Moon Valley Press

The Cowards of Congress

2007-12-28T22:42:00.000-08:00

June, 2007

American soldiers who have been sent to Iraq are now being killed there at a rate of 3 or 4 every day. That's two dozen a week, more than 100 men and women each month who will die in order to sustain the illegal occupation of a sovereign nation.

There will almost certainly be 300 more dead soldiers and 3,000 more wounded by Sept. 1, when our government will provide the American people with a progress report. After that date, more soldiers will die so that our government can keep a military presence in a country it invaded without cause. The only questions left are how many more will be killed, and how long will our government continue to sacrifice their lives?

The blood of every soldier killed in Iraq stains the hands of not only the President and Vice President, but also everyone who ever voted to fund the military invasion and occupation of Iraq. That includes 280 of our current members in the House of Representatives and 80 of our Senators who just voted to spend more tax money to keep American troops in Iraq.

It doesn't matter if they are Republican or Democrat; it doesn't matter if they are enthusiastic supporters or reluctant enablers of this act of aggression that violates international law. What matters is the absolute failure of both House and Senate - but especially the Senate – to exercise their Constitutional responsibility to determine national policy, especially military policy.

House Appropriations Chairman David Obey, who voted against the latest funding package, stated his disappointment by saying, "I hate this agreement. We simply did not have the votes to force the president to change policy."

Under the Constitution, the President does not set any national policy; he can only implement the policies set by Congress. The President does not command Congress; he is accountable to Congress.

Under the Constitution, only Congress can authorize military action. Only Congress can authorize funds to support a military action. If Congress withdraws funding, then the troops must come home.

The President is commander-in-chief of the armed forces only; he can conduct a Congressionally approved military action any way he deems best, within the existing military budget, but he must ask Congress for all supplemental funds, materials and troops necessary for any large-scale actions.

Many of the 360 elected officials who approved the recent supplemental request will explain their vote as Supporting The Troops On The Ground. They say that as if soldiers would be stuck in Iraq without proper equipment if they didn't get more money; they say it as if soldiers would go hungry or be forced to go on patrol without ammunition or without a medic to treat the wounded.

Here's how we all can best Support Our Troops – train them well and provide them with the best equipment; pay them a wage that truly reflects their importance to society; give them a clear, honorable mission and a way home; and take proper care of those who fall along the way. Anything else is politics at its worst.

A vote to continue funding the illegal occupation of Iraq has nothing to do with Supporting The Troops. Those "aye" votes were cast out of political fear or in defiance of the framework of the American Republic. They stand for cowardice, or they stand for subservience to a Unitary President, a Strong Leader who promises to Protect Our Children at any cost.

Those "aye" votes were cast in support of an act that violates international law. They cannot be justified under any standard of common humanity.

The cost of all this ... wrongness ... is the blood of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens flowing into the sands of Arabia every day, symbolically mixing with the oil pumped out of that same sand every day. Those lives will continue to be sacrificed to provide American access to oil that doesn't belong to us and to prop up a false promise of safety here at home.

Everywhere is up from here...

2007-12-28T22:34:00.000-08:00

"The Constitution is being trampled, the very form of our government is being perverted, and nothing less than American democracy itself is endangered. A presidential coup is taking place."
Jim Hightower

When it comes to living up to our own ideal as a nation, we've just about hit rock bottom. We kidnap and torture suspected terrorists, we owe nine trillion dollars to everybody and our soldiers are dying in a country we invaded "by mistake". How low is that?

We weren't all that great a country in the first place – not when right from the start, in the Land of the Free, white men could own black people and women couldn't even vote. But whatever greatness America ever achieved it owes to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, documents that describe an ideal still valid after more than two centuries. We've been at our best whenever we've honestly tried to live up to those ideals in the real world.

We aren't even trying anymore. Every level of government hides behind layers of secrecy while legislators mock the law with decisions that favor the interests of corporations over the rights of the citizenry. The occupation of Iraq has made us a debtor nation and the value of a US dollar has dropped until it's worth less than a Canadian loonie.

For a political junkie, one of the most interesting things about Hawai‘i is its political transparency. Malfeasance is usually done right in the open in the islands, with the current Superferry mess offering a perfect example of why American government sucks most of the time.

The ferry owners used loans cosigned by the federal government to build two ferryboats and start a business in Hawai‘i. Legislators committed public money for harbor improvements to accommodate the ferries and told the owners that environmental laws didn't apply to them. Citizens on Maui believed otherwise; they hired an attorney and sued for compliance.

When the state Supreme Court ruled that the laws must be followed, Gov. Lingle called a special legislative session to create a new law that allows the Superferry to operate while it conducts an environmental review.

That's not exactly democracy in action. In a true Republic that could never happen, but that form of bias and repression is now common all over our country.

It's certainly alive in the Aloha State. When people took to the water and blockaded the ferry from entering Nawiliwili Harbor, Lingle responded by declaring the harbor to be a "high-security zone" whenever the ferry comes to Kaua‘i. Her action is part of a growing national pattern of elected "public servants" abusing the Public Commons in the name of security and for the benefit of commerce.

Lingle went one step further and threatened to use state agencies to take the children of demonstrators away from their parents. That threat goes even beyond being unconstitutional and an impeachable offense; it's reprehensible behavior, immoral in every way.

Sadly, Lingle is not alone in her cynical disdain for the Rule of Law in the Land of the Free. The scales of justice are so far out of alignment that two priests were recently sentenced to five months in federal prison for trespassing on a military base. Their intent was to deliver a letter protesting the teaching of torture at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Both priests were arrested while kneeling in prayer in a driveway. They pled no contest and were taken straight to jail after sentencing.

Lewis Libby, however will serve no jail time after his conviction for obstruction of justice. He lied to a grand jury about leaking the identity of a covert CIA officer – an act akin to treason, some say – but was handed a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card by the president. The two priests who want our government to stop torturing people won't be getting any such cards from George Bush, however. They'll sit behind bars because national security is at stake.

Our federal government may also have reached a record low in hypocrisy with its recent attempt to label a century-old massacre of Armenians by Turks as an act of genocide. Our own history of genocide against Native Americans doesn't give us any moral authority on that issue, but it didn't stop that bit of history from being discussed on the floor of the House and in the Senate chamber. In doing so, Congress confirmed that they are as irrelevant as the British House of Lords in the eyes of the world.

We do have a few politicians willing to speak the truth as they see it. Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are the most prominent among a handful of elected officials from both major political parties who want to change the way we govern our country. They're proof that Americans will vote honest, reasonable people into positions of power when they can find them.

It's going to take more than a handful of conscientious individuals to solve our current problem, however. Government in America has slipped so far off its foundation that it may never sit on solid ground again. But we can build a better government – or install a new one – any time we choose. We do, after all, still own the country.

The momentum for a fundamental change in politics is rising slowly but it's rising all across the nation.

On Oct. 27, anti-war protests were held across the land in cities as diverse in character as San Francisco and Salt Lake City, Seattle and Orlando and Jonesborough, Tennessee. Tens of thousands in each city took to the streets to voice their anger over the occupation of Iraq and to protest Dick Cheney's plans to bomb Iran.

Garret Keizer, writing in the October issue of Harper's Magazine, has called for a general strike on Nov. 6 – Election Day, a date that Keizer calls "The Feast of the Hanging Chads." He proposes that everyone who can afford not to work should stay home for as long as possible. The rest of us should stay out of shopping malls and retail stores as long as possible, buying only food and essentials. An economic message of that magnitude could change the level of political discourse across the nation, just as it has done in dozens of other countries during the past century.

More demonstrations and peace actions are being scheduled across the land every day. Confrontations with lawmakers are increasing as more citizens are demanding answers to some very difficult questions. Military families, religious groups and coalitions of true conservatives are calling for our soldiers to return home. Grassroots media are carrying that same call with blogs, email campaigns calls to talk radio, letters to editors and a dozen other forms of expression.

We haven't actually hit bottom yet – that moment could come however, if Cheney is able to bomb Iran before he slinks out of Washington and goes home to his Wyoming ranch – or moves to Dubai to run Halliburton once again – where he can dream of WWIII and an Armageddon that he hopes will bring redemption to his murderous soul.

We can prevent that if we ignore the political divisions in this country and unite to chart a new course for government to follow. It's the one right that can't be taken from us, and it's past time for us to exercise that right in full.

A time for intervention: get in the way

2007-10-16T22:50:00.001-07:00

In 1866 the US Supreme Court issued an explicit ruling that no emergency – not even an open civil war like the country had just suffered through – can justify the suspension or removal of any rights recognized by the Constitution. Although five of the justices were appointed by Abraham Lincoln, the Court delivered a message that Lincoln's deliberate disregard of the law of the land during his "war presidency" was illegal.

Their words were clear: "The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances."

The same rights those justices were trying to protect 140 years ago are still being trampled today. The rights of the people of Kaua‘i to assemble and protest are violated by Gov. Lingle and others in her administration as she orders the Coast Guard to arrest anyone who enters hastily-drawn "emergency security zones" in Nawiliwili Harbor whenever the Superferry comes to port.

Any government promotion of corporate and military interests over the rights of free citizens is a call for resistance. The brave folks on Kaua‘i responded; across the country many other groups and individuals have begun to take direct action as well.

Representatives of 33 antiwar and environmental organizations have agreed to hold a national "intervention" this month to demand an end to the occupation of Iraq and strong action on the climate crisis. At a meeting last spring, representatives of those groups agreed to escalate their current activities. As a result of their commitment, the intervention will involve nonviolent civil disobedience.

Local solidarity actions are being planned to take place Oct. 20-22 during the IMF and World Bank meetings in Washington, D.C, with the day of intervention set for Monday, October 22.

"We will hold an intervention by taking over Capitol Hill on a day that Congress is in session," according to a statement posted on the No War, No Warming website at www.nowarnowarming.org. "We will be putting our bodies on the line to say enough is enough. We will be taking positive action to make visible the cost of these failed government policies and to creatively manifest the world we know is possible."

The coalition will help local groups across the country and world to deliver their message by demonstrating outside of federal buildings, US embassies and the offices of corporate profiteers. As the organizers state, "Until our government representatives change course off the path of destruction, we have no choice but to get in the way."

Their voices are needed to counter the advice coming into the White House and the propaganda that keeps flowing from it as Bush, Cheney and the war hawks in the inner circle try to redefine the occupation of Iraq as a strategic battle between the US and Iran.

Norman Podhoretz, a neoconservative mouthpiece who is also a senior foreign policy adviser to Rudy Giuliani, met with Bush last spring in New York.

"I urged Bush to take action against Iranian nuclear facilities and explained why I thought there was no alternative," said Podhoretz.

John Bolton, our former ambassador to the United Nations, spoke recently with members of Britain's Tory party, saying he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike against Iran. He also showed his yearning for more of the illegal, immoral behavior by the American government that has caused so much death and grief around the world.

"I think we have to consider the use of military force," Bolton said. "It should be accompanied by an effort at regime change. The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back."

Tony Teolis of Veterans for Peace, a veteran of the first Gulf War with a long family history of military service, has been courageous in speaking about the need to return to the rule of Constitutional law.

"As veterans, we believe in the Constitution as the law of the land, and we took an oath to preserve, protect and defend it," he said. "The way I see it, we have two options for going forward. We can either throw out the Constitution as our laws and start all over again, or we have to act like we mean what we say – and that goes for the president, for Congress, for soldiers and veterans and citizens."

This year our government will give $650 billion to the war machine but claims it can't afford $7 billion a year for children's health care. That policy is in direct opposition to the will of the majority, but it will remain in place.

And it's our fault because we allowed – in fact, we enabled – empire-building warmongers to seize the reins of power. It will take a massive effort on our part to dismantle their war machine before it ruins our country.

Governments rise and fall, as do the politicians and policies that make up any governmental body. The nation remains when the tide of government changes, for a nation is defined by a land and its people. Today the American people need to reclaim control over their government.

As a beginning, our current "leaders" must be held accountable for the damage they have done. They will never face criminal charges for the blood on their hands but they can be impeached and removed from power as soon as possible. We are obligated; it is a requirement of honor towards those who have died.

We can then pursue a new and different path. For every single neoconservative, neofascist or warmonger in this land, there are probably fifty people who want to live in peace and freedom under a system based on honest justice.

You, gentle reader, are just one person but there are 100 million others just like you. Collectively we still own the Republic. We can hire new managers any time we choose and chart a new course for them to steer.

For that to happen, we first must stop being afraid. We who seek to live free are the true Silent Majority; our voices have been stilled by fear for too long. Our worst nightmares have already come true and we no longer have much to lose. Our day of freedom has arrived.

As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, "If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold."

I'm getting a little spooked here...

2007-05-21T22:25:00.001-07:00

Is it just me, or is there something especially ominous in the latest Presidential Directive? National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20, documents released earlier this month by the Bush administration, give the president some new powers in the event of a national emergency.
Actually, the new National Continuity Policy outlined in those documents formalizes the current reality in Washington, where the White House has exerted firm control over most branches of government. It simply defines and extends that control while giving it some legitimate-sounding cover.
According to this new policy "...any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function" would be sufficient cause for the President to assume full directorial control over every branch of the US government. In the policy language, it states: "The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government."
Not much attention was paid to this directive, especially in the largest media outlets. That's not too surprising, as most of the newspapers and all of the television news programs report the same stories, the kind that can be easily digested, while this story takes some explaining for most folks to understand its significance.
But I'm sure that you, gentle reader, understand the danger of centralizing power over a massive social services system. We've seen the failure of FEMA to respond well when a national disaster occurs. The agency is hampered by its own structure and bulk, along with its top-down management style that falls apart when an incompetent manager is sitting in the top chair – and in government, incompetence is obviously not career-threatening.
But that's not what has me spooked, you see... I'm probably just being paranoid, but this particular action by the President has me sniffing the wind. I smell something bad here...
The attack on New York and Washington on 9/11 caught most of America by surprise, but not everyone. There were many people in civilian and military intelligence who reported signs of an imminent attack in tthe summer months of 2001. They were ignored by the White House at the time, but they proved to be correct later on...
The "catastrophic emergency" of 9/11 resulted in a vast expansion of Federal powers. Today we have evidence of the President granting himself full control over those expanded powers. It makes me wonder, "Why now?"
Does the White House suspect another "catastrophic emergency" to happen soon? Is that why they've taken this extraordinary step that violates the separation of powers written into the US Constitution? Are they hearing from their intelligence officers again and listening to them now?
If some bad shit happens on a large scale real soon, it won't look like a coincidence to me. But it will close the lid and pound the first nail in the coffin of Freedom in America....

Hanging On By Tooth And Nail

2007-04-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

Paul Wolfowitz is being advised to resign his position at the World Bank by almost everyone with connections past or present to that organization. He won't quit, however, until he's forced into doing so to avoid being indicted for corruption.
Alberto Gonzales is being advised by people on both sides of the political spectrum to step down as Attorney General. He has the full support of his immediate supervisors, however, so he has no plans to walk away, even when he's being told that he can no longer be effective in his job by some of the same folks who supported his nomination. Gonzales will be sacrificed once it becomes necessary, but not until his presence threatens the ongoing attempt to impose a neoconservative dominance on the American government.
The Vice President, Dick Cheney, has less credibility than any VP since Spiro Agnew. Even Dan Quayle held a higher level of respect from the general public that Cheney does. He won't be quitting, of course – and no matter what he does, from enriching Halliburton to outing a CIA officer to accidentally shooting a friend in the face with a shotgun, he has the full support of the man who relies on him for direction, his nominal superior, George Bush. At this moment, Cheney is even testing the possibility of making a third try for President himself in 2008.
Condileeza Rice has worked in the highest levels of the government for seven years now, with little to show for her efforts except mistakes and failures. She's guilty of telling the same lies to Congress that others in this administration have uttered, but she's not going to be held accountable, ever.
And the Architect, Karl Rove, has Bush firmly attached to his hip. Rove is never going to be held accountable for his political meddling in all aspects of government policy and the process of determing the laws of the land – unless the Office of Special Counsel can remain independent long enough to complete the full-scale investigation of Rove that they have just begun...
But deputies and underlings at a variety of levels are quitting to avoid accountability or being forced to resign under indictment for their behavior while following orders. They are quickly replaced by the equivalent of a partisan clone.
This is the condition of federal goverment in America today – personal and political loyalty to "leadership" is the overriding consideration behind every act of governance. Competence and good management skills are not valued unless they are used to politicize departmental operations and policy.
The Bush legacy will be this attempt to subvert the rule of law into a rule of men. This administration has created a kind of government similar to that which inspired the American revolution 200 years ago, one in which the people have no representation in a government that imposes its will against their wishes.
But this isn't 1770, its 2007. The American people lack the quality of courage that their ancestors possessed, so a new revolution to restore their Constitutional rights simply isn't going to happen. As a result, we no longer live in an American Republic; we live instead under an Amerikan Empire.
Fortunately, for the rest of the world, the NeoConservative political movement won't be able to sustain this New World Order for much longer – but we will pay a high price here at home for allowing this takeover of our own government to happen in the first place, and for not reclaiming what is rightfully ours once the theft became apparent. It's a price we deserve to pay...

And all the King’s Men: laying down the law on Bush and his cronies

2007-02-11T11:29:00.000-08:00

In March 2002, more than a year before the invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush interrupted a meeting between National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and three U.S. Senators, who were in her office discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations.
“Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out,” he said.
According to one of the participants, the senators laughed uncomfortably at the President’s comment while Rice merely smiled. Bush then left the room, as he wasn’t part of the work being done there.
Later in the year, Vice President Dick Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy to “...go fuck yourself...” as he walked away from their argument on the floor of the Senate about Cheney’s ties to Halliburton.
While this kind of language could be seen as inappropriate, even embarrassing, coming from the two highest elected officials in the land, it isn’t a legal problem.
The Constitution allows anyone to speak freely whenever they choose. Even grandiose dreams of an American military empire aren’t impeachable acts unless the dreamers engage in illegal conduct to further their ambitions.
But Cheney and Bush have done exactly that. They have, as the articles of impeachment brought against President Richard Nixon state, “acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”
They’ve broken the laws of the country and violated the Constitution in a wide variety of ways, surpassing the crimes committed during even the Nixon and Reagan years – which is no small accomplishment, considering how criminally active those administrations were.
But don’t expect the current Congress to hold Cheney or Bush accountable. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has said that impeachment is “off the table” because it’s “a waste of time.” But while Pelosi may be correct in that she lacks the necessary votes to impeach either man, articles of impeachment can still be filed. In fact, they already have been. Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) and Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia) filed Articles of Impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee in *******, where they will likely sit and gather dust until they become irrelevant in 2009.
Illegal, impeachable conduct by Cheney and Bush is documented in the perjury trial of Lewis Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff. Cheney told Libby in June 2003 that the President had authorized Libby to disclose the classified identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA officer and wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in retaliation for Wilson blowing the whistle on Bush’s false statement that Iraq was trying to buy enriched uranium from the African nation of Niger.
Despite subsequent lies spoken by Cheny, Bush, Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell, we now know that the CIA and other sources warned the White House not to make that false claim, and that it had been taken out of an earlier Presidential speech.
After Plame’s CIA status and identity were leaked by at least four White House operatives to a half-dozen journalists, Bush told the American people that it was unlikely that the individuals who blew her cover would ever be found.
“I mean, this is a town full of people who like to leak information,” Bush said. “And I don’t know if we’re going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there’s lots of senior officials. I don’t have any idea.”
Game over, Mr. President. That was a stone cold lie. Bush knew exactly who the leakers were, because he gave explicit approval to publicly disclose the identity of a CIA officer. And the extent of the deception was worse than most of us could have even imagined. According to The Washington Post, “...Martin explained how she, Libby and Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley worked late into the night writing a statement to be issued by George Tenet in 2004 in which the CIA boss would take blame for the bogus claim in Bush’s State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking nuclear material in Africa. After ‘delicate’ talks, Tenet agreed to say the CIA ‘approved’ the claim and ‘I am responsible’ – but even that disappointed Martin, who had wanted Tenet to say that ‘we did not express any doubts about Niger.’”
Compromising the integrity of the CIA and disclosing classified information for political and personal reasons are actions that meet any standard for impeachment. Betraying an oath to uphold the Constitution and deceiving Congress also meet that standard.
But any discussion of impeachment must center on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Bush authorized a war of aggression in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg Principles and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The badly misnamed “Siege of Fallujah” along with the “Shock and Awe” bombing of the city of Baghdad are war crimes under both U.S. and international law. The facts regarding those events have been reported by only a few U.S. news sources, but the truth is that Bush authorized military actions he knew would cause the deaths of hundreds or possibly thousands of innocent civilian residents in those two cities.
And there’s more to the story. Here’s a brief timeline of Bush administration lies:

IRAQ

March 6, 2003:

George W. Bush: “I’ve not made up our mind about military action. Hopefully, this can be done peacefully.”

March 7, 2003

UN Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix reports that Iraq is cooperating with weapons inspectors, and that they cannot confirm any presence of WMDs. Blix asks for two more months to complete his task, as Iraq is cooperating better by the day and progress is being made.

March 8, 2003

Bush says in a speech, “We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq.” Nine days later he publicly advises weapons inspectors to leave Iraq immediately and includes the following lie in his comments: “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

July 14, 2003

Bush makes the following statement: “The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And therefore ... we decided to remove him from power.”

EASEDROPPING

December 2000

During the transition prior to taking office, Bush issues a classified executive order to authorize electronic eavesdropping on American citizens. Four years later he speaks publicly about it, saying, “Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.”

December 2001:

Bush admits that the spying program was far more extensive than the law allowed and that court orders were not always sought. He also states, “I have reauthorized this program more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks,” and justifies the illegal behavior as “necessary to protect Americans.”

January 2006:

In an open session of the House, Rep. Conyers (D-Michigan) says: “There can be little doubt that we’re in a constitutional crisis that threatens the system of checks and balances that have preserved our fundamental freedoms for over 200 years. There’s no better illustration of that crisis than the fact that the President of the United States is violating our Nation’s laws by authorizing the National Security Administration to engage in warrantless surveillance of United States citizens.”

August 2006:

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor rules that the NSA wiretapping program violates the First and Fourth Amendments.
“There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution,” Judge Taylor said. “The public interest is clear in this matter. It is the upholding of our Constitution. It was never the intent of the Framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights.”
Taylor quotes a statement made by Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1967: “It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of those liberties which makes the defense of the nation worthwhile.”

TORTURE

February 2002:

Bush authorizes forms of interrogation that are considered inhumane under the Geneva Accords and the War Crimes Act, a law approved by Congress that makes the Geneva rules a corollary to federal laws. Cheney and Bush both deny that they approved the torture of suspects by describing it as “tough interrogation” and “taking the gloves off” when dealing with illegally imprisoned “detainees” in secret prisons around the world. The Supreme Court has since ruled that military tribunals used by the administration to try those “detainees” were illegal.

Excuse me, has anyone seen the legislative branch?

The only reason not to pursue the Conyers and McKinney resolutions to investigate the Vice President and President for possible impeachment is a lack of Congressional courage. But honest and full inquiries are required to preserve what little remains of the American Republic while restoring the government to its proper role of serving the will of the people.
Supporters of Cheney and Bush are claiming that those charges have already been investigated by the Senate, but the few hearings that were held on those matters were carefully restricted in their scope. The administration first tried to prevent any investigation at all, according to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who said that the pressure came directly from Cheney.
“We've abdicated our responsibilities,” Chuck Hagel, the Republican Senator from Nebraska, said recently. “That has to do with the fact that the Republican Party controlled the White House, the House, and the Senate. When that happens, you get no probing, no questioning, no oversight. If Bill Clinton had invaded Iraq and after two years he was having the same problems, do you think the Republican Congress would have put up with that? I don't think so.”
Faced with that lack of oversight by Congress, at least a dozen citizen groups have drafted their own Articles of Impeachment, citing some of the following actions as their cause:
“The Bush Administration authorized, under the doctrine of 'preemptive war' and a policy of 'regime change', a war of aggression against Iraq. It did so not in self-defense or under the authorization of the United Nations Security Council. The doctrine of ‘preventive war’ is not recognized as a justification for war under international law. The goal of 'regime change' is also not recognized as a legitimate purpose for waging war under international law.”
“The Bush Administration declared the city of Fallujah, a population of 350,000 people, a free-fire zone. As a result, the Bush Administration bombed 70 percent of the city in 2004. The Bush Administration also extensively and indiscriminately bombed Ramadi, Samara, Haditha, Alkaim, Abuhisma, Sania, Najaf, Kut, Baghdad, Musul and other Iraqi cities causing substantial civilian deaths and severe injuries.”
“The use of force beginning with the campaign of 'Shock and Awe' was not a necessary means or necessary measure to attain a lawful objective, and it was a severe example of overwhelming, indiscriminate, and disproportionate use of military force against a nation state.”
“The indiscriminate use of weapons such as cluster munitions, incendiary bombs, depleted uranium, and chemical weapons, for which it is reasonably foreseeable would have caused and have indeed caused significant civilian injuries.”
“The invasion of Iraq was the supreme war crime and the resultant occupation of Iraq is itself a war crime. The occupation consisted of additional war crimes such as intentional and targeted attacks upon civilian populations, hospitals, medical centers, residential neighborhoods, electrical power stations and water purification facilities; the wide spread use of torture against the Iraqi people, mass arrests and detention of civilians and civilian home demolitions, and the destruction and desecration of the cultural and archeological heritage of the Iraqi people.”
Investigations are being called for to examine the fact that Bush took $2.5 billion appropriated by Congress for Afghanistan and used it to improve Kuwaiti airfields and fuel pipelines that would be used in the invasion of Iraq. There are also questions regarding why four huge, permanent military bases in Iraq are still under construction and why the Pentagon is building a massive communication system that will link those bases with bases in Qatar and Afghanistan – despite the fact that Congress has prohibited further spending on those so-called “superbases.” Both of those actions violate Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution (“No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law”) and rise to the level of impeachable offenses.
David Swanson, former press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, sums up things in just a few words: “This president believes that laws passed by Congress can be overturned by the president. Only after the Supreme Court has ruled on each point of law is the president obliged to obey and properly execute. So, why have a Congress at all?”

"Enduring Camps" in Iraq portend a long stay

2007-02-06T22:35:00.000-08:00

As a New Year full of uncertainties begins, there's one thing you can be certain of – many thousands of US soldiers will still be in Iraq on New Year's Day of 2008. That sad fact will be true every year in the foreseeable future, based on activities at the four largest military bases in Iraq where construction continues at a high pace.

It doesn't matter what the President or anyone else says about those bases, what matters is the reality of concrete and steel growing into buildings on the sand. Once labeled "enduring camps" but now called "contingency operating bases", the large facilities – primarily air bases with hardened runways – are still under construction in every province in Iraq.

The Iraqi people have seen little or no reconstruction projects at work in their shattered cities, but more than one hundred billion dollars have been spent on military housing and infrastructure to serve a permanent contingent of American troops. Camp Victory North, near Baghdad International Airport, is designed to house at least 14,000 soldiers in relatively comfortable conditions. Balad Air Base north of Baghdad, the largest American base in the country, holds 20,000 troops now and is still growing. Al-Asad Airbase in western Anbar province sprawls across 20 square miles of desert.

The intention to have a permanent military force strategically placed across the region in Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq was part of the overall Mideast strategy of the people in this administration many years before the Bush/Cheney team took office. That policy has its roots in a Defense Policy Guidance report crafted by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in the months following the first Gulf War. The 46-page memorandum from 1992 describes itself as "definitive guidance from the Secretary of Defense", who at that time was Dick Cheney.

After reading the report, West Virginia's Senator Robert Byrd offered his summary of its contents, saying, "The basic thrust of the document seems to be this: We love being the sole remaining superpower in the world and we want so much to remain that way that we are willing to put at risk the basic health of our economy and well-being of our people to do so."

The first President Bush also rejected the policy of using military superiority to create a global American Empire. He described it as "undesirable" and "unachievable" before ordering Cheney to rewrite the document.

Jump ahead to the spring of 1998 when the neoconservative movement was gearing up for a serious run at the White House. The Project For A New American Century, a self-styled advisory panel, was formed and began to publish policy papers that offered a refinement of the original Wolfowitz/Cheney policy, culminating in an extraordinary 2000 document titled "Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century."

The opening pages contain a description of America's world status that serves today as a stark reminder of how far this country has fallen since the invasion of Iraq:

"Today, the United States has an unprecedented strategic opportunity. It faces no immediate great-power challenge; it is blessed with wealthy, powerful and democratic allies in every part of the world; it is in the midst of the longest economic expansion in its history; and its political and economic principles are almost universally embraced. At no time in history has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals."

It refers to the 1992 Wolfowitz/Cheney report as "a blueprint for maintaining US pre-eminence" throughout the world, but then makes the strange and false claim that the report "was subsequently buried by the new (Clinton) administration".

The rest of the document, signed by more than a dozen men who were later given posts in the Bush administration, openly calls for US military and economic expansion across the planet in the name of peace.

"The presence of American forces in critical regions around the world is the visible expression of the extent of America’s status as a superpower and as the guarantor of liberty, peace and stability," according to the theorists at the PNAC.

In particular, the report speaks of the need to "...protect enduring American interests" in the Persian Gulf:

"The need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein. From an American perspective, the value of such bases would endure even should Saddam pass from the scene. And even should U.S.-Iranian relations improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in U.S. security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region."

What exactly are the "American interests" that the report refers to repeatedly? The answer isn't in the report itself, because that kind of naked truth is rarely written into policy documents that the public might actually read. There is one brief reference to the "resource-rich regions" of the Middle East, but no actual explanation of why it's in America's best interest to station US soldiers in the sands of Arabia.

"Rebuilding America's Defences" also included an amazingly accurate bit of prophecy, as it described the need for "a Pearl Harbor-type event" to occur before the American people would support an invasion of Iraq. When the Twin Towers of New York came crashing down in 2001, the entire neoconservative geopolitical dream instantly became a fully operative strategy.

Recent comments indicate that it's still the operative strategy as far as Cheney is concerned, and that the President still believes in the dream of an American Empire. US troops may be kept off the streets of Baghdad to avoid being human targets, but there will be US soldiers in the deserts of Arabia through 2008 and beyond, eating at Burger King and Pizza Hut outlets and playing on miniature golf courses and bowling alleys that already exist on several huge – and permanent – US military bases in Iraq.

The Long War Moves to Iran

2007-02-06T22:32:00.000-08:00

On Jan. 10, one day before his televised speech outlining a "new way forward" in Iraq, President Bush spoke to representatives of several network news organizations on the condition that he not be quoted. His purpose was to provide those individuals with more background and context than he would offer in the speech itself, and rely on them to deliver his full message to the American people.

A lot of folks who listened to the President's speech got that message quite clearly, without any help. The first clue came just 193 words into the script, when Bush read the following words from his teleprompter – "Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads."

We've heard this kind of diversion before, where a partial truth is inflated into an active threat and given a false priority. Introducing Iran into a speech about Iraq is the same tactic as introducing Iraq into speeches about Al-Qaida, a diversion that Vice President Cheney still uses today.

Three paragraphs later, the President was more direct: "Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons." And one sentence later came the phrase that is always written into Bush's speeches: " On Sept. 11, 2001..."

We've heard this kind of verbal linking before, too. It was pretty successful four years ago, when half of America came to believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were partners in crime. A surprising number of people still hold that false belief, despite the fact that the two men were cultural enemies with nothing but contempt for each other.

Bush's speechwriters, who are quite good, got the key elements of the new link into the same paragraph and in their proper order. First the word "Iran", then the phrase "nuclear weapons", followed by the date the towers fell in New York. The rest of the speech was very Presidential – eloquent phrases containing little or no content, aside from the no-surprise announcement that 21,500 more troops will be added to the US forces occupying Iraq.

The spokesperson for Military Families Speak Out, an organization of over 3,100 military families opposed to the war in Iraq, certainly got the escalation message. "Military families across the country were deeply saddened and outraged to hear President Bush once again engage in fear-mongering to continue and expand the war in Iraq," said Nancy Lessin, co-founder of the group, before reciting the long list of lies used by the administration to justify the original invasion.

Bush's pre-speech briefing featured the same warlike message the rest of the country heard the following day, according to television news reporters Tim Russert and Brian Williams, who shared their reaction to the briefing in their own words.

"There's a strong sense in the upper echelons of the White House that Iran is going to surface relatively quickly as a major issue – in the country and the world – in a very acute way," Russert said after Bush's speech.

"The President's inference was this: that an entire region would blow up from the inside, the core being Iraq, from the inside out," Williams said.

In his briefing, Bush defended the invasion of Iraq by arguing that if Saddam Hussein had remained in power, "... he and Iran would be in a race to acquire a nuclear bomb and if we didn't stop him, Iran would be going to Pakistan or to China and things would be much worse," Russert said. "That's the way he sees the world. His rationale, he believes, for going into Iraq still was one that was sound."

Chris Matthews, another news show host invited to the briefing, added to Russert's comments by saying, "And it could be the rationale for going into Iran at some point."

This not-so-new Bush/Cheney message of increased US military action in the sands of Arabia and Persia was previewed in public weeks ahead of Bush's speech. Just before Christmas, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was quoted as saying, "I think the message that we are sending to everyone, not just Iran, is that the United States is an enduring presence in this part of the world. We have been here for a long time. We will be here for a long time and everybody needs to remember that."

In his speech, Bush showed his willingness to extend military action beyond Iraq's borders, saying it was necessary to "disrupt the attacks on our forces" in Iraq.

"We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria," Bush said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

The next morning Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began spreading the message by saying, "The President made very clear last night that we know Iran is engaged in activities endangering our troops... and that we're going to pursue those who may be involved in those activities."

And on that same day, US soldiers entered Iranian government offices in northern Iraq, detained six people, including embassy diplomats, and seized documents and computers. Iran, of course, condemned the raid, calling it an "extreme provocation" and Bush's speech "a declaration of war" on Iran.

In the week before Bush's speech the Treasury Department named Iran's Bank Sepah as a "proliferator of weapons of mass destruction", banned all US companies or citizens from doing business with the bank and seized all of its assets that are under American jurisdiction.

During that same week Bush replaced his two top-ranking military commanders in the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid and Gen. George Casey, who both had opposed sending more soldiers into Iraq or sending any across the border into Iran. Bush also demoted Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, who insisted that intelligence estimates showed no near-term threat from Iran's nuclear program.

"Our assessment is that the prospects of an Iranian weapon are still a number of years off, and probably into the next decade," Negroponte said last April. "I think it's important that this issue be kept in perspective."

Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Gates have a different perspective; when they look at the Middle East, they see "The Long War". They clearly believe that US soldiers, innocent Iraqis – and now, innocent Iranians as well – must continue to sacrifice their lives in "the decisive ideological struggle of our time", as Bush's own words reveal:

"Even if our new strategy works exactly as planned, deadly acts of violence will continue, and we must expect more Iraqi and American casualties."

In closing, he added a statement that many other leaders have made before: "Fellow citizens, the year ahead will demand more patience, sacrifice and resolve."

If President Bush had shown patience with international efforts to deal with Saddam Hussein; if he had sacrificed the neoconservative dreams of a global American Empire: if he had kept his resolve to pursue the true terrorists of Al-Qaida – if the President had done four years ago what he asks of us all now, several thousand Americans and untold thousands of Iraqis would still be alive.

Instead we will have more war, more "preemptive military action", and more innocent victims bombed in their own homes. The President has made his decision and he cannot be stopped – because in the aftermath of 9/11, the American people traded their ownership of the Republic for a false promise of safety.

Fear Not

2006-09-06T22:12:00.000-07:00

From where I sit, here in the woods of Oregon, it's looking pretty ugly out across the country towards the South and East.

The weather is brutal and the political climate reeks of decay.
People are choosing sides once again, as another round of Us vs Them gets ready to rumble.
Believers in Doomsday feel the Rapture of Armageddon approaching, getting anxious as the fulfillment of both their deepest fear and greatest wish is at hand.
The concept of government has been eroded, fundamentally altered beyond repair, perhaps, done with deliberate intent.
Idol-worshipping false Christian "leaders" sanction the killing of innocents.
American bombs and rockets are used around the world, by Americans or by others, to kill more innocents.
The Truth is being told in a few places, but few are listening.
Lies are being repeated everywhere and accepted by too many as if true.
Fear still rules the lives of far too many, as is still used as a Control Mechanism by too many.

Yet I can turn away from all of that, for a while, out here in the coastal mountains where few care to live. There's little sign of the world whose pictures are carried to me through the cable across the road. Here the timelessness of the natural world lives on in secret places, seldom visited, carefully preserved...

In those places, Hope lives. Like water from a spring, it flows from the Earth, bearing the historical record that reminds us that all things change.

My wish for all of you who read this is for you to find that place for yourself where the Earth's story can be heard, where humanity's role in that history can be understood, and where your own place in the story resides. For Hope will be needed; Faith will be your best defense against the shitstorm that human ignorance has spawned.

The End is not at hand, not for Earth – and not for human kind, either. The end comes to each of us in Time, but collectively we have a future that is yet to unfold. We can influence that unfolding process, we cannot help but to influence it, with the choices we make each day.

I choose Hope over Fear. I chose Faith over Religion. I choose acceptance over aggression. I choose reason over belief.

Those choices work for me. More people every day are coming to the point where they must choose, and many choose well. Not many are in business or government, but they don't need to be - because the changes that are coming will come from outside, from those places of that allow us to be reawakened to the Truth of who and what we are.

Always go forward, always be strong when facing the illusion of Fear. You cannot be defeated, you cannot be harmed, you canot lose unless you surrender to the illusion.

Tabu Soro. Never Surrender.

Back from the heart

2006-07-27T14:13:00.000-07:00

I've been away for a bit. I've been immersed in the heart of America, filling in as a freelance relief editor for the West Lane news, a weekly newspaper published in the small town of Veneta, Oregon. The paper has more than four decades of history behind it, with huge binder files of past editions – pure treasure to a history freak like me.
I've just been watching the current world news, not writing about events or even talking about them much. I've been tightly focused on covering the local news, which is based in a reality that is impacted by world politics, but isn't connected to those events in any other way – except when a local soldier dies in the ongoing occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
But my temporary gig in small town America, where the true heart of nation lives on, will end next week and I came back into focus on the world stage again – just in time to hear Newt Gingrich and Bill Bennett claim on national tv that we are already well into World War III.
Fuck that, Newt and Bill. Go sell your fear and lies elsewhere, there's no market for them at this house.
We might be killed by terrorists tomorrow, sure – anything can happen. Our house might get hit be a meteor at any minute, too. Both events are on the same magnitude of likelihood – nil, essentially zero, so low that it would be foolish to worry about it. We're all gonna die of something, and probably sooner than we think.
I'm far more worried about the people, like Bill and Newt, Dick and George, Condi and Karl and Scooter, who believe that the President must be the most powerful man in the world, and must not be restrained by the American people, or by American law or international law, from doing whatever he wants – in the name of freedom. If that includes sanctioning murder and torture, if that includes poisoning the earth and destroying the life-sustaining infrastructure of towns, cities and even whole regions – then so be it. If it's acceptable to George and Dick, then We the People should accept it, too – in the name of security.
Well, fuck that too, I say to all of you believers in the Great White Father on the Potomac. The time of military power and the Quest for Empire is over. It ended when weaponry advanced enough to allow small groups of people to inflict big damage to a standing army. Global empire will only be possible when small arms and munitions are eliminated, and that will never happen.
If there is a surplus of anything on this planet, it's effective weaponry. We've gots tons of those things just lying about, apparently, as even the poorest of militias anywhere in the world seem well-armed. They've generally got more guns than food or money, at least. And bullets, too – one gun may serve a warrior for the cause during several years of battle, but each bullet or rocket needs replacing the next day.
That never seems to be a problem...
So the empire builders are doomed to fail, in the long run – which won't be much longer, it seems. But a lot of people are gonna get hurt before they surrender their dream of Empire that is a living nightmare for the rest of the world.
The real problem for we who watch as power brokers and fear mongers carve up our planet, is that it's our collective fault for letting it happen...
So we should put a stop to it. We can, you know. We've done it before here in America, and it's been done before in other places. A state of relatively peaceful coexistance of humanity never seems to last for long, but it can be achieved once again, if only for a while.
And we need to be in that state to deal with what Mother Nature is about to bring us...

Untold deaths – how many more?

2006-04-13T22:33:00.000-07:00

How many people – overwhelmingly innocent men, women and children – have died because of direct action by US military soldiers in Iraq? How much "collateral damage" has there been? How many peaceful families have become victims of the neocon desire to own Iraq in the way that the US owns Kuwait?

Go ahead and take a guess, because nobody can say with certainty. Estimates range wildly, but all of the numbers indicate a lot of killing has happened in our name.

Here's just a few opinions:

"I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis."
- George W. Bush, December 12, 2005, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Iraq Body Count estimated on April 12, 2006, that the minimum number of Iraqi dead was 34,030 and the maximum was 38,164.

British medical journal The Lancet on October 29, 2004 stated, "Making conservative assumptions, we think about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq."

An Iraqi humanitarian group, Iraqiyun, counted 128,000 actual violent deaths as of July 12, 2005.

Les Roberts, one of the world's top epidemiologists, reported on February 8, 2006, that there may be as many as 300,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. His findings in the Sudan and other war zones have been accepted without question by the Bush administration – they even quoted his numbers about estimated Dafur deaths publicly. His figures on Iraqi deaths were immediately challenged as being "ridiculous" by Donald Rumsfeld.

I took an informal tally myself, adding up all the individual public reports of civilians who were killed in Iraq by US soldiers that I could find, going back to the first days of the invasion. My own count, which isn't an accurate total by any means, but represents only those deaths that were reported and seemed to be credible, came to 8,317.

Using only that ridiculously low number as a measure, America as a nation is now responsible for killing more than twice as many innocents in Iraq over a three-year period as were killed in New York on one day by a small band of suicidal religious fanatics.

Where's the moral superiority in that position? How can we expect any intelligent people anywhere in the world to support what we have allowed to be done in our name?

Before the American public woke up and spoke loudly enough to stop the death being dealt in the jungles of Southeast Asia, more than 50,000 US soldiers were dead along with more than a million Vietnamese, Laotions and Cambodians. When will we decide that enough innocent blood has been spilled in Iraq?

And what will you say when you finally meet your Creator if you remain compliant now, quiescent and complicit in the destruction of so many sacred lives?

How many times can Bush lie without being held accountable?

2006-04-06T15:39:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from recent reports by Jason Leopold, writing for truthout.org, show that President George Bush directly and intentionally lied to the American people and to federal investigators in order to protect members of his administration who violated national security – with his authorization – in an act of revenge against former ambassador Joseph Wilson after Wilson exposed the false justifications for invading Iraq.

In early June of 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney met with Bush and told him that CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was Wilson's wife and that she was responsible for sending him on a fact-finding mission to Niger to check out reports about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from the African country. She was not responsible, although she did recommend her husband to her superiors, and Cheney knew that his attempts to portray her as the person responsible were untrue.

According to Leopold, the meeting with Cheney and Bush included former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, her former deputy Stephen Hadley, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

Cheney advised his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, in mid-June of 2003 that the President had authorized Libby to disclose the classified identity of Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife, using a classified National Intelligence Estimate.

Three months after Plame Wilson's CIA status and identity were unmasked in print by columnist Robert Novak, President Bush said publicly that it was unlikely that the individual who leaked her name would ever be found, but that he welcomed a Justice Department investigation to find out who was responsible for it.

"I mean, this is a town full of people who like to leak information," Bush said during a press conference on Oct. 7, 2003. "And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's lots of senior officials. I don't have any idea."

He did, actually – Bush knew exactly who had leaked Plame's name and status, because he gave explicit approval for an act that could be called treason. He knew he was in trouble a few months earlier when he retained legal counsel in case this ugliness came back to smack him in the face.

It did, and it continues to do so. Bush did not disclose to special counsel Patrick Fizgerald that he was aware of the campaign to discredit Wilson. Bush also said he did not know who, if anyone, in the White House had retaliated against the former ambassador by leaking his wife's undercover identity to reporters. Bush was not under oath at the time, but a lie is a lie whenever it's told.

The fact that much of this information was revealed by Libby and his lawyers in order to provide some kind of defense against perjury and obstruction of justice charges makes it difficult for anyone to blame a non-existent "liberal media" for the information, or to claim that the charges are politically motivated.

How long, America? How many lies must be revealed before we decide that Bush must be impeached? Have we given up so completely on the concept of honest government that we will continue to allow mean-spirited, confirmed liars who have committed criminal acts to occupy the White House?

A response to Rep. Jack Kingston

2006-04-03T16:07:00.000-07:00

Georgia's Rep. Jack Kingston recently called anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan "a nutcase" and "a very flaky woman" according to reports posted on his blog. He issued an apology the following day. I sent the following screed to him that same day...

Good day to you, sir;

It was heartening to see your apology posted on your site regarding comments you made about Cindy Sheehan. I was the editor of the Haleakala Times in Hawaii when Ms. Sheehan lost her son, and was one of the first to publish her commentary on the war, before she became a media icon. I did so because her voice is not unique; she is most certainly not a nutcase or beatnik; I have heard far too many comments much like her original public statement from fathers and mothers of fallen soldiers. I heard many of the same comments during the Vietnam War, which compares to the invasion of Iraq only in its injustice and unnecessary deaths.

I'm writing to thank you for the posted apology, and I understand fully how emotions can drive us to saying hurtful things that we later regret – but I am also angry that your outburst will cause more damage to her reputation and her perceived character than your apology can ever repair. It was a disgraceful act, especially for an elected representative of the people. It seemed as if you felt those words to be true, but would not ordinarily have voiced them. If you believe that – if that is the truth about the way your mind works, then you have a responsibility to re-examine that way of thinking or to step down from public office.

As I'm not a resident of your state, much less your district, it will be easy for you to dismiss anything I have to say – if, in fact, you ever have the opportunity to read this message at all. I hope that you will take a moment to consider this opinion:

Our country has a government that functions poorly. The primary reason for that state of affairs is the antagonistic approach to governing that partisan politics has created. Your comments about Ms. Sheehan reflect the atmosphere in which they were spoken, but they also contribute to that atmosphere. I hope that you personally can rise above taking hard positions on issues whenever possible and return to the proper duties of an elected official – representing the myriad and diverse voices of your constituency in the most complete manner possible.

That means, to me, that your personal opinion on any issue is of no more value than any one of your constituents. Your job is to educate the residents of your district regarding an issue, determine the majority opinion and all minority opinions amongst them, then present all of those voices in debating the issue. Your final vote should reflect the desires of the majority of your constituency.

It's the only way to avoid the trap of partisanship and corruption that dominates national politics today. I urge you to seek a change of heart about your approach to representation, and lead the way for others to follow you back to the kind of representation that can find honest solutions to our society's most pressing problems.

One last comment - any vote for continued funding of military operations in Iraq is a wrong vote. I take that hard position because human beings are dying unnecessarily as a direct result of our government's involvement in Iraq. Innocent blood will be on our hands whether we stay in Iraq or not, and the longer we stay, the more blood will spill. Any resolution of that nightmare will come only when our military is fully withdrawn. Any vote to fund this invasion further sanctions the death of thousands of innocents. That is never acceptable, ever. It violates every principle that Christ taught. It is always wrong...

Thank you for taking the time to listen,
Rob Lafferty

Idiots Abounding

2006-03-23T23:13:00.000-08:00

We The People must be a nation of idiots, because we elected a president who either is an idiot himself or thinks that we are. You can tell in his few unscripted appearances on television or taking questions from the press corp – those rare occasions when his audience is not carefully restricted to folks supportive of his policies.

Here's just one example from his press conference earlier this week:

George Bush:"You know, we used to think we were secure because of oceans and previous diplomacy. But we realized on September the 11th, 2001, that killers could destroy innocent life..."

Is he really that naive? Or does he think that we are? The World Trade Center was bombed once before by Islamic extremists; does he think we all had forgotten that? Does he really expect us to forgive him for having forgotten that important bit of recent history?

That incredible comment came during the middle part Bush's reply to a question from Helen Thomas, the senior AP correspondent and Washington reporter for more than 40 years. This was the first time Bush had called on her for a question in more than four years, because she asks hard questions – like "Why did you want to go to war in Iraq?" Here is more of Bush's reply, picking up from where it left off above:

George Bush: "...and that's why I went into Iraq - hold on for a second -"

Helen Thomas: "They didn't do anything to you, or to our country."

George Bush: "Look - excuse me for a second, please. Excuse me for a second. They did. The Taliban provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That's where al Qaeda trained -"

Helen Thomas: "I'm talking about Iraq -"

George Bush: "Helen, excuse me. That's where - Afghanistan provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That's where they trained. That's where they plotted. That's where they planned the attacks that killed thousands of innocent Americans. I also saw a threat in Iraq."

That's our President, babbling away to cover his mistake until he can verbally close the loop that links Iraq and al-Queda – a link that never existed before the US invasion of Iraq. The neocon's illegal war in Iraq has created the very danger that they now try to use to justify the invasion, having run out of all other possible justifications.

How did we sink so low as a body politic that this man could front for a pack of moral and intellectual dinosaurs and earn enough legitimate votes – twice – to win the election by stealing the necessary few more?

Why aren't people howling in the streets for his impeachment? Is it for fear of unleashing Dick Cheney, who wouldn't hesitate to declare martial law and imprison all dissenters if he had the chance?

Well, Cheney can be impeached, too. Who will run the country, you say? Well, Congress could do it, like they are supposed to, instead of kneeling in submission to the figurehead of a cabal whose visions of Imperial Destiny are fogging their brains.

Transnational Empire

2006-03-13T21:42:00.000-08:00

One of the most important stories of the past year is the continued construction of permanent US military bases in Iraq, and it's been largely ignored by mainstream American media. Since May of last year, American troops are being consolidated into four large military bases that cover miles of desert, have hardened runways, inground swimming pools, bowling alleys, fast-food franchises and Internet and cable TV inside their concrete buildings.

The permanent US embassy compound in Baghdad's current "Green Zone" will house over 1,000 people, have walls up to 15 feet thick and is already completely independent of the surrounding infrastructure for fresh water and power.

None of this is secret; the plans for building what have always appeared to be permanent bases have long been known to anyone who was paying attention. Military officials even refer to these bases as "long-term access facilities", which translates into real language quite easily as "permanent bases".

It's not even much of a secret why these bases are being built; the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Perle junta always denied that the US was building bases, but their primary guiding document, a Project For a New American Century report, calls for exactly the kind of permanent presence that is being built.

Iraq is the future Middle Eastern outpost for the world's first true global Empire – but it won't be an American empire. It won't be controlled any single country. It may appear to be a consortium of countries led by the US, much like Bush's "coalition of the willing" that invaded Iraq – but the New World Order will be controlled by a geopolitical force that transcends nationality.

In terms a historian might use, it will be a Trans-National Corporate Hegemony that uses the marketplace to dominate the politics of countries. It's been an Empire on the quick rise since the day that China finally agreed to play along – but the Chinese people remain a sleeping giant that, if awakened, will change the world in a far different way.

That's the not-so-secret plan behind the invasion of Iraq. That's why billions of our dollars are being spent building permanent US military bases in Iraq.

By the way, you and I weren't supposed to pay for those bases in the original plan. Iraq has lots of oil, and the neocons thought they could sell a few million barrels to finance their plan once they controlled the country. Bad planning, yet someone must pay for the mistakes that were made. That someone is us...

The question is: why isn't this being written about by the mainstream press and discussed on television news programs? There've been a few letters to editors published in some papers that raise questions about those bases, but simply no mention at all on broadcast news of these massive projects with alarming implications.

The failure to properly report on this storyis one of the great failures of the American press in my lifetime, and perhaps the greatest ever. As much as I miss reading the news on a printed page, when it comes to national and global news, that era is nearly dead. Broadcast news died out a long time ago, leaving cyberspace as the new frontier for journalism and news reporting.

Considering the new energy and audience that many hard-working Internet journalists are gaining from this new form of publishing the news, it may be a key ingridient in ending the New World Order before it fully takes root.

Do Your Job

2006-03-05T08:50:00.000-08:00

The attempt by the Bush administration to expand the powers of the presidency, and the neoconservative philosophy that drives that attempt, are exactly the kind of imperial ambitions that our political system of checks and balances was designed to prevent. Elected representatives across the land have failed to fulfill that duty.

That's our fault, collectively, because We The People haven't demanded that our Senators and Representatives actually do their jobs.

I urge everyone to do exactly that, regardless of your political persuasion. The Constitution is at stake; our way of life is more threatened by the fear and greed amongst our own elected officials than by any terrorist group.

I've been sending this message to anyone who will listen to it, and I urge you to do the same. I've added a sample letter below that my representaives have received, as an example of how I'm calling for an inquiry by Congress.

"If the American Congress can bring articles of impeachment against a sitting president for lying to the American people, as was rightfully done with President Clinton, then justice demands that President Bush be held to that same standard. This country has been damaged by lies spoken repeatedly by the president and vice-president, and by criminal behavior that other administration officials have commited with sanction from their superiors. If your presence in Congress has any meaning at all, you must do the unpleasant and politically hazardous work of holding the administration accountable for their actions on behalf of all Americans."

It really doesn't matter how you choose express your feelings; it only matters that you do. It's part of your responsibility as a citizen to demand that elected officials behave as they should – and it's the very least that you can do...

Let's pay attention to what really matters, please

2006-03-02T21:39:00.000-08:00

It doesn't make the slightest bit of difference who owns the port management companies in America; it certainly makes no difference if ownership is British or Arab, with headquarters in London or Dubai. None of that matters, as some 80% of American ports are managed already by companies that claim corporate residency outside the US.

And few of those ports are secure, if any. That's not the fault of the management companies – security is handled by US officials at various levels, and they have neither the personnel, resources or political will to make the port entry system secure.

If we want secure ports, we need to tell the Bush administration to stop building permanent military bases in Iraq and invest that money in cargo inspections and port security in the US. But that's not a real issue, not in comparison to the increased use by the US military of jets and helicopters to deliver airstrikes – rockets and bombs – into neighborhoods where suspected insurgents may be hiding.

The civilian death toll as a direct result of US military air assaults is likely to be well over 100,000 during the past two years. That's the most tragic crime to emerge from the US occupation and invasion of Iraq.

It's also the story that your television and daily paper won't talk about in any way. We all owe the innocent Iraqi dead the honor of not forgetting their deaths when being distracted by the media choice of some easier story – or non-story – to report.

Some Light At Last

2005-12-20T21:26:00.000-08:00

I haven't written anything political for nearly three weeks now. I've been watching, listening, and trying to be patient as the grand illusion created by the Bush administration finally begins to lose its hold on a majority of the American public.
I've been listening to Senators and Representatives speak of impeachment. I heard the President admit that he committed an impeachable offense against the citizenry.
I watched this same President claim that "we are winning" in the everybody-loses invasion and makeover of a country that didn't even exist a century ago, and would not exist today as a political entity if the people who actually live in the region could choose their own destiny.
I'm trying oh, so, hard to remain patient with the hundreds of pundits and bloggers who act as if they're shocked to learn that this administration is spying on innocent citizens in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights.
And I'm seeking the path of forgiveness when it comes to those journalists who know much more truth than they are willing to print; those who have known a great deal for a very long time, yet remained silent.
I'm not getting my hopes up that there will actually be an impeachment of George W. Bush. He was re-elected largely because the American people have never been willing to change presidents during Times of War. An actual impeachment during this never-ending, militarily unwinnable War on Terror seems most unlikely.
But there is hope. Impeachment, although it would come too late to save the uncounted thousands of dead human beings in Iraq and Afghanistan, is a necessary first step in restoring the American Republic to the American People. It's a step that seemed unthinkable just one year ago, but the word has been spoken aloud in the halls of Congress by nearly a dozen elected officials now.
Bush's admission that he violated the Fourth Amendment by ordering the NSA to spy on American citizens is an impeachable offense according to John Dean, who knows this subject area quite well. The irony is that this matter involves the same kind of overkill that brought Nixon to his knees in the White House, begging Henry Kissinger to pray with him.
The NSA not only has a secret court that will grant any warrant they request within hours or even minutes, they don't even need to wait for a warrant to wiretap or eavesdrop on anyone suspected of anything – they're allowed to seek a warrant after the fact.
Ordering secret, unauthorized surveillance was not only illegal, it was completely unnecessary. It may prove to be Bush's downfall, just as the unnecessary retaliation against Joseph Wilson by outing his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, cost Lewis Libby his job, and will probably cost Karl Rove his position as well.
There's gonna be some interesting political theater to watch in the months ahead, folks, and I'll be playing close attention. I don't necessarily enjoy watching it unfold, but there is some pleasure in seeing all this stuff that was known but never revealed finally coming to light.

So much blood shed...

2005-12-04T22:59:00.000-08:00

A vast amount of blood has been spilled in Iraq during the past fifteen years. Beginning with our response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and continuing today, some five thousand American citizens and soldiers have been killed. During that same time at least 100,000 Iraqi citizens have been killed by American weapons – possibly many more.

Some of those now-dead Iraqi were soldiers or extremists engaged in battle with US military forces, but they're only a small percentage of the total.

Some of the dead were, from their perspective, simply defending their country from an invading force. They were not terrorists, not even insurgents – just people defending their homes and cities, their land and their families.

Some were seekers of vengeance – the survivors of an American assault that killed someone they loved, or who watched their child die from a lack of medical care that was once available, before the US invasion of Iraq began.

But most of the Iraqis who have died a violent death during the past decade are innocent civilians killed in bombing raids and artillery attacks against suspected targets of armed resistance. They had no role in the conflict, were not in any way violent, and usually had no idea that death was about to rain down on them from an unseen source.

Many other lives have been lost due to the consequences of US military actions on hospitals and clinics. The social fabric of the country has disintegrated as a result of the ruined infrastructure. The economy has been shattered and now lies in the hands of foreign interests with long histories of exploitation who will control any reconstruction.

About half of the dead from the Iraqi conflict were killed because our elected and appointed officials lied to the world about the justification for invasion and war. Their lies were obvious to much of the world then, but only now are being truly exposed.

The ugly reality that Iraq has become is not what those war hawks were promising when they set out to destroy Saddam Hussein. Their failure to see the inevitable outcome of their actions is just one measure of their incompetence.

Since so many human beings have died because of the failures of the Bush administration and the US Congress, those legislators must be held accountable. About a third of our Senators and Representatives face elections this year that can serve as courts of accountability; within four years we could have all those who supported this atrocity out of office.

Waiting for the 2008 presidential election is not an option for holding current White House officials accountable for their gross incompetence. They will never be tried in a civil court for the damage they have done, and will never face criminal charges for the laws they have broken and the lives they have taken. They can, at least, be impeached from office and removed from power as soon as possible.

We have filed impeachment charges against a president for dishonesty in the recent past. It is a requirement of honor towards those who have died that we bring justice to bear on those whose lies caused so much blood to be shed.

Polls, Predictions, Soothsayers and a False Reality

2005-11-03T12:40:00.000-08:00

Polls, predictions, soothsayers and a false reality

Ask a dozen people who they think are the most powerful families in the US today, and you’ll get a short list of answers. All of them will, almost certainly, be wrong.
The Bush family would probably be mentioned most often in response to your informal poll – after all, they can seat a President, an ex-President and a Governor at the table for Thanksgiving dinner. That’s a tough trifecta to beat.
The Clintons can do pretty well on holidays with a Senator and an ex-President to claim. The Kennedys also have an impressive collection of resumes at their family reunions, especially if Maria brings Arnold with her.
But no clan comes close to wielding direct power over the social fabric of American life as The Nielsen Families do, those carefully chosen anonymous few whose television viewing habits are electronically measured. The economic impact of television is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, yet the industry depends entirely on mysterious, secret sampling formulas applied by self-certified experts to determine where that enormous flow of money will go.
A wonderful scam, really, one that would make P. T. Barnum proud. Take a tiny sample of the general public, make an semi-educated guess about what’s being viewed on all of the televisions in the land, and then have everyone accept your results as Fact. There’s no downside, really, because nobody can ever prove you wrong. It’s even better than the fortune-telling con “Miss Cleo” used to get rich during her few weeks of fame.
Public opinion polls have morphed into the same soothsayer mode as the Nielsen ratings. Both rely on fewer and fewer samplings to make their projections; soon they'll both be using just the Smith family from Indiana to assess the national mood.
The pollsters at Gallup have convinced the nation that by phoning 767 or 1022 selected people to question, they can predict the political beliefs and potential votes of millions of people. Meanwhile, nobody in the television or advertising business questions the validity of Nielsen numbers despite the tiny fraction of viewers they actually sample.
Over at Gallup they admit to a margin of error of four or five percent, but even if they’re proven wrong by events, that doesn’t shake their faith. They simply refine their methods a bit and start a new poll. But no margin of error exists in the Nielsen world, where a one percent change in ratings will affect millions of advertising dollars.
All this educated guessing would just be good entertainment and the source for a few side bets, except that far too many people take the “results” seriously. We may be getting bad television because of flawed Nielsen sampling. What’s worse is that we may be electing poor representatives because of bad polling practices.
Polls have become a compelling force in politics; they can determine the outcome in a close election by trying to predict it. How often - be honest, now - have you voted for a candidate because all you knew about them was that they were ahead in the polls? Did you question the validity of those polls at the time?
No, you didn’t. Neither did a lot of other folks. They just absorbed the numbers and moved on, usually spreading disinformation as they went.
The faith-based pseudosciences of polling and ratings shape the political and social landscape of America more than ever. Invented as a way of reflecting reality, they’ve grown in influence to the point of creating reality. It may be time to do to them what the Republican party wants to do to our bloated federal government – shrink it down to a size small enough to drown in a bathtub.
That won’t happen in television because the industry needs numbers of some kind, any kind, to attract those advertising billions. It can happen in politics if we collectively choose to refuse to participate in polls and ignore the results when they are announced. Even better, we could all start voting the opposite of poll results until their credibility is completely destroyed.
We might not get a better government, but considering what we have now, there’s little to lose by trying.

Lies And More Damned Lies

2005-10-31T12:34:00.000-08:00

Irvin "Scooter" Libby may go to jail for lying to a grand jury and obstructing an investigation into the outing of a CIA agent. Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove may yet be indicted for similar crimes.

Scooter’s boss is Dick "Vice" Cheney, a master of the art of lying to the American people. In December 2001, speaking on "Meet the Press" about a link between the lead 9/11 hijacker and Iraq, Vice clearly said "it's been pretty well confirmed". That wasn't true, as we know now and he knew then – but when confronted with his own words in a subsequent interview, Vice denied three times that he had said "pretty well confirmed."

Vice has been scowling in the background in this ugliness from the start. He also knew that Scooter was lying about both of their involvement for two years, and allowed White House representatives to repeat Scooter's lies to the world throughout that time.

Turd Blossom’s boss, George "Shrub" Bush, has told just as many lies as the thugs who, in theory, work for him. Unlike Vice, Shrub isn’t even a very good liar – except when he doesn’t know that he’s lying, which seems to be about half of the time.

Lying to a grand jury is a felony. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of lies were told to the American people in order to invade another country. Those lies caused the death of at least 30,000 human beings. Which is the higher crime? Who will be held accountable?

Ethics, Oaths and the Big Spin

2005-10-25T08:12:00.000-07:00

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison on October 23, 2005, put a big hypocritical spin on the matter of lying while under oath to a grand jury. Speaking about the Fitzgerald investigation into the leak of classified information for personal revenge and political reasons, she stated:
"I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality..."
On February 12, 1999, Hutchison spoke about her vote to impeach then-president Bill Clinton for perjury – for lying under oath:
"The edifice of American jurisprudence rests on the foundation of the due process of law. The mortar in that foundation is the oath. The oath is how we defend ourselves against those who would subvert our system by breaking our laws. There are Americans in jail today because they violated that oath."
That kind of partisan, unethical, flopping behavior is one of the three root problems choking the life out of American politics today. Pressure from the main economic powers of a region or nation is another; the third is never mentioned in public – and it won't be mentioned here, either.
We the People can pull ourselves out of this muck we're stuck in, but we'll have to address those two speakable problems if we expect to get any help from our own government.

Miers – a non-partisan bad choice

2005-10-19T09:06:00.000-07:00

In a nation that is increasingly defining itself - and dividing itself - with political labels like conservative and liberal, there is some unity on at least one issue. Informed people on both sides of the divide are speaking out against President Bush's choice of Harriet Miers, his former personal attorney with no judicial experience, as a Supreme Court nominee.
Charles Krauthammer wrote, "If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the President of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her."
George Will spoke against her as well, saying, "There is no reason to believe that Miers' nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers' name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists."
A Supreme Court Justice needs a thorough understanding of constitutional law and a wide range of legal experience. There's no requirement that a nominee for the Court must have served as a judge at a lower level, but a person who lacks that experience should have an impressive legal mind and be able to demonstarte their superior ability over any other possible candidate.
Miers can meet neither standard. Based on the small amount of public records regarding her accomplishments and opinions, she may well be the least capable person ever nominated to the Court. But that's probably an appropriate choice, coming from the least capable President in American history.

Cruel, Inhuman and Perfectly Acceptable

2005-10-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

Cruel, Inhuman and Perfectly Acceptable

"I think what's going on in Guantanamo Bay and other places is a disgrace to the U.S.A."
Former president Jimmy Carter, winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.

In November of 2003, one Iraqi prisoner, an insurgent group leader in Qaim, was interrogated for sixteen days then beaten by Iraqi paramilitaries with fists, a club and a length of rubber hose while American Army officials watched. Two days later, an Army interrogator and a military guard stuffed the prisoner into a sleeping bag, tied it closed and beat him until he died.

That's just one incident from among hundreds of documented cases of prisoner abuse by American soldiers, CIA operatives, Department of Defense interrogators and foreign nationals working with US authorities. Maj. Gen. Jack L. Rives, the Air Force deputy judge advocate general, has said that at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and inside Iraqi prisons, the "more extreme interrogation techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law as well as military law."

The Bush administration also outsources torture through it's "extraordinary rendition" program. A Pentagon spokesman has confirmed that detainees have been transferred from Guantanamo Bay to Pakistan, Russia, Morocco and Saudi Arabia - all countries the State Department criticizes for practicing torture against its own people. And, of course, the CIA has its own program going in dark and secret places. "The fact that there are underground CIA facilities somewhere where people are being tortured has been known for a while," says Michael Ratner of the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City.

As much as we disapprove of the torture other humans, it's easy to understand how it happens so often. In a war zone, when bullets start flying, human emotions peak - fear and hatred, anger and survival dominate all other feelings. That emotional state exists in POW camps almost as strongly. When people who have been trained to see each other as enemies are forced into close contact, bad things happen.

That same dynamic has always existed in our prison system, although convicted felons are supposed to be protected by law against physical and mental abuse. Those who guard the prisoners tend to use whatever force will accomplish the task at hand. Administrators speak publicly of humane treatment, but allow mistreatment as long as it's done quietly. Things can turn ugly fast in such an environment.

I know that to be true from a dozen years of working in the youth correctional system. The crisis mentality that everyone adopts to work in a prison became something I used to justify cruel and unnecessary behavior towards inmates. And it was surprisingly easy to do things that I ashamed of today, when every day I witnessed others doing things far worse.

I lost all claims to moral authority inside that prison yard because of my own behavior. Our country loses any claim to moral authority in the world society when we allow the torture and murder of "detainees" or "enemy combatants". No other country will listen to our government representatives moralize about the sanctity of life, freedom or human rights when we don't practice those principles ourselves.

230 soldiers have been charged with abuse of prisoners. That's not just the behavior of a few bad apples, that's a systemic problem. But no soldier of high rank or government official in the Defense Department, who are charged with the responsibility of overseeing those soldiers and maintaining the system, is being held accountable for what has occurred. And why should they? Our new Attorney General openly advocated for the use of abusive tactics and violations of the Geneva Convention, so who will hold them accountable?

The sanction of abuse and torture stands in opposition to every principle of human rights that gave birth to this nation. It is reprehensible to most of the civilized world. Any individual who orders the beating of another human being or carries out such an order is a criminal by any rational definition, and is likely a borderline sociopath as well.

The US Senate has voted 90-9 to adopt uniform standards for anyone detained by the Defense Department. They would limit interrogation techniques to those contained in the Army field manual and prohibit the "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of anyone in US custody. Senator John McCain released a letter from more than a dozen retired generals, admirals and former prisoners of war offering support for his legislative amendment. The letter says, in part, "The abuse of prisoners hurts America's cause in the war on terror, endangers US service members who might be captured by the enemy, and is anathema to the values Americans have held dear for generations."

Still, nine Senators voted against adding the McCain amendment to the military spending bill that will help fund the NeoCon War On Terror - Senators Allard (CO), Bond (MO), Coburn (OK), Cochran (MS), Cornyn (TX), Inhofe (OK), Roberts (KS), Sessions (AL), and Stevens (AK). That's unacceptable for any reason. If only one piece of legislation ever deserved a unanimous vote on the Senate floor, this amendment would be that one.

President Bush has threatened to veto the spending bill that contains McCain's amendment, "if legislation is presented that would restrict the President's authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice." That's his way of saying that he wants to retain his self-granted authority to order the torture of prisoners.

It's may also be the Bush Administration's way of sending a tough message to terrorists and their sympathizers. Unfortunately, the threat of torture isn't going to put much fear into someone who has chosen to be a suicide bomber. It will, however, inspire more violence against Western society, and lead to the death of more American soldiers and innocent bystanders.

That doesn't seem to trouble our Commander-In-Chief. Watch closely when he speaks, listen carefully to the tone of his words and you'll see and hear his lack of emotional attachment to the daily sacrifice of lives that his war requires. Notice that he does not speak of the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi people who have already died, and are still dying, from bombs dropped on their cities by US warplanes.

George W. Bush claims that we overthrew Saddam Hussein because, in part, he was guilty of torturing his own people. Bush says that we are in a war with terrorists who hate the American way of life. The torture and murder of prisoners was not an acceptable part of Iraqi life. Although it happens here at home, it isn't an acceptable part of the American way of life, either. This shame and disgrace to our nation must stop now.

Excerpts from Oct. 6 speech by GWB before the National Endowment for Democracy, with commentary added:

2005-10-10T21:49:00.000-07:00

Reading the transcript of the speech, there were, as usual, a number of phrases that made me cringe. Here's just two of those...

"Evil men obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience must be taken very seriously, and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply."

What an amazingly ironic phrase for him to use... there are several million people - at the very least - in this country who would say that those words describe just how they feel about GWB and the people who are guiding him. It's a bit spooky to actually hear him say that. It would be even stranger if he had actually written those fine-sounding words...

"In Iraq, there is no peace without victory. We will keep our nerve and we will win that victory."

He can't just come straight out and say that American troops will be stationed in Iraq forever, if the NeoCons he works for get their way. Instead he can offer that bold phrase as the not-secret code for what is intended. That's been their dream for nearly two decades, and they fully expect to make their dream come true. They're deluded, of course; patriotic Iraqi people and extremists from all over the world will oppose an American presence forever, just as they do now. And the American people, despite our war-like history, have had enough of this particular war...

It takes a felony...

2005-10-09T22:19:00.000-07:00

A man was asked to use his experience in the service of his country, to investigate rumors of a potential threat to national security. He did, and reported back truthfully what he found – that the rumors were false and no threat existed.

He was ignored by those in power who sent him on the mission. He remained quiet until the day he heard that false rumor and false threat used in the justification for war.

Again he spoke the truth, this time to the public through the press. Those in power responded with attacks on his credibility, character and reputation – then set out to destroy his wife's career.

Karl Rove, chief advisor to George Bush, and Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Dick Cheney went after Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame (Rove called her "fair game") in what was both an act of revenge and a naked abuse of power intended to intimidate critics of the administration.

Along the way, they violated every ethical standard that exists. They violated national security and put CIA operatives and their contacts at risk. They broke the law, although that may be difficult to prove under the technically vague federal laws that apply to national security violations.

Libby acts on the orders of, and on behalf of, Dick Cheney. Rove is Bush's closest advisor and longtime friend. The behavior that they now admit to, after two years of denials, is roughly equal to the kind of cheap criminal thuggery that pervaded the White House in the time of Richard Nixon.

Bush once insisted that anyone leaking secrets from within his administration would be fired for that breach of trust. But Rove or Libby will now have to be convicted of a felony before Bush will consider firing either of them. After all, Rove, Libby and and Cheney are key members of the inner circle that Bush serves.

Bush has hired a private attorney to advise him as he speaks with investigators about the matter, yet he has little to fear. The crimes of Nixon's inner circle brought down his presidency; Bill Clinton faced impeachment for lies and disgracing his office; Bush, however, has Ronald Reagan's gift of remaining untouched by scandal.

Perhaps that's because we all recognize that, like Reagan, Bush isn't really in charge. That was made evident on 9/11 when, after the first tower was hit, Bush was left alone for twenty minutes reading stories to schoolkids while his "aides" did what they thought was needed. At that same moment of impact, Cheney was rumored to be in a secret command bunker supervising a "military exercise"; and that's an appropriate snapshot for the true location of power in America today.

Judge Not, Lest Ye Become A Judge

2005-10-04T21:36:00.000-07:00

GWB has chosen as his newest Supreme Court Justice a person who has never been a judge. She'll fit right in with the new Chief Justice, who was never even an Associate Justice before assuming the leadership of the Court. She can join the FEMA Director who was never involved in emergency planning before his appointment – the one who quit after his inexperience was publicized. They can all hold hands with the World Bank president who has no history of financial management and the UN Ambassador who has no diplomacy skills of any kind.
GWB believes in the practice of putting untrained people in places of responsibility – after all, it's worked for him. He was handed an oil company when he had no business experience, and although he ran it into the ground, it somehow sold for a huge profit. With some help, he leveraged that profit into part-ownership of a baseball team. After he got bored with the business side of baseball, GWB sold his share of the team for an excellent profit.
Then he ran for Governor of Texas, and won. That lead him right into the White House, despite any skill or ability to handle either job.
Hard to argue against that kind of track record... until a disaster comes along, like a hurricane or an insurgency...

A Cowardly War

2005-10-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

If Congress can hold hearings to discover the truth about steroid use among professional baseball players, it should certainly hold hearings to determine the truth about the Bush administration's justifications for invading Iraq.

We have allowed the current government to commit extreme violence, supposedly on our behalf. Under the false premise of protecting our personal safety, our military has killed untold thousands of completely innocent Iraqi people.

We have allowed the use of depleted uranium in the weaponry fired by our soldiers, poisoning the earth for generations for the people who live there, as well as our own soldiers.

We allow our CIA operatives to abduct people, to detain and interrogate them, while wearing black hoods and gloves in order to remain anonymous and unaccountable.

It's all being done in the name of safety, in the cause of freedom; we are allowing terrible things to happen to innocents in our desire for the illusion of safety.

We can never win a war on terrorism. History shows it can't be done; our own history as a nation confirms that fact. Yet we continue to allow our President to make that claim – "We're Winning The War On Terror" – and pretend that it's possible to be true.

When a human being is determined to use murder and self-sacrifice as the defining statement of their life, then they will find a way to make it happen.

And now we are allowing military recruiters to operate inside our high schools. We are allowing our children to be sacrificed in this war effort.

Bush says that we must fight terrorists in Iraq so that we don't have to fight them here. The British public heard them same line from Tony Blair, yet their subway system was attacked twice in two weeks. Those who claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings and failed attempts stated that Britain's military presence in Iraq was their justification for the attacks.

The War On terror is the latest in the long line of perpetual war that this country has maintained for fifty years. We We fight wars on the domestic front as well as on foreign soil - the Drug War is into its fourth decade now, with no real change in the situation and no end in sight.

Our perspective is so out of balance that we threaten sick people who would benefit from using cannabis with a jail sentence for seeking relief from their pain – and jail, too, for the person who provided the patient with the herb.

Meanwhile, we allow the sale of sleeping pills, sexual aids and anti-depressants on television – because somehow, if it comes in a pill, a drug has moral respectability. Many of those drugs have the potential for nasty side effects, but because that fact is mentioned briefly in the ads, it's considered fine. The ads even recommend that we "tell our doctor" about the latest drug

Bush wanted democracy in Iraq, and he will end up getting one - only it will be a pro-Iranian, Islamic government comprised largely of Shiite Muslims who are not friendly to the US. They haven't forgotten that Bush's father failed to support their attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1991, and they remember the three hundred thousand Shiites who died while the US military command stood by and watched from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

A President who favors torture?

2005-10-02T11:19:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Senate will soon debate two amendments to a bill that will provide the Defence Department's funding. The amendments are intended to prevent the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody, which seems to happen quite a bit in many different places around the world.

Both proposals have been opposed by the White House. President Bush threatens to veto any bill that contains the no-torture policy amendment introduced by Senator John McCain. It's not too surprising that the Bush regime would take such a wrong position.

What is surprising is that it's unlikely that the United States Senate would override Bush's veto. It may not be possible to have 67 of our 100 senators defy the President and vote against his desire to keep using torture as a interrogation tool.

On the floor of the US Senate, the use of torture against "suspects" in "detention" will be defended. At the very heart of our democratic republic, facism will – once again – be justified with words of fear and revenge. And in the end, at least 34 of our Senators will probably support the idea of American soldiers or operatives dehumanizing and abusing a few of the Others.

It shouldn't be surprising, I suppose – our government has a long history of sanctioning barbaric acts against Others, and there's always been those who justify cruelty by citing some kind of threat, including our current Attorney General. But the issue of establishing an official no-torture policy is pretty easy to support, regardless of circumstances. It's a patriotic bandwagon to ride in, and I expected more elected officials to jump aboard.

The Christian community has been largely quiet on this issue, too. I can't imagine that Son of God would remain quiet about the torture of many of his brothers or sisters, yet few who claim to share his faith are calling for the state to end this decidedly un-Christian behavior. In their Sunday sermons, how many pastors, priests and ministers are denouncing the torture of prisoners by US authorities?

I suppose it's just the ancient human folly of demonizing the Other, then become those very demons by mistreating the Other. It seems we haven't evolved past that foolishness even now in the 21st Century, here at the pinnacle of the modern world.

Aloha, and welcome...

2005-10-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

Folks who've read my writing from my years at the Haleakala Times on Maui keep telling me that I should be blogging. This is new to me, but why not? Another opportunity to rant is difficult to pass up...
My wife Karen and I moved to the coastal hills of Oregon at the end of April, and we've been renovating a house built in 1930, located in the Blachly township, in Lake Creek Valley about 45 minutes west of Eugene.
I've not done much writing since leaving Maui. because we've been a bit preoccupied with making this place comfortable. Once I get this blog up to full speed, however, I hope you'll find it an interesting place to visit. I'll be posting my thoughts along with info gathered around the world to try and encourage folks to make this world a better place.
Please feel free to open a dialogue on any subject you wish, and we'll see what develops...