Strange thing...On and off I find myself playing "America, the Beautiful" while I'm working away on this machine. It sort of makes me sad. No...it does make me sad for the America that was before George W Bush and his people stole the office of the presidency.
So I listen to the song that I've long thought would be a wonderful national anthem, with longing. I would so much like America to return to living up to its promise. The nation where the good people are. The free people. The honorable and brave people. As represented through our elected officials and our deeds.
The people of our nation have been...to put it into current slang...dissed by those same elected officials in the worst kind of ways. We are disgraced. We are hated by the rest of the world. We are shamed.
Yet the people in this administration are proud of themselves.
I'm sad...and very, very angry.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Cut this guy's tongue out...
From AP via NBCSanDiego.com :
Doctor Allegedly Mocked Obese Woman, Told Patient To Shoot Self
Judge Orders Disciplinary Proceedings To Stop
POSTED: 4:58 am PDT July 7, 2006
CONCORD, N.H. -- A judge has ordered the state Board of Medicine to stop disciplinary proceedings against a doctor accused of telling a patient she was so obese she might only be attractive to black men and advising another to shoot herself following brain surgery.
Judge Edward Fitzgerald made clear in a ruling released Thursday that he did not condone remarks attributed to Dr. Terry Bennett and found them unnecessary, but ruled Bennett had a right to speak bluntly.
"It is nonetheless important ... to ensure that physicians and patients are free to discuss matters relating to health without fear of government reprisal, even if such discussions may sometimes be harsh, rude or offensive to the listener," he concluded in the ruling Wednesday.
The complaints against Bennett included charges that he told a white patient that she was so obese she might only be attractive to black men.
"Let's face it, if your husband were to die tomorrow, who would want you?" the board has said Bennett told the overweight patient in June 2004. "Well, men might want you, but not the types you want to want you. Might even be a black guy," it quoted him as saying, based on the woman's complaint.
Bennett, 68, has denied making the comment, but has said he's seen polls supporting that position.
"If you look at the polling, nobody likes fat women," he said last year. "Is it right? No. Is it sensible? No. Is it true? Yeah ... Black guys are the only group that don't mind that. Is that racist to say that?"
A 2001 complaint accused Bennett of telling a woman recovering from brain surgery to buy a pistol and shoot herself to end her suffering. The doctor was also accused of speaking harshly to a woman about how her son might have contracted hepatitis, according to the ruling.
Bennett claimed victory.
"If you look at the polling, nobody likes fat women," he said last year. "Is it right? No. Is it sensible? No. Is it true? Yeah ... Black guys are the only group that don't mind that. Is that racist to say that?"
-- Dr. Terry Bennett
"The question now is: Will the board waste more of your and my tax dollars and appeal this, or accept done as done?" he said in a telephone interview.
Fitzgerald also ruled that state and American Medical Association requirements to treat patients with "compassion and respect for human dignity and rights" are so vague they are unconstitutional. Bennett probably would have won his challenges before the board, the judge said.
Bennett said he planned to sue everyone involved for "malicious prosecution."
"I am not inclined to be forgiving about it," he said. "It's been devastating and infuriating."
Assistant Attorney General Elyse Alkalay, who represented the board in the court case, said she was reviewing the ruling and had not decided whether to appeal.
Bennett could have faced penalties ranging from a written reprimand to suspension or revocation of his medical license.
Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press.
Wrap...
Doctor Allegedly Mocked Obese Woman, Told Patient To Shoot Self
Judge Orders Disciplinary Proceedings To Stop
POSTED: 4:58 am PDT July 7, 2006
CONCORD, N.H. -- A judge has ordered the state Board of Medicine to stop disciplinary proceedings against a doctor accused of telling a patient she was so obese she might only be attractive to black men and advising another to shoot herself following brain surgery.
Judge Edward Fitzgerald made clear in a ruling released Thursday that he did not condone remarks attributed to Dr. Terry Bennett and found them unnecessary, but ruled Bennett had a right to speak bluntly.
"It is nonetheless important ... to ensure that physicians and patients are free to discuss matters relating to health without fear of government reprisal, even if such discussions may sometimes be harsh, rude or offensive to the listener," he concluded in the ruling Wednesday.
The complaints against Bennett included charges that he told a white patient that she was so obese she might only be attractive to black men.
"Let's face it, if your husband were to die tomorrow, who would want you?" the board has said Bennett told the overweight patient in June 2004. "Well, men might want you, but not the types you want to want you. Might even be a black guy," it quoted him as saying, based on the woman's complaint.
Bennett, 68, has denied making the comment, but has said he's seen polls supporting that position.
"If you look at the polling, nobody likes fat women," he said last year. "Is it right? No. Is it sensible? No. Is it true? Yeah ... Black guys are the only group that don't mind that. Is that racist to say that?"
A 2001 complaint accused Bennett of telling a woman recovering from brain surgery to buy a pistol and shoot herself to end her suffering. The doctor was also accused of speaking harshly to a woman about how her son might have contracted hepatitis, according to the ruling.
Bennett claimed victory.
"If you look at the polling, nobody likes fat women," he said last year. "Is it right? No. Is it sensible? No. Is it true? Yeah ... Black guys are the only group that don't mind that. Is that racist to say that?"
-- Dr. Terry Bennett
"The question now is: Will the board waste more of your and my tax dollars and appeal this, or accept done as done?" he said in a telephone interview.
Fitzgerald also ruled that state and American Medical Association requirements to treat patients with "compassion and respect for human dignity and rights" are so vague they are unconstitutional. Bennett probably would have won his challenges before the board, the judge said.
Bennett said he planned to sue everyone involved for "malicious prosecution."
"I am not inclined to be forgiving about it," he said. "It's been devastating and infuriating."
Assistant Attorney General Elyse Alkalay, who represented the board in the court case, said she was reviewing the ruling and had not decided whether to appeal.
Bennett could have faced penalties ranging from a written reprimand to suspension or revocation of his medical license.
Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press.
Wrap...
Rummy doesn't know a threat when he sees one...
From truthout.org :
AUS Redux
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t Perspective
Monday 10 July 2006
"My name is Duffy. Sergeant Duffy to you. I'm going to be your drill sergeant. My job here is to make you college types and Jewboys into real soldiers."
Such was my introduction to the army and to the man who would supervise my basic training after I was drafted into military service the Korean War in 1950.
The differences between Sergeant Duffy and me are too numerous to enumerate here. But one of them was that the Sergeant was drunk most of the time. Another was that, like all draftees during this period, I was a member of something called the Army of the US - the AUS. The AUS consisted of temporary soldiers - draftees like me - while Duffy belonged to the US Army, otherwise known as the Regular Army.
As we were to learn, Duffy was not some aberration. In the years between the two Great Wars, the regular army was filled with racists and bigots. They were mostly non-commissioned officers, but their views were known to many and shared by some officers all the way to the top of the chain of command.
The couple of hundred men drafted with me somehow included a disproportionate number of people with college degrees and about a dozen Jews. But we came from lots of different places, backgrounds, and religions - and we were virtually unanimous in our view that Sergeant Duffy was in the Regular Army because he'd be unable to make it in the world outside the military.
Over the next two years, my fellow draftees and I served as members of a military police company at Governors Island, New York, the headquarters of the First Army. One of the saddest things we learned there was just how ubiquitous the Sergeant Duffys were.
President Truman had only recently desegregated the US Armed Forces, and we felt the intense resentment of that action in our MP station. There still weren't many African-American soldiers stationed on Governors Island, but there were some. And our Desk Sergeant could always be counted on to single them out for arrest and extended detention for even the smallest infraction.
But that was then, and now is now. After the Korean War, my fellow draftees and I were discharged, and most of us wanted to forget our military service as quickly as possible. And I think most of us came to believe that, while in the period between the two Great Wars the military may have been filled with racists, anti-Semites and other miscreants, today's military would simply not allow the uniform to be dishonored by allowing the Sergeant Duffys of the world to wear it.
Now, thanks to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), we learn how wrong we were.
SPLC's David Holthouse reminds us that ten years ago the Pentagon toughened policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel, a move that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing by decorated Gulf War combat veteran Timothy McVeigh, and the murder of a black couple by members of a skinhead gang in the elite 82nd Airborne Division.
Today, he reports, "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world's best-trained, best-equipped fighting force. Military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way."
According to Department of Defense investigator Scott Barfield, neo-Nazis "stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they're inside, and they are hard-core. We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," he added. "That's a problem."
Under pressure to meet wartime manpower goals, the US military has relaxed standards designed to weed out racist extremists. Large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the armed forces, Holthouse reports.
He reminds us that back in 1996, following a decade-long rash of cases where extremists in the military were caught diverting huge arsenals of stolen firearms and explosives to neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations, conducting guerrilla training for paramilitary racist militias, and murdering non-white civilians (see timeline), the Pentagon finally launched a massive investigation and crackdown. One general ordered all 19,000 soldiers at Fort Lewis, Washington, strip-searched for extremist tattoos.
Now, with the country at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military under increasingly intense pressure to maintain enlistment numbers, weeding out extremists is less of a priority.
"Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members," said Barfield.
"Last year, for the first time, they didn't make their recruiting goals. They don't want to start making a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military, because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they'll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."
Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, said he has identified and submitted evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year. "Only two have been discharged," he said.
Barfield and other Department of Defense investigators said they recently uncovered an online network of 57 neo-Nazis who are active duty Army and Marines personnel spread across five military installations in five states - Fort Lewis; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Stewart, Georgia; and Camp Pendleton, California. "They're communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military," Barfield said. "Several of these individuals have since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq."
Every year, the Army's Criminal Investigation Division conducts a threat assessment of extremist and gang activity among army personnel. "Every year, they come back with 'minimal activity,' which is inaccurate," said Barfield. "It's not epidemic, but there's plenty of evidence we're talking numbers well into the thousands, just in the Army."
Last July, the white supremacist web site "Stormfront" hosted a discussion on "Joining the Military."
In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, SPLC President Richard Cohen urged D0D to adopt a zero-tolerance policy regarding racist extremism among members of the US military.
"Because hate group membership and extremist activity are antithetical to the values and mission of our armed forces, we urge you to adopt a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to white supremacy in the military and to take all necessary steps to ensure that the policy is rigorously enforced," Cohen wrote.
"Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists are joining the military in large numbers so they can get the best training in the world on weapons, combat tactics and explosives," said Mark Potok, director of SPLC's Intelligence Project.
"We should consider this a major security threat, because these people are motivated by an ideology that calls for race war and revolution," he said, adding. "Any one of them could turn out to be the next Timothy McVeigh."
Or Sergeant Duffy.
William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.
Wrap...
AUS Redux
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t Perspective
Monday 10 July 2006
"My name is Duffy. Sergeant Duffy to you. I'm going to be your drill sergeant. My job here is to make you college types and Jewboys into real soldiers."
Such was my introduction to the army and to the man who would supervise my basic training after I was drafted into military service the Korean War in 1950.
The differences between Sergeant Duffy and me are too numerous to enumerate here. But one of them was that the Sergeant was drunk most of the time. Another was that, like all draftees during this period, I was a member of something called the Army of the US - the AUS. The AUS consisted of temporary soldiers - draftees like me - while Duffy belonged to the US Army, otherwise known as the Regular Army.
As we were to learn, Duffy was not some aberration. In the years between the two Great Wars, the regular army was filled with racists and bigots. They were mostly non-commissioned officers, but their views were known to many and shared by some officers all the way to the top of the chain of command.
The couple of hundred men drafted with me somehow included a disproportionate number of people with college degrees and about a dozen Jews. But we came from lots of different places, backgrounds, and religions - and we were virtually unanimous in our view that Sergeant Duffy was in the Regular Army because he'd be unable to make it in the world outside the military.
Over the next two years, my fellow draftees and I served as members of a military police company at Governors Island, New York, the headquarters of the First Army. One of the saddest things we learned there was just how ubiquitous the Sergeant Duffys were.
President Truman had only recently desegregated the US Armed Forces, and we felt the intense resentment of that action in our MP station. There still weren't many African-American soldiers stationed on Governors Island, but there were some. And our Desk Sergeant could always be counted on to single them out for arrest and extended detention for even the smallest infraction.
But that was then, and now is now. After the Korean War, my fellow draftees and I were discharged, and most of us wanted to forget our military service as quickly as possible. And I think most of us came to believe that, while in the period between the two Great Wars the military may have been filled with racists, anti-Semites and other miscreants, today's military would simply not allow the uniform to be dishonored by allowing the Sergeant Duffys of the world to wear it.
Now, thanks to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), we learn how wrong we were.
SPLC's David Holthouse reminds us that ten years ago the Pentagon toughened policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel, a move that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing by decorated Gulf War combat veteran Timothy McVeigh, and the murder of a black couple by members of a skinhead gang in the elite 82nd Airborne Division.
Today, he reports, "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world's best-trained, best-equipped fighting force. Military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way."
According to Department of Defense investigator Scott Barfield, neo-Nazis "stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they're inside, and they are hard-core. We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," he added. "That's a problem."
Under pressure to meet wartime manpower goals, the US military has relaxed standards designed to weed out racist extremists. Large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the armed forces, Holthouse reports.
He reminds us that back in 1996, following a decade-long rash of cases where extremists in the military were caught diverting huge arsenals of stolen firearms and explosives to neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations, conducting guerrilla training for paramilitary racist militias, and murdering non-white civilians (see timeline), the Pentagon finally launched a massive investigation and crackdown. One general ordered all 19,000 soldiers at Fort Lewis, Washington, strip-searched for extremist tattoos.
Now, with the country at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military under increasingly intense pressure to maintain enlistment numbers, weeding out extremists is less of a priority.
"Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members," said Barfield.
"Last year, for the first time, they didn't make their recruiting goals. They don't want to start making a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military, because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they'll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."
Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, said he has identified and submitted evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year. "Only two have been discharged," he said.
Barfield and other Department of Defense investigators said they recently uncovered an online network of 57 neo-Nazis who are active duty Army and Marines personnel spread across five military installations in five states - Fort Lewis; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Stewart, Georgia; and Camp Pendleton, California. "They're communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military," Barfield said. "Several of these individuals have since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq."
Every year, the Army's Criminal Investigation Division conducts a threat assessment of extremist and gang activity among army personnel. "Every year, they come back with 'minimal activity,' which is inaccurate," said Barfield. "It's not epidemic, but there's plenty of evidence we're talking numbers well into the thousands, just in the Army."
Last July, the white supremacist web site "Stormfront" hosted a discussion on "Joining the Military."
In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, SPLC President Richard Cohen urged D0D to adopt a zero-tolerance policy regarding racist extremism among members of the US military.
"Because hate group membership and extremist activity are antithetical to the values and mission of our armed forces, we urge you to adopt a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to white supremacy in the military and to take all necessary steps to ensure that the policy is rigorously enforced," Cohen wrote.
"Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists are joining the military in large numbers so they can get the best training in the world on weapons, combat tactics and explosives," said Mark Potok, director of SPLC's Intelligence Project.
"We should consider this a major security threat, because these people are motivated by an ideology that calls for race war and revolution," he said, adding. "Any one of them could turn out to be the next Timothy McVeigh."
Or Sergeant Duffy.
William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.
Wrap...
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Dems better win in 2006 or else...
From Information Clearing House:
Chronicle of a War Foretold:
On May 20, 2004, US President George W Bush disclosed with great fanfare his plan to annex Cuba. The massive 450-page creation elicited a wave of criticism from around the world.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13925.htm
Wrap...
Chronicle of a War Foretold:
On May 20, 2004, US President George W Bush disclosed with great fanfare his plan to annex Cuba. The massive 450-page creation elicited a wave of criticism from around the world.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13925.htm
Wrap...
Saturday, July 08, 2006
BushCo wants us ignorant....
NOTE: It seems to me that it's well past time that those of us who value our newspapers, magazines...the jounalists and editors and photographers of the news...get our act together and start standing up for them. As a Democrat, I am not at all pleased by the Bush administration's on-going war on the media....in effect, the war against the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They value secrecy more than truth and openness. Anytime any administration tries to muffle the press, there's no question that they're trying to hide what shouldn't be hidden.
From The New Yorker:
by David Remnick
(an excerpt)
Justice Hugo Black wrote, “The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.”
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others in the Nixon-Agnew-Ford orbit left Washington believing that the imperial Presidency had been disastrously hobbled by a now imperial press. When they reappeared in 2001, under the auspices of George W. Bush, the Nixon-Agnew spirit was resurrected with them—this time without the Joycean wordplay. More than any other White House in history, Bush’s has tried to starve, mock, weaken, bypass, devalue, intimidate, and deceive the press, using tactics far more toxic than any prose devised in the name of Spiro Agnew.
Firm in the belief that the press can be gored for easy political gain, the Bush Administration has set about reducing the status of the media (specifically, what it sees as the left-wing, Eastern-establishment media) to that of a pesky yet manageable interest group, nothing more. As Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff at the time, told this magazine’s Ken Auletta, “They”—the media—“don’t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election. . . . I don’t believe you have a check-and-balance function.”
In the past six years, the Administration and its surrogates have issued a stream of disinformation about intelligence and Iraq; paid friendly “columnists” like Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher tens of thousands of dollars to parrot the White House line; accredited to the White House press corps a phony journalist and ex-prostitute (Jeff “Bulldog” Gannon, a.k.a. James Dale Guckert) as a reliable pitcher of softball questions; tightened Freedom of Information Act restrictions; and pioneered a genre of fake news via packaged video “reports.” The President has held fewer solo news conferences than any of his modern predecessors. The Vice-President kept the Times reporter off his plane because he didn’t like the paper’s coverage.
The atmosphere, in general, has been one of crude manipulation and derision. After Seymour M. Hersh published, in this magazine, his third article on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in as many weeks, the Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita, overlooking the truth of the reports, publicly declared that Hersh merely “threw a lot of crap against the wall and he expects someone to peel off what’s real.” (Hersh’s articles, he said, composed a “tapestry of nonsense.”)
In recent months, the critique has grown more ominous. Cheney and other officials have attacked Dana Priest’s article in the Washington Post detailing the rendition of prisoners to secret jails in Europe and James Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s articles in the Times describing the government’s attempt to fight terrorism with warrantless domestic wiretaps. Aping the spirit, if not the élan, of his predecessor, Cheney called the articles disloyal, damaging to national security, and undeserving of the Pulitzer Prizes they won.
Late last month, the Times published a long report by Lichtblau and Risen on the C.I.A.’s and the Treasury Department’s monitoring of an international banking database in Brussels to track the movement of funds by Al Qaeda. The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times very quickly followed with their own articles on the government’s monitoring of Al Qaeda’s financial transactions, which has been an open secret ever since it was trumpeted by––well, by George W. Bush, in mid-September, 2001. Infuriated that the editors of the Times had not acceded to blandishments to kill the story, Bush and Cheney, in a coördinated offensive, described the Times report as a disgrace and, outrageously, as a boon to further terror attacks.
The ideological noise machine took it from there. A congressman, Peter King, and a senator, Jim Bunning, both Republicans, accused the Times of treason. King, whose contradictory nature once embraced the violent activities of the I.R.A., is now the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Curiously, it was King who, in September of 2004, co-chaired a hearing so that a Treasury official could tell the world how the department’s programs were driving terrorists out of the banking system; now he speaks of employing the 1917 Espionage Act to investigate and try journalists.
Last week, the House approved a resolution condemning the newspapers that published the banking story for placing “the lives of Americans in danger.” The resolution passed 227–183, almost completely along party lines. On the airwaves and in the blogosphere, it got uglier. Melanie Morgan, a shouter on northern California’s biggest talk radio station, told the San Francisco Chronicle that if Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, “were to be tried and convicted of treason, yes, I would have no problem with him being sent to the gas chamber.”
The Bush Administration can’t really believe that these newspaper stories have undermined the battle against Al Qaeda; what’s more, it knows that over the decades papers like the Times have kept many stories and countless particulars secret when editors saw that it was in the interest of national security and military safety to do so. The Times banking story disclosed no leads, named no targets. To say that it risked lives is like saying that an article revealing that cops tap phones to monitor the activities of the Mafia is a gift to the Five Families of New York.
The Bush Administration knows very well what it is doing and in what climate. The press––particularly the mainstream outlets the White House finds most irritating––is in a collective state of anxious transition, hurt by scandals (Congressman King was quick to mention Jayson Blair, the Times serial fabulist), by the appearance of a blizzard of new technologies and ideologized alternatives like Fox News, and by a general sense of economic, even existential, worry. The era of hegemonic networks and newspapers, of supremely confident Bradlees and Rosenthals, is a memory.
In the wake of the Administration’s record of dishonesty and incompetence in Iraq and the consequent decline in the President’s domestic polling numbers, it is not hard to discern why the White House might find a convenient enemy in the editors of the Times: this is an election year. The assault on the Times is a no-lose situation for the White House. The banking story itself showed the Administration to be doing what it had declared it was doing from the start: concertedly monitoring the financial transactions of potential terrorists. At the same time, by smearing the Times for the delectation of the Republican “base,” the Administration could direct attention away from its failures, including, last week, the Supreme Court’s decision to block its plans to try Guantánamo detainees before military commissions.
In the era of the Pentagon Papers, a war-weary White House went to the courts to stifle the press. You begin to wonder if the Bush White House, in its urgent need to find scapegoats for the myriad disasters it has inflicted, is preparing to repeat a dismal and dismaying episode of the Nixon years.
— David Remnick
Wrap....
From The New Yorker:
by David Remnick
(an excerpt)
Justice Hugo Black wrote, “The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.”
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others in the Nixon-Agnew-Ford orbit left Washington believing that the imperial Presidency had been disastrously hobbled by a now imperial press. When they reappeared in 2001, under the auspices of George W. Bush, the Nixon-Agnew spirit was resurrected with them—this time without the Joycean wordplay. More than any other White House in history, Bush’s has tried to starve, mock, weaken, bypass, devalue, intimidate, and deceive the press, using tactics far more toxic than any prose devised in the name of Spiro Agnew.
Firm in the belief that the press can be gored for easy political gain, the Bush Administration has set about reducing the status of the media (specifically, what it sees as the left-wing, Eastern-establishment media) to that of a pesky yet manageable interest group, nothing more. As Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff at the time, told this magazine’s Ken Auletta, “They”—the media—“don’t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election. . . . I don’t believe you have a check-and-balance function.”
In the past six years, the Administration and its surrogates have issued a stream of disinformation about intelligence and Iraq; paid friendly “columnists” like Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher tens of thousands of dollars to parrot the White House line; accredited to the White House press corps a phony journalist and ex-prostitute (Jeff “Bulldog” Gannon, a.k.a. James Dale Guckert) as a reliable pitcher of softball questions; tightened Freedom of Information Act restrictions; and pioneered a genre of fake news via packaged video “reports.” The President has held fewer solo news conferences than any of his modern predecessors. The Vice-President kept the Times reporter off his plane because he didn’t like the paper’s coverage.
The atmosphere, in general, has been one of crude manipulation and derision. After Seymour M. Hersh published, in this magazine, his third article on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in as many weeks, the Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita, overlooking the truth of the reports, publicly declared that Hersh merely “threw a lot of crap against the wall and he expects someone to peel off what’s real.” (Hersh’s articles, he said, composed a “tapestry of nonsense.”)
In recent months, the critique has grown more ominous. Cheney and other officials have attacked Dana Priest’s article in the Washington Post detailing the rendition of prisoners to secret jails in Europe and James Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s articles in the Times describing the government’s attempt to fight terrorism with warrantless domestic wiretaps. Aping the spirit, if not the élan, of his predecessor, Cheney called the articles disloyal, damaging to national security, and undeserving of the Pulitzer Prizes they won.
Late last month, the Times published a long report by Lichtblau and Risen on the C.I.A.’s and the Treasury Department’s monitoring of an international banking database in Brussels to track the movement of funds by Al Qaeda. The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times very quickly followed with their own articles on the government’s monitoring of Al Qaeda’s financial transactions, which has been an open secret ever since it was trumpeted by––well, by George W. Bush, in mid-September, 2001. Infuriated that the editors of the Times had not acceded to blandishments to kill the story, Bush and Cheney, in a coördinated offensive, described the Times report as a disgrace and, outrageously, as a boon to further terror attacks.
The ideological noise machine took it from there. A congressman, Peter King, and a senator, Jim Bunning, both Republicans, accused the Times of treason. King, whose contradictory nature once embraced the violent activities of the I.R.A., is now the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Curiously, it was King who, in September of 2004, co-chaired a hearing so that a Treasury official could tell the world how the department’s programs were driving terrorists out of the banking system; now he speaks of employing the 1917 Espionage Act to investigate and try journalists.
Last week, the House approved a resolution condemning the newspapers that published the banking story for placing “the lives of Americans in danger.” The resolution passed 227–183, almost completely along party lines. On the airwaves and in the blogosphere, it got uglier. Melanie Morgan, a shouter on northern California’s biggest talk radio station, told the San Francisco Chronicle that if Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, “were to be tried and convicted of treason, yes, I would have no problem with him being sent to the gas chamber.”
The Bush Administration can’t really believe that these newspaper stories have undermined the battle against Al Qaeda; what’s more, it knows that over the decades papers like the Times have kept many stories and countless particulars secret when editors saw that it was in the interest of national security and military safety to do so. The Times banking story disclosed no leads, named no targets. To say that it risked lives is like saying that an article revealing that cops tap phones to monitor the activities of the Mafia is a gift to the Five Families of New York.
The Bush Administration knows very well what it is doing and in what climate. The press––particularly the mainstream outlets the White House finds most irritating––is in a collective state of anxious transition, hurt by scandals (Congressman King was quick to mention Jayson Blair, the Times serial fabulist), by the appearance of a blizzard of new technologies and ideologized alternatives like Fox News, and by a general sense of economic, even existential, worry. The era of hegemonic networks and newspapers, of supremely confident Bradlees and Rosenthals, is a memory.
In the wake of the Administration’s record of dishonesty and incompetence in Iraq and the consequent decline in the President’s domestic polling numbers, it is not hard to discern why the White House might find a convenient enemy in the editors of the Times: this is an election year. The assault on the Times is a no-lose situation for the White House. The banking story itself showed the Administration to be doing what it had declared it was doing from the start: concertedly monitoring the financial transactions of potential terrorists. At the same time, by smearing the Times for the delectation of the Republican “base,” the Administration could direct attention away from its failures, including, last week, the Supreme Court’s decision to block its plans to try Guantánamo detainees before military commissions.
In the era of the Pentagon Papers, a war-weary White House went to the courts to stifle the press. You begin to wonder if the Bush White House, in its urgent need to find scapegoats for the myriad disasters it has inflicted, is preparing to repeat a dismal and dismaying episode of the Nixon years.
— David Remnick
Wrap....
This sounds like a VERY interesting book...
From The Nation:
Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld
by Sharon Weinberger
June 2006 - ISBN: 1560258497
Despite its dubious origins--a fluke experiment involving a used dental X-ray machine and a dab of radioactive material called hafnium--the isomer bomb was conceived in 1998 as the next wave of cutting-edge military technology, a futuristic weapon so powerful it would rival the nuclear bomb. With dark humor and access to original source materials--including interviews, e-mails and internal Pentagon documents--author Sharon Weinberger exposes the ideology-driven "true believers" in the Pentagon who, for five years, ignored scientific experts to pursue this fictional weapon of mass destruction.
Imaginary Weapons exposes the decline of scientific expertise within US security agencies and the government's increasing susceptibility to outlandish claims about the technologies of war.
Listen to an interview with Sharon Weinberger on NPR.
Sharon Weinberger is the editor of Defense Technology International and has reported on national security and defense technology since 2001 for publications including Slate and the Washington Post Magazine.
Wrap...
Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld
by Sharon Weinberger
June 2006 - ISBN: 1560258497
Despite its dubious origins--a fluke experiment involving a used dental X-ray machine and a dab of radioactive material called hafnium--the isomer bomb was conceived in 1998 as the next wave of cutting-edge military technology, a futuristic weapon so powerful it would rival the nuclear bomb. With dark humor and access to original source materials--including interviews, e-mails and internal Pentagon documents--author Sharon Weinberger exposes the ideology-driven "true believers" in the Pentagon who, for five years, ignored scientific experts to pursue this fictional weapon of mass destruction.
Imaginary Weapons exposes the decline of scientific expertise within US security agencies and the government's increasing susceptibility to outlandish claims about the technologies of war.
Listen to an interview with Sharon Weinberger on NPR.
Sharon Weinberger is the editor of Defense Technology International and has reported on national security and defense technology since 2001 for publications including Slate and the Washington Post Magazine.
Wrap...
They're in cowboy country!!!
From the Ponoka News :
Police Blotter
Jul 05 2006
During the week of June 26th to July 3th, (a.ka.: the Ponoka Stampede) police responded to over 290 complaints and requests for assistance. 98 people visited our cell block during that time. 20 more that last year at this time.
Undoubtedly you’ll be able to read all about the high-lights of this year’s Ponoka Stampede elsewhere in this fine newspaper. Here are some of the low-lights (or dim lights, if you will).
Most were Stampede related, but not all.
The record for most cell block visits over the Stampede by one person: 8. Quite a feat when you consider that the Stampede is only 6 days long. The first 7 were for being Drunk In a Public Place. Apparently she wanted to avoid an 8th DIPP arrest by doing her drinking in a residence. Only it wasn’t her residence and the last charge was for Break and Enter.
A well known young offender was observed climbing the fence into the Midway after hours. In doing so he breached 9 of his 10 release conditions in one transaction. A new Ponoka record!
This week a 45 year old man was lodged in the tank for being drunk and disorderly at the arena beer gardens. Great big guy. Strong as an ox. A “farmer” he proclaimed. He could really shake the walls when he pounded his fists into that solid steel cell door. This made for an interesting juxtaposition in that he apparently misinterpreted his Charter Rights. He must have thought we said “You have the right to retain and instruct mother” because he kept demanding to call her. So much so, that the other drunks in the tank finally had enough and he had to be quickly removed to protective custody for his own safety.
The toughest ombre police had to wrassle with this year was not the 7 foot giant we traditionally have to scrap with or any other gargantuan raging bull of a cowboy. This year it was a 5'4", 140 lb woman that bit, kicked, scratched and slapped her way through 3 five second discharges of the taser before being brought under control. Charges for her performance are still under consideration.
Strange 911: “Male riding bike. Intoxicated dog running beside him. Concerned he will cause an accident”. Who? The pickled pooch???
Stranger 911: “Male harassing and bugging caller. Male who’s friend just got arrested told caller not familiar with guy who’s friend was just arrested he said that’s fine don’t worry about it and thank you” (call disconnected). If you can figure out what this means ... let us know.
Strangest 911: “Man is trying to sleep in his camper and cannot sleep with all the racket. Wants police to make patrols. Seems to be a lot of drunks nearby”. He followed this by providing a detailed description of his present camping spot. Tell him that he should probably expect more of the same for the next several hours since he has chosen to camp in the Arena Parking lot (during beer gardens).
Strange thing to run into on the QE2: A wicker chair.
Strangest thing to run into on the QE2: A porcupine. What’s strange about that?. The half smashed driver (who rolled his former pal’s new SUV) said it was a deer.
Police received a complaint of an intoxicated or high woman causing a disturbance at a Riverside residence. Before police arrived they were alerted to the fact that she was now naked and hiding in a small wooded area. Ponoka’s newest Rookie member searched for her and brought her back to the police car and to his Field Training Officer. He appeared to be quite proud of himself for being able to locate her and making the arrest. His FTO asked, “what’s the big deal? How many naked girls were in there anyway?”. Oh and by the way, Cst.YAWORSKI ... just because someone has an identical twin brother doesn’t mean that he has the same prison tattoo’s too!
This week a man called police to complain that an unknown man (who just got out of prison) was admiring his $2500.00 ring had just stolen it from him. When asked for further detail he said that the suspect had asked to see it, he took it off and gave it to him (the guy who just got out of prison, the guy he doesn’t know) and surprisingly he ran off with it. We found the suspect and he did have the ring. He said he was given it as security on a $20.00 drug dept. The ring was returned to the owner and neither had much to say about anything thereafter.
Most dangerous duty this Stampede: Guarding the 600 or so cans of Budweiser which had scattered themselves upon the ground at the entrance to the arena after having fallen off the back of the delivery truck. The owner, the driver and some trustworthy Samaritan’s triaged the fatally wounded ones from the ones which were dented but otherwise fit for duty. Many thanks to those people who stopped to help clean up the mess while police were busy turning down an army of people offering to put the wounded ones out of their misery and let them go down in the line of duty.
This year I almost made it through the entire Stampede without having some yahoo yak up the collected contents of his stomach in the back of my police car. I was bragging about this to my peers just before my last official call of the Stampede. Oh well, better luck at Stampede 07. I’m spending the next three weeks with my favourite five people on the planet but if you have information about any unsolved crime or ongoing criminal enterprise, you can still call the Ponoka RCMP at 783-4472 or call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS, where you are anonymous and we are beholden to you.
© Copyright 2006 Ponoka News
Wrap...
Police Blotter
Jul 05 2006
During the week of June 26th to July 3th, (a.ka.: the Ponoka Stampede) police responded to over 290 complaints and requests for assistance. 98 people visited our cell block during that time. 20 more that last year at this time.
Undoubtedly you’ll be able to read all about the high-lights of this year’s Ponoka Stampede elsewhere in this fine newspaper. Here are some of the low-lights (or dim lights, if you will).
Most were Stampede related, but not all.
The record for most cell block visits over the Stampede by one person: 8. Quite a feat when you consider that the Stampede is only 6 days long. The first 7 were for being Drunk In a Public Place. Apparently she wanted to avoid an 8th DIPP arrest by doing her drinking in a residence. Only it wasn’t her residence and the last charge was for Break and Enter.
A well known young offender was observed climbing the fence into the Midway after hours. In doing so he breached 9 of his 10 release conditions in one transaction. A new Ponoka record!
This week a 45 year old man was lodged in the tank for being drunk and disorderly at the arena beer gardens. Great big guy. Strong as an ox. A “farmer” he proclaimed. He could really shake the walls when he pounded his fists into that solid steel cell door. This made for an interesting juxtaposition in that he apparently misinterpreted his Charter Rights. He must have thought we said “You have the right to retain and instruct mother” because he kept demanding to call her. So much so, that the other drunks in the tank finally had enough and he had to be quickly removed to protective custody for his own safety.
The toughest ombre police had to wrassle with this year was not the 7 foot giant we traditionally have to scrap with or any other gargantuan raging bull of a cowboy. This year it was a 5'4", 140 lb woman that bit, kicked, scratched and slapped her way through 3 five second discharges of the taser before being brought under control. Charges for her performance are still under consideration.
Strange 911: “Male riding bike. Intoxicated dog running beside him. Concerned he will cause an accident”. Who? The pickled pooch???
Stranger 911: “Male harassing and bugging caller. Male who’s friend just got arrested told caller not familiar with guy who’s friend was just arrested he said that’s fine don’t worry about it and thank you” (call disconnected). If you can figure out what this means ... let us know.
Strangest 911: “Man is trying to sleep in his camper and cannot sleep with all the racket. Wants police to make patrols. Seems to be a lot of drunks nearby”. He followed this by providing a detailed description of his present camping spot. Tell him that he should probably expect more of the same for the next several hours since he has chosen to camp in the Arena Parking lot (during beer gardens).
Strange thing to run into on the QE2: A wicker chair.
Strangest thing to run into on the QE2: A porcupine. What’s strange about that?. The half smashed driver (who rolled his former pal’s new SUV) said it was a deer.
Police received a complaint of an intoxicated or high woman causing a disturbance at a Riverside residence. Before police arrived they were alerted to the fact that she was now naked and hiding in a small wooded area. Ponoka’s newest Rookie member searched for her and brought her back to the police car and to his Field Training Officer. He appeared to be quite proud of himself for being able to locate her and making the arrest. His FTO asked, “what’s the big deal? How many naked girls were in there anyway?”. Oh and by the way, Cst.YAWORSKI ... just because someone has an identical twin brother doesn’t mean that he has the same prison tattoo’s too!
This week a man called police to complain that an unknown man (who just got out of prison) was admiring his $2500.00 ring had just stolen it from him. When asked for further detail he said that the suspect had asked to see it, he took it off and gave it to him (the guy who just got out of prison, the guy he doesn’t know) and surprisingly he ran off with it. We found the suspect and he did have the ring. He said he was given it as security on a $20.00 drug dept. The ring was returned to the owner and neither had much to say about anything thereafter.
Most dangerous duty this Stampede: Guarding the 600 or so cans of Budweiser which had scattered themselves upon the ground at the entrance to the arena after having fallen off the back of the delivery truck. The owner, the driver and some trustworthy Samaritan’s triaged the fatally wounded ones from the ones which were dented but otherwise fit for duty. Many thanks to those people who stopped to help clean up the mess while police were busy turning down an army of people offering to put the wounded ones out of their misery and let them go down in the line of duty.
This year I almost made it through the entire Stampede without having some yahoo yak up the collected contents of his stomach in the back of my police car. I was bragging about this to my peers just before my last official call of the Stampede. Oh well, better luck at Stampede 07. I’m spending the next three weeks with my favourite five people on the planet but if you have information about any unsolved crime or ongoing criminal enterprise, you can still call the Ponoka RCMP at 783-4472 or call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS, where you are anonymous and we are beholden to you.
© Copyright 2006 Ponoka News
Wrap...
Only stupid owners infuriate their editors & reporters!!!
From Cagle Newsletter:
MY LOCAL NEWSPAPER "BLOODBATH"
My own hometown newspaper, the Santa Barbara News-Press, has been in the news lately. I like the News-Press because they print my cartoons and they print a great international cartoon round-up each week - but my point of view is rather narrowly focused.
All of the top editors at the News-Press quit this week, along with a long-time local columnist, to protest eccentric editorial dictums from the paper's reclusive billionaire owner, Wendy McCaw.
Here are articles about my hometown tempest from the San Francisco Chronicle, Businessweek, Editor & Publisher, and the Los Angeles Times, which describes a "bloodbath". Here's a colorful local account that describes the News-Press as a "living hell."
Santa Barbara readers wouldn't know what had happened from reading the News-Press.
Steve Greenberg works at the next paper down the coast in Ventura, and I think he summed the situation up well with his cartoon.
Wrap...
MY LOCAL NEWSPAPER "BLOODBATH"
My own hometown newspaper, the Santa Barbara News-Press, has been in the news lately. I like the News-Press because they print my cartoons and they print a great international cartoon round-up each week - but my point of view is rather narrowly focused.
All of the top editors at the News-Press quit this week, along with a long-time local columnist, to protest eccentric editorial dictums from the paper's reclusive billionaire owner, Wendy McCaw.
Here are articles about my hometown tempest from the San Francisco Chronicle, Businessweek, Editor & Publisher, and the Los Angeles Times, which describes a "bloodbath". Here's a colorful local account that describes the News-Press as a "living hell."
Santa Barbara readers wouldn't know what had happened from reading the News-Press.
Steve Greenberg works at the next paper down the coast in Ventura, and I think he summed the situation up well with his cartoon.
Wrap...
Well, Bushie has trouble remembering sometimes....
From Salon.com :
Dead or alive, more or less
Sometimes, it's hard to keep up.
Sept. 17, 2001: George W. Bush is asked if he wants Osama bin Laden dead. "I want justice," he says. "There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'"
March 13, 2002: At a press conference, Bush says that he doesn't know if bin Laden is dead or alive. "You know, I just don't spend that much time on him. . . . And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."
Oct. 13, 2004: "Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations."
Jan. 31, 2006: "Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder -- and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously."
May 25, 2006: "I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner -- you know, 'Wanted dead or alive,' that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted, and so I learned from that."
July 4, 2006: The New York Times reports that the CIA last year disbanded a secret unit assigned to track down bin Laden and his top lieutenants in an effort to focus on "regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals."
July 7, 2006: At a press conference in Chicago, Bush calls the Times report "just an incorrect story." "I mean, we got a -- we're -- we got a lot of assets looking for Osama bin Laden. So whatever you want to read in that story, it's just not true, period." Asked if he's still on the hunt for bin Laden, the president says: "Absolutely. No ands, ifs or buts. And in my judgment, it's just a matter of time, unless we stop looking. And we're not going to stop looking so long as I'm the president." Bush said he had announced regret over the "dead or alive" comment only because "my wife got on me for talking that way."
-- Tim Grieve
Wrap...
Dead or alive, more or less
Sometimes, it's hard to keep up.
Sept. 17, 2001: George W. Bush is asked if he wants Osama bin Laden dead. "I want justice," he says. "There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'"
March 13, 2002: At a press conference, Bush says that he doesn't know if bin Laden is dead or alive. "You know, I just don't spend that much time on him. . . . And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."
Oct. 13, 2004: "Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations."
Jan. 31, 2006: "Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder -- and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously."
May 25, 2006: "I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner -- you know, 'Wanted dead or alive,' that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted, and so I learned from that."
July 4, 2006: The New York Times reports that the CIA last year disbanded a secret unit assigned to track down bin Laden and his top lieutenants in an effort to focus on "regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals."
July 7, 2006: At a press conference in Chicago, Bush calls the Times report "just an incorrect story." "I mean, we got a -- we're -- we got a lot of assets looking for Osama bin Laden. So whatever you want to read in that story, it's just not true, period." Asked if he's still on the hunt for bin Laden, the president says: "Absolutely. No ands, ifs or buts. And in my judgment, it's just a matter of time, unless we stop looking. And we're not going to stop looking so long as I'm the president." Bush said he had announced regret over the "dead or alive" comment only because "my wife got on me for talking that way."
-- Tim Grieve
Wrap...
"Plastic Panic" is a good name for this....
From money.cnn.com :
It was a hysterical government trumpeting that everyone was going to die when swine flu mutated and jumped species and human-to-human. People freaked out. The people that got the vaccine got sick and no one got the swine flu. It never jumped human to human although there were isolated incidences of species jumping.
The bird flu is very real and can be a problem. You can (as things stand now) avoid the bird flu by not playing with sick live chickens.
It also does not appear to be behaving as the trumpeters are trying to drum up fear and trepidation.
There have been incidents where families have contracted bird flu and it has appeared to spread within a family. This was only 1 isolated case in Vietnam and has not occurred anywhere else.
If you want to really worry about something, worry about West Nile or Lyme disease.
As far as Tamiflu, Rummy made an absolute obscene killing on this stuff. Tamiflu does appear to be effective, in a small way.
So far, as of now, the virus has not mutated into one capable of jumping species. I'd suggest you not spend a lot of time with live chickens and you probably and hopefully will be fine.
The latest occurrences of bird flu also appear to be milder - viruses morph at a phenomenally rapid rate.
Check out the connection:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/31/news/newsmakers/fortune_rumsfeld/?cnn=yes
Wrap... [thanks, Chrissie!]
It was a hysterical government trumpeting that everyone was going to die when swine flu mutated and jumped species and human-to-human. People freaked out. The people that got the vaccine got sick and no one got the swine flu. It never jumped human to human although there were isolated incidences of species jumping.
The bird flu is very real and can be a problem. You can (as things stand now) avoid the bird flu by not playing with sick live chickens.
It also does not appear to be behaving as the trumpeters are trying to drum up fear and trepidation.
There have been incidents where families have contracted bird flu and it has appeared to spread within a family. This was only 1 isolated case in Vietnam and has not occurred anywhere else.
If you want to really worry about something, worry about West Nile or Lyme disease.
As far as Tamiflu, Rummy made an absolute obscene killing on this stuff. Tamiflu does appear to be effective, in a small way.
So far, as of now, the virus has not mutated into one capable of jumping species. I'd suggest you not spend a lot of time with live chickens and you probably and hopefully will be fine.
The latest occurrences of bird flu also appear to be milder - viruses morph at a phenomenally rapid rate.
Check out the connection:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/31/news/newsmakers/fortune_rumsfeld/?cnn=yes
Wrap... [thanks, Chrissie!]
Friday, July 07, 2006
Time to fix Gitmo...
From Secrecy News:
GEN. MCCAFFREY VISITS GUANTANAMO"
Arrogance, secrecy, and bad judgment have mired us in a mess inGuantanamo from which we are having great difficulty in extricatingourselves," wrote U.S. Army Gen. (Ret.) Barry R. McCaffrey in a reporton his recent trip to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay."
The JTF Guantanamo Detention Center is the most professional, firm,humane and carefully supervised confinement operation that I haveever personally observed," he stated.
At the same time, "Much of the international community views theGuantanamo Detention Center as a place of shame and routine violationof human rights. This view is not correct. However, there will be no possibility of correcting that view."
"There is now no possible political support for Guantanamo going forward," Gen. McCaffrey wrote."We need a political-military decisive move to break the deadlock" and to permit the closure of the Guantanamo detention facility.
Gen. McCaffrey proposed a combination of steps including transfer of as many detainees as possible to their host countries, criminal trials for some, and efforts to engage foreign and international legal organs to assume jurisdiction. "We need to rapidly weed out as many detainees as possible and return them to their host nation with an evidence package as complete as we can produce. We can probably dump 2/3 of the detainees in the next 24 months."
"Many we will encounter again armed with an AK47 on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. They will join the 120,000 + fighters we now contend with in those places of combat."
But even if that is so, he wrote, "It may be cheaper and cleaner to kill them in combat than sit on them for the next 15 years."
"We need to be completely transparent with the international legal and media communities about the operations of our detention procedures wherever they are located," Gen. McCaffrey advised.
A copy of Gen. McCaffrey's June 28, 2006 trip report on his June 18-19 trip to Guantanamo is available here: http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/mccaffrey.pdf
Wrap...
GEN. MCCAFFREY VISITS GUANTANAMO"
Arrogance, secrecy, and bad judgment have mired us in a mess inGuantanamo from which we are having great difficulty in extricatingourselves," wrote U.S. Army Gen. (Ret.) Barry R. McCaffrey in a reporton his recent trip to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay."
The JTF Guantanamo Detention Center is the most professional, firm,humane and carefully supervised confinement operation that I haveever personally observed," he stated.
At the same time, "Much of the international community views theGuantanamo Detention Center as a place of shame and routine violationof human rights. This view is not correct. However, there will be no possibility of correcting that view."
"There is now no possible political support for Guantanamo going forward," Gen. McCaffrey wrote."We need a political-military decisive move to break the deadlock" and to permit the closure of the Guantanamo detention facility.
Gen. McCaffrey proposed a combination of steps including transfer of as many detainees as possible to their host countries, criminal trials for some, and efforts to engage foreign and international legal organs to assume jurisdiction. "We need to rapidly weed out as many detainees as possible and return them to their host nation with an evidence package as complete as we can produce. We can probably dump 2/3 of the detainees in the next 24 months."
"Many we will encounter again armed with an AK47 on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. They will join the 120,000 + fighters we now contend with in those places of combat."
But even if that is so, he wrote, "It may be cheaper and cleaner to kill them in combat than sit on them for the next 15 years."
"We need to be completely transparent with the international legal and media communities about the operations of our detention procedures wherever they are located," Gen. McCaffrey advised.
A copy of Gen. McCaffrey's June 28, 2006 trip report on his June 18-19 trip to Guantanamo is available here: http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/mccaffrey.pdf
Wrap...
We, the people, need to....
From writers talking...
1st writer:
"All I have to say is that I sincerely hope there are enough good lawyers to save us all cause that's what it's gonna take. " Betty
2nd writer:
Good lawyers willing to fight the good fight can help, no question, but what is really needed in this country is for a majority of the hard-working folks to wake up to how political demogogues have set out in the past to play on their fears and passions, and how they are continuing to do so on a regular basis right now.
At some point, if the greatness of the American dream is ever to be reasserted and recognized by our people and by others around the world, people have got to understand the kinds of deliberate political and social ploys to which they have been subject.
As a group, as a majority, our voting citizens have got to recognize that those who are the first to leap up on the podiums, and the first to play ear-splitting chords of patriotism and religion, are not necessarily (or even usually) the leaders we want to depend upon for the long haul. Until people become aware that these "tools" (tapping as they do directly into our emotions, fears and prejudices) are the most common devices used by these All-American phonies to get us to dance to the tunes they want us to follow--until we as a people, as a voting public, know and understand this, we will remain in trouble as a nation and as people and it will take more than dedicated lawyers to pull our fat out of the fire.
The first need is for us as a people to regain some genuine respect once again for the whole idea of dissent and political differences (the very circulatory system of a thriving democracy). We have to value those who have distinquished themselves by intellectual work and achievment, who have demonstrably succeeded by actually using their minds to solve problems--people who are skilled at thinking things through on a daily, regular basis.
We need to acknowledge once again that university degrees are not something to be made mock of, and that they are not just a "ticket" to making more money in our materialistic society--but rather, that genuine intellectual accomplishment is something to be respected, not disparaged and villified--not if we really seek to find again the greatness of which this country is capable.
We need to recapture, somehow, some genuine tolerance and respect for the differences between us--differences not only of color and religious belief and sexuality---but differences in our views and perspectives both politically and socially.
Clearly, having an anti-intellectual buffoon at the helm is not a plus for us in this struggle, nor is having a leader who is surrounded by political hacks and minions who make easy capital out of the fact that an opponent is well-educated, or that he speaks other languages, or that he is a liberal (and therefore, ipso facto, a traitor and a weakling).
The direction in which our country moves now and in the future, where we go as a nation and how we get there, depends largely on the thinking or lack of thinking given to these matters by those who have reached the age of reason, and who, for better or worse, register to vote.
What friends we make and keep throughout the world, what enemies we target and deal effectively with--these require much more thought and concern on the part of the voting public than has been demonstrated in the last several decades.
In sum, we need a sea change in the social and political climate, one that shoves the "no-nothing" haters back into their holes. If we are ever going to regain the stature we once held so proudly on the world stage, we will need a lot more than we've been getting from those spin-doctors inside the beltway, and a lot more than the college-boy slogans and the revivalist camp meeting whoop-dee-doos we have been getting from this administration.
Ed
Wrap...
1st writer:
"All I have to say is that I sincerely hope there are enough good lawyers to save us all cause that's what it's gonna take. " Betty
2nd writer:
Good lawyers willing to fight the good fight can help, no question, but what is really needed in this country is for a majority of the hard-working folks to wake up to how political demogogues have set out in the past to play on their fears and passions, and how they are continuing to do so on a regular basis right now.
At some point, if the greatness of the American dream is ever to be reasserted and recognized by our people and by others around the world, people have got to understand the kinds of deliberate political and social ploys to which they have been subject.
As a group, as a majority, our voting citizens have got to recognize that those who are the first to leap up on the podiums, and the first to play ear-splitting chords of patriotism and religion, are not necessarily (or even usually) the leaders we want to depend upon for the long haul. Until people become aware that these "tools" (tapping as they do directly into our emotions, fears and prejudices) are the most common devices used by these All-American phonies to get us to dance to the tunes they want us to follow--until we as a people, as a voting public, know and understand this, we will remain in trouble as a nation and as people and it will take more than dedicated lawyers to pull our fat out of the fire.
The first need is for us as a people to regain some genuine respect once again for the whole idea of dissent and political differences (the very circulatory system of a thriving democracy). We have to value those who have distinquished themselves by intellectual work and achievment, who have demonstrably succeeded by actually using their minds to solve problems--people who are skilled at thinking things through on a daily, regular basis.
We need to acknowledge once again that university degrees are not something to be made mock of, and that they are not just a "ticket" to making more money in our materialistic society--but rather, that genuine intellectual accomplishment is something to be respected, not disparaged and villified--not if we really seek to find again the greatness of which this country is capable.
We need to recapture, somehow, some genuine tolerance and respect for the differences between us--differences not only of color and religious belief and sexuality---but differences in our views and perspectives both politically and socially.
Clearly, having an anti-intellectual buffoon at the helm is not a plus for us in this struggle, nor is having a leader who is surrounded by political hacks and minions who make easy capital out of the fact that an opponent is well-educated, or that he speaks other languages, or that he is a liberal (and therefore, ipso facto, a traitor and a weakling).
The direction in which our country moves now and in the future, where we go as a nation and how we get there, depends largely on the thinking or lack of thinking given to these matters by those who have reached the age of reason, and who, for better or worse, register to vote.
What friends we make and keep throughout the world, what enemies we target and deal effectively with--these require much more thought and concern on the part of the voting public than has been demonstrated in the last several decades.
In sum, we need a sea change in the social and political climate, one that shoves the "no-nothing" haters back into their holes. If we are ever going to regain the stature we once held so proudly on the world stage, we will need a lot more than we've been getting from those spin-doctors inside the beltway, and a lot more than the college-boy slogans and the revivalist camp meeting whoop-dee-doos we have been getting from this administration.
Ed
Wrap...
Now's the time for Court Marshals...
From NY Times via truthout.org :
Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Asserts
By John Kifner
The New York Times
Friday 07 July 2006
A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.
"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org . "That's a problem."
A Defense Department spokeswoman said officials there could not comment on the report because they had not yet seen it.
The center called on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to appoint a task force to study the problem, declare a new zero tolerance policy and strictly enforce it.
The report said that neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance, whose founder, William Pierce, wrote "The Turner Diaries," the novel that was the inspiration and blueprint for Timothy J. McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, sought to enroll followers in the Army to get training for a race war.
The groups are being abetted, the report said, by pressure on recruiters, particularly for the Army, to meet quotas that are more difficult to reach because of the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq.
The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."
Mr. Barfield said Army recruiters struggled last year to meet goals. "They don't want to make a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military," he said, "because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they'll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."
The 1996 crackdown on extremists came after revelations that Mr. McVeigh had espoused far-right ideas when he was in the Army and recruited two fellow soldiers to aid his bomb plot. Those revelations were followed by a furor that developed when three white paratroopers were convicted of the random slaying of a black couple in order to win tattoos and 19 others were discharged for participating in neo-Nazi activities.
The defense secretary at the time, William Perry, said the rules were meant to leave no room for racist and extremist activities within the military. But the report said Mr. Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, Wash., had said that he had provided evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year, but that only two had been discharged. He also said there was an online network of neo-Nazis.
"They're communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military," he said. "Several of these individuals have since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq."
The report cited accounts by neo-Nazis of their infiltration of the military, including a discussion on the white supremacist Web site Stormfront. "There are others among you in the forces," one participant wrote. "You are never alone."
An article in the National Alliance magazine Resistance urged skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light infantry units.
The Southern Poverty Law Center identified the author as Steven Barry, who it said was a former Special Forces officer who was the alliance's "military unit coordinator."
"Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war," he wrote. "It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed.' "
He concluded: "As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood."
Wrap...
Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Asserts
By John Kifner
The New York Times
Friday 07 July 2006
A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.
"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org . "That's a problem."
A Defense Department spokeswoman said officials there could not comment on the report because they had not yet seen it.
The center called on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to appoint a task force to study the problem, declare a new zero tolerance policy and strictly enforce it.
The report said that neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance, whose founder, William Pierce, wrote "The Turner Diaries," the novel that was the inspiration and blueprint for Timothy J. McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, sought to enroll followers in the Army to get training for a race war.
The groups are being abetted, the report said, by pressure on recruiters, particularly for the Army, to meet quotas that are more difficult to reach because of the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq.
The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."
Mr. Barfield said Army recruiters struggled last year to meet goals. "They don't want to make a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military," he said, "because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they'll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."
The 1996 crackdown on extremists came after revelations that Mr. McVeigh had espoused far-right ideas when he was in the Army and recruited two fellow soldiers to aid his bomb plot. Those revelations were followed by a furor that developed when three white paratroopers were convicted of the random slaying of a black couple in order to win tattoos and 19 others were discharged for participating in neo-Nazi activities.
The defense secretary at the time, William Perry, said the rules were meant to leave no room for racist and extremist activities within the military. But the report said Mr. Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, Wash., had said that he had provided evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year, but that only two had been discharged. He also said there was an online network of neo-Nazis.
"They're communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military," he said. "Several of these individuals have since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq."
The report cited accounts by neo-Nazis of their infiltration of the military, including a discussion on the white supremacist Web site Stormfront. "There are others among you in the forces," one participant wrote. "You are never alone."
An article in the National Alliance magazine Resistance urged skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light infantry units.
The Southern Poverty Law Center identified the author as Steven Barry, who it said was a former Special Forces officer who was the alliance's "military unit coordinator."
"Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war," he wrote. "It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed.' "
He concluded: "As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood."
Wrap...
Mark Morford counting down the minutes....
From SFGate.com :
George W. Bush Is Dead To Me Nation cringes as the worst president ever continues long, painful slog to the end
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, July 7, 2006
It is like some sort of virus. It is like some sort of weird and painful rash on your face that makes you embarrassed to walk out the door and so you sit there day after day, waiting for it to go away, slathering on ointment and Bactine and scotch. And yet still it lingers.
Some days the pain is so searing and hot you want to cut off your own head with a nail file. Other days it is numb and pain-free and seemingly OK, to the point where you think it might finally be all gone and you allow yourself a hint of a whisper of a positive feeling, right up until you look in the mirror, and scream.
George W. Bush is just like that.
Everyone I know has had enough. Everyone I know is just about done. There is this threshold of happy deadened disgust, this point where the body simply resigns itself to the pain, a point where the disease, the poison has seeped so deeply into the bones that you just have to laugh and shrug it all off and go for a drink. Or 10.
I was having cocktails recently with a group of people, among whom were two lifetime Republicans, each in his 60s, corporate businessmen, one admittedly slightly more moderate than the other (to the point where, after once hearing a senator read off a long list of Bush's hideous environmental atrocities, actually let his conscience lead his choice and ended up voting for Kerry) but nevertheless both devoted members of the party.
Bush came up, as a topic, as a cancer, as a fetid miasma in the air. They were both shaking their heads. They were sighing heavily. They were both, in a word, disgusted. The more staunchly conservative of the two even went so far as to say he was so embarrassed and humiliated by this president, by this administration, so appalled at all the war atrocities and the wiretapping and the misuse of law, the fiscal irresponsibility and the abuse of the lower classes and the outright arrogance, that if the Dems could somehow produce a decent moderate candidate with a brain, he'd have zero problem switching allegiances and voting for him. Or her.
It may not sound like much. It may not seem like a major shift. But it is, in its way, sort of massive. For thoughtful Repubs with a conscience (they actually exist, I have seen them), there is little left to defend. There is little this administration has done among all categories of ostensible GOP values that they can look to with any sort of pride. Medicare? Shrinking the budget? Smaller government? Less intervention in our lives? Reduced spending? Increased respect in the international community? Responsible international citizen? Ha. Name your topic, BushCo has failed. Spectacularly. Intentionally.
Indeed, countless Dems were disappointed with Clinton's behavior during Monicagate. Many were ashamed that he would cheapen the office so badly by such trashy moral behavior.
But that was just a cheap little affair (our allies never understood all the fuss anyway). This was never the attitude toward Clinton's politics, his capacity to understand complex issues, his astounding political savvy. No one anywhere doubted he made the country richer, more environmentally conscious, more stable, more respected and admired. Clinton was globally adored not only for his charisma but for his contributions to world peace. Plus he could actually point to Afghanistan on a map.
What a difference a handful of years makes. Now, overseas, we are a joke. A threat. A toxin. We are considered reckless and arrogant and ignorant, dangerous not just to the rest of the world but to the overall health of the planet. No one anywhere understands how a man like Bush can be the leader of the Free World, stolen election or no.
Sure, smarter Europeans know full well that the United States is deeply divided between the pseudo-religious right-wing warmongers who control a tiny cadre of the powerful elite, and, well, everyone else. It does not matter. America's reputation as a powerful and respected diplomatic peacekeeper, as the nation that sets the standards for human rights and economic freedom and choice, is hobbled. Crippled. Is very nearly dead. How quickly can we recover? How much damage has been done? History will tell, and it will be ugly indeed.
Interesting feature interview with Al Gore in Rolling Stone recently. Gore mentions two amazing things: one is the discussion he's had with generals regarding Iraq, with one coming right out and admitting that Bush's disastrous Iraq war will go down as the worst invasion in American history, our greatest misstep, our most costly and debilitating mistake. Among top brass in the know, of this there is little question.
The other was about the discussions Gore's had with various major corporate CEOs about Gore's pet issue, global warming, and how obvious it is that 15 minutes after BushCo leaves office, we will have a radically new global warming policy. In other words, Bush won't do a thing about it in the next two years, despite how obvious it shall become that we are in crisis, simply because he can't risk finally coming out and admitting yet another enormous policy disaster. Not to mention how nearly six years of enviro policy abuse, from air quality to water to forestry to pollution deregulation on all his industrial pals, can't be undone with a smirk and a prayer.
Which is just another way of saying we are currently stuck. We are swirling around the bottom of the drain, clinging on to anything that might hold us from going under for just a little while longer. We have to let the neocon disease run its course, and just pray that at the end of it all the scarring and the pain and damage will not be so permanent, and so hideous, that we can't be seen in public for a decade.
This is where it stands: Bush can in no way risk alienating the ultra-right-wing bonk-job contingent that put him in office (they are, considering Bush's 32-percent approval rating, the only ones left even remotely supporting him -- even though, according to many estimates, they're starting to abandon him, too), and hence all policy and all agenda items from here on out will be even more vicious and desperate in an attempt to shore up the base. Hence trying to mutilate the Constitution to ban gay marriage. Hence attacking the New York Times and claiming newspapers are endangering American lives.
In other words, Bush's latest nasty, Rove-designed salvos and upcoming attacks to save a sliver of power and pride and sneering GOP control are just the beginning.
However -- praise Jesus and pass the scotch -- they are the beginning of the end.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Wrap...
George W. Bush Is Dead To Me Nation cringes as the worst president ever continues long, painful slog to the end
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, July 7, 2006
It is like some sort of virus. It is like some sort of weird and painful rash on your face that makes you embarrassed to walk out the door and so you sit there day after day, waiting for it to go away, slathering on ointment and Bactine and scotch. And yet still it lingers.
Some days the pain is so searing and hot you want to cut off your own head with a nail file. Other days it is numb and pain-free and seemingly OK, to the point where you think it might finally be all gone and you allow yourself a hint of a whisper of a positive feeling, right up until you look in the mirror, and scream.
George W. Bush is just like that.
Everyone I know has had enough. Everyone I know is just about done. There is this threshold of happy deadened disgust, this point where the body simply resigns itself to the pain, a point where the disease, the poison has seeped so deeply into the bones that you just have to laugh and shrug it all off and go for a drink. Or 10.
I was having cocktails recently with a group of people, among whom were two lifetime Republicans, each in his 60s, corporate businessmen, one admittedly slightly more moderate than the other (to the point where, after once hearing a senator read off a long list of Bush's hideous environmental atrocities, actually let his conscience lead his choice and ended up voting for Kerry) but nevertheless both devoted members of the party.
Bush came up, as a topic, as a cancer, as a fetid miasma in the air. They were both shaking their heads. They were sighing heavily. They were both, in a word, disgusted. The more staunchly conservative of the two even went so far as to say he was so embarrassed and humiliated by this president, by this administration, so appalled at all the war atrocities and the wiretapping and the misuse of law, the fiscal irresponsibility and the abuse of the lower classes and the outright arrogance, that if the Dems could somehow produce a decent moderate candidate with a brain, he'd have zero problem switching allegiances and voting for him. Or her.
It may not sound like much. It may not seem like a major shift. But it is, in its way, sort of massive. For thoughtful Repubs with a conscience (they actually exist, I have seen them), there is little left to defend. There is little this administration has done among all categories of ostensible GOP values that they can look to with any sort of pride. Medicare? Shrinking the budget? Smaller government? Less intervention in our lives? Reduced spending? Increased respect in the international community? Responsible international citizen? Ha. Name your topic, BushCo has failed. Spectacularly. Intentionally.
Indeed, countless Dems were disappointed with Clinton's behavior during Monicagate. Many were ashamed that he would cheapen the office so badly by such trashy moral behavior.
But that was just a cheap little affair (our allies never understood all the fuss anyway). This was never the attitude toward Clinton's politics, his capacity to understand complex issues, his astounding political savvy. No one anywhere doubted he made the country richer, more environmentally conscious, more stable, more respected and admired. Clinton was globally adored not only for his charisma but for his contributions to world peace. Plus he could actually point to Afghanistan on a map.
What a difference a handful of years makes. Now, overseas, we are a joke. A threat. A toxin. We are considered reckless and arrogant and ignorant, dangerous not just to the rest of the world but to the overall health of the planet. No one anywhere understands how a man like Bush can be the leader of the Free World, stolen election or no.
Sure, smarter Europeans know full well that the United States is deeply divided between the pseudo-religious right-wing warmongers who control a tiny cadre of the powerful elite, and, well, everyone else. It does not matter. America's reputation as a powerful and respected diplomatic peacekeeper, as the nation that sets the standards for human rights and economic freedom and choice, is hobbled. Crippled. Is very nearly dead. How quickly can we recover? How much damage has been done? History will tell, and it will be ugly indeed.
Interesting feature interview with Al Gore in Rolling Stone recently. Gore mentions two amazing things: one is the discussion he's had with generals regarding Iraq, with one coming right out and admitting that Bush's disastrous Iraq war will go down as the worst invasion in American history, our greatest misstep, our most costly and debilitating mistake. Among top brass in the know, of this there is little question.
The other was about the discussions Gore's had with various major corporate CEOs about Gore's pet issue, global warming, and how obvious it is that 15 minutes after BushCo leaves office, we will have a radically new global warming policy. In other words, Bush won't do a thing about it in the next two years, despite how obvious it shall become that we are in crisis, simply because he can't risk finally coming out and admitting yet another enormous policy disaster. Not to mention how nearly six years of enviro policy abuse, from air quality to water to forestry to pollution deregulation on all his industrial pals, can't be undone with a smirk and a prayer.
Which is just another way of saying we are currently stuck. We are swirling around the bottom of the drain, clinging on to anything that might hold us from going under for just a little while longer. We have to let the neocon disease run its course, and just pray that at the end of it all the scarring and the pain and damage will not be so permanent, and so hideous, that we can't be seen in public for a decade.
This is where it stands: Bush can in no way risk alienating the ultra-right-wing bonk-job contingent that put him in office (they are, considering Bush's 32-percent approval rating, the only ones left even remotely supporting him -- even though, according to many estimates, they're starting to abandon him, too), and hence all policy and all agenda items from here on out will be even more vicious and desperate in an attempt to shore up the base. Hence trying to mutilate the Constitution to ban gay marriage. Hence attacking the New York Times and claiming newspapers are endangering American lives.
In other words, Bush's latest nasty, Rove-designed salvos and upcoming attacks to save a sliver of power and pride and sneering GOP control are just the beginning.
However -- praise Jesus and pass the scotch -- they are the beginning of the end.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Wrap...
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Taking Bush's poop home...Really!!!
From Waynemadsenreport.com :
July 4, 2006 -- Even Bush's crap is classified top secret.
According to our Austrian sources, Austrian newspapers are currently abuzz with special security details of George W. Bush's recent trip to Vienna. Although the heavy-handed Gestapo-like security measures meted out to Viennese home owners, business proprietors, and pedestrians by US Secret Service agents and local police before and during Bush's visit received widespread Austrian media attention, it was White House "toilet security" ("TOILSEC"), which has Austrians talking the most.
The White House flew in a special portable toilet to Vienna for Bush's personal use during his visit. The Bush White House is so concerned about Bush's security, the veil of secrecy extends over the president's bodily excretions. The special port-a-john captured Bush's feces and urine and flew the waste material back to the United States in the event some enterprising foreign intelligence agency conducted a sewage pipe operation designed to trap and examine Bush's waste material. One can only wonder why the White House is taking such extraordinary security measures for the presidential poop.
In the past, similar operations were conducted against foreign leaders to determine their medical condition. However, these intelligence operations were directed against dictators in countries where even the medical conditions of the top political leaders were considered "state secrets."
The Israeli Mossad conducted one such operation against Syrian President Hafez Assad when he visited Amman, Jordan in Feb. 1999 for the funeral of King Hussein. The Mossad and its Jordanian counterpart installed a special toilet in Assad's hotel room that led not to a pipe but to a specimen canister. Assad suffered from diabetes and cancer and the operation was designed to discover the actual medical condition of the ailing leader.
During Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to Washington in 1987, the CIA reportedly placed a special trap under a sewage tank to collect the Soviet leader's bodily waste for analysis. More recently, the CIA was reported to have collected waste samples from Ugandan President-dictator Yoweri Museveni's toilet when he visited Washington.
Even Bush's toilet paper was flown in from the U.S. Air Base at Ramstein, Germany. In addition, Bush's food was flown in from the United States and tested with special chemicals before he ate it. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was shot by a firing squad in 1989, was the last major European leader to constantly use a food tester. The last frequent state visitor to Vienna, who always relied on a food tester, was Adolf Hitler.
Wrap...
July 4, 2006 -- Even Bush's crap is classified top secret.
According to our Austrian sources, Austrian newspapers are currently abuzz with special security details of George W. Bush's recent trip to Vienna. Although the heavy-handed Gestapo-like security measures meted out to Viennese home owners, business proprietors, and pedestrians by US Secret Service agents and local police before and during Bush's visit received widespread Austrian media attention, it was White House "toilet security" ("TOILSEC"), which has Austrians talking the most.
The White House flew in a special portable toilet to Vienna for Bush's personal use during his visit. The Bush White House is so concerned about Bush's security, the veil of secrecy extends over the president's bodily excretions. The special port-a-john captured Bush's feces and urine and flew the waste material back to the United States in the event some enterprising foreign intelligence agency conducted a sewage pipe operation designed to trap and examine Bush's waste material. One can only wonder why the White House is taking such extraordinary security measures for the presidential poop.
In the past, similar operations were conducted against foreign leaders to determine their medical condition. However, these intelligence operations were directed against dictators in countries where even the medical conditions of the top political leaders were considered "state secrets."
The Israeli Mossad conducted one such operation against Syrian President Hafez Assad when he visited Amman, Jordan in Feb. 1999 for the funeral of King Hussein. The Mossad and its Jordanian counterpart installed a special toilet in Assad's hotel room that led not to a pipe but to a specimen canister. Assad suffered from diabetes and cancer and the operation was designed to discover the actual medical condition of the ailing leader.
During Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to Washington in 1987, the CIA reportedly placed a special trap under a sewage tank to collect the Soviet leader's bodily waste for analysis. More recently, the CIA was reported to have collected waste samples from Ugandan President-dictator Yoweri Museveni's toilet when he visited Washington.
Even Bush's toilet paper was flown in from the U.S. Air Base at Ramstein, Germany. In addition, Bush's food was flown in from the United States and tested with special chemicals before he ate it. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was shot by a firing squad in 1989, was the last major European leader to constantly use a food tester. The last frequent state visitor to Vienna, who always relied on a food tester, was Adolf Hitler.
Wrap...
A few choice books....
From Publishers Lunch Weekly:
FICTION/DEBUT:
Wisconsin bookseller Ellen Baker's KEEPING THE HOUSE, a multigenerational saga of the downfall of a Midwestern family, through the eyes of a lonely new bride and youngest member of a small town's sewing circle as she attempts to uncover the family's story by secretly caring for their abandoned Victorian house, to Kate Medina at Random House, in a pre-empt, for two books, by Marly Rusoff at Marly Rusoff & Associates (NA).
FOREIGN:
Foreign rights to Milos Forman & Jean-Claude Carriere's GOYA'S GHOSTS, the novel of their upcoming film about the Spanish painter Francisco Goya, set in Spain when the Revolution has sent neighboring France into turmoil and the Spanish church decides to bring back the dreaded Inquisition, Goya's teenage muse is falsely accused of heresy, raped, and imprisoned due to the manipulations of an ambitious and zealous monk - the story opposes the priest's extremism to Goya's search to portray humankind, to Tusquets in Spain, in a good deal; to ASA in Portugal; Compahnia Das Letras in Brazil; Empuries in Catalan; DTV in Germany; Rizzoli in Italy; Livanis in Greece; Vatan in Turkey; Hyndae Munhak in South Korea; Beltek in Japan; Geleos in Russia; Ulpius in Hungary; Alpress in the Czech Republic; Ucila in Slovenia; Metafora in Slovakia; and Laguna in Serbia, by Rebecca Byers and Sylvie Breguet at Editions Plon.
HISTORY/POLITICS/CURRENT AFFAIRS:
Former CIA station chief for Europe Tyler Drumheller's ON THE BRINK: How the White House Has Compromised American Intelligence, exploring the gradual erosion of the CIA's independence, its descent into bureaucratic inertia and its abuse by powerbrokers seeking to achieve their own political ends, along the way shedding new light on how America was propelled into war with Iraq, and the war's detrimental effect on our national security, to Philip Turner at Carroll & Graf, by Carmen Lavia at the Fifi Oscard Agency (world).carmenagent@fifioscard.com philip.turner@avalonpub.com
Former UN Weapons inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter's TARGET IRAN: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change, an exploration of the Iran nuclear crisis, which exposes the role the neo-cons are playing in inflaming the situation, to Carl Bromley at Nation Books (world).yuliab@avalonpub.com carlb@thenation.com
MEMOIR:
Dean Kohler's FLAK JACKET ROCK, co-authored by rock biographer Susan VanHecke, which tells Kohler's story of being drafted into the Vietnam War at age 18 one day after signing a recording deal with Tower Records and forming a rock band that played for the troops right in the middle of battle zones, to Phoebe Yeh at Harper, in a pre-empt, by Jodie Rhodes (world).jrhodes1@san.rr.com
Wrap...
FICTION/DEBUT:
Wisconsin bookseller Ellen Baker's KEEPING THE HOUSE, a multigenerational saga of the downfall of a Midwestern family, through the eyes of a lonely new bride and youngest member of a small town's sewing circle as she attempts to uncover the family's story by secretly caring for their abandoned Victorian house, to Kate Medina at Random House, in a pre-empt, for two books, by Marly Rusoff at Marly Rusoff & Associates (NA).
FOREIGN:
Foreign rights to Milos Forman & Jean-Claude Carriere's GOYA'S GHOSTS, the novel of their upcoming film about the Spanish painter Francisco Goya, set in Spain when the Revolution has sent neighboring France into turmoil and the Spanish church decides to bring back the dreaded Inquisition, Goya's teenage muse is falsely accused of heresy, raped, and imprisoned due to the manipulations of an ambitious and zealous monk - the story opposes the priest's extremism to Goya's search to portray humankind, to Tusquets in Spain, in a good deal; to ASA in Portugal; Compahnia Das Letras in Brazil; Empuries in Catalan; DTV in Germany; Rizzoli in Italy; Livanis in Greece; Vatan in Turkey; Hyndae Munhak in South Korea; Beltek in Japan; Geleos in Russia; Ulpius in Hungary; Alpress in the Czech Republic; Ucila in Slovenia; Metafora in Slovakia; and Laguna in Serbia, by Rebecca Byers and Sylvie Breguet at Editions Plon.
HISTORY/POLITICS/CURRENT AFFAIRS:
Former CIA station chief for Europe Tyler Drumheller's ON THE BRINK: How the White House Has Compromised American Intelligence, exploring the gradual erosion of the CIA's independence, its descent into bureaucratic inertia and its abuse by powerbrokers seeking to achieve their own political ends, along the way shedding new light on how America was propelled into war with Iraq, and the war's detrimental effect on our national security, to Philip Turner at Carroll & Graf, by Carmen Lavia at the Fifi Oscard Agency (world).carmenagent@fifioscard.com philip.turner@avalonpub.com
Former UN Weapons inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter's TARGET IRAN: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change, an exploration of the Iran nuclear crisis, which exposes the role the neo-cons are playing in inflaming the situation, to Carl Bromley at Nation Books (world).yuliab@avalonpub.com carlb@thenation.com
MEMOIR:
Dean Kohler's FLAK JACKET ROCK, co-authored by rock biographer Susan VanHecke, which tells Kohler's story of being drafted into the Vietnam War at age 18 one day after signing a recording deal with Tower Records and forming a rock band that played for the troops right in the middle of battle zones, to Phoebe Yeh at Harper, in a pre-empt, by Jodie Rhodes (world).jrhodes1@san.rr.com
Wrap...
A writer inspects the Constitution vs religion...
From a writer:
Those "letters" to the editor by James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton that became The Federalist Papers are marvelous reading about original intent. I am not reader enough to have read them all, but I have read widely on this subject, years ago out of curiosity and recently because I constructed a portion of a class around the "intelligent design" controversy.
James Madison, who wrote the First Amendment, was nothing if not clear about the amendment's intent. The Founders knew perfectly well that citizens would fight their good fight over religion before anything else, and the fight would involve power, not truth. They knew perfectly well that the history of the modern (2500 years) species is far more soaked in the blood of religious power than the sovereignty of any nation-state. People will die to spread their religion far more enthusiastically than they will risk for their country. The Founders knew that. They lived with it, and they were the intelligentsia of the day, which means they read its history. Madison was its champion.
Here is the myth so forcefully promulgated by people whose commitment is to their religion rather than to the integrity of their country: "You have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion." The Mt. Soledad cross controversy rests on that myth, as does the Delaware controversy, the famous "monkey trial," and most of the rest. The myth is a purposeful disinformation ploy, for we do not have the freedom to practice as we wish (not to practice is to practice as we wish) if we are required to adhere to or observe beliefs, rules, or icons of any other religion.
Period!
In Delaware the controversy between reference to "god" or "Jesus" is a false one, for both compromise each of our freedom to practice as we wish. Any observance, any reference to belief, any positioning of any icon, by any agency of government, at any level, for any reason, violates the original intent of the First Amendment.
The only controversy here is the one manufactured by religionists whose best interest rests on initiating ambiguity and keeping the ambiguity alive. There is no ambiguity. We ought not negotiate as though there were.
Leif
Wrap...
Those "letters" to the editor by James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton that became The Federalist Papers are marvelous reading about original intent. I am not reader enough to have read them all, but I have read widely on this subject, years ago out of curiosity and recently because I constructed a portion of a class around the "intelligent design" controversy.
James Madison, who wrote the First Amendment, was nothing if not clear about the amendment's intent. The Founders knew perfectly well that citizens would fight their good fight over religion before anything else, and the fight would involve power, not truth. They knew perfectly well that the history of the modern (2500 years) species is far more soaked in the blood of religious power than the sovereignty of any nation-state. People will die to spread their religion far more enthusiastically than they will risk for their country. The Founders knew that. They lived with it, and they were the intelligentsia of the day, which means they read its history. Madison was its champion.
Here is the myth so forcefully promulgated by people whose commitment is to their religion rather than to the integrity of their country: "You have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion." The Mt. Soledad cross controversy rests on that myth, as does the Delaware controversy, the famous "monkey trial," and most of the rest. The myth is a purposeful disinformation ploy, for we do not have the freedom to practice as we wish (not to practice is to practice as we wish) if we are required to adhere to or observe beliefs, rules, or icons of any other religion.
Period!
In Delaware the controversy between reference to "god" or "Jesus" is a false one, for both compromise each of our freedom to practice as we wish. Any observance, any reference to belief, any positioning of any icon, by any agency of government, at any level, for any reason, violates the original intent of the First Amendment.
The only controversy here is the one manufactured by religionists whose best interest rests on initiating ambiguity and keeping the ambiguity alive. There is no ambiguity. We ought not negotiate as though there were.
Leif
Wrap...
A writer thinks about Ken Lay's death...
From a writer:
I'm not the type to wish ill for others. They can take care of their own ill wishes. And under the tutelage of my father, who said, when I wished for something, "Well, wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one gets full the fastest," I tend not to wish.
As a boy, I knew what he was getting at, but his little bit there didn't work for me for the longest time -- I always figured I could fill a hand with wishes much faster than with anything else. But when I got a little older, what he meant hit me, and it all made sense. That's one of the times my father got smarter as I got older. It worked the other way, too.
All that by way of saying I don't believe much in wishes, so I'm not inclined to make wishes for a stranger like Ken Lay. I never wished him well, either. I guess what I wished for most is that the people from whom he stole would get their money back. That's a hand empty of wish-results, whether he's dead or alive. He stole it fair and square. It's not likely to go anywhere.
At least the Carnegies, Buffetts, and Gates of the world, who also stole it fair and square, have given and are giving it back. They're better people than Ken Lay, and that's a toot hard to fathom. Imagine how hard it is to be a worse human being than Andrew Carnegie. Or J.D. Rockefeller, whose exploits I recently read.
And now to my point. Our executive branch holders today are going to walk away with a staggering fortune, and while the Dick hasn't the stones to think about philanthropy, the George will likely be forced into it because of that silver spoon Molly Ivins talks about. Silver spoons tend to give, once they're stolen more than they can count.
It will be important to remember in whose blood the largess is soaked -- 2500 dead brothers, wives, and grandchildren; several tens of thousands of the same without minds, faces, and legs; two generations, and counting, of Americans paying the bill; and a Herculean struggle to reassemble our constitutional republic from the wreckage left when they leave office.
Let's be vigilant about the collective memory when people who do not remember decide to heap plaudits for a piece of the tens of millions the George stole in the course of running his war.
Leif
Wrap...
I'm not the type to wish ill for others. They can take care of their own ill wishes. And under the tutelage of my father, who said, when I wished for something, "Well, wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one gets full the fastest," I tend not to wish.
As a boy, I knew what he was getting at, but his little bit there didn't work for me for the longest time -- I always figured I could fill a hand with wishes much faster than with anything else. But when I got a little older, what he meant hit me, and it all made sense. That's one of the times my father got smarter as I got older. It worked the other way, too.
All that by way of saying I don't believe much in wishes, so I'm not inclined to make wishes for a stranger like Ken Lay. I never wished him well, either. I guess what I wished for most is that the people from whom he stole would get their money back. That's a hand empty of wish-results, whether he's dead or alive. He stole it fair and square. It's not likely to go anywhere.
At least the Carnegies, Buffetts, and Gates of the world, who also stole it fair and square, have given and are giving it back. They're better people than Ken Lay, and that's a toot hard to fathom. Imagine how hard it is to be a worse human being than Andrew Carnegie. Or J.D. Rockefeller, whose exploits I recently read.
And now to my point. Our executive branch holders today are going to walk away with a staggering fortune, and while the Dick hasn't the stones to think about philanthropy, the George will likely be forced into it because of that silver spoon Molly Ivins talks about. Silver spoons tend to give, once they're stolen more than they can count.
It will be important to remember in whose blood the largess is soaked -- 2500 dead brothers, wives, and grandchildren; several tens of thousands of the same without minds, faces, and legs; two generations, and counting, of Americans paying the bill; and a Herculean struggle to reassemble our constitutional republic from the wreckage left when they leave office.
Let's be vigilant about the collective memory when people who do not remember decide to heap plaudits for a piece of the tens of millions the George stole in the course of running his war.
Leif
Wrap...
Bush sicced Cheney on Amb. Wilson....
From The Guardian.UK :
Bush told Cheney to discredit diplomat critical of Iraq policy
· Vice-president told to put out classified information
· No instruction to out CIA agent, says president Suzanne Goldenberg in WashingtonThursday July 6, 2006The Guardian
President George Bush directed his vice-president, Dick Cheney, to take personal charge of a campaign to discredit a former ambassador who had accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence on Iraq, it emerged yesterday.
The revelation by the National Journal, a respected weekly political magazine, that Mr Bush took a personal interest in countering damaging allegations by the former ambassador, Joe Wilson, reveals a White House that was extraordinarily sensitive to any criticism of its prewar planning. It also returns the focus of the criminal investigation into the outing of a CIA agent to the White House only weeks after the senior aide Karl Rove was told he would not face prosecution.
The Journal said Mr Bush made the admission in a July 24 2004 interview in the Oval Office with the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, who is leading the investigation into the outing of the CIA agent, Valerie Plame. Ms Plame is married to Mr Wilson, who says her cover was broken in retaliation after he accused the administration of knowingly using false information on Saddam Hussein's weapons programme.
According to the National Journal, Mr Bush told prosecutors he directed Mr Cheney to disclose classified information both to defend his administration and to discredit Mr Wilson.
Elsewhere, the magazine quotes other government officials as saying that Mr Bush was very anxious to use classified information to counter Mr Wilson's charges, telling the vice-president:
"Let's get this out."
However, the president told investigators that he never directed anyone to disclose Ms Plame's identity. He also said that he was unaware Mr Cheney had directed his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to covertly leak the information, rather than formally declassify it.
Mr Libby faces prosecution for lying to investigators about his role in the outing of Ms Plame.
There was no immediate comment from the White House. The office of the special prosecutor also declined to comment yesterday.
The revelation that Mr Bush instructed Mr Cheney to personally oversee the campaign to discredit Mr Wilson arrives at an inconvenient time for a White House vehement in criticising leaks.
Last month it condemned as "disgraceful" a report in the New York Times that agents from the CIA and treasury departments had been secretly monitoring international wire transfers without court oversight.
Wrap...
Bush told Cheney to discredit diplomat critical of Iraq policy
· Vice-president told to put out classified information
· No instruction to out CIA agent, says president Suzanne Goldenberg in WashingtonThursday July 6, 2006The Guardian
President George Bush directed his vice-president, Dick Cheney, to take personal charge of a campaign to discredit a former ambassador who had accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence on Iraq, it emerged yesterday.
The revelation by the National Journal, a respected weekly political magazine, that Mr Bush took a personal interest in countering damaging allegations by the former ambassador, Joe Wilson, reveals a White House that was extraordinarily sensitive to any criticism of its prewar planning. It also returns the focus of the criminal investigation into the outing of a CIA agent to the White House only weeks after the senior aide Karl Rove was told he would not face prosecution.
The Journal said Mr Bush made the admission in a July 24 2004 interview in the Oval Office with the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, who is leading the investigation into the outing of the CIA agent, Valerie Plame. Ms Plame is married to Mr Wilson, who says her cover was broken in retaliation after he accused the administration of knowingly using false information on Saddam Hussein's weapons programme.
According to the National Journal, Mr Bush told prosecutors he directed Mr Cheney to disclose classified information both to defend his administration and to discredit Mr Wilson.
Elsewhere, the magazine quotes other government officials as saying that Mr Bush was very anxious to use classified information to counter Mr Wilson's charges, telling the vice-president:
"Let's get this out."
However, the president told investigators that he never directed anyone to disclose Ms Plame's identity. He also said that he was unaware Mr Cheney had directed his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to covertly leak the information, rather than formally declassify it.
Mr Libby faces prosecution for lying to investigators about his role in the outing of Ms Plame.
There was no immediate comment from the White House. The office of the special prosecutor also declined to comment yesterday.
The revelation that Mr Bush instructed Mr Cheney to personally oversee the campaign to discredit Mr Wilson arrives at an inconvenient time for a White House vehement in criticising leaks.
Last month it condemned as "disgraceful" a report in the New York Times that agents from the CIA and treasury departments had been secretly monitoring international wire transfers without court oversight.
Wrap...
"The Care & Handling of Spooks"
From the LA Times:
Unclassified advice for the new CIA chief
A former case officer outlines the care and handling of spooks.
By Garrett JonesJuly 1, 2006
Because this is the season for gratuitous and unsolicited advice (see any graduation ceremony near you), I thought I would offer some thoughts for former Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who took over as CIA director a month ago. I am sure many people are sharing their wisdom on the "big picture," so I will confine myself to advice on the care and feeding of the denizens of the building where I once worked.*
THEY ARE AN odd bunch at the Central Intelligence Agency, and your predecessor, Porter Goss, did not adapt well. He seemed unable to make it out of the lobby each morning without starting a fistfight. You can do better.For starters, resist any impulse to "demonstrate who is in charge." The people at the agency have never had any problem understanding who is in charge; they have on occasion had trouble believing that the person in charge knew what he was doing.
As CIA director, Goss said he did not "do" personnel, and inside the agency, it was easily the most resented remark he ever made. You have talented people working for you. Use them, and do not go to the retirees looking for the "perfect" person. They don't make them like they used to, and that's probably a good thing.
Do not try to undo all the personnel changes made by Goss. Some people needed to be pushed out. You're trying to hire back Stephen Kappes, the former field operations boss, as your deputy, and this is good and bad. Many officers respect his operational judgment, and many are angry about his alleged leaks to the media. On your team, he should keep his mouth shut.
Goss let his entourage alienate the entire building before he ever got there. Get your assistants under control. It's better to make your own enemies. You probably brought some military aides with you. Remind them that half the agency does not know the difference between a full colonel and a milkshake; those who do know don't care.
Don't ask anyone to dumb down their work for you. The CIA has a jargon that you need to learn. Before you change anything about agency culture, first you need to understand it.The executive dining room is a bad idea. You and your staff should be down in the cafeteria meeting people, not huddled up in a bunker wondering what folks think. Listen to people. They are smart and sophisticated and will usually tell you what is wrong if you give them a chance.
The RUMINT (rumor intelligence) on you is that you like "corporate speak" and prefer large, impersonal gatherings to one-on-one encounters. Work on that. Blunt, plain speech will get you further with those in the agency than anything else. If something is going to happen to them, tell them before they see it in the Los Angeles Times. "I do not know" or "I cannot tell you" are statements that spooks accept as sometimes necessary, but they will always find out if you lie to them. You are working with a bunch of spies, so you should not be surprised that RUMINT travels quickly and is surprisingly accurate. Yes, you are busy, but your first job is to make people motivated and effective. Screw this up and you are doomed.
The directorate of operations is where all the spies live. Frankly, this is a tough room. Your best move is to pick someone whom they respect to lead them — lead them, not manage them. When they are in some sand-blown flyspeck in Iraq with their lives on the line, they want a leader who cares about them and their mission, not a nice guy who is good at managing his paperwork. Once you get them a leader, you need to expect the impossible from them. Right now, everyone is afraid to make mistakes. Make it clear that you have confidence in them and will back them even if they do not succeed. This directorate exists to run high-risk, high-payoff operations; otherwise, it could be replaced by Al Jazeera.
The directorate of intelligence is where the analysts live and where the National Intelligence Estimates are produced. This place is a mess. Since the fiasco over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, it has been full of dead men walking, paralyzed with fear of making another mistake. Start over. Anyone associated with the WMD mess — and there are such people still there — needs to be retired, kicked upstairs or otherwise moved on. It may not be fair, just or efficient, but you must do it to blow the smell of failure out of the organization. Then appoint a pit bull as the quality-control officer for analysis.Your job is one of the most important in Washington, and one of the toughest. You are playing "Bet your country's future" every day. History has not been kind to your immediate predecessors. They got famous in the worst ways. Good luck. You're going to need it.
GARRETT JONES served as a case officer with the CIA in Africa, Europe and the Middle East for 17 years before retiring in 1997. A longer version of this article appears at www.fpri.org. Disclaimer: This material has been reviewed by the CIA as required by agency regulations. That review neither constitutes CIA authentication of information nor implies CIA endorsement of the author's views.
Wrap...
Unclassified advice for the new CIA chief
A former case officer outlines the care and handling of spooks.
By Garrett JonesJuly 1, 2006
Because this is the season for gratuitous and unsolicited advice (see any graduation ceremony near you), I thought I would offer some thoughts for former Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who took over as CIA director a month ago. I am sure many people are sharing their wisdom on the "big picture," so I will confine myself to advice on the care and feeding of the denizens of the building where I once worked.*
THEY ARE AN odd bunch at the Central Intelligence Agency, and your predecessor, Porter Goss, did not adapt well. He seemed unable to make it out of the lobby each morning without starting a fistfight. You can do better.For starters, resist any impulse to "demonstrate who is in charge." The people at the agency have never had any problem understanding who is in charge; they have on occasion had trouble believing that the person in charge knew what he was doing.
As CIA director, Goss said he did not "do" personnel, and inside the agency, it was easily the most resented remark he ever made. You have talented people working for you. Use them, and do not go to the retirees looking for the "perfect" person. They don't make them like they used to, and that's probably a good thing.
Do not try to undo all the personnel changes made by Goss. Some people needed to be pushed out. You're trying to hire back Stephen Kappes, the former field operations boss, as your deputy, and this is good and bad. Many officers respect his operational judgment, and many are angry about his alleged leaks to the media. On your team, he should keep his mouth shut.
Goss let his entourage alienate the entire building before he ever got there. Get your assistants under control. It's better to make your own enemies. You probably brought some military aides with you. Remind them that half the agency does not know the difference between a full colonel and a milkshake; those who do know don't care.
Don't ask anyone to dumb down their work for you. The CIA has a jargon that you need to learn. Before you change anything about agency culture, first you need to understand it.The executive dining room is a bad idea. You and your staff should be down in the cafeteria meeting people, not huddled up in a bunker wondering what folks think. Listen to people. They are smart and sophisticated and will usually tell you what is wrong if you give them a chance.
The RUMINT (rumor intelligence) on you is that you like "corporate speak" and prefer large, impersonal gatherings to one-on-one encounters. Work on that. Blunt, plain speech will get you further with those in the agency than anything else. If something is going to happen to them, tell them before they see it in the Los Angeles Times. "I do not know" or "I cannot tell you" are statements that spooks accept as sometimes necessary, but they will always find out if you lie to them. You are working with a bunch of spies, so you should not be surprised that RUMINT travels quickly and is surprisingly accurate. Yes, you are busy, but your first job is to make people motivated and effective. Screw this up and you are doomed.
The directorate of operations is where all the spies live. Frankly, this is a tough room. Your best move is to pick someone whom they respect to lead them — lead them, not manage them. When they are in some sand-blown flyspeck in Iraq with their lives on the line, they want a leader who cares about them and their mission, not a nice guy who is good at managing his paperwork. Once you get them a leader, you need to expect the impossible from them. Right now, everyone is afraid to make mistakes. Make it clear that you have confidence in them and will back them even if they do not succeed. This directorate exists to run high-risk, high-payoff operations; otherwise, it could be replaced by Al Jazeera.
The directorate of intelligence is where the analysts live and where the National Intelligence Estimates are produced. This place is a mess. Since the fiasco over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, it has been full of dead men walking, paralyzed with fear of making another mistake. Start over. Anyone associated with the WMD mess — and there are such people still there — needs to be retired, kicked upstairs or otherwise moved on. It may not be fair, just or efficient, but you must do it to blow the smell of failure out of the organization. Then appoint a pit bull as the quality-control officer for analysis.Your job is one of the most important in Washington, and one of the toughest. You are playing "Bet your country's future" every day. History has not been kind to your immediate predecessors. They got famous in the worst ways. Good luck. You're going to need it.
GARRETT JONES served as a case officer with the CIA in Africa, Europe and the Middle East for 17 years before retiring in 1997. A longer version of this article appears at www.fpri.org. Disclaimer: This material has been reviewed by the CIA as required by agency regulations. That review neither constitutes CIA authentication of information nor implies CIA endorsement of the author's views.
Wrap...
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
War and the power of photography...
From The Observer via truthout.org :
A Soldier's Story
By Paul Harris
The Observer UK
Sunday 02 July 2006
A picture made him a hero. Then his life fell apart.
James Blake Miller
A photographer's lens caught James Blake Miller smeared with blood and dirt during the battle for Falluja. In his eyes, America saw the steely determination that would bring victory in Iraq; now stress and divorce have made him a casualty of the war.
Combat can change a life in a second. The snap of a sniper's bullet or the blast of a bomb will instantly end it or turn a healthy body into a maimed wreck. But for US marine James Blake Miller what changed his life was the sudden shutter click of a war photographer's camera.
On a rooftop in Falluja, Miller was captured in a picture that has become one of the enduring images of the Iraq war. It showed his wan face, streaked with mud and blood, in a moment of reflection. His eyes stared out, tired yet determined. From his lips drooped a cigarette, curling a wisp of thin pale smoke.
That moment saw Miller, an ordinary soldier from the hills of Kentucky, turn into Marlboro Man, an everyday American hero.
The image hit the world on 10 November, 2004, as US marines stormed into Falluja to try to end a war that was supposed to have finished more than a year earlier. It appeared on newspaper front pages and made the cover of Time.
Miller's image became a symbol of steely resolve, of weary-yet-determined struggle, of the toughness of the American fighting man having a cigarette break before finishing the job. It captured a moment when most Americans still thought the invasion of Iraq a worthy undertaking.
Now Miller is a different symbol in a different time. As the war has dragged on, Miller's life has collapsed in the face of post-traumatic stress disorder. He draws a disability pension for his condition and his personal life is a wreck. He suffers from nightmares, panic attacks and survivor's guilt. Despite the immense goodwill of a grateful nation, Miller has slumped into struggle and despair. Last week came the news that he and his childhood sweetheart, Jessica, were getting divorced.
Marlboro Man is no longer an icon for the American warrior ethic. He is a symbol of pain and suffering and the enormous problems endured by veterans returning home. He has become the public face of shell-shock. No longer the victor, Miller has become one of the war's victims.
In the Appalachian hills which Miller calls home, the word for grandfather is 'papaw'. Miller's step-papaw, Joe Lee, was a Vietnam veteran. In interviews Miller has described how Papaw Joe Lee would get drunk and tell war stories. Then Papaw would get upset and tearful at the memories of death and killing in Vietnam and eventually his wife, fearful of scaring the grandchildren, would tell him to be quiet.
It was classic post-traumatic behaviour, going undiagnosed. It was also a scene played out across America in the wake of Vietnam as hundreds of thousands of disturbed and troubled veterans returned home. Now those scenes are happening again as the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan return to wives, husbands, partners and families, carrying psychological scars hidden by their apparently healthy bodies.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is not an easy condition to treat. It is tough to deal with and requires a wide range of possible approaches, on an individual's circumstances. Some will be 'cured' relatively easily. Others may take decades to deal with what they have seen or done in war. The symptoms are relatively common across the cases. They involve flashbacks, panic attacks and paranoia. A person's behaviour changes and sufferers can become violent to their loved ones. It destroys lives, often bringing on divorce, bankruptcy and suicide.
America's Department of Veterans Affairs has been caught flat-footed by the flood of sufferers. It estimates that it will have to treat 20,000 new cases this fiscal year alone. That is almost six times its initial estimate and comes after the amount of therapy sessions available for veterans has been cut by 25 per cent over the past 10 years. There are also signs the condition is left widely undiagnosed and sufferers are going untreated. One study showed that the Pentagon did not seek further treatment for eight out of 10 veterans showing signs of combat stress. Many veterans complain that their needs are ignored when they return. They say that, in the military, post-traumatic stress disorder is still seen as unmacho and seeking treatment for mental health issues as unmanly. 'There is still a stigma around psychological care. It is considered unmacho and malingering,' said Garett Reppenhagen, a former sniper and Iraq war veteran who works on veterans' issues.
Some believe the military's whole approach to the disorder is wrong, and that instead of dealing with sufferers who emerge from combat it should concentrate on mentally preparing its soldiers beforehand. That would be a policy of prevention, not cure. 'We teach these kids to fight, but we don't equip them well for the psychological aftermath. The time to do all this is in basic training,' said Dr Glenn Schiraldi of the University of Maryland who has written a book on the treatment of the disorder.
The story of how Miller became one of many sufferers is probably typical. It is only widely known because of the profile that becoming Marlboro Man gave him. Miller arrived in Iraq with his marine unit and was sent to the restive Anbar province. On 5 November, 2004, in the middle of a sandstorm, word filtered through that his unit was to join the attack on Falluja. The assault began three days later.
Two days after that, Miller's face was famous around the world. Not wanting to lose their new poster-boy, the US Marines command tried to have him pulled out of the fight. But Miller refused. He stayed and fought with his comrades. He has never fully described the events of the next few weeks, but has let slip details which are horrifying enough. There were ambushes and firefights. He has described his horror at seeing a cat make a home in the open chest cavity of a dead Iraqi. He lost his close friend, Demarkus Brown. Miller knows what it is like to look down a gun barrel at another human being and pull the trigger. 'You can make out a guy's eyes,' he told one interviewer.
After the war Miller took it as a personal mission to use his fame to highlight the stresses that veterans face when suffering with post-traumatic stress. He spoke out in the press and teamed up with the National Mental Health Association. He spoke to politicians on Capitol Hill in Washington. He became a force for not forgetting what America's returning veterans had gone through. All the while, he hinted at what was happening in his own life.
The forces that Miller spoke so passionately about were starting to destroy his own return home. During one meeting with Congressman Mike Michaud of Maine he hinted at his fears that he might end up hurting those he loved, including Jessica. 'Can you imagine waking up in the middle of the night to realise that you had harmed them in some way?' he asked Michaud.
Miller represents the new face of the American soldier - a face that bears the scars of war. It was not like that when he signed up. Before 2001 in places like Pike County, Kentucky, where Miller grew up, the US army meant a way out of poverty. It meant access to college. It meant the chance of travel and excitement.
That was why Miller joined the military. Deep in the heart of impoverished coal country there was no other way of affording the money to get the qualifications he needed to be a mechanic. But since 2001, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raging, signing up has meant combat. And even if a soldier emerges unwounded from a tour of active duty, he rarely emerges unscathed.
After his tour was up, Miller returned to Pike County and the tiny hamlet of Jonancy where his family had lived practically since the area was first settled by Europeans. The signs of trouble quickly emerged. Friends and relatives found him quick to anger. He had bad dreams where his fingers pulled imaginary triggers in his sleep. He jumped at car exhaust backfires. Jessica complained he would tighten his arm around her neck at night.
Once, on a trip to the county seat of Pikeville, he hallucinated that he saw the body of a dead Iraqi sprawled out on the ground. He took long and solitary motorbike rides, tearing up the tarmac on the back of a Harley, trying not to think about the war. He spoke of his guilt at having survived while many of his comrades did not.
'It is like a big guilt trip, day in and day out. I just lie there and rot,' he told one interviewer. It was classic survivor's guilt - a common emotion in many people who have survived traumatic experiences, whether it is combat or a train wreck. Those around him did not know how to deal with him.
'People often don't know what to do with these traumatised individuals,' Schiraldi said. 'They come home with these mental wounds and want to get things back to normal. But what they really need is a healing process. You bring these haunted memories with you.'
Miller was not given the chance to heal when his tour of duty in Iraq was over. Instead he was sent to New Orleans. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had left the city burning, flooded and being looted. Waiting offshore in a troop transport, it appeared to Miller as if he were returning to urban combat. It would be Falluja by the bayou.
When another marine in his boat made a whistling sound, like a rocket-propelled grenade, Miller suddenly blacked out. When he came to, he found he had assaulted the man, pinning him to the ground. He was honourably discharged on 10 November, 2005 - exactly one year after the photograph that made him famous was published around the globe. He was diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress.
But America still saw him as Marlboro Man. The country could not let one of its heroes have an unhappy ending. When word of his troubles leaked out people started coming to visit, or writing to him and Jessica in Jonancy. They even began to send the couple money. One man drove all the way from Kansas on a motorbike and waited for him for two days in the hope of meeting him. Miller did not show up and the biker and his wife left behind a note. It read simply: 'It will be all right.' Eunice Davis from Pleasanton, near San Francisco, read about Miller in her local newspaper. Miller had made a comment that he and Jessica had never been able to afford a proper wedding ceremony. Davis took it upon herself to organise one. She rallied hundreds of donors and helped organise a lavish ceremony.
Miller and his blushing 'bride' took their vows anew. He wore his marine uniform. A huge American flag fluttered near by. Television news crews recorded the day for posterity and prime time. That was 3 June. For a moment it seemed America - and Miller - would get a happy ending. But it was not to be. Last Sunday, barely three weeks since the ceremony, came the news of a divorce. Post-traumatic stress was to blame.
It was not just the disorder that unhinged Miller's life. Undoubtedly the stress of unexpected and unwanted fame added to the problems. Miller joined a growing list of cultural icons emerging from Iraq and it is not an easy role to play, especially for those who do not choose it.
There was Jessica Lynch, the young woman soldier whose story of kidnap and rescue was used and abused by the Pentagon to create a heroic figure for the invasion of Iraq. There was steel-jawed Pat Tillman, the former American football star turned Army Ranger whose death in Afghanistan seemed to embody the noble causes of freedom and democracy until it was revealed the army had tried to cover up the fact he had been accidentally shot by his own side.
Being an icon is not easy. 'The impact on one's life is life-altering,' said Professor Robert Thompson, a popular culture expert at Syracuse University. Miller's life became public property. He became a focus for the psychological needs and desires of strangers. Complex events such as the war in Iraq are much easier for society to deal with if the focus is on an individual's story, yet Miller always seemed to express bafflement at his fame. How had a single image made his Kentucky face one of the most famous on the planet? There is little doubt that whatever chance he had of settling back into his old life in Pike County was reduced by having to do it all in the public glare. 'When you become a symbol your ability to live your old life disappears. It is not easy to be a metaphor,' Thompson said.
Miller remains a symbol. But it is no longer that of the tough-as-nails Marlboro Man. It is of the human cost of war. As the conflict in Iraq drags on into its fourth year, it is often remarked upon how little ordinary life in America has changed. There is no draft, there is no rationing, there is no reshaping of the economy to meet military needs. There are not even any extra taxes to pay for all the men and money being sunk into the conflict.
It is, in short, easy to ignore the fact that America is fighting at all. But now Miller's story is a reminder of the price that ordinary men and women are paying for the Iraq operation. He has disappeared into a private world to try to cope with his demons. He has asked not to be disturbed by the media and other outsiders. He just wants to deal with his problems and rebuild his life and, perhaps, his marriage too. 'I'm looking for time to figure out what exactly I need to do, not just for me and Jessica but for myself as well,' he told the San Francisco Chronicle, which has developed a close relationship with him.
Hopefully he can. For Miller is now a metaphor, not of steely resolve, but of pain and loss. He is a reminder of how war can destroy even those it does not kill. How it leaves behind a trail of victims, whether they are Iraqi civilians or a kid from the Kentucky hills.
Miller is proof that not all wounds received in combat can be seen by the naked eye.
Icons and Villains
Jessica Lynch
US army supply clerk Lynch, now 23, was rescued by US special forces after being captured by Iraqis during the invasion in 2003. The first American successfully rescued since 1945 - and the first ever woman - she became a symbol of American martial heroism, but has since become a metaphor for government manipulation of the media after conflicting accounts emerged as to how and why she was rescued so dramatically from a civilian hospital. Debate mainly centred on whether Lynch was actually being held prisoner at all. She had been well treated by Iraqi doctors, and it is believed that no Iraqi soldiers were present in the hospital when it was raided by US forces. The military was later accused of treating the doctors like enemy forces and causing unnecessary damage to the clinic.
Pat Tillman
A professional American football star who abandoned fame and riches to join the elite Army Rangers, only to be killed in action, Tillman became a symbol of the self-sacrificing hero. However, when it emerged that his death had been caused by friendly fire, he became a symbol of the army's cynicism in exploiting the loss of one of its own soldiers. A series of investigations into his death has left many questions unanswered and lingering suspicions that the full truth has yet to emerge.
Lynndie England
The young woman soldier featured in photographs exposing the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, notably a photograph showing her with an Iraqi prisoner on the end of a leash. At first seen as a symbol of American military brutality, she became viewed as a scapegoat after she was convicted of criminal behaviour while senior officers largely escaped blame. England came from an impoverished background in West Virginia and that background has fuelled attacks on army recruitment policies. Those who defended the military saw the attack on the young soldier as an example of unpatriotic and elitist behaviour. England has thus also come to symbolise a growing political and social divide in America.
The Abu Ghraib Man
The figure of a hooded man standing on a box and apparently attached to electrodes became an iconic image throughout the world, especially in the Middle East. Several papers, including the New York Times, identified him as a man called Ali Shalal Qaissi, but his true identity remains in doubt and the NYT has since retracted its story. Many Americans now regard the picture as a symbol of anti-American, anti-Bush media bias. It has also been used to recall the way in which Vietnam was lost on the home front and to draw parallels suggesting that the Iraq war may be lost in the same way.
Wrap...
A Soldier's Story
By Paul Harris
The Observer UK
Sunday 02 July 2006
A picture made him a hero. Then his life fell apart.
James Blake Miller
A photographer's lens caught James Blake Miller smeared with blood and dirt during the battle for Falluja. In his eyes, America saw the steely determination that would bring victory in Iraq; now stress and divorce have made him a casualty of the war.
Combat can change a life in a second. The snap of a sniper's bullet or the blast of a bomb will instantly end it or turn a healthy body into a maimed wreck. But for US marine James Blake Miller what changed his life was the sudden shutter click of a war photographer's camera.
On a rooftop in Falluja, Miller was captured in a picture that has become one of the enduring images of the Iraq war. It showed his wan face, streaked with mud and blood, in a moment of reflection. His eyes stared out, tired yet determined. From his lips drooped a cigarette, curling a wisp of thin pale smoke.
That moment saw Miller, an ordinary soldier from the hills of Kentucky, turn into Marlboro Man, an everyday American hero.
The image hit the world on 10 November, 2004, as US marines stormed into Falluja to try to end a war that was supposed to have finished more than a year earlier. It appeared on newspaper front pages and made the cover of Time.
Miller's image became a symbol of steely resolve, of weary-yet-determined struggle, of the toughness of the American fighting man having a cigarette break before finishing the job. It captured a moment when most Americans still thought the invasion of Iraq a worthy undertaking.
Now Miller is a different symbol in a different time. As the war has dragged on, Miller's life has collapsed in the face of post-traumatic stress disorder. He draws a disability pension for his condition and his personal life is a wreck. He suffers from nightmares, panic attacks and survivor's guilt. Despite the immense goodwill of a grateful nation, Miller has slumped into struggle and despair. Last week came the news that he and his childhood sweetheart, Jessica, were getting divorced.
Marlboro Man is no longer an icon for the American warrior ethic. He is a symbol of pain and suffering and the enormous problems endured by veterans returning home. He has become the public face of shell-shock. No longer the victor, Miller has become one of the war's victims.
In the Appalachian hills which Miller calls home, the word for grandfather is 'papaw'. Miller's step-papaw, Joe Lee, was a Vietnam veteran. In interviews Miller has described how Papaw Joe Lee would get drunk and tell war stories. Then Papaw would get upset and tearful at the memories of death and killing in Vietnam and eventually his wife, fearful of scaring the grandchildren, would tell him to be quiet.
It was classic post-traumatic behaviour, going undiagnosed. It was also a scene played out across America in the wake of Vietnam as hundreds of thousands of disturbed and troubled veterans returned home. Now those scenes are happening again as the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan return to wives, husbands, partners and families, carrying psychological scars hidden by their apparently healthy bodies.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is not an easy condition to treat. It is tough to deal with and requires a wide range of possible approaches, on an individual's circumstances. Some will be 'cured' relatively easily. Others may take decades to deal with what they have seen or done in war. The symptoms are relatively common across the cases. They involve flashbacks, panic attacks and paranoia. A person's behaviour changes and sufferers can become violent to their loved ones. It destroys lives, often bringing on divorce, bankruptcy and suicide.
America's Department of Veterans Affairs has been caught flat-footed by the flood of sufferers. It estimates that it will have to treat 20,000 new cases this fiscal year alone. That is almost six times its initial estimate and comes after the amount of therapy sessions available for veterans has been cut by 25 per cent over the past 10 years. There are also signs the condition is left widely undiagnosed and sufferers are going untreated. One study showed that the Pentagon did not seek further treatment for eight out of 10 veterans showing signs of combat stress. Many veterans complain that their needs are ignored when they return. They say that, in the military, post-traumatic stress disorder is still seen as unmacho and seeking treatment for mental health issues as unmanly. 'There is still a stigma around psychological care. It is considered unmacho and malingering,' said Garett Reppenhagen, a former sniper and Iraq war veteran who works on veterans' issues.
Some believe the military's whole approach to the disorder is wrong, and that instead of dealing with sufferers who emerge from combat it should concentrate on mentally preparing its soldiers beforehand. That would be a policy of prevention, not cure. 'We teach these kids to fight, but we don't equip them well for the psychological aftermath. The time to do all this is in basic training,' said Dr Glenn Schiraldi of the University of Maryland who has written a book on the treatment of the disorder.
The story of how Miller became one of many sufferers is probably typical. It is only widely known because of the profile that becoming Marlboro Man gave him. Miller arrived in Iraq with his marine unit and was sent to the restive Anbar province. On 5 November, 2004, in the middle of a sandstorm, word filtered through that his unit was to join the attack on Falluja. The assault began three days later.
Two days after that, Miller's face was famous around the world. Not wanting to lose their new poster-boy, the US Marines command tried to have him pulled out of the fight. But Miller refused. He stayed and fought with his comrades. He has never fully described the events of the next few weeks, but has let slip details which are horrifying enough. There were ambushes and firefights. He has described his horror at seeing a cat make a home in the open chest cavity of a dead Iraqi. He lost his close friend, Demarkus Brown. Miller knows what it is like to look down a gun barrel at another human being and pull the trigger. 'You can make out a guy's eyes,' he told one interviewer.
After the war Miller took it as a personal mission to use his fame to highlight the stresses that veterans face when suffering with post-traumatic stress. He spoke out in the press and teamed up with the National Mental Health Association. He spoke to politicians on Capitol Hill in Washington. He became a force for not forgetting what America's returning veterans had gone through. All the while, he hinted at what was happening in his own life.
The forces that Miller spoke so passionately about were starting to destroy his own return home. During one meeting with Congressman Mike Michaud of Maine he hinted at his fears that he might end up hurting those he loved, including Jessica. 'Can you imagine waking up in the middle of the night to realise that you had harmed them in some way?' he asked Michaud.
Miller represents the new face of the American soldier - a face that bears the scars of war. It was not like that when he signed up. Before 2001 in places like Pike County, Kentucky, where Miller grew up, the US army meant a way out of poverty. It meant access to college. It meant the chance of travel and excitement.
That was why Miller joined the military. Deep in the heart of impoverished coal country there was no other way of affording the money to get the qualifications he needed to be a mechanic. But since 2001, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raging, signing up has meant combat. And even if a soldier emerges unwounded from a tour of active duty, he rarely emerges unscathed.
After his tour was up, Miller returned to Pike County and the tiny hamlet of Jonancy where his family had lived practically since the area was first settled by Europeans. The signs of trouble quickly emerged. Friends and relatives found him quick to anger. He had bad dreams where his fingers pulled imaginary triggers in his sleep. He jumped at car exhaust backfires. Jessica complained he would tighten his arm around her neck at night.
Once, on a trip to the county seat of Pikeville, he hallucinated that he saw the body of a dead Iraqi sprawled out on the ground. He took long and solitary motorbike rides, tearing up the tarmac on the back of a Harley, trying not to think about the war. He spoke of his guilt at having survived while many of his comrades did not.
'It is like a big guilt trip, day in and day out. I just lie there and rot,' he told one interviewer. It was classic survivor's guilt - a common emotion in many people who have survived traumatic experiences, whether it is combat or a train wreck. Those around him did not know how to deal with him.
'People often don't know what to do with these traumatised individuals,' Schiraldi said. 'They come home with these mental wounds and want to get things back to normal. But what they really need is a healing process. You bring these haunted memories with you.'
Miller was not given the chance to heal when his tour of duty in Iraq was over. Instead he was sent to New Orleans. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had left the city burning, flooded and being looted. Waiting offshore in a troop transport, it appeared to Miller as if he were returning to urban combat. It would be Falluja by the bayou.
When another marine in his boat made a whistling sound, like a rocket-propelled grenade, Miller suddenly blacked out. When he came to, he found he had assaulted the man, pinning him to the ground. He was honourably discharged on 10 November, 2005 - exactly one year after the photograph that made him famous was published around the globe. He was diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress.
But America still saw him as Marlboro Man. The country could not let one of its heroes have an unhappy ending. When word of his troubles leaked out people started coming to visit, or writing to him and Jessica in Jonancy. They even began to send the couple money. One man drove all the way from Kansas on a motorbike and waited for him for two days in the hope of meeting him. Miller did not show up and the biker and his wife left behind a note. It read simply: 'It will be all right.' Eunice Davis from Pleasanton, near San Francisco, read about Miller in her local newspaper. Miller had made a comment that he and Jessica had never been able to afford a proper wedding ceremony. Davis took it upon herself to organise one. She rallied hundreds of donors and helped organise a lavish ceremony.
Miller and his blushing 'bride' took their vows anew. He wore his marine uniform. A huge American flag fluttered near by. Television news crews recorded the day for posterity and prime time. That was 3 June. For a moment it seemed America - and Miller - would get a happy ending. But it was not to be. Last Sunday, barely three weeks since the ceremony, came the news of a divorce. Post-traumatic stress was to blame.
It was not just the disorder that unhinged Miller's life. Undoubtedly the stress of unexpected and unwanted fame added to the problems. Miller joined a growing list of cultural icons emerging from Iraq and it is not an easy role to play, especially for those who do not choose it.
There was Jessica Lynch, the young woman soldier whose story of kidnap and rescue was used and abused by the Pentagon to create a heroic figure for the invasion of Iraq. There was steel-jawed Pat Tillman, the former American football star turned Army Ranger whose death in Afghanistan seemed to embody the noble causes of freedom and democracy until it was revealed the army had tried to cover up the fact he had been accidentally shot by his own side.
Being an icon is not easy. 'The impact on one's life is life-altering,' said Professor Robert Thompson, a popular culture expert at Syracuse University. Miller's life became public property. He became a focus for the psychological needs and desires of strangers. Complex events such as the war in Iraq are much easier for society to deal with if the focus is on an individual's story, yet Miller always seemed to express bafflement at his fame. How had a single image made his Kentucky face one of the most famous on the planet? There is little doubt that whatever chance he had of settling back into his old life in Pike County was reduced by having to do it all in the public glare. 'When you become a symbol your ability to live your old life disappears. It is not easy to be a metaphor,' Thompson said.
Miller remains a symbol. But it is no longer that of the tough-as-nails Marlboro Man. It is of the human cost of war. As the conflict in Iraq drags on into its fourth year, it is often remarked upon how little ordinary life in America has changed. There is no draft, there is no rationing, there is no reshaping of the economy to meet military needs. There are not even any extra taxes to pay for all the men and money being sunk into the conflict.
It is, in short, easy to ignore the fact that America is fighting at all. But now Miller's story is a reminder of the price that ordinary men and women are paying for the Iraq operation. He has disappeared into a private world to try to cope with his demons. He has asked not to be disturbed by the media and other outsiders. He just wants to deal with his problems and rebuild his life and, perhaps, his marriage too. 'I'm looking for time to figure out what exactly I need to do, not just for me and Jessica but for myself as well,' he told the San Francisco Chronicle, which has developed a close relationship with him.
Hopefully he can. For Miller is now a metaphor, not of steely resolve, but of pain and loss. He is a reminder of how war can destroy even those it does not kill. How it leaves behind a trail of victims, whether they are Iraqi civilians or a kid from the Kentucky hills.
Miller is proof that not all wounds received in combat can be seen by the naked eye.
Icons and Villains
Jessica Lynch
US army supply clerk Lynch, now 23, was rescued by US special forces after being captured by Iraqis during the invasion in 2003. The first American successfully rescued since 1945 - and the first ever woman - she became a symbol of American martial heroism, but has since become a metaphor for government manipulation of the media after conflicting accounts emerged as to how and why she was rescued so dramatically from a civilian hospital. Debate mainly centred on whether Lynch was actually being held prisoner at all. She had been well treated by Iraqi doctors, and it is believed that no Iraqi soldiers were present in the hospital when it was raided by US forces. The military was later accused of treating the doctors like enemy forces and causing unnecessary damage to the clinic.
Pat Tillman
A professional American football star who abandoned fame and riches to join the elite Army Rangers, only to be killed in action, Tillman became a symbol of the self-sacrificing hero. However, when it emerged that his death had been caused by friendly fire, he became a symbol of the army's cynicism in exploiting the loss of one of its own soldiers. A series of investigations into his death has left many questions unanswered and lingering suspicions that the full truth has yet to emerge.
Lynndie England
The young woman soldier featured in photographs exposing the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, notably a photograph showing her with an Iraqi prisoner on the end of a leash. At first seen as a symbol of American military brutality, she became viewed as a scapegoat after she was convicted of criminal behaviour while senior officers largely escaped blame. England came from an impoverished background in West Virginia and that background has fuelled attacks on army recruitment policies. Those who defended the military saw the attack on the young soldier as an example of unpatriotic and elitist behaviour. England has thus also come to symbolise a growing political and social divide in America.
The Abu Ghraib Man
The figure of a hooded man standing on a box and apparently attached to electrodes became an iconic image throughout the world, especially in the Middle East. Several papers, including the New York Times, identified him as a man called Ali Shalal Qaissi, but his true identity remains in doubt and the NYT has since retracted its story. Many Americans now regard the picture as a symbol of anti-American, anti-Bush media bias. It has also been used to recall the way in which Vietnam was lost on the home front and to draw parallels suggesting that the Iraq war may be lost in the same way.
Wrap...
Amazon is trying hard to get this book...
NOTE: I intend to have TJ's book, come hell or high water. The CIA had better turn it loose ASAP!
Order Placed: October 1, 2005
Delayed items--your approval required
Items Ordered
Approve
Class 11 : Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class, T.J. Waters
Updated Shipping Estimate: October 19, 2006
Updated Delivery Estimate: October 23, 2006 - October 25, 2006
Your approval required by: October 19, 2006
We will still try to dispatch the above item(s) by the approval required by date(s). If this is not possible, and we have not received your approval for the delay by the date(s) listed above, we will cancel this part of your order.
Wrap...
Order Placed: October 1, 2005
Delayed items--your approval required
Items Ordered
Approve
Class 11 : Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class, T.J. Waters
Updated Shipping Estimate: October 19, 2006
Updated Delivery Estimate: October 23, 2006 - October 25, 2006
Your approval required by: October 19, 2006
We will still try to dispatch the above item(s) by the approval required by date(s). If this is not possible, and we have not received your approval for the delay by the date(s) listed above, we will cancel this part of your order.
Wrap...
Heads UP!!!
Sometimes, we just need to remember what the rules of life really are: You only need two tools: WD-40 and Duct Tape. If it doesn't move and should, use the WD-40. If it shouldn't move and does, use the duct tape.
Wrap...
Wrap...
BushCo doesn't dare burn books...They do THIS!!!
For Immediate Release: June 29, 2006
Contact: Chas Offutt (202) 265-7337
10,000 EPA SCIENTISTS PROTEST LIBRARY CLOSURES
Loss of Access to Collections Will Hamper Emergency Response and Research
Washington, DC - In an extraordinary letter of protest, representatives for 10,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientists are asking Congress to stop the Bush administration from closing the agency's network of technical research libraries.
The EPA scientists, representing more than half of the total agency workforce, contend thousands of scientific studies are being put out of reach, hindering emergency preparedness, anti-pollution enforcement and long-term research, according to the letter released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
In his proposed budget for FY 2007, President Bush deleted $2 million of support for EPA's libraries, amounting to 80% of the agency's total budget for libraries.
Without waiting for Congress to act, EPA has begun shuttering libraries, closing access to collections and reassigning staff.
The letter notes that "EPA library services are [now] greatly reduced or no longer available to the general public" in agency regional offices serving 19 states. The letter signed by presidents of 17 locals of four unions (the American Federation of Federal Employees, the National Treasury Employees Union, the National Association of Government Employees and the Engineers and Scientists of California) representing more than 10,000 EPA scientists, engineers and other technical specialists was sent to Congressional appropriators this morning and states:
* "The ability of EPA to respond to emergencies will be reduced" due to a diminishing access to "the latest research on cutting-edge homeland security and public health" topics;
* Approximately 50,000 original research documents will become completely unavailable because they are not available electronically and the agency has no budget for digitizing them; and
* The public and academic researchers may lose any access to EPA library materials as services to the public are being axed and there are no plans to maintain "the inter-library loan process."
"Eliminating library access is an absolutely awful way to run an agency devoted to public and environmental health," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. "For example, important research on the Chesapeake Bay is locked away in boxes since EPA closed its Ft. Meade library this February, yet EPA still maintains that restoring the Chesapeake is a top priority."
The dogged insistence by the Bush administration on a $2 million cut in an overall EPA budget of nearly $8 billion is particularly curious. EPA internal studies show that providing full library access saves an estimated 214,000 hours in professional staff time worth some $7.5 million annually, an amount far larger than the total agency library budget of $2.5 million.
"The Bush administration apparently decided that it was politically easier to close the libraries than to burn the books, although the end result will be the same," Ruch added, noting that the EPA Administrator brushed aside an earlier request by the scientist unions to bargain about the library shutdowns internally.
In their letter, the EPA scientists cite library closures as "one more example of the Bush administration's effort to suppress information on environmental and public health-related topics." At the same time, other outside observers, such as the Chair of EPA's own Science Advisory Board, are expressing growing concerns over the viability and coherence of EPA's research program.
Wrap....
Contact: Chas Offutt (202) 265-7337
10,000 EPA SCIENTISTS PROTEST LIBRARY CLOSURES
Loss of Access to Collections Will Hamper Emergency Response and Research
Washington, DC - In an extraordinary letter of protest, representatives for 10,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientists are asking Congress to stop the Bush administration from closing the agency's network of technical research libraries.
The EPA scientists, representing more than half of the total agency workforce, contend thousands of scientific studies are being put out of reach, hindering emergency preparedness, anti-pollution enforcement and long-term research, according to the letter released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
In his proposed budget for FY 2007, President Bush deleted $2 million of support for EPA's libraries, amounting to 80% of the agency's total budget for libraries.
Without waiting for Congress to act, EPA has begun shuttering libraries, closing access to collections and reassigning staff.
The letter notes that "EPA library services are [now] greatly reduced or no longer available to the general public" in agency regional offices serving 19 states. The letter signed by presidents of 17 locals of four unions (the American Federation of Federal Employees, the National Treasury Employees Union, the National Association of Government Employees and the Engineers and Scientists of California) representing more than 10,000 EPA scientists, engineers and other technical specialists was sent to Congressional appropriators this morning and states:
* "The ability of EPA to respond to emergencies will be reduced" due to a diminishing access to "the latest research on cutting-edge homeland security and public health" topics;
* Approximately 50,000 original research documents will become completely unavailable because they are not available electronically and the agency has no budget for digitizing them; and
* The public and academic researchers may lose any access to EPA library materials as services to the public are being axed and there are no plans to maintain "the inter-library loan process."
"Eliminating library access is an absolutely awful way to run an agency devoted to public and environmental health," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. "For example, important research on the Chesapeake Bay is locked away in boxes since EPA closed its Ft. Meade library this February, yet EPA still maintains that restoring the Chesapeake is a top priority."
The dogged insistence by the Bush administration on a $2 million cut in an overall EPA budget of nearly $8 billion is particularly curious. EPA internal studies show that providing full library access saves an estimated 214,000 hours in professional staff time worth some $7.5 million annually, an amount far larger than the total agency library budget of $2.5 million.
"The Bush administration apparently decided that it was politically easier to close the libraries than to burn the books, although the end result will be the same," Ruch added, noting that the EPA Administrator brushed aside an earlier request by the scientist unions to bargain about the library shutdowns internally.
In their letter, the EPA scientists cite library closures as "one more example of the Bush administration's effort to suppress information on environmental and public health-related topics." At the same time, other outside observers, such as the Chair of EPA's own Science Advisory Board, are expressing growing concerns over the viability and coherence of EPA's research program.
Wrap....
How about getting a "Mission Accomplished" here?
From:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/troops-face-resurgent-taliban-on-home-turf/2006/07/05/1151779013606.html
Cynthia Banham
Defence ReporterJuly 6, 2006
AUSTRALIAN troops are about to be deployed to an area of Afghanistan where government is virtually non-existent - a province so lawless that local police are too afraid to work there.
The province of Oruzgan is due to see 240 Australian soldiers arrive this month as part of a Dutch-led Provincial Reconstruction Team.
A grim assessment of Oruzgan was provided to the Herald by a top German official, closely connected with Germany's deployment to Afghanistan. It has 2700 troops in the north of the country, where the situation is "a lot easier", the official said.
In a briefing in Berlin, the official said security in Afghanistan had worsened in the past six weeks, and for the first time in two years the Taliban were operating in large units of up to 100 fighters.
He said the Taliban had also started to acquire "a greater competence", and their ability to stage attacks had increased.
He added that the Taliban, who were ousted from government and forced underground by coalition forces in late 2001, were enjoying increased support from ordinary Afghans.
The reason Oruzgan and other provinces in the south are more dangerous is that the Taliban are receiving training in Pakistan, across the border, and then coming back into the country.
The Australian soldiers would be "in the thick of it", the official warned. "You have to move around [there] at all times expecting an attack," he said.
The description of the situation is far more complete than any provided by Australian officials - a fact that has drawn criticism from some of the parents of Australian troops in Afghanistan.
One father of a soldier, in a letter to the magazine Defender, expressed concern the lack of information about the deployment to Afghanistan was affecting troop morale. He compared the reliance on foreign sources for news of the conflict to Vietnam.
"The Government and the [Australian Defence Force] run the risk of losing public support for defence force operations if there is no news at all being made available," the soldier's father wrote.
The German official said there was now a core group of about 1500 Taliban - an increase from 1000 a year ago - who were carrying out guerilla attacks.
Al-Qaeda was not believed to be involved in the bulk of the attacks, he added, and the Taliban members were Afghans, not foreigners.
The official said Taliban forces were managing to attract new local support because of the weakness of the Afghan Government, and because of nepotism and bad governance, which was creating disillusion among the population.
For this reason a resolution to Afghanistan's problems could not be achieved by military means alone, the official said. Local expectations about the pace of change in the country needed to be managed, he said, and poor governance had to be stamped out.
The deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan was illustrated by the anti-American riots in May. The riots, in the capital, Kabul, were sparked by a fatal traffic accident involving US troops in which locals were killed. Such riots would not have been thought possible a year ago, the official said.
Wrap...
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/troops-face-resurgent-taliban-on-home-turf/2006/07/05/1151779013606.html
Cynthia Banham
Defence ReporterJuly 6, 2006
AUSTRALIAN troops are about to be deployed to an area of Afghanistan where government is virtually non-existent - a province so lawless that local police are too afraid to work there.
The province of Oruzgan is due to see 240 Australian soldiers arrive this month as part of a Dutch-led Provincial Reconstruction Team.
A grim assessment of Oruzgan was provided to the Herald by a top German official, closely connected with Germany's deployment to Afghanistan. It has 2700 troops in the north of the country, where the situation is "a lot easier", the official said.
In a briefing in Berlin, the official said security in Afghanistan had worsened in the past six weeks, and for the first time in two years the Taliban were operating in large units of up to 100 fighters.
He said the Taliban had also started to acquire "a greater competence", and their ability to stage attacks had increased.
He added that the Taliban, who were ousted from government and forced underground by coalition forces in late 2001, were enjoying increased support from ordinary Afghans.
The reason Oruzgan and other provinces in the south are more dangerous is that the Taliban are receiving training in Pakistan, across the border, and then coming back into the country.
The Australian soldiers would be "in the thick of it", the official warned. "You have to move around [there] at all times expecting an attack," he said.
The description of the situation is far more complete than any provided by Australian officials - a fact that has drawn criticism from some of the parents of Australian troops in Afghanistan.
One father of a soldier, in a letter to the magazine Defender, expressed concern the lack of information about the deployment to Afghanistan was affecting troop morale. He compared the reliance on foreign sources for news of the conflict to Vietnam.
"The Government and the [Australian Defence Force] run the risk of losing public support for defence force operations if there is no news at all being made available," the soldier's father wrote.
The German official said there was now a core group of about 1500 Taliban - an increase from 1000 a year ago - who were carrying out guerilla attacks.
Al-Qaeda was not believed to be involved in the bulk of the attacks, he added, and the Taliban members were Afghans, not foreigners.
The official said Taliban forces were managing to attract new local support because of the weakness of the Afghan Government, and because of nepotism and bad governance, which was creating disillusion among the population.
For this reason a resolution to Afghanistan's problems could not be achieved by military means alone, the official said. Local expectations about the pace of change in the country needed to be managed, he said, and poor governance had to be stamped out.
The deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan was illustrated by the anti-American riots in May. The riots, in the capital, Kabul, were sparked by a fatal traffic accident involving US troops in which locals were killed. Such riots would not have been thought possible a year ago, the official said.
Wrap...
Sounds like a very interesting TV series to me!!!
NOTE: Even though I rarely watch television, rec'd this in an email. This political story captured my attention...my kind of story...so wanted to post it in case readers find it as fascinating a proposition as I do.
From M80teams.com :
Amidst the weathered row houses and rust-barnacled tugboats framing the port city of Providence, Rhode Island, lies an Irish-American neighborhood known as “The Hill.” There, the old-world ways of street justice and loyalty still permeate through the tough blue-collar neighborhood. It is where the familial bonds of the Caffee brothers are constantly teetering above a moral abyss, something akin to the classic sibling fable of Cain and Abel.
It is this tradition that the new SHOWTIME original series, BROTHERHOOD follows.
BROTHERHOOD tells the story of two brothers who sometimes share a twisted sense of moral compromise — both with their own skewed, idealistic visions of what makes the American dream. They live the lie that noble ends can sometimes only be accomplished through dubious means.
Tommy Caffee (JASON CLARKE) is a family man whose ambition and street smarts help him navigate the back-room dealings and underhanded tactics of Providence politics. He is a local politician out to protect “The Hill” and its interests by any means necessary.
Tommy's complicated family and professional lives turn upside-down with the return of his gangster brother Mike (JASON ISAACS), who has come back to the neighborhood to regain control of its underworld activities.
Caught in the turbulent crossfire of a tense, conflicted relationship between two brothers is their mother, Rose (FIONNULA FLANAGAN), who is proud of both sons, to the point where she turns a blind eye to Mike's shady, sometimes deadly dealings — even when he passes her counterfeit money as a gift.
Then there is Tommy's wife, Eileen (ANNABETH GISH), who tirelessly supports her husband but is constantly wary of how Mike potentially places Tommy and their children in harm's way.
Their path is a minefield of shifting alliances, leaving the brothers constantly in doubt about who they can trust. Mike's close confidante, Pete McGonagle (STIVI PASKOSKI), is a recovering alcoholic struggling to stay straight but who easily reverts back to his role as Mike's enforcer. Then there is competing gangland boss Freddie Cork (KEVIN CHAPMAN), who regularly threatens Tommy with blackmail (or Mike's life) in order to secure sweetheart city contracts.
Even if Tommy can protect his brother Mike's life and business interests with his own brand of backroom dealings, he knows that police detective Declan Giggs (ETHAN EMBRY) is always lurking in surveillance and monitoring his every move. Driven by their mutual resentment and rivalry, the Caffee brothers embark on a dangerous course, where their love and loyalty will be tested like never before. The duality of both men and their lives interweave to create a volatile dynamic that could destroy both of them…and both of their families.
M80teams.com Brotherhood Contact
Wrap...
From M80teams.com :
Amidst the weathered row houses and rust-barnacled tugboats framing the port city of Providence, Rhode Island, lies an Irish-American neighborhood known as “The Hill.” There, the old-world ways of street justice and loyalty still permeate through the tough blue-collar neighborhood. It is where the familial bonds of the Caffee brothers are constantly teetering above a moral abyss, something akin to the classic sibling fable of Cain and Abel.
It is this tradition that the new SHOWTIME original series, BROTHERHOOD follows.
BROTHERHOOD tells the story of two brothers who sometimes share a twisted sense of moral compromise — both with their own skewed, idealistic visions of what makes the American dream. They live the lie that noble ends can sometimes only be accomplished through dubious means.
Tommy Caffee (JASON CLARKE) is a family man whose ambition and street smarts help him navigate the back-room dealings and underhanded tactics of Providence politics. He is a local politician out to protect “The Hill” and its interests by any means necessary.
Tommy's complicated family and professional lives turn upside-down with the return of his gangster brother Mike (JASON ISAACS), who has come back to the neighborhood to regain control of its underworld activities.
Caught in the turbulent crossfire of a tense, conflicted relationship between two brothers is their mother, Rose (FIONNULA FLANAGAN), who is proud of both sons, to the point where she turns a blind eye to Mike's shady, sometimes deadly dealings — even when he passes her counterfeit money as a gift.
Then there is Tommy's wife, Eileen (ANNABETH GISH), who tirelessly supports her husband but is constantly wary of how Mike potentially places Tommy and their children in harm's way.
Their path is a minefield of shifting alliances, leaving the brothers constantly in doubt about who they can trust. Mike's close confidante, Pete McGonagle (STIVI PASKOSKI), is a recovering alcoholic struggling to stay straight but who easily reverts back to his role as Mike's enforcer. Then there is competing gangland boss Freddie Cork (KEVIN CHAPMAN), who regularly threatens Tommy with blackmail (or Mike's life) in order to secure sweetheart city contracts.
Even if Tommy can protect his brother Mike's life and business interests with his own brand of backroom dealings, he knows that police detective Declan Giggs (ETHAN EMBRY) is always lurking in surveillance and monitoring his every move. Driven by their mutual resentment and rivalry, the Caffee brothers embark on a dangerous course, where their love and loyalty will be tested like never before. The duality of both men and their lives interweave to create a volatile dynamic that could destroy both of them…and both of their families.
M80teams.com Brotherhood Contact
Wrap...
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