Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Pentagon Fundies trashing the Constitution and the Military...
This summary is not available. Please
click here to view the post.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
What the Iraq Study Group's purpose really is....
From The Heart of the Matter :
Iraq Study Group: Success Through Failure
The first thing I noticed about the Iraq Study Group's report was the title of its policy prescriptions: The Way Forward. I couldn't help but smile when I saw it. "The way forward?" I thought. "Come on, what we're looking for is a way out!"
I know, I know, that makes me a "surrender monkey," too. Look, probably the heart of the matter here is that there are people who continue to believe Iraq is still salvageable, and that it is within US power to salvage it, on the one hand; and people -- like me -- who believe Iraq is past saving and that we therefore need to change our objectives to damage control. A shame the debate can't be conducted in a way that's respectful of the other side's motives -- except here on HOTM, of course... ;-)
Okay, substance. The meat of the report is in its diplomacy prescriptions: engage Iran and Syria and create something called the Iraq International Support Group, which would "include all countries that border Iraq as well as other key countries in the region and the world."
My first reaction to all this was, are you kidding?
[to continue reading click : http://www.barryeisler.com/blog.html ]
Wrap...
Iraq Study Group: Success Through Failure
The first thing I noticed about the Iraq Study Group's report was the title of its policy prescriptions: The Way Forward. I couldn't help but smile when I saw it. "The way forward?" I thought. "Come on, what we're looking for is a way out!"
I know, I know, that makes me a "surrender monkey," too. Look, probably the heart of the matter here is that there are people who continue to believe Iraq is still salvageable, and that it is within US power to salvage it, on the one hand; and people -- like me -- who believe Iraq is past saving and that we therefore need to change our objectives to damage control. A shame the debate can't be conducted in a way that's respectful of the other side's motives -- except here on HOTM, of course... ;-)
Okay, substance. The meat of the report is in its diplomacy prescriptions: engage Iran and Syria and create something called the Iraq International Support Group, which would "include all countries that border Iraq as well as other key countries in the region and the world."
My first reaction to all this was, are you kidding?
[to continue reading click : http://www.barryeisler.com/blog.html ]
Wrap...
China, the US, and $$$$$$$$$$$...................
From Tom Paine. org:
China Has U.S. By The Purse
Danny Schechter
December 12, 2006
Danny Schechter edits MediaChannel.org. He is the director of "In Debt We Trust," a new film on the credit crunch, and author of Falun Gong’s Challenge to China. Comments can be sent to dissector@mediachannel.org.
Who has real power over U.S. decision-making? If you think it is the White House, or even the Congress, think again. There has been a power shift underway for years and, believe it our not, our future and fortune rests in the hands of bureaucrats on the other side of the world. Sorry folks, but our red, white and blue economy is afloat because of members of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.
Yes, the Red Menace that we spent so many years fearing as a military threat now represents a far more serious economic threat. Mao must be turning in his grave with the news that no less than six U.S. Cabinet members are on their way to the Middle Kingdom on Wednesday to beseech, beg, lobby and try to persuade the new mandarins not to sell off their vast reservoir of dollars.
There’s an old saying that a person can be in trouble when he owes a bank a hundred bucks. But if he owes $100 million, the bank could be in trouble. We owe China billions, but they realize that collapse of American capitalism—once a goal—could also trigger a collapse of Chinese “communism.” That’s how mutually intertwined we have become, and how complicit we are with a government which the Committee to Protect Journalists says now jails more journalists than any other.
The New York Times reports on the big trip that will bring Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and company on their ballyhooed "excellent adventure" to Beijing. Yet it doesn’t look like much will happen:
“...Pressure is mounting on [Paulson] to produce results or face a wave of protectionist measures in the new Congress next year.
Mr. Paulson conferred this week with business leaders urging him to bring about changes in China’s economic practices, particularly its regulated economy, manipulation of currency levels to spur exports and its failure to crack down on piracy of software, pharmaceuticals and other items.
At the same time, Mr. Paulson’s aides were also conferring with Chinese representatives preparing for his Dec. 13-15 trip. Both sides cautioned not to expect breakthroughs on the big issues, in part because the Chinese cannot be seen as kowtowing to American pressure."
So we will hear a lot of rhetoric in the days to come about China’s failures to honor agreements and violations of trade regimes. They will all be true—but besides the point. Who has the power to bring China into line? We don’t. We are as dependent in Beijing as we are in Baghdad.
The Times reports that “Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organization, said in a recent interview. ‘There are constituencies and vested interests. You can’t deal with the Chinese by banging on the table, going to the balcony and saying, ‘This is what I want.’ ”
What’s really going on? It looks like this could be the opening stages of a trade war, revolving in part around the shrinking power of the dollar.
And that war could do more damage to the U.S. than the defeat in Iraq.
Already, as I have reported , the Treasury Department has opened a global crisis management center that sounds very much like an economic war room. It is headed by none other than Jim Wilkinson, the GOP info warrior who ran the Coalition Media Center during the opening days of the Iraq War, when great victories were all we read about in the news.
What we are not reading today is how serious this is. And how our national and consumer debt is at the center of it.
Reports The Economist:
America’s growth has been driven by consumer spending. That spending, supported by increased borrowing, is clearly unsustainable; and the consequent economic and financial imbalances must invariably unwind. As that happens, the country could face a prolonged period of slower growth.
The bill is coming due. The piper must be paid. And all the financial wonks and gnomes and commissars worldwide know it. In many quarters, the euro looks like a better bet than the dollar. Why? The Economist says productivity growth is going down in the U.S. and up in Europe. The U.S. structural budget deficit has widened and American savings has gone down. Their cover story speaks of illusions in Washington. Sound familiar?
A slump in the American economy is likely to be cushioned by banks and investors overseas because it could bring them down, too. What this means is that we are dependent on what others do or fail to do. Washington is actually undermining the dollar in hopes it will make our exports cheaper and thus ease the deficit. It’s our way of pressuring the Chinese and try to get them lower the value of their currency.
Clever? Don’t be so sure. They are not fools.
If China’s wise men decide that propping up the dollar is not in their interest, they can move more money in euros. And then the real battle begins. Already their finance minister said they are “diversifying” their currencies. That’s not in “our interest” and yet our monetary manipulations could backfire, as Robert Sinche of the Bank of America suggests. Listen to this:
Let’s say China revalues by 10 percent overnight. The prices at Wal-Mart go up 10 percent. So we then see worse inflation, the Fed tightens monetary policies and we end up with higher inflation, higher prices and higher interest rates. Remind me again why that’s what we want.
Forget the Beijing Olympics. This is the real game in town.
So if you didn’t trust this administration on the war, why should you trust them on economics? When you know the war casualty figures have been downplayed, why do you think the jobless figures and “misery index” are not? Would you give your money and your destiny over to con men? Of course not, if you knew what the con is.
Unfortunately, the real news about these manipulations is buried in the labyrinth of the business pages, where many claim of having the "MEGO” (My Eyes Glaze Over) effect.
So that’s why it's time to pay attention to the dropping dollar, the China game and the housing “train wreck,” as experts call it. It feeds into the global credit crunch and affects all of us, and we need our media to explain it all more clearly—with less of a big business bias and more of a “who wins and who loses” framework.
While we watch one war go up in flames, the matches are being lit for another one.
Wrap...
China Has U.S. By The Purse
Danny Schechter
December 12, 2006
Danny Schechter edits MediaChannel.org. He is the director of "In Debt We Trust," a new film on the credit crunch, and author of Falun Gong’s Challenge to China. Comments can be sent to dissector@mediachannel.org.
Who has real power over U.S. decision-making? If you think it is the White House, or even the Congress, think again. There has been a power shift underway for years and, believe it our not, our future and fortune rests in the hands of bureaucrats on the other side of the world. Sorry folks, but our red, white and blue economy is afloat because of members of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.
Yes, the Red Menace that we spent so many years fearing as a military threat now represents a far more serious economic threat. Mao must be turning in his grave with the news that no less than six U.S. Cabinet members are on their way to the Middle Kingdom on Wednesday to beseech, beg, lobby and try to persuade the new mandarins not to sell off their vast reservoir of dollars.
There’s an old saying that a person can be in trouble when he owes a bank a hundred bucks. But if he owes $100 million, the bank could be in trouble. We owe China billions, but they realize that collapse of American capitalism—once a goal—could also trigger a collapse of Chinese “communism.” That’s how mutually intertwined we have become, and how complicit we are with a government which the Committee to Protect Journalists says now jails more journalists than any other.
The New York Times reports on the big trip that will bring Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and company on their ballyhooed "excellent adventure" to Beijing. Yet it doesn’t look like much will happen:
“...Pressure is mounting on [Paulson] to produce results or face a wave of protectionist measures in the new Congress next year.
Mr. Paulson conferred this week with business leaders urging him to bring about changes in China’s economic practices, particularly its regulated economy, manipulation of currency levels to spur exports and its failure to crack down on piracy of software, pharmaceuticals and other items.
At the same time, Mr. Paulson’s aides were also conferring with Chinese representatives preparing for his Dec. 13-15 trip. Both sides cautioned not to expect breakthroughs on the big issues, in part because the Chinese cannot be seen as kowtowing to American pressure."
So we will hear a lot of rhetoric in the days to come about China’s failures to honor agreements and violations of trade regimes. They will all be true—but besides the point. Who has the power to bring China into line? We don’t. We are as dependent in Beijing as we are in Baghdad.
The Times reports that “Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organization, said in a recent interview. ‘There are constituencies and vested interests. You can’t deal with the Chinese by banging on the table, going to the balcony and saying, ‘This is what I want.’ ”
What’s really going on? It looks like this could be the opening stages of a trade war, revolving in part around the shrinking power of the dollar.
And that war could do more damage to the U.S. than the defeat in Iraq.
Already, as I have reported , the Treasury Department has opened a global crisis management center that sounds very much like an economic war room. It is headed by none other than Jim Wilkinson, the GOP info warrior who ran the Coalition Media Center during the opening days of the Iraq War, when great victories were all we read about in the news.
What we are not reading today is how serious this is. And how our national and consumer debt is at the center of it.
Reports The Economist:
America’s growth has been driven by consumer spending. That spending, supported by increased borrowing, is clearly unsustainable; and the consequent economic and financial imbalances must invariably unwind. As that happens, the country could face a prolonged period of slower growth.
The bill is coming due. The piper must be paid. And all the financial wonks and gnomes and commissars worldwide know it. In many quarters, the euro looks like a better bet than the dollar. Why? The Economist says productivity growth is going down in the U.S. and up in Europe. The U.S. structural budget deficit has widened and American savings has gone down. Their cover story speaks of illusions in Washington. Sound familiar?
A slump in the American economy is likely to be cushioned by banks and investors overseas because it could bring them down, too. What this means is that we are dependent on what others do or fail to do. Washington is actually undermining the dollar in hopes it will make our exports cheaper and thus ease the deficit. It’s our way of pressuring the Chinese and try to get them lower the value of their currency.
Clever? Don’t be so sure. They are not fools.
If China’s wise men decide that propping up the dollar is not in their interest, they can move more money in euros. And then the real battle begins. Already their finance minister said they are “diversifying” their currencies. That’s not in “our interest” and yet our monetary manipulations could backfire, as Robert Sinche of the Bank of America suggests. Listen to this:
Let’s say China revalues by 10 percent overnight. The prices at Wal-Mart go up 10 percent. So we then see worse inflation, the Fed tightens monetary policies and we end up with higher inflation, higher prices and higher interest rates. Remind me again why that’s what we want.
Forget the Beijing Olympics. This is the real game in town.
So if you didn’t trust this administration on the war, why should you trust them on economics? When you know the war casualty figures have been downplayed, why do you think the jobless figures and “misery index” are not? Would you give your money and your destiny over to con men? Of course not, if you knew what the con is.
Unfortunately, the real news about these manipulations is buried in the labyrinth of the business pages, where many claim of having the "MEGO” (My Eyes Glaze Over) effect.
So that’s why it's time to pay attention to the dropping dollar, the China game and the housing “train wreck,” as experts call it. It feeds into the global credit crunch and affects all of us, and we need our media to explain it all more clearly—with less of a big business bias and more of a “who wins and who loses” framework.
While we watch one war go up in flames, the matches are being lit for another one.
Wrap...
Polonuim 210 has a history...
From Secrecy News...
INJECTING POLONIUM INTO HUMANS
The apparent murder of former Russian intelligence officer AlexanderLitvinenko through polonium poisoning seemed like an outlandish innovation in crime. But it was not the first time that polonium had been deliberately administered to human subjects.
In 1944 at the University of Rochester in New York, "tracer amounts of radioactive polonium-210 were injected into four hospitalized humans and ingested by a fifth," according to a 1995 retrospective account.Four men and one women who were already suffering from a variety of cancers reportedly volunteered for the dangerous experiment. Onepatient died from his cancer six days after the injection.
See "Polonium Human-Injection Experiments," Los Alamos Science, Number 23, 1995: http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326640-po.pdf
That polonium article appeared as a sidebar in a larger paper called"The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments" by William Moss andRoger Eckhardt, which follows on the work of reporter Eileen Welsome, builds on the declassification activities of Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary and complements the research of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.
See the Mossand Eckhardt paper from Los Alamos Science here: http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326640.pdf
Polonium was classified in July 1945, the authors note, and given the code name "postum." The basic chemistry and physics of polonium were declassified in 1946. The fact that polonium-210 was used in nuclear weapon initiators was declassified in 1967, according to a Department of Energy historical account.
Wrap...
INJECTING POLONIUM INTO HUMANS
The apparent murder of former Russian intelligence officer AlexanderLitvinenko through polonium poisoning seemed like an outlandish innovation in crime. But it was not the first time that polonium had been deliberately administered to human subjects.
In 1944 at the University of Rochester in New York, "tracer amounts of radioactive polonium-210 were injected into four hospitalized humans and ingested by a fifth," according to a 1995 retrospective account.Four men and one women who were already suffering from a variety of cancers reportedly volunteered for the dangerous experiment. Onepatient died from his cancer six days after the injection.
See "Polonium Human-Injection Experiments," Los Alamos Science, Number 23, 1995: http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326640-po.pdf
That polonium article appeared as a sidebar in a larger paper called"The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments" by William Moss andRoger Eckhardt, which follows on the work of reporter Eileen Welsome, builds on the declassification activities of Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary and complements the research of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.
See the Mossand Eckhardt paper from Los Alamos Science here: http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326640.pdf
Polonium was classified in July 1945, the authors note, and given the code name "postum." The basic chemistry and physics of polonium were declassified in 1946. The fact that polonium-210 was used in nuclear weapon initiators was declassified in 1967, according to a Department of Energy historical account.
Wrap...
Monday, December 11, 2006
In 2002, Obama's speech...he's Prez material all right...
From the Ed Shultz show :
[NOTE: 2002!!! While still a State Senator! Before the attack on Iraq!]
Remarks of Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama Against Going to War with Iraq
Speech by Barack Obama
I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil.
I don't oppose all wars. My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil.
I don't oppose all wars. After September 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again.I don't oppose all wars.
What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
[continue reading at: http://www.bigeddieradio.com/News/more.asp?ID=2196 ]
Wrap...
[NOTE: 2002!!! While still a State Senator! Before the attack on Iraq!]
Remarks of Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama Against Going to War with Iraq
Speech by Barack Obama
I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil.
I don't oppose all wars. My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil.
I don't oppose all wars. After September 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again.I don't oppose all wars.
What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
[continue reading at: http://www.bigeddieradio.com/News/more.asp?ID=2196 ]
Wrap...
Determined Fitzgerald forges ahead...
From Associated Press:
Judge settles fight over classified info
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer
Last Updated 10:10 am PST Monday, December 11, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal judge all but resolved the protracted legal fight over classified information in the CIA leak case Monday, helping ensure the dispute would not derail former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's perjury and obstruction trial.
Libby is accused of lying to investigators about his conversations with reporters regarding a CIA operative. He says he had more pressing issues on his mind and wants to discuss classified intelligence about terrorist threats and foreign nuclear programs to bolster that argument.
Prosecutors had accused Libby of demanding so much sensitive information that the government could not safely release it - leading to a dismissal - but U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton appears to have resolved that dispute.
Walton, who rankled Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald last month by ruling that Libby must be allowed to discuss intelligence on Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, terrorism and other issues at trial, accepted Fitzgerald's proposal to limit the details Libby and his attorneys can discuss.
The details of those limitations are sealed but, because it was Fitzgerald's proposal, it's unlikely he would come back to court later this month and argue that the limitations did not go far enough to protect government secrecy.
Neither Fitzgerald's office not Libby's attorneys would comment Monday.
The ruling helps keep the trial on track for next month. That could still be delayed, however, if Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush aide Karl Rove claim they cannot testify because of separation-of-powers issues.
While the case hinges on whether Libby knowingly lied about his conversation regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame, testimony could offer a behind-the-scenes look at how the Bush administration handled intelligence and criticism in its march to war.
Plame believes the administration leaked her name to reporters as retribution for her husband's criticism of prewar intelligence. Nobody has been charged with the leak.
Wrap...
Judge settles fight over classified info
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer
Last Updated 10:10 am PST Monday, December 11, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal judge all but resolved the protracted legal fight over classified information in the CIA leak case Monday, helping ensure the dispute would not derail former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's perjury and obstruction trial.
Libby is accused of lying to investigators about his conversations with reporters regarding a CIA operative. He says he had more pressing issues on his mind and wants to discuss classified intelligence about terrorist threats and foreign nuclear programs to bolster that argument.
Prosecutors had accused Libby of demanding so much sensitive information that the government could not safely release it - leading to a dismissal - but U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton appears to have resolved that dispute.
Walton, who rankled Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald last month by ruling that Libby must be allowed to discuss intelligence on Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, terrorism and other issues at trial, accepted Fitzgerald's proposal to limit the details Libby and his attorneys can discuss.
The details of those limitations are sealed but, because it was Fitzgerald's proposal, it's unlikely he would come back to court later this month and argue that the limitations did not go far enough to protect government secrecy.
Neither Fitzgerald's office not Libby's attorneys would comment Monday.
The ruling helps keep the trial on track for next month. That could still be delayed, however, if Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush aide Karl Rove claim they cannot testify because of separation-of-powers issues.
While the case hinges on whether Libby knowingly lied about his conversation regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame, testimony could offer a behind-the-scenes look at how the Bush administration handled intelligence and criticism in its march to war.
Plame believes the administration leaked her name to reporters as retribution for her husband's criticism of prewar intelligence. Nobody has been charged with the leak.
Wrap...
Iraqi reporters reporting from inside Iraq....
From Tom Dispatch:
"Today Is Better than Tomorrow"Iraq as a Living Hell
By Dahr Jamail
The situation in Iraq has reached such a point of degradation and danger that I've been unable to return to report -- as I did from 2003 to 2005 -- from the front lines of daily life. Instead, in these last months, I have found myself in a supportive role, facilitating the work of some of my former sources, who remain in their own war-torn land, to tell their hair-raising tales of the new Iraq.
While relying on my Iraqi colleagues to report the news, which we then publish at Inter Press Service and my website, I continue to receive emails from others in Iraq, civilian and soldier alike.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
Wrap...
"Today Is Better than Tomorrow"Iraq as a Living Hell
By Dahr Jamail
The situation in Iraq has reached such a point of degradation and danger that I've been unable to return to report -- as I did from 2003 to 2005 -- from the front lines of daily life. Instead, in these last months, I have found myself in a supportive role, facilitating the work of some of my former sources, who remain in their own war-torn land, to tell their hair-raising tales of the new Iraq.
While relying on my Iraqi colleagues to report the news, which we then publish at Inter Press Service and my website, I continue to receive emails from others in Iraq, civilian and soldier alike.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
Wrap...
Sunday, December 10, 2006
New SecDef Gates/CIA/Columbia Cartel & John Kerry...
From Consortium News via truthout.org :
Gary Webb's Death: American Tragedy
By Robert Parry
Consortium News
Saturday 09 December 2006
When Americans ask me what happened to the vaunted U.S. press corps over the past three decades - in the decline from its heyday of the Watergate scandal and the Pentagon Papers to its failure to challenge the Iraq WMD lies or to hold George W. Bush accountable - I often recall for them the story of Gary Webb.
Two years ago, on the night of Dec. 9, 2004, investigative reporter Webb - his career shattered and his life in ruins - typed out four suicide notes for his family, laid out a certificate for his cremation, put a note on the door suggesting a call to 911, and removed his father's handgun from a box.
The 49-year-old Webb, a divorced father of three who was living alone in a rental house in Sacramento County, California, then raised the gun and shot himself in the head. The first shot was not lethal, so he fired once more.
His body was found the next day after movers who were scheduled to clear out Webb's rental house, arrived and followed the instructions from the note on the door.
Though a personal tragedy, the story of Gary Webb's suicide has a larger meaning for the American people who find themselves increasingly sheltered from the truth by government specialists at cover-ups and by a U.S. news media that has lost its way.
Webb's death had its roots in his fateful decision eight years earlier to write a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News that challenged a potent conventional wisdom shared by the elite U.S. news organizations - that one of the most shocking scandals of the 1980s just couldn't have been true.
Webb's "Dark Alliance" series, published in August 1996, revived the story of how the Reagan administration in the 1980s had tolerated and protected cocaine smuggling by its client army of Nicaraguan rebels known as the contras.
Though substantial evidence of these crimes had surfaced in the mid-1980s (initially in an article that Brian Barger and I wrote for the Associated Press in December 1985 and later at hearings conducted by Sen. John Kerry), the major news outlets had bent to pressure from the Reagan administration and refused to take the disclosures seriously.
Reflecting the dominant attitude toward Kerry and his work on the contra-cocaine scandal, Newsweek even dubbed the Massachusetts senator a "randy conspiracy buff." [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Kerry's Contra-Cocaine Chapter."]
Thus, the ugly reality of the contra-cocaine scandal was left in that netherworld of uncertainty, largely proven with documents and testimony but never accepted by Official Washington, including its premier news organizations, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
But Webb's series thrust the scandal back into prominence by connecting the contra-cocaine trafficking to the crack epidemic that had ravaged Los Angeles and other American cities in the 1980s. For that reason, African-American communities were up in arms as were their elected representatives.
So, the "Dark Alliance" series offered a unique opportunity for the major news outlets to finally give the contra-cocaine scandal the attention it deserved.
Media Resistance
But that would have required some painful self-criticism among Washington journalists whose careers had advanced in part because they had avoided retaliation from aggressive Reagan supporters who had made an art of punishing out-of-step reporters for pursuing controversies like the contra-cocaine scandal.
Also, by the mid-1990s, a powerful right-wing news media had taken shape and was in no mood to accept the notion that President Ronald Reagan's beloved contras were little more than common criminals. That recognition would have cast a shadow over the Reagan Legacy, which the Right was busy elevating into mythic status.
There was the turf issue, too. Since Webb's stories coincided with the emergence of the Internet as an alternate source for news and the San Jose Mercury News was at the center of Silicon Valley, the big newspapers saw a threat to their historic dominance as the nation's gatekeepers for what information should be taken seriously.
Plus, the major media's focus in the mid-1990s was on scandals swirling around Bill Clinton, such as some firings at the White House Travel Office and convoluted questions about his old Whitewater real-estate deal.
In other words, there was little appetite to revisit scandals from the Reagan years and there was strong motive to disparage what Webb had written.
It fell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon's right-wing Washington Times to begin the counterattack. The Washington Times turned to some ex-CIA officials, who had participated in the contra war, to refute the drug charges.
But - in a pattern that would repeat itself over the next decade - the Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers quickly lined up behind the right-wing press. On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb's story.
The Post's approach was twofold: first, it presented the contra-cocaine allegations as old news - "even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers," the Post reported - and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted - that it had not "played a major role in the emergence of crack."
A Post side-bar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to "conspiracy fears."
Soon, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times joined in the piling on against Gary Webb. The big newspapers made much of the CIA's internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 that supposedly cleared the spy agency of a role in contra-cocaine smuggling.
But the CIA's decade-old cover-up began to weaken on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only 12 days, the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.
Nevertheless, Webb was becoming the target of outright media ridicule. Influential Post media critic Howard Kurtz mocked Webb for saying in a book proposal that he would explore the possibility that the contra war was primarily a business to its participants.
"Oliver Stone, check your voice mail," Kurtz chortled. [Washington Post, Oct. 28, 1996]
Webb's suspicion was not unfounded, however. Indeed, White House aide Oliver North's emissary Rob Owen had made the same point a decade earlier, in a March 17, 1986, message about the contra leadership.
"Few of the so-called leaders of the movement … really care about the boys in the field," Owen wrote. "THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM." [Capitalization in the original.]
Kurtz and other big-name journalists may have been ignorant of key facts about the contra war, but that didn't stop them from pillorying Gary Webb. The ridicule also had a predictable effect on the executives of the Mercury News. By early 1997, executive editor Jerry Ceppos was in retreat.
On May 11, 1997, Ceppos published a front-page column saying the series "fell short of my standards." He criticized the stories because they "strongly implied CIA knowledge" of contra connections to U.S. drug dealers who were manufacturing crack-cocaine. "We did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship," Ceppos wrote.
The big newspapers celebrated Ceppos's retreat as vindication of their own dismissal of the contra-cocaine stories. Ceppos next pulled the plug on the Mercury News' continuing contra-cocaine investigation and reassigned Webb to a small office in Cupertino, California, far from his family. Webb resigned the paper in disgrace.
For undercutting Webb and other reporters working on the contra investigation, Ceppos was lauded by the American Journalism Review and was given the 1997 national "Ethics in Journalism Award" by the Society of Professional Journalists. While Ceppos won raves, Webb watched his career collapse and his marriage break up.
The CIA Probe
Still, Gary Webb had set in motion internal government investigations that would bring to the surface long-hidden facts about how the Reagan administration had conducted the contra war.
The CIA's defensive line against the contra-cocaine allegations began to break when the spy agency published Volume One of Inspector General Hitz's findings on Jan. 29, 1998.
Despite a largely exculpatory press release, Hitz's Volume One admitted that not only were many of Webb's allegations true but that he actually understated the seriousness of the contra-drug crimes and the CIA's knowledge.
Hitz acknowledged that cocaine smugglers played a significant early role in the Nicaraguan contra movement and that the CIA intervened to block an image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San Francisco-based drug ring with suspected ties to the contras, the so-called "Frogman Case."
On May 7, 1998, another disclosure from the government investigation shook the CIA's weakening defenses.
Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, introduced into the Congressional Record a Feb. 11, 1982, letter of understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department.
The letter, which had been sought by CIA Director William Casey, freed the CIA from legal requirements that it must report drug smuggling by CIA assets, a provision that covered both the Nicaraguan contras and Afghan rebels who were fighting a Soviet-supported regime in Afghanistan and were implicated in heroin trafficking.
The next breach in the defensive wall was a report by the Justice Department's inspector general Michael Bromwich. Given the hostile climate surrounding Webb's series, Bromwich's report opened with criticism of Webb. But, like the CIA's Volume One, the contents revealed new details about government wrongdoing.
According to evidence cited by Bromwich, the Reagan administration knew almost from the outset of the contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the paramilitary operation. The administration also did next to nothing to expose or stop the crimes.
Bromwich's report revealed example after example of leads not followed, corroborated witnesses disparaged, official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged, and even the CIA facilitating the work of drug traffickers.
The report showed that the contras and their supporters ran several parallel drug-smuggling operations, not just the one at the center of Webb's series.
The report also found that the CIA shared little of its information about contra drugs with law-enforcement agencies and on three occasions disrupted cocaine-trafficking investigations that threatened the contras.
Though depicting a more widespread contra-drug operation than Webb had understood, the Justice report also provided some important corroboration about a Nicaraguan drug smuggler, Norwin Meneses, who was a key figure in Webb's series.
Bromwich cited U.S. government informants who supplied detailed information about Meneses's operation and his financial assistance to the contras.
For instance, Renato Pena, a money-and-drug courier for Meneses, said that in the early 1980s, the CIA allowed the contras to fly drugs into the United States, sell them and keep the proceeds.
Pena, who was the northern California representative for the CIA-backed FDN contra army, said the drug trafficking was forced on the contras by the inadequate levels of U.S. government assistance.
The Justice report also disclosed repeated examples of the CIA and U.S. embassies in Central America discouraging Drug Enforcement Administration investigations, including one into contra-cocaine shipments moving through the international airport in El Salvador.
Inspector General Bromwich said secrecy trumped all. "We have no doubt that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy were not anxious for the DEA to pursue its investigation at the airport," he wrote.
Despite the remarkable admissions in the body of these reports, the big newspapers showed no inclination to read beyond the press releases and executive summaries.
Cocaine Crimes & Monica
By fall 1998, Official Washington was obsessed with the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, which made it easier to ignore even more stunning contra-cocaine disclosures in the CIA's Volume Two.
In Volume Two, published Oct. 8, 1998, CIA Inspector General Hitz identified more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations throughout the 1980s.
According to Volume Two, the CIA knew the criminal nature of its contra clients from the start of the war against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.
The earliest contra force, called ADREN or the 15th of September Legion, had chosen "to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre," according to a June 1981 draft CIA field report.
ADREN also employed terrorist methods, including the bombing of Nicaraguan civilian planes and hijackings, to disrupt the Sandinista government, the CIA knew. Cocaine smuggling was also in the picture.
According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, two ADREN members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981, the CIA cable reported.
ADREN's leaders included Enrique Bermudez and other early contras who would later direct the major contra army, the CIA-organized FDN. Throughout the war, Bermudez remained the top contra military commander.
The CIA later corroborated the allegations about ADREN's cocaine trafficking, but insisted that Bermudez had opposed the drug shipments to the United States which went ahead nonetheless.
The truth about Bermudez's supposed objections to drug trafficking, however, was less clear. According to Volume One, Bermudez enlisted Norwin Meneses, a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine smuggler, to raise money and buy supplies for the contras.
Volume One had quoted a Meneses associate, another Nicaraguan trafficker named Danilo Blandon, who told Hitz's investigators that he and Meneses flew to Honduras to meet with Bermudez in 1982.
At the time, Meneses's criminal activities were well known in the Nicaraguan exile community. But the FDN commander told the cocaine smugglers that "the ends justify the means" in raising money for the contras.
After the Bermudez meeting, contra soldiers helped Meneses and Blandon get past Honduran police who briefly arrested them on drug-trafficking suspicions. After their release, Blandon and Meneses traveled on to Bolivia to complete a cocaine transaction.
There were other indications of Bermudez's drug-smuggling tolerance. In February 1988, another Nicaraguan exile linked to the drug trade accused Bermudez of narcotics trafficking, according to Hitz's report.
After the contra war ended, Bermudez returned to Managua, where he was shot to death on Feb. 16, 1991. The murder has never been solved.
CIA Drug Asset
Along the Southern Front, in Costa Rica, the drug evidence centered on the forces of Eden Pastora, another leading contra commander. But Hitz discovered that the U.S. government may have contributed to the problem.
Hitz revealed that the CIA put an admitted drug operative - known by his CIA pseudonym "Ivan Gomez" - in a supervisory position over Pastora. Hitz reported that the CIA discovered Gomez's drug history in 1987 when Gomez failed a security review on drug-trafficking questions.
In internal CIA interviews, Gomez admitted that in March or April 1982, he helped family members who were engaged in drug trafficking and money laundering. In one case, Gomez said he assisted his brother and brother-in-law in transporting cash from New York City to Miami. He admitted that he "knew this act was illegal."
Later, Gomez expanded on his admission, describing how his family members had fallen $2 million into debt and had gone to Miami to run a money-laundering center for drug traffickers. Gomez said "his brother had many visitors whom [Gomez] assumed to be in the drug trafficking business."
Gomez's brother was arrested on drug charges in June 1982. Three months later, in September 1982, Gomez started his CIA assignment in Costa Rica. Years later, convicted drug trafficker Carlos Cabezas charged that in the early 1980s, Ivan Gomez was the CIA agent in Costa Rica who was overseeing drug-money donations to the contras.
Gomez "was to make sure the money was given to the right people [the contras] and nobody was taking ... profit they weren't supposed to," Cabezas stated publicly.
But the CIA sought to discredit Cabezas at the time because he had trouble identifying Gomez's picture and put Gomez at one meeting in early 1982 before Gomez started his CIA assignment.
While the CIA was able to fend off Cabezas's allegations by pointing to these discrepancies, Hitz's report revealed that the CIA was nevertheless aware of Gomez's direct role in drug-money laundering, a fact the agency hid from Sen. Kerry's investigation in 1987.
The Bolivian Connection
There also was more about Gomez. In November 1985, the FBI learned from an informant that Gomez's two brothers had been large-scale cocaine importers, with one brother arranging shipments from Bolivia's infamous drug kingpin Roberto Suarez.
Suarez already was known as a financier of right-wing causes. In 1980, with the support of Argentine's hard-line anti-communist military regime, Suarez bankrolled a coup in Bolivia that ousted the elected left-of-center government.
The violent putsch became known as the Cocaine Coup because it made Bolivia the region's first narco-state. Bolivia's government-protected cocaine shipments helped transform the Medellin cartel from a struggling local operation into a giant corporate-style business for delivering cocaine to the U.S. market.
Some of those profits allegedly found their way into contra coffers. Flush with cash in the early 1980s, Suarez invested more than $30 million in various right-wing paramilitary operations, including the contra forces in Central America, according to U.S. Senate testimony by an Argentine intelligence officer, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse.
In 1987, Sanchez-Reisse said the Suarez drug money was laundered through front companies in Miami before going to Central America. There, other Argentine intelligence officers - veterans of the Bolivian coup - trained the contras.
CIA Inspector General Hitz added another piece to the mystery of the Bolivian-contra connection. One contra fund-raiser, Jose Orlando Bolanos, boasted that the Argentine government was supporting his anti-Sandinista activities, according to a May 1982 cable to CIA headquarters.
Bolanos made the statement during a meeting with undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Florida. He even offered to introduce them to his Bolivian cocaine supplier.
Despite all this suspicious drug activity around Ivan Gomez and the contras, the CIA insisted that it did not unmask Gomez until 1987, when he failed a security check and confessed his role in his family's drug business.
The CIA official who interviewed Gomez concluded that "Gomez directly participated in illegal drug transactions, concealed participation in illegal drug transactions, and concealed information about involvement in illegal drug activity," Hitz wrote.
But senior CIA officials still protected Gomez. They refused to refer the Gomez case to the Justice Department, citing the 1982 DOJ-CIA agreement that spared the CIA from a legal obligation to report narcotics crimes by non-employees.
Instead, the CIA eased Gomez, an independent contractor, out of the agency in February 1988, without alerting law enforcement or the congressional oversight committees.
When questioned about the case nearly a decade later, one senior CIA official who had supported the gentle treatment of Gomez had second thoughts. "It is a striking commentary on me and everyone that this guy's involvement in narcotics didn't weigh more heavily on me or the system," the official acknowledged.
The White House Trail
A Medellin drug connection arose in another section of Hitz's report, when he revealed evidence suggesting that some contra trafficking may have been sanctioned by Reagan's National Security Council.
The protagonist for this part of the contra-cocaine mystery was Moises Nunez, a Cuban-American who worked for North's NSC operation and for two drug-connected seafood importers, Ocean Hunter in Miami and Frigorificos de Puntarenas in Costa Rica.
Frigorificos de Puntarenas was created in the early 1980s as a cover for drug-money laundering, according to sworn testimony by two of the firm's principals - Carlos Soto and Medellin cartel accountant Ramon Milian Rodriguez. Drug allegations were swirling around Moises Nunez by the mid-1980s. At the AP, his operation was one of the targets of our investigation.
Finally reacting to these suspicions, the CIA questioned Nunez on March 25, 1987, about his alleged cocaine trafficking. He responded by pointing the finger at his NSC superiors.
"Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council," Hitz reported.
"Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC. Nunez refused to identify the NSC officials with whom he had been involved."
After this first round of questioning, CIA headquarters authorized an additional session, but then senior CIA officials reversed the decision. There would be no further efforts at "debriefing Nunez."
Hitz noted that "the cable [from headquarters] offered no explanation for the decision" to stop the Nunez interrogation.
But the CIA's Central American task force chief Alan Fiers said the Nunez-NSC drug lead was not pursued "because of the NSC connection and the possibility that this could be somehow connected to the Private Benefactor program [the contra money handled by North]. A decision was made not to pursue this matter."
Joseph Fernandez, who had been the CIA's station chief in Costa Rica, later confirmed to congressional Iran-Contra investigators that Nunez "was involved in a very sensitive operation" for North's "Enterprise." The exact nature of that NSC-authorized activity has never been divulged.
At the time of the Nunez-NSC drug admissions and his truncated interrogation, the CIA's acting director was Robert M. Gates, who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Dec. 6, 2006, to be President George W. Bush's new Secretary of Defense.
Miami Vice
The CIA also worked directly with other drug-connected Cuban-Americans on the contra project, Hitz found.
One of Nunez's Cuban-American associates, Felipe Vidal, had a criminal record as a narcotics trafficker in the 1970s. But the CIA still hired him to serve as a logistics coordinator for the contras, Hitz reported.
The CIA also learned that Vidal's drug connections were not only in the past.
A December 1984 cable to CIA headquarters revealed Vidal's ties to Rene Corvo, another Cuban-American suspected of drug trafficking. Corvo was working with anti-communist Cuban, Frank Castro, who was viewed as a Medellin cartel representative within the contra movement.
There were other narcotics links to Vidal. In January 1986, the DEA in Miami seized 414 pounds of cocaine concealed in a shipment of yucca that was going from a contra operative in Costa Rica to Ocean Hunter, the company where Vidal worked.
Despite the evidence, Vidal remained a CIA employee as he collaborated with Frank Castro's assistant, Rene Corvo, in raising money for the contras, according to a CIA memo in June 1986.
By fall 1986, Sen. Kerry had heard enough rumors about Vidal to demand information about him as part of a congressional inquiry into contra drugs. But the CIA withheld the derogatory information. On Oct. 15, 1986, Kerry received a briefing from Alan Fiers, who didn't mention Vidal's drug arrests and conviction in the 1970s.
But Vidal was not yet in the clear. In 1987, the U.S. attorney in Miami began investigating Vidal, Ocean Hunter and other contra-connected entities.
This prosecutorial attention worried the CIA. The CIA's Latin American division felt it was time for a security review of Vidal. But on Aug. 5, 1987, the CIA's security office blocked the review for fear that the Vidal drug information "could be exposed during any future litigation."
As expected, the U.S. Attorney did request documents about "contra-related activities" by Vidal, Ocean Hunter and 16 other entities. The CIA advised the prosecutor that "no information had been found regarding Ocean Hunter," a statement that was clearly false.
The CIA continued Vidal's employment as an adviser to the contra movement until 1990, virtually the end of the contra war.
Honduras Trafficking
Hitz revealed that drugs also tainted the highest levels of the Honduran-based FDN, the largest contra army.
Hitz found that Juan Rivas, a contra commander who rose to be chief of staff, admitted that he had been a cocaine trafficker in Colombia before the war. The CIA asked Rivas, known as El Quiche, about his background after the DEA began suspecting that Rivas might be an escaped convict from a Colombian prison.
In interviews with CIA officers, Rivas acknowledged that he had been arrested and convicted of packaging and transporting cocaine for the drug trade in Barranquilla, Colombia. After several months in prison, Rivas said, he escaped and moved to Central America where he joined the contras.
Defending Rivas, CIA officials insisted that there was no evidence that Rivas engaged in trafficking while with the contras. But one CIA cable noted that he lived an expensive lifestyle, even keeping a $100,000 thoroughbred horse at the contra camp.
Contra military commander Bermudez later attributed Rivas's wealth to his ex-girlfriend's rich family. But a CIA cable in March 1989 added that "some in the FDN may have suspected at the time that the father-in-law was engaged in drug trafficking."
Still, the CIA moved quickly to protect Rivas from exposure and possible extradition to Colombia. In February 1989, CIA headquarters asked that DEA take no action "in view of the serious political damage to the U.S. Government that could occur should the information about Rivas become public."
Rivas was eased out of the contra leadership with an explanation of poor health. With U.S. government help, he was allowed to resettle in Miami. Colombia was not informed about his fugitive status.
Drug Flights
Another senior FDN official implicated in the drug trade was its chief spokesman in Honduras, Arnoldo Jose "Frank" Arana.
The drug allegations against Arana dated back to 1983 when a federal narcotics task force put him under criminal investigation because of plans "to smuggle 100 kilograms of cocaine into the United States from South America."
On Jan. 23, 1986, the FBI reported that Arana and his brothers were involved in a drug-smuggling enterprise, although Arana was not charged.
Arana sought to clear up another set of drug suspicions in 1989 by visiting the DEA in Honduras with a business associate, Jose Perez. Arana's association with Perez, however, only raised new alarms.
If "Arana is mixed up with the Perez brothers, he is probably dirty," the DEA responded.
Through their ownership of an air services company called SETCO, the Perez brothers were associated with Juan Matta Ballesteros, a major cocaine kingpin connected to the murder of a DEA agent, according to reports by the DEA and U.S. Customs.
Hitz reported that someone at the CIA scribbled a note on the DEA cable about Arana stating: "Arnold Arana ... still active and working, we [CIA] may have a problem."
Despite its drug ties to Matta Ballesteros, SETCO emerged as the principal company for ferrying supplies to the contras in Honduras.
During congressional Iran-Contra hearings, FDN political leader Adolfo Calero testified that SETCO was paid from bank accounts controlled by Oliver North. SETCO also received $185,924 from the State Department for ferrying supplies to the contras in 1986.
Hitz found other air transport companies used by the contras implicated in the cocaine trade. Even FDN leaders suspected that they were shipping supplies to Central America aboard planes that might be returning with drugs.
Mario Calero, Adolfo Calero's brother and the chief of contra logistics, grew so uneasy about one air-freight company that he notified U.S. law enforcement that the FDN only chartered the planes for the flights south, not the return flights north.
Hitz found that some drug pilots simply rotated from one sector of the contra operation to another. Donaldo Frixone, who had a drug record in the Dominican Republic, was hired by the CIA to fly contra missions from 1983-85.
In September 1986, however, Frixone was implicated in smuggling 19,000 pounds of marijuana into the United States. In late 1986 or early 1987, he went to work for Vortex, another U.S.-paid contra supply company linked to the drug trade.
Fig Leaf
By the time that Hitz's Volume Two was published in fall 1998, the CIA's defense against Webb's series had shrunk to a fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking.
But Hitz made clear that the contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of contra crimes from the Justice Department, the Congress and even the CIA's own analytical division.
Besides tracing the evidence of contra-drug trafficking through the decade-long contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the contra-drug problem but didn't want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.
According to Hitz, the CIA had "one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. … [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the contra program."
One CIA field officer explained, "The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war."
Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the contras hid evidence of contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA's analysts.
Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that "only a handful of contras might have been involved in drug trafficking." That false assessment was passed on to Congress and the major news organizations - serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his series in 1996.
Nevertheless, although Hitz's report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it passed almost unnoticed by the big newspapers. [For more details, see Robert Parry's Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth']
On Oct. 10, 1998, two days after Hitz's report was posted at the CIA's Internet site, the New York Times published a brief article that continued to deride Webb but acknowledged the contra-drug problem may have been worse than earlier understood.
Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times never published a story on the release of the CIA's Volume Two.
To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-cocaine story has been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, some of them are now top executives at their news organizations. On the other hand, Gary Webb's career never recovered.
Unable to find decent-paying work in a profession where his past awards included a Pulitzer Prize, Webb grew despondent. His marriage broke up. By December 2004, he found himself forced to move out of his rented house near Sacramento.
Instead, Webb decided to end his life.
One Last Chance
Webb's suicide offered the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times one more opportunity to set matters right, to revisit the CIA's admissions in 1998 and to exact some accountability on the Reagan-era officials implicated in protecting the contra crimes.
But all that followed Gary Webb's death was more trashing of Gary Webb. The Los Angeles Times ran a graceless obituary that made no mention of the admissions in the CIA's Volume Two and treated Webb like a low-life criminal, rather than a journalist who took on a tough story and paid a high price.
The Times obituary was republished in other newspapers, including the Washington Post. No one reading this obit would understand the profound debt that American history owed to Gary Webb, who deserved the lion's share of the credit for forcing the CIA to make its extraordinary admissions.
Yet, the big media's consistent mishandling of the contra-cocaine scandal in the 1980s and 1990s carried another warning that the nation missed: that the U.S. press corps was no longer capable of reporting complex crimes of state.
That unaddressed danger returned with disastrous results in late 2002 and early 2003 when George W. Bush sold false stories about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction while the major newspapers acted as cheerleaders and accomplices.
At the time of Webb's death on Dec. 9, 2004, the full scope of the Iraq disaster was still not evident, nor was the major press corps ready to acknowledge that its cowardice in the 1980s and its fecklessness in the 1990s were the direct antecedents to its complicity in the illegal invasion of Iraq.
Gary Webb had been a kind of canary in the mine shaft. His career destruction in the 1990s and his desperate act of suicide in 2004 were warnings about grave dangers that, if left ignored, would wreak even worse havoc on the United States and the world.
But - on this second anniversary of Webb's death - it should be remembered that his great gift to American history was that he, along with angry African-American citizens, forced the government to admit some of the worst crimes ever condoned by any White House: the protection of drug smuggling into the United States as part of a covert war against a country, Nicaragua, that represented no real threat to Americans.
It is way past time for that reality - and that gift - to be acknowledged.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & "Project Truth."
Wrap...
Gary Webb's Death: American Tragedy
By Robert Parry
Consortium News
Saturday 09 December 2006
When Americans ask me what happened to the vaunted U.S. press corps over the past three decades - in the decline from its heyday of the Watergate scandal and the Pentagon Papers to its failure to challenge the Iraq WMD lies or to hold George W. Bush accountable - I often recall for them the story of Gary Webb.
Two years ago, on the night of Dec. 9, 2004, investigative reporter Webb - his career shattered and his life in ruins - typed out four suicide notes for his family, laid out a certificate for his cremation, put a note on the door suggesting a call to 911, and removed his father's handgun from a box.
The 49-year-old Webb, a divorced father of three who was living alone in a rental house in Sacramento County, California, then raised the gun and shot himself in the head. The first shot was not lethal, so he fired once more.
His body was found the next day after movers who were scheduled to clear out Webb's rental house, arrived and followed the instructions from the note on the door.
Though a personal tragedy, the story of Gary Webb's suicide has a larger meaning for the American people who find themselves increasingly sheltered from the truth by government specialists at cover-ups and by a U.S. news media that has lost its way.
Webb's death had its roots in his fateful decision eight years earlier to write a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News that challenged a potent conventional wisdom shared by the elite U.S. news organizations - that one of the most shocking scandals of the 1980s just couldn't have been true.
Webb's "Dark Alliance" series, published in August 1996, revived the story of how the Reagan administration in the 1980s had tolerated and protected cocaine smuggling by its client army of Nicaraguan rebels known as the contras.
Though substantial evidence of these crimes had surfaced in the mid-1980s (initially in an article that Brian Barger and I wrote for the Associated Press in December 1985 and later at hearings conducted by Sen. John Kerry), the major news outlets had bent to pressure from the Reagan administration and refused to take the disclosures seriously.
Reflecting the dominant attitude toward Kerry and his work on the contra-cocaine scandal, Newsweek even dubbed the Massachusetts senator a "randy conspiracy buff." [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Kerry's Contra-Cocaine Chapter."]
Thus, the ugly reality of the contra-cocaine scandal was left in that netherworld of uncertainty, largely proven with documents and testimony but never accepted by Official Washington, including its premier news organizations, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
But Webb's series thrust the scandal back into prominence by connecting the contra-cocaine trafficking to the crack epidemic that had ravaged Los Angeles and other American cities in the 1980s. For that reason, African-American communities were up in arms as were their elected representatives.
So, the "Dark Alliance" series offered a unique opportunity for the major news outlets to finally give the contra-cocaine scandal the attention it deserved.
Media Resistance
But that would have required some painful self-criticism among Washington journalists whose careers had advanced in part because they had avoided retaliation from aggressive Reagan supporters who had made an art of punishing out-of-step reporters for pursuing controversies like the contra-cocaine scandal.
Also, by the mid-1990s, a powerful right-wing news media had taken shape and was in no mood to accept the notion that President Ronald Reagan's beloved contras were little more than common criminals. That recognition would have cast a shadow over the Reagan Legacy, which the Right was busy elevating into mythic status.
There was the turf issue, too. Since Webb's stories coincided with the emergence of the Internet as an alternate source for news and the San Jose Mercury News was at the center of Silicon Valley, the big newspapers saw a threat to their historic dominance as the nation's gatekeepers for what information should be taken seriously.
Plus, the major media's focus in the mid-1990s was on scandals swirling around Bill Clinton, such as some firings at the White House Travel Office and convoluted questions about his old Whitewater real-estate deal.
In other words, there was little appetite to revisit scandals from the Reagan years and there was strong motive to disparage what Webb had written.
It fell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon's right-wing Washington Times to begin the counterattack. The Washington Times turned to some ex-CIA officials, who had participated in the contra war, to refute the drug charges.
But - in a pattern that would repeat itself over the next decade - the Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers quickly lined up behind the right-wing press. On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb's story.
The Post's approach was twofold: first, it presented the contra-cocaine allegations as old news - "even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers," the Post reported - and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted - that it had not "played a major role in the emergence of crack."
A Post side-bar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to "conspiracy fears."
Soon, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times joined in the piling on against Gary Webb. The big newspapers made much of the CIA's internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 that supposedly cleared the spy agency of a role in contra-cocaine smuggling.
But the CIA's decade-old cover-up began to weaken on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only 12 days, the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.
Nevertheless, Webb was becoming the target of outright media ridicule. Influential Post media critic Howard Kurtz mocked Webb for saying in a book proposal that he would explore the possibility that the contra war was primarily a business to its participants.
"Oliver Stone, check your voice mail," Kurtz chortled. [Washington Post, Oct. 28, 1996]
Webb's suspicion was not unfounded, however. Indeed, White House aide Oliver North's emissary Rob Owen had made the same point a decade earlier, in a March 17, 1986, message about the contra leadership.
"Few of the so-called leaders of the movement … really care about the boys in the field," Owen wrote. "THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM." [Capitalization in the original.]
Kurtz and other big-name journalists may have been ignorant of key facts about the contra war, but that didn't stop them from pillorying Gary Webb. The ridicule also had a predictable effect on the executives of the Mercury News. By early 1997, executive editor Jerry Ceppos was in retreat.
On May 11, 1997, Ceppos published a front-page column saying the series "fell short of my standards." He criticized the stories because they "strongly implied CIA knowledge" of contra connections to U.S. drug dealers who were manufacturing crack-cocaine. "We did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship," Ceppos wrote.
The big newspapers celebrated Ceppos's retreat as vindication of their own dismissal of the contra-cocaine stories. Ceppos next pulled the plug on the Mercury News' continuing contra-cocaine investigation and reassigned Webb to a small office in Cupertino, California, far from his family. Webb resigned the paper in disgrace.
For undercutting Webb and other reporters working on the contra investigation, Ceppos was lauded by the American Journalism Review and was given the 1997 national "Ethics in Journalism Award" by the Society of Professional Journalists. While Ceppos won raves, Webb watched his career collapse and his marriage break up.
The CIA Probe
Still, Gary Webb had set in motion internal government investigations that would bring to the surface long-hidden facts about how the Reagan administration had conducted the contra war.
The CIA's defensive line against the contra-cocaine allegations began to break when the spy agency published Volume One of Inspector General Hitz's findings on Jan. 29, 1998.
Despite a largely exculpatory press release, Hitz's Volume One admitted that not only were many of Webb's allegations true but that he actually understated the seriousness of the contra-drug crimes and the CIA's knowledge.
Hitz acknowledged that cocaine smugglers played a significant early role in the Nicaraguan contra movement and that the CIA intervened to block an image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San Francisco-based drug ring with suspected ties to the contras, the so-called "Frogman Case."
On May 7, 1998, another disclosure from the government investigation shook the CIA's weakening defenses.
Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, introduced into the Congressional Record a Feb. 11, 1982, letter of understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department.
The letter, which had been sought by CIA Director William Casey, freed the CIA from legal requirements that it must report drug smuggling by CIA assets, a provision that covered both the Nicaraguan contras and Afghan rebels who were fighting a Soviet-supported regime in Afghanistan and were implicated in heroin trafficking.
The next breach in the defensive wall was a report by the Justice Department's inspector general Michael Bromwich. Given the hostile climate surrounding Webb's series, Bromwich's report opened with criticism of Webb. But, like the CIA's Volume One, the contents revealed new details about government wrongdoing.
According to evidence cited by Bromwich, the Reagan administration knew almost from the outset of the contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the paramilitary operation. The administration also did next to nothing to expose or stop the crimes.
Bromwich's report revealed example after example of leads not followed, corroborated witnesses disparaged, official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged, and even the CIA facilitating the work of drug traffickers.
The report showed that the contras and their supporters ran several parallel drug-smuggling operations, not just the one at the center of Webb's series.
The report also found that the CIA shared little of its information about contra drugs with law-enforcement agencies and on three occasions disrupted cocaine-trafficking investigations that threatened the contras.
Though depicting a more widespread contra-drug operation than Webb had understood, the Justice report also provided some important corroboration about a Nicaraguan drug smuggler, Norwin Meneses, who was a key figure in Webb's series.
Bromwich cited U.S. government informants who supplied detailed information about Meneses's operation and his financial assistance to the contras.
For instance, Renato Pena, a money-and-drug courier for Meneses, said that in the early 1980s, the CIA allowed the contras to fly drugs into the United States, sell them and keep the proceeds.
Pena, who was the northern California representative for the CIA-backed FDN contra army, said the drug trafficking was forced on the contras by the inadequate levels of U.S. government assistance.
The Justice report also disclosed repeated examples of the CIA and U.S. embassies in Central America discouraging Drug Enforcement Administration investigations, including one into contra-cocaine shipments moving through the international airport in El Salvador.
Inspector General Bromwich said secrecy trumped all. "We have no doubt that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy were not anxious for the DEA to pursue its investigation at the airport," he wrote.
Despite the remarkable admissions in the body of these reports, the big newspapers showed no inclination to read beyond the press releases and executive summaries.
Cocaine Crimes & Monica
By fall 1998, Official Washington was obsessed with the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, which made it easier to ignore even more stunning contra-cocaine disclosures in the CIA's Volume Two.
In Volume Two, published Oct. 8, 1998, CIA Inspector General Hitz identified more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations throughout the 1980s.
According to Volume Two, the CIA knew the criminal nature of its contra clients from the start of the war against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.
The earliest contra force, called ADREN or the 15th of September Legion, had chosen "to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre," according to a June 1981 draft CIA field report.
ADREN also employed terrorist methods, including the bombing of Nicaraguan civilian planes and hijackings, to disrupt the Sandinista government, the CIA knew. Cocaine smuggling was also in the picture.
According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, two ADREN members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981, the CIA cable reported.
ADREN's leaders included Enrique Bermudez and other early contras who would later direct the major contra army, the CIA-organized FDN. Throughout the war, Bermudez remained the top contra military commander.
The CIA later corroborated the allegations about ADREN's cocaine trafficking, but insisted that Bermudez had opposed the drug shipments to the United States which went ahead nonetheless.
The truth about Bermudez's supposed objections to drug trafficking, however, was less clear. According to Volume One, Bermudez enlisted Norwin Meneses, a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine smuggler, to raise money and buy supplies for the contras.
Volume One had quoted a Meneses associate, another Nicaraguan trafficker named Danilo Blandon, who told Hitz's investigators that he and Meneses flew to Honduras to meet with Bermudez in 1982.
At the time, Meneses's criminal activities were well known in the Nicaraguan exile community. But the FDN commander told the cocaine smugglers that "the ends justify the means" in raising money for the contras.
After the Bermudez meeting, contra soldiers helped Meneses and Blandon get past Honduran police who briefly arrested them on drug-trafficking suspicions. After their release, Blandon and Meneses traveled on to Bolivia to complete a cocaine transaction.
There were other indications of Bermudez's drug-smuggling tolerance. In February 1988, another Nicaraguan exile linked to the drug trade accused Bermudez of narcotics trafficking, according to Hitz's report.
After the contra war ended, Bermudez returned to Managua, where he was shot to death on Feb. 16, 1991. The murder has never been solved.
CIA Drug Asset
Along the Southern Front, in Costa Rica, the drug evidence centered on the forces of Eden Pastora, another leading contra commander. But Hitz discovered that the U.S. government may have contributed to the problem.
Hitz revealed that the CIA put an admitted drug operative - known by his CIA pseudonym "Ivan Gomez" - in a supervisory position over Pastora. Hitz reported that the CIA discovered Gomez's drug history in 1987 when Gomez failed a security review on drug-trafficking questions.
In internal CIA interviews, Gomez admitted that in March or April 1982, he helped family members who were engaged in drug trafficking and money laundering. In one case, Gomez said he assisted his brother and brother-in-law in transporting cash from New York City to Miami. He admitted that he "knew this act was illegal."
Later, Gomez expanded on his admission, describing how his family members had fallen $2 million into debt and had gone to Miami to run a money-laundering center for drug traffickers. Gomez said "his brother had many visitors whom [Gomez] assumed to be in the drug trafficking business."
Gomez's brother was arrested on drug charges in June 1982. Three months later, in September 1982, Gomez started his CIA assignment in Costa Rica. Years later, convicted drug trafficker Carlos Cabezas charged that in the early 1980s, Ivan Gomez was the CIA agent in Costa Rica who was overseeing drug-money donations to the contras.
Gomez "was to make sure the money was given to the right people [the contras] and nobody was taking ... profit they weren't supposed to," Cabezas stated publicly.
But the CIA sought to discredit Cabezas at the time because he had trouble identifying Gomez's picture and put Gomez at one meeting in early 1982 before Gomez started his CIA assignment.
While the CIA was able to fend off Cabezas's allegations by pointing to these discrepancies, Hitz's report revealed that the CIA was nevertheless aware of Gomez's direct role in drug-money laundering, a fact the agency hid from Sen. Kerry's investigation in 1987.
The Bolivian Connection
There also was more about Gomez. In November 1985, the FBI learned from an informant that Gomez's two brothers had been large-scale cocaine importers, with one brother arranging shipments from Bolivia's infamous drug kingpin Roberto Suarez.
Suarez already was known as a financier of right-wing causes. In 1980, with the support of Argentine's hard-line anti-communist military regime, Suarez bankrolled a coup in Bolivia that ousted the elected left-of-center government.
The violent putsch became known as the Cocaine Coup because it made Bolivia the region's first narco-state. Bolivia's government-protected cocaine shipments helped transform the Medellin cartel from a struggling local operation into a giant corporate-style business for delivering cocaine to the U.S. market.
Some of those profits allegedly found their way into contra coffers. Flush with cash in the early 1980s, Suarez invested more than $30 million in various right-wing paramilitary operations, including the contra forces in Central America, according to U.S. Senate testimony by an Argentine intelligence officer, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse.
In 1987, Sanchez-Reisse said the Suarez drug money was laundered through front companies in Miami before going to Central America. There, other Argentine intelligence officers - veterans of the Bolivian coup - trained the contras.
CIA Inspector General Hitz added another piece to the mystery of the Bolivian-contra connection. One contra fund-raiser, Jose Orlando Bolanos, boasted that the Argentine government was supporting his anti-Sandinista activities, according to a May 1982 cable to CIA headquarters.
Bolanos made the statement during a meeting with undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Florida. He even offered to introduce them to his Bolivian cocaine supplier.
Despite all this suspicious drug activity around Ivan Gomez and the contras, the CIA insisted that it did not unmask Gomez until 1987, when he failed a security check and confessed his role in his family's drug business.
The CIA official who interviewed Gomez concluded that "Gomez directly participated in illegal drug transactions, concealed participation in illegal drug transactions, and concealed information about involvement in illegal drug activity," Hitz wrote.
But senior CIA officials still protected Gomez. They refused to refer the Gomez case to the Justice Department, citing the 1982 DOJ-CIA agreement that spared the CIA from a legal obligation to report narcotics crimes by non-employees.
Instead, the CIA eased Gomez, an independent contractor, out of the agency in February 1988, without alerting law enforcement or the congressional oversight committees.
When questioned about the case nearly a decade later, one senior CIA official who had supported the gentle treatment of Gomez had second thoughts. "It is a striking commentary on me and everyone that this guy's involvement in narcotics didn't weigh more heavily on me or the system," the official acknowledged.
The White House Trail
A Medellin drug connection arose in another section of Hitz's report, when he revealed evidence suggesting that some contra trafficking may have been sanctioned by Reagan's National Security Council.
The protagonist for this part of the contra-cocaine mystery was Moises Nunez, a Cuban-American who worked for North's NSC operation and for two drug-connected seafood importers, Ocean Hunter in Miami and Frigorificos de Puntarenas in Costa Rica.
Frigorificos de Puntarenas was created in the early 1980s as a cover for drug-money laundering, according to sworn testimony by two of the firm's principals - Carlos Soto and Medellin cartel accountant Ramon Milian Rodriguez. Drug allegations were swirling around Moises Nunez by the mid-1980s. At the AP, his operation was one of the targets of our investigation.
Finally reacting to these suspicions, the CIA questioned Nunez on March 25, 1987, about his alleged cocaine trafficking. He responded by pointing the finger at his NSC superiors.
"Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council," Hitz reported.
"Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC. Nunez refused to identify the NSC officials with whom he had been involved."
After this first round of questioning, CIA headquarters authorized an additional session, but then senior CIA officials reversed the decision. There would be no further efforts at "debriefing Nunez."
Hitz noted that "the cable [from headquarters] offered no explanation for the decision" to stop the Nunez interrogation.
But the CIA's Central American task force chief Alan Fiers said the Nunez-NSC drug lead was not pursued "because of the NSC connection and the possibility that this could be somehow connected to the Private Benefactor program [the contra money handled by North]. A decision was made not to pursue this matter."
Joseph Fernandez, who had been the CIA's station chief in Costa Rica, later confirmed to congressional Iran-Contra investigators that Nunez "was involved in a very sensitive operation" for North's "Enterprise." The exact nature of that NSC-authorized activity has never been divulged.
At the time of the Nunez-NSC drug admissions and his truncated interrogation, the CIA's acting director was Robert M. Gates, who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Dec. 6, 2006, to be President George W. Bush's new Secretary of Defense.
Miami Vice
The CIA also worked directly with other drug-connected Cuban-Americans on the contra project, Hitz found.
One of Nunez's Cuban-American associates, Felipe Vidal, had a criminal record as a narcotics trafficker in the 1970s. But the CIA still hired him to serve as a logistics coordinator for the contras, Hitz reported.
The CIA also learned that Vidal's drug connections were not only in the past.
A December 1984 cable to CIA headquarters revealed Vidal's ties to Rene Corvo, another Cuban-American suspected of drug trafficking. Corvo was working with anti-communist Cuban, Frank Castro, who was viewed as a Medellin cartel representative within the contra movement.
There were other narcotics links to Vidal. In January 1986, the DEA in Miami seized 414 pounds of cocaine concealed in a shipment of yucca that was going from a contra operative in Costa Rica to Ocean Hunter, the company where Vidal worked.
Despite the evidence, Vidal remained a CIA employee as he collaborated with Frank Castro's assistant, Rene Corvo, in raising money for the contras, according to a CIA memo in June 1986.
By fall 1986, Sen. Kerry had heard enough rumors about Vidal to demand information about him as part of a congressional inquiry into contra drugs. But the CIA withheld the derogatory information. On Oct. 15, 1986, Kerry received a briefing from Alan Fiers, who didn't mention Vidal's drug arrests and conviction in the 1970s.
But Vidal was not yet in the clear. In 1987, the U.S. attorney in Miami began investigating Vidal, Ocean Hunter and other contra-connected entities.
This prosecutorial attention worried the CIA. The CIA's Latin American division felt it was time for a security review of Vidal. But on Aug. 5, 1987, the CIA's security office blocked the review for fear that the Vidal drug information "could be exposed during any future litigation."
As expected, the U.S. Attorney did request documents about "contra-related activities" by Vidal, Ocean Hunter and 16 other entities. The CIA advised the prosecutor that "no information had been found regarding Ocean Hunter," a statement that was clearly false.
The CIA continued Vidal's employment as an adviser to the contra movement until 1990, virtually the end of the contra war.
Honduras Trafficking
Hitz revealed that drugs also tainted the highest levels of the Honduran-based FDN, the largest contra army.
Hitz found that Juan Rivas, a contra commander who rose to be chief of staff, admitted that he had been a cocaine trafficker in Colombia before the war. The CIA asked Rivas, known as El Quiche, about his background after the DEA began suspecting that Rivas might be an escaped convict from a Colombian prison.
In interviews with CIA officers, Rivas acknowledged that he had been arrested and convicted of packaging and transporting cocaine for the drug trade in Barranquilla, Colombia. After several months in prison, Rivas said, he escaped and moved to Central America where he joined the contras.
Defending Rivas, CIA officials insisted that there was no evidence that Rivas engaged in trafficking while with the contras. But one CIA cable noted that he lived an expensive lifestyle, even keeping a $100,000 thoroughbred horse at the contra camp.
Contra military commander Bermudez later attributed Rivas's wealth to his ex-girlfriend's rich family. But a CIA cable in March 1989 added that "some in the FDN may have suspected at the time that the father-in-law was engaged in drug trafficking."
Still, the CIA moved quickly to protect Rivas from exposure and possible extradition to Colombia. In February 1989, CIA headquarters asked that DEA take no action "in view of the serious political damage to the U.S. Government that could occur should the information about Rivas become public."
Rivas was eased out of the contra leadership with an explanation of poor health. With U.S. government help, he was allowed to resettle in Miami. Colombia was not informed about his fugitive status.
Drug Flights
Another senior FDN official implicated in the drug trade was its chief spokesman in Honduras, Arnoldo Jose "Frank" Arana.
The drug allegations against Arana dated back to 1983 when a federal narcotics task force put him under criminal investigation because of plans "to smuggle 100 kilograms of cocaine into the United States from South America."
On Jan. 23, 1986, the FBI reported that Arana and his brothers were involved in a drug-smuggling enterprise, although Arana was not charged.
Arana sought to clear up another set of drug suspicions in 1989 by visiting the DEA in Honduras with a business associate, Jose Perez. Arana's association with Perez, however, only raised new alarms.
If "Arana is mixed up with the Perez brothers, he is probably dirty," the DEA responded.
Through their ownership of an air services company called SETCO, the Perez brothers were associated with Juan Matta Ballesteros, a major cocaine kingpin connected to the murder of a DEA agent, according to reports by the DEA and U.S. Customs.
Hitz reported that someone at the CIA scribbled a note on the DEA cable about Arana stating: "Arnold Arana ... still active and working, we [CIA] may have a problem."
Despite its drug ties to Matta Ballesteros, SETCO emerged as the principal company for ferrying supplies to the contras in Honduras.
During congressional Iran-Contra hearings, FDN political leader Adolfo Calero testified that SETCO was paid from bank accounts controlled by Oliver North. SETCO also received $185,924 from the State Department for ferrying supplies to the contras in 1986.
Hitz found other air transport companies used by the contras implicated in the cocaine trade. Even FDN leaders suspected that they were shipping supplies to Central America aboard planes that might be returning with drugs.
Mario Calero, Adolfo Calero's brother and the chief of contra logistics, grew so uneasy about one air-freight company that he notified U.S. law enforcement that the FDN only chartered the planes for the flights south, not the return flights north.
Hitz found that some drug pilots simply rotated from one sector of the contra operation to another. Donaldo Frixone, who had a drug record in the Dominican Republic, was hired by the CIA to fly contra missions from 1983-85.
In September 1986, however, Frixone was implicated in smuggling 19,000 pounds of marijuana into the United States. In late 1986 or early 1987, he went to work for Vortex, another U.S.-paid contra supply company linked to the drug trade.
Fig Leaf
By the time that Hitz's Volume Two was published in fall 1998, the CIA's defense against Webb's series had shrunk to a fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking.
But Hitz made clear that the contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of contra crimes from the Justice Department, the Congress and even the CIA's own analytical division.
Besides tracing the evidence of contra-drug trafficking through the decade-long contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the contra-drug problem but didn't want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.
According to Hitz, the CIA had "one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. … [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the contra program."
One CIA field officer explained, "The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war."
Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the contras hid evidence of contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA's analysts.
Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that "only a handful of contras might have been involved in drug trafficking." That false assessment was passed on to Congress and the major news organizations - serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his series in 1996.
Nevertheless, although Hitz's report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it passed almost unnoticed by the big newspapers. [For more details, see Robert Parry's Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth']
On Oct. 10, 1998, two days after Hitz's report was posted at the CIA's Internet site, the New York Times published a brief article that continued to deride Webb but acknowledged the contra-drug problem may have been worse than earlier understood.
Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times never published a story on the release of the CIA's Volume Two.
To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-cocaine story has been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, some of them are now top executives at their news organizations. On the other hand, Gary Webb's career never recovered.
Unable to find decent-paying work in a profession where his past awards included a Pulitzer Prize, Webb grew despondent. His marriage broke up. By December 2004, he found himself forced to move out of his rented house near Sacramento.
Instead, Webb decided to end his life.
One Last Chance
Webb's suicide offered the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times one more opportunity to set matters right, to revisit the CIA's admissions in 1998 and to exact some accountability on the Reagan-era officials implicated in protecting the contra crimes.
But all that followed Gary Webb's death was more trashing of Gary Webb. The Los Angeles Times ran a graceless obituary that made no mention of the admissions in the CIA's Volume Two and treated Webb like a low-life criminal, rather than a journalist who took on a tough story and paid a high price.
The Times obituary was republished in other newspapers, including the Washington Post. No one reading this obit would understand the profound debt that American history owed to Gary Webb, who deserved the lion's share of the credit for forcing the CIA to make its extraordinary admissions.
Yet, the big media's consistent mishandling of the contra-cocaine scandal in the 1980s and 1990s carried another warning that the nation missed: that the U.S. press corps was no longer capable of reporting complex crimes of state.
That unaddressed danger returned with disastrous results in late 2002 and early 2003 when George W. Bush sold false stories about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction while the major newspapers acted as cheerleaders and accomplices.
At the time of Webb's death on Dec. 9, 2004, the full scope of the Iraq disaster was still not evident, nor was the major press corps ready to acknowledge that its cowardice in the 1980s and its fecklessness in the 1990s were the direct antecedents to its complicity in the illegal invasion of Iraq.
Gary Webb had been a kind of canary in the mine shaft. His career destruction in the 1990s and his desperate act of suicide in 2004 were warnings about grave dangers that, if left ignored, would wreak even worse havoc on the United States and the world.
But - on this second anniversary of Webb's death - it should be remembered that his great gift to American history was that he, along with angry African-American citizens, forced the government to admit some of the worst crimes ever condoned by any White House: the protection of drug smuggling into the United States as part of a covert war against a country, Nicaragua, that represented no real threat to Americans.
It is way past time for that reality - and that gift - to be acknowledged.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & "Project Truth."
Wrap...
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Listen up, BushCo...and NOW!!!
From McClatchy Newspapers via truthout.org :
Leave Iraq Now; Don't Wait Until 2008 Election Day
By Joseph L. Galloway
McClatchy Newspapers
Thursday 07 December 2006
After nearly four years of living in what can be charitably described as a state of denial, everyone in Washington, from President Bush to the Baker Commission to incoming defense secretary Robert Gates, to outgoing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to the study group assembled by Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has finally admitted that pretty much nothing is going right in Iraq.
Duh.
Our president, who froze the whole process of planning and fighting a war by declaring that he was "staying the course" even when the course was obviously wrong, finally abandoned those words, if not his dogged pursuit of "victory" in a place which has denied victory to a string of foreign invaders dating back to Alexander the Great.
The Baker Commission issued its report - which primarily recommended that we begin talking with Iraq's friends and enemies next door and Iraqi-izing the war by handing things over to Iraqi forces before we begin pulling out in time for the 2008 presidential election - on a day when 10 American troops were killed on the roads of Iraq by improvised explosive devices.
All things considered, it was too little, too late and too long a wait if you have a son or daughter serving a third or fourth combat tour in Iraq - something that few, if any, of the above referenced politicians and wise men have contributed to the war effort.
Gates, whose nomination to replace Rumsfeld in the Pentagon's top job is being rushed through the Senate at the speed of light, told the Senate Armed Forces Committee we're neither winning nor losing in Iraq and could offer them no path to victory.
The senators, clearly enamored of Bob Gates because he isn't Don Rumsfeld, had no hard questions for the nominee, and in a rare show of bipartisan unanimity voted 24-0 to send his nomination to the floor for swift approval.
The senators and much of official Washington clearly want Gates in and Rumsfeld on a Greyhound bus bound for oblivion as soon as humanly possible. The disgruntled Rumsfeld leaked his own Iraq report, dated two days prior to his firing, admitting that things weren't nearly as rosy as he'd been pretending they were.
While those who have nothing more at risk than their personal pride and the arrogance of power published reports and made statements devoid of any real answers, young American soldiers and Marines were being wounded and killed at an appalling rate on the dangerous streets and roads of Iraq.
This week, the American military death toll in Iraq crossed the 2,900 mark, with well over 20,000 wounded.
All the politicians paid the customary lip service in praising the troops and commending them for the terrible sacrifices they must continue to endure while the wrangling and dithering over a futile war goes on with no end in sight.
How can they look at themselves in the mirror every morning?
Some even suggest sending additional U.S. forces to Iraq - 20,000 to 30,000 more to try to clean up Baghdad, or as Sen. John McCain suggests, 100,000 more to achieve a victory of some kind.
What are they thinking?
The time to use overwhelming force, according to the Caspar Weinberger-Colin Powell doctrine, is when you launch an invasion. Ratcheting up later is just so 1965, and so hopeless a gesture when the situation has already gone to hell.
Let's get a few more things straight right now.
There's no victory waiting for President Bush in Iraq, and nothing that his father's friends say or do can save him from an ignominious end to his presidency in two years and two months, or from the judgment of history.
There will be no convenient and successful negotiation of a "decent interval" with our enemies Iran and Syria to cover our withdrawal from a war that we should never have started.
There can be no successful Vietnamization in Iraq - standing up more and better Iraqi army and police units and handing control over to them - when all we're doing is arming and training more recruits for the civil war that clogs the streets of Baghdad with the corpses of the victims of a Sunni-Shia bloodbath.
What we need to do is what none of the commissions and their reports dared to suggest: Begin withdrawing American forces from Iraq right now. Not in 2008. Not after the American death toll has crossed 5,000. Not just in time for a presidential election.
If you worry about the future of Iraq, don't. It will remain what it's always been: a violent, angry land of warring tribes only occasionally beaten and bludgeoned into submission by a homegrown despot like Saddam Hussein.
If you worry about added turmoil and instability in the Middle East, pull some of those departing American forces back to Kuwait and leave them there on standby. Then redirect thought, energy and effort into salvaging Afghanistan, finding Osama bin Laden, saving Lebanon, negotiating peace between Israel and its enemies, rebuilding the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and, oh yes, ending the uncivil war between Republicans and Democrats.
There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there's only one way to leave Iraq: Load our people up on their trucks and tank transporters and Bradleys and Humvees and head for the border. Now.
--------
Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young. Readers may write to him at: P.O. Box 399, Bayside, Texas 78340; e-mail: jlgalloway2@cs.com.
Wrap...
Leave Iraq Now; Don't Wait Until 2008 Election Day
By Joseph L. Galloway
McClatchy Newspapers
Thursday 07 December 2006
After nearly four years of living in what can be charitably described as a state of denial, everyone in Washington, from President Bush to the Baker Commission to incoming defense secretary Robert Gates, to outgoing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to the study group assembled by Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has finally admitted that pretty much nothing is going right in Iraq.
Duh.
Our president, who froze the whole process of planning and fighting a war by declaring that he was "staying the course" even when the course was obviously wrong, finally abandoned those words, if not his dogged pursuit of "victory" in a place which has denied victory to a string of foreign invaders dating back to Alexander the Great.
The Baker Commission issued its report - which primarily recommended that we begin talking with Iraq's friends and enemies next door and Iraqi-izing the war by handing things over to Iraqi forces before we begin pulling out in time for the 2008 presidential election - on a day when 10 American troops were killed on the roads of Iraq by improvised explosive devices.
All things considered, it was too little, too late and too long a wait if you have a son or daughter serving a third or fourth combat tour in Iraq - something that few, if any, of the above referenced politicians and wise men have contributed to the war effort.
Gates, whose nomination to replace Rumsfeld in the Pentagon's top job is being rushed through the Senate at the speed of light, told the Senate Armed Forces Committee we're neither winning nor losing in Iraq and could offer them no path to victory.
The senators, clearly enamored of Bob Gates because he isn't Don Rumsfeld, had no hard questions for the nominee, and in a rare show of bipartisan unanimity voted 24-0 to send his nomination to the floor for swift approval.
The senators and much of official Washington clearly want Gates in and Rumsfeld on a Greyhound bus bound for oblivion as soon as humanly possible. The disgruntled Rumsfeld leaked his own Iraq report, dated two days prior to his firing, admitting that things weren't nearly as rosy as he'd been pretending they were.
While those who have nothing more at risk than their personal pride and the arrogance of power published reports and made statements devoid of any real answers, young American soldiers and Marines were being wounded and killed at an appalling rate on the dangerous streets and roads of Iraq.
This week, the American military death toll in Iraq crossed the 2,900 mark, with well over 20,000 wounded.
All the politicians paid the customary lip service in praising the troops and commending them for the terrible sacrifices they must continue to endure while the wrangling and dithering over a futile war goes on with no end in sight.
How can they look at themselves in the mirror every morning?
Some even suggest sending additional U.S. forces to Iraq - 20,000 to 30,000 more to try to clean up Baghdad, or as Sen. John McCain suggests, 100,000 more to achieve a victory of some kind.
What are they thinking?
The time to use overwhelming force, according to the Caspar Weinberger-Colin Powell doctrine, is when you launch an invasion. Ratcheting up later is just so 1965, and so hopeless a gesture when the situation has already gone to hell.
Let's get a few more things straight right now.
There's no victory waiting for President Bush in Iraq, and nothing that his father's friends say or do can save him from an ignominious end to his presidency in two years and two months, or from the judgment of history.
There will be no convenient and successful negotiation of a "decent interval" with our enemies Iran and Syria to cover our withdrawal from a war that we should never have started.
There can be no successful Vietnamization in Iraq - standing up more and better Iraqi army and police units and handing control over to them - when all we're doing is arming and training more recruits for the civil war that clogs the streets of Baghdad with the corpses of the victims of a Sunni-Shia bloodbath.
What we need to do is what none of the commissions and their reports dared to suggest: Begin withdrawing American forces from Iraq right now. Not in 2008. Not after the American death toll has crossed 5,000. Not just in time for a presidential election.
If you worry about the future of Iraq, don't. It will remain what it's always been: a violent, angry land of warring tribes only occasionally beaten and bludgeoned into submission by a homegrown despot like Saddam Hussein.
If you worry about added turmoil and instability in the Middle East, pull some of those departing American forces back to Kuwait and leave them there on standby. Then redirect thought, energy and effort into salvaging Afghanistan, finding Osama bin Laden, saving Lebanon, negotiating peace between Israel and its enemies, rebuilding the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and, oh yes, ending the uncivil war between Republicans and Democrats.
There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there's only one way to leave Iraq: Load our people up on their trucks and tank transporters and Bradleys and Humvees and head for the border. Now.
--------
Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young. Readers may write to him at: P.O. Box 399, Bayside, Texas 78340; e-mail: jlgalloway2@cs.com.
Wrap...
Friday, December 08, 2006
Microloans and the Nobel Prize...well earned!
From International Herald Tribune :
Giving credit where it's due
Muhammad Yunus
Published: December 8, 2006
DHAKA, Bangladesh: When I stepped out of my classroom at Chittagong University 30 years ago and into Jobra, the village next to my campus, I had only one goal in mind: to see if I could be of service to a few starving human beings.
Little did I know that those walks into Jobra village would lead me to walk across a stage in Oslo, Norway this Sunday afternoon to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. What I learned in that village changed my life and the lives of hundreds of millions of others around the world.
In 1976, I met Sufia Khatum, who made bamboo stools. This hardworking woman, who could neither read nor write, became my teacher. She didn't have the money to buy the bamboo for her stools and so she borrowed from a local moneylender on the condition that she sell the finished stools back to him at a price he set.
The moneylender's price barely covered the cost of the bamboo, leaving her with only a two- penny return on her work. This forced her to continue borrowing from the moneylender and placed her in a condition of slave labor. My students found 41 other people like Sufia who needed a grand total of $27 to free themselves from this debt trap.
She and the other 41 microentrepreneurs were the first borrowers of what would become Grameen Bank, the institution with which I share the Nobel Peace Prize.
They, and our nearly 7 million current borrowers, who are the owners of the bank, will be with me on that stage receiving the prize. Ninety-six percent of Grameen's clients are women, affecting a total of 35 million family members. We have lent nearly $6 billion over the last 30 years in loans that average $130 each.
The $27 I lent to 42 people 30 years ago was my first lesson in a new kind of banking. The first rules to be broken were the rules of banking. We made small loans to women without collateral, not large loans to men with great holdings. We required no paperwork of our illiterate borrowers, only that they learn to sign their names, and we did our banking in the villages.
Our work is built on the realization that our society has not only marginalized the poor, but also marginalized women. That is why our housing loans are in the name of the woman and require that the title to the land on which the house will be built is also in the name of the woman. We have made nearly 600,000 housing loans on these conditions.
One of our sister organizations, GrameenPhone, has 10 million cellphone subscribers in Bangladesh. There is no revolution in getting cellphones to better-off people in poor countries. Our revolution, however, is placing cellphones in the hands of 300,000 village phone ladies who use the phone as a profitable business.
The Nobel Peace Prize has established the link between poverty and peace, and underscored that poverty is a threat to peace. Microcredit plays a very important role in reducing poverty.
From humble beginnings 30 years ago with a loan of $27 to 42 people in Jobra, this work has now spread rapidly worldwide, empowered by the Microcredit Summit, a global campaign committed to ensuring 100 million microcredit families rise above the $1 a day threshold by the end of 2015, thus lifting half a billion people out of extreme poverty.
Poverty does not belong in a civilized society. It belongs in museums. We are committed to building a world in which our children and grandchildren will have to go to museums to see what poverty looked like.
Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006.
Wrap...
Giving credit where it's due
Muhammad Yunus
Published: December 8, 2006
DHAKA, Bangladesh: When I stepped out of my classroom at Chittagong University 30 years ago and into Jobra, the village next to my campus, I had only one goal in mind: to see if I could be of service to a few starving human beings.
Little did I know that those walks into Jobra village would lead me to walk across a stage in Oslo, Norway this Sunday afternoon to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. What I learned in that village changed my life and the lives of hundreds of millions of others around the world.
In 1976, I met Sufia Khatum, who made bamboo stools. This hardworking woman, who could neither read nor write, became my teacher. She didn't have the money to buy the bamboo for her stools and so she borrowed from a local moneylender on the condition that she sell the finished stools back to him at a price he set.
The moneylender's price barely covered the cost of the bamboo, leaving her with only a two- penny return on her work. This forced her to continue borrowing from the moneylender and placed her in a condition of slave labor. My students found 41 other people like Sufia who needed a grand total of $27 to free themselves from this debt trap.
She and the other 41 microentrepreneurs were the first borrowers of what would become Grameen Bank, the institution with which I share the Nobel Peace Prize.
They, and our nearly 7 million current borrowers, who are the owners of the bank, will be with me on that stage receiving the prize. Ninety-six percent of Grameen's clients are women, affecting a total of 35 million family members. We have lent nearly $6 billion over the last 30 years in loans that average $130 each.
The $27 I lent to 42 people 30 years ago was my first lesson in a new kind of banking. The first rules to be broken were the rules of banking. We made small loans to women without collateral, not large loans to men with great holdings. We required no paperwork of our illiterate borrowers, only that they learn to sign their names, and we did our banking in the villages.
Our work is built on the realization that our society has not only marginalized the poor, but also marginalized women. That is why our housing loans are in the name of the woman and require that the title to the land on which the house will be built is also in the name of the woman. We have made nearly 600,000 housing loans on these conditions.
One of our sister organizations, GrameenPhone, has 10 million cellphone subscribers in Bangladesh. There is no revolution in getting cellphones to better-off people in poor countries. Our revolution, however, is placing cellphones in the hands of 300,000 village phone ladies who use the phone as a profitable business.
The Nobel Peace Prize has established the link between poverty and peace, and underscored that poverty is a threat to peace. Microcredit plays a very important role in reducing poverty.
From humble beginnings 30 years ago with a loan of $27 to 42 people in Jobra, this work has now spread rapidly worldwide, empowered by the Microcredit Summit, a global campaign committed to ensuring 100 million microcredit families rise above the $1 a day threshold by the end of 2015, thus lifting half a billion people out of extreme poverty.
Poverty does not belong in a civilized society. It belongs in museums. We are committed to building a world in which our children and grandchildren will have to go to museums to see what poverty looked like.
Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006.
Wrap...
McKinney's last Bill...
From truthout.org :
BREAKING McKinney Introduces Bill to Impeach Bush
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120806Z.shtml
In what was likely her final legislative act in Congress, outgoing Georgia representative Cynthia McKinney announced a bill Friday to impeach President Bush.
Wrap...
BREAKING McKinney Introduces Bill to Impeach Bush
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120806Z.shtml
In what was likely her final legislative act in Congress, outgoing Georgia representative Cynthia McKinney announced a bill Friday to impeach President Bush.
Wrap...
Republican Majority at work...more for the rich...
From American Progress:
CONGRESS -- TAX BILL STUFFED WITH TAX BREAKS FOR THE WEALTHY:
In the coming days, Congress will likely pass a "tax extenders" bill containing "provisions to renew popular expired tax breaks," including the "research credit, a deduction for tuition and other college expenses, and a deduction for teachers who spend money out of their own pocket for classroom supplies." Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) called the tax extenders "no-brainers" that "give continued tax relief to families paying for college, teachers buying classroom supplies, and producers of clean energy from sources such as wind."
But instead of simply passing the popular tax extenders, Congress has decided to use the bill for partisan purposes. The House and Senate have attached drilling legislation to the bill, which would open 8.3 million acres of federal land in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling.
Additionally, in closed-door final negotiations of the tax extenders package, "House and Senate negotiators added a tax break benefiting high-income taxpayers that was never passed by either the full House or Senate." The measure would increase the amount that individuals could contribute to Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), "thereby allowing those who could make these additional contributions to shelter even more of their income from taxation." HSAs are disproportionately used by high-income individuals.
The Government Accountability Office found "that the average income of HSA users was $133,000 in 2004, compared to $51,000 for all non-elderly tax filers." American Progress has more facts on HSAs here and here.
Wrap...
CONGRESS -- TAX BILL STUFFED WITH TAX BREAKS FOR THE WEALTHY:
In the coming days, Congress will likely pass a "tax extenders" bill containing "provisions to renew popular expired tax breaks," including the "research credit, a deduction for tuition and other college expenses, and a deduction for teachers who spend money out of their own pocket for classroom supplies." Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) called the tax extenders "no-brainers" that "give continued tax relief to families paying for college, teachers buying classroom supplies, and producers of clean energy from sources such as wind."
But instead of simply passing the popular tax extenders, Congress has decided to use the bill for partisan purposes. The House and Senate have attached drilling legislation to the bill, which would open 8.3 million acres of federal land in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling.
Additionally, in closed-door final negotiations of the tax extenders package, "House and Senate negotiators added a tax break benefiting high-income taxpayers that was never passed by either the full House or Senate." The measure would increase the amount that individuals could contribute to Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), "thereby allowing those who could make these additional contributions to shelter even more of their income from taxation." HSAs are disproportionately used by high-income individuals.
The Government Accountability Office found "that the average income of HSA users was $133,000 in 2004, compared to $51,000 for all non-elderly tax filers." American Progress has more facts on HSAs here and here.
Wrap...
Impeach Bush/Cheney?
From Tom Paine:
Impeachment: Morally Right vs. Politically Wrong
Jennifer Van Bergen David Corn
December 08, 2006
Why Impeachment Is Crucial
Jennifer Van Bergen : "The choice is not between impeachment and Iraq, or impeachment and ethics, or impeachment and the budget. Impeachment proceedings are not the beginning but the end result of a healing process for the nation that needs to begin now. Impeachment begins with investigations."
Impeachment At Our Peril
David Corn : "The matter of impeachment, like most issues in the real world, cannot be considered in a vacuum. The key question is not whether there is a case, but whether it should be prosecuted. The Democrats would do so at their peril—and at risk to their agenda, which includes stopping the war in Iraq."
Wrap...
Impeachment: Morally Right vs. Politically Wrong
Jennifer Van Bergen David Corn
December 08, 2006
Why Impeachment Is Crucial
Jennifer Van Bergen : "The choice is not between impeachment and Iraq, or impeachment and ethics, or impeachment and the budget. Impeachment proceedings are not the beginning but the end result of a healing process for the nation that needs to begin now. Impeachment begins with investigations."
Impeachment At Our Peril
David Corn : "The matter of impeachment, like most issues in the real world, cannot be considered in a vacuum. The key question is not whether there is a case, but whether it should be prosecuted. The Democrats would do so at their peril—and at risk to their agenda, which includes stopping the war in Iraq."
Wrap...
BushCo: I can torture...No questions allowed..
From TomDispatch :
Impunity and Immunity
The Bush Administration Enters the Confessional
By Karen Greenberg
Confession, the time-honored, soul-soothing last resort for those caught in error, may not survive the Bush administration. It has, after all, long made a mockery of such revelations by manufacturing an entire lexicon of coercive techniques to elicit often non-existent "truths" that would justify its detention policies. And yet, without being coerced in any way, administration officials have been confessing continually these past years -- in documents that may someday play a part in their own confrontation with justice.
The Bush administration trail of confessions can be found in the most unlikely of places -- the very memos and policy statements in which its officials were redefining reality in their search for the perfect (and perfectly grim) extractive methods that would give them the detainee confessions they so eagerly sought. These were the very documents that led first to Gitmo, then to Abu Ghraib, and finally deep into the hidden universe of pain that was their global network of secret prisons.
Strangely enough, the administration confessional was open for business within weeks of the attacks of September 11th, 2001. It could be found wrapped in persistent assertions of immunity, assertions that none of their acts to come could ever be brought before the bar of justice or the oversight of anyone. The first of these documents was issued on September 25th, 2001. Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, writing for the Office of Legal Counsel, laid out the reasons for the President of the United States to assume broad executive powers in the war on terror. The last footnote of the memo declared, "In the exercise of his plenary power to use military force, the President's decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable."
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
Wrap...
Impunity and Immunity
The Bush Administration Enters the Confessional
By Karen Greenberg
Confession, the time-honored, soul-soothing last resort for those caught in error, may not survive the Bush administration. It has, after all, long made a mockery of such revelations by manufacturing an entire lexicon of coercive techniques to elicit often non-existent "truths" that would justify its detention policies. And yet, without being coerced in any way, administration officials have been confessing continually these past years -- in documents that may someday play a part in their own confrontation with justice.
The Bush administration trail of confessions can be found in the most unlikely of places -- the very memos and policy statements in which its officials were redefining reality in their search for the perfect (and perfectly grim) extractive methods that would give them the detainee confessions they so eagerly sought. These were the very documents that led first to Gitmo, then to Abu Ghraib, and finally deep into the hidden universe of pain that was their global network of secret prisons.
Strangely enough, the administration confessional was open for business within weeks of the attacks of September 11th, 2001. It could be found wrapped in persistent assertions of immunity, assertions that none of their acts to come could ever be brought before the bar of justice or the oversight of anyone. The first of these documents was issued on September 25th, 2001. Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, writing for the Office of Legal Counsel, laid out the reasons for the President of the United States to assume broad executive powers in the war on terror. The last footnote of the memo declared, "In the exercise of his plenary power to use military force, the President's decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable."
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
Wrap...
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Wes Clark on "Golden Rules of Behavior"..a reply...
Email from Leif, author and Grad School Professor:
The United States should practice "golden rules of behavior" when mitigating world conflicts because its international preeminence is dwindling, retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark told a crowded Salomon 101 Monday evening.
Reply:
Wesley Clark is right, but, perhaps, for the wrong reason(s). In a piece in The Week recently (December 1, 206, p. 3), there appeared the following sentence: "While the United States is the last remaining superpower, it will never get its way -- not in North Korea, and not in Iraq -- through unilateral bullying."
The United States, because of the role we have inherited in the world, that is, leader, cannot avoid "mitigating world conflicts." It is what we must do because of who we are -- "mitigate world conflicts." The last remaining superpower is like the person with the biggest club on the island; that is the one who has to handle (mitigate) the conflicts.
Sometimes the person with the biggest club is enlisted by conflicting others to mitigate. Sometimes the person with the biggest club mitigates because (s)he decides it is in the best interest of the whole to do so. In both cases, the person with the biggest club is resented. When (s)he is asked, the asker resents having to ask. When (s)he is not asked and mitigates anyway, the rest resent because their influence is not part of the mix. In both cases, finally, the mitigation is unilateral, if not in literal fact, certainly in perception, and perception is reality to the perceiver.
So the United States has inherited a role that virtually by definition leads to its demise. Clark didn't describe it correctly. The international preeminence is not "dwindling"; it is gone, and it has been gone for several decades. The press didn't lose in Vietnam, nor the hippies or anyone else on whom we want to blame the catastrophe. The United States lost because it is no longer possible to prevail in a conflict (mitigation) on another's soil. It has never been a slam; now, history tells us, it doesn't happen. It didn't happen in Vietnam, it isn't happening in the Middle East, it didn't happen for the vaunted Soviet military machine in Afghanistan, nor for France in IndoCina. It is hard to find an instance in the last five to six decades when a military mitigation has prevailed in any significant geopolitical problem.
And now it is worse than it has been before for the United States. We have big guns and good military personnel, but we are on the verge, if not there already, of being unable to pay our way out of debt. We are seriously weakened by the economic cancer within. We can't launch an effort to mitigate world conflicts, and the world knows it. The loonies are out there tweaking the United States knowing full well that the United States can't do a thing about it.
No, that isn't precisely correct. We can, in fact, incinerate most of the world. Now isn't that a happy thought?
Leif
Wrap...
The United States should practice "golden rules of behavior" when mitigating world conflicts because its international preeminence is dwindling, retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark told a crowded Salomon 101 Monday evening.
Reply:
Wesley Clark is right, but, perhaps, for the wrong reason(s). In a piece in The Week recently (December 1, 206, p. 3), there appeared the following sentence: "While the United States is the last remaining superpower, it will never get its way -- not in North Korea, and not in Iraq -- through unilateral bullying."
The United States, because of the role we have inherited in the world, that is, leader, cannot avoid "mitigating world conflicts." It is what we must do because of who we are -- "mitigate world conflicts." The last remaining superpower is like the person with the biggest club on the island; that is the one who has to handle (mitigate) the conflicts.
Sometimes the person with the biggest club is enlisted by conflicting others to mitigate. Sometimes the person with the biggest club mitigates because (s)he decides it is in the best interest of the whole to do so. In both cases, the person with the biggest club is resented. When (s)he is asked, the asker resents having to ask. When (s)he is not asked and mitigates anyway, the rest resent because their influence is not part of the mix. In both cases, finally, the mitigation is unilateral, if not in literal fact, certainly in perception, and perception is reality to the perceiver.
So the United States has inherited a role that virtually by definition leads to its demise. Clark didn't describe it correctly. The international preeminence is not "dwindling"; it is gone, and it has been gone for several decades. The press didn't lose in Vietnam, nor the hippies or anyone else on whom we want to blame the catastrophe. The United States lost because it is no longer possible to prevail in a conflict (mitigation) on another's soil. It has never been a slam; now, history tells us, it doesn't happen. It didn't happen in Vietnam, it isn't happening in the Middle East, it didn't happen for the vaunted Soviet military machine in Afghanistan, nor for France in IndoCina. It is hard to find an instance in the last five to six decades when a military mitigation has prevailed in any significant geopolitical problem.
And now it is worse than it has been before for the United States. We have big guns and good military personnel, but we are on the verge, if not there already, of being unable to pay our way out of debt. We are seriously weakened by the economic cancer within. We can't launch an effort to mitigate world conflicts, and the world knows it. The loonies are out there tweaking the United States knowing full well that the United States can't do a thing about it.
No, that isn't precisely correct. We can, in fact, incinerate most of the world. Now isn't that a happy thought?
Leif
Wrap...
Air Force and messes in space...
From Secrecy News:
AIR FORCE SPACE OPERATIONS, AND ORBITAL DEBRIS
U.S. Air Force doctrine on space operations is elaborated in a new publication. See "Space Operations," Air Force Doctrine DocumentAFDD 2-2, November 27, 2006:
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afdd2_2.pdf
The threat posed by debris in Earth orbit is the subject of a recent Master's Thesis, which provides a convenient introduction to the subject and a review of recent literature. See "OrbitalDebris: Technical and Legal Issues and Solutions" by Michael W.Taylor, Institute of Air and Space Law, McGill University, Montreal, August 2006:
http://www.fas.org/spp/eprint/taylor.pdf
Wrap...
AIR FORCE SPACE OPERATIONS, AND ORBITAL DEBRIS
U.S. Air Force doctrine on space operations is elaborated in a new publication. See "Space Operations," Air Force Doctrine DocumentAFDD 2-2, November 27, 2006:
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afdd2_2.pdf
The threat posed by debris in Earth orbit is the subject of a recent Master's Thesis, which provides a convenient introduction to the subject and a review of recent literature. See "OrbitalDebris: Technical and Legal Issues and Solutions" by Michael W.Taylor, Institute of Air and Space Law, McGill University, Montreal, August 2006:
http://www.fas.org/spp/eprint/taylor.pdf
Wrap...
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
3 Films and a selection of new books...
From Publishers Lunch Weekly:
FICTION/DEBUT:
NY Giant star and two-time Super Bowl champion Mark Bavaro's first novel, a fictionalized account of life in a scandal-ridden NFL through the eyes of a tough, idiosyncratic athlete at the top of his sport, pitched as a modern-day NORTH DALLAS FORTY, to Marc Resnick at St. Martin's, at auction, by Alex Glass at Trident Media Group.
MYSTERY/CRIME:
James Patterson's co-author on three books Peter de Jonge's IT TAKES A LOT OF HEART, the first in a series about a young NYPD detective, to Claire Wachtel at Harper, at auction, by Lane Zachary and Todd Shuster at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency (world).
GENERAL/OTHER:
S. Thomas Russell's THE BLIND IN HEAVEN, a naval adventure novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, to Dan Conaway at Putnam, at auction, by Howard Morhaim at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency (NA).Philip Roth's EXIT GHOST, his "ninth and last Zuckerman novel," called "a study of obsession, forgetfulness, resignation, and ungratifiable desire," in which Zuckerman returns to New York after eleven years of living as a reclusive writer in western Massachusetts, where encounters with a new generation of writers and an old, dying friend produce unsettling revelations, to Janet Silver at Houghton Mifflin, for publication in October 2007, 28 years after the publication of THE GHOST WRITER, by Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency.lori_glazer@hmco.com
Author of ARABIAN JAZZ and CRESCENT Diana Abu-Jaber's ORIGIN, in which a fingerprint expert's investigation of a series of crib deaths leads her back to the mystery of her own childhood, to Alane Mason at Norton, for publication in spring 2007, in a two-book deal, by Joy Harris at the Joy Harris Agency (world).
WHAT DO WE BELIEVE?, a new series introducing different beliefs from across the world in lively, accessible and intelligent short books, to George Gibson at Walker, in a nice deal, by Angela Rose at Granta Books.Rights previously sold to Uitgeverij Ad. Donker in Holland, Dom Quixote in Portugal, Plan B in Turkey, Vallardi in Italy, Orpheas in Greece, and Otava in Finland.
UK:
THE INSIDE RING author Mike Lawson's two new Joe DeMarco novels, pitched as David Baldacci meets Lee Child, to Wayne Brookes at Harper UK, by Abner Stein.
[NOTE: Very good writer]
NON-FICTION/BIOGRAPHY:
Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Schiff's CLEOPATRA, to Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown, for publication in 2010, by Eric Simonoff at Janklow & Nesbit (world).
BUSINESS/INVESTING/FINANCE:
Barbara Peterson's LIQUID ASSETS, the story of 100 multi-national companies and culture-defining ideas that started off as crude sketches on the back of a paper napkin, from Southwest Airlines to the Clinton Presidential Library, Compaq to "supply side economics," to Colin Dickerman at Bloomsbury, by Jay Mandel at William Morris Agency (NA).
HISTORY/POLITICS/CURRENT AFFAIRS:
Historian, crime professor and author of three books on George Washington Bruce Chadwick's untitled book about the lethal poisoning of Founding Father George Wythe, the sensationalistic murder trial that followed, and the world of Thomas Jefferson, to Stephen Power at Wiley, by Elizabeth Winick and Jonathan Lyons at McIntosh & Otis (NA).Wesleyan historian and two-time National Book Award nominee Richard Slotkin's untitled history of the Civil War Battle of the Crater, a significant engagement that featured the largest explosion yet detonated by man, and a lens to explore the racial and class tensions that the war both reflected and reinforced, to Will Murphy at Random House, by Carl Brandt at Brandt & Hochman (world).
MEMOIR:
Retired West Point philosophy professor Lieutenant Colonel Alan Bishop's OFF THE HARD PINE PEW: What One Philosophical Redneck Learned in the Army, combining the author's account of his self-described redneck childhood in Mississippi, his discovery of philosophy while in college on an Army scholarship, and its influence on his intellectual life, and a call for fundamental change in the way that young Army officers -- and American youth in general -- are educated, to Morgan Entrekin at Grove/Atlantic, by David Kuhn at Kuhn Projects (World).jmonahan@groveatlantic.com
FILM:
Eric Jager's THE LAST DUEL: A True Story of Crime, Scandal and Trial by Combat in Medieval France, to Paramount for Martin Scorsese under his new deal there, with Kevin Misher at Misher Films producing.
NYT writer Timothy Egan's 2006 National Book Award Winner THE WORST HARD TIME, a narrative of those who survived the Dust Bowl, optioned by Tagline Pictures with Kirk Ellis (Emmy nominee and writer/producer of HBO's upcoming John Adams miniseries based on David McCullough's book) adapting, by Carol Mann at the Carol Mann Agency.
William Wright's HARVARD'S SECRET COURT, an account of how officials and faculty members at Harvard in the early 1920's hounded a group of gay students into suicide or shameful obscurity and decades later were still trying to derail the careers of those accused, optioned to David Brind, screenwriter/producer of short film DARE, and director of Sandra Bernhard's one-woman show, by Bill Contardi at Brandt & Hochman.
Wrap...
FICTION/DEBUT:
NY Giant star and two-time Super Bowl champion Mark Bavaro's first novel, a fictionalized account of life in a scandal-ridden NFL through the eyes of a tough, idiosyncratic athlete at the top of his sport, pitched as a modern-day NORTH DALLAS FORTY, to Marc Resnick at St. Martin's, at auction, by Alex Glass at Trident Media Group.
MYSTERY/CRIME:
James Patterson's co-author on three books Peter de Jonge's IT TAKES A LOT OF HEART, the first in a series about a young NYPD detective, to Claire Wachtel at Harper, at auction, by Lane Zachary and Todd Shuster at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency (world).
GENERAL/OTHER:
S. Thomas Russell's THE BLIND IN HEAVEN, a naval adventure novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, to Dan Conaway at Putnam, at auction, by Howard Morhaim at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency (NA).Philip Roth's EXIT GHOST, his "ninth and last Zuckerman novel," called "a study of obsession, forgetfulness, resignation, and ungratifiable desire," in which Zuckerman returns to New York after eleven years of living as a reclusive writer in western Massachusetts, where encounters with a new generation of writers and an old, dying friend produce unsettling revelations, to Janet Silver at Houghton Mifflin, for publication in October 2007, 28 years after the publication of THE GHOST WRITER, by Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency.lori_glazer@hmco.com
Author of ARABIAN JAZZ and CRESCENT Diana Abu-Jaber's ORIGIN, in which a fingerprint expert's investigation of a series of crib deaths leads her back to the mystery of her own childhood, to Alane Mason at Norton, for publication in spring 2007, in a two-book deal, by Joy Harris at the Joy Harris Agency (world).
WHAT DO WE BELIEVE?, a new series introducing different beliefs from across the world in lively, accessible and intelligent short books, to George Gibson at Walker, in a nice deal, by Angela Rose at Granta Books.Rights previously sold to Uitgeverij Ad. Donker in Holland, Dom Quixote in Portugal, Plan B in Turkey, Vallardi in Italy, Orpheas in Greece, and Otava in Finland.
UK:
THE INSIDE RING author Mike Lawson's two new Joe DeMarco novels, pitched as David Baldacci meets Lee Child, to Wayne Brookes at Harper UK, by Abner Stein.
[NOTE: Very good writer]
NON-FICTION/BIOGRAPHY:
Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Schiff's CLEOPATRA, to Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown, for publication in 2010, by Eric Simonoff at Janklow & Nesbit (world).
BUSINESS/INVESTING/FINANCE:
Barbara Peterson's LIQUID ASSETS, the story of 100 multi-national companies and culture-defining ideas that started off as crude sketches on the back of a paper napkin, from Southwest Airlines to the Clinton Presidential Library, Compaq to "supply side economics," to Colin Dickerman at Bloomsbury, by Jay Mandel at William Morris Agency (NA).
HISTORY/POLITICS/CURRENT AFFAIRS:
Historian, crime professor and author of three books on George Washington Bruce Chadwick's untitled book about the lethal poisoning of Founding Father George Wythe, the sensationalistic murder trial that followed, and the world of Thomas Jefferson, to Stephen Power at Wiley, by Elizabeth Winick and Jonathan Lyons at McIntosh & Otis (NA).Wesleyan historian and two-time National Book Award nominee Richard Slotkin's untitled history of the Civil War Battle of the Crater, a significant engagement that featured the largest explosion yet detonated by man, and a lens to explore the racial and class tensions that the war both reflected and reinforced, to Will Murphy at Random House, by Carl Brandt at Brandt & Hochman (world).
MEMOIR:
Retired West Point philosophy professor Lieutenant Colonel Alan Bishop's OFF THE HARD PINE PEW: What One Philosophical Redneck Learned in the Army, combining the author's account of his self-described redneck childhood in Mississippi, his discovery of philosophy while in college on an Army scholarship, and its influence on his intellectual life, and a call for fundamental change in the way that young Army officers -- and American youth in general -- are educated, to Morgan Entrekin at Grove/Atlantic, by David Kuhn at Kuhn Projects (World).jmonahan@groveatlantic.com
FILM:
Eric Jager's THE LAST DUEL: A True Story of Crime, Scandal and Trial by Combat in Medieval France, to Paramount for Martin Scorsese under his new deal there, with Kevin Misher at Misher Films producing.
NYT writer Timothy Egan's 2006 National Book Award Winner THE WORST HARD TIME, a narrative of those who survived the Dust Bowl, optioned by Tagline Pictures with Kirk Ellis (Emmy nominee and writer/producer of HBO's upcoming John Adams miniseries based on David McCullough's book) adapting, by Carol Mann at the Carol Mann Agency.
William Wright's HARVARD'S SECRET COURT, an account of how officials and faculty members at Harvard in the early 1920's hounded a group of gay students into suicide or shameful obscurity and decades later were still trying to derail the careers of those accused, optioned to David Brind, screenwriter/producer of short film DARE, and director of Sandra Bernhard's one-woman show, by Bill Contardi at Brandt & Hochman.
Wrap...
Guerilla warfare...
An email from an author (Bank's Bandits) and former Green Beret:
Yesterday I received the story and picture again about the marine in Iraq holding the child and rocking her to sleep--a child who had been shot in the head and whose whole family had been executed by insurgents. It was a great picture and story, but it prompted this response from me to the writer (edited and developed in more detail here). I thought I would share these thoughts with you for what they are worth.
Great story and picture.
The bottom line is that this is what it is all about in the long run. Will the fundamental "humanity" of the majority of our troops eventually override, in the minds of the people directly affected, the horrors of war that have been visited upon that region (largely, or at least most recently, by us). When the shooting war for us is finally over and all the dust settles, how will we and our troops be viewed after we leave. If this kind of humanitarian action by our individual troops is not one of the paramount things that "most" of the people of that region think about when they think about us--then we have been whistling in the dark in trying to bring democracy to that area by imposing it at the point of a gun.
We might well ask, aside from the killings and maimings that inevitably characterize our continuing and deadly running war with the insurgents (a war that clearly has grown worse rather than better), what kind of lasting impression will we actually have made upon the people of that region by the collective kindnesses and humanitarian acts of our troops and by those working for us in that region? What acts, performed by our men and women while the heat of battle continued to rage all around them, will the Iraqui people note and remember, share with their children, and talk about in the years to come?
This is what Mao meant when he said that to wage successful guerilla warfare you have to learn "to swim in the water with the fishes." To do this, the great mass of the common people of the country, not just the "currently in power" political or economic leaders, must come to understand and accept what it is you are in their country fighting for. If they do, and if they accept and share your goals, only then can you "swim among them" in safety even if you are "foreigners." If you do not gain that essential support of the mass of the people over time, you are doomed to failure and no amount of modern airpower and weaponry will sustain you. Indeed, that is precisely what happened to us in Vietnam. The mass of the common people of that country rallied to the aims and goals of Ho Chi Min--and so the Viet Cong could "swim safely" among the people. With a few exceptions, we failed miserably to win "the hearts and minds" of the people to our side of that conflict. (One exception were the fiercely independent Montagnard tribesman, who were won over to our side by the teams of Special Forces men who lived and 'swam among them" and obtained their loyal support to the bitter end--and beyond.) A recognition of all the reasons why we failed to gain the support of the Vietnam people in general, despite the millions we spent there for their defense, is still a matter too bitter for most Americans to deal with rationally, but those reasons would have to begin with our indefensible support of the wretchedly venal and corrupt regimes in the South that had always victimized the people for the benefit of the very few.
In sum, if the goals that this President insists are the reasons we invaded Iraq in the first place are ever to be realized, then some real and recognizeable change will have to take place in the attitude toward us as presently held by the great mass of the Iraqi people. Furthermore, if this were going to happen at all, it would have to begin to happen very soon. Any fair evaluation of where we now stand in Iraq would have to recognize that the chances of this happening are diminishing daily rather than gaining in probablility as the factional and religious "civil war" worsens.
At present, the simple fact is that there is no persuasive evidence that a large portion of the Iraqi people, much less the majority, welcomes our presence there and accepts our role in Iraq as an essential tool for bridging the gap between the dictatorship of Sadaam and the establishment of a real democracy. Indeed, many of those who will share in the resolution of these questions, do not want a real democracy at all; they want a country which will advance their own religous and economic priorities. If, when we finally leave Iraq we are viewed primarily as a despised "occupying army," if most of the people there actually view us with nothing but hate and contempt, if they feel that collectively we have "raped and ruined" their country, then everything we have done will avail us naught in terms of the so-called goals of our invasion. If that is the way we are viewed when we leave Iraq, we will have effected no fundamental changes for the better in that region. Indeed, the brutal and deadly internecine strife and warfare which is already underway--the "civil war," if you will--will burst out full-blown when we leave and how the partisan religous and secular leaders of Iraq eventually resolve those differences is the thing that will determine the political and social character of the country for many years to come.
The truth is that we don't know the end to that story yet. We don't yet know how the majority of people in that country (and in that region) view our presence there, although we have every reason to believe the great majority resents our presence and wants us out. History, after we leave, will have the final say on whether our "invasion" of Iraq accomplished anything of real and lasting benefit to that country, and--just as important--to the real and lasting benefit of our country. Only time and the perspective of history will tell whether our terrible sacrifices in terms of human lives, and of the suffering of our military people, and of the total costs to our nation, can ever be justified.
Ed
Yesterday I received the story and picture again about the marine in Iraq holding the child and rocking her to sleep--a child who had been shot in the head and whose whole family had been executed by insurgents. It was a great picture and story, but it prompted this response from me to the writer (edited and developed in more detail here). I thought I would share these thoughts with you for what they are worth.
Great story and picture.
The bottom line is that this is what it is all about in the long run. Will the fundamental "humanity" of the majority of our troops eventually override, in the minds of the people directly affected, the horrors of war that have been visited upon that region (largely, or at least most recently, by us). When the shooting war for us is finally over and all the dust settles, how will we and our troops be viewed after we leave. If this kind of humanitarian action by our individual troops is not one of the paramount things that "most" of the people of that region think about when they think about us--then we have been whistling in the dark in trying to bring democracy to that area by imposing it at the point of a gun.
We might well ask, aside from the killings and maimings that inevitably characterize our continuing and deadly running war with the insurgents (a war that clearly has grown worse rather than better), what kind of lasting impression will we actually have made upon the people of that region by the collective kindnesses and humanitarian acts of our troops and by those working for us in that region? What acts, performed by our men and women while the heat of battle continued to rage all around them, will the Iraqui people note and remember, share with their children, and talk about in the years to come?
This is what Mao meant when he said that to wage successful guerilla warfare you have to learn "to swim in the water with the fishes." To do this, the great mass of the common people of the country, not just the "currently in power" political or economic leaders, must come to understand and accept what it is you are in their country fighting for. If they do, and if they accept and share your goals, only then can you "swim among them" in safety even if you are "foreigners." If you do not gain that essential support of the mass of the people over time, you are doomed to failure and no amount of modern airpower and weaponry will sustain you. Indeed, that is precisely what happened to us in Vietnam. The mass of the common people of that country rallied to the aims and goals of Ho Chi Min--and so the Viet Cong could "swim safely" among the people. With a few exceptions, we failed miserably to win "the hearts and minds" of the people to our side of that conflict. (One exception were the fiercely independent Montagnard tribesman, who were won over to our side by the teams of Special Forces men who lived and 'swam among them" and obtained their loyal support to the bitter end--and beyond.) A recognition of all the reasons why we failed to gain the support of the Vietnam people in general, despite the millions we spent there for their defense, is still a matter too bitter for most Americans to deal with rationally, but those reasons would have to begin with our indefensible support of the wretchedly venal and corrupt regimes in the South that had always victimized the people for the benefit of the very few.
In sum, if the goals that this President insists are the reasons we invaded Iraq in the first place are ever to be realized, then some real and recognizeable change will have to take place in the attitude toward us as presently held by the great mass of the Iraqi people. Furthermore, if this were going to happen at all, it would have to begin to happen very soon. Any fair evaluation of where we now stand in Iraq would have to recognize that the chances of this happening are diminishing daily rather than gaining in probablility as the factional and religious "civil war" worsens.
At present, the simple fact is that there is no persuasive evidence that a large portion of the Iraqi people, much less the majority, welcomes our presence there and accepts our role in Iraq as an essential tool for bridging the gap between the dictatorship of Sadaam and the establishment of a real democracy. Indeed, many of those who will share in the resolution of these questions, do not want a real democracy at all; they want a country which will advance their own religous and economic priorities. If, when we finally leave Iraq we are viewed primarily as a despised "occupying army," if most of the people there actually view us with nothing but hate and contempt, if they feel that collectively we have "raped and ruined" their country, then everything we have done will avail us naught in terms of the so-called goals of our invasion. If that is the way we are viewed when we leave Iraq, we will have effected no fundamental changes for the better in that region. Indeed, the brutal and deadly internecine strife and warfare which is already underway--the "civil war," if you will--will burst out full-blown when we leave and how the partisan religous and secular leaders of Iraq eventually resolve those differences is the thing that will determine the political and social character of the country for many years to come.
The truth is that we don't know the end to that story yet. We don't yet know how the majority of people in that country (and in that region) view our presence there, although we have every reason to believe the great majority resents our presence and wants us out. History, after we leave, will have the final say on whether our "invasion" of Iraq accomplished anything of real and lasting benefit to that country, and--just as important--to the real and lasting benefit of our country. Only time and the perspective of history will tell whether our terrible sacrifices in terms of human lives, and of the suffering of our military people, and of the total costs to our nation, can ever be justified.
Ed
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