Top story of 2004 is the worst

Through its torture practices, the George W. Bush Administration in 2004 has redefined America in the eyes of the world

No doubt, 2004 has been a terrible year. How can I even presume to name the worst news event of the year? After all, the Tsunami of the Indian Ocean has devastated an incredible swath of the world.

And what about the US invasion and conquest of Iraq that has evolved into a costly colonial war? America has responded to anti-colonial resistance in Iraq by smashing cites. There is no end in sight. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died as have over 1000 Americans. But to me this is not by itself the worst story of the year. In my mind a story connected to the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan is the top story and the worst story -- the development of the United States as a torture state the likes of which the world has never known.

Members of the Associated Press named their top 2004 stories last week (prior to the tsunami). The Abu Ghraib photographs made the list. But here is how they phrase the story: "U.S. military guards at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad forcing naked Iraqi detainees to pose in humiliating positions. Prosecutions ensued...."

Clearly, this represents the cleaning-up-the-bad-apples media posture the Pentagon has used to deflect deeper examination of what is going on here. And use of this posture is bringing the public along the road to dictatorship with hardly a whisper of dissent.

Steps towards dictatorship
The Center for Constitutional Rights describes in a recent release the facilities and practices now employed worldwide on the mere authority of the president alone:

the CIA has been secretly operating a holding and interrogation center within the larger American military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba...the CIA Center at Guantanamo is "related to a network of holding centers operated by the CIA at undisclosed locations around the world"..."The use of secret detentions centers not only violates international and U.S. law", said CCR deputy legal director, Barbara Olshansky, "it undermines the critical pillars of our Democracy -- justice and liberty -- and tosses aside the Framers concerns about the dangers of an overreaching executive. How can we hold ourselves up as an example as the world's preeminent democracy when we are violating the founding principles of our own?"

We must act in 2005 to stop these Bush practices, as the soul and spirit of America will soon become unredeemable.

A barrelful of Rotten Apples

Washington Post indicts Bush Administration for war crimes

From today's lead editorial in the Washington Post:

...Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in the spring the administration's whitewashers -- led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- have contended that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists, that they were limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib in 2003, that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of terrorism suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false...

The Post editorial page has now used its considerable conservative microphone to emphasize what Deep Blade has been saying for months: a dozen or so low-level operatives are not the biggest problem -- it is the Pentagon leadership, the White House, and the Republican Congress that are the real Rotten Apples where torture is concerned. US atrocities against prisoners are far more than "isolated aberrations" -- indeed torture underpins US policy.

Documents released this week through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that the torturers had "their marching orders from the Sec Def", according to one of the items released. This memo was discussed by salon.com writer Joe Conason Tuesday on Democracy Now!:

What it says is that the F.B.I. argued strongly against abusive techniques in Guantanamo, and argued with two ranking generals, General Dunlavey and General Geoffrey Miller who figured largely in the Abu Ghraib scandal because he went to Iraq after setting up the system at Guantanamo, and that the response of the military was, of these generals was, you can try your methods, but we have our marching orders from the SecDef, which is what the memo says and the SecDef is military jargon for the Secretary of Defense. In other words, this is an acknowledgement by the F.B.I. in the internal memo that the military was behaving towards these prisoners in a manner that had been ordered by Donald Rumsfeld's office. That the allegations of abuse and in some cases torture had grown out of an attitude that ordinary conventions and international law did not have to be observed in the treatment of these prisoners.

And "treatment" these prisoners did receive, to wit:

* Mock executions

* Simulated drowning on "waterboards"

* Cuffing and pouring cold water on a subject in an act called the scorpion

* Beatings, chokings, prolonged sleep deprivation and humiliations such as being wrapped in an Israeli flag with loud music blaring

* Dragging feet over barbed wire

* Burning with flammable liquids and cigarettes, including inside the ear

After searching for the slightest bit of administration accountability and failing to find it, the Post to concludes with this lament:

The record of the past few months suggests that the administration will neither hold any senior official accountable nor change the policies that have produced this shameful record...For now the appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for the documented torture and killing of foreign prisoners by this American government.

The absence of significant public demand upon the courts and our elected representatives to put an end to this treatment and give those who are criminally culpable the severest punishment is shameful. I feel great revulsion towards this behavior and the failure of our system to do a damn thing about it. We better be careful. These are exactly the sorts of acts President George W. Bush has continually stated were the crimes of Saddam that justified American conquest of Iraq. Is it such a stretch to think new-formed enemies of America could use the same justification for reciprocal attacks?

Mosul bomb hits home

Family relative in one of the affected units


Photo by Gregory Rec of the Portland Press Herald. The Maine Army National Guard's 133rd Engineer Battalion is based here. We have a relative by marriage who is with this unit.

Two from Maine died and several were wounded in Tuesday's bomb attack on the mess tent in Mosul, Iraq. We know that our relative was not killed. But we have no word yet on his condition. This is gut wrenching. We send our prayers to his family, and to all of the families who must suffer through this, especially during the Christmas season.

Reporters Patrick Cockburn and Jeremy Redmond describe the scene in a story posted on Counterpunch:

Soldiers scrambled back into the hall to check for more wounded. The explosion blew out a huge hole in the roof of the tent. Puddles of bright red blood, lunch trays and overturned tables and chairs covered the floor.

Bill Nemitz, columnist for the Portland Press Herald, Portland, Maine writes today about the attack:

With one cruel blow, the insurgents who prowl outside the perimeter of this godforsaken place hijacked a rare chance for true celebration and set it on a collision course with yet another round of tearful eulogies, another set of gut-wrenching final roll calls....

Nemitz closes his column by describing the prayers and sentiments we all now share:

Some [prayers] will be for those who left for midday chow Tuesday with no idea they were sitting down to a full-blown tragedy.

Some will be for peace, now more than ever, in this place where long ago civilization was born.

And some will be that this base, this hell on Earth, will soon loosen its grip on these proud but weary Mainers.

Sunday afternoon, two days before he went to lunch and emerged dazed, disoriented but otherwise uninjured, Chaplain David Sivret welcomed a visitor to his decked-out chapel, poured from his ever-present pot of hot coffee and said the words that will pull the 133rd through this tangle of tinsel and torture.

"It's time," Sivret said with a weary smile. "It's time for all of us to come home."

I concur completely with the Chaplain's remarks.

Closing in on the rottenest apple

Dictators declare their own law for themselves


Bush gave a pathetic press conference on Monday.

Yesterday, in a news release the ACLU describes to which rotten apple the trail of US torture planning leads:

A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as "torture" and a June 2004 "Urgent Report" to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.

From his press conference:

PRESIDENT BUSH: I think it's important to let the world know that we fully understand our obligations in a society that honors rule of law to do that. But I also have an obligation to protect the American people, to make sure we understand the nature of the people that we hold, whether or not there's possible intelligence we can gather from them that we could then use to protect us. So we'll continue to work the issue hard.

So, Mr. President, why the coverup? If "inhumane interrogation methods" protect America, why not just say so?

The truth is that the Bush Administration feels that it can make its own law, or be lawless, as it alone chooses. This, to Bush, constitutes "the rule of law". The president is not accountable, his decisions not "reviewable". These are characteristics of dictatorship.

And the premise that this torture will "protect the American people" is false. It invites retaliation by new-formed enemies.

The bad apples are at the top

Bush established torture regime under theory of absolute power


Boot kicking detainees in distress positions happens under the color of high-level authority.

A report by Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman and Michael Hirsh of Newsweek in the Dec. 27 / Jan. 3 issue underscores the very clear reasons why torture of detainees under US care is not just the work of a few bad-apple, low-level grunts. They write about meetings held in the office of now Attorney-General nominee Alberto Gonzales during July 2002:

And partly out of the discussions in Gonzales's office came the most notorious legal document to emerge from last spring's Abu Ghraib interrogation scandal. This was an Aug. 1, 2002, memo -- drafted by [Justice Department lawyer John] Yoo, signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and addressed to Gonzales -- which provoked outrage among human-rights advocates by narrowly defining torture. The memo concluded, among other things, that only severe pain or permanent damage that was "specifically intended" constituted torture. Mere "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment did not qualify.

So the usual definition of torture was set aside by those at the top, and if a technique was not intended to be torture under these self-defined criteria, it simply no longer would be called such.

Furthermore, Bush was the direct recipient of ethically-questionable legal gymnastics intended to neutralize US law and the Geneva Conventions:

...memos reviewed by Newsweek and interviews with key principals show that Gonzales's advice to the president reflected the bold views laid out in the Aug. 1 memo and other documents. Sources close to the Senate Judiciary Committee say a chief focus of the hearings will be Gonzales's role in the so-called "torture memo," as well as his legal judgment in urging Bush to sidestep the Geneva Conventions. In a Jan. 25, 2002, memo to Bush, Gonzales said the new war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." Some State Department lawyers charge that Gonzales misrepresented so many legal considerations and facts (including hard conclusions by State's Southeast Asia bureau about the nature of the Taliban) that one lawyer considers the memo to be "an ethical breach." In response, a senior White House official says Gonzales's memo was only a "draft" and just one part of an extensive decision-making process in which all views were aired.

In an accompanying article, Isikoff describes the royal theory of absolute presidential power in matters of torture, and indeed the entire legal backing for invading Iraq that Bush and his shady lawyers declared for themselves:

Just two weeks after the September 11 attacks, a secret memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales' office concluded that President Bush had the power to deploy military force "preemptively" against any terrorist groups or countries that supported them -- regardless of whether they had any connection to the attacks on the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon.

The memo, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, argues that there are effectively "no limits" on the president's authority to wage war -- a sweeping assertion of executive power that some constitutional scholars say goes considerably beyond any that had previously been articulated by the department....

What is particularly striking is that it goes beyond the joint congressional resolution passed on Sept. 14, 2001, authorizing the president to respond to the terror attacks. Although the White House had initially sought authority for the president to "preempt any future acts of terrorism" without any limitation on those responsible for the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Congress deleted the pre-emption request and narrowed the scope of the president's authority to attack only those connected with September 11. "The authority granted is focused on those responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11," Sen. Joe Biden stated on the Senate floor in explaining what Congress intended to authorize.

But Yoo's memo, written 11 days later, essentially argued that what Congress authorized didn't matter. "It should be noted here that the Joint Resolution is somewhat narrower than the President's constitutional authority," Yoo wrote in the memo, adding that the resolution "does not reach other terrorist individuals, groups or states which cannot be determined to have links to the September 11 attacks."

"Nonetheless," he added, "the President's broad constitutional power to use military force to defend the nation, recognized by the Joint Resolution itself, would allow the President to whatever actions he deems appropriate to pre-empt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters." The memo was written at a time when, unknown to the public, officials in the Pentagon -- including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz -- were privately pushing the president to consider attacking Iraq. Indeed, according to the September 11 commission, a memo apparently written by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith just five days before Yoo's memo suggested "hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq."

Aggression is the supreme crime under international law. The record under the Bush regime is an open declaration that these precepts no longer apply to the US post-911. If this declaration sticks, the post-WWII international order is dead and a new era of international Aggression is upon us.

Model Social Security letter

For anyone who is interested, I have posted a pdf file containing a letter on Social Security that I have just faxed to my representative and senators in the US Congress. If you have Acrobat Reader installed, you can download the letter here.

Oil-for-Food update

I have not forgotten that two weeks ago I promised four entries on the over-hyped "scandal" at the UN and the real corruption behind the destruction of Iraq. I have two more parts largely written and they should be up by Christmas. The last should be up by New Years.

Meanwhile, there have been some interesting developments... The week before last on Monday December 6, Five Republican members of the House of Representatives backed Norm Coleman's call for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to resign.

Just as momentum seemed to be building for Annan's head, the US Ambassador to the UN John Danforth threw cold water on the fire while outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell made his last swing by the UN to check on preparations for the Iraqi election. According to the Chronicle story cited, "Danforth said the White House is not pressing for Annan's departure now".

Functioning with UN imprimatur of the barely, if at all tenable occupier-designed election is more important than an immediate sating of Republican dogs looking to snack on Annan. This may be a sick joke, but it seems to be how the Republicans are choosing to run this show. See this post in Empire Notes for more...

Bush plan to destroy Social Security

Atrios asks, "Why Does the Media Hate Social Security?"


This won't mean much after President Bush is done with it.

President Bush plans to spend his political capital in order to fulfill a long-time Republican dream of crushing the Social Security program. This sport is as old as Alf Landon's 1936 attempt to unseat President Roosevelt. Landon's big-newspaper supporters threw up all sorts of scare tacticts against Social Security in that thankfully losing effort.

I agree with many commenters to the Eschaton post cited above that corporate media owners and other rich folks hate the program because, as one comment writer says, "They don't need SS and could not care less about it's fate."

I'd go farther and say that many rich Republicans view the program with jealousy. It's money the government reserves for the whole spectrum of little people that they can't appropriate for themselves or shut off by fiat. They have to pay the payroll tax, but they can't discipline workers by threatening to cut their Social Security. At least not until now – Bush may have enough political and media juice lined up to force large benefit cuts for future retirees in order to dump a large number of dollars from payroll taxes into the coffers of Wall Street investment casinos.

The media mythology that has become part and parcel of reporting on Social Security (see FAIR's recent go-round with CBS news for phoniness on the issue) has developed over nearly a decade of hysterical crisis mongering by the libertarian reactionaries at the Cato Institute. Their innocuously named website, http://www.socialsecurity.org/ is the media clearinghouse for framing the terms of the debate. Here is a sample of the Cato hustle:

Social Security is going bankrupt. The federal government's largest spending program, accounting for nearly 22 percent of all federal spending, faces irresistible demographic and fiscal pressures that threaten the future retirement security of today's young workers. According to the 2003 report of the Social Security system's Board of Trustees, in 2018, just 14 years from now, the Social Security system will begin to run a deficit. That is, it will begin to spend more on benefits than it brings in through taxes. Anyone who has ever run a business--or balanced a checkbook--understands that when you are spending more than you bring in, something has to give--you need to start either earning more money or spending less to keep things balanced. For Social Security, that means either higher taxes or lower benefits.

You bet, lower benefits. That stings me hard because the minimal existing benefits are absolutely essential to my own low-dollar retirement plan. Media outlets are likely to swallow and regurgitate this official-sounding crap hook, line and sinker.

Bush last week at the economic dog show (no critical voices present) reiterated the mythology:

One of the things that we heard today from experts is that the Social Security system is safe today, but is in serious danger as we head down the road of the 21st century. And this problem has got to be confronted now. And we heard from people that know what they're talking about on this stage this morning, saying that it is a far easier problem to manage today than it will be if we continue postponing solutions.

In 1950, there were 16 workers paying for every beneficiary. Today, there are about three, and when the younger workers retire, there will be only two workers per beneficiary. That should be a warning signal for those of us who are charged with having to confront problems and not pass them on to future Congresses or future generations. The system becomes untenable within a relatively quick period of time. The Social Security system is in the black today, but in the long-term, has $10.4 trillion in unfunded liability -- that's trillion with a "T." That means that a 20-year-old worker today is being promised retirement benefits that are 30 percent higher than the system can pay. By the year 2018, Social Security will pay out more in benefits than the government collects in payroll taxes. And once that line into red has been crossed, the shortfalls will grow larger with each passing year. We have a problem.

First, the whole thing about number of working people per retiree that you hear again and again and again is a huge red herring. The supposedly dramatic downward shift in the ratio over seven decades does not mean anything until you look at the so-called trust fund ratio. Then, the shift is not nearly so dramatic because over the years worker productivity has increased, as has the payroll tax rate. Four decades from now the program will have to seek additional funding sources to replace a slowly declining ratio. And as the SSA trustees admit, there is great uncertainty in these projections. While it's worth paying attention and making wise fiscal choices that Bush is not now making vis-a-vis the idiotic tax cuts, this is hardly a crisis today.

The Bush "solution" of private accounts for worker-beneficiaries in stock market investments has a dually contractictory premise. First, there is no way that private accounts would solve Social Security's woes if the economy were bad. But if economic times were good enough to produce historical-average returns for stocks, then there would be no Social Security funding crisis!

Here are some additional references worth reading for facts on the phony crisis...

First, a nice little site with lots of links to reports from the reality-based world: The Bruce Web: Social Security is not Broke

See also The Trillion Dollar Hustle: Hello Wall Street, Goodbye Social Security. By Thomas Frank. From Harpers, June 2002. Excerpt:

You've heard this many times before, of course: from the Beardstown Ladies to the Raging Bull website, this was the ideological fantasy of the last decade. This time, though, it is being replayed not to sell us on some mutual fund or hot tech issue but to convince us to bet it all—to liquidate what remains of the welfare state, head down to the great casino, and put our trust in Greenspan. Social Security privatization is to be the trillion-dollar hustle, Wall Street's final joke on those who just can't shake the free-market superstition.

Finally, lots and lots and lots of documents are linked here: Social Security Website Links from EBRI

Did Kerick really have a nanny?

Mystery woman used as excuse for Homeland Security nomination withdrawal may not exist.


"The White House has been unwilling to discuss any specifics of the nanny herself..."

It's easy to see why the White House needed this diversionary excuse, real or not, for Kerick's departure. Deep questions concerning the former nominee's personal, professional, and business practices have flooded New York newspapers in the week since the withdrawal.

Two blogs are really keeping track of the juice on Kerick, Talking Points Memo and Steve Gilliard.

Gilliard has many postings including this one that contains a laundry list of his dealings:

Kerick...

*had mystery dealings with companies for contracts which didn't make sense

*slept with a subordinate, then punished supervisors who admonished her

*had work done by Paulie Walnuts and his crew on an apartment he couldn't afford

*rented an apartment in the shadows of Ground Zero as a love shack

*borrowed $18k from friends which he never reported

*was wanted for arrest over a condo deal

*associated with people linked to organized crime

*left Iraq after 3 months and failing to train the police

*allegedly threatened a second mistress and stalked her.

...All while running New York's City jails and police department.

I'd like to expand for a moment on Kerick's Iraq tenure and this interesting post by Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo. Marshall points out that Kerick was in the thick of the wild early days of the US regime in Iraq then known as the Coalition Provisional Authority. In May 2003, Bush sent him to Baghdad to run the Interior Ministry. Before he left there just three months later, well short of the effort to which he had originally committed, he had he spent 1.2 billion taxpayer dollars to train Iraqi police. Into a country awash in small arms, he imported revolvers and Kalashnikov rifles for the Iraqi police from vendors in Jordan at exorbitant cost to the US taxpayer.

Marshall writes,

It's been known for a longtime that the Iraqi Interior Ministry under the CPA was rife with corruption. Lots and lots of US tax dollars went missing.

In November 2003, Deep Blade Journal issued its extensive Reference Article on U.S.-Iraq Business Relationships which included the comment, "...there seems to be deep distrust of the financial management of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Numerous articles and reports have appeared in the last few weeks that raise a plethora of serious questions about the conduct of the occupation...."

In one of those articles, Spending On Iraq Sets Off Gold Rush: Lawmakers Fear U.S. Is Losing Control of Funds, Jonathan Weisman and Anitha Reddy of the Washington Post reported on Thursday, October 9, 2003 that

Among the dozens of projects in the proposal is a State Department plan to spend $800 million to build a large training facility for a new Iraqi police force. Management fees alone would run $26 million a month, while 1,500 police trainers would cost $240,000 each per year, or $20,000 each per month. DynCorp of Reston is likely to get the contract.

"All I can say is it's mind-boggling," James Lyons, a former military subcontractor in Bosnia, said of the opportunities for private contractors. "People must be drooling."

Kerick apparently was well suited, for a while anyway, to help initiate the taxpayer sink hole that the colonial project in Iraq represents. A full investigation of Kerick and the disaster he helped spawn clearly is called for.

Homeland Security nomination blunder

The black-belt nominee had a "nanny problem", but that's not all


Bernard Kerik with Bush Dec. 3 during the Homeland Security nomination announcement

Sure, the obvious irony of having a Secretary of Homeland Security, the highest official in charge of immigration, with a history of immigration law violations is too much even for this venal administration.

But, as the Times reports, the nanny problem only scratches the surface of what is potentially some very rotten pulp:

In just the last three years, Mr. Kerik, 49, made millions of dollars, mainly through his partnership in a security consulting firm headed by Mr. Giuliani and by serving on the board of a stun-gun manufacturer that has been seeking to do business with Homeland Security. Most recently, Mr. Kerik sold $5.8 million of stock in the stun-gun company.

Democracy Now! had a great segment on Kerik last Tuesday, leading with a troubling quote reported by Newsday on October 20, 2003, which had Kerik saying, "Political criticism is our enemy's best friend".

Sounds perfect for the Bush approach to "security".

To top it off, Kerik has a history of misuse of personnel under his authority. In the same interview on Democracy Now!, Ellis Henican of Newsday discusses various incidents, including this striking example:

...the story essentially is that Ms. Regan, who is his [Kerik's] publisher, lost a cell phone one day at Fox; and the story goes that he sent out some New York Police detectives to go into the homes in the evening of the hair and make-up people at the Fox news channel to investigate the disappearance of that cell phone.

The entire segment is worth a read or listen.

So at 8:30pm on Friday night, the very bottom of the week's news cycle, the Kerik nomination was withdrawn as quietly as possible.

Fallujah atrocities in pictures

Dahr Jamail has posted a 58-photo gallery showing the aftermath of the US attack


Body in ransacked home

More on Coleman

Here are two links on Coleman. My friend David from St. Paul who runs a nifty blog called Some Kinda Possible has posted a StarTribune editorial with some good quotes from locals. Also see Atrios. It's the comments for this post that are the most fun.

And on Bush & Annan you'll enjoy this from Tom Burka. I did.

Tough-minded liberalism erupts...again

With Bush firmly ensconced in the Whitehouse, warrior liberals attack leftward

In the three-plus years since 911, a powerful strain of thinking that demands genuflection before the altar of American military force has held sway amongst establishment liberals. Now writers including Peter Beinhart of The New Republic have called for "a fighting faith" in a new liberalism after the defeat of John Kerry. He means military flailing against terrorism, not fighting for the working person, health care, or some quaint idea like that.

Suddenly losing sight of the Anybody But Bush (ABB) theory of the 2004 election, these "Tough-Minded Liberals" (TMLs) now are left with their favorite sport -- attack Nader, Chomsky, and anyone else holding anti-war views. Roots in this struggle to destroy anti-imperialism, non-violent resistance to war, and radical pacifism reach back to post-WWII Democratic-Party-based anti-communism. Nowadays, the target includes the Deaniacs and Kucinichites who offered in varying measures alternatives to Democratic business-as-usual.

Go here for a link to the Beinhart article.

This all has set off a minor wave, with many bloggers weighing in. I'd love to put up a huge post myself, as I have a lot to say about this. For example, I'd like to explain why I subscribe to the Chomskian heresies that both the Kosovo war and Afghan war were illegal, immoral, wrong, destructive, and did pretty much nothing but harm both to the people that were bombed and to America's own future. But I can't take the time now.

Instead I'll defer to some fine rebuttals to the general outlook of the TMLs.

The first I'll mention goes back a year, but it's one of the best. Following a provocation by Michael Tomasky, then freshly minted as American Prospect chief, Mark Hand at Press Action wrote in October 2003,

The anger against the likes of Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal has been building among the liberal missionaries since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Out of this anger emerged the tough-minded liberals who now feel they must loosen their chains in order to confront their enemies on the left....

Another showdown is brewing for 2004. In his American Prospect essay, Tomasky lobs a grenade toward his enemies on the left. "Nader is obviously out to kill the Democrats", he writes. The collateral damage, to regular citizens whose lives are directly affected by which party is in power, is not his concern. He has long since quit caring about that. It's time a Democrat killed back....

The whole thing is well worth the read.

Yesterday, Steve Gilliard had a good post on "Vichy Democrats". Check it out. I dislike Gilliard's constant axe grinding against Counterpunch and Pacifica (exactly the people who are at once the movement counter and target of the Vichy Democrats, or TMLs), but the value of what he offers outweighs this flaw.

Finally, Neiwert takes on the TMLs on their own terms. He reminds us that we have homegrown terror threats! I don't like the civil liberties implications of some things he says, but this dispassionate piece is quite interesting nonetheless.

The Pentagon Archipelago

First, widespread use of torture becomes policy. A few weeks ago we heard about deportation flights. Now this:

In a Boston Globe story today, Returning Fallujans will face clampdown, Anne Barnard writes about plans to resettle the residents into their bombed-out city:

...troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times....

One idea that has stirred debate among Marine officers would require all men to work, for pay, in military-style battalions. Depending on their skills, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons.

I am stunned. Identity cards and forced work camps... but oh, we'll pay them, oopy doopy. How do we avoid having America become one of the most notorious criminal regimes of all time? It may be too late.

See Steve Gilliard's pithy item on this particular subject, and his long continuing series on colonial wars. The series should carry college course credit for all you can learn from it.

Norm Coleman attacks Kofi Annan

Find the snake in the image below:


Left to right: Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein, Norm Coleman

Here begins a four-part series on the rich history of corruption and secret dealings during the last twenty-five years of US involvement in the Iraq tragedy.

Part I: Norm Coleman
Part II: Oil-for-food in the media
Part III: Year zero in Spring 2003: Pentagon/CPA burns Iraq
Part IV: Iraqgate

A useful idiot
Republican US Senator Norm Coleman from Minnesota is a useful idiot in the Bush Administration's war of contempt against the United Nations and international law.

Coleman is the perfect handmaiden. He is a smooth operator, but not so bright -- perfect qualities with which to serve Bush. His conscience is difficult to trouble as he easily abandoned his Democratic friends, including the late Senator Paul Wellstone and former Minnesota Attorney General Skip Humphrey to become a Republican turncoat. He has a proven track record as a corporate shill, a gambler with large quantities of taxpayer money, and a protector of private interests from the prying eyes of the public. To top it off, he's pretty on camera.

See the Appendix on Coleman below for some choice references.

Still, being from blue-state Minnesota where "values" at times have been known to include honesty in government, he must prove his mettle and manhood as a Republican servant. Therefore, the junior senator has been tasked as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) in the United States Senate with the UN Oil-for-food investigation. A hearing on Oil-for-food was held on November 15. The author of the last null Iraq weapons report, Charles Duelfer, gave testimony. Audio with lousy video of this hearing, plus text of witness testimony, is available from a page at the site for the full Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs.

Note the participation of my own current senator, the Honorable Republican Puppy Dog Susan Collins. Collins is chairman of the larger committee of which Coleman's subcommittee is a part. She is better known in current news as the shepherd of the 911-inspired intelligence reform bill. Limits of her own mettle are showing while much more powerful military and anti-immigrant reactionaries have decided to stop her bill dead in its tracks.

Target: Annan
All the posturing on UN Oil-for-Food is a wedge to attack the legitimacy of the UN itself. The lurking issue is the illegality of the invasion of Iraq. The normally cowed-by-US-power-UN-Secretary-General Kofi Annan had been so challenged by the world's lesser countries –- while the Iraq-invading monster daily showed its true colors with its brutal occupation practices -- that he decided, 18 months late, to declare the war illegal.

Some impact was added by the timing of Annan's remarks because they were given in a BBC interview seven weeks prior to the US election. Annan probably had no chance of influencing any US voters, but the heresy was enough to send at the time a number of US mouthpieces into a vicious snit. Refer to the link for details.

So in Bushworld, punishment for Annan is in order. He therefore has been set upon by the scorpion Coleman. In a December 1 Wall Street Journal oped, Coleman puffed up with an air of indignity over the affair, primed his stinger, and demanded Annan resign. In the piece, Coleman suggests that there is no way that the UN's own investigation led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker can be credible.

But that's not all. Coleman basically blames the UN for forcing the US to invade and putting its troops at risk over the corrupt objections of countries in the pocket of Saddam. It's a clever construct of the Bush principle of "you're with us or you're with the terrorists" -- one used repeatedly against the peace movement -- which paints anti-invasion/occupation sentiment as endorsement of Saddam and a laundry list of no good we were told he definitely was up to.

Of course it doesn't matter the list was false -- the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq only the most glaring evidence of the lies. The propaganda line has evolved into some sort of bizarre precognitive, "pre-crime" scenario, and Coleman repeats this here -- there is certainty Saddam had in his mind a whole scheme for building some future arsenal and attacking all that is good and proper in the world, using the ill-gotten gains built up with the acquiescence of the UN.

Sure, Norm, just like there was in March 2003 "no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised".

Here is part of Coleman's piece, with my emphasis added:

While many questions concerning Oil-for-Food remain unanswered, one conclusion has become abundantly clear: Kofi Annan should resign. The decision to call for his resignation does not come easily, but I have arrived at this conclusion because the most extensive fraud in the history of the U.N. occurred on his watch. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, as long as Mr. Annan remains in charge, the world will never be able to learn the full extent of the bribes, kickbacks and under-the-table payments that took place under the U.N.'s collective nose.

Mr. Annan was at the helm of the U.N. for all but a few days of the Oil-for-Food program, and he must, therefore, be held accountable for the U.N.'s utter failure to detect or stop Saddam's abuses. The consequences of the U.N.'s ineptitude cannot be overstated: Saddam was empowered to withstand the sanctions regime, remain in power, and even rebuild his military. Needless to say, he made the Iraqi people suffer even more by importing substandard food and medicine under the Oil-for-Food program and pawning it off as first-rate humanitarian aid.

Since it was never likely that the U.N. Security Council, some of whose permanent members were awash in Saddam's favors, would ever call for Saddam's removal, the U.S. and its coalition partners were forced to put troops in harm's way to oust him by force. Today, money swindled from Oil-for-Food may be funding the insurgency against coalition troops in Iraq and other terrorist activities against U.S. interests. Simply put, the troops would probably not have been placed in such danger if the U.N. had done its job in administering sanctions and Oil-for-Food.

Another point must be made about the evidence against Annan on which Coleman apparently depends. Coleman admits that nothing implicates Annan directly, it's simply a "fish rots from the head" argument that he's making. However, there is a recent story about the involvement of Annan's son with a Swiss company that had been contracted to render certain services during the Oil-for-food program. This story in today's Observer has some breaking information. Coleman and company have latched onto "Kojo" as some kind of "gotcha".

Documents Coleman does cite allegedly show the corruption of other UN employees and international figures in oil voucher deals. These documents may have a highly questionable pedigree. Deep Blade Journal posted on this last April, explaining the involvement of suspected spy and forger Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi handled certain secret Iraqi archives after the invasion. The initial planting of the story followed Chalabi's work with these documents.

Recently, one of the alleged beneficiaries of Saddam's largesse has been vindicated by a court in the UK. Anti-war Member of Parliament George Galloway from Glasgow, who engaged in diplomatic missions in Iraq, was savagely libeled by the conservative Telegraph newspaper. He has now won a judgment against the newspaper for framing it's stories about Galloway with phrases like "In Saddam's pay'' and "Saddam's little helper'".

There is not likely to be a reprieve for Annan. Despite the fact that he has the confidence of a broad spectrum of UN supporters (for example from Timothy Wirth, the former senator in a debate with Norm Coleman during an interesting report on Friday's PBS News Hour), business will grind to a halt until the organization's dominant member is satisfied.

Personally, I believe the UN should release all information it has about the Iraq sanctions regime – and anyone culpable in corruption or destruction of the country should lose their jobs. What happened during this time was tragic, the product of UN complicity with US perfidy. I also argue that all this focus on Annan and just the Oil-for-food aspect of the sanctions misses the bigger picture.

Foremost, the sanctions destroyed the country with tenacious American insistence, while setting off slow wasting of the population. Death rates -- especially for children -- rose to levels tantamount to genocide. And post-invasion Iraq obviously is a sea of death.

On top of all that killing, post-invasion abuse of Iraq's finances by Pentagon authorities (under UN Security Council Resolution 1483) was redolent of corruption and misappropriation. (See links here, here, here, and here)

Likewise were secret US dealings with a friendly Saddam -- including missions by Donald Rumsfeld -- throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Should we so easily forget the "tilt towards Iraq" and the Iraqgate scandal? If Annan's head deserves to roll, absolutely, most certainly so should Donald Rumsfeld's.

Where is Coleman's bright light when it comes to investigating the rest of the story of the monstrous tragedy that is Iraq?

For additional insights and some excellent references on Oil-for-food, please see Rodger Payne's posting of November 9. Payne has links to articles by Professor Joy Gordon that are absolutely essential for understanding the workings and destructive force of the sanctions against Iraq during the period from 1990-2003.

Appendix on Coleman
Who is Norm Coleman? As I mentioned, he switched from Democrat to Republican. In late 1996 while mayor of St. Paul, he found backers for private development boosterism in Minnesota's capital were much more comfortable with a Republican.

The switch meshed perfectly with Coleman's political ambitions. But his first try for higher office was a bust, losing the governorship to Jesse Ventura in 1998 (he came in second, ahead of Democrat Skip Humphrey).

Fast forward to April 2001. At that time the current Minnesota governor, Republican Tim Pawlenty, was considering a run against Paul Wellstone in 2002. On April 18, 2001, Pawlenty was preparing to make an announcement that he would run for the Republican nomination to challenge Wellstone. He was stopped in his tracks by a phone call from – Dick Cheney. The Bush camp preferred Coleman as their handpicked candidate.

So it was. Then tragedy struck. Less than two weeks before the 2002 election Wellstone, his wife, their daughter, three staffers, and two pilots died in a plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota. Coleman became the beneficiary of the untimely death, as Wellstone was set to win that election by at least a five-point margin.

The best source for stories on what Coleman's boosterism has meant for St. Paul is the Twin Cities weekly, City Pages. Check out these stories:

October 2003: This Space for Rent
Lots of layoffs. Cheap leases. Empty offices. Welcome to downtown St. Paul.

"...it is generally agreed that the city's central business district is now experiencing its highest office vacancy rate ever, at about 30 percent--worse than the metro-wide vacancy rates (estimated at 19 percent this summer) or downtown Minneapolis (21 percent)..."

October 2002: Magical Misery Tour
Norm Coleman's "St. Paul miracle" gets a withering report card

St. Paul's citizens will be paying for Coleman's corporate charity well into the future. Between 1993 and 2000 the total indebtedness facing the city rose from $460 million to $619 million--more than this year's entire budget.

"You can't run a city like Norm Coleman did and expect that to be sustainable," says Dan McGrath, executive director of Progressive Minnesota. "Norm Coleman might be a wonderful mayor in great economic times, but look at the economic disaster he's left in St. Paul."

Coleman went to bat big-time for Lawson Software, a firm now struggling to keep its head above water after a protracted and continuing period of industry consolidation and layoffs. Coleman gambled $100 million of public money to build facilities for Lawson. The City of St. Paul sold the property to developer and Coleman campaign contributor David Frauenshuh for about 50-cents on the dollar. Frauenshuh made political contributions to Coleman totaling over $40,000 from 1998 to 2004, according to an April 2004 story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. What if these legal contributions had involved relief supplies for Iraq rather than politics? We'd be calling it "corruption", wouldn't we?

One more item related to the NHL hockey team Coleman spearheaded into Minnesota with public money:

January 2002: Trouble in Rivercentre
St. Paul built a new hockey arena for the Wild and a new convention center for the city. Guess which one is losing money?

My personal opinion, having lived six years in the same state as Norm Coleman and having watched his unfortunate rise to power, is that he is a snake. He has shown willingness to gamble away the public trust, do the bidding for powerful interests, and consume anything that is in his way, including UN officials and by extension international law that the UN represents. The bad misdirection of emphasis of Coleman's Oil-for-food investigation could cost the world more than the dubious gains made through the firing of allegedly corrupt officials.

Next: Oil-for-food in the media

Tuesday update: Go see my St. Paul friend David's post on Coleman. There is a good quote there from the StarTribune and some choice words from Twin Cities locals.

Thompson resigns HHS with poisoning message

Former Wisconsin governor sends a few parting warning shots on food terrorism while leaving a history of conflicting interests on more common poisonings


Thompson on the road again

For several years we lived within a few miles of the state of Wisconsin where departing Department of Health and Human Services chief Tommy Thompson was then the governor. Ours was Minnesota's Jesse Ventura. A fine, entertaining pair they were, both often providing reporters with wild, quotable stories.

The wildman lived up to his reputation yesterday at his resignation conference by issuing this disturbing threat assessment (as reported by the Washington Post):

"The big one is pandemic flu," Thompson said. He said the avian flu known as H5N1 has such "huge lethality" that the World Health Organization has estimated 30 million to 70 million people could die worldwide if a pandemic breaks out. "And we do not have a vaccine," he said. "We do not have a therapy for H5N1."

He said an arm of HHS, the National Institutes of Health, "is working on a vaccine," but that he remains "very concerned about pandemic flu because we're not prepared for it." He said such an outbreak "is a really huge bomb out there that could adversely impact on the health care of the world."

Thompson said he also worries constantly about food poisoning.

"I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not, you know, attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do," he said. "And we are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that."

Although inspections of food imports have risen sharply in the past four years, "it still is a very minute amount that we're doing."

Bravo, Tommy. Poisoning matters when the issue can be framed with terrorism. But what about the everyday poisoning experience throughout our country, particularly by poor children, who are forced to live in environments polluted by lead and pesticides -- at the insistence of the powerful chemical lobby? It's easy to find lots of good sources on how Thompson and the Bush Administration have been rife with conflicts on these matters. Here is a quote from an October 27 Orbis column:

More recent studies have indicated that even at levels below 10 micrograms/deciliter, learning problems in children can be demonstrated. In this context, about two years ago, Jean Carnahan and a group of other senators began pressuring the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Tommy Thompson (a Bush appointee) to lower the lead standard form 10 to 5 micrograms/deciliter. At the time, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention was in general agreement.

However, before formal action could be taken by the CDC, Thompson nominated three industrialists to the Advisory Committee. Joyce Tsuji of Exponent (whose clients include a lead smelting company), Sergio Piomelli (who opposed lowering the lead standards in 1991) and William Banner (who provided written testimony on behalf of the lead industry in a recent Rhode Island law suit). While the pro-industry anti-public health agenda is now clear, the public remains unaware of this back door method of influencing CDC decisions.

Enjoy your Harley ride into the sunset, Tommy.

NPR: National Pentagon Radio

I choose radio services other than the presidential/military stenographer

I don't listen to NPR nearly as much as I have in the past. From about 1978 into the run-up to Iraq, I probably had NPR on at least an hour a day -- every day I was near a radio. Not any more. Who are those new people on Morning Edition, anyway? Frankly, I don't miss it.

These days what I try not to miss are Democracy Now!, FSRN, and Flashpoints. On Friday there is a new Counterspin from FAIR and occasionally I pick up an Alternative Radio. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I sometimes catch the Duke Skorich Show from KUWS in our old stomping ground of Duluth/Superior. It's a Wisconsin Public Radio affiliate. WPR also has a very worthwhile talk lineup on the Ideas Network. Check out their program notes. Finally, driving across Canada has given me a lot of appreciation of CBC Radio One. Links for all of these services may be found in the left pane.

Today I made the mistake of listening to a couple of NPR's hourly newscasts (thank goodness Maine Public Radio also carries the BBC) and a few All Things Considered segments. Here are things I heard:

NPR hourly newscast
Bush took a few reporters questions at an event today. Here is part of the transcript:

Yes, Gregory.

Q Mr. President, you're sending more troops to Iraq now. This comes on the heels of reports that Iraqi security forces appear to be under-performing, appear to be unprepared for elections in January. If that's the case, what would be so bad about postponing elections if there's the potential that those elections may be seen as illegitimate?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, first of all, the elections should not be postponed. It's time for the Iraqi citizens to go the polls. And that's why we are very firm on the January 30th date. Secondly, I have always said that I will listen to the requests of our commanders on the ground. And our commanders requested some troops delay their departure home and the expedition of other troops to help these elections go forward. And I honored their request.

And, thirdly, we are working hard to train Iraqis. And we have got certain benchmarks in mind. And General Petraeus is in charge of training the Iraqi troops, and the Iraqi ministers in charge of that are meeting the goals. And the idea, of course, and the strategy, of course, is have the Iraqis defend their own freedom. And we want to help them have their presidential elections. And at some point in time, when Iraq is able to defend itself against the terrorists who are trying to destroy democracy -- as I have said many times -- our troops will come home with the honor they have earned.

It's time for those people to vote, and I am looking forward to it. It's one of those moments in history where a lot of people will be amazed that a society has been transformed so quickly from one of tyranny and torture and mass graves, to one in which people are actually allowed to express themselves at the ballot.

Yep, you guessed it. The italic part alone was what was inserted into the broadcast with zero effort to report other views on the Iraqi election. As can be seen from the reporter's question, there are a lot of issues involved and many reasons to doubt the Iraqi election is what it seems or what Bush says it is. And that blatant hypocrisy about torture again! With new stories flying that US treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba was "tantamount to torture", and with the bodies piling up, you'd think NPR would not just replay Bush's known fraud of saying he led the cleanup of torture and mass graves in Iraq!!

All Things Considered (ATC)
Nothing else need be discovered about what ATC does these days after you listen to the interview, "Fallujah Invasion Can Offer Lessons for the Future". In it, Major-General Robert Scales tells NPR's Michele Norris all about the precision guided munitions zeroing in on "point targets" containing the insurgents in Fallujah. Clean, precise killing. We've heard it all before. We kill only those deserving it with ultra-clean technology. We've beaten the strategy of the resistance. Lies.

Some weeks ago, in another ATC segment, Anne Garrels, a courageous reporter who has done multiple embedded tours in Iraq, showed how she clearly is too close to the troops on whom she is reporting. As the Marines were readying the big assault on Fallujah, she speaks, without skepticism, of how her Marines told her they played Marine Corps Hymn to rile insurgents enough so that they could be located and shot.

Semper fi NPR! From the Halls of Montezuma, To the Shores of Tripoli...!!

Canada versus Bush

Case against US president forceful in Ottawa and Halifax


Bush unwelcome Wednesday evening in Nova Scotia



Feelings run deep all over Canada as protests against the November 30/December 1 Bush visit erupted from coast to coast

Coverage of the Bush visit to Canada in the US is hilarious. Most of it goes something like, "leaders mending ties, have shared goals", or "Bush, Martin patch things up", or Bush, Visiting Canada, Aims to Smooth Ruffled Relations. Then there is talk of trade in beef and lumber. No doubt, trade issues are critical to the two countries.

But my favorite US coverage of the visit was on the PBS News Hour.

Here is a sample of the arrogant Bush agitprop performance and then how it was called out by Canadian commentators:

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We just had a poll in our country where people decided that the foreign policy of the Bush administration ought to be: "Stay in place for four more years."

I made some decisions, obviously, that some in Canada didn't agree with, like, for example, removing Saddam Hussein and enforcing the demands of the United Nations Security Council....

The riposte by Mark Kingwell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine, came later in the segment after a question from Gwen Ifill. Kingwell calls Bush a liar in so many words. And he characterizes US action as rogue. Wow! On US TV!

GWEN IFILL: So are you suggesting that the goodwill that we saw on display when the president joked about the beef and when the president said thank you, didn't necessarily sit that well with Canadians?

MARK KINGWELL: Well, it didn't sit well with this Canadian. I think it is disingenuous. I also think that his defense of his actions in Iraq as being in accordance with the United Nations Security Council is disingenuous.

The Bush administration has consistently failed to cooperate with the United Nations; something that Canadians have been urging all along as the real basis of any kind of legitimate international action.

He has also refused to cooperate with the international criminal court with various measures which Canadian diplomats and thinkers have been spearheading to try to give a legitimate basis to international law so that we don't see the kind of rogue action that we have seen in Iraq...

The complete exchange is far more extensive than what I report here and taking the time to listen to the whole thing would be worthwhile.

CBC coverage was quite a bit better, but not devoid some of the same wash found south of the border. See this rather nice page on "The protests for and against", with lots of additional links on the page.

A lot of people in Canada actually seem to care about the fact that George W. Bush is dragging the world into dangerous territory with his wars and escalating the nuclear arms race by putting his missile system offering phony "protection" right on Canada's doorstep. Maybe they are just a bit less distracted and less arrogant than their belligerent neighbors to the south.

Peace organizing in Canada
Canadian Peace Alliance

StopWar.ca

Toronto Coalition to Stop the War