather, it would be considered valuable to the degree, but only to the degree, that it facilitated participatory democracy. Such a conception would make Milton's argument in Areopagitica congruent with modern efforts to justify freedom of speech in an age more concerned with democratic identity than with the fear of tyranny or the mismanaging of the Reformation.

The derivation is not incoherent but neither is it ineluctable. Thoughtful persons could debate to a standoff whether the dynamics and virtues that Milton prized are more served than disserved by mass politi

Published on Thursday, May 4, 2006 by the Guardian / UK

Ridicule and Contempt
An imperial president is smothering the system of checks and balances, imperiling free speech

by Sidney Blumenthal


The most scathing public critique of the Bush presidency and the complicity of a craven press corps was delivered at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday by a comedian. Bush was reported afterwards to be seething, while the press corps responded with stone-cold silence. In many of their reports of the event they airbrushed out the joker.

Stephen Colbert performed within 10 yards of Bush's hostile stare and before 2,600 members of the press and their guests. After his mock praise of Bush as a rock against reality, Colbert censured the press by flattering its misfeasance. "Over the last five years you people were so good - over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out ... Here's how it works: the president makes decisions ... The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spellcheck and go home ... Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!"

The day after Colbert's performance, the New York Times published a front-page story on the latest phase of the administration's war on the press. Bush is weighing "the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws." Since the Washington Post exposed the existence of CIA "black site" prisons holding detainees without due process of law and the New York Times disclosed the president's order to the National Security Agency to engage in domestic surveillance without legal court warrants, the administration has applied new draconian methods to clamp down.

"Has the New York Times violated the Espionage Act?" asks an article in the neoconservative journal Commentary by Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior editor, that lays out the case for prosecution. When the Post and Times won Pulitzer prizes for their stories, William Bennett, a former Republican cabinet secretary and now a commentator on CNN, said: "What they did is worthy of jail."

At Bush's orders dragnets are being conducted throughout the national security bureaucracy in search of press sources. And the FBI subpoenaed four decades of files accumulated by recently deceased investigative journalist Jack Anderson in an attempt to exhume old classified material.

Bush takes a different attitude on his own leaking of secrets. Dozens of National Security Council documents were leaked to journalist Bob Woodward for his 2002 encomium, Bush At War. Vice-President Cheney and his staff leaked disinformation to reporters to make the case that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. And Bush and Cheney authorized Cheney's then chief of staff Lewis Libby to leak portions of the national intelligence estimate on Iraq's WMD to sympathetic reporters in an effort to discredit a critic, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

In January, two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (the so-called Israel Lobby) were indicted for receiving classified material from a Pentagon official who was imprisoned. The AIPAC officials are being prosecuted as if they were reporters receiving leaks; if convicted under the 1917 Espionage Act, the precedent would be ominous.

Some in the press understand the peril posed to the first amendment by an imperial president trying to smother the system of checks and balances. For those of the Washington press corps who shunned a court jester for his irreverence, status is more urgent than the danger to liberty. But it's no laughing matter.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0504-24.htm

Fantasies of American Preponderance

by Tom Engelhardt

Tom Dispatch


"




Hmm… American preponderance. We know that this preponderance dazzled the men who became known as neoconservatives (though only the "neo" part of it seems even faintly accurate as a label) – and Zalmay Khalilzad, our ambassador to and putative viceroy in Baghdad, was one of them. They wanted to wield that "preponderance" of power preponderantly. They wanted to lower America's terrible, swift sword decisively.

Now, preponderance ("superiority in weight, force, influence, numbers, etc.") is a strange word when you think about it, seeming to have both "ponder" and "ponderous" hidden somewhere within. As it happened, while the neocons proposed much from inside Washington's Beltway, from various right-wing think tanks and later from the inner offices of the Bush administration, while oil-consultant Khalilzad was still trying to sort out energy pipeline deals with the Taliban, and while various Iraqi exile Scheherezades were whispering sweet nothings in their ears about flowers, and liberated populaces, and the glory that was Rome – oh, sorry, those were pundits on the editorial pages of our major newspapers – they surely pondered too little.

They had been so certain of themselves for so long that they, along with administration mentors Don Rumsfeld and the Veep, had no need to think too deeply. After all, why ponder when you already know? Anyway, when it came to knocking off Iraq, if somebody didn't agree with you – as was true of almost every expert in the State Department and most elsewhere in the government, as well as numerous generals, not to speak of Father Bush's men like family consigliere James Baker and daddy's former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft – well, you just kicked them out of your gatherings, or left them out in the cold, to preserve the unanimity of consensus thinking. This lent the old adage, "ignorance is bliss," new meaning in the halls of superpower governance.

And then, to make bad worse, all that preponderant American power they were going to shock and awe the world with – and that would indeed prove devastatingly destructive – turned out to be so much more ponderous, so much less effective, than any of them ever imagined from their offices in Washington.

In a sense, they're undoubtedly still in shock, still largely acting as if the ship of state weren't listing, as if the only thing needed was the odd course tweak or two – the most recent formula for this being: skip some of that "democracy" malarkey and head for a little more good old autocratic/dictatorial geopolitics, and while you're at it, send the second team, a (James) Baker's dozen (in fact, a party of 10) stocked with Clinton/Bush Senior "wise men" (and a woman) off to Baghdad for a little stir of the salad dressing, an extra twist or two of salt and pepper, as that ship drifts among the rocks.

Of course, somewhere in their souls, they must have known something, mustn't they? After all on Jan. 29, 2002, our president announced to Congress and the nation that we faced an "axis of evil" – three countries instantly elevated into the pantheon of righteous historical analogy just beside that other "axis" – you know, Tojo, Benito, Adolph, and their lovely war of choice, World War II.

Talk about power and preponderance, then and now. When administration officials peered out from the capital of the globe's only "hyperpower" at desperate, starveling, grim-faced North Korea with its possible nuclear weapon or two, riven, fundamentalist Iran with all that oil but a per-capita income level of something like $2,000 a year, and, of course, war-ravaged, sanctions-weakened, pitiful Iraq, held together by engineering ingenuity, mad dictatorial power, and baling wire, how could they not have been dazzled by the preponderance of possibility that seemed to lie before them?

Still – and it's a big still – when they struck, they chose by far the weakest of the three evil lands, the one least likely to be able to whack back. They decided to send the cavalry against Saddam's by-then hopelessly fifth-rate military. They were going to stomp his forces, take him down, locate themselves in the non-Saudi part of the Middle East, and then turn around and intimidate the rest of the "axis" (as well as Syria, and anyone else in sight). It would be, in neocon Kenneth Adelman's famous prewar word, a "cakewalk."

Okay, we all know now that these oh-so-practical plans were part and parcel of a set of fantasies meant for the consumption of the American public, but no less believed in by them for all that. In fact, although just about everyone on the planet then believed, to one degree or another, in American preponderance, no one believed in it more firmly or deeply than the top officials of the Bush administration. And what glorious, theocratic dreams they had based on that belief. Best of all, they could dream on the cheap, so sure were they that their foes would be as dazzled by our preponderance as they were. As Paul Wolfowitz put it, Iraq was a country that "floats on a sea of oil" and we, of course, were going to be floating atop it. We would have, in the phrase of that moment, "permanent access" to Iraq for all time to come. Now, a cool $300-400 billion later with only perhaps another trillion dollars to go…

As it happened, a bunch of Sunni "bitter-enders" weren't as impressed with us as we were, and the rest of the unraveling you know; and now, it seems, nobody's all that impressed. Not the North Koreans. Not certainly, the Iranians, who are, if anything, too radically unimpressed with the preponderance of American power for their own good.

Anyway, you would think, under such circumstances, that someone up there might perhaps ponder a bit. But, by the evidence, no such luck – despite the revolt of the retired generals (seven or eight of them standing in for a bevy of disgruntled, angry non-retirees). What rethinking there has been seems just so completely retro-imperial, so-Vietnam, that it's hard to even find words to sum it up.

Of course, among the original neocon dreamers, Paul Wolfowitz was pensioned off to the World Bank, Douglas Feith sent home to spend more time with his family, and ally John Bolton dispatched to whack the UN; but those left at the helm (facing backwards and sideways) still seem too dazzled by half by fantasies of American preponderance, by that feeling… you know… that, given who we are and the power we wield… this can't be happening – that the U.S. will still, in the end, prove part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Let's just drop in, then, on a few of the remaining dreams of the Bush administration, a little list of ongoing fantasies of the Iraqi occupation, all reflecting an unshakable belief that American power is still the "decider," that it is still our sad "destiny," our weary burden, to shoulder American preponderance and march on into that darkling night.

The Turning Point (or the Last Chance): Iraq has a new prime-minister designate, more or less the twin of the previous one shoved out of power by Sunnis, Kurds, and Ambassador Khalilzad. He now has less than 30 days to form a government inside the fortified Green Zone that will somehow do something for someone in a city (forget the country) crawling with militias and death squads, whose mixed neighborhoods are separating fast, which, as Juan Cole points out, sometimes gets less than an hour of electricity a day, which lacks so many other urban amenities, but experiences, on average, perhaps 50 kidnappings in that same 24 hours. A typical small event in lawless Baghdad, as reported in today's New York Times, involved gunmen stopping a minibus in western Baghdad and slaughtering four college students, at least two of whom may have had "names that suggested they were Shi'ite."

In this context, the president welcomed back his secretaries of state and defense last week. On his orders, they had just flown to Baghdad in what appeared to be an unseemly rush to stamp "American preponderance" on the forehead of the new Prime-Minister Designate Nuri al-Maliki and so brand him an American "puppet." (I didn't use that word, I swear. A reporter questioning the two secretaries at a Baghdad news conference did.) From the Rose Garden, the president made a statement in which he referred to Maliki's prospective new government (that, for all we know, may never come into being), using a politer p-word – "partner." He claimed that (gasp!) we had finally reached the "turning point" for which all Americans have been waiting so breathlessly. (In the Vietnam era, of course, this was the infamous "light at the end of the tunnel," the military version of which was the "crossover point.") Not that such a turning point hasn't already been announced a million times by just about every American civil and military official in sight, but his exact words were: "This new government is going to represent a new start for the Iraqi people … we believe this is a turning point for the Iraqi citizens, and it's a new chapter in our partnership." A new chapter? Maybe the president was reading Stephen King's Carrie for the first time over the weekend. Who knows? Can anyone but him believe this any more?

Not, evidently, his secretary of state, who is reputedly slightly more reality-based than the Man Upstairs. Her people seem to have chosen another image, according to a New York Times report on her trip to Baghdad: "At least in Ms. Rice's entourage, there was an atmosphere that the joint visit might offer a last chance to reverse some of the mistakes of the past three years in providing security for Iraq, getting the oil and power systems back, and curbing sectarian hatreds and corruption."

A last chance. The president aside, the images used by this administration have, like its polling figures, been on a distinct downward slide for some time. Only months ago, its officials reached the Iraqi "precipice" and finally looked down into "the abyss" of civil war, before everyone (supposedly) took "a step back." Evidently, one step back from the precipice offers you that "last chance." For what you might ask? The answer's obvious: For American preponderance to finally get it right.

The Second Liberation of Baghdad (or Last Chance, Take Two): Given that ruling the city-state of Baghdad, rather than just the citadel of the Green Zone, would be a giant step forward for this administration and its "partner," it has been reported that the American military is planning a "second liberation" of Baghdad. (At this point, you wouldn't think anyone would care to recall, even by implication, the first liberation, which proved grim indeed.) According to Sarah Baxter of the London Sunday Times, American military planners under Lt.-Gen. David Petraeus, who put a good deal of effort into "standing up" the Iraqi army, are planning to launch this neighborhood by neighborhood campaign as soon as they have a government, however wobbly, "standing up" somewhere inside the Green Zone.

They will then "clear, hold, and build" – think of the failed Vietnam-era "oil spot" strategy – in a ground campaign supported by air power. "Helicopters suitable for urban warfare" will be brought to bear, possibly backed by "heavily armed AC-130 aircraft and F-16s. But close air support is more likely to be provided by Cobra and Little Bird helicopters to minimize casualties."

According to Baxter, this second liberation won't involve all-out combat like the November 2004 campaign against Fallujah in which approximately three-quarters of that city was turned to rubble, but a more precise set of operations modeled on the "successful" campaign in Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, where only part of the town was rubble-ized. As John Burns and Dexter Filkins reported recently in the New York Times, the Army has been practicing this sort of new-style warfare in twelve "virtual Iraqi villages" in the California desert with the help of Hollywood stunt extras and Carl Weathers, "best known for his portrayal of the boxer Apollo Creed in the Rocky films," giving acting tips to the "insurgents." Even there, our troops don't do all that well; but, oh my gosh, in the real Baghdad this will surely work! Even better, by "minimizing casualties" through air power in the heavily populated capital, hearts and minds galore can be captured.

The War Can Be Won From Las Vegas (Last Chance, Take Three): Call in the (air) cavalry. This is the more general version of the above, the belief that air power – we have it, they don't – can do what ground troops couldn't. The insurgents may control their neighborhoods, towns, and villages, but at least we can spot and destroy them whenever and wherever they gather via our "flock" of Predator drones over Baghdad and elsewhere (but operated from a base outside Las Vegas), as Michael Hirsh reports in Newsweek.

Does no one remember the Vietnam equivalent of this: Robert McNamara's surefire"electronic battlefield" and the hubris that went with it? Or the massive use of air power over rural (and sometimes urban) South Vietnam and its results? Ever since World War II, air power has been the American form of war-fighting and its promise has always dazzled strategists. Yet it is essentially guaranteed to be no more decisive in the urban jungles of Iraq than it was in the actual jungles of Vietnam.

We'll Never Leave (and You Can't Make Us): This might be thought of as the we're-so-preponderant-you'll-never-be-able-to-get-rid-of-us fantasy. The Bush administration continues to buildup our major bases in Iraq massively. When you look under the headlines, U.S. officials tend to let leak that we're digging in at our major "consolidated" bases for at least a decade – and you now find quotes from officials on those bases like this: "It's safe to say Balad will be here for a long time."

The 15-square-mile American air base at Balad – in air-traffic terms second only to London's Heathrow Airport – is indeed a massive American town with at least some of the amenities of home. Dubbed "Mortaritaville" by its residents, it is, according to Hirsh, "shaping up to resemble a warrior's country club."

Or, if you're talking "permanent," consider the embassy we're building inside Baghdad's Green Zone. It's the size of Vatican City, will have its own apartment buildings (six of them) for its staff of perhaps 5,500 (all that diplomatic heavy-lifting), its own electricity, well-water, and waste-treatment facilities to guarantee "100 percent independence from city utilities," not to speak of the "swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court, and American Club, all housed in a recreation building." And unlike just about every other reconstruction project in the country, it's going up efficiently and on schedule.

In fact, reports the London Times' Daniel McGrory, it drives Baghdad residents wild to watch what they call, in mock-honor of Saddam Hussein's famously self-glorifying building projects, "George W.'s palace," as it rises on the banks of the Tigris River, while their lives crumble around them. It will be bermed, "hardened," and have its own defense force (just like the Vatican!). A citadel inside a citadel, this one is clearly meant for the ages. Talk about preponderant! Talk about signaling who we think is in command in Iraq! How sensible to establish our diplomatic position in relation to our Iraqi "partner" by erecting the ziggurat of ziggurats. Imagine, as Iraq disintegrates, our soldiers (and their attendant KBR workers) living in blissful, Pizza-Hut isolation on our little, well-fortified American islands. Do you really think that's likely to last long?

Recall our giant bases at places like Danang and Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam or our embassy in Saigon. They, too, were meant for permanency until, of course, we didn't turn out to be quite as preponderant as we dreamed. On the bright side, a hardened fortress of an embassy will be a perfect spot from which to organize an evacuation of the country someday.

Let's Divide It Up! (Last Chance, Take Four): Think of the tripartite division of Iraq as the preponderance of American power for the rest of Washington. This week, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb in a New York Times op-ed ("Unity Through Autonomy") suggested that the Bush administration step up to the plate "decisively" and "choose a third way" between never "cutting and running" and "bringing the troops home now." (Biden and Gelb seem to be decisively into the power of three.) We can, they suggest, begin to shepherd the division of Iraq (already underway in any case) into Shi'ite, Kurdish, and Sunni sectors via a five-part plan that will also leave in place, evidently permanently, "a small but effective residual force to combat terrorists and keep the neighbors honest." In other words, if we can't make it work, at least we can divvy it up. These gentlemen are, according to Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post, but the tip of the partitioning iceberg:

"As the U.S. military struggles against persistent sectarian violence in Iraq, military officers and security experts find themselves in a vigorous debate over an idea that just months ago was largely dismissed as a fringe thought: that the surest – and perhaps now the only – way to bring stability to Iraq is to divide the country into three pieces. Those who see the partitioning of Iraq as increasingly attractive argue that separating the Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Kurds may be the only solution to the violence that many experts believe verges on civil war."

Whether or not Iraq actually divides in three, the idea that Americans can decide on such a path, that we can "step in" at a time when "options in Iraq are narrowing" for us, and still solve the problem, seems but another version of the same old same old. Hubris rebottled. Do these people have any idea of the hatreds already let loose by the American occupation, or the ones that are likely to be released by such an American plan, or how certain it is that any American planning for Iraq will work out horribly at the cost of who knows how many further lives?

Let's Bomb Iran (Last Chance, Take Five): Don't even get me started on this one. The American invasion of Iraq has proved a bottomless catastrophe, bombing a disaster, regime change an abyss – all based on a deep-seated belief in the power of "American preponderance"… and now, could I please have the envelope with the possible plan for extracting ourselves from this mess? Let's see. It says: Send American planes and missiles over Iran, loose the Israelis on that country, knock out some of their nuclear program, bomb the hell out of them, make sure there's plenty of "collateral damage," and hope for "regime change."

Gee, put the tens of billions of dollars that go into the CIA into my bank account and I'll be happy to give you my advice on this one. Or why not just listen to our country's retired generals, who crept up reasonably close to your basic Seven-Days-in-May territory, to make a similar point, however obliquely, about Iran. As Tony Karon of Time magazine notes, thoughtfully as ever, in his Rootless Cosmopolitan blog: "Having watched the Iraq debacle take shape in no small part because those from the military establishment in a position to do so (think Colin Powell) failed to publicly challenge what they could see was a disaster in the making, the generals are clearly inclined to act preemptively this time."

Unfortunately, when you look down the list of retired military men speaking out, they all are Army or Marine generals, almost all associated with war-fighting in Iraq. Not an admiral, nor anyone associated with the Air Force, has been in critical sight – and those, of course, are the two services that would be preponderantly used in Iran. (The Navy, in particular, has been sidelined in Iraq, which is never good for the old yearly budget battle back in Washington.)

To all of this I would just counterpoise my own little riddle:

Question: What's the difference between the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and a future massive air assault on Iran?

Answer: When it comes to Iran, the nature of the catastrophe will be evident on day one.

Gee, you don't exactly have to be a genius to grasp this. You only have to take the odd glance at the oil-futures market – at present the hottest thing in town (other than oil-company profits). Whack Iran and you probably get $120 a barrel oil or worse on the spot. In fact, just the threat may get you there. And that's before Iran lifts a finger. Regime change in Iran via the preponderance of American air power? It will surely be more like global turmoil – some version of Iraq writ painfully large (and if you think things are bad for Americans in Iraq now, just wait).

In the end, the dazzling dream of American preponderance may turn our era into one of energy chaos and ever more widespread terrorism.

Let me just put a tad of passing reality up against all these fantasies: George Bush's approval rating just hit 32 percent, the lowest of his presidency, in the latest CNN poll; 30 percent in New Hampshire (a state he won in 2004); and even white evangelicals are starting to peel away. The president has been losing on average a percentage point a month since January 2005. Call this the preponderance of polls.

Or consider the comment of Riverbend, the pseudonymous young Sunni blogger in Baghdad, on possible American bombing plans for Iran:

"While I hate the Iranian government, the people don't deserve the chaos and damage of air strikes and war. I don't really worry about that though, because if you live in Iraq – you know America's hands are tied. Just as soon as Washington makes a move against Tehran, American troops inside Iraq will come under attack. It's that simple – Washington has big guns and planes. … But Iran has 150,000 American hostages."

Hers is a glimpse of reality worth tens of billions of intelligence dollars, and it came to her in a building that lacks electricity most of the time. Then again, without electricity over three years after Baghdad fell to American troops (and Iraqi looters), she's not dazzled by American preponderance, that holy grail of global power, and every illusory perk that goes with it. Because our leaders still are, they may never learn – to our shame and the future pain of many Iranians.



http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=8945

May 5, 2006
Comrade Cheney
vs. President Putin
The Sovietization of American foreign policy

by Justin Raimondo


Busy. Busy. Busy. When it comes to conjuring new enemies, this administration never sleeps. If you thought taking on the non-Israeli portion of the Middle East is a lot to put on our plate, then you haven't got a clue as to the appetites of the Bush regime. Not only do they want to start a new cold war with the Muslim world, they want to re-ignite the old cold war with Russia.

Speaking in Vilnius at a summit of Baltic and Black Sea officials – in effect, a concordance of America's very own Warsaw Pact, which now encircles the former Soviet Union – Cheney brayed: "No legitimate interest is served when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or blackmail, either by supply manipulation or attempts to monopolize transportation."

This is a reference to the dispute between Ukraine, with its newly installed, Washington-loyal satrap Viktor Yushchenko at the helm, and the Russians over the price of oil and natural gas. During the bad old days of the Soviet empire, Ukraine was considered such a loyal Soviet sycophant that the Kremlin gladly subsidized the cost of oil and natural gas, exporting it at below cost to Ukrainian consumers. That's precisely the sort of uneconomic feature of empire-building that leads to imperial decay, and, in the case of the Soviet Union, contributed to its downfall. In any event, after the implosion of Communism and the demise of the Warsaw Pact, Ukraine broke away from the Soviet Union, and that was a bitter blow to the formerly high-and-mighty lords of the Kremlin. The seizure of the Ukrainian government by Washington's allies in Kiev meant Moscow itself was but a few minutes by missile from the nearest NATO outpost. (Yes, technically, Ukraine is still not a formal member of NATO, but that's on the agenda if the Americans can keep their local hirelings in the saddle.)

So what is this "blackmail" Cheney is talking about? It is the Russians abandoning the doctrine of socialist internationalism and putting good old capitalist theory into practice. Instead of continuing to offer oil and natural gas to Ukraine at below-market prices, they insist on charging the price set by the international market. To Cheney, this is "blackmail": an economist would call it capitalism.

I don't know if this signifies Cheney's formal conversion to Marxism, but surely it ought to dispel the myth that our Vice President believes in anything approaching the free market. Or, perhaps, he believes that capitalism is a system reserved for the U.S. Whatever is going on here, the brazen hypocrisy of Cheney's remarks are hard to take: here, after all, is the vice president of a nation that imposes draconian economic sanctions on countries that fail to kowtow to its every edict, making accusations of "blackmail"! Here is a nation whose president refuses to take the nuking of Iran off the table as a distinct possibility – and it's the Russians who are the blackmailers. Go figure!

Cheney, however, was just getting started. Russia, he insisted, harbors dreams of revanchism: "No one can justify actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbor." Coming from Cheney, these words must have struck at the heart of every Russian nationalist, including those in the Kremlin, cutting them to the quick. Because there Russian President Vladimir Putin sits amid the ruins of a shattered empire, like a quadruple-amputee victim of a major car accident with the shards still lodged in the bleeding sides of his torso. Cheney's words rubbed salt in some pretty sore wounds: That this was his intention is hard not to believe.

What did he hope to accomplish by it? Certainly he could not have thought it would have any effect other than to ratchet up anti-American sentiment and reinforce rising Russian nationalism. The vice president may be evil, but he's no dummy: this was a provocation, pure and simple.

The reference to Russia's alleged subversion of its neighbors' "territorial integrity" is code for the disputes over separatism that have broken out in the nations ruled by Cheney's audience. The president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, was present and must have smiled (albeit inwardly) as he recalled his brutal suppression of pro-Russian ethnic minorities in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, who seek independence from their ethnic Georgian overlords. In Kosovo, the Albanian Kosovars were supported by the U.S. in their struggle to achieve de facto independence, but in Georgia separatism is opposed. The one consistent strain in this policy is to oppose Slavic interests wherever they may dare raise their heads: there is to be no quarter in the civilizational war with the (now vastly diminished) Byzantine East, just as there is to be no retreat in the global war on Islam. The American strategy is a simple one: regime change all 'round!

The series of "peaceful" regime changes effected in Russia's "near abroad" – Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova – were all bought and paid for by the U.S., and now, in the cases of Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, we are seeing some blowback, a nationalist reaction to the overweening arrogance of the American hegemon. An effort to pull off a self-styled "denim revolution" in Belarus failed miserably, in part on account of the disunity (and sheer dizziness) of the "democratic" opposition, but mostly because Eastern Europeans are wising up to the Americans' game. Having only just recently left one Warsaw Pact, they are no longer quite so eager to join another.

The recent election held in Belarus, won handily by President Lukashenko, is routinely denounced as fraudulent by European Union commissioners. This charge has got to establish some sort of record for sheer gall, coming as it does from officials of a political entity that repeats referenda until the politically correct results are achieved, in this case "yes" votes for the Euro and the adoption of the EU "constitution" in recalcitrant states like Denmark and Switzerland. In the EU, they just keep voting until they get it "right." This makes the electoral process of a Soviet-era relic like Belarus seem positively liberal by comparison.

Anyone seeking a principled consistency in American foreign policy is bound to be disappointed: separatism is good for the Kosovars and the southern Sudanese, but bad for the South Ossetians and the Russian-speakers of Moldova and the Baltics. Nukes are good in the hands of the Israelis and the Pakistanis, not to mention the Indians, but bad if they're acquired by the Iranians, who have no right to deter nuclear blackmail. No nation may invade or occupy the territory of another – not because it is an act of unprovoked aggression, but because such acts are privileges reserved for the exclusive enjoyment of American government officials.

Facing off against the U.S. in a rematch, post-Communist Russia sees a funhouse mirror reflection of its old self, a Sovietized America at the head of a "global democratic revolution," as our Great Leader puts it. With Washington at the center of an international web of servile "pro-American" parties and propaganda outlets, all trained to bark and bite on command, the anti-Russian "Putin = Stalin" chorus is rising loud and fast. The reason has little to do with his alleged authoritarian proclivities. It is because no one else has unified the Russian people behind an independent agenda – and an independent foreign policy.

Standing up to America on the Iranian question, selling arms to Syria, forbidding the dissemination of American taxpayer dollars to Russian "opposition" politicians – Putin has incurred the wrath of the neoconservatives, who see in him a prime candidate for the new "Hitler." This demonization campaign will accelerate if and when Putin moves to run for another term. The Russian constitution forbids him from running again, but that can always be changed by a Putin-loyal Duma. The irony is that the "human rights" activists accuse the Russian president of harboring "antidemocratic" tendencies precisely because he is supported by the overwhelming majority of Russians, who would gladly elect him to a third and even a fourth term, just like the Americans supported Franklin Roosevelt.

The idea that the U.S. is trying to spread its system of "democracy" is just a cover for a program that is essentially the opposite. As evidenced by Cheney's denunciation of Russia's newfound devotion to the free market – at least when it comes to un-fixing oil and natural gas prices – the Americans are not intent on spreading free-market ideology. What they are spreading is American control: of key military bases and access to oil. The U.S. drive to achieve what the neocons call "benevolent global hegemony" is relentless, and Putin is an obstacle in their path: there can be little doubt that the regime-changers of Washington have him in their sights.



http://antiwar.com/justin/

Published on Saturday, May 6, 2006 by the Boston Globe


'World Wide Suicide'

by Pearl Jam



I felt the earth on Monday. It moved
beneath my feet.
In the form of a morning paper,
Laid out for me to see.

Saw his face in a corner picture,
I recognized the name.
Could not stop staring at the, Face
I'd never see again.

It's a shame to awake in a world of pain
What does it mean when a war has taken over
It's the same everyday in a hell manmade
What can be saved, and who
will be left to hold her?

The whole world, World over.
It's a world wide suicide.
The whole world, World over.
It's a world wide suicide.

Medals on a wooden mantle,
Next to a handsome face.
That the president took for granted,
Writing checks that others pay.

And in all the madness,
thought becomes numb and naive.
So much to talk about, nothing for to say.

It's the same everyday and the wave won't break
Tell you to pray, while the devils on their shoulder
Laying claim to the take that our soldiers save
Does not equate, and the truth's already out there

The whole world, World over.
It's a world wide suicide.
The whole world, World over.
It's a world wide suicide.

Looking in the eyes of the fallen
You got to know there's another, another,
another, another, another way

It's a shame to awake in a world of pain
What does it mean when a war has taken over
It's the same everyday and the wave won't break
Tell you to pray, while the devils on their shoulder

The whole world, World over.
It's a world wide suicide.
The whole world, World over.
It's a world wide suicide.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0506-23.htm

4 dead in Ohio

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are gunning us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are gunning us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

- Neil Young

Published on Saturday, May 6, 2006 by the Boston Globe

'Lookin' for a Leader'

by Neil Young


Lookin' for a leader
To bring our country home
Re-unite the red white and blue
Before it turns to stone

Lookin' for somebody
Young enough to take it on
Clean up the corruption
And make the country strong

Walkin' among our people
There's someone who's straight and strong
To lead us from desolation
And a broken world gone wrong

Someone walks among us
And I hope he hears the call
And maybe it's a woman
Or a black man after all

Yeah maybe it's Obama
But he thinks that he's too young
Maybe it's Colin Powell
To right what he's done wrong

America has a leader
But he's not in the house
He's walking here among us
And we've got to seek him out

Yeah we've got our election
But corruption has a chance
We got to have a clean win
To regain confidence

America is beautiful
But she has an ugly side
We're lookin' for a leader
In this country far and wide
We're lookin' for a leader
With the great spirit on his side

Someone walks among us
And I hope he hears the call
And maybe it's a woman
Or a black man after all


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0506-22.htm

Published on Saturday, May 6, 2006 by the Boston Globe

'We Shall Overcome'

by Robert Kuttner


NEW ORLEANS -- 'THIS IS our first gig," said Bruce Springsteen. ''I hope it goes OK."

With that, The Boss and his 18-piece Seeger Sessions Band opened their set with a rocking rendition of ''Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep." As an act of solidarity with this doubly ravaged city, Springsteen began his homage to Pete Seeger tour here, at ground zero of everything ruinous about the people who now run our country.

The 37th annual Jazz and Heritage Festival was playing to a smaller, whiter crowd than usual in half-abandoned New Orleans. It would be hard to imagine a more poignant or uplifting marriage of musician, impulse, venue, and moment.

Lately, musicians as diverse as Neil Young, Pearl Jam, Green Day, Paul Simon, and Ani di Franco have followed the same impulse. This is surely the time and the place.

Commentators solemnly billed Hurricane Katrina as the flood that laid bare awkward truths of class and race in America. It did -- for a vivid week, and then we turned away.

By a fine accident of timing, I came here for a conference on what Katrina revealed -- and found plenty of surprises. Downtown and the tourist French Quarter, which got priority federal attention, look as if Katrina had never happened. But the outlying scale of devastation is far more extensive, and the federal default of government more staggering, than one could imagine.

Of 485,000 people who lived here before Katrina, only about 165,000 remain. New Orleans had high rates of black home ownership. But tens of thousands of homeowners are trapped in a horrific Catch-22 because of cascading federal failures.

In huge swaths of the city, basic public services are unrestored, so people can't return to viable houses. Mountains of stinking rubbish -- once the stuff of homes and lives -- lie uncollected on front yards. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, decided to clear inhabited areas first. It just never returned to pick up the rest.

Tens of thousands of homes could be renovated and reoccupied. But instead of making emergency rehab grants or loans, FEMA spends $90,000 per trailer, often parked in front yards, while black mold relentlessly ruins structurally sound houses.

FEMA was slow to revise federal flood insurance guidelines. Without federal flood coverage, no private insurance flows and people can't get bank loans. So extensive salvageable areas remain unoccupied. Meanwhile, the 2006 hurricane season arrives June 1, but the levees are restored only to withstand a mild category 2 storm.

Filling some of the vacuum left by the Bush default, heroic work is being done by volunteers, from Habitat for Humanity, ACORN, and several churches and trade unions. Many live in a tent city -- which FEMA now plans to tear down June 1.

Springsteen toured all this, appalled. He composed two new stanzas to the 1929 song, ''How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" including, ''[Bush] gave a little pep talk, said I'm with you, then he took a walk." Springsteen elicited loud cheers when he deplored the government's ''criminal irresponsibility." A small plane circled, towing an ''Impeach Bush" banner.

New Orleans heroically pulled itself together to bring off this Fest. Held on a racetrack grounds, the fair has nine simultaneous performance spaces going all day, a crafts section, kids' tent, and a food midway where New Orleans's finest chefs serve such specialties as artichoke and oyster soup and gourmet jambalaya ladled from murky oil drums at $5 a bowl.

As the field dried out from a drenching rain, I gloriously wandered from Willis Prudhomme and the Zydeco Express to the gospel tent to a medley of everything from brass bands, Dixieland funeral music, back to more zydeco, to blues.

By 5:30, when Springsteen strode onto the main stage, following New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint, the sun was shining. Like Seeger's, the Springsteen repertoire included not just political songs such as ''Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," but the whimsical bits of Americana that Seeger loved, like ''(Get Out of the Way,) Old Dan Tucker." And when Springsteen began ''We Shall Overcome," the crowd, both the '60s generation and youngsters who had seen it only on TV joined uplifted hands, swayed, and sang along, without irony.

If anyone can reintroduce songs of protest to a new mass audience, making that much-reworked tradition fresh, it is the sunny, exuberant Springsteen. Folk music was, of course, the original popular culture. Sometimes, the borrowings of commercial pop from folk music are cheesy and opportunistic (say, the Byrds' version of Seeger). Other times, the result is a powerful, authentic synthesis, as in the work of Ry Cooder, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon at their best, New Orleans's own Randy Newman, who wrote the original flood anthem three decades ago, ''Louisiana: They're trying to wash us away," and now Springsteen.

Like protest music, you never know when protest itself will recur. As Springsteen packed up and our conference began, millions not ''Born In The USA" were assembling across America to declare their dignity as working people and human beings. They also sang.

America today is depressing, but music adds energy and spirit to the protest imperative. Song is an inherently collective ritual that reminds us that we are not alone. You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.



http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0506-20.htm

Published on Sunday, May 7, 2006 by the Boston Globe

A Clear Message on Iraq

by Joan Vennochi


Our war, through their eyes, is not a pretty picture.

As they see it, war with Iraq weakens America and strengthens a mutual enemy -- Muslim fundamentalists.

A small delegation of women journalists and media professionals from Morocco visited Boston this week to ''break the ice between the US and Muslim countries," as they explained in French, through a translator.

When the discussion turned to war in Iraq, their message was loud and clear, in French or English.

''C'est une catastrophe," said Hinde Taarji, a journalist and author of several books, including one about women and Islam.

''C'est terrible," said Maria Latifi, director of an educational television station in Morocco.

The others in this band of four Muslim women echoed these sentiments.

They came to America, first, to get the word out that not all Muslim women are swathed in veils and burkas, living lives of oppression and misery. But they also have a larger mission, to fight on behalf of those who still struggle.

To that end, they seek a longstanding weapon of mass influence: American moral authority. Yet, in their eyes, that sharp and precious tool is dulled by America's policy in Iraq.

Didn't they and other progressive Muslims see the proudly purple fingers of voters in Iraq?

No, said Latifi. They ''went completely unnoticed." People see ''the mayhem . . . the sectarian war."

''They see a country sinking," she said.

And, as she pointed out, they see it everyday, as America does, via CNN.

Because of the negative perception in the Muslim world of what is happening in Iraq, these women believe hard-line religious fundamentalists are gaining strength.

Bahia Amrani, founder and publisher of a newsweekly magazine, Le Reporter, said that America does not understand that democracy cannot be secured through force. Before people can fight for freedom on their own behalf, she said, ''There has to be a fight against illiteracy, poverty, exclusion."

This perspective on democracy comes from citizens who live in what is considered an emerging democracy.

''We are in a situation of transition -- the process of democratization," said Fatiha Layadi, the director of communication and press for the Kingdom of Morocco and part of this women's delegation.

Morocco achieved independence from France in 1956 and is governed by a parliamentary monarchy. Under King Hassan II, who ruled from 1960-99, the country went through ''les annees de plomb" -- the years of lead. This was a period of repression and political unrest that was fiercest in the 1970s and 1980s. Newspapers were closed and books banned. Dissidents were arrested and executed; people ''disappeared." During the 1990s, pressure from the United States and European countries led to improvements.

Under King Mohammed VI, who took over in 1999, Morocco is achieving what are viewed as slow, incremental reforms. The press is freer, and the king is allowing public review of Morocco's past human rights violations. This delegation of women is also touting the promise of a new family law code. Proposed by the king and passed by the Moroccan Parliament in 2004, the law recognizes women as equal to their husband; it allows divorce, child custody, and inheritance rights that were previously denied them.

Barbara Bodine, a former ambassador to Yemen and now a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School, calls Morocco ''one of the credible, emerging democracies" in the Muslim world. The family law code makes Morocco ''one of the leaders in the Islamic world" when it comes to women's rights.

Still, religious fundamentalists still fight hard against reforms.

For these Moroccan women, the pressure America applies to the cause of women's rights is very important. They see tangible results in Afghanistan. But in their view, American policy in Iraq is now ''helping fundamentalists, preventing the voice of modernity from being heard."

These women should be invested in democracy as the key to greater freedom for all. But they are not invested in the US fight in Iraq and its stated goal of establishing some form of democracy in that country. They believe fundamentalists are drawing strength from the war and that strength threatens progressive goals.

Many Americans see what they see, too. How sad for that to be our common ground.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0507-25.htm

Bush and repubs at Their Most Dangerous;
Scorching the Earth Behind Them

By Ron Fullwood
OpEdNews.com

Sunday 07 May 2006


This could be the most dangerous period of Bush's reign.
If it's true that the next presidential election has already begun, then it's also true that the end of the Bush regime is unfolding as well. I should be feeling some satisfaction in that, and, I will, when it's over.

This could be the most dangerous period of Bush's reign. The carefully layered walls of Bush's bubble are closing in as the outer layers of purchased politicos are beginning to peel away, revealing the core ideologues of the cabal. Long gone are wistful architects of the new, bloody American imperialism like Wolfowitz and Perle. As they receded, loyalists like Rice, Hadley, Gordon England, etc. advanced up the chain they forged with their military industrial alliances into catbird seats, lording over our defense budgets, plotting out their imperious ambitions with no fear in their fiefdom.

Stepping out from behind the curtain into the positions of power are faces of past bloody mis-adventures like Negroponte, and engineers of the new American fascism, like Gen. Hayden, whose tenure is marked by the admission of the treasonous act of spying on Americans he shared with the president who directed him there.

This bunch's retreat from their privileged bunkers at the end of Bush's term will be marred by more than misplaced furniture and missing typewriter keys. They are neck-deep in two occupations (both with active, violent resistance), complete with over a thousand prisoners, most held without charges, and many subject to torture which continues even in the wake of the revelations at Abu Ghraib; they are actively engaged in another similar face down of another sovereign nation, Iran, threatening them with preemptive war without any evidence of any threat, direct or otherwise; and our nation is being held hostage to outrageous prices for gas and oil, fueled in a great part by the very militarism that Bush's father promised in the first Gulf war would secure the flow of oil in the Persian Gulf.

The core ideologues who comprise the leadership in the U.S. offices of war and muckraking have long nursed their ambitions to ride the nation's military machine to world dominance and influence. Unchecked, they're going to scorch the earth before their regime dies.

Cheney did his best to lurch our nation back into the Cold War Thursday when he criticized Russia and President Vladimir V. Putin at a conference in Lithuania. He accused Russia of using their oil reserves as "tools of intimidation or blackmail."

Cheney went from there to Kazakhstan to buddy up with the oppressive state (two presidential candidates murdered in the past 6 months), score their oil, and possibly persuade them to bypass the Russians with their pipeline to directly supply the West, possibly coming out in Turkey.

Russian press immediately accused Cheney of trying to start a new Cold war. That's what Kommersant, a major newspaper there called it: "The beginning of a second Cold War." That would mesh with the Bush regime's ambition to use their militarism to catapult the U.S. into an era of paranoiac appropriations of our tax dollars into their military industry protection racket. Stir up a nemesis and force the nation to spend their great-grandchildren's future on weaponry and mobilizations of our fractured forces defending against the certain reprisals and recriminations.

All of this is fostered, nurtured, and perpetuated by a State Dept. more concerned with proliferating war than in promoting the institution of peace. We started out with the agency headed by the general who prosecuted the first bloody, neo-con aggression against sovereign Iraq, now we will presumably have a general running the CIA. At the U.N. Bush has installed a man who has publicly asserted that the institution 'doesn't exist'.

John Bolton, leading foreign policy adviser and diplomat of the U.S. regime which doles out nuclear favors and permissions according to how low countries bow to them, while punishing those who dare to criticize them, is actively trying to intimidate the international community into approving a security council resolution under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which is militarily enforceable, to make all IAEA resolutions mandatory.

Instead of continuing with the dismantling of our nuclear arsenal, the Bush regime set out from the beginning of their reign to awaken the nation's slumbering nuclear program in their ambition to build more radioactive bombs with new justifications for their use. They want to build nuclear bunker-busters; the type of weapon that, coincidently, they have called for to disrupt the weapon's labs they have conjured up in Iran beyond any supporting evidence. In all, no nemesis, no new nukes.

The danger from this retreating U.S. regime is not just in the new money they seek for new nukes, or for ground-based lasers to shoot down 'enemy' satellites. It's not just from the money they want for new construction of permanent military bases in Iraq, or for new prison construction at Gitmo and Afghanistan. The danger's not restricted to assertions by the Executive branch that they have the authority to ignore or re-interpret any law because of a congressional authorization to catch the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks.

The real danger is in the mindlessly callous manner the Bush regime has set the bulk of the world against our nation by acting on their manufactured mandate to conquer. Their aggressive and violent expansionism has provoked lesser equipped nations to unconventional defenses in support of basic expressions of liberty and self-determination, which the Bushites false authority disregards as mere threats to their consolidation of power.

Across the globe there was, at least, a tacit understanding about our nation's military forces, which were to be guileless in their unassailable defenses, that there was some internal moral compass that would stifle our leader's tendencies toward repression and domination with the checks and balances of our democracy. But, the institutions of our government have been invaded by a cabal of industry executives whose ambitions to rape our Treasury for their own greed have been unabated by the representatives we elect to account for our tax dollars. Their only relevant authority outside of their squabbling is the allocation of our hard-earned contributions to government, which they pass around among their industry benefactors as if they hadn't already broken the bank with over 40% of our national debt foreign-owned.

The legacy of the Bush regime will be a loaded Supreme Court, a kudzu of surveillance and muckraking against Americans, indenture to price inflation by wizened energy producing nations antagonized by his arrogant assumption of U.S. ownership of their resources by virtue of our need, and, of course, a manipulated foreign policy which exploits the resources of the defenseless around the world for the benefit of a minority of industry leeches.

The continuing danger of this regressive regime is in trumped-up, bloody invasions of sovereign nations to rob them of their oil and resources. And, it's in the shackling of countless generations of Americans to a corporate agenda of U.S. world domination, supported by the perpetual sacrifice of the lives and blood of generations of our sons and daughters in continuous world war. Regaining control of Congress from the republican enablers will be the first step in coaxing the tentacles of their fascism from their grip on the institutions of our democracy.

Then, our Democratic leaders will have to act . . . to reclaim the ground.


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050706H.shtml

Defending the Indefensible

By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 09 May 2006

After years of ignoring the United Nations panel charged with oversight of the Convention Against Torture (CAT) - a centerpiece of international human rights law - the US government turned up at a meeting of the group in Geneva with a delegation of more than two dozen lawyers and other officials to affirm that the US is "absolutely committed to uphold its national and international obligations to eradicate torture" and that "there are no exceptions to this prohibition."

That's what I call chutzpah!

The government's theory must be that the more lawyers you bring to Geneva, the easier it will be to bob and weave your way around those pesky questions people keep asking about Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo, renditions and secret prisons in Eastern Europe.

Especially if your delegation doesn't include anyone from the CIA.

Heading this delegation of representatives from the departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, is State Department legal adviser John B. Bellinger III.

With an absolutely straight face, Bellinger told the Committee Against Torture that despite instances of abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the US has not systematically mistreated prisoners and remained committed to a global ban on torture.

But members of the panel referred to a report by investigators for the European Parliament who said last month they had evidence that the CIA had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over Europe since 2001, in some cases transporting terrorist suspects abducted within the European Union to countries known to use torture.

Bellinger said he could not answer questions about intelligence-related activities, but asserted that the allegation that those planes carried terror suspects was an "absurd insinuation."

He added that in cases where the government has "rendered" prisoners to countries with poor human rights records, it has sought assurances that they will not be tortured.

But the panel wasn't buying the "diplomatic assurances" argument. "The very fact that you are asking for diplomatic assurances means you are in doubt," said Andreas Mavrommatis, chairman of the committee.

The "diplomatic assurances" charade has been known - and discredited - for years. But "rendition" is a policy the administration defends, saying it helps to get dangerous individuals out of the US.

In one of the better-publicized cases of "rendition," Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, was detained by US authorities after arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport from a vacation in North Africa. Instead of being allowed to continue his journey to Canada, he was detained by US officials, then shipped off to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured. He tried to sue the US government, but his suit was dismissed because the Justice Department argued that trial would involve divulging "state secrets" in open court.

In another "rendition" case, a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, was abducted while on vacation in Macedonia in December 2003 and flown to Afghanistan, where he remained in jail without charge until late May 2004, when he was taken to a deserted country road and set free. He too has brought suit against the US government.

Bellinger also defended the US decision not to grant prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq rights under the Geneva Conventions.

Terrorist suspects could pose a threat to security if allowed to meet with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, as stipulated by the Geneva Conventions, he said.

The rationale of such a security threat has clearly been applied by the Bush administration to the alleged key figures in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubeida. These men are being held in undisclosed locations without access to the Red Cross or to legal counsel, and have reportedly been subjected to "aggressive interrogation" techniques such as "waterboarding," in which the prisoner is led to believe he is drowning. And at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the government has Mohamed al-Qahtani, who it now claims is the real would-be 20th hijacker.

Many legal experts believe that US treatment of these suspects is the principal reason they will never be tried in a court of law, civilian or military. It is unlikely that either would admit evidence obtained through torture.

That's one reason the Justice Department made such a big deal of the trial, conviction and sentencing of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was clearly a bit player in al-Qaeda who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. He was found guilty of conspiracy and of lying to the FBI, thereby preventing the government from taking actions to prevent the 9/11 attacks. The government sought the death penalty, but the jury sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of release.

Meanwhile, back in Geneva, attorney Bellinger offered a self-congratulatory tribute to US commitment to the rule of law. "The timing of our report comes at a difficult time for the United States," he said. "But we did not shy away from coming."

Members of the panel were clearly unimpressed. Some expressed skepticism about aspects of the American presentation. For example, Fernando Mariño Menendez of Spain cited data from human rights groups saying that of 600 American service members or intelligence officers accused of having been involved in the torture or murder of detainees, only 10 have received prison terms of a year or more.

Addressing reporters after the hearing concluded, Bellinger said that provisions in the torture convention that prohibit transferring detainees to countries where they could be tortured do not apply to detainee "transfers that take place outside of the United States." He added, however, that the US has "as a policy matter, applied exactly the same standards" to such transfers.

Members of the US delegation also emphasized that there have been "relatively few actual cases of abuse" of terror detainees, and Bellinger said that some allegations have been widely exaggerated.

Deputy US Assistant Defense Secretary Charles Stimson told the UN panel that of the 120 detainee deaths that have occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq, abuse was suspected in only 29 cases. He said that the deaths had been investigated and appropriate action taken. Stimson also said that no detainees have died at Guantanamo Bay.

For years, Bush administration officials have argued that international human rights laws should not constrain the conduct of United States forces. By sending its oversized delegation to Geneva, the administration is belatedly seeking to restore credibility to its record on prisoner treatment by affirming support for the CAT.

But pulling off that sleight of hand is going to take a lot more than a couple of dozen lawyers turning up in Geneva.

They could start by including a CIA representative in our next delegation to Geneva.

Then President Bush could rescind the "signing statement" he attached to the McCain anti-torture legislation, effectively giving himself the right to ignore the law whenever he says it's in the interest of national security.

That's known as Dubya's Rule of Law.


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050906Z.shtml

Published on Wednesday, May 10, 2006 by The Nation

Will Civilians Control the Military?

by John Nichols


President Bush's nomination of Air Force General Michael V. Hayden to direct the Central Intelligence Agency has opened a debate over whether the most fundamental principles of the American Republic remain will remain in place.

The founders who proposed to "chain the dogs of war" established civilian control over the military as an essential underpinning of the American experiment. Along with their determination to put in place a system of checks and balances, which they constructed to prevent presidents from leading the country into war without properly consulting Congress, Jefferson, Madison and their compatriots believed that giving civilians the means to manage the military was necessary if the nation they imagined was to be free.

Agonizingly aware of the abuses that had been imposed upon the former colonies by a British military accountable only to a distant and dictatorial king, the founders worried about the degeneration of the American experiment into a state of affairs similar to that of the Empire against which they had rebelled.

Sam Adams warned that, "Even when there is a necessity of military power, within the land... a wise and prudent people will always have a watchful & jealous eye over it." Elbridge Gerry, a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and the fifth vice president of the United States, argued that, "Standing armies in time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican Governments, dangerous to the liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism."

Gerry was no radical. He expressed a common concern about the scope and power of the new nation's military, according to the essential review of thinking of the founders with regard to civilian control of the military compiled by Dr. Michael F. Cairo, a specialist in American foreign policy and the foreign policy process.

"At the beginnings of the Republic," recalls Dr. Cairo, in an explanation of the principle distributed by no less an authority than the U.S. State Department, "four basic premises conditioned how most Americans saw civilian control of the military. First, large military forces were viewed as a threat to liberty, a legacy of British history and the army's occupation in the colonial period. Second, large military forces threatened American democracy. This notion was linked to the ideal of the citizen-soldier and fears of establishing an aristocratic or autocratic military class. Third, large military forces threatened economic prosperity. Maintaining large standing armies represented an enormous burden on the fledgling economy of a new nation. Finally, large military forces threatened peace. The founders accepted the liberal proposition that arms races led to war. Thus, civilian control of the military arose from a set of historical circumstances and became embedded over time in American political thought through tradition, custom, and belief."

To cement those principles in place, the founders assured that a civilian, the president, would serve as commander-in-chief of the military. They also established the principle and the precedent that, as Alexander Hamilton noted in a discussion of the management of the military in the Federalist Papers, "the whole power of the proposed government is to be in the hands of the representatives of the people." To Hamilton's view, "This is the essential, and, after all, the only efficacious security for the rights and privileges of the people which is attainable in civil society."

In order to maintain meaningful civilian control of the military, however, one commodity has always been essential: honest intelligence about global threats and opportunities gathered and assessed by an independent agency that recognizes its responsibility to inform and empower civilian authorities -- as opposed to merely echoing the official line of the Pentagon.

This is a wall of separation every bit as important as the one the founders proposed to divide church and state. And the motivation was the same: a sense, born of painful experience, that only by maintaining a strict separation of powers and influences could the new Republic function across the long term as an entity distinct from the monarchical dictatorships of old Europe.

President Bush says his nominee to succeed scandal-hobbled Central Intelligence Agency director Porter Goss is "the right man to lead the CIA at this critical moment in our nation's history." But even if it was true that Hayden's background made him "the right man" for the job -- as assumption shot down by the fact of Hayden's involvement with the president's illegal program of eavesdropping on the phone conversations of Americans -- the appointment of a military commander to head the nation's premier civilian intelligence gathering and analysis agency would still by the wrong move at this or any other point in American history.

Any effort to collapse the wall of separation between an agency charged with gathering the intelligence needed to enable civilians to guide and manage the military -- as the Hayden appointment would surely do -- has to be seen as a radical assault on the founding principles of the Republic.

To his credit, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who rarely differs with the White House, does see it that way.

"The Speaker does not believe that a military person should be leading the CIA, a civilian agency," explains Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean.

Hastert argues that putting a general in charge of the "CIA would give too much influence over the U.S. intelligence community to the Pentagon."

The Speaker is right, and his position parallels that of House Intelligence Committee chair Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who has led the charge against Hayden's nomination. "I do believe he's the wrong person, the wrong place, at the wrong time," Hoekstra says of Hayden. "We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time."

The only problem in Hoekstra's otherwise strong statement is his "at this time" qualification.

There is never a right time to undermine the fundamental American principle that civilians should control the military -- and that those civilians should have access to the independent intelligence that alone makes real the promise of such control.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0510-27.htm

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/conte...oycol_0506.html

Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death

by Craig Crawford

05.12.2006


Americans must now tap into their inner Patrick Henry. A radical among revolutionaries who opposed the U.S. Constitution for giving government too much power, the fiery Virginian would probably set himself on fire today. The government spies on people, lies about it, and, when caught in the act, refuses to give security clearances to the investigators.


If we believe the dubious claim that terrorist threats justify sweeping surveillance without any checks and balances then, in a different context, we have truly come to the ultimate choice that Henry posed: Are we prepared to die for liberty? Not in battle against foreign occupiers, but as a possible consequence of preventing our own government from spying on us? My answer is Yes: If losing freedom be the price of safety, then safety be damned.


"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" -- Patrick Henry, 1775



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-crawfo...-m_b_20851.html

Inferno xxxii
And while we were advancing toward the center
to which all weight is drawn-I, shivering
in that eternally cold shadow-I
know not if it was will or destiny
or chance, but as I walked among the heads,
I struck my foot hard in the face of one

Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?

By Frank Rich
The New York Times

Sunday 14 May 2006


When America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.

This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.

President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.

We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.

Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention "secrets" secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees "to countries that routinely use torture." Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that "plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements." These articles, capped by Ms. Priest's, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can't afford to lose.

The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved "thousands of lives." The White House's journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposŽ "may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs."

Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.

Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.

Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In "Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.

Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about prostitutes and Watergate "poker parties" swirling around this Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn't play games with the nation's defense during wartime.

Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."

What prompted Mr. Goss's about-face was revealed in his early memo instructing C.I.A. employees to "support the administration and its policies in our work." His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers also tried to halt publication of "Jawbreaker," the former clandestine officer Gary Berntsen's account of how the American command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen's team had him trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her boss's management disasters.

Soon to come are the Senate's hearings on Mr. Goss's successor, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He's "the right man" to lead the C.I.A. "at this critical moment in our nation's history." That's not exactly reassuring.

This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss's appointment in the autumn of 2004.

Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they'll fail to investigate the nominee's record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 - "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one - and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."

If Democrats - and, for that matter, Republicans - let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051406F.shtml

Published on Sunday, May 14, 2006 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Washington)

What CIA Needs is a New President

by Margaret Carlson


When the GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee immediately objected to the prospect of Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden heading the Central Intelligence Agency, I knew the president would appoint him. Nothing stiffens The Decider's spine like someone presuming to contradict him.

In some ways Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency, is actually a high-water mark in Bush headhunting. Hayden's resume, unlike those of Harriet Miers, Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff, is at least thematically related to the core requirements of the job.

Yet Rep. Peter Hoekstra, head of the intelligence committee, has valid reasons for calling Hayden the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time. It's not that he's a military man -- four CIA heads have been that -- but that the military has already grabbed an outsized amount of authority over intelligence under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who can shape it to his liking when it's in his own back yard.

Nor do members of Congress share the White House's view that its tough-on-terrorism credentials are burnished only by elevating the man who gave us warrantless wiretaps and then demonstrated a disturbing enthusiasm for repeating Karl Rove's talking points in defending them.

Hayden's nomination is one more chapter in the Bush administration's campaign to simultaneously punish the CIA for not completely rolling over in the run-up to the war and blame it for suckering the Congress and public into the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation. It's quite a card trick for the president and vice president to slice and dice the info to their needs, add homegrown material from Rumsfeld's shop as needed, and then claim we were all fooled by the same faulty data.

Since then, George W. Bush's plan on intelligence is the opposite of the old saw that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. His is "if it ain't broke, break it." Then put the fix in.

Bush started by appointing former low-level CIA case worker and Florida Rep. Porter Goss to replace George "Slam Dunk" Tenet. And what a heckuva job Goss did until he was shown the door several days ago.

Goss brought in a raft of political operatives from Capitol Hill who knew nothing about intelligence and everything about insulting the Langley veterans who helped end the Cold War. His strange choice as executive director was Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who resigned Monday amid reports in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that he took part in poker games at the Watergate Hotel arranged by Brent Wilkes, a contractor and longtime friend of Foggo's.

Wilkes was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case that sent former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham to federal prison for accepting bribes. Prosecutors are investigating whether Wilkes and the fellow contractor who bribed Cunningham provided Watergate suites and prostitutes to him and others, the Journal reported on May 2. A CIA spokesman confirmed to the Journal that Foggo attended some of the poker games but said he never saw any prostitutes or did anything improper.

Thank goodness for what bloggers are calling Watergategate. Mere rank incompetence isn't usually enough to move Bush to get rid of an appointee.

The spin out of the White House about Goss' resignation is that he was having a turf war with intelligence czar John Negroponte, whose very job it is to end turf wars. If that's the positive spin, imagine what the truth must look like.

Negroponte is the winner in the assault on the CIA so far. He has limited training for the job and it's hard to know precisely what he's going to do. Is the intent to merge all intelligence operations into his? If so, we're in for the Bureaucratic Rumble of the Century between him and Rumsfeld.

Is he going to put all his eggs into the high-tech basket, reducing the already depleted clandestine operations at the CIA?

Hayden is all about equipment. The greatest high-tech bungle of recent years is the multibillion-dollar hole dug at the NSA by his Trailblazer system, which was recently put out of its misery. Although Hayden's machines sometimes worked, as when the NSA recovered the message on Sept. 10, 2001, that "Tomorrow is zero hour," he lacked the human intelligence to translate it.

If Bush opts to overweight technology, intelligence may turn out to be one more policy area in which the president is duped by someone else's fantasy.

The CIA could use some oversight, which it would have if Congress were still alive, and needs more analysts who know the countries, languages and gathering places of the terrorists we seek to defeat. Most of all, it needs a firewall making it impervious to manipulation by presidents and their minions. That's one thing we know won't happen on Bush's watch, no matter who sits at the top.



http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0514-27.htm

"Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization." -George Orwell 1984


Bush's 'Big Brother' Blunder

By Robert Parry
May 13, 2006


George W. Bush’s warrantless phone data collection may not only violate the U.S. Constitution but expend so much money and manpower that America is made less safe – by diverting resources away from more practical steps, like inspecting cargo and hiring translators.

Yet, because the operation is wrapped in layers and layers of secrecy – based on the dubious argument that al-Qaeda might not realize it’s being spied on – the public doesn’t know how much the project costs, who’s getting contracts and whether it does any good.

So far, however, what administration officials and computer experts have been willing to describe shouldn’t give Americans much confidence that their trade-off of Fourth Amendment freedoms for a little extra safety is a particularly good deal.

The project’s designers say the National Security Agency’s electronic warehousing of trillions of phone records from calls made by some 200 million Americans is intended to seek out “patterns” from conversations involving alleged terrorists and then to apply the digital outline to the stockpiled records.

That search, presumably, then spits out the phone numbers of other callers in the United States who fit into the “patterns.” These computer-generated tips then go to the FBI, which may question the suspects or use other investigative strategies.

There are, however, logical flaws to this “Big Brother” computer scheme, especially the idea that the project is likely to discern many usable “patterns” of phone calls that if applied to the population would detect much suspicious activity.

The 9/11 hijackers, for instance, made very few substantive calls about their plot, recognizing the risk of electronic surveillance and preferring face-to-face meetings as a way to avoid detection, according to the 9/11 Commission Report.

Most of the calls cited by the report relate to personal matters, such as contacting friends or searching for housing. For instance, Flight 93 hijacker Ziad “Jarrah made hundreds of phone calls to [his girlfriend] and communicated frequently by e-mail,” the report said.

On Jan. 20, 2001, Flight 173 hijacker Marwan al “Shehhi telephoned [his family in the United Arab Emirates] and said he was still living and studying in Hamburg,” Germany, the report said. The cell-phone records of 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta showed him calling about lodging in Florida on April 6, 9, 10 and 11, 2001.

Meaningful communications about the 9/11 plot almost always occurred in direct meetings between participants, often in foreign countries. According to the 9/11 report, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden passed on his final instructions to Atta through intermediary Ramzi Banalshibh in Spain.

Little Advantage

So, even with the most expensive computers, it’s hard to see how a “social-network analysis” would likely lead to revealing a terrorist plot, unless the analysis was aided by effective human intelligence. In other words, old-fashioned intelligence-gathering, not new-fangled gimmicks, still would be the key to stopping terrorism.

That seems to be the conclusion, too, of a Washington Post source who helped develop the technology.

“Let’s say lots [of data] comes in and we don’t see anything interesting,” the source said. “Tomorrow we find out someone is communicating with a known terrorist. When you go back and look at the past data, there may be information that you missed. A pattern that was meaningless suddenly makes sense.”

That information would then guide the NSA in selecting which telephones in the United States to bug, the Post reported. [Washington Post, May 12, 2006]

But that example could be handled almost as easily while complying with constitutional requirements and getting a warrant. The case also presumes that there was a break in the investigation elsewhere that identified one of the contacts as a terrorist.

Once there is “probable cause” of terrorist activity, a secret warrant could be obtained from a special court under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – or a wiretap could be started 72 hours before the request is made. The terrorist’s contacts then could be traced lawfully.

According to other published accounts, Bush’s warrantless surveillance operation also has had negative consequences, sending FBI investigators off on too many wild goose chases. The warrantless wiretapping generated thousands of tips each month, the New York Times reported..

“But virtually all of [the tips], current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans,” the Times wrote. “FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. … Some FBI officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.” [NYT, Jan. 17, 2006]

Perhaps the best that can be said for storing trillions of American phone records – as disclosed in a May 11 article by USA Today – is that the NSA could move a bit faster in checking out leads that might arise from identifying a terrorist.

The FISA law allows the government to start immediate wiretaps, but the NSA would probably save some time in not having to get the data from the phone companies, since it would already be stored.

To get that slight advantage in speed, however, large sums of money is spent, funds that might be better used for training counter-terrorism agents, hiring more translators and inspecting more than five percent of the cargo containers entering U.S. ports.

‘Big Brother’

An even more troubling trade-off is the possibility that Bush or some future President could exploit the stockpiled data for political ends.

The Founders enacted the Fourth Amendment because they considered freedom from unreasonable search and seizure an “unalienable” right of all citizens. The principle has been largely upheld over more than two centuries of American constitutional history, including moments of danger arguably far more extreme than what is presented today by a small band of al-Qaeda terrorists.

But after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush quickly assembled a system of secrecy and snooping that may have been unprecedented in U.S. history. While some of Bush’s supporters cite prior suspensions of constitutional rights during the Civil War and World War II, those eras lacked today’s technology to pry into the most personal details of the lives of Americans.

Even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Richard Nixon had relatively crude means for invading the privacy of Americans. Bugs were placed on phones; agents were infiltrated into political organizations; and burglars were sent into homes and offices searching for embarrassing or incriminating information.

By contrast, today’s modern technology would let the government collect and analyze trillions of bytes of data from transactions and communications. Indeed, in 2002, the Bush administration did explore the creation of a system for capturing the electronic footprint of just about everybody as they move through everyday life.

The concept, called Total Information Awareness, would have pulled together data on virtually every action that is connected to a computer: books borrowed from a library, fertilizer bought at a farm-supply outlet, movies rented at a video store, prescriptions filled at a pharmacy, sites visited on the Internet, tickets reserved for travel, borders crossed, rooms rented at a motel, and hundreds of other examples.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s top research and development arm, commissioned a comprehensive plan for electronic spying that would track everyone in the world who is part of the modern economy.

“Transactional data” would be gleaned from electronic data on every kind of activity – “financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary, country entry, place/event entry, transportation, housing, critical resources, government, communications,” according to DARPA’s Information Awareness Office.

The program would then cross-reference this data with the “biometric signatures of humans,” data collected on individuals’ faces, fingerprints, gaits and irises. The project sought to achieve what it called “total information awareness” as a way to fight the War on Terror.

The Information Awareness Office even boasted a logo that looked like some kind of clip art from George Orwell’s 1984. The logo showed the Masonic symbol of an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid peering over the globe, with the slogan, “scientia est potentia,” Latin for “knowledge is power.”

Heading the office was Ronald Reagan’s former national security adviser, John Poindexter, who had been a leading figure in the Iran-Contra scandal. Poindexter was convicted of five felonies in 1990, but his case later was overturned by a conservative-dominated three-judge appeals court panel.

After the Information Awareness Office came under public scrutiny in 2002, Poindexter resigned and the project was supposedly shut down. What’s now clear, however, is that elements of “total information awareness” survived in other forms.

Indeed, given the disclosures about the NSA collecting the phone records of some 200 million Americans, a logical extension for the Bush administration would be to factor in more of Poindexter’s ideas.

The argument could be made that if phone records were merged with credit card purchases and other electronic data, the chances of locating a terrorist actually might be increased. For Americans who put their personal safety over the nation’s “unalienable rights,” that might be trade-off they would find acceptable.

But for Americans who believe that fear should never be allowed to trump liberty, a voluntary surrender of the freedoms that have defined the United States – in exchange for some questionable assurances of a little more safety – would be unthinkable.


http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/051206.html

Published on Sunday, May 14, 2006 by the Seattle Times (Washington)

God's Own Party

by Kevin Phillips


Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before — in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews.

Indeed, there is a potent change taking place in this country's domestic and foreign policy, driven by religion's new political prowess and its role in projecting military power in the Mideast.

The United States has organized much of its military posture since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks around the protection of oil fields, pipelines and sea lanes. But U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has another dimension. In addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the White House is courting end-times theologians and electorates for whom the Holy Lands are a battleground of Christian destiny. Both pursuits — oil and biblical expectations — require a dissimulation in Washington that undercuts the U.S. tradition of commitment to the role of an informed electorate.

The political corollary — fascinating but appalling — is the recent transformation of the Republican presidential coalition. Since the election of 2000 and especially that of 2004, three pillars have become central: the oil/national-security complex, with its pervasive interests; the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and the debt-driven financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street.

President Bush has promoted these alignments, interest groups and their underpinning values. His family, over multiple generations, has been linked to a politics that conjoined finance, national security and oil. In recent decades, the Bushes have added close ties to evangelical and fundamentalist power brokers of many persuasions.

Over a quarter-century of Bush presidencies and vice presidencies, the Republican Party has slowly become the vehicle of all three interests — a fusion of petroleum-defined national security; a crusading, simplistic Christianity; and a reckless, credit-feeding financial complex. The three are increasingly allied in commitment to Republican politics.

On the most important front, I am beginning to think that the Southern-dominated, biblically driven Washington GOP represents a rogue coalition, like the Southern, proslavery politics that controlled Washington until Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860.

I have a personal concern over what has become of the Republican coalition. Forty years ago, I began a book, "The Emerging Republican Majority," which I finished in 1967 and took to the 1968 Republican presidential campaign, for which I became the chief political and voting-patterns analyst. Published in 1969, while I was still in the fledgling Nixon administration, the volume was identified by Newsweek as the "political bible of the Nixon Era."

In that book I coined the term "Sun Belt" to describe the oil, military, aerospace and retirement country stretching from Florida to California, but debate concentrated on the argument — since fulfilled and then some — that the South was on its way into the national Republican Party. Four decades later, this framework has produced the alliance of oil, fundamentalism and debt.

Some of that evolution was always implicit. If any region of the United States had the potential to produce a high-powered, crusading fundamentalism, it was Dixie. If any new alignment had the potential to nurture a fusion of oil interests and the military-industrial complex, it was the Sun Belt, which helped draw them into commercial and political proximity and collaboration.

Wall Street, of course, has long been part of the GOP coalition. But members of the Downtown Association and the Links Club were never enthusiastic about "Joe Sixpack" and middle America, to say nothing of preachers such as Oral Roberts or the Tupelo, Miss., Assemblies of God. The new cohabitation is an unnatural one.

While studying economic geography and history in Britain, I had been intrigued by the Eurasian "heartland" theory of Sir Halford Mackinder, a prominent geographer of the early 20th century. Control of that heartland, Mackinder argued, would determine control of the world. In North America, I thought, the coming together of a heartland — across fading Civil War lines — would determine control of Washington.

This was the prelude to today's "red states." The American heartland, from Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico to Ohio and the Appalachian coal states, has become (along with the onetime Confederacy) an electoral hydrocarbon coalition. It cherishes sport-utility vehicles and easy carbon-dioxide emissions policy, and applauds preemptive U.S. air strikes on uncooperative, terrorist-coddling Persian Gulf countries fortuitously blessed with huge reserves of oil.

Because the United States is beginning to run out of its own oil sources, a military solution to an energy crisis is hardly lunacy. Neither Caesar nor Napoleon would have flinched. What Caesar and Napoleon did not face, but less able American presidents do, is that bungled overseas military embroilments could also boomerang economically.

The United States, some $4 trillion in hock internationally, has become the world's leading debtor, increasingly nagged by worry that some nations will sell dollars in their reserves and switch their holdings to rival currencies. Washington prints bonds and dollar-green IOUs, which European and Asian bankers accumulate until for some reason they lose patience. This is the debt Achilles' heel, which stands alongside the oil Achilles' heel.

Unfortunately, more danger lurks in the responsiveness of the new GOP coalition to Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists and Pentecostals, who muster some 40 percent of the party electorate. Many millions believe that the Armageddon described in the Bible is coming soon. Chaos in the explosive Middle East, far from being a threat, actually heralds the second coming of Jesus Christ. Oil-price spikes, murderous hurricanes, deadly tsunamis and melting polar ice caps lend further credence.

The potential interaction between the end-times electorate, inept pursuit of Persian Gulf oil, Washington's multiple deceptions and the financial crisis that could follow a substantial liquidation by foreign holders of U.S. bonds is the stuff of nightmares. To watch U.S. voters enable such policies — the GOP coalition is unlikely to turn back — is depressing to someone who spent many years researching, watching and cheering those grass roots.

Four decades ago, the new GOP coalition seemed certain to enjoy a major infusion of conservative Northern Catholics and Southern Protestants. This troubled me not at all. I agreed with the predominating Republican argument at the time that "secular" liberals, by badly misjudging the depth and importance of religion in the United States, had given conservatives a powerful and legitimate electoral opportunity.

Since then, my appreciation of the intensity of religion in the United States has deepened. When religion was trod upon in the 1960s and thereafter by secular advocates determined to push Christianity out of the public square, the move unleashed an evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal counterreformation, with strong theocratic pressures becoming visible in the Republican national coalition and its leadership.

Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq — widely anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon — the Republican coalition has also seeded half a dozen controversies in the realm of science. These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global population planning, derogation of women's rights and opposition to stem-cell research.

This suggests that U.S. society and politics may again be heading for a defining controversy such as the Scopes trial of 1925. That embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a generation, but the outcome of the eventual 21st century test is hardly assured.

These developments have warped the Republican Party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices and become a gathering threat to America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.

Conservative true believers will scoff at such concerns. The United States is a unique and chosen nation, they say; what did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that he apparently was not added a further debilitating note to the late stages of each national decline.

Over the past 25 years, I have warned frequently of these political, economic and historical (but not religious) precedents. The concentration of wealth that developed in the United States in the bull market of 1982 to 2000 was also typical of the zeniths of previous world economic powers as their elites pursued surfeit in Mediterranean villas or in the country-house splendor of Edwardian England. In a nation's early years, debt is a vital and creative collaborator in economic expansion; in late stages, it becomes what Mr. Hyde was to Dr. Jekyll: an increasingly dominant mood and facial distortion. The United States of the early 21st century is well into this debt-driven climax, with some analysts arguing — all too plausibly — that an unsustainable credit bubble has replaced the stock bubble that burst in 2000.

Unfortunately, three of the preeminent weaknesses displayed in these past declines have been religious excess, a declining energy and industrial base, and debt often linked to foreign and military overstretch. Politics in the United States — and especially the evolution of the governing Republican coalition — deserves much of the blame for the fatal convergence of these forces in America today.



http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0514-26.htm

Feingold The Forthright

Alexandra Walker
May 08, 2006


Is this man too smart to be president? When Russ Feingold talks about how national security and foreign policy intersect, you think this man might just know what he's talking about. His ideas don't sound canned or full of buzz phrases, nor do they appeal to fear. Plus, they make sense.

Speaking Monday at the National Press Club, Feingold described his vision for national security. The senator from Wisconsin said he believes that "battling al-Qaida and associated networks" should be the nation's national security priority. Thinking about the war on terror in exclusively military terms is short-sighted and insufficient. Instead, Feingold argued, the U.S. should be focusing on safe havens of Islamist activity (like Indonesia), rescuing failed states and supporting human rights. Put another way, Feingold seemed to be saying, where we consort with repressive leaders and ignore the human rights of their citizens, we sow the seeds of anti-American hatred. Sure, it would've been nice if he'd noted how large America's fossil fuel-dependency looms as a factor in U.S. foreign policy decisions and how the lack of a real energy plan undermines our national security (hat tip, my former colleague Patrick Doherty and Michael Klare). That aside, it was refreshing to hear a Democrat talk about national security strategies that transcend defensive, reactive postures, and are informed by principle, not polling.

On Iraq, Feingold displayed the candor and directness that makes him popular with why-don't-Dems-get-a-spine progressives. He blasted the Bush administration's decision to invade, his Democratic colleagues' decision to vote in 2002 to authorize the president's use of force ("We missed an opportunity to define a different approach to the war on terror"), and the White House's refusal to admit it's made any mistakes and thus lay the groundwork for solutions. Feingold's own proposal relies on drawing down U.S. troops according to a "flexible timetable." When asked to counter those who claim that withdrawal of U.S. troops will plunge Iraq into further chaos, Feingold didn't flinch:

Our presence is a stimulant to terrorist activity. Reminiscent of France in Algeria and the Soviets in Afghanistan. The lesson of insurgencies is that when the occupying power leaves, it will lessen the power of the insurgency.

Feingold argued that there's nothing "weak" about saying the U.S. should redeploy troops. Alas, his colleagues don't share his view. He offered his redeployment plan as an unsuccessful amendment to the Iraq supplemental funding bill that passed the Senate last week.

The very first question from the audience concerned the president’s nomination of General Michael Hayden to be the director of the CIA. Feingold gave a measured response, neither signaling support nor an all-out fight:

"It is unfortunate that the president made such a contentious choice at a time when the intelligence community, and this country, need consensus on how to move forward. General Hayden will need to convince me that he is committed to the rule of law in order to win my support. "

The very last question concerned the criteria informing his decision to enter the 2008 presidential race—which he said he won't make until after the midterm elections. Feingold listed a few things—the outcome of the midterms, his family and whether he feels he's up to the job. When answering that last question, Feingold said, the answer some of his supporters offer him—"Look who we got there now!"—is not good enough.

UPDATE: AP has a good write-up of Feingold's remarks, particularly his assessment of what Dems need to do to win elections:

He said some Democrats in Congress gave in to "intimidation" by the Bush administration when they voted to authorize the war in 2002, and warned: "If we do not show both a practical and emotional readiness to lead in the fight against terrorism, we will lose in '06 and we will lose in '08, just like we did in '02 and '04."


http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/05/0..._forthright.php

"America is leading the world in a titanic struggle against terror." -GWB


Published on Monday, May 15, 2006 by the Boston Globe

America the Titanic

by James Carroll


The last living American survivor of the Titanic died last week. Lillian Gertrud Asplund was 5 when the luxury liner sank after hitting an iceberg in 1912. Her father and three brothers were lost. She, another brother, and her mother survived.

At death, Asplund was 99. In reading her obituary, one could not escape the feeling that her entire life was shadowed by this tragedy. Is such a thing true more broadly? Does her passing mark the end of the Titanic story? What was that story anyway?

Many ships have been ill-fated. Why did the fate of that particular one so grip the world's imagination? The Hollywood blockbuster of a few years ago brought the story to a new generation, but its pins were already deeply planted in human consciousness. Why? The Titanic, as the unsinkable vessel that sank on its maiden voyage, became an ultimate symbol of hubris, a cautionary tale warning that human inventiveness can always be trumped by nature.

But the Titanic took on mythic significance only because of what soon followed in its wake. It was in hindsight that the catastrophe of The Great War took on the implicit character of the unforeseen obstacle into which Europe crashed.

The unbridled optimism of the Enlightenment, a belief in the ''unsinkability" of progress, drove full speed into the abyss of trench warfare. A generation of European males was lost, and for what? Kaiser? King? The Archduke of Sarajevo? A dynamic set by arms merchants?

After the fact, what came to be called World War I could only be understood as an act of civilizational suicide. For year after year, Germany, Britain, France, and other nations sent their very futures ''over the top" into the maw of machine guns that refused to falter. It was as if the man at the helm of the Titanic sailed into the thick of icebergs he had been warned were certainly there. The story of the ship became one of pure foreboding.

The entry of the United States into the war was decisive, but it remained marginal to the agonies and the destructiveness, and so inherited the century. In America, it seemed possible to regard the Titanic tragedy as a morality tale meant for Europe, just as one could think of The Great War as the death rattle of the ''Old World."

That sense of relatively immune superiority was only confirmed by World War II. Though US losses were greater than before, so was the benefit when the ''New World" emerged uniquely whole, soon to become the engine of the global economy. Commanding from the bridge of ''the West," American leaders went full speed ahead into a sea of icebergs, but now the true hazards had been created by the geniuses who had built the ship. The icebergs this time were thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union joined the United States in the manufacture of an ever growing danger. The stage for a second act of civilizational suicide was set.

By sheer dumb luck the USS America navigated the Cold War without hitting one of the nuclear icebergs, but the helmsmen credited their own skill while slaphappy passengers celebrated -- again -- a claim to unsinkability. We had ''won" the Cold War, and now we were the ''indispensable nation." Not even awareness of the dangers posed by unmoored nuclear weapons -- ''loose nukes" -- made America's geniuses see the hazard as applying to them. That alone is why, against reason and law, Washington can maintain its fleet of nuclear icebergs even now. Tragedy, nuclear or otherwise, is a fate awaiting other peoples, not Americans, who remain the last Enlightenment optimists.

Oddly, the blow of 9/11 reinforced this exceptionalism. The anguish of that day was real, but it equaled neither what other nations suffered in the world wars, nor what the earth narrowly survived in the Cold War. Nor does it compare to what lies dead ahead if the captains of our ship hold course -- ''Steady as she goes."

Looming obstacles include an Islamic world enflamed by American belligerence, Russians feeling pushed into a new Cold War, China in an arms race, and a demonized Iran acting -- no surprise -- like a demon. All of these threats have their stimulus, if not their origins, in the old hubris of the New World.

What America has done over the last six years makes plain that the lesson of the Titanic, even with its last US survivor gone, has yet to be learned in Washington. It is 1912 again.



http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0515-23.htm

Published on Monday, May 15, 2006 by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Sacrifice Liberty For Security? Not Without a Fight

by Jay Bookman


This is supposed to be America, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But I'm beginning to have my doubts, about the free part and the brave part, too.

This America, this increasingly strange America, is looking more and more like the land of the cowed and the home of the silent.

In this America, we have a military agency, the National Security Agency, secretly tracking and analyzing every phone call or e-mail that is sent or received by hundreds of millions of American citizens, with records of all of those calls retained forever.

And in this America, millions and millions of people profess to be quite comfortable living under a government that wants to know who every one of us is talking to, and has the technology to realize that ambition.

It will keep us safe, some Americans have responded. Only those with something to hide should be worried, others have said.

But then again, we all have something to hide, don't we? My something may be different than your something, but we all have something we would rather keep to ourselves — the things we read or watch, the things we do or think or buy, the people we talk with or the Web sites we visit. . . .

Admittedly, there is a reason for that willingness to let government vastly expand its oversight of our lives, and that reason is fear of terrorism.

But there is always a reason, isn't there? There is always some threat to security that is said to justify the surrender of liberty to government. In every nation that has ever lost freedom to government, there has always been a reason.

There was a reason that the soldiers of King George III burst into the homes of colonial Americans without warrants or reasonable cause. And back then, there were also those who saw nothing wrong with that practice, who believed that only those who had done something wrong had anything to fear.

Fortunately, our Founding Fathers thought otherwise, enshrining that belief in the Bill of Rights to guarantee that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."

In Stalin's Soviet Union, they had a reason for government monitoring — fear of capitalist imperialists. In today's China and North Korea, they have a reason as well. In George Orwell's "1984," the reason was the threat from Eastasia or Eurasia.

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment," Orwell wrote. "How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time."

But a strong people, a free people intent on remaining free, does not accept those reasons as sufficient. They are willing to accept the danger as the price of their liberty.

Our fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers were such people. We tell ourselves that we today are still that people. We still celebrate ourselves as willing to fight and die for freedom, but the evidence accumulates that we are not.

The infinitesimal danger that any one of us might be killed in a terror attack — a danger much smaller than that of getting killed by crossing the street — is enough to send too many of us scurrying to toss liberty onto the bonfire in the vain hope that the sacrifice might make us safe.

But this is about more than civil liberties, as precious as they might be. These violations of constitutional rights are made possible because of a still more fundamental problem: The system isn't working; the checks and balances built into government by our Founding Fathers have been dismantled.

Congress has passed laws to ensure that any spying on the American people is conducted appropriately and within the Constitution; the executive branch simply proclaims it will not be bound by those laws.

Lawsuits have been filed alleging that the spying is illegal and unconstitutional; the executive branch refuses to allow those suits to be heard by the judicial branch, on grounds that the programs are national secrets and not to be questioned.

At every turn, it seems, every mechanism to rein in the executive or make it accountable to the people has been frustrated.

Two events of last week demonstrate just how far down this road we have traveled.

First, the U.S. Justice Department announced it had been forced to drop its own internal investigation into the legality of warrantless wiretapping. The federal government had refused to give its own lawyers the security clearances needed to conduct such an internal analysis, so the effort had to be abandoned.

Then Gen. Michael Hayden, the president's nominee as CIA director, told members of the Senate that he might be open to allowing debate on legalizing warrantless wiretapping, an ongoing practice that violates federal law.

"I'm willing to consider trying to bring the NSA wiretap program, as it exists now, under federal law," Hayden was paraphased as saying by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois who cited the statement as an encouraging sign of compromise.

Think about that. A government official says he might be open to allowing Congress to debate such things. More chilling still, the much-abused Congress is pleased by that new "flexibility."

And the compromise in question? Congress would be allowed to legalize what the executive branch has already decided to do anyway.

We need to have a fight about all this. It won't be pleasant, it won't be fun, but we need to hash it all out in a down and dirty political brouhaha. As the party in opposition, the Democrats need to lead that fight using every tool at their disposal.

It may be that today's Democrats lack the guts for such a battle. If so, then they also lack the guts to lead this country, and I fear to think where that would leave us, forced to choose between one party with no courage and another with no brains or perspective.

But if we have that fight, and if at the end our craving for security proves stronger than our love of liberty, I guess I would want to know that, bitter as that knowledge would be. At least then it would be clear where this nation stands, or more accurately, where it cowers.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0515-22.htm

Published on Monday, May 15, 2006 by MediaChannel.org

From Hobbes To Your Cell: Hail the Surveillance State

by Danny Schechter


Attention, chickens: You may soon be coming home to roost.

The word has gone out in the windowless buildings that house the switching equipment, and state of the art technology—in what used to be called phone companies before they morphed into communication giants—that a day of reckoning may be on the horizon for Verizon and its mates.

These chickens have been clucking at each other and gobbling each other up for years, silently reestablishing the old monopoly Bell System under the guise of new competitive guidelines. Private industries are once again putting together what the federal courts tore asunder. Oligopoly seems to be the highest expression of "free" market logic and its logical consequence.

At issue now are historically unprecedented and massive violations of privacy that we learned about from a rare occurrence: a newspaper actually doing its job. USA Today of all papers, blew the whistle on a massive government surveillance program run by the National Insecurity Agency tapping millions of phones, cell phones and every manner of communications devices.

It's called "data mining" and it's now the scandal du jour as National Security journalist William Arkin explains, "This NSA dominated program of ingestion, digestion, and distribution of intelligence raises profound questions about the privacy and civil liberties of all Americans."

He warns "an all-seeing domestic surveillance is slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will be able track the activities and "transactions" of any targeted individual in near real time."

Knee jerk supporters of the Bush agenda were backhanded in their support. Here's Neil Cavuto on Fox News implying that all of this spying is needed to protect us: "Yes, it is not great to necessarily hear they're collecting our phone records, but it's a heck of a lot better than collecting our remains."

Since this news broke, the Telco companies went into full PR spin mode as the New York Times reported Saturday: "Those companies insisted that the were vigilant about their customers' privacy, but did not directly address their cooperation with the government effort, which was reported on Thursday by USA Today. Verizon said that it provided customer information to a government agency 'only where authorized by law for appropriately defined and focused purposes' but that it could not comment on any relationship with a national security program that was 'highly classified.'"

"Legal experts said the companies faced the prospect of lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages over cooperation in the program, citing communications privacy legislation stretching back to the 1930's. A federal lawsuit was filed in Manhattan yesterday seeking as much as $50 billion in civil damages against Verizon on behalf of its subscribers.'

Unfortunately, buried in all the reporting on the latest juicy scandal at a time of cascading horror stories is something even worse: These same companies, rip-off artists that they are, have their wallets set and lobbyists targeted in taking over the Internet. This felonious attempt by the telcos to control the most powerful communications medium in the world makes the spy scandal a mere misdemeanor.

Note which story is getting most of the attention!

TV pundit Paul Begala made this point on CNN: "Big government is getting into bed with big business. We're talking about AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. AT&T, by the way, wants to take over the Internet and start charging for access to the Internet, which Internet pioneers desperately oppose.

"So, now, if you are running AT&T, and the president of the United States comes to you and says, hey, why don't I spy, why don't I snoop through your files there, and you want him to give you permission to control the Internet, that's a really lousy alliance politically for the Republicans, to be seen as big government in bed with big business."

This collusion between the corporate world and the Busheviks mirrors the pre-war complicity at the FCC between the news networks and the government. The covert quid pro-quo then had the TV nets telling the regulators essentially "you waive the rules and we will wave the flag."

The blogger Billmon raises an even darker specter, writing, "what makes the program so scary, at least to me, isn't the possibility that it was built to serve some sinister purpose, like subverting what's left of American democracy (which is scary enough) but rather that it may be the end product of a national security bureaucracy running completely out of control -- even more so now than during the worst years of the Cold War.

"Rogue actors can still be voted out of office, even impeached. But a rogue Leviathan is another story. Certainly, the details that have come to light about the program so far smack of what can only be described as bureaucratic megalomania: 'It's the largest database ever assembled in the world,' said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

"It sounds suspiciously like Robert Klein's old standup routine about the late-night TV ad that promises to send you 'every record evermade.'

"I'm certainly no technical expert, but I find it really hard to believe that collecting such a staggering horde – 2 trillion call records since 2001 – will yield useful intelligence about a relatively small and increasingly amorphous network of clandestine operatives who by now have almost certainly learned not to use the phones…"

This surveillance scenario now has a space component as well with the little known National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGIA) watching us from satellites in space.

AP reports: "With help, the agency can also zoom in. Its officials cooperate with private groups, such as hotel security, to get access to footage of a lobby or ballroom. That video can then be linked with mapping and graphical data to help secure events or take action, if a hostage situation or other catastrophe happens.

"Privacy advocates wonder how much the agency picks up and stores.…Among the government's most closely guarded secrets, the quality of pictures NGA receives from classified satellites is believed to far exceed the one-meter resolution available commercially. That means they can take a satellite 'snapshot'' from high above the atmosphere that is crisply detailed down to one-meter level, which is 3.3 feet."

To Billmon, this increasingly permanent scandal and insidious threat recalls the words of Thomas Hobbes in "The Leviathan" written in 1651.

"It appeareth plainly, to my understanding, both from reason and Scripture, that the sovereign power…is as great as possibly men can be imagined to make it. And though of so unlimited a power men may fancy many evil consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetual war of every man against his neighbor, are much worse."

And I, a mere news dissector have been bombarded with other words, suspicious comments favoring the telecos, infiltrated into my own Mediachannel.org. blog suddenly as show show up on others as well. The spinmeisters are out to cover every base.

The convergence between the telcos and the internet, the broadcasters and the broadbanders is birthing a new media world—one I explore in my book The Death of Media. (Melville) But it’s not just the old media that is at risk. Our democracy is imperiled, and not just by the unchecked power of big government.

The corporate world lurks in the shadows here. They are the “men behind the curtain.” It It is our our job as concerned citizens to take crises like the ones now surfacing and deepen them and raise bloody hell before their new technologies take us backwards into the future.

Hobbes’ Leviathan begat Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. His worries are still timely, and, as Billmon intimates, it offers a vision of chickens—and chicken hawks-- playing “gobble, gobble” with our freedoms and our lives.

“Having entrusted their security and their liberties to the beast,” he writes, “Leviathan’s subjects will be lucky not to wind up like Jonah, lodged in its belly.”



http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0515-20.htm

Published on Monday, May 15, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

The $70 Billion Tax Cut: Irresponsible and Obscene

by Robert B. Reich


Here we are six months before a mid-term election, with polls showing only about 20 percent of the American public approving the job Congress is doing. Small wonder. The federal budget deficit is still out of control. We’ve got a war going on that’s not going well, and the military is spending over a half a trillion dollars a year. Meanwhile, public services are being slashed. So what’s Congress about to give us? A $70 billion tax cut.

The tax cut would be politically irresponsible, but not obscene, if it were going to middle-income workers now facing sky-high fuel prices and soaring health-insurance costs, and variable-rate mortgage payments heading through the roof.

But this tax cut is not going to the middle class. Like the Bush Administration’s previous tax cuts, most of this one is going to people who are already very comfortable. Hence, it’s both irresponsible and obscene.

The non-partisan Urban Institute - Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center examined its provisions, including a two-year extension of capital gains and dividend tax cuts, and a one-year extension of relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax. It turns out a whopping 87 percent of the benefits of this tax cut will go to the 14 percent of American households earning above $100,000 a year. Twenty-two percent of the benefits will go to the richest two-tenths of one percent of American households earning more than a million dollars a year.

Perhaps I am slow to catch on to something the Bush administration and the Republican Congress understand intuitively. But I’d appreciate it if someone could explain to me why we need another tax cut for high-income Americans. At a time when the gap between the rich and poor, and between every rung on the income ladder, is wider than it’s been in almost a century, it would seem imprudent to add to these disparities unless there was a compelling public need.

What is the public need? Some administration apologists, including the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, claim repeatedly that the rich are paying a larger-than-ever share of income taxes, so it’s entirely fitting that they get the lion’s share of any tax cut. This logic conveniently leaves out two facts. First, the rich are now paying a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than at any time in the last seventy-five years. That they pay a lot of taxes nonetheless is a by-product of the mind-boggling increase in their income and wealth relative to most other Americans.

Second, if you consider not just income and capital-gains taxes but all the taxes people pay – including payroll taxes and sales taxes – you find that middle-income workers are now paying a larger share of their incomes than people at or near the top. We have turned the principle of a graduated, progressive tax on its head.

A second justification given by the White House and the Journal for continuing to cut taxes on the wealthy is that the wealthy invest their extra money in the economy, and that extra investment trickles down to everyone else. The inconvenient missing fact here is the recent real-world impact of such supply-side economic theory. To date, the Administration’s capital gains and dividend tax cuts have not reaped what their proponents promised. The rate of new investment during this recovery has trailed the rate of investment during the three previous recoveries.

Meanwhile, almost nothing has trickled down. Productivity is up, but the current annual median wage of around $35,000 is what it was five years ago, adjusted for inflation. While top executives are raking in seven and eight-digit compensation packages, their middle-class workers are stuck in the mud.

Don’t expect much of a fight over this tax bill, however. The so-called "reconciliation" procedure, on which it’s riding, requires only a simple majority in the Senate and does not allow a filibuster. Members of the American public who believe this bill is irresponsible and obscene will get a chance to express their view in the voting booths, next November.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0515-30.htm

Posted 05/11/2006 @ 3:13pm

White House, NSA Block Investigation of Spying

by John Nichols


With news reports exposing the National Security Agency's previously secret spying on the phone conversations of tens of millions of Americans, what is the status of the U.S. Department of Justice probe of the Bush administration's authorization of a warrantless domestic wiretapping program?

The investigation has been closed.

That's right. Even as it is being revealed that the president's controversial eavesdropping program is dramatically more extensive – and Constitutionally dubious -- than had been previously known, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has informed Representative Maurice Hinchey that its attempt to determine which administration officials authorized, approved and audited NSA surveillance activities is over.

Why?

In a letter to Hinchey, the New York Democrat who has been the most dogged Congressional advocate for investigation of the spying program, OPR Counsel H. Marshall Jarrett explained that he had closed the Justice Department probe on Tuesday, May 9, because his office's requests for security clearances to conduct the investigation had been denied.

"I am writing to inform you that we have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," Jarrett explained in his letter to Hinchey. "Beginning in January 2006, this Office made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. On May 9, 2006, we were informed that our requests had been denied. Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation."

Who blocked the request? The obstruction has come from the very administration that the president asserts is operating "within the laws of our country" and cooperating with appropriate investigations.

The security clearances were blocked by the NSA, which has taken its direction on the spying program from the White House.

Hinchey, who along with Representatives John Lewis of Georgia and Henry Waxman and Lynn Woolsey of California requested the Justice Department inquiry in January, following initial reports regarding the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, is furious.

"It is outrageous that people within the Bush administration have blocked an investigation into the role that members of the Justice Department played in establishing and executing this secret domestic spy program," says the New York Democrat. "We must get to the bottom of this and reveal who has stifled this investigation. The Bush administration cannot simply create a Big Brother program and then refuse to answer any questions on how it came about and what it entails. We are not asking for top secret information. We simply want to know how the domestic spy initiative evolved and who is behind what many legal scholars believe is an unconstitutional surveillance program. If the administration believes the program is legal then it should have no problem being forthright with Justice Department investigators as to how it was initiated and is being carried out."

The key questions that Hinchey and his colleagues want answered are these:

• Who within the DOJ first authorized the domestic surveillance program?

• What was that official's justification was for doing so?

• Had the Bush administration already enacted the program before getting original DOJ approval?

• What does the reauthorization process for the surveillance initiative entail?

• Why, according to news reports, did the then-Acting Attorney General refuse to reauthorize the program and why the Attorney General expressed strong reservations about the program and may have rejected it as well?

Hinchey is not prepared to let the matter rest.

The congressman is seeking to determine who in the administration prevented the OPR investigators from obtaining the security clearances needed to conduct an investigation. When he has that information, Hinchey says, he will press for a reversal of the denial of the clearances and the reopening of the investigation.

At the same time, Hinchey continues to push on a number of fronts for the opening of a full Congressional inquiry into the warrantless wiretapping program and administration efforts to stifle examinations of its domestic spying initiatives.

While he has often stood alone in the past, Hinchey's calls come as part of a Congressional chorus of concern expressed by key members of the House and Senate on Thursday.

The Senate's chief critic of the spying program, Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, says that the latest revelations have raised a range of new concerns about the White House's apparent disregard for the Constitution and specific statutes requiring that a warrant be obtained before tapping into the telephone conversations of Americans on American soil.

"This Administration's arrogance and abuse of power should concern all Americans," says Feingold, who has proposed that the president be censured for authorizing the warrantless wiretapping program. "That the government may be secretly collecting, and using data mining to analyze, the phone records of millions of law-abiding Americans, as reported in the press today, is a frightening prospect. I am unaware of this program, and Congress needs to find out exactly what the Administration is doing and whether it is legal. It is time for the Administration to come clean with Congress and the American people. We can effectively fight terrorism and protect privacy, the rule of law, and separation of powers, but only if we have a President who believes in these principles."


http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=83135

General Hayden's Constitutional Sedition
Rewriting the Fourth Amendment


By DAVE LINDORFF


Bush's nominee for head of the CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden, at a press conference, offered an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution that removes the requirement of "probable cause" from that important guarantee of freedom.

Asked by Jonathan Landay of Knight-Ridder about the Fourth Amendment's standard of "probable cause" for issuance of a warrant for a police search, Gen. Hayden disputed the standard.

"No, actually -- the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure." Hayden said, trying to correct Landay.

"But it does say probable" Landay tried to interject.

"No, the amendment says unreasonable search and seizure," snapped Hayden.

Now the problem here is that the General, who was running the National Security Agency as it has been operating a secret program, just disclosed by USA Today, that monitors the phone calling records of virtually all phone customers of AT&T, Bell South and Verizon, is selectively quoting from the Fourth Amendment.

In fact, what the Fourth Amendment says is:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The trick here is that under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the NSA is required to obtain a court warrant for any domestic surveillance. What Bush has done is to authorize secret monitoring of Americans communications without a warrant. At the same time, once he was caught in the act, both Bush and Gen. Hayden have claimed that they are following the same strict guidelines as if they were going to court for a warrant.

Clearly, however, the standard for a warrant, as laid out by the Founding Fathers, is "probably cause," not the much looser "reasonable" that Hayden asserted to Landay at the press conference.

We Americans, and the members of Congress who are being asked to consider Hayden's fitness to serve as CIA director, need to challenge this spook's sleight of hand.

Clearly there is no "probable cause" for monitoring all the phone records of the entire customer base of three of the nation's largest phone service providers.

That's why Hayden tried so hard to deny that the standard for monitoring people's communications is "probable cause."

The president and his subordinates have been found out violating the Constitution in a serious way.

If this is not an impeachable act, I don't know what is.



http://counterpunch.org/lindorff05152006.html

"If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land."

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt


May 15, 2006
Fascism: Are We There Yet?

The surveillance state and the dangers of 'data-mining'


by Justin Raimondo


The lies keep coming. During the run-up to war with Iraq, we were told this administration knew for sure that Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction," and not only that, but knew exactly where they were. When no WMD turned up after the invasion, the Bushies came up with a bushel of excuses and denied ever saying that in the first place.

Oh, but don't worry – their real motive for going to war was to export "democracy" to Iraq – which, as anyone can see, is happening – so none of that matters anyway.

When it came out that the U.S. government was intercepting and listening to all overseas calls, the president himself stepped up to the plate and declared that they weren't spying on domestic calls – and now we learn that the biggest database in the world is being compiled by the National Security Agency (NSA) in which a record of every phone call made in the U.S. since 2001 is kept.

Oh, but don't fret – no one in government would ever allow this vital and potentially sensitive information to be put to unsavory purposes, such as blackmailing political opponents or similar dirty tricks. That anyone in Washington would do such a thing – why, it's unthinkable!

Trust us, say the biggest liars since the boy who cried wolf. Scooter Libby really doesn't remember outing undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, and Ahmed Chalabi really is a "hero in error." All the lying war propaganda vomited forth by this administration and its media toadies on the front page of the New York Times, then dutifully lapped up by administration talking heads on the Sunday morning talk show circuit, was just an honest mistake. They didn't mean to deceive us, you see, and this is supposed to make us feel better as well as let the War Party off the hook.

It does neither. It won't matter in the long run, however, if the neocons get what they're after. What's really at stake here is the continued relevance of the Constitution and the legacy of the Founding Fathers. Listen closely – you can hear them turning in their graves.

What is significant about this new revelation is the way the White House is spinning it: they claim it's all perfectly legal, because the president – according to their creative interpretation of the Constitution – has the "inherent" authority to create such a database. Congress may object, but it isn't up to them – it's up to "the decider," as Dubya has recently begun referring to Himself. Instead of a president, we now have a decider in chief, who combines the qualities of a chief executive, a military chieftain, and a king. Not a modern monarch, all of whom are merely symbolic reminders of fallen empires, but a king of old, who could dismiss Parliament and rule by decree.

The phone record database is ostensibly a weapon to be used against terrorists plotting another 9/11: by employing a technique known as "data-mining" the authorities are supposed to be able to detect "bursts" of unusual calls and reveal a pattern that will somehow lead them to the bad guys. A piece in the Christian Science Monitor says this "can be used to identify a 'social network' of interconnected people – including, perhaps, would-be terrorists." Yes, and also including the "social network" of the political opposition, antiwar leaders, and – yikes! – antiwar writers.

Data-mining is the Big Idea now energizing the burgeoning "anti-terrorist" industry, and its purpose is nothing less than to build databases that can be "cross-referenced in the hope of matching patterns, relationships, and activities that bear investigating." The Monitor goes on to cite Silicon Valley security expert Bruce Schneier, of Counterpane Internet Security:

"You should presume that phone numbers are being collated with Internet records, credit-card records, everything."

That's why they call it totalitarianism – because they want access to everything. The totality of your life must be available at the touch of a button. Remember "Total Information Awareness," the scheme cooked up by John Poindexter and Donald Rumsfeld that Congress ordered dismantled? Well, this "data-mining" business is it: Rummy, it appears, just embedded the program in a different bureaucratic rat-hole, and they've been pursuing their quest for omniscience ever since, without the knowledge or oversight of Congress. This usurpation has so riled Sen. Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, and 50 other members of congress, that there will be a congressional investigation into the matter.

"Privacy nuts," sneersThe Weekly Standard, which wheels out good old reliable Heather MacDonald to explain why "only a paranoid solipsist could feel threatened" by this latest intrusion. After all, Heather explains, your name won't be attached to the number: it's just a bunch of digits, silly. And even then, there's just so much data that getting anything out of it is going to be very difficult. There, there – now go back to sleep.

But if there's too much data to glean meaningful patterns in anything close to real-time, then doesn't that invalidate the entire "data-mining" procedure as a useful tool in tracking terrorists? As William Arkin put it in a fascinating piece on this subject of "harvesting" useful intelligence from a massive database:

"An all-seeing domestic surveillance is slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will be able to track the activities and 'transactions' of any targeted individual in near real time."

And digits can always be attached to a name, as MacDonald admits:

"True, the government can de-anonymize the data if connections to terror suspects emerge, and it is not known what threshold of proof the government uses to put a name to critical phone numbers. But until that point is reached, your privacy is at greater risk from the Goodyear blimp at a Stones concert than from the NSA's supercomputers churning through trillions of zeros and ones representing disembodied phone numbers."

The mere fact that "it is not known what threshold of proof the government uses" before implementing this Orwellian technique tells us all we need to know about this very imminent threat to what is left of our civil liberties. What threshold of proof must be reached before the government arrogates to itself the "right" to ferret out the perhaps intimate details of your life? If we are talking about this government, one shudders to contemplate the answer. The Bush administration considers itself above the law: it recognizes no law but itself, and to hell with the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights.

The old republic passes away, but what will take its place? The outlines of the new system emerging from the ruins of the Constitution are beginning to take shape, and it isn't a pretty sight. One of my favorite bloggers put the issue in context, warning against:

"The ultra-conservative legal scholars who invented the doctrine of the unitary executive and turned into our own home-grown version of the Fuhrerprinzip – now backed by the ability to process 10 billion bits of telecommunications data per second. Big Brother, eat your heart out."

Last year, a number of writers, including Lew Rockwell of the Mises Institute, Scott McConnell of The American Conservative, and myself, among others, took up the question of whether or not America is going fascist. A unique confluence of various factors gave rise to this kind of speculation: the leader cult that had grown up around the president, the worship of the military, and a foreign policy stance somewhere between old-style British imperialism and Soviet-style "liberation" (as when the Red Army "liberated" Afghanistan in the 1970s). Rockwell started the discussion with his perceptive comments on "Red State Fascism," and the topic soon became a subject of debate all over the Internet, as well as in print. I chimed in on several occasions with my own somewhat pessimistic prognosis. Scott was more optimistic, yet still clearly worried about the future prospects of a genuinely fascist regime taking hold in the land of the free. The existence of government "data-miners" with full access to our phone records, our financial records, and every other bit of data they can dig up, provides yet more evidence that Rockwell is right about the rising fascist danger. As he put it:

"The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing."

The Bushies and their media megaphones are loudly touting a recent poll that shows majority support for increased surveillance. This, I think, underscores the prescience of Rockwell's analysis. The present regime is busily building up the structural basis of a police state, one in which they will have the power to see into everything with the possible exception of your very soul – and that, I can almost assure you, is coming.

Yes, data-mining can be used to track those millions of Americans who aren't plotting terrorist attacks – and, heck, Big Brother can even watch us from space. I suppose executive orders could be used to lock up political dissidents without charges or a trial: and, yes, the U.S just possibly mightuse its doctrine of military "preemption" to defeat a threat that was never there. Luckily for us, we're governed by angels. Otherwise, I shudder to think what might happen…



http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8992

I'M SO LOATHSOME I COULD SPY


You call your sweetie on the phone
There's breathing on the line
Don't worry, that's the NSA
I'm so loathsome I could spy

Don't bother me with FISA courts
I haven't got the time
I bend the law until it breaks
I'm so loathsome I could spy

Why can't people trust in me
I'm such a stand up guy
Just ask Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson
I'm so loathsome I could spy

Verizon, Bell South and AT&T
Know the enemy is nigh
Tens of millions of Americans
I'm so loathsome I could spy

To doubt my intentions is un-American
And to question me is a lie
Haven't I won your trust so far?
I'm so loathsome I could spy

c Paul Hipp 2006

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-hipp/im...d-_b_21033.html

http://myspace.com/paulhipp

Groundhog Day in Iraq

By Joshua Holland
AlterNet

Monday 15 May 2006


America's foreign policy elite seems incapable of understanding the limited uses of hard power. Until they do, we'll continue to get into wars like Iraq - over and over again.

As the architects of the Iraq war cast about for someone to blame for their debacle, they've turned their sights inward - to the U.S. public. A lack of fortitude among the American people is to blame; only the folks back home can defeat our awe-inspiring military.

Others, despairing of the Bush administration's "soft approach" to the Iraq insurgency - and casting hungry eyes toward Tehran - have adopted a feverish, almost genocidal view of the war. If only we had the stomach to bring more firepower to bear on the Iraqi people, they say, "victory" would be assured.

In both formulations, the media is ultimately at fault for poisoning Americans' view of the war and sapping our national strength. But the war's advocates have no one to blame but themselves; we are in Iraq because of their delusion that raw military power can solve even the most complex transnational issues. They're incapable of grasping the importance of real moral legitimacy in modern warfare. Without that legitimacy, even the most powerful military in the world is likely to get dragged into a quagmire and, when it does, the public's weariness is entirely predictable. File it away as another error in post-war planning.

Many military thinkers - people like Colin Powell and Anthony Zinni - learned the hard way, in Vietnam, how important it is to be right as well as strong. They appreciate hard power but also understand that wars of choice or ideological preference won't cut it unless they're over very quickly. Recent history is full of grim examples of the most powerful states launching wars with thin justification, only to find themselves bogged down by militarily weak resistance groups.

But America's foreign policy elite - our strategic class - seems incapable of learning from those experiences. For them - both "hawks" and "doves" - hard power remains the ultimate tool of the game; he who has the most raw force will usually prevail. It's a belief that's deeply embedded in the strategic worldview, and it's been reinforced again and again by political philosophers through the ages: Thucydides ("The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must"); Niccolo Machiavelli ("War should be the only study of a prince"); Thomas Hobbes ("Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues"); and Mao Tse-Tung ("Whoever has an army has power, and war decides everything"). And it remains a touchstone of international relations today; Hans Morgenthau, the "father of modern realism," wrote that "World public opinion as a restraint on the struggle for power is a fiction" and "International law - is a fiction as well."

But times change. Before the last century, it was largely (but not wholly) true that military might usually won out in the end. An army could, if need be, kill every man, woman and child in the enemy's camp without facing recrimination back home or condemnation abroad. Three developments in the 20th century changed the rules of the game.

First, the brutality of the two world wars drained much of the romance from warfare; after the second global conflict in a 20-year span, launching a war of aggression became the highest international crime.

Second, the concept of human rights took hold, embedding value in all human lives - including the lives of foreign citizens. No longer do we view enemy civilians as sub-human, to be slaughtered with impunity.

Third, and most significantly, the world became wired for instant communication. Now, we watch wars unfold on CNN in real-time. And it's not just CNN; the news broadcast to the world is beyond the control of any government. Images of mangled Iraqi children are all over the internet.

For the United States, there's another factor: Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we've been at the top of the food chain, too powerful to fear attack from other states. As long as that remains the case, we'll always be fighting "wars of choice" based on shaky grounds that are open to debate.

The new reality - elusive to a strategic class mired in pre-1900 thinking - is that in asymmetrical conflicts, military force is only effective when combined with the legitimacy that can win over the hearts and minds of a world that's grown skeptical of the Great Powers' interventions in the developing world.

Lacking that legitimacy, home-grown insurgents can bring even the most powerful to a standstill; the United States had enough power to wipe out every North Vietnamese, the Russians could have slaughtered every Afghan and the Israelis have the ability to kill every last Palestinian. Today, we have the capacity to fulfill the most brutal fantasies of the Michelle Malkin set and turn Iraq into a sea of nuclear glass. But that capacity is meaningless in the context of modern warfare. So we lost Vietnam, the Russians lost Afghanistan, and Israel and the U.S. are bogged down in violent occupations in the Middle East that have no end in sight.

If only the hawks who lust after these wars could understand the limited utility of hard power. But they're blind to the fact that, lacking the kind of broad international consensus that the United States had during the "first" Gulf War - another conflict launched under false pretenses - the public will always give them just a brief window of flag-waving opportunity to wreak havoc on the weak (think Grenada in 1983 or Panama in 1989).

There was never much support for the Iraq war; a majority opposed it a month before it was launched, there was a spike of support as the attack began, and it's declined ever since. That was to be expected. As the premise for a war of choice unravels and the costs - in blood and treasure - mount, public support will always prove to be an illusion.

Instead of whining about how the American public's support for their war has eroded, the Rumsfelds, Cheneys and their cohorts would be better served getting their collective head around the fact that as long as the rationale is weak, power will only go so far.

If they can't figure that out, Iraq won't be our last drawn-out adventure in the global south; we'll shed blood on the soil of other far-off little countries that most Americans can't find on a map, the media will hype other tin-pot dictators as the next coming of Hitler, and the defense industry will have other opportunities to shake some silver out of the treasury. And we'll wake up in a decade or so facing another quagmire and realize it's Groundhog Day all over again.



http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051506B.shtml

Dixie Chicks, Valerie Plame & Bush

By Robert Parry
May 16, 2006


A politician's reaction to dissent is often the true test of a commitment to democracy. Great leaders not only tolerate criticism, but welcome disagreement as part of a fair competition of ideas leading to the best result for society.

Certainly, no one who truly cares about democracy favors punishing critics and demonizing dissenters. But just such hostility has been the calling card of George W. Bush and his backers over the past five years as they have subjected public critics to vilification, ridicule and retaliation.

While Bush doesn’t always join personally in the attack-dog operations, he has a remarkable record of never calling off the dogs, letting his surrogates inflict the damage while he winks his approval. In some cases, however, such as the punishment of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, Bush has actually gotten his hands dirty. [See below.]

The Bush-on-the-sidelines cases are illustrated by what happened to the Dixie Chicks, a three-woman country-western band that has faced three years of boycotts because lead singer, Natalie Maines, criticized Bush as he was stampeding the nation toward war with Iraq.

During a March 10, 2003, concert in London, Maines, a Texan, remarked, “we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” Two days later – just a week before Bush launched the Iraq invasion – she added, “I feel the President is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world.”

With war hysteria then sweeping America, the right-wing attack machine switched into high gear, organizing rallies to drive trucks over Dixie Chicks CDs and threatening country-western stations that played Dixie Chicks music. Maines later apologized, but it was too late to stop the group’s songs from falling down the country music charts.

On April 24, 2003, with the Iraq War barely a month old, NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw asked Bush about the boycott of the Dixie Chicks. The President responded that the singers “can say what they want to say,” but he added that his supporters then had an equal right to punish the singers for their comments.

“They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out,” Bush said. “Freedom is a two-way street.”

So, instead of encouraging a full-and-free debate, Bush made clear that he saw nothing wrong with his followers hurting Americans who disagree with him.

Pattern of Attack

Other celebrities who opposed the Iraq War, such as Sean Penn, got a similar treatment. Bush’s supporters even gloated when Penn lost acting work because he had criticized the rush to war.

“Sean Penn is fired from an acting job and finds out that actions bring about consequences. Whoa, dude!” chortled pro-Bush MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough.

Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, cited as justification for Penn’s punishment the actor’s comment during a pre-war trip to Iraq that “I cannot conceive of any reason why the American people and the world would not have shared with them the evidence that they [Bush administration officials] claim to have of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” [MSNBC transcript, May 18, 2003]

In other words, no matter how reasonable or accurate the concerns expressed by Bush’s Iraq War critics, they could expect retaliation.

With Bush’s quiet encouragement, his supporters also denigrated skeptical U.S. allies, such as France by pouring French wine into gutters and renaming “French fries” as “freedom fries.”

Bush’s backers even mocked U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix for not finding WMD in Iraq in the weeks before the U.S. invasion. CNBC’s right-wing comic Dennis Miller likened Blix’s U.N. inspectors to the cartoon character Scooby Doo, racing fruitlessly around Iraq in vans.

As it turned out, of course, the Iraq War critics were right. The problem wasn’t the incompetence of Blix but the fact that Bush’s claims about Iraq’s WMD were false, as Bush’s arms inspectors David Kay and Charles Duelfer concluded after the invasion.

But the critics never got any apologies or repair to the careers. As CBS’s “60 Minutes” reported in a segment on May 14, 2006, the Dixie Chicks were still haunted by the pro-Bush boycott three years later.

“They have already paid a huge price for their outspokenness, and not just monetarily,” said correspondent Steve Kroft. Sometimes, Iraq War supporters even turned to threats of violence.

During one tour, lead singer Maines was warned, “You will be shot dead at your show in Dallas,” forcing her to perform there under tight police protection, said the group’s banjo player, Emily Robison. In another incident, a shotgun was pointed at a radio station’s van because it had the group’s picture on the side, Robison said.

Though the Dixie Chicks are still shunned by many country-western stations, they have refused to back down. Indeed, one of their new songs – entitled “Not Ready to Make Nice” – takes on the hatred and intolerance they faced for voicing an opinion about Bush and the Iraq War.

As Kroft noted, “Not Ready to Make Nice” received favorable reviews and became one of the most downloaded country songs on the Internet, but it still “fizzled on the charts” as Bush supporters called up stations and demanded that it never be played.

Asked to explain why these tactics work, Maines said, “when you’re in the corporate world, and when that’s your livelihood, and when 100 people e-mail you that they’ll never listen to your station again, you get scared of losing your job. And why did they need to stand up for us? They’re not our friends. They’re not our family. And they cave.” [CBS’s “60 Minutes,” May 14, 2006]

http://www.sonynashville.com/DixieChicks/







The Plame Case

But what’s most troubling is that this intolerance toward dissent is not simply overzealous Bush supporters acting out, but rather loyal followers who are getting their signals from the top levels of the Bush administration.

For instance, a new federal court filing by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney apparently instigated the campaign to punish former Ambassador Wilson for his criticism of the administration’s claims that Iraq had sought enriched uranium from Africa.

After reading Wilson’s July 6, 2003, opinion article in the New York Times, Cheney scrawled questions in the space above the article, according to the court filing. Cheney’s questions would soon shape the hostile talking points that White House officials and their right-wing supporters would spread against Wilson and his CIA officer wife, Valerie Plame.

“Those annotations support the proposition that publication of the Wilson Op-Ed acutely focused the attention of the Vice President and the defendant – his chief of staff [I. Lewis Libby] – on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in his article, and on responding to these assertions,” according to a May 12, 2006, filing by Fitzgerald.

Cheney’s questions addressed the reasons why the CIA sent Wilson to Niger in 2002 to check out – and ultimately discredit – suspicions about Iraq allegedly seeking “yellowcake” uranium from Africa.

“Have they [CIA officials] done this sort of thing before?” Cheney wrote. “Send an Amb[assador] to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?”

Though Cheney did not write down Plame’s name, his questions indicate that he was aware that she worked for the CIA and was in a position (dealing with WMD issues) to have a hand in her husband’s assignment to check out the Niger reports.

Over the next several days, White House officials, including Libby and Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove, allegedly disseminated information about Plame’s CIA identity to journalists in the context of knocking down Wilson’s critical article. In effect, the White House tried to cast Wilson’s trip as a case of nepotism arranged by his wife.

On July 14, 2003, Plame was publicly identified as a CIA operative in a column by right-wing commentator Robert Novak, destroying her career at the CIA and forcing the spy agency to terminate the undercover operation that she had headed. A CIA complaint to the Justice Department prompted an investigation into the illegal exposure of a CIA officer.

Initially, when the investigation was still under the direct control of Attorney General John Ashcroft, Bush and other White House officials denied any knowledge about the leak. Bush pretended that he wanted to get to the bottom of the matter.

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

Yet, even as Bush was professing his curiosity and calling for anyone with information to step forward, he was withholding the fact that he had authorized the declassification of some secrets about the Niger uranium issue and had ordered Cheney to arrange for those secrets to be given to reporters.

In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson scheme got started – since he was involved in starting it – he uttered misleading public statements to conceal the White House role and possibly to signal to others that they should follow suit in denying knowledge.

Failed Cover-up

The cover-up might have worked, except in late 2003, Ashcroft recused himself because of a conflict of interest, and Fitzgerald – the U.S. Attorney in Chicago – was named as the special prosecutor. Fitzgerald pursued the investigation far more aggressively, even demanding that journalists testify about the White House leaks.

In October 2005, Fitzgerald indicted Libby on five counts of perjury, lying to investigators and obstruction of justice. In a court filing on April 5, 2006, Fitzgerald added that his investigation had uncovered government documents that “could be characterized as reflecting a plan to discredit, punish, or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson” because of his criticism of the administration’s handling of the Niger evidence.

Beyond the actual Plame leak, the White House oversaw a public-relations strategy to denigrate Wilson. The Republican National Committee put out talking points ridiculing Wilson, and the Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee made misleading claims about his honesty in a WMD report.

Rather than thank Wilson for undertaking a difficult fact-finding trip to Niger for no pay – and for reporting accurately about the dubious Iraq-Niger claims – the Bush administration sought to smear the former ambassador and, in so doing, destroyed his wife’s career and the effectiveness of her undercover work on WMDs. Plame has since quit the CIA.

The common thread linking the Plame case to the attacks on the Dixie Chicks and other anti-war celebrities is Bush’s all-consuming intolerance of dissent.

Rather than welcome contrary opinions and use them to refine his own thinking, Bush operates from the premise that his “gut” judgments are right and all they require is that the American people get in line behind him.

Bush then views any continued criticism as evidence of disloyalty. While Bush will tolerate people voicing disagreement, he feels they should pay a steep price, exacted by Bush’s loyalists inside and outside the government.

So, when Bush’s supporters malign his critics as “traitors” and spit out other hate-filled expressions bordering on exhortations to violence, Bush sees no obligation to rein in the intimidating rhetoric.

Instead, Bush almost seems to relish the punishments meted out to Americans who dissent.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/051506.html

What Will It Take?

By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 16 May 2006


Recent revelations indicate that the President of the United States continues to flout the law.

In December, we learned that Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by wiretapping without a warrant. Two weeks ago, the Boston Globe revealed that Bush has claimed authority to disobey more than 750 laws passed by Congress. And last week, USA Today reported that he has been secretly collecting the domestic telephone records of tens of millions of Americans.

This is nothing new.

In 2003, Bush invaded a sovereign country in violation of the United Nations Charter. His administration routinely tortures prisoners, rendering some to countries that have perfected the art of torture. The US laws prohibiting torture are absolute; torture is never permitted, even in time of war.

What will it take for Congress to exercise its Constitutional authority to stop the president when he has gone too far?

Every time another instance of Bush's lawbreaking emerges, a handful of lawmakers express indignation. Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) talked tough when the secret NSA program became public a few months ago. But when Bush mouthpiece Alberto Gonzales appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Specter skillfully threw him softballs to dilute the thrust of the administration's illegal spying.

"Maverick" John McCain (R-Ariz.) is busy defending Bush's Iraqi disaster and pandering to Jerry Falwell at "Liberty University."

The Republicans aren't the only ones in Congress who are asleep at the wheel. When Senator Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) made a motion to censure Bush for his illegal NSA spying, all Democratic senators, with a couple of exceptions, ran for cover.

Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Barack Obama (D-Ill.), John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) sat on their hands.

Clinton, the likely 2008 Democratic presidential candidate, is a major Bush ally when it comes to foreign policy. As our brave soldiers continue to die in his illegal, gratuitous war, Clinton opposes withdrawal any time soon. "Nor do I believe that we can or should pull out of Iraq immediately," she said. Clinton advocates leaving behind "a small contingent in safer areas with greater intelligence and quick strike capabilities" - in other words, the 14 "enduring bases" Bush is building in Iraq.

And as Bush ramps up his dangerous rhetoric against Iran, following the same game plan he used in the run-up to his Iraq war, Clinton eggs him on.

In January, Clinton challenged Bush to get tough with Iran. In a line from Bush's playbook, she told an audience at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, "We cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran - that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons."

Never mind the absence of any evidence that Iran is actually acquiring nukes.

To grease the wheels for his impending attack on Iran, Bush has nominated yes-man General Michael Hayden to head the CIA. Hayden was in charge of the NSA while it was keeping track of our phone calls. A Senate confirmation of Hayden will ensure that Bush receives the intelligence he wants to fit his policy of regime change in Iran.

Where's the accountability?

Since George W. Bush took the reins of government more than five years ago and began to systematically unravel the separation of powers and the rule of law, Congress has opened no investigations with subpoena power to hold the president accountable.

The Justice Department's "inquiry" into Bush's NSA spying program ended abruptly last week when the National Security Agency refused to grant DOJ lawyers necessary security clearances.

Bush justifies his warrantless surveillance programs as essential to keep America safe. Yet, as Frank Rich pointed out in Sunday's New York Times, these programs "may have more to do with monitoring 'traitors' like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists."

In an attempt to neuter the press, Team Bush has been tracking the phone numbers reporters at ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post call.

"What we have here is a clandestine surveillance program of enormous size, which is being operated by members of the administration who are subject to no limits or scrutiny beyond what they deem to impose on one another," the Times wrote in an editorial last week.

In response to a suit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T for its alleged participation in the government's electronic surveillance program, the Bush administration filed secret statements in a motion to dismiss. Bush contends that allowing the case to proceed would jeopardize national security.

With Bush's popularity at an all-time low, the Democrats are in a prime position to take back both houses of Congress. But even if the gerrymandering by Delay & Co. doesn't prevent a shift in Congressional power, there is no guarantee that the new power brokers in Congress would stand up to Bush. Indeed, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has ruled out impeachment of the president.

As we witness the deployment of 6,000 precious National Guard troops to the border in a photo-op designed to boost support for Republicans in the November election, we can take solace in a recent suggestion going around:

The members of Congress should resign and undocumented immigrants should take over because they will do jobs that Americans won't do.

What will it take for Congress to do its job?


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051606J.shtml

Published on Tuesday, May 16, 2006 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal

Down in the Polls, Bush Dusts Off A Uniform in the Art of Distortion

by Pierre Tristam


Salvador Dali was the surrealist painter to whom distortion was means, ends, and art all in one. These are Dali times, minus the art. George W. Bush is the surrealist president to whom distortion is means, ends, and crime. Dali's dalliance with fascism was the harmless product of a man infatuated with schlock. Bush's dalliance with fascism is the by-product of a man who thinks being on a mission from God is not just a line in "The Blues Brothers," but an executive order from a gospel of his own discovery. Dali would have appreciated the gall of a president still pushing the hallucinogens of Sept. 11, especially this month, when the American death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan will exceed that of ground zero. Bush is just glad a third of the nation and most of Congress are still inhaling.

A quick example. On the inhaling side, there's the $70 billion in tax cut extensions for the rich (those who profit from capital gains and stock dividends) that the Senate just approved. On the exhaling side, it's exactly the amount Bush is requesting in his latest "supplemental" bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Supplementals are the accounting deceptions that hide how the United States spends more on its $600 billion military than all other nations combined. The latest supplemental will bring the cumulative cost of Iraq and Afghanistan to $438 billion by midyear, and past the half-trillion dollar mark by the time American deaths in Iraq alone are likely to exceed all those of Sept. 11, in time for Christmas.

Here's the odd part. Bush promises a veto if the spending bill includes $14 billion in so-called domestic pork, like promoting Gulf of Mexico fisheries or moving a railroad or building a bridge here and there. Headlines have focused on that $14 billion as pointless spending by a typically pork-ridden Congress. But what's the true obscenity -- the cost of wars that are undermining national security and jeopardizing the nation's fiscal future or a few congressional pet projects that will at least create jobs, improve life, maybe even produce some useful research along the way? But distortions of national purpose have become so perverse that any civilian spending is presumed suspicious, while any military spending is presumed worthy. That's how military regimes are born.

One of Dali's last paintings is called "Warrior," an up-close portrait of a helmeted soldier whose face looks eerily like the Statue of Liberty's. Bush's triumph has been to draft liberty in the service of war -- a fundamental reversal that hasn't quite registered in the national psyche. Most of us still think that we fight wars to protect freedom. In fact, not a single war since Korea can make that claim (no, not even Gulf War I, which only restored Kuwait's playboy caliphate and secured Saudi oil's intravenous pipeline to America's arteries). Most wars since, Iraq, Afghanistan and the "war on terror" most of all, are doing the reverse: mocking liberty where they're being fought and systematically undermining it at home. Two acronyms suffice to illustrate this point for now: GWB and NSA.

Americans love a uniform. They instinctively equate the military with the efficient and the victorious. The assumption is as outdated as Ernie Pyle-like war reporting. Vietnam was a catastrophe. Lebanon was a disaster. Grenada was like sending the New York Yankees to beat up on a little league team. Somalia and Haiti were disasters, especially in retrospect. Iraq is a Vietnam-size catastrophe. Afghanistan is getting there. Conservatives pretend that they don't throw money at a problem (though they have no issue with throwing money their way; see tax cuts above). They rarely hesitate to throw troops at a problem. The waste in lives, money, resources and liberties has been criminal.

Inefficient in everything, victorious in nothing, Bush knows at least this much: When he puts on a uniform, speaks to military audiences or starts wars, his approval numbers go up. After Iraq, Afghanistan and Old Europe, he's run out of places to start wars. So he's invading the U.S.-Mexico border. Troops there won't make a difference. But illegal immigration isn't his concern. He's militarized foreign policy. He's militarized spying and intelligence. The Department of Homeland Security is a quasi-military operation. He had no "boots on the ground" here at home, visible and enforcing federal will. Now he'll have them. Legislative and judiciary branches abdicated years ago. The dissident media is its own echo chamber. Dangle a uniform and the public will still inhale deeply. With such willing collaborators, who needs a coup?


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0516-25.htm

Published on Tuesday, May 16, 2006 by TruthDig

Could Lunacy Explain Bush's Policies?

by Molly Ivins


I hate to raise such an ugly possibility, but have you considered lunacy as an explanation? Craziness would make a certain amount of sense. I mean, you announce you are going to militarize the Mexican border, but you assure the president of Mexico you are not militarizing the border. You announce you are sending the National Guard, but then you assure everyone it’s not very many soldiers and just for a little while.

Militarizing the border is a totally terrible idea. Do we have a State Department? Are they sentient? How much do you want to infuriate Mexico when it’s sitting on quite a bit of oil? Bush knows what the most likely outcome of this move will be. He was governor during the political firestorm that ensued when a Marine taking part in anti-drug patrols on the border shot and killed Esequiel Hernandez, an innocent goat herder from Redford, Texas. That’s the definition of crazy—repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

I suppose politics could explain it, too. It’s quite possible that lunacy and politics are closely related. It’s still damned hard cheese for the Guard, though. The Guard is heavily deployed in Iraq, currently 20% of those serving, down from 40% last year. Some soldiers are sent back for multiple tours. Lt. Gen. James Helmly, head of the Army Reserve, said the Reserve is rapidly degenerating into “a broken force” and is “in grave danger of being unable to meet other operational requirements.” Happy hurricane season to you, too. The Guard is also short on equipment and falling short on recruiting goals.

But right-wingers are very unhappy with Bush right now, and this is a strong, red-meat gesture that will make them happy, even if it does nothing to shut down the border. You want to shut down illegal immigration? You want to use the military as police? Make it illegal to hire undocumented workers and put the National Guard into enforcing that. Then rewrite NAFTA and invest in Mexico.

Meanwhile, further proof that the entire party is cuckoo comes to us with the passage of another big ($70-billion) tax cut for the rich. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the average middle-income household will get a $20 tax cut, while those making more than $1 million a year will get nearly $42,000.

The Washington Post editorialized, “Budgetary dishonesty, distributional unfairness, fiscal irresponsibility—by now the words are so familiar, it can be hard to appreciate how damaging this fiscal course will be.”

Both President Bush and Veep Cheney are still going around claiming if you cut taxes, your tax revenues increase. No, they don’t. Now we’re just in whackoville. It’s not true. Their own economists tell them it’s not true, but they go about claiming it is with the same desperate tenacity with which they clung to false tales of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. How pathetic.

Speaking of lunacy, the saddest report from Iraq is that American soldiers showing signs of psychological distress and depression are being kept on active duty, increasing the risk of suicide. The Hartford Courant reports that even soldiers who have already been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome are kept on duty. This has led to an increase in the suicide rate—22 soldiers in 2005. And as I have reported before, the military is unprepared to deal with the flood of head cases coming back from Iraq. How many ways can we mistreat our own soldiers, while the right makes an elaborate show of devotion to “the troops”?

The consistent pattern that runs through all these problems is the failure to distinguish fantasy from reality. Mexican immigrants keep crossing the border because they can get jobs here—and most of those jobs are provided by companies whose CEOs support George W. Bush. That’s where he can have an impact on the problem, should he choose to do so.

The $70-billion tax cut is part of a continuing right-wing fantasy going back to the Laffer curve. Of course, clinging to demonstrably false economic precepts is understandable when you benefit from them, but at some point reality does intervene.

As for the Iraq fantasy and those who pushed it on a reluctant country through lies, disinformation and bending intelligence—isn’t there a law against that?


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0516-30.htm

Guffaws for Bush's Immigration Speech


By Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive

Tuesday 16 May 2006


It's painful to watch Bush give a speech, and his immigration address was no exception.

Hell, it was hard not to break out into guffaws when he said, "We have enough Guard forces to win the war on terror, to respond to natural disasters, and to help secure our borders."

Anyone who has been watching what's going on in Iraq, or anyone who saw Katrina, knows that the Guard is spread woefully thin right now, even before Bush tries stretch them from San Diego to Brownsville.

Oh, but he's "not going to militarize the southern border," he promised. Right.

In this age of NSA data mining and privacy invading, none of us should be keen on the idea of "high-tech fences in urban corridors," or, for that matter, "unmanned aerial vehicles."

What's next? A predator missile?

The speech was obnoxious from the start, when Bush drew a parallel between the hundreds of thousands of people marching in city after city for immigrant rights, on the side, and the Minuteman vigilantes on the other.

Both are displaying "intense emotions," he said, condescendingly.

True to his base, Bush conjured up images of immigrants committing crimes and draining our Treasury, and then he went out of his way not to insult his buddies in the business community, who are flouting the law as much as anybody.

In his speech, the employers were the victims of sneaky immigrants, not the recruiters and the exploiters of undocumented workers.

Here's Bush: "Illegal immigrants live in the shadows of our society. Many use forged documents to get jobs, and that makes it difficult for employers to verify that the workers they hire are legal."

This is a charge he made not once but twice. Fifteen paragraphs after the first reference, he said, "Businesses often cannot verify the legal status of their employees because of the widespread problem of document fraud."

The speech was also internally inconsistent. Bush said, "When people know that they'll be caught and sent home if they enter our country illegally, they will be less likely to try to sneak in." A mere 12 words later, he said, "The reality is that there are many people on the other side of our border who will do anything to come to America to work and build a better life. They walk across miles of desert in the summer heat, or hide in the back of 18-wheelers to reach our country."

If they are that desperate to get here, the threat of being returned home won't amount to much.

But Bush did not address why people are so desperate to get here, and that's, in large part, because of NAFTA, which has thrown millions of Mexican peasants off the land and led to an increase in poverty. Bush couldn't own up to that because he worships at the altar of free trade.

Bush's speech was a desperate ploy to change the subject.

But the subject remains his ineptitude.

The subject remains the Iraq War.

The subject remains his corporate fealty.

And the subject remains his criminality.


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051706A.shtml

Published on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 by the Baltimore Sun

Nation of Suspects in Land of the Free

by Steve Chapman


The Bush administration has managed to cross George Orwell with Sting. Every step you take, every move you make, Big Brother will be watching you.

No one is exempt from the National Security Agency's program to amass a record of every phone call, with the help of major telecommunications providers. As one insider told USA Today, "It's the largest database ever assembled in the world."

And have no doubt: You're in it.

President Bush insisted, "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans." In fact, that's exactly what his administration is doing - 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It is no longer possible (unless you're a customer of Qwest, which has refused to cooperate) to make a telephone call without the government knowing about it and keeping a record of it. We are all suspects now.

Why should law-abiding citizens care about this surveillance? To begin with, even the best of us sometimes make calls we wouldn't want everyone to know about. Another reason is that we could be implicated in terrorism through no fault of our own. Suppose you call your friend Bob, who later calls his friend Rashid, who later calls his cousin in Kabul. The government may conclude you're consorting with associates of al-Qaida.

It's not just the NSA that will know whom you call. According to USA Today, the NSA told Qwest that "other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database." What's next? The IRS? The Office of Child Support Enforcement? Your local police?

But privacy is valuable even if you have nothing to hide. Each of us benefits from having a zone in which we can do as we please without fear of exposure. Thanks to this program, there is no longer an impermeable barrier around your personal zone. It's more like a screen door on a submarine.

Investigative powers often have been used by unscrupulous people in government to intimidate, coerce or embarrass their enemies. Even if the administration has the noblest intentions, this database is vulnerable to abuse.

Law enforcement officers have ample experience with gadgets that monitor who's calling whom. But those require police to convince a judge they will yield information relevant to an investigation. In this program, here's what the government has to show: nothing.

His latest extralegal initiative furnishes more evidence that George W. Bush regards himself as an elected dictator, free to do anything he wants in the name of national security.

In December, it emerged that the NSA was eavesdropping on the contents of phone calls and e-mail messages between Americans on U.S. soil and people abroad. That program was of doubtful legality, and so is this one. As a rule, federal law forbids phone companies from turning over calling records to anyone, and it forbids the government from getting call records without a court order or a national security letter.

So it's cold comfort to hear Mr. Bush say that "the intelligence activities I authorized are lawful." He said the same thing about the other NSA program. But when the Justice Department undertook an investigation, the White House refused to grant its attorneys the security clearances they needed to proceed. The Bush administration doesn't trust even Bush administration lawyers to agree the program is kosher.

Even if you don't care about the privacy of your phone records, you might care that we have a president who feels no obligation to obey the law. You might care that if the government was secretly doing this, it may be doing other things that are even more worrisome. And you might care that one day, we may find that the free society we claim to cherish has become a police state.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0517-22.htm

Big Oil Launches Attack On Al Gore


Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) will unveil two 60-second TV ads focusing on what it calls “global warming alarmism and the call by some environmental groups and politicians to reduce fossil fuel and carbon dioxide emissions.” The ad, which will be aired in more than a dozen cities across the country, is being released just a week before the May 24th opening (in LA and NYC) of Al Gore’s new movie on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth.

Who is CEI? The Washington Post explains:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which widely publicizes its belief that the earth is not warming cataclysmically because of the burning of coal and oil, says Exxon Mobil Corp. is a “major donor” largely as a result of its effort to push that position.

CEI also gets funding from other oil companies through the American Petroleum Institute.

Exxon documents reveal the company gave $270,000 to CEI in 2004 alone. $180,000 of that was earmarked for “global climate change and global climate change outreach.” Exxon has contributed over $1.6 million to CEI since 1998.

CEI’s general counsel Sam Kazman said, “I think what attracted [Exxon] to us was our position on global warming.” CEI’s position? The Institute believes the dangers of global warming are akin “to that of ‘an alien invasion.’”

Exxon’s spokesperson Tom Cirigliano has explained why the company is so dedicated to funding CEI’s pushback on global warming:

We want to support organizations that are trying to broaden the debate. … There is this whole issue that no one should question the science of global climate change that is ludicrous. That’s the kind of dark-ages thinking that gets you in a lot of trouble.

The science is not questioned because the science behind global warming is indisputable. Science Magazine analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003. Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus that the earth’s temperature is rising due to human activity. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program concluded that humans are driving the warming trend through greenhouse gas emissions. And the EPA has said that the recent warming trend “is real and has been particularly strong within the past 20 years…due mostly to human activities.”

For the oil industry, Al Gore’s film exposing the truth is perceived as a threat, and they have no shortage of funds to try to distort it.

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/05/17/attack-on-gore/

Published on Thursday, May 18, 2006 by the Guardian/UK

An American Idea Shatters: The Reawakening of a Virulent Nationalism is Tearing Apart Bush's Conservative Coalition

by Sidney Blumenthal


President Bush's nationally televised address on immigration on Monday night was intended as a grand gesture to revive his collapsing presidency, but instead he has plunged the Republicans into a political centrifuge, breaking the party down into its raw elements, whose collisions are triggering explosions of unexpected and ever greater magnitude.

The nativist Republican base is at the throat of the business community. The Republican House of Representatives, in the grip of the far right, is at war with the Republican Senate. The evangelical religious right is paralysed while the Catholic church is a mobilising force behind demonstrations by Hispanic immigrants. Every effort Bush makes to hold a nonexistent Republican centre generates an opposing effect within his party.

Bush's victory in 2004 depended on the management of highly volatile constituencies: the religious right was shepherded by referendums against gay marriage; the abortion issue was used to elevate Catholic conservatives and isolate progressive-minded bishops; nativists were captivated by hosts of enemies in the whirlwind of September 11.

Bush's political handlers were determined to suppress immigration as an issue. Hispanics made up 14% of the population in 2004, and Bush's ability to capture Catholic and Hispanic voters was one of the decisive factors in winning a second term. However, as Bush's neoconservative foreign policy has been discredited, a virulent form of isolationist nationalism has filled the vacuum. Bush conflated the fears arising from September 11 with Iraq, but the fear of the other is now being directed at immigrants - a nativist tradition that goes back to the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s and the Ku Klux Klan.

The house has approved a bill that would make it a felony to hire or help undocumented workers. On the right this is considered a precondition for the deportation of more than 11 million such workers, and anything short of this solution is branded a treasonous "amnesty".

Bush's modest proposal to allow undocumented workers to stay and eventually be granted citizenship has incited contempt on the right. His dispatch of thousands of troops to the border with Mexico was derided as a "Band Aid" by California's Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Meanwhile, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has identified the church as the moral guardian of immigrants and the proponent of social services and citizenship. Last month, when the Family Research Council, a prominent religious-right group, tried to summon support for the house bill, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference warned it would break away, and the religious right was stymied.

The Republican party as a whole is repeating the self-destruction of the California Republican party. In 1994 the governor, Pete Wilson, advocated proposition 187, which threatened to deny social services, healthcare and education to undocumented workers, and it aroused the Hispanic sleeping giant. From that moment California became one of the safest Democratic states, and only an anomaly like Schwarzenegger, an immigrant, could emerge as a viable statewide candidate. Ronald Reagan's party is a thing of the past.

The delicate coalition Bush put together in 2004 is shattered. And in losing control of the immigration debate he has lost something more - the capacity to speak for the American idea. In 1938 Franklin Roosevelt confidently spoke to the nativist Daughters of the American Revolution. "Remember, remember always," he said, "that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists."


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0518-22.htm

Liberty Over Safety

By Robert Parry
May 19, 2006


Until now, every generation of Americans has traded safety for liberty. From the Lexington Green to the Normandy beaches, from the Sons of Liberty to the Freedom Riders, it has been part of the American narrative that risks are taken to expand freedom, not freedoms sacrificed to avoid risk.

The Founders challenged the most powerful military on earth, the British army, all the while knowing that defeat would send them to the gallows. The American colonists spurned their relative comfort as British subjects for a chance to be citizens of a Republic dedicated to the vision that some rights are “unalienable” and that no man should be king.

Since then, despite some ups and downs, the course of the American nation has been to advance those ideals and broaden those freedoms.

In the early years of the Republic, African-American slaves resisted their bondage, often aided by white Abolitionists who defied unjust laws on runaways and pressed the government to restrict slave states and ultimately to eliminate slavery.

With the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves, the United States underwent a painful rebirth that reaffirmed the nation’s original commitment to the principle that “all men are created equal.” Again, the cause of freedom trumped safety, a choice for which Lincoln and thousands of brave soldiers gave their lives.

In the latter half of the Nineteenth Century and into the Twentieth, the Suffragettes demanded and fought for extension of basic American rights to female citizens. These women risked their reputations and their personal security to gain the right to vote and other legal guarantees for women.

When fascist totalitarianism threatened the world in the 1930s and 1940s, American soldiers turned back the tide of repression in Europe and Asia, laying down their lives by the tens of thousands in countless battlefields from Normandy to Iwo Jima.

The march of freedom continued in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights fighters – both black and white – risked and sometimes lost their lives to tear down the walls of racial segregation.

For two centuries, this expansion of freedom always came with dangers and sacrifices. Yet, the trade-off was always the same: safety for liberty.

Reversed March

Only in this generation – only on our watch – has the march reversed.

Instead of swapping safety for liberty, this generation – traumatized by the 9/11 attacks and under the leadership of George W. Bush – has chosen to trade liberties for safety.

Instead of Patrick Henry’s stirring Revolutionary War cry of “give me liberty or give me death,” this era has Sen. Pat Roberts’s instant-classic expression of self over nation. “You have no civil liberties if you are dead,” the Kansas Republican explained on May 18 before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which he chairs.

Roberts’s dictum echoed through the mainstream media where it was embraced as a pithy expression of homespun common sense. But the commentators missed how Roberts’s preference for life over liberty was the antithesis of Henry’s option of liberty or death.

Roberts’s statement also represented a betrayal of two centuries of bravery by American patriots who gave their own lives so others could be free.

After all, it would follow logically that if “you have no civil liberties if you are dead,” then all those Americans who died for liberty were basically fools. Roberts’s adage reflects a self-centeredness, which would shame the millions of Americans who came before, putting principle and the interests of “posterity” ahead of themselves.

If Roberts is right, the Minutemen who died at Lexington Green and at Bunker Hill had no liberty; the African-Americans who enlisted in the Union Army and died in Civil War battles had no liberty; the GIs who died on the Normandy beaches or Marines who died at Iwo Jima had no liberty; Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights heroes who gave their lives had no liberty.

If Sen. Roberts is right, they had no liberties because they died in the fight for liberty. In Roberts’s view – which apparently is the dominant opinion of the Bush administration and many of its supporters – personal safety for the individual tops the principles of freedom for the nation.

This security-over-everything notion has emerged as the key justification for stripping the American people of their “unalienable rights,” liberties that were promised them in the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

But the American people are now told that the President is exercising “plenary” – or unlimited – powers as long as the indefinite “war on terror” continues. Bush has been ceded these boundless powers with only a meek request from the populace that he make life in the United States a little safer from the threat of another al-Qaeda attack.

Discretionary Rights

So, Bush holds discretion over the constitutional guarantee of a fair trial, the right to know the charges against you and to confront your accuser, the protection against warrantless searches and seizures, the delicate checks and balances designed by the Founders, the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, the power to wage war, even the right to freedom of speech.

In claiming “plenary” powers as Commander in Chief and arguing that the United States is part of the battlefield, Bush has asserted that all rights are his, that they are given to the people only when he says so, that the rights are no longer “unalienable.”

Like before the Declaration of Independence, the American people find themselves as “subjects” reliant for their rights on the generosity of a leader, rather than “citizens” possessing rights that can’t be denied.

As a trade-off for accepting Bush’s unlimited powers, the American people have gotten assurances that Bush will make protecting them his top priority. Yet, the presidential oath says nothing about shielding the public from danger; rather it’s a vow to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Since George Washington first took the oath, it has been the Constitution that is paramount, because it enshrines the liberties that define America.

Within that presidential oath and within the nation’s historic commitment to freedom, there is no assurance against risk or danger. There is no government guarantee of safety, nor is there a promise that harm might not come to American citizens.

Indeed, it has been assumed by all previous generations of Americans – dating back to the beginning of the Republic and ending only with today’s fearful generation – that risk and danger were part of the price for maintaining and spreading freedom.


http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/051806.html

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_815.shtml

http://commonwonders.com/archives/col346.htm

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20060519.html

Why I Spoke Up

by Jean Rohe


05.20.2006



When I was selected as a student speaker for the New School commencement about two months ago I had no idea that I'd end up on CNN and in Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times, among other places, when it was all over. One day after the big event I'm still reeling from all the media attention and emails from professors, students, and other supporters from all over the country, so forgive me if my writing is a little scattered.

In my speech yesterday I had hoped to talk about social responsibility in a time of war, but in much more oblique terms. I wanted to speak about communication, and how I have found that one of my strongest and most enjoyable methods of communication is music. I wanted to talk about the New York City public school preschoolers with whom I work each week and how they've been empowered through music, how they've been able to learn linguistic and social skills by singing together. I wanted to talk about my grandfather, who, despite the fact that he has Alzheimer's disease and cannot remember even my name, still knows all the songs he sang in his youth. I wanted to talk about music as a powerful tool for peace. I wanted to encourage everyone to identify his or her talents and to always use them for the greater good.

Unfortunately, a certain not-so-dynamic duo of "centrist" politicians foiled my standard graduation speech and forced me to act. Until just the day before commencement I really hadn't understood the gravity of the situation. I suppose I should tell the story.

On Thursday I attended two graduation ceremonies for my two degrees, one at the New School Jazz Program and one at Eugene Lang College at the New School. The Lang graduation was a pretty raucous affair, owing mostly to the dissenting voices of Elijah Miller, a student award recipient, and Mark Larrimore, a religious studies professor and our keynote speaker. Through the cheers at that event I got a sense of just how widespread the student outrage was. Forgive me now if I seem out of touch with my student body, but as a double degree student who had spent the last month in hibernation working on her recital and her thesis, in addition to working with the preschoolers, I hadn't done anything else for weeks. At some point that day I was introduced to Irene, a student who was involved in organizing pins and armbands for students to wear during commencement the next day. We figured out a way to get me and the other student speaker armbands before the event. This same day all of us in the platform party got an email from the event organizer letting us know that certain media representatives would be in attendance, among them Fox news and National Public Radio. The situation seemed pretty serious.

When I got home Thursday night after a rehearsal, I decided I needed to at least insert a line in my speech about the armbands. And I would've left it there, had the other student speaker, Christina Antonakis-Wallace, not reminded me in a telephone conversation that night that I should read John McCain's speech from his other two speaking engagements which was conveniently posted on his website. Of course! I had to do my research. I checked the schedule for the ceremony and realized that I would be speaking just before the senator got his award. And that's when the idea for a preemptive strike began to brew in my little stressed-out brain. What if I tore McCain's speech apart before he even opened his mouth? After reading his speech a couple of times I picked out a few particularly loathsome sections--and believe it or not, none of these actually came from the extensive section where he defends his position on the war in Iraq--and I began planning an attack against him using his own words.

At two in the morning when my boyfriend came home I hadn't even started writing yet. I was in a terrible state of anxiety. What if it didn't work? Didn't my earlier speech make my position clear enough? I told him my new idea. "Jean, you have to do it. You'll kick yourself later if you don't." "But it's two in the morning. There's no way it's going to be any good." "Jean, do it. You'll have nothing to regret."

So in the wee hours of the morning I set out to revise my speech, re-saving it as "mccain speech subversive.doc". And at three o'clock in the morning I woke up my other roommate as I practiced reading it in our living room. She wasn't upset. "Sounds like you're running for president," she told me. We all agreed that I had no choice. It was the only thing I could do at the commencement. And so, tingling with nerves, I tried to go to sleep.

The morning of the event I shared my speech over the phone with my mother who predictably enough, cried. She gave me her words of encouragement. And moments later, in the driving rain, I set off alone for Madison Square Garden.

The entire afternoon leading up to my speech I imagined that everyone who saw me knew what I was up to. I felt like an infiltrator. I wanted to go home and I was sick to my stomach. But when I heard an organizer on her walkie-talkie speaking nervously with another coordinator about the students outside who had leaflets and armbands, I knew that I would have my supporters. Later, John McCain arrived in the green room, and with the encouragement of Laurie Anderson, another honoree, Christina and I introduced ourselves to him. I almost wanted to warn the guy that I was about to make him look like an idiot so that he would at least have a fighting chance and an extra moment to change his speech to save himself. But he didn't even make eye contact when we shook hands, so I figured I didn't owe him anything.

The rest is a blur. I didn't have a high school graduation, so I was kind of looking forward to the whole ceremony of it, but all I remember is suddenly being in a robe, walking down the aisle of the MSG Theater to the cheers of my friends (who, incidentally, had no idea what to expect) and then I was on stage staring out at thousands of people and trying not to vomit. Eventually I spoke, and everyone loved it. And McCain spoke and we all had a bit of déjà vu. Then some other people spoke and I tried to pay attention but I couldn't stop gawking at the protesters in the audience. And just before the end of the ceremony Bob Kerrey asked if I wanted to walk out with McCain. I said that would be OK. Kerrey led me over to him as the recessional music began, and I took McCain's arm. "I'm sorry, man," I told him, "I just had to do it." He mumbled something about it being alright, but I think he probably would've rather not had me there. It really wasn't his fault that he got invited into a pit of very well-educated vipers, and it really wasn't my fault that I did what I had to do in the situation. Had he been speaking at something other than our graduation, or had he spoken about almost anything other than his life and his position on the Iraq War and Darfur it might have been OK. But what did he expect? Campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination at the New School is like trying to catch fish in a swimming pool. It was just totally out of place. Many thanks go to the people in the audience who managed to capture with a few yelled and widely-quoted phrases, just exactly what was going on there.

I suppose I've written enough already, none of which has been particularly journalistic. But I do feel that I need to respond to a couple of things that have been floating around in the news. It's been noted in several columns that anti-McCain sentiment coming from the left may actually help him to garner support from the conservatives by giving him the opportunity to paint us as extremist liberals, so we should all keep our mouths shut. I say we need some "extremist liberals" if we're ever going to get our democracy back. Others have said that he's a moderate at heart and that we should let him continue pandering to the religious right so he can get the vote. Once he gets into office he'll show his true colors and be the centrist he always was. I don't buy that. People who truly care about human beings don't vote for an unjust war, among other things, simply as a political maneuver. Enough said.

More importantly, I feel obligated to respond to one thing that McCain told the New York Times. "I feel sorry for people living in a dull world where they can't listen to the views of others," he said. This is just preposterous. Yes, McCain was undoubtedly shouted-out and heckled by people who were not politely absorbing his words so as to consider them fully from every angle. But what did he expect? We could've all printed out his speech and chanted it with him in chorus. Did he think that no one knew exactly what he was about to say? And it was precisely because we listen to the views of others, and because, as I said in my speech, we don't fear them, that we as a school were able to mount such a thorough and intelligent opposition to his presence. Ignorant, closed-minded people would not have been able to do what we did. We chose to be in New York for our years of higher education for the very reason that we would be challenged to listen to opposing viewpoints each and every day and to deal with that challenge in a nonviolent manner. We've gotten very good at listening to the views of others and learning how to also make our views heard, even when we don't have the power of national political office and the media on our side.

I think we must remember that as big as this moment may seem to me today and perhaps to other supporters who are reading this article, this is a very small victory in a time when democracy is swiftly eroding under the pressure of the right wing in this country. We all have much work to do, and for the most part the media do not represent us, the small people who don't hold any special titles but who feel the weight of our government's actions on our backs each and every day. I never expected to get the opportunity to speak the way I did yesterday, but I'm so glad that I did. I hope that other people found strength in my act of protest and will one day find themselves in my position, drawing out their own bravery to speak truth.


Here's my commencement speech:

If all the world were peaceful now and forever more,

Peaceful at the surface and peaceful at the core,

All the joy within my heart would be so free to soar,

And we're living on a living planet, circling a living star.

Don't know where we're going but I know we're going far.

We can change the universe by being who we are,

And we're living on a living planet, circling a living star.



Welcome everyone on this beautiful afternoon to the commencement ceremony for the New School class of 2006. That was an excerpt of a song I learned as a child called "Living Planet" by Jay Mankita. I chose to begin my address this way because, as always, but especially now, we are living in a time of violence, of war, of injustice. I am thinking of our brothers and sisters in Iraq, in Darfur, in Sri Lanka, in Mogadishu, in Israel/Palestine, right here in the U.S., and many, many other places around the world. And my deepest wish on this day--on all days--is for peace, justice, and true freedom for all people. The song says, "We can change the universe by being who we are," and I believe that it really is just that simple.

Right now, I'm going to be who I am and digress from my previously prepared remarks. I am disappointed that I have to abandon the things I had wanted to speak about, but I feel that it is absolutely necessary to acknowledge the fact that this ceremony has become something other than the celebratory gathering that it was intended to be due to all the media attention surrounding John Mc Cain's presence here today, and the student and faculty outrage generated by his invitation to speak here. The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded. Not only this, but his invitation was a top-down decision that did not take into account the desires and interests of the student body on an occasion that is supposed to honor us above all, and to commemorate our achievements.

What is interesting and bizarre about this whole situation is that Senator Mc Cain has stated that he will be giving the same speech at all three universities where he has been invited to speak recently, of which ours is the last; those being Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, Columbia University, and finally here at the New School. For this reason I have unusual foresight concerning the themes of his address today. Based on the speech he gave at the other institutions, Senator Mc Cain will tell us today that dissent and disagreement are our "civic and moral obligation" in times of crisis. I consider this a time of crisis and I feel obligated to speak. Senator Mc Cain will also tell us about his cocky self-assuredness in his youth, which prevented him from hearing the ideas of others. In so doing, he will imply that those of us who are young are too naïve to have valid opinions and open ears. I am young, and although I don't profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that preemptive war is dangerous and wrong, that George Bush's agenda in Iraq is not worth the many lives lost. And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction.

Finally, Senator Mc Cain will tell us that we, those of us who are Americans, "have nothing to fear from each other." I agree strongly with this, but I take it one step further. We have nothing to fear from anyone on this living planet. Fear is the greatest impediment to the achievement of peace. We have nothing to fear from people who are different from us, from people who live in other countries, even from the people who run our government--and this we should have learned from our educations here. We can speak truth to power, we can allow our humanity always to come before our nationality, we can refuse to let fear invade our lives and to goad us on to destroy the lives of others. These words I speak do not reflect the arrogance of a young strong-headed woman, but belong to a line of great progressive thought, a history in which the founders of this institution play an important part. I speak today, even through my nervousness, out of a need to honor those voices that came before me, and I hope that we graduates can all strive to do the same.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jean-rohe/wh...up_b_21358.html

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

-- Robert Frost

( recited at John F. Kennedy's inauguration 1961)


In Search of Political Courage

by John Shattuck

It takes a lot of courage these days for a government official to stand up for the rule of law.

On Dec. 17, 2002, Alberto Mora received information from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service that prisoners at the Guantanamo Naval Base were being abusively interrogated. Mora, a loyal conservative, had been appointed by President Bush in 2001 to serve as general counsel of the Navy. Since the Navy had no responsibility for Guantanamo interrogations, Mora could have referred the report to others in the Pentagon, or simply decided to ignore it. Instead, he chose to investigate. What he discovered was deeply disturbing.

As he wrote in a recently declassified memo to the Navy's inspector general, Mora learned that his boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had authorized interrogation techniques that ''could rise to the level of torture." Mora told the Pentagon's general counsel, William Haynes, that Rumsfeld's memorandum ''could have severe ramifications unless the policy was quickly reversed." He warned that the interrogation policy was ''unlawful" and that its consequences could be ''incalculably harmful to US foreign, military, and legal policies."

When nothing happened, Mora set out to change the policy. He knew he had to find allies in the Pentagon, and he began to recruit them by openly debating the Rumsfeld memorandum with other officials. A small bureaucratic victory came when the Department of Defense created a ''Working Group" to develop new recommendations. But this process was overwhelmed by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which weighed in with its own memo expanding the original Rumsfeld policy.

Mora challenged the Justice Department. He charged that the policy allowed ''cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees," and expressed deep disagreement with its ''extreme and virtually unlimited theory of the extent of the President's authority." Mora confronted the author of the memo, Office of Legal Counsel Deputy Director John Yoo, asking him ''whether the president could order the application of torture." Mora wrote in his memo to the inspector general: ''Yoo responded, 'Yes.' "

Mora was shocked. He worked hard to get the Pentagon to shelve what he called this ''deeply flawed" policy that now had been hijacked by the Justice Department. For nearly a year Mora thought he had succeeded in persuading his superiors to block the policy, because the Rumsfeld and Legal Counsel memoranda were never finalized.

Then in April 2004 the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke. Mora learned the bitter truth -- the torture policy he and others inside the Pentagon had fought so courageously to stop had secretly been kept in place all along, and the horrors they had warned against had come to pass.

Mora did not prevail in his bureaucratic battle, but his defense of the law and the Constitution demonstrated great political courage. That's why the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation today will recognize Alberto Mora with its Profile in Courage Award, together with John Murtha, a senior member of Congress and Vietnam combat veteran who made a difficult decision of conscience last year when he reversed his support for the Iraq war and sparked a national debate by calling for the withdrawal of US troops from the conflict.

''To be courageous requires no exceptional qualifications," wrote then-Senator John F. Kennedy in his 1957 Pulitzer-Prize winning book, ''Profiles in Courage." ''It is an opportunity sooner or later presented to us all."

We need leaders today who dare to defend the rule of law and the role of debate in our government against those who would suppress or circumvent them.

At a time when the proscription against torture has been undermined, when a secret domestic spying program has been carried out in apparent violation of federal law, when the president has claimed the authority to disregard hundreds of other statutes passed by Congress, and when the country has been taken to war under an erroneous pretext, we should follow the example of those who stand up for democracy. That's the message of Alberto Mora and John Murtha.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0522-34.htm

Published on Sunday, May 21, 2006 by the Boulder Daily Camera (Colorado)

Hold the Corrupt Jerks Accountable

by Molly Ivins


AUSTIN, Texas - Looking at the wreckage of the Bush administration leaves one with the depressed query, "Now what?" The only help to the country that can come from this ugly and spectacular crack-up is, in theory, things can't get worse. This administration is so discredited it cannot talk the country into an unnecessary war with Iran as it did with Iraq. In theory, spending is so out of control it cannot cut taxes for the rich again; the fiscal irresponsibility of the Bushies is already among its lasting legacies.

As we all know, things can always get worse, and often do. I rather think it's going to be up to the Democrats to hold the metaphoric hands of this crippled administration until it limps off stage.

The Republican National Committee has a new scare tactic for the faithful: You must give to the party, or else the Democrats will spend the next two years investigating the administration (horror of horrors). Those who recall the insanely trivial investigations of the Clinton years may indeed regard this as the ultimate waste of time and money (as even Ken Starr concluded, there never was anything to Whitewater), but in fact it could be a therapeutic use of the next biennium. In fact, the offenses are not comparable.

Suppose we really did stop to investigate why and how and who is responsible for the lies, the deformed policies and the inability to govern of this administration. There is a wealth of lessons to be learned about the dangers of ideological delusion and of contempt for governance.

Trouble is, the world is not apt to hold still for two years. It seems to me pointless to impeach Bush. In the first place, the Republicans so trivialized impeachment into partisan piffle, it would look like little more than payback. In the second place, I believe Dick Cheney is seriously off the rails, apparently deeply paranoid — let's not put him in charge. The minimum we should expect of Bush in return for dropping impeachment (or not) is that he cease breaking the law. Despite the opinions of Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, etc., the president of the United States does not have the authority to set aside the law.

(If Bush were impeached, I would use as evidence his astounding statement in March that the matter of getting American troops out of Iraq "will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq." What a contemptible statement.)

It would be easier to contemplate a two-year holding period if Bush hadn't already wasted so much time. Of particular note in this department is "the inconvenient truth" — global warming. Wasting eight years in the face of what we already knew when Bush came in is not only insane, but also unforgivable. A recent poll showed the majority of Americans feel the war in Iraq will be the overriding issue of Bush's presidency. I suspect future historians will fixate on his global warming record — not only doing nothing to stop it, but letting the hole get dug deeper, as well.

Barring emergency, I suspect the wisest thing Democrats can do in the next two years is to begin steadily undoing what Bush hath wrought — on tax and spending, on global warming, and on surveillance and other illegal lunges for power.

George W. Bush ran in 2000 as a moderate. He did not bother to inform us at the time that he felt the government of this country needed a much stronger executive above the law. Congress has sat by passively while this administration accrued more and more power. If members of Congress think the legislative branch should be equal, it's time for them to stir their stumps.

Am I jumping to conclusions? Can Karl Rove yet steer his party away from electoral disaster in the fall? I learned long ago never to call elections closer than six weeks out, and normally I stick to that rule. But I do not think George W. can be put together again, so Rove's only option is go negative against the Democrats — no surprise there. At this point, they could attack Democrats on almost anything, but that would leave the large question, "Compared to what?" And, we must watch out for those voting machines.

It would be interesting to see an election in which Bush is not a factor and the whole fight is over what Tom DeLay and the K Street Project have made of the Congress. If ever a gang of corrupt jerks deserved to be held accountable, this one does.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0521-29.htm

President grabs power while Congress sleeps

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER, Times Perspective Columnist
Published May 21, 2006



It's only three more years. That is the coldly comforting phrase used by people who can't wait until our destructive, intellectually limited president has permanently gone fishing.

But the changes that George W. Bush has made to our nation's constitutional firmament may not depart with the first family's bags. His disregard for the separation of powers has so dramatically distorted the office of the president that he may have engineered a turning point in American history.

Bush represents the flag-wavers who are long on enthusiasm but don't have any real appreciation for the nobility of America. It isn't our big, expensive military or our big, expensive economy that bestows greatness. It is our modesty. America's magnificence lies in its grounding principle that power must be diffuse. We built a system based on the assessed fallibility of man, where a president is limited by Congress, the courts and the Constitution.

But from the beginning, Bush has disregarded America's well-tested formula of calibrated and collaborative governing. His can't-think-of-any-mistakes presidency has stomped on comity and established a pattern of unilateralism that future presidents may well emulate.

Bush has taught tomorrow's leaders that, if there are no consequences for ignoring legal constraints on power and if no one stops you from conducting the nation's business in secret, you don't have to be accountable. He is ruling through the tautological doctrine of Richard Nixon, who told interviewer David Frost that as long as the president's doing it "that means it is not illegal.''

Nothing better illuminates Bush's contempt for American checks and balances than his abuse of the presidential signing statement. According to a Boston Globe report, Bush has asserted the authority to disregard more than 750 laws by essentially writing provisos into them - a power he stole from Congress.

The Republican leadership in Congress is standing by while its house is being pillaged. The power to write federal laws is Congress' alone. The president's duty, as expressly stated in the Constitution, is to faithfully execute the laws he signs, not to add asterisks on parts he intends to ignore.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert are joining in their own emasculation when they utter not a peep during this bloodless coup. I don't know why Republicans have a reputation for strength. When blindly supporting a president from your own party takes precedence over guarding Congress' historic role, "Republican leadership" becomes an oxymoron.

It is not just liberals who have recognized the danger. I challenge anyone to read an important new report by the libertarian Cato Institute (www.cato.org) and not be chilled. "Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush" is an unblinking 28-page analysis of our slow devolution into autocracy. Its message can be summed up with this quote: "Under (the president's) sweeping theory of executive power, the liberty of every American rests on nothing more than the grace of the White House."

A meek and pliant Congress is allowing this new paradigm to take root.

It wasn't until the White House started getting nervous about the confirmation prospects of Gen. Michael Hayden as CIA chief that it bothered to brief the full intelligence committees of the House and Senate on the domestic wiretapping and information-collection programs that had been operational for years. For the previous five months, the White House stonewalled lawmakers' questions on warrantless domestic wiretapping of Americans. Republican Sen. Arlen Specter was so frustrated that he threatened to cut off funding for the NSA's wiretapping program if the information he had requested was not forthcoming. But rather than rallying around Specter and standing firmly for the oversight role of Congress, his colleagues left him to flap in the wind, with an empty threat on his lips.

Where is Congress? Why is it that the revelations surrounding a secret database of millions of Americans' phone records, warrantless wiretapping by the NSA, secret overseas CIA prisons, memos excusing torture and other horribles authorized by Bush had to come from the press? The same press that, according to ABC News, is having its calls checked so sources can be unearthed. The same press that administration shill William Bennett suggested should be prosecuted under a 1917 espionage law for telling the American people the truth about what their government is up to.

Our lawmakers are MIA. They have handed the game board to Bush, and he has taken it and gone home. He now controls his pieces and theirs. But it wasn't their game to give away. It was ours.

Holding the executive branch to account for its actions, demanding that it respect the law and insisting that it fully report to Congress on its activities - these are nonnegotiable duties of Congress, because they are key part of our inheritance.

Being answerable to another is humbling. It makes you more careful in your actions. It requires that you consider how you will defend your decisions. George Bush has freed himself of this constitutional imperative and is showing the next president, and the next, how it is done.


http://www.sptimes.com/2006/05/21/Columns/...abs_power.shtml

Published on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 by The Progressive

The Democrats' Losing Attitude

by Ruth Conniff


Conservatives are considering sulking at home during the upcoming midterms. Apparently, two rightwing appointments to the Supreme Court and an evangelical crusader in the White House are apparently not enough. Meanwhile, the Democrats are, for the first time, actually looking at a fighting chance to take over Congress, according to a front page story in Sunday's New York Times. A simultaneous rebuke to Bush from the right and the left may break the Republican stranglehold on government this fall. But dramatic political change is not necessarily at hand.

Even if the Democrats gain a majority in Congress in 2006, it won't be a progressive majority. The party leadership continues to promote caution on withdrawing from Iraq, criticizing the President, or taking a stand against the aggressive and unconstitutional policies of this administration. The conventional wisdom--that taking too clear a position might get in the way of letting the Republicans hang themselves—is only strengthened by the fact that the Dems' chances are looking better in the polls now, even as they shy away from appearing to be too strong an opposition.

If stalling is a viable strategy, why be surprised that some Dems are even promoting losing as a winning prospect? Really. Last week Tony Coelho told Adam Nagourney that NOT gaining majorities in the House and Senate might be better for Democrats, since then they won't be blamed for the mess the country is in. "The most politically advantageous thing for the Democrats is to pick up 11, 12 seats in the House and three or four seats in the Senate but let the Republicans continue to be responsible for government," Coelho, a former House Democratic whip, told the Times. "We are heading into this period of tremendous deficit, plus all the scandals, plus all the programs that have been cut. This way, they get blamed for everything."

So when, exactly, can we expect a change of direction? When the Republicans start governing responsibly, ending the deficit, reforming government, restoring domestic services, and rolling back the Bush tax cuts? It will be a cold day in Hell before the Democrats judge it a safe time to step up to the plate and take over.

And if they manage to stumble into power, what are the chances that the Democrats will take bold steps to rescue the country from all the bad policies this Administration has brought on us? Not much, judging by the nervous attitude of the current leadership.

Howard Dean incurred the wrath of House and Senate leaders when he declined to direct funds to the Congressional campaigns of the suddenly viable Democratic contenders, who are counting on the anyone-but-Bush-and-friends vote to get them into office. Instead, the DLC chair insists on continuing to fund state-level party-building activities. That sort of long term thinking is not particularly popular. But it might help cure what ails the Democrats. By bringing some grassroots candidates up through the ranks, it is possible that, in a few years, the party might actually have some candidates willing to take a chance on leading the country. Imagine.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0523-29.htm

Published on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 by Inter Press Service

Bush Democracy Doctrine, 2003(?)-2006, R.I.P

by Jim Lobe


WASHINGTON - Less than 18 months after U.S. President George W. Bush declared in his 2005 Inaugural Address his unequivocal commitment to the "ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world", tyrants, particularly in the Islamic world, are taking heart.

From North Africa to Central Asia, top U.S. officials are busy embracing dictators -- and their sons, where appropriate -- even as they continue to mouth the pro-democracy rhetoric that became the hallmark of the administration's foreign policy pronouncements, particularly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq failed to turn up evidence of weapons of mass destruction or ties to al Qaeda.

Particularly notable in just the past month have been White House receptions for Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's heir-apparent, his son Gamal; the praise lavished by Vice President Dick Cheney on Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev during a recent visit to Almaty; and last week's normalisation of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

"You add up all the pieces, and the message to the world is, 'We have a lot of other business than just democracy in this region'," according to Thomas Carothers, director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) here. "And that business means friendly relations with all sorts of autocrats."

Whether due to the ever-tightening oil market, the sweeping electoral victories by Islamist parties in Egypt, Iraq and the Palestinian territories, or geo-strategic manoeuvring against Iran, Russia and China, the administration now appears to have all but abandoned its "freedom agenda" in favour of a new "realism" not much different from that practiced by successive U.S. administrations during the Cold War.

And, in a scenario familiar to veterans of Washington's Cold War machinations against democratic but suspiciously left-wing governments, the administration is focusing its efforts at "regime change" against those Middle Eastern governments which, besides Israel, enjoy the greatest popular and electoral legitimacy in the region -- namely, Iran and the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Moreover, the administration's neo-conservative supporters, who were the first to justify the Iraq invasion as part of a grand strategy to "transform" the Middle East into a democratic region presumably far more hospitable to Israel and the West, have become noticeably less enthusiastic, particularly since HAMAS's sweeping election victory in the PA.

They now argue that the administration was wrong to press free elections on the region's rulers as a way of promoting democratic change in the absence of years, perhaps decades, of gradual liberalisation.

"...(A)n intense focus on holding elections everywhere as quickly as possible ...has been a mistake because, although elections are part of the democratic process, they are never a substitute for it," wrote former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky whose 2004 book, "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror", was personally and repeatedly endorsed by Bush himself as the inspiration for his 2005 Inaugural Address.

That address marked the high point of the administration's freedom rhetoric, which Bush had launched in earnest in February 2003 in a speech at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) where he first cited an analogy between the democratisation of occupied Germany and Japan and what Washington intended for Iraq.

During her confirmation hearings as secretary of state on the eve of the 2005 inaugural, Condoleezza Rice also insisted that Bush had "broken with six decades of excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the hope of purchasing stability at the price of liberty".

"As long as the broader Middle East remains a region of tyranny and despair and anger," she argued, "it will produce extremists and movements that threaten the safety of Americans and our friends."

Indeed, for some months after the inaugural, it appeared that the policy was more than mere rhetoric.

Encouraged by the momentum created by the ballot victory of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the smooth running of elections in Iraq in January and the subsequent "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon, the administration exerted unusually strong pressure on the elder Mubarak to release jailed opposition leader Ayman Nour and enact major constitutional changes. It also pressed Saudi Arabia and the emirates on their reform programmes, and even gave up access to a key military base in Uzbekistan, a strong ally in the "global war on terror", after the massacre last May of hundreds of unarmed demonstrators in Andijan.

As the situation continued to go downhill in Iraq, Hizbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood did particularly well in elections in Lebanon and Egypt, respectively, and tensions with Iran arose after the upset win of right-wing candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, however, Washington's enthusiasm began to fade.

The Palestinian election in January -- which Washington had insisted go forward despite Abbas' and Israel's concerns that HAMAS would win -- appears to have marked a turning point. As noted shortly afterward by the chairman of the House of Representatives International Relations Committee, Henry Hyde, "There is no evidence that that we or anyone can guide from afar revolutions we have set in motion."

In the last few months, the return to Realpolitik has been remarkable, even if the rhetoric remains largely unchanged.

"It will be business as usual," said Marina Ottaway, another democracy specialist at the Carnegie Endowment. "I think we can expect that the rhetoric and the funding for democracy-promotion activities through the Middle East Partnership Initiative -- activities that are not dangerous to the regimes in power -- will continue, but what we aren't going to see too much of is high-level pressure on those governments to carry out reforms ...and certainly not pressure on any country to rush into elections."

"What has happened is what the realists predicted -- that Israel and pro-American regimes in the region would be threatened by the democracy drive," said Anatole Lieven, a foreign policy specialist at the New America Foundation.

"If you try to carry out democratisation while pursuing policies that the vast majority of Muslims detest and in countries where economic development is stagnant, democracy will of course lead to anti-American radicalism," he added.

In addition to the strength of Islamist parties throughout the Middle East, the growing competition with Russia and China over energy supplies and pipelines and the looming confrontation with Iran also help explain the administration's fading enthusiasm for democratisation, particularly in the Gulf and among Iran's Central Asian neighbours, such as Azerbaijan.

"The administration is trying to convince these countries to be allied with us against Iran," noted Ottaway. "When you want them to help you, it's not a good time to be critical."

Indeed, almost exactly one year after the Andijan massacre, the Pentagon is urging a major reassessment of relations with Uzbekistan, apparently in hopes of regaining access to the Khanabad air base, particularly in light of Russia's recent success in acquiring access to bases there.


http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0524-03.htm

Published on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Of Loss and Hope

by Joyce Marcel


With all the unnecessary carnage in Iraq, the babies blown to bits, the blood feuds, the women mowed down by rifles, the estimated 2,455 Americans dead, the estimated 19,000 to 48,000 Americans returning without arms, legs, or eyes, along with the horror of Darfur, the AIDS epidemic in India, Africa, Russia, and China - in fact, with the immense amount of human suffering on the planet, I'm having a hard time explaining to myself how I got so worried about a horse.

The horse, of course, of course, was the undefeated Barbaro.

Barbaro thrilled me in the Florida Derby, where he danced out ahead of everyone else. I won money on him in the Kentucky Derby. I had several bets on him, including a few exactas, in the Preakness.

Oh, he was rambunctious on Preakness day, finely tuned, full of energy and heart. Like an Olympic speed skater he jumped the gun at the starting gate, then broke clean at the true start and began cutting through the field.

All eyes were on him then, and I don't just mean the steady track-rat viewers of ESPN, or the johnny-come-lately NBC crowd, or the 118,442 drunken fans in the infield at Pimlico. He seemed like a natural to win the Triple Crown, and because of that the eyes of the whole country were on him.

So, moments after the Preakness began in earnest, when Barbaro's jockey, Edgar Prado, pulled him up, jumped off, and held him steady, and as trainer Mike Matz dashed out of the stands with an anguished look on his face, everyone was aghast. This was a blessed horse. and in front of all of us the blessing fled.

The race continued. It was won by Bernardini -hold on for the irony here - owned by Sheik Mohammad, the fascinating and hawk-eyed ruler of oil-rich Dubai.

But most of us were no longer focused on the race. Instead, we were heartsore and horrified. Barbaro had three breaks in his leg. One bone fractured into 20 pieces. Gloom set in where anticipation had been drinking Champagne.

"It's only a horse," some people shrugged. "That's horse racing," said others.

For many others, though, depression followed. A black cloud descended on me, I can tell you that. And it wasn't a gloom brought on by the winning tickets I wouldn't be cashing. It was about seeing something so bright and fine and eager cut down in its prime.

Barbaro was starting to look more and more like a symbol.

But a symbol of what, I wondered?

In the same way that the Depression needed Seabiscuit, I decided, America needed Barbaro now.

It's not a perfect comparison. Seabiscuit was a beaten-down horse who was rescued and allowed to be the winner that he always was inside. He was a metaphor for all the whipped, jobless, hungry Americans who badly needed to be rescued and allowed to be the winners they always knew inside they could be. It was Roosevelt who rescued those Americans, and it was World War II they won for him.

Different times call for different metaphors. Barbaro was a million-dollar race horse, groomed and trained and primed and gleaming. He was unbeaten and everyone knew he was the strongest, fastest horse in the field.

Americans identified with Barbaro. We loved him. We needed him to win the Preakness. Then we needed him to win the Belmont Stakes, and then to be the first Triple Crown winner since Affirmed in 1978.

We needed a superhorse, a horse that loved to run, a horse that could gladden our hearts and reflect back to us what we used to think was the best of ourselves - our strength, our beauty, our courage, our joy in the game, our speed, our heart. Reflect back to us the things that I think we now know, deep in our hearts, we have lost.

Outrage and anger has gotten me through the long, long years of the Bush Administration, through the lying and deceit and killing and looting and the destruction of our precious Constitution. Outrage and anger has gotten me through as I watch my fellow Americans become complicit in acts we have all loathed in others: as we torture, threaten and jail journalists, distribute propaganda, build high border walls and spy on our own citizens.

Outrage and anger as I watch America turn into Cold War East Germany - or the old U.S.S.R.

I thought outrage and anger would get me the rest of the way, but when Barbaro broke his leg - threatening his life and certainly ending his racing career - I recognized, with a shock, that the Bush years are irreparable, too. Real damage has been sustained. We can't just go in and fix things when Bush leaves office.

Maybe we can pay down the national debt - for all his faults, Bill Clinton managed to do that after the wastrel Reagan-Bush I years. Maybe we can get out of Iraq. Nixon, for all his faults, managed to get us out of Vietnam. But our hands will never be clean again: we will never be able to wash them of Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib or Afghanistan or the innocents who have died in Iraq. We will never be a nation of jobs and homeowners again. We will not see a strong middle class again for a long, long time.

Barbaro underwent five hours of surgery. According to all reports, he's happy and frisky. He can even balance himself well enough to scratch his left ear with his left hind leg. But he'll never run again, splendid and strong, all heart and courage and soul.

And neither will America.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0524-32.htm

May 25, 2006
Eavesdropping, Gagging, and the Constitution

by Ray McGovern

Is the National Security Agency being "turned against the people," as the Congressional committee led by Sen. Frank Church warned might happen? We the people cannot know; it's classified.

Thursday's slick but evasive testimony by Gen. Mike Hayden, the president's nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency, put the spotlight on Hayden's personal role in an aggressive NSA program that skirts strict 30-year-old legal restrictions on eavesdropping on American citizens. As NSA director from 1999 to 2005, Hayden did the White House's bidding in devising and implementing that program without adequately informing Congress – as required by law. When an unauthorized disclosure revealed the program to the press, Hayden agreed to play point-man with smoke and mirrors. Small wonder that the White House considers him the perfect man for the CIA job.

The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect us from "unreasonable searches and seizures," unless the government can establish "probable cause" that a crime is involved. The NSA, FBI, and other agencies of government had been running programs in clear violation of the amendment in the decades before the Church committee held extensive hearings on these matters in 1975.

While acknowledging the NSA's technological capability as a "sensitive national asset valuable to national defense," the Church committee sharply warned, "If not properly controlled … this same capability could be turned against the American people, at great cost to liberty." The upshot was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was passed in 1978 in an effort to ensure that (1) this capability could play an effective role for national defense and (2) it would not be "turned against the American people."

The football lingo favored by Gen. Hayden provides an instructive metaphor here. FISA was essentially an "end run" around the Fourth Amendment. But it was a legal play authorized by the 1978 legislation out of concern that this valuable eavesdropping tool not be lost to intelligence officials charged with protecting U.S. national security. To ensure as much as possible that constitutional protections would not be jeopardized, the 1978 law gave the government permission to eavesdrop on Americans only with a warrant from a special court set up for that purpose (the FISA court). At the same time, in recognition of the occasional need for intelligence officers to act quickly, the law specifically allows eavesdropping on U.S. citizens for 72 hours before a warrant must be sought.

Illegal Procedure

After 9/11, at the urging of Vice President Dick Cheney and his counsel David Addington, President George W. Bush authorized what can be likened to an end run around the FISA end run. But since this new play ignores the requirement for a court warrant, it amounts to "illegal procedure." And this is recognized by virtually everyone but the most zealous fans of the Bush team, who argue vehemently that the play should not be called back and the team not be penalized.

As I noted in an earlier article, Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, NSA director (1977-81), who over a long career has earned wide respect from Republicans and Democrats alike, recently leveled pointed criticism at the new administration program. Inman stressed, "There clearly was a line in the FISA statutes which says you couldn't do this." He also pointed to an "extra sentence put in the bill, which said, 'You can't do anything that is not authorized by this bill.'" He added that we should get away from the idea that the program can continue.

Fouling One Off

Switching to the baseball lingo equally favored by Hayden, at his confirmation hearing Thursday he swung at a fat pitch from administration loyalist Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.). But instead of knocking it over the fence, per the game plan, Hayden fouled up by fouling it off. Bond's delivery:

"Did you believe that your primary responsibility as director of NSA was to execute a program that your NSA lawyers, the Justice Department lawyers, and White House officials all told you was legal, and that you were ordered to carry it out by the president of the United States?"

Instead of the simple "Yes" that was anticipated, Hayden paused and spoke rather poignantly – and revealingly:

"I had to make this personal decision in early October 2001, and it was a personal decision…. I could not not do this."

Why should it be such an enormous personal decision whether or not to obey a White House order? No one asked Hayden, but it requires no particular acuity to figure it out. This is a military officer who had indoctrinated NSA employees with what used to be known as NSA's "First Commandment" – Thou Shalt Not Eavesdrop on U.S. Citizens; an officer who, like the rest of us, had sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; a military man well aware one must never obey an unlawful order.

That, it seems clear, is why Hayden found it a difficult personal decision. Did the new, post-9/11 "paradigm" created by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington trump the Constitution? President George W. Bush on Jan. 23, 2006: "I had all kinds of lawyers review the process." Seems so. The same ones who were concurrently devising ways to "legalize" torture and indefinite detention without due process.

No American, save perhaps Adm. Inman, who was present at the creation of FISA, knew the FISA law better than Hayden. Nonetheless, the general said Thursday that he did not even require a written legal opinion to satisfy himself that this very aggressive surveillance program, to be implemented without warrant and without adequate consultation in Congress, could be considered legal. Attorneys from the Justice Department and elsewhere were said to have blessed the program. But when Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.) asked now-Attorney General Gonzales to have lawyers look into the advice rendered at the time by Justice attorneys, he was told that Justice had to drop the investigation. The lame excuse? The NSA had refused to grant the attorneys from Justice the needed clearances to look into the NSA program.

The Powell Virus

Infected like so many other senior military officers by what might be called the "Powell virus," Hayden could "not not" salute his commander in chief – whether the order be legal or illegal. He could not summon the courage to say "Sir, no sir," as the excellent new film on Vietnam puts it.

Hayden's Prussian boot-click is what we can anticipate if he is confirmed as director of the CIA. This is why the White House considers him so highly qualified for the job. But it is hardly what the country needs in dealing with the long train of abuses and usurpations adopted post-9/11, including kidnapping, extraordinary rendition, torture, sequestering detainees without notification to the Red Cross, and illegal surveillance.

Lies, Leaks, and the Constitution

The confirmation hearing also raised the issue of leaks, with Gen. Hayden subjecting them to harsh criticism. After all, his nomination would slide through easily, were it not for unauthorized disclosures showing that, at the behest of the vice president (and maybe the president too, who knows?), Hayden devised and ran illegal programs in violation of FISA and the Fourth Amendment. We retirees who have had firsthand experience with the value of leaks have been working hard to put them in perspective.

Twenty months ago, a dozen former government officials established the Truth-Telling Coalition to encourage serving officials to expose consequential government lies – the varying reasons adduced for attacking Iraq, for example. Our initial appeal issued on Sept. 9, 2004, was very direct:

"We know how misplaced loyalty to bosses, agencies, and careers can obscure the higher allegiance all government officials owe the Constitution, the sovereign public, and the young men and women put in harm's way. We urge you to act on those higher loyalties."

We were trying to challenge the pervasive temptation – especially among officials working on classified matters – to hunker down and avoid placing job and financial future at risk. The coalition urged government officials instead to provide such information both to Congress and, through the media, to the public. "Truth-telling is a patriotic and effective way to serve the nation," we wrote.

Good News and Bad News

The good news is that many officials still serving in the national security parts of our government have found ways to expose crimes like kidnapping "suspected terrorists," torturing them or "rendering" them to other countries to be tortured, holding them incommunicado without the required notice to the Red Cross, warrantless eavesdropping… The list goes on.

The bad news is that administration officials and those in Congress who do their bidding seem determined to intimidate those like Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) from exercising our First Amendment rights to speak out against that which we should speak out against: What the Nuremberg Tribunal called "the supreme international crime" of initiating a war of aggression. Especially considering that, as Nuremberg stressed, such a war contains the "accumulated evil of the whole." Just like the evils mentioned above, which are still going on.

It is abundantly clear that the George W. Bush administration – enjoying abroad "sole-remaining-superpower" status, and at home effective control of all three formerly independent branches of government – believes it has carte blanche to continue these abuses under the rubric of the "Long War" on terror. So, rather than addressing these abuses, the executive branch and its courtiers in Congress have been fixated on stemming the flow of revelations to the press.

Goss and His Lie Detectors

Toward this end, before former CIA director Porter Goss was given a pink slip on May 5, he had earned the dubious distinction of blowing more electrical circuits than any of his predecessors through overuse of polygraph machines for "single-issue" questioning: i.e., have you talked to the press? Goss fired senior analyst Mary McCarthy 10 days short of retirement as a warning to those misguided souls who may still believe the Fourth Estate has an important role to play in curbing government excesses.

During his tepid exit interview with President George W. Bush, the president described him (accurately) as a "transition" leader. The transition has been from bad ("slam-dunk" Tenet) to worse (yes-man Hayden). Gen. Hayden, by most accounts, was a decent sort until he fell in with bad companions – Vice President Dick Cheney, his "sure-you-can-do-anything" lawyer David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, and other hired-gun lawyers. Sniffing absolute power can do things to the most righteous. Forget the warrantless eavesdropping. What kind of person would lust after a job, the description of which includes supervising kidnapping, rendition, and torture?

Under pressure from his patron, Vice President Dick Cheney, to plug the leaks, Goss repeatedly condemned public discussion of intelligence matters – not only by current employees, but also by retirees – and was extremely critical of the media for publishing unauthorized disclosures. Similarly driven by Cheney, House Intelligence Committee chairman Pete Hoekstra has expressed outrage at the disclosures, particularly those regarding warrantless eavesdropping and secret CIA-run prisons abroad.

The problem is that Hoekstra is in a position to do something about it. The odor of fascism rises from his latest effort to intimidate those like VIPs from speaking and writing about administration behavior. Hoekstra inserted the following into the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY '07 (HR 5020), which has passed the House:

"SEC. 413. STUDY ON REVOKING PENSIONS OF PERSONS WHO COMMIT UNAUTHORIZED DISCLOSURES OF CLASSIFIED INFORMATION.

"(a) Study – The Director of National Intelligence shall conduct a study on the feasibility of revoking the pensions of personnel in the intelligence community … who commit unauthorized disclosures of classified information, including whether revoking such pensions is feasible under existing law or under the administrative authority of the Director of National Intelligence or any other head of an element of the intelligence community."

Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte would have 90 days from the date of enactment (the bill has not yet made it to the president's desk) to conduct and submit the study to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

Who decides what constitutes "classified information?" Not CIA retirees, you can be sure. Administration spokesmen have stressed that, despite previous disclosures to the press, programs like the eavesdropping and secret prisons remain classified. Journalists, too, are in jeopardy. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales warned Sunday on ABC's This Week that they can be prosecuted for publishing classified information, and insisted that the government will not hesitate to track telephone calls involving reporters as part of criminal investigations regarding leaks. Gonzales said he understood the role of the press, but insisted that the rights of a free press cannot trump national security concerns.

There it is, folks. The same Addington/Gonzales team that created a "post-9/11 paradigm" to justify torture can use that paradigm to trump the First Amendment as well. And we now have it straight from the mouth of the attorney general.

If the bill is passed with Hoekstra's Sec. 413 intact, we who have been speaking out against administration misdeeds will be reduced to hoping that any penalties are not made retroactive. The cognoscenti tell us not to worry; the Constitution will in the end trump draconian legislation of that kind. But given the current whiff of fascism wafting over Washington, it seems altogether possible the administration would not shy away from using our tax dollars to bring us to trial, and deprive us of our pensions for use in defending ourselves.

O Tempora, O Mores!


http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=9036

Published on Thursday, May 25, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

The Fairies That Set Our National Security Policy

by Larry Beinhart


The first play I ever went to was Peter Pan. I was five or six years old. The emotional peak of the play is when Tinker Bell, who was played by a small light that darts around the stage, is dying. Peter, who was played by a woman, turns to the audience and explains that every time someone says they don't believe in fairies, another fairy dies. So Tink is dying because some terrible person somewhere said they don't believe in faries!

But if we believe in fairies then we can make Tinker Bell live!

Peter asks the audience to clap if they believe in fairies.

Believe me, it was a very moving situation, and as a six year old I clapped frantically. As did all the other children and their parents. And we saved Tinker Bell! Or, to state it another way, a stagehand turned up the rheostat on the pin spot.

Now we are told by General Hayden that every time someone tells the truth about an NSA operation, another fairy dies.

He is not alone in telling that fairy tale. President Bush says the same thing. Attorney General Gonzales now mutters that reporters who expose secret programs should be criminally prosecuted, presumably for the underlying crime of fairy killing.

It's fair to call them fairies because no one says exactly who those people are who have died or offers facts about programs that have failed. If our leaders mean that a person has died because a secret has been compromised, they ought, at some point, to say so, to actually name the person and demonstrate the actual linkage. If they mean that one of the programs failed, someone ought to get specific and there too, demonstrate an actual linkage, a genuine cause and effect.

Of course, in the magic world where fairies live, telling means more dying.

So the General, the President, the Attorney General, and all, can't tell which fairies died and how.

Theoretically, they could tell in closed session without killing Tinker Bell, and theoretically, we the people, could have someone inside that closed session who evaluated their claims and then report back as to whether the warnings had real merit. Our witness would to be tough enough to stand up to accusations of fairy killing due to disbelief and bright enough to demand a certain level of proof and a realistic view of cause and effect. Based on past history and what we've observed in the hearings, the requirement that our witness exercise critical intelligence means he or she would have to be drawn from outside the House and Senate intelligence committees.

The fairy tale that a critical word will kill one of our men and women on the front lines is not limited to the Hayden nomination and to the defense of wiretaps without warrants and collecting data on all of our phone calls. It is used to stifle all criticism. It is, in particular, used to crush any questions about the War on Terror. That's unfortunate, because, although terrorism is real, the War on Terror contains many fairy tales.

One of the founding ideas, one of the essential ideals of this country, is that if something is true, then there's nothing wrong with criticizing it, because the criticism can be refuted with facts. If something is a fairy tale, it ought to be criticized, because spending time and money on the basis of fairy stories is a waste. Sending people off to kill and be killed for a fairy story is a tragedy.

So clap if you believe in fairies!

But please, if you think that the people in power are telling you fairy tales, speak up! Dont be afraid that you will kill Tinker Bell. She is only a little pin spot darting around a set, manipulated by a stage hand.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0525-33.htm

Playing the Impeachment Card

By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 25 May 2006


All in all, the framers would probably agree that it's better to impeach too often than too seldom. If presidents can't be virtuous, they should at least be nervous.

- Joseph Sobran



Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan is a small and soft-spoken man. One gets the definite sense upon meeting him that here is a man who could probably have made a fortune in Hollywood, had he chosen a different direction in life, playing the role of the wise and kindly grandfather. He wound up in public service, and today - if you listen to Karl Rove and the GOP - he is easily the most terrifying man in America.

Back on May 10th, Howard Fineman wrote for MSNBC: "Then there is the attention being paid - and it's just starting - to obscure Democratic characters such as Rep. John Conyers of Michigan. As of now, only political junkies know that Conyers, an African-American and old-school liberal from Detroit, would become chairman of the Judiciary Committee if the Democrats regain control of the House. Few know that Conyers has expressed interest in holding hearings on the impeachment of the president."

A direct-mail piece from Senator Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) popped up several days ago. In the mailer, Dole warned that unless the faithful donate money for the midterm elections, rampaging Democrats were going to, "increase your taxes, call for endless investigations, Congressional censure and maybe even impeachment of President Bush."

A Fox News online editorial acknowledges the very real possibility of a Democratic takeover of the House, and proposes several steps the Democrats should take in such an event, in order to do right by the country. "Step one," reads the Fox editorial, "would be for the Democratic leadership to definitively put to rest any loose talk of impeaching President Bush. They should say in one and two syllable words that impeachment will not happen once they are in the majority and thus take away a potential rallying cry for the beleaguered Republicans."

This may be, when all is said and done, one of the funniest moments in time in all of American political history.

Approval ratings for the Bush administration are at historic lows, and approval ratings for the Republican Congressional majority currently languish in a root-cellar beneath those historic lows. There are 159 days until the November 7th midterm elections, and the Republican majority has absolutely nothing to run on. The economy? They say it is strong but no one believes them, and rising gas prices don't do their arguments any favors. Immigration? This is a self-inflicted brawl that has ripped a wide rift down the middle of the Republican coalition. National security? Iraq.

On top of this big three, the White House and the Republican Congressional majority are also walking around with NSA domestic spying, the investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame, the now-axiomatic belief that Bush left New Orleans to die, and a half-dozen other millstones hanging around their necks.

The White House can't shed these millstones, because just about all of these catastrophes came out of 1600 Pennsylvania. The Republican Congressional majority can't shed them, because they stapled themselves to this White House a long time ago, and there are no pliers in the world large enough to extricate them from that association.

The abandonment of Congressional oversight is a lot of the reason we are in such a sorry state, and that abandonment was authored by Republicans who were stupid enough and opportunistic enough to trust that Bush and his people would lead them to the promised land of a permanent majority. This won't be forgotten by November.

Beyond that, few people are going to rise in response again to the waving of the bloody shirt of September 11. The Cunningham and Abramoff scandals continue to grow, chopping down Republicans left and right. The GOP's usual electoral strengths - morality and security - are gone, and the Republican base is abandoning them. The cupboard is just about empty.

What's left? Vote for us, or else we'll be held accountable! That's just funny.

Usually, the Republican National Committee has to roll out horror stories about mandatory abortions, the planned annihilation of every Bible in the land, and the prospect of Jack and Joe's civil union eviscerating the sanctity of millions of unhappy marriages everywhere. To be sure, these themes will be played throughout the upcoming election seasons, but clearly the GOP overmind is not confident that the masses will dance to the tune.

Thus, the warning: if the Republicans lose in November, Bush will be impeached, and the Earth will immediately thereafter hurtle into the sun. This isn't just a lot of smoke and scare-tactics, however. The Republicans are genuinely worried about what will happen if the Democrats re-take the House in November. They have ample cause for concern.

Beyond the specter of John Conyers doing an impersonation of Peter Rodino should Conyers become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee - in an interesting historical quirk, Conyers sat on the Judiciary Committee when Rodino shepherded it through drafting the three articles of impeachment against Nixon, and voted "Yes" on all three articles - lie a number of other House Democrats whose rise to a chairmanship would be devastating to the White House.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) sits on the Committee on Government Reform, and will become chairman should the Democrats re-take the House in November. Waxman, in 1998, founded the Special Investigations Division within the minority offices on this committee, "to conduct investigations into issues that are important to the minority members of the Government Reform Committee and other members of Congress."

There are more than fifty investigations that have been performed and continued to be performed by Waxman's Special Investigations Division. Among these are investigations into the torture at Abu Ghraib, Cheney's notorious energy task force meetings, a variety of Halliburton payoffs, electronic voting, the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, and the vast scandal surrounding administration abuse of Iraq intelligence and the exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

There is enough meat on that bone to keep Rep. Waxman, armed with subpoena power, busy as a beaver for the foreseeable future. It is also worth noting, when considering the formidable arsenal of information Waxman can bring to bear against the Bush White House, the legacy of Dan Burton.

Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) became notorious as chairman of Government Reform during the Clinton administration. He fired off enough subpoenas to fill an oil tanker, almost all of them inspired by baseless and scurrilous accusations. Without actually proving much of anything, beyond the fact that subpoena power is an astonishingly large stick to hand to someone, Burton managed to keep the Clinton administration tied in knots for years.

Burton was throwing mud. Waxman will be throwing fire, if handed the opportunity. Beyond Waxman and Conyers, there will be Barney Frank chairing the House Financial Services Committee. There will be Louise Slaughter chairing the House Committee on Rules. There will be Charlie Rangel chairing the Ways and Means Committee. This list goes on, and on.

As amusing as the GOP's fear of impeachment is, the truth is that this Constitutional doomsday device is the least of their worries. Conyers does not have to impeach George W. Bush to throw a few torpedoes into the side of the Republican battleship. All he has to do, along with Waxman and the other chairs, is investigate with subpoena power. Tell the truth in public hearings with the principals under oath. Let the facts come to light in a way we have not seen for many years.

The result of this would be an even greater Democratic Congressional victory in 2008, and an incredible series of obstacles for any Republican presidential nominee to overcome. A drumbeat of truth about Iraq, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Halliburton, Plame and all the rest of it would have every Republican who has ever uttered Bush's name in public fleeing for their lives. The long-sought permanent majority lusted after by the GOP would be transformed into a cemented minority, reminiscent of the shattered state of the Republican party in the aftermath of Watergate.

All of this only comes to pass, of course, if the Democrats re-take the House. What was considered an incredible long-shot even a few months ago has become an even-money proposition. Nothing is guaranteed by any stretch, and events may well transpire that swing the electorate back in favor of Bush and his Congressional allies. The fiasco that is electronic voting and the Help America Vote Act will stand in favor of the GOP come November, as it always has. If the Democrats want to win in November, they will have to work harder than they ever have before.

For now, it is enough to be amused by the smell of fear emanating from the GOP. This newest tactic - warning people about the potential for impeachment - begs one simple question: if they have nothing to hide, what are they afraid of? The answer, clearly, is John Conyers. He is, you'll hear soon enough, a terrifying man.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052506J.shtml