WHERE are the Democrats? I swear, the leadership should hold their annual convention at the Waffle House!
I’m going to a local Dem “do” in a couple of weeks; I stay out of local politics as best I can in the Pea Patch, since there is a frogs-hair of difference between the actual record of the two parties achievements. We’re a swing state, but here in the southern portion of the state … well … we’re the home of John Ashcroft and Roy Blunt, you may remember. ‘Nuff said.
Anyhow — when thinking about this shindig, I can already feel myself get hot … these people are so leaned back their spine touches their belly button. They’re not ready for me, I assure you … I will have to put on my big smile, my virtual sun bonnet and meet them as disgruntled little gal instead of fire-breathing dragoness. More flies with honey … you know. Think I can do it?
Maybe I could just channel Janet Jackson — What. Have. You. Done. For. Me. Lately? But then I’d have to listen to their response, all the lame excuses. There are few Democratic leaders in my area … and they’re behind the 8 Ball — my beating them up won’t help. Dealing with these folks is like punching at air … only one of us [me] seems to think there’s an emergency.
But they NEED to hear that message — they NEED to know how pissed the public is. At a recent summers-end party [barbecue and bonfire] here in the Patch, and after having a couple too many, I answered the question, “What do you DO, exactly?” with “I’m trying to save the world from George Bush.” Amazingly [!!!] I got a hearty round of applause, and a rush of comments about sending our kids off to die — one old gent spit in the fire, and growled, “Good LUCK!” I don’t think I’d have heard that a year ago, not here. Such an opinion would have been mumbled softly, if at all.
One pundit I appreciate, David Gergen, comes on CNN from time to time to report on the election issues … over the last month, each time he’s given his assessment he’s ended it with a warning that the Republicans are underestimating how ANGRY the public is. Well, so are the Democrats! They’d best be wise enough to use that to their advantage, lest it backfire on THEM. Frankly, I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s no “there” there … and the next few years will find us recreating this from scratch; maybe that’s the Hope we’re looking for. The Dem’s should be reminded that political party’s have come and gone, but the people’s demand for honest representation doesn’t miss a beat.
Here’s a collection — next to last piece says everything you wanted to say [but your Mother wouldn't let you] — and I saved the best ’til last; at any point that we collectively AGREE to boycott these thugs, to stop participating and let them see how many of us stand against them, we will surprise ourselves with our power … them too, I’d expect. Oct. 5th might be such a day, should you care to play. Open the link for the scoop.
What was it V [for Vendetta] said?
The people should not be afraid of the government, the government should be afraid of the people.
Jude
Déjà Vu All Over Again: It’s Not the Economy, Stupid!
Arianna Huffington
09.21.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/deja-vu-all-over-again_b_29977.html
Newsflash: According to this article in Roll Call, Congressional Democrats privately admit they really want to lose the 2006 midterm elections!
Okay, the article doesn’t actually say that, but it might as well, since it is all about how Democrats have decided that the way to win in November is — I kid you not — to make the economy the central issue of the campaign.
“We’ve got to go on the offensive,” explained a senior Democratic aide, “and keep our eye on the ball — and that’s the economy”
“We’re not going to win 15 seats on the war in Iraq,” said another Democratic staffer, insisting it is the economy that will, in the words of Roll Call, “bring the party across the goal line.”
Sen. Debbie Stabenow is quoted as saying the 2006 election “is all about jobs.”
And, in a memo sent to Democratic staffers, the party’s Senate leadership claimed “while Iraq may be high among the concerns of the American people, it is a distant reality in comparison to the day to day challenges many families face filing their gas tanks, paying for college, saving for retirement and securing a job.”
A distant reality? Oh. My. God.
In poll after poll, voters place Iraq well above the economy when asked which issue will most affect their vote this year. And when you combine concerns about the war with concerns about terrorism/national security, it’s the economy that is “a distant reality.”
Yet Democrats keep returning to the same domestic-issues-uber-alles thinking that cost them the elections in 2002 and 2004. They can’t really believe that people are more interested in raising the minimum wage, middle class tax relief, and college affordability than they are in who’s going to keep them from being blown up, can they? The Dems are like a bunch of crack addicts who know that the stuff is killing them, but keep reaching for the pipe. The closer they get to Election Day, the more they desperately crave a hit of “It’s the economy, stupid!”
Or maybe they have fallen prey to the war fatigue Chris Matthews thinks is responsible for the appalling lack of Iraq coverage on TV — and the smile on Karl Rove’s face.
This is a crying shame. The 2006 election — and with it control of the House and the power to investigate the Bush administration’s abundant outrages — is there for the taking… if only Democrats would put down the economy crack pipe and put their energy into hammering Bush and the GOP for their many tragic foreign policy and national security failures, which have combined to make America far less safe.
The numbers couldn’t be any clearer. Seventy-seven percent of voters think that it’s time to give new people a shot at running Congress. But while Democrats continue to hold a lead when voters are asked which party they plan to support in November, Republicans are making significant gains in convincing voters they are better able to handle national security and the war on terrorism. According to a new LA Times/Bloomberg poll, voters give the GOP a whopping 17 point advantage on the “who’ll keep us safe?” question (nearly double the number who felt that way in June). At the same time, 56 percent of voters don’t believe that America is making progress in Iraq. (What’s more, Bush’s numbers on the economy have greatly improved in the last three months).
Which is why Democrats can’t take their eye off the real ball — making the case that Iraq is not, as Bush continues to claim, the centerpiece of the war on terror, and has, in fact, compromised America’s ability to combat terrorists and protect our homeland.
When asked by the New York Times/CBS which party takes the threat of terrorism more seriously, only six percent of those polled said Democrats while 22 percent gave the nod to Republicans.
Democrats need to close that chasm — and fast. If the next 7 weeks are spent with Democrats harping on the economy and Bush acting like he’s saving the world, the dream of 2006 becoming the Dem version of the GOP’s 1994 landslide will quickly morph into a November nightmare.
Repeat after me: It’s NOT the economy, stupid! ++
The Democrats Should Probably Lose In November
Oliver Willis
09.22.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/oliver-willis/the-democrats-should-prob_b_30011.html
For the sake of America, I hope the Democrats win. In the 5+ years of solid Republican rule, the congress has abdicated its constitutional role as a watchdog. It has become just another cheerleading section for the Republican party and has overseen fraud, waste, criminal activity and the abdication of American values and the abolition of precious liberties.
A Democratic congress would at least restore checks and balances and throw a well-deserving butt or two in jail.
For the sake of the Democratic party, the party’s long-term viability, and America’s long term existence I sort of hope the Democrats lose this November. A win this Fall would be an endorsement of the party’s ridiculously idiotic posture and would reward its sniveling cowardice with power. A Democratic win would put a rubber stamp on the feckless leadership and push the party to keep it going into 2008, where we would lose yet again for the third time out of the last four elections.
The Democratic Party apparently has no clue. It seems to believe that 1994-present is just a temporal hiccup, and all they have to do is wait for the Republicans to self-destruct and naturally inherit the earth and the congress. The party is like the child who refuses to learn its lesson, even though the results of 2000, 2002, and 2004 show us that simply wishing is not a good enough strategy for winning.
I thought they would learn. I thought they would learn to keep the message simple, repeat it often and repeat it wherever the media was. The Republicans have mastered this. The phrases they come up with are not magic (as folks like George Lakoff would have you believe) but appeal to people’s gut instincts, especially with their repetition (”Head On, Apply Directly To The Forehead” is just the latest iteration of “Flip Flopper”).
Democrats refuse to aim for the gut and the heart and prefer to aim for the head. So many Democrats and progressives think simply dropping a mountain of “facts” to “refute” Republican arguments will work in the public’s eyes. But if you’re responding, you are already losing.
Ever since I’ve been able to vote, the Democrats have been in response mode. Since 1994 they have steadily tried the same old, same old stodgy techniques, acting as if still in power while the Republicans have adapted and are beating the hell out of the Dems. The Republicans identified a way to get the vote out by sending a consistent message to their base and getting the base to share that message with their friends. Democrats outsource the jobs to the unions and pray that black voters turn out to vote. One of those two strategies is viable in the long term. It’s not ours.
The Clinton folks innovated with the war room concept, responding and also introducing new media stories throughout the whole media cycle. They did this in an environment dominated by the three networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) and a handful of papers (NY Times, USA Today, Washington Post, etc.). Yet, even this concept is not being used by today’s Democrats and we face a significantly faster and news hungry media environment that encompasses 24-hour blogs, cable news, newspapers, magazines, radio and the like. This is not a question of having a progressive or conservative media, or a question of financial assets. The tools are all there and they don’t cost a lot. Democrats are just not willing to do this. Republicans regularly flood the media with new initiatives, attacks on the left, and propaganda in favor of their party and the conservative movement. If you’re lucky, sometime in the cycle a Democrat will drop off a press release or someone will say something on the floor of the House or Senate that nobody ever sees. The idea of using friendly contacts in the blogosphere and pushing the media to include a Democratic response or initiative just seems like its too much hard work.
None of this is hard to do, it certainly is not rocket science. The strategy of “hoping” has led to losing, why would it be any different this year? The President is one of the most unpopular in history, while the GOP-dominated congress is at all-time lows. Yet, the Democrats are not benefiting from this. Like the Kerry campaign not capitalizing on a President with middling approval ratings, Democrats are not presenting themselves as the alternative to the Republican brand. People are tired of Brand GOP but Brand Democrat isn’t even handing out free samples. You can’t blame the consumer for not choosing you if aren’t getting in their faces, can you? No.
The Democrats don’t deserve to win this election or the next one until they begin to show that they are willing to fight for it. They need to show that they want to fight hard and aren’t just going to sit back and relax. They need to show that they believe in their guts on the issues we hold dear (Defending America, Improving America, Uniting America) and aren’t so damn scared that Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh might say something mean about them, and choose to be so damn vanilla nobody gives a damn. America needs a strong Democratic party, but aren’t getting it. In the absence of that, Republicans will rule. Because for all their innate evil, racism, classism and cronyism - their is no denying Republicans lust for the role of leaders while Democrats barely seem to want to show up.
Do better, damn it. ++
Abandon hope all ye who vote here
DOUG THOMPSON
September 21, 2006
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/content/2006/09/abandon_hope_al.html
How many more must die because of the deceit and arrogance of the American government and its despotic leader George W. Bush?
How much deeper must America sink into the cesspool of corruption?
How much is enough?
According to the United Nations, a record 6,599 Iraqi civilians died in July and August as a direct result of the illegal American invasion of a sovereign nation on trumped up charges that have, one by one, fallen to the onslaught of fact.
Even worse, the UN report says torture of Iraqi civilians have surpassed the levels during the reign of Saddam Hussein.
This is what we call liberation?
Bush’s cold, calculated manipulation of Congress, the media and the American public allowed him to launch an invasion based on lies, an action that the previous Pope called a “war crime.” The Republicans who control Congress went along with his madness but so, too, did most of the Democrats serving in the House and Senate and too many of them are still reluctant to oppose the war and call for a withdrawal even today.
These mindless, brain-dead lemmings still follow this madman and his insane policies into the abyss, obviously unconcerned about the damage to individual liberties, civil rights and a little document called the Constitution of the United States.
Such pathetic, intellectually-challenged morons, like Bush, put political partisanship above their country and don’t give a rat’s ass about the law, morality or ethics. They, like the President they follow, are little more than scum of the earth.
Yet these cretins may actually keep control of government after the mid-term elections because the Democrats lack both usable brain matter and political savvy and have yet to offer any real alternatives to voters.
To win in November, the Democrats need to offer something with an ounce of logic and a modicum of common sense. They can’t because, like Republicans, original thought is beyond their capacity. Sadly, politicians of either party lack the ability to come up with anything that really matters to the American people. Both Democrats and Republicans are hopeless losers who couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse on freebie night.
Bush and the Republicans have their lemmings and so do the Democrats. Political partisans are foolish little followers who subscribe to the inane belief that a political party is capable of caring about the will of the people or the welfare of a nation. They lack both the capacity or the will and anyone who thinks such a system is the best we can do lost their minds years ago.
In the end, voters this fall are left with no real choice, no real hope and no real way out of the morass. The corruption of the Republican Party must be stopped but the only other choice in the battle is another collection of fucking idiots incapable of leading a Cub Scout pack out of a city park.
Maybe the best answer is to just bring the soldiers home from Iraq and then send every elected official - Republican and Democrat - along with every political wannabe to Iraq and leave their fates to the fanatics, suicide bombers and “Islamic extremists.”
Then we can start over and build a real government. ++
Founders Saw Impeachment as a Cure
John Nichols
Friday, September 22, 2006 by the Madison Capital Times (Wisconsin)
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0922-24.htm
“… it may, perhaps, on some occasion, be found necessary to impeach the President himself…”
~ James Madison
Last Sunday, Sept. 17, I appeared on the National Mall in Washington as part of Camp Democracy’s daylong session on impeachment.
Camp Democracy organizer David Swanson’s timing was, as always, impeccable. Though it is too little noted by the current guardians of the American experiment - and the media guardians of the American discourse - Sept. 17 is Constitution Day. It was on Sept. 17, 1787, that 39 of the founders signed the U.S. Constitution and took the first formal step on America’s journey as a nation of laws rather than men.
It is possible, and indeed appropriate, to debate the intentions of the founders on a host of issues. But there can be no debate about their determination that the document guarantee the most necessary of all democratic protections: the power of impeachment.
George Mason, who along with James Madison was a definitional figure in the drafting of the Constitution, said of the document’s contents: “No point is of more importance than that the right of impeachment should be continued.”
Madison’s notes from the summer when the Constitution was drafted, as well as his letters to Jefferson regarding the product of that summer, leave no doubt that the founders intended for impeachment to be utilized whenever necessary in defense of the republic. They did not want the power to impeach treated as a fetish or a fantasy, nor did they intend for its application to be seen as a constitutional crisis. Rather, they wanted impeachment to be recognized for what it is: the cure for the crisis of executive excess.
It was Madison’s view that impeachment was an “indispensable” provision for defending the American experiment - and the American people - “against the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate.” The promise of another election, at which a wrongdoing executive might be removed, was not enough to provide such protection, Madison had warned in his address to the Constitutional Convention that made provision for impeachment. “The imitation of the period of (the president’s) service, was not a sufficient security,” explained the man who would, himself, serve two full terms as the new nation’s fourth president. “(The president) might lose his capacity after his appointment. He might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression. He might betray his trust to foreign powers. … In the case of the Executive Magistracy which was to be administered by a single man, loss of capacity or corruption was more within the compass of probable events, and either of them might be fatal to the Republic.”
Gouverneur Morris, the “gentleman revolutionary” whose pen Madison credited with providing “the finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution,” was even blunter than his compatriot. Speaking of “the necessity of impeachments,” Morris asserted that only the broad power to remove the president - not merely for corruption and incapacity but for the far more fluidly defined act of “treachery” - would provide the essential insurance across time that: “This Magistrate is not the King. … The people are the King.”
Two hundred and nineteen years after that first Sept. 17, Swanson and the Camp Democracy organizers brought together many of the best thinkers in the nation - including former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega and former U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman - to discuss the question of how best to maintain the mandate of the Constitution.
There was little debate about whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their compatriots have committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” - the deliberately broad term for executive wrongdoing that the founders intended to address both legal and political concerns. There was a good deal of frustration with the failure of Democratic leaders to accept the responsibility of the opposition party to hold out-of-control leaders to account. But there was, as well, a dawning recognition that the discussion about impeachment will be had - if not as quickly or as well as should be in Washington, then surely in the great expanses of the United States.
Polls and practices suggest that the citizenry well understands the necessity of holding this administration to account - not to punish Bush or Cheney but to restore the system of checks and balances that has been so warped in this era of executive whim and lawlessness. And 219 years into this American experiment, as we honor the Constitution that is its foundation, the message from Camp Democracy is clear: It is time to remind the politicians and the pundits that: “This Magistrate is not the King … The people are the King.” ++
A Modest Proposal
Let’s Do Fight Them Here! Right Here, On Our Own Turf!
John Hennen
Friday, September 22, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0922-32.htm
Not long ago the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, John Boehner of Ohio, said some Democrats were more concerned with protecting terrorists than protecting Americans.
“Wow,” I thought. “That’s terrible. I didn’t know that. I wonder who they are?”
Then, just last night (September 20) right here on the Morehead campus, there was a discussion about the Bill of Rights, where I learned another startling fact—-this time from a young man in the audience: Half of the people in the United States hate the country!
I never realized this, and it upset me that so many Americans hate our country. But then, in a moment of horror and self-loathing, I knew: I was one of those terrorist-protecting Democrats.
I, who have always thought of myself as a loyal if contrarian citizen, hated my country. I was precisely the kind of person Rep. Boehner and the young man in the audience were referring to.
You see, I did not admit—-as we all must—that we have to be ready to torture suspected terrorists in our custody. I would not admit they must face secret charges based on secret evidence from secret informants and be secretly interrogated and secretly imprisoned or executed by secret tribunals if we are to preserve our freedom. Moreover, for too long I questioned President Bush’s claim that the war in Iraq is the central front in the most crucial war of the century (fortune telling is an inherent executive power), the defining conflict in the struggle between good and evil, the place where the forces of enlightenment must conquer the forces of darkness. I also questioned his belief that if we do not fight them there, we’ll have to fight them here.
For some nagging reason—traitor that I was– it always seemed to me that the invasion of Iraq was a witless distraction from the hunt for the masterminds of 9/11, that it was a calculating, voluntary, imperial war for which Ms. Rice and Messrs. Cheney, Kristol, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bush, et. al. had long sought a catalytic element to justify—and, joila! 9/11 gave it to them. But now I am redeemed, and see that all my mad suspicion was only the latent hatred I had for my country. And I have an idea that I believe will bring all the other America-hating Americans fully back into the embrace of the mother country: Let’s do fight them here! Right here, on our own turf!
If we fight them here, everyone will drop all doubts and step forward to defend their homes and families. All that the national mobilization will require is that we withdraw U. S. regular forces and National Guard troops from Iraq and bring them home to train every able-bodied citizen in small-arms and artillery fire, air assaults, hand-to-hand combat, IED deployment, and body-bag (oops, sorry—-“transport tube”) stuffing. By the time the millions and millions and millions of insane terrorists have overrun the Middle East, East Asia, the Mediterranean region, Iberia, and Europe to establish their Islamofascist Caliphate—six months, tops– we will be battle ready when they invade the homeland. We will conscript everyone into a seamless network of neighborhood, village, rural, urban, and national militias to fight them on familiar streets and take advantage of their ignorance of our terrain, language, religious customs, and traditional culture.
When 100,000 crazed mullahs and suiciders careen into Morehead to pillage and murder, by God we will fight them! In the Student Union! On the lawn! In the gym! In the library! At the Bell Tower—–we will fight them everywhere. It may take years for us to beat back the invasion of the massive terrorist armies, but we’ll have a unified force of constant patriots and ex-America- haters like me standing shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, in full-throated battle cry to send them to Allah if they dare come down our street. Those we don’t kill we will wear down, since this time, they will be the ones who don’t understand what the war is all about.
The logistics are in our favor. We won’t have to worry about supply lines being cut off—-supply lines will be all over the place! We won’t have to worry about giving in, forgoing the mission, or cutting and running—where would we cut and run to? The mission would be here!
Casualties? Hell, we have over ten times the population of Iraq, and the Iraqis have only been dying at the rate of about three thousand civilians a month—we can take way, way more hits than that. What’s a couple hundred thousand dead kids if it saves our way of life, like the president says?
Everyone will serve in some way. Mr. Cheney, who missed out on the Vietnam fun like I did, has a bad heart, so he could clean latrines or something and I’m sure he would donate his Halliburton stock to the cause. Mr. Bush can strap on his flight suit and be a for real war leader, swearing and spitting like Patton, visiting the front lines like Lincoln, exhorting the citizen militia like Churchill, awarding Silver Stars to Jenna and Barbara—-oh, man, what a photo op—, who will undoubtedly rush to volunteer for the most perilous duty. Rush Limbaugh can lead a brigade of his most fervent dittoheads, pharmacologically fortified, into the fray.
Oh, the majesty of it—-farmers, nurses, teachers, miners, preachers, steelworkers, computer specialists, students, the liberal media, Grandpa and Grandma, everyone welded into one white hot mass of ruthless passion for liberty. No dissent, no pesky whining about civil liberties, no deferments, and an armored Humvee in every garage.
The Great Defense of Civilization will cost a lot of dough. Naturally the patriotic benefactors of President Bush’s tax cuts will voluntarily increase their income tax rates from the current 28% to 94%. That was the tax rate on the wealthiest Americans during World War II—-and the Cold War rate was about 65%. That’s the kind of sacrifice it took to whip Hitler and Hirohito and the Reds, and by God we all know the rich will gladly cough it up now.
I feel purified already. Bring ‘em on. ++
John Hennen is Associate Professor of History at Morehead State University in Kentucky.
The Democrats: Too Clever by Half
Susan Madrak
09.22.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-madrak/the-democrats-too-clever_b_30015.html
How about that new, Bush-approved Geneva Convention? Great, huh?
This is why I was yelling at Harry Reid during a bloggers conference call last week. (In response, he told me he wished I could see the list of all the people “who call my office complaining about me picking a fight.”)
Goddamn, this Democratic “leadership” is just too fucking clever by half.
Now they’re left holding their flabby dicks in their limp hands, and our democracy is slowly circling the bowl.
It reminds me of this baseball team I once knew. Even though they won their division the previous year, the know-it-all manager connived them into a lower national tournament bracket, basically telling them in so many words they weren’t capable of winning in the appropriate, more competitive bracket. Well, that show of confidence worked wonders: they lost almost every game, and dropped out early.
Deja vu all over again. But the stakes are so much higher here.
The Democrats don’t so much want to win the mid-term elections as they want to sit back and hope the Republicans lose it for themselves. This is what I was trying to tell Harry Reid: People will only believe in the Democrats again if they stop calculating every word and just stand up and fight for them. Instead, we get this.
Nice work, Harry. Nice work. Now the Democrats (surprise, surprise) look like ciphers, and the Republicans look like fucking statesmen - merely for barely shaving the definition of torture. And you sold democracy down the river by hedging your bets.
Hey, but at least no one will be calling your office today, complaining you picked a fight. Why, you’re just a regular Miss Congeniality! ++
The World Can’t Wait: Drive Out the Bush Regime!http://www.worldcantwait.org/
YOUR GOVERNMENT, on the basis of outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in Iraq, with other countries in their sights.
YOUR GOVERNMENT is openly torturing people, and justifying it.
YOUR GOVERNMENT puts people in jail on the merest suspicion, refusing them lawyers, and either holding them indefinitely or deporting them in the dead of night.
YOUR GOVERNMENT is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule.
YOUR GOVERNMENT suppresses the science that doesn’t fit its religious, political and economic agenda, forcing present and future generations to pay a terrible price.
YOUR GOVERNMENT is moving to deny women here, and all over the world, the right to birth control and abortion.
YOUR GOVERNMENT enforces a culture of greed, bigotry, intolerance and ignorance.
People look at all this and think of Hitler - and they are right to do so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come.
We must act now; the future is in the balance.
Millions and millions are deeply disturbed and outraged by this. They recognize the need for a vehicle to express this outrage, yet they cannot find it; politics as usual cannot meet the enormity of the challenge, and people sense this. There is not going to be some magical “pendulum swing.” People who steal elections and believe they’re on a “mission from God” will not go without a fight. There is not going to be some savior from the Democratic Party. This whole idea of putting our hopes and energies into “leaders” who tell us to seek common ground with fascists and religious fanatics is proving every day to be a disaster, and actually serves to demobilize people.
But silence and paralysis are NOT acceptable. That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn - or be forced - to accept. There is no escaping it: the whole disastrous course of this Bush regime must be STOPPED. And we must take the responsibility to do it. And there is a way. We are talking about something on a scale that can really make a huge change in this country and in the world. We need more than fighting Bush’s outrages one at a time, constantly losing ground to the whole onslaught. We must, and can, aim to create a political situation where the Bush regime’s program is repudiated, where Bush himself is driven from office, and where the whole direction he has been taking society is reversed. We, in our millions, must and can take responsibility to change the course of history. Acting in this way, we join with and give support and heart to people all over the globe who so urgently need and want this regime to be stopped.
This will not be easy. If we speak the truth, they will try to silence us. If we act, they will try to stop us. But we speak for the majority, here and around the world, and as we get this going we are going to reach out to the people who have been so badly fooled by Bush and we are NOT going to stop. The point is this: history is full of examples where people who had right on their side fought against tremendous odds and were victorious. And it is also full of examples of people passively hoping to wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined.
The future is unwritten. WHICH ONE WE GET IS UP TO US.
[open to sign pledge] ++
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
September 22nd, 2006
There are ethical hurdles we’ve jumped in the last five years that have taken my breath away — but none so dire, so despicable and so disastrous as this thing we’re poised on doing regarding torture and habeas corpus. This is one of those Crossing the Rubicon moments. If we do this thing, as it appears the Republican’s are determined to, the moral underpinnings of our agreement with the world … with each other in our human family … comes to a halt; we will no longer be able to see ourselves as a country strong in rule of law and Constitutional oversight … we’ll be just another nation flailing away to find it’s center … only bigger, louder and vastly more dangerous.
I wrote, a few years back, that apparently America needed some humbling and George Bush, faux-cowboy, was here to “git ‘er done.” I had hoped that we would get our come-uppance quickly and decisively, so we could move on from the goad of a shallow despot … evidently not. And now our checks and balances, the laws established for civil liberties and protections have been systematically stripped away, one by one, covertly and with intent.
It’s a Stephen King novel come to life … we’re riding a train into Hell with a load of laughing goons, and those of us who foresee the consequence can’t find an e-brake. The beasts at the engine will show us a milder face, and speak of another destination … but beasts they remain, and Hell lies ahead.
In America, with our busy-busy lives, we process all this information intellectually, far from the heart … the earliest stepping stone to disaster was actually holding a conversation about torture, making it a viable option. Allowing it to be “thinkable.” That was Pandora’s Box … once opened, the consequences were destined. And now they’re here, dearhearts.
Our hearts ache for the tortured, the innocent … but even that is a barrier to what this actually means, too far from the reality of such a proposition. In such a national policy, it’s evident to all but the deliberately obtuse that the “tortured” may turn out to be our neighbor, our child, our self. Did it have to become this personal? I guess it did. Did it require us to lose so much to decide who we really are, as Americans? I suppose so.
It’s kind of like the plot of Sophie’s Choice – remember that one? A woman in the Holocaust has to surrender one of her children to death at the hands of the SS in order for the other to live. Which will she sacrifice? How will she live with her choice? Can she survive for survival’s sake alone? And once done, are the ruined remains of her psyche enough reason to go on living with that terrible wound … or is ending her life at her own hand the mercy she sought but could not find?
We make our decision soon. Do we love Liberty so little that we will choose “safety and survival” over the well being of our national soul? What will remain of us if we compromise with darkness, traffic with the beasts? Will such an assault on our essence be enough, finally, to give us an understanding of how far we’ve fallen, how deep the hole, how MUCH we lose, day by day? And will such a glimpse of the “new reality” be enough, finally, to get us on our feet, to help us find our voice?
Is it “personal” enough yet?
I guess we’re gonna find out.
Below — Must Reads and Need To Know’s.
Jude
Compact with Evil: The McCain “Compromise” on Bush’s Torture Program
Chris Floyd
Sep 22 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/886
After George Bush’s Rose Garden hissy fit, in which he declared that he would simply stop interrogating suspected terrorists unless he could torture them, John “I Only Flip-Flop On Matters of Deep Principle” McCain and the other so-called “Senate rebels” have capitulated to the unpopular president’s petulant demands.
In the universe of moral perversion in which we now live, White House National Security (sic) Adviser Stephen Hadley called the pro-torture, anti-due process agreement between these deeply cynical power-gamesters “a good day for the American people.” Here’s how the Gamester-in-Chief described it (from the NYT):
-“I’m pleased to say this agreement preserves the most single, the most potent tool we have in protecting America and foiling terrorist attacks,” he said, adding, “The agreement clears the way to do what the American people expect us to do — to capture terrorists, to detain terrorists, to question terrorists, and then to try them.”
In other words, not until this very day was the American government able to capture, detain, question and try terrorists. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. I’ll bet the men who were captured, detained, questioned, tried and convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing didn’t know that either. Really, that’s what Bush said; the agreement “clears the way” for the government to actually detain and interrogate terrorists — as if they weren’t able to do that before. What he means, of course, is that the ability to torture alleged terrorists — snatched arbitrarily, anywhere in the world, simply on the say-so of the Leader or his designated minions — will be preserved. Bush obviously has a deep psychological need to feel that someone is being tormented at his orders at all times.
But the demented psychology of this sad little shriveled-up nothing of a man is of slight import. What matters are the actions and policies that are being carried out by the junta operating in his name — and the countenancing of this gang’s crimes by the United States Congress. And that is what we have seen today: the countenancing of torture and kangaroo courts by some sad sacks of shinola lauded by the media as “men of principle.” This is what we’ve come to, this is where are today: sick bastards and cynical bastards openly and eagerly gutting the very core of American law.
Let’s have Bill Frist — surely one of the most pathetic creatures ever inflicted on the U.S. Senate and the long-suffering people of Tennessee — explain exactly what this great “agreement” means:
-Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, said the agreement had two key points. “Classified information will not be shared with the terrorists” tried before the tribunals, he said. And “the very important program of interrogation continues.”
There you have it. People snatched off the street — or sold to spies by snitches and scamsters — can be tried, in military tribunals, without seeing the evidence against them; and Bush’s “program of interrogation continues.”
Let’s be very clear on the latter point. What Bush has been talking about and protesting against were efforts to ensure that CIA interrogators could not torture suspects. Because of course they could continue to use ordinary methods of interrogation — which experts uniformly agree produce better intelligence — just as they have always been able to. When Bush and Tennessee cat-torturer talk about the “program of interrogation” continuing, they mean allowing the CIA to torture captives by various methods without being charged with war crimes and felony violations of American law. That is precisely what they are talking about, and nothing else. But you won’t see it put that way on the pages of our most august journalist institutions nor on the broadcasts of our world-renowned network news shows.
And let us make one other point — and in a most impolitic way, for the truth is often an impolitic commodity: John McCain is a goddamned liar. Yes, he himself suffered torture, yes he came through it, yes, we all admire his fortitude during that ordeal in his youth: but his record in later life, in politics, is that of a moral coward with good PR skills. (Not that it takes much skill to wow the poltroons who squat on the commanding heights of the corporate media world today.) And today, he has opened his mouth and emitted a damnable lie, to wit: “the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved.”
This is an untrue statement, analogous to saying the moon is located in his rectum or that he can bite through pig iron with his bare teeth. Every step the Bush gang has taken in this pro-torture, don’t-prosecute-us campaign is designed to weaken the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions. The Conventions, which have been adopted into American law by Congress — in bills sponsored and championed by Republicans — are crystal clear on torture.
There is no need to “preserve” their integrity with new legislation; there is nothing wrong with the Conventions that need to be “fixed” — unless, of course, you wish to use interrogation techniques that any sentient human being would recognize as torture. In that case, of course you have to “fix” the Conventions by gutting their integrity, letter and spirit.
John McCain might be a moral coward in his old age, but he’s not stupid. He knows all this. He knows that the Bush Administration has been trying to wriggle out of the Conventions since the earliest days of the “War of Terror.” He knows that gutting the Conventions is at the heart of Bush’s “interrogation program” which McCain and his “rebels” have just saved with their grand “compromise.”
Therefore, we will say it again clearly, so that even the nabobs on the Washington Post editorial page can hear it: John McCain is a goddamned liar, and his “agreement” today serves some of the most evil principles ever supported openly by the United States government since slavery.
And let’s put this other point plainly one more time: the American government has always been able to capture, detain, question and try terrorists. Always. The American government has for 28 years had the power to eavesdrop on anyone in the world or in the country whom they suspected even slightly of terrorism or terrorist connections. And they could and can do that instantly, without waiting for a court order or jumping through any bureaucratic hoops, under the long-existing law. Everything that Bush says his clearly illegal surveillance programs do can already be done within the law. Therefore, it is clear that the whole raison d’etre behind the illegal programs is to establish the principle that the president is beyond the law. (And also, almost certainly, to perform illegal surveillance that has nothing to do with terrorism.)
What we have seen today is no “grand compromise,” no “great debate,” no “act of principle” and certainly no “preservation” of the Geneva Conventions. What we have seen instead is a small group of rich, cynical, power-hungry old bastards belch forth lies in the service of torture and tyranny. And if you’re not angry about that, if you’re not “shrill” about that, then by God you are one piss-poor American citizen. You shame every man and woman who have fought and died and marched and worked and dreamed for our freedoms. ++
The torture battle royal: The public violation of the Geneva convention has created a schism between the president and military
Sidney Blumenthal
Sep 22 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/891
President Bush’s torture policy has provoked perhaps the greatest schism between a president and the military in American history. From the outside, this battle royal over his abrogation of the Geneva conventions appears as a shadow war. But since the supreme court’s ruling in Hamdan v Rumsfeld in June, deciding that Bush’s kangaroo court commissions for detainees “violate both the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] and the four Geneva conventions”, the struggle has been forced into the open.
On September 6 Bush made his case for torture, offering as validity the interrogation under what he called an “alternative set of procedures” of an al-Qaida operative named Abu Zubaydah. Bush claimed he was a “senior terrorist leader” who “ran a terrorist camp” and had provided accurate information about planned terrorist attacks. In fact, Zubaydah was an al-Qaida travel agent (literally a travel agent), who, under torture, spun wild scenarios of terrorism that proved bogus. Zubaydah, it turns out, is a psychotic with the intelligence of a child. “This guy is insane, certifiable,” said Dan Coleman, an FBI agent assigned to the al-Qaida taskforce.
Bush’s argument for torture is partly based on the unstated premise that the more sadism, the more intelligence. While he referenced Zubaydah, he did not mention Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, described by the FBI, according to the New Yorker, as “arguably the US’s most valuable informant on al-Qaida”, who is wined, dined and housed by the federal witness protection programme.
On September 15 the Senate armed services committee approved a bill affirming the Geneva conventions, sponsored by three Republicans with military backgrounds - John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The former secretary of state Colin Powell, Bush’s “good soldier,” released a letter denouncing Bush’s version. “The world,” he wrote, “is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” and Bush’s bill “would add to those doubts”. That sentiment was underlined in another letter signed by 29 retired generals and CIA officials. General John Batiste, former commander of the 1st army division in Iraq, appeared on CNN to scourge the administration’s policy as “unlawful”, “wrong”, and responsible for Abu Ghraib.
Before the committee vote, Bush’s administration had tried to coerce the top military lawyers, the judge advocates general (JAGs), into signing a statement of uncritical support, which they refused to do. The Republican senators opposing Bush’s torture policy first learned about the military’s profound opposition from the JAGs. For years, the administration has considered them subversive and tried to eliminate them as a separate corps and substitute neoconservative political appointees.
In the summer of 2004 General Thomas J Fiscus, the top air force JAG, informed the senators that the administration’s assertion that the JAGs backed Bush on torture was utterly false.
Suspicion instantly fell upon Fiscus, one of the most aggressive opponents of torture policy, as the senators’ source. Within weeks he was drummed out under a cloud of anonymous allegations by Pentagon officials of “improper relations” with women. His discharge was trumpeted in the press, but his role in the torture debate remained unknown.
Bush had intended to use his post-Hamdan bill to taint the Democrats, but instead he has split his party and further antagonised the military. His standoff on torture threatens to leave no policy whatsoever, and leave his war on terror in a twilight zone beyond the rule of law. ++
The Torture of Liberty
BOB HERBERT
September 21, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/pszb5
After traveling to Ottawa to interview Maher Arar last year, I wrote: “If John Ashcroft was right, then I was staring into the malevolent, duplicitous eyes of pure evil … But all I could really see was a polite, unassuming, neatly dressed guy who looked like a suburban Little League coach.”
It turns out John Ashcroft was wrong. After an exhaustive investigation, a government commission in Canada ruled definitively and unequivocally this week that Maher Arar was no terrorist. He was nothing more than a quiet family man who found himself sucked into a vortex of incompetence, hysteria and a so-called war on terror that has gone completely haywire.
He’s lucky he survived. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who was born in Syria, was snatched by American authorities as he waited for a connecting flight home from Kennedy Airport in September 2002. The Americans apparently were acting on bad information fed to them by Canadian investigators.
As in the witch hunts of old, no one seemed to care whether there was any factual basis for the allegations against Mr. Arar. Without even a nod in the direction of due process, the Americans put him on a government jet and shipped him off to Jordan, where he was promptly driven to Syria, where he was tortured.
Welcome to extraordinary rendition, a reprehensible practice in which people are kidnapped by the U.S. government and sent off to countries that specialize in the evil arts of torture.
Mr. Arar lived in torment for nearly a year, confined most of the time to a tiny underground cell, about the size of a grave. Despite the torture, the Syrians were unable to connect him to terrorism in any way. The Canadian government managed to secure his release in October 2003.
If this were just a bad but honest mistake, we might be able to simply wish Mr. Arar well and vow never to let it happen again. Instead, the United States is about to ensure that many more individuals who are falsely accused are deprived of the single most fundamental tool they need to establish their innocence.
In the push to enact legislation dealing with the interrogation and prosecution of terror suspects, both the White House and dissident Republicans in the Senate intend to strip away the hallowed safeguard of habeas corpus for some noncitizens held in U.S. custody outside the United States.
Habeas corpus (literally “produce the body”) is a legal proceeding that allows one to challenge his or her detention in a court of law. It is the most significant safeguard against arbitrary imprisonment. Someone deprived of this right — which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and has been recognized by various societies all the way back to the Middle Ages — can be locked up, whether innocent or guilty of any offense, and never heard from again.
I can’t believe that most Americans think this is all right.
“This is recognized as a broad common-law and constitutional right,” said Bill Goodman, the legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which has been fighting to secure basic legal protections for prisoners in American custody at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
At a minimum, said Mr. Goodman, “A person has a right to know what crime he’s being charged with. And a court can demand that the government produce evidence indicating that there is a reason to hold that person.”
The authority to demand that even the highest officials in a nation — even the president, even the king back in the days of the Magna Carta — justify the detention of a human being is powerful, and essential in a free society.
The right to file for a writ of habeas corpus, insisting that this authority be exercised, is a crucial check on naked governmental power. It’s a check on injustice.
In Washington, instead of saluting this cornerstone of freedom, politicians are about to deep-six it for some people without even much in the way of debate.
Talk about freedom is cheap. We hear it all the time. Real protection against tyrannical behavior by powerful government officials is another matter.
I spoke to Mr. Arar by phone yesterday. He said now that the Canadian government has publicly cleared his name, he would like the U.S. government to follow suit. But the U.S. government is busy trying to make sure that other innocents, trapped unfairly in a cage, have absolutely nowhere to turn. No recourse at all. ++
Future Shock: Evidence of Plans to Torture US Demonstrators
RJ Eskow
Sep 22 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/896
Remember this story from last week? “The Air Force secretary says nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before they are used on the battlefield.” It’s worse than we heard … much worse. These weapons, which cause “intolerable pain” and have been condemned by scientists as mass torture devices, may be coming soon to a demonstration near you. And there are stranger and more lethal weapons where these came from.
The Secretary, Michael Wynne, is a longtime exec at defense contractor General Dynamics - a fox now in charge of the henhouse. The weapon he was describing is “intended to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds,” as described in this Australian newspaper account.
And guess which company is one of the world’s leaders in military microwave technology? General Dynamics. So you can rest assured that Wynne’s very knowledgeable about this technology’s intended use here and abroad, both by the military and other agencies.
Microwave beam devices are just one of a number of new weapons under development that could be used against US crowds. This article in Defense Update magazine describes the variety of anti-personnel energy weapons being developed by the Department of Defense.
These include the Laser Induced Plasma Channel (LIPC) pictured above, which can “work like ‘artificial lightning’ to disable human targets” and “can be adjusted for non-lethal or lethal use.”
Other weapons being developed include the “Pulsed Energy Projectile” (PEP) device which, as New Scientist explains, “delivers a bout of excruciating pain from up to 2 kilometres away.”
New Scientist observes that “pain researchers are furious that (medical research) aimed at controlling pain has been used to develop a weapon,” adding that “they fear that the technology will be used for torture.”
The Wynne story came and went so quickly that radio journalist Charles Goyette from KFNX in Phoenix tried to follow up. An interview was scheduled with the Air Force Secretary’s spokesman, USAF Major Aaron Burgstein, to get elaboration on the Secretary’s remarks. But Burgstein cancelled at the last minute without explanation.
Burgstein’s email to Goyette added that “SECAR (Wynne) is not advocating using non-lethal weapons on the American public,” just that they be “fully tested first before they’re employed overseas” because our enemy “uses any and all opportunities to wage a propaganda war.”
Sounds benign enough. Unfortunately, it directly contradicts what Wynne actually said. “If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens,” said Wynne, “then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation.”
“If they are used in the US,” Burgstein wrote Goyette, “it would be by the police, not the military.” Burgstein equates these energy beams to tasers, perhaps unaware of the controversy surrounding a number of taser injuries and deaths.
Wynne, a major defense contractor turned Pentagon insider, tipped his hand. Pentagon planners intend to use high-tech weapons on Americans before turning them on Iraqis, either directly or by making the technology available to police and other agencies. And that’s not a new story, either. ABC News reported in 2004 that there were active discussions to use sonic weaponry against demonstrators during the Republican National Convention in New York.
When in “weapon” mode, the “LRAD” (long range acoustic device) “blasts a tightly controlled stream of caustic sound that can be turned up to high enough levels to trigger nausea or possibly fainting.”
Sounds like waterboarding, doesn’t it? It too would pass the Gonzales test of not “duplicating the pain associated with major organ failure” (assuming anyone has done a study comparing the two levels of pain.) As it turned out, there were no reports of LRADs being used against demonstrators in 2004, although many citizens were illegally detained during a temporary suspension of civil liberties on the streets of New York. (The city was eventually fined for mass violations of due process.)
As for the microwave beam, New Scientist reported that when it was tested, “experimenters banned glasses and contact lenses to prevent possible eye damage to the subjects, and in the second and third tests removed any metallic objects such as coins and keys to stop hot spots being created on the skin. They also checked the volunteers’ clothes for certain seams, buttons and zips which might also cause hot spots.”
In other words, this beam doesn’t only inflict agony on its targets. If you can’t move out of the way quickly enough it can cause serious burns and potentially even fuse contact lenses onto their wearers’ eyeballs.
Goyette stayed on this story long enough for me to realize that I had missed its real significance. He’s understandably struck by how quickly the Secretary’s remarks seem to have been forgotten. I am, too, but I think I understand. This government is dismantling the world as we know it at an unprecendented rate. The suspension of civil liberties and the codifying of torture into law are only two examples. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for many people to keep up with the pace of change while its happening, either psychologically or cognitively.
These revelations about mass “torture technology,” and the Secretary’s remarks, need to be viewed in the context of our collective “future shock.” This Administration - which illegally uses the military to spy on Quaker peace demonstrators, violates laws and the Constitution with impunity, and degrades its country through torture - is literally capable of anything.
The idea of subjecting demonstrating Americans to group torture may seem unthinkable today. Yet a few years ago we couldn’t have imagined that our government woul ban public demonstrations by forcing protesters into “Free Speech Zones” behind fences, miles away from other Americans. The unimaginable has now become real. This is only the next logical step, and it could happen soon.
Welcome to the Brave New America. Be careful out there. ++
Secret CIA Prisons in Your Backyard
Onnesha Roychoudhuri, Truthdig
September 22, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/41923/
The largest covert CIA operation since the Cold War is run not only by shadowy government contractors in the darkest corners of Afghanistan, but also by unassuming Americans in places like Dedham, Mass.
When U.S. civilian airplanes were spotted in late 2002 taking trips to and from Andrews Air Force Base, and making stops in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, journalists and plane-spotters wondered what was going on. It soon became clear that these planes were part of the largest covert operation since the Cold War era. Called extraordinary rendition, the practice involves CIA officials or contractors kidnapping people and sending them to secret prisons around the world where they are held and often tortured, either at the hands of the host-country’s government or by CIA personnel themselves.
On Sept. 6, after a long period of official no-comments, President Bush acknowledged the program’s existence. But the extent of its operations has yet to be publicly disclosed.
How extensive is it? Trevor Paglen, an expert in clandestine military installations, and A.C. Thompson, an award-winning journalist for S.F. Weekly, spent months tracking the CIA flights and the businesses behind them. What they found was a startlingly broad network of planes (including the Gulfstream jet belonging to Boston Red Sox co-owner Phillip Morse), shell companies, and secret prisons around the world. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation of their new book Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights is the collusion of everyday Americans in this massive CIA program. From family lawyers who bolster the shell companies, to an entire town in Smithfield, N.C., that hosts CIA planes and pilots, Torture Taxi is the story of the broad reach of extraordinary rendition, and, as Hannah Arendt coined the phrase, the banality of evil.
Trevor and A.C. joined me by phone to explain how they managed to follow a paper trail that led to some of the most critical unknowns about the extraordinary rendition program.
Onnesha Roychoudhuri: How did the idea for the book come about?
Trevor Paglen: I research military secrecy at Berkeley and there is a community there trying to figure out what military programs are. At some point, this hobbyist community became aware that there were these civilian planes flying around, acting as if they were working in military black programs. These people started tracking the planes and repeatedly seeing them in places like Libya and Guantanamo Bay. It became pretty clear that this was a CIA thing and that these were planes that were involved in the extraordinary rendition program.
Roychoudhuri: When did the pieces start to come together?
Paglen: Late last year, there was a big uproar about secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Dana Priest at the Washington Post broke the story and Human Rights Watch put out a press release. At that moment the pieces started making sense and we could start explaining what was going on. By that time I had collected a number of files on this just as a curiosity. I brought them over to A.C.’s job, where he has access to some tools to do investigative journalism.
A.C. Thompson: Trevor had this aviation and military expertise and all this information when he came to my office. I’ve been doing corporate research for years and when we started looking at these possible CIA front companies associated with the planes, it immediately became very apparent that we were looking at phony companies.
Roychoudhuri: How did you track the extraordinary rendition program?
Thompson: We wanted to gather up as much information as we could to create this mosaic of evidence to show the broad picture of extraordinary rendition. We went from Smithfield, N.C., to Gardez, Afghanistan, to piece it together. This is something that people have only really had snapshots of thus far. We reverse-engineered the program. We used the paper trails and evidence left behind, from FAA flight logs to the testimony of former prisoners in Afghanistan to piece it all together.
Paglen: We conceived of the book as a travel diary. We showed up at the addresses on this paper trail and followed the leads. The point was to find the story behind the address. Then we would go to the places where those companies actually fly those airplanes and provide the pilots. Then, when we saw that the airplanes frequently landed in Afghanistan, we went there, too.
Roychoudhuri: You relied on data from amateur plane-spotters with data from all over the world. Can you explain how that works?
Paglen: There are many plane-spotting websites with data regarding the movements of these aircrafts along with pictures. The data can be very scattered and difficult to do much with. But some of these plane-spotters have developed advanced techniques to get information on aircraft movement. That became very helpful in piecing some of this together. If you are a plane-spotter and you are interested in the history of a particular aircraft, you know there are many documents publicly available: registration papers and airworthiness certificates from the FAA. You can also get flight data from the FAA. And in the cases that data has been blocked, people have figured out ways to get around those blocks. When the plane-spotter community and journalists came together, it became one of the few ways to see the outlines of this program.
Roychoudhuri: The fact that the CIA is using civilian planes actually makes it easier to track them.
Paglen: Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world. The U.S. military needs special permission to fly over somebody else’s airspace. Using the civilian companies is a way to create mobility and avoid drawing attention.
Thompson: The CIA wants to exist in the civilian world. It wants to create these entities so that it can move without a lot of scrutiny. But in the civilian world, you have to interact with other parts of the government all the time. If you create a shell corporation that is going to supposedly own an airplane that will be used to transport people to dungeons around the world, you have to file incorporation papers with the state the company is based in. When you go and get these corporate papers, you can analyze things like the signatures on the documents.
Roychoudhuri: What did you find when you examined some of these documents?
Thompson: We found Colleen Bornt who was an exec at a company called Premier Executive Transport Services. Premier was the company that owned the plane that took Khaled el-Masri to the Salt Pit. When you go look at the paper documents that Colleen signed, you find that every one of her signatures looks completely different. That’s because each one was made by a different person. When we started looking for more traces of Colleen there was no home address, no phone number, nor any other proof that she’s existed at all.
That’s the same with all these companies. They don’t have real headquarters, staff or anything besides these paper documents they filed to incorporate and a handful of lawyers who helped set these companies up and serve as the registered agents for them. These are the people who receive summons and subpoenas for the companies.
Roychoudhuri: What are these lawyers?
Thompson: These lawyers are the only humans you can find who actually exist in these companies. We went to look to talk to people at Keeler and Tate, another shell company implicated in el-Masri’s abduction. Keeler and Tate were sued by el-Masri with the help of the ACLU. We went to the only address for Keeler and Tate–a law office in Reno, Nevada. We told the secretary “One of the lawyers here is a registered agent and you have been named in a lawsuit alleging a connection to the CIA and extraordinary rendition, what do you think of that?”
She didn’t seem at all surprised, but she threw us out pretty quickly.
Roychoudhuri: Who are these lawyers?
Thompson: The kind of people we’re talking about are Dean Plakias in Dedham, Mass., outside of Boston. He is not a high-profile guy. He’s a family lawyer with a small practice and how he ended up in this world is still a mystery. This is an American story, a neighborhood story. When we started looking at all the front companies the CIA had erected, we realized our neighbors were helping the CIA set up these structures. These are family lawyers in suburban Massachusetts and Reno, Nevada. People in our communities are doing dirty work for the CIA. This is not just people being snatched up from one faraway country and taken to a country that’s even farther away.
Roychoudhuri: When you have a false entity like Colleen Bornt signing for purchases of planes, is that breaking business laws?
Thompson: As far as I can tell, it’s 100% illegal under the business and professions codes in any state. I don’t think that it would be legal anywhere. I also don’t think that it’s legal in any state for a lawyer to set up a phony business for people who they know don’t exist. It’s also likely at odds with the ethics provisions of most state bar organizations for lawyers. Strictly speaking, I don’t think any of these things are legal.
Roychoudhuri: Where was the most interesting place you traveled?
Thompson: We went to Nevada, Massachusetts and New York to track down the front companies. We went to Beale Air Force base in Northern California to track U2 spy planes. We went to Smithfield, N.C, which is home to the airfields that many of these airplanes fly out of. Then we went to Kabul and Gardez, Afghanistan.
But the two most interesting places were the rural town of Smithfield and Kinston down the road, where there’s another airstrip that a company called Aero Contractors uses. Aero is the company that flies many of these missions for the CIA. We went there and talked to a pilot who had worked for Aero about exactly what they did and how the program worked. There’s nothing random about the CIA using this rural area in North Carolina. If you wanted to shut up a secret operation, this is where you would do it. It’s a God, guns and guts area.
Roychoudhuri: When you asked questions, what kind of answers did you get?
Thompson: What you start to figure out by spending time in Smithfield is that a lot of people know about the company and have at least an inkling of what goes on at the airport. Most don’t want to talk about it and don’t take a critical view of it. Folks we met there framed the debate within this religious discourse. The activists that we talked to were god-fearing devout Christians who felt like this was not what they signed up for as religious people, that it violates the religious tenets they adhere to. Interestingly, folks on the other side of the debate seem to be coming from a similar place, but just coming to a different conclusion. The subject of whether or not torture was permitted by the Bible was discussed in church there–and many congregants believed it was.
Paglen: It’s this small town with this open secret that nobody wants to talk about. It shows what’s going on culturally. When a country starts doing things like torturing and disappearing people, it’s not just a policy question, it’s also a cultural question.
Roychoudhuri: When you started to put the pieces of the rendition program together, what did you see?
Paglen: Take Khaled el-Masri for example. His case was a blueprint for this program because it’s the most complete account. He showed up in Germany after having disappeared for five months and told this incredible story. His interrogators told him not to tell anybody because they wouldn’t believe him anyway. But when you excavate his story, there is a trail of evidence to corroborate it.
He says he was kidnapped in Macedonia on a certain day. It turns out that a plane-spotter took a picture of a known CIA airplane in Majorca [Spain] the day before el-Masri was kidnapped. German journalists went to the airport of Skopje [Macedonia] with this picture and verified the plane was there on that date. The plane had also filed a flight plan from Macedonia to Kabul. El-Masri said he was taken to Kabul. In Kabul, he said he was taken on a 10-minute drive to a prison. He drew a map of what he thought the prison floor plan was. We got on Google Earth, looked at Kabul and drew a ring around how far you could go in about 10 minutes. Then we compared the buildings in that ring to the map that el-Masri had drawn. We found a building that looks exactly like it. So we drove out there. There is indeed a giant facility with Americans there. He could not have made this up.
Roychoudhuri: You actually went to one of the places el-Masri believes he was held–the Salt Pit in Afghanistan.
Paglen: There have been at least three or four black sites in and around Kabul, Afghanistan. The one we definitely knew the location of was the Salt Pit. We found a driver who would take us out there. When you drive out to the Salt Pit, you have these wide plains; it’s very isolated. We were driving up and there was a traffic jam which was a goat herder with a bunch of goats on the road. As we’re waiting, he turns around and he’s wearing a hat that says KBR–Kellogg Brown and Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton). As we drove farther, we saw a huge complex with a big wall around it. There are signs in English saying this is an Afghan military facility, no entrance. There’s then a checkpoint. We were stopped. We told the guards we were turning around and going back to Kabul. We asked what goes on there and the guard said he didn’t know exactly. Then we asked if there were Americans there. And he said, “Oh yes, there’s lots of Americans here.” And we saw some Americans sitting on a Humvee.
Roychoudhuri: Did you get a sense of the scope of the rendition program through your travels in Afghanistan?
Thompson: When Trevor and I went to Afghanistan we realized that this wasn’t about a handful of CIA secret prisons. The U.S. military has erected some 20 detention centers throughout Afghanistan –which all operate in near total secrecy. These are facilities that the U.N., the Afghan government, journalists, and human rights groups can’t get into. Extraordinary rendition is one facet of a much broader story of secrecy and imprisonment that spans the globe.
In Kabul and Gardez, we interviewed many people–in human rights organizations, NGOs, local journalists, and former detainees. We realized that the kinds of distinctions that we were making between CIA and military black sites, CIA and military torture made absolutely no sense to people. It’s more like the U.S. is treating this whole country as if it were a giant black site.
Paglen: This rendition and torture is one flavor of a larger thing going on: the U.S. taking people all over the place, imprisoning and torturing them without charge.
Thompson: From interviewing a lot of detainees and Dr. Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, it was clear that the Americans had grabbed hundreds and hundreds of people. They’re being held without charges, in some 20 different facilities.
Roychoudhuri: Who are these people?
Paglen: When A.C. interviewed people who had been held at the military air base Bagram, prisoners told him that there were Iraqis, Yemenis, an international cast of characters at this DOD prison. So what the hell are they doing there? These are not high-profile renditions like el-Masri or Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. So who are these guys? How did they get there? Is this part of the rendition program, or has the practice of transferring prisoners to these different places around the world become a standard practice?
Roychoudhuri: In the book, you make clear that the rendition program has been around for years. What has changed?
Paglen: The program was established over multiple administrations, Democrat and Republican. For example, Aero Contractors was set up under the Carter administration. The counter-terrorist unit in the CIA was set up under the Reagan administration, but the rendition program was set up under Clinton. It’s an accumulation of the capacity of this infrastructure. After 9/11, the CIA went about setting up this entire infrastructure. Materially, they started getting airplanes and secret prisons together. They also started putting together a corporate structure, meaning shell companies. All of this was already in place, but not solidified. All the controls seemed to be taken off of it. They’re not planning each operation so meticulously, they’re not getting presidential authorization for each operation.
We’re hearing about it now because it grew so big, clearly expanding beyond what the intention of the program was at first. There is no question that some of these guys they’re picking up did nothing and are the wrong people. One of the differences between the pre- and post-9/11 is that the CIA becomes squarely in charge of the program. Before, the CIA was working with the FBI.
Thompson: The pre-9/11 program was geared more towards adjudicating people domestically who were suspected of crimes against American citizens. That was obviously not quite as controversial as running this huge program that’s snatching people and taking them to secret dungeons around the world.
Roychoudhuri: Clearly, other countries have to be at least partially aware of the program in order for the U.S. program to operate. Did you get a sense of the level of collaboration?
Paglen: We know that immediately after 9/11 the CIA set up a program to collaborate with 80 foreign countries to varying degrees. The CIA also started funding other intelligence services in order to use them as proxies. We also know that some of these collaborations were kept off the record; supposedly there is no paper trail.
Roychoudhuri: Has that off-the-record quality caused glitches in the program?
Paglen: What happened in October of 2001 is that one of these airplanes landed in Pakistan.
The Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) picked up a guy named Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed. The plane landed on the tarmac; they had this guy in chains. That guy was handed over to the Americans and put into this Gulfstream. They were going to fly him out of there, but the air traffic controllers require a landing fee and they refused to pay. The ISI then went to the airport officials and told them to waive the landing fee, so the plane took off. But it created a stir, and drew attention to the aircraft. A Pakistani journalist heard about this and published it, including the tail number of the plane in the newspaper. American journalists then got their hands on this tail number, and this is one of the very early keys that began to unlock parts of this story.
Roychoudhuri: As journalists have begun tracking plane numbers, the CIA has attempted to reshuffle. They change the number on the plane, or they change the phone line of the shell companies. How much do you think public scrutiny can achieve?
Thompson: A ton. If people want the CIA to be reined in and if they feel we shouldn’t go around the world summarily detaining and torturing people, they can truly pressure their government to make that happen. They did it in the ’70s through Frank Church, the Idaho senator, and the Church Committee. They severely curbed the transgressions and the misdeeds of the CIA. The thing is, by and large Americans don’t care about this. Europeans, who play a much smaller role in this, are absolutely outraged about it; their governments are outraged about it. The day Americans decide that they don’t think torture is something we should do, than maybe we’ll see some pressure to change these things.
Roychoudhuri: You quote 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick in the book: “In criminal justice, you either prosecute suspects or let them go. But if you’ve treated them in ways that won’t allow you to prosecute them, you’re in this no man’s land. What do you do with those people?” Based on the fact that it’s so difficult to bring these people back out of this extralegal system, do you have any sense of where the rendition program is going?
Paglen: This is the crucial question that we are facing right now. Bush transferred a handful of guys to Guantanamo and acknowledged they were kept in these secret prisons. Congress has to come up with a framework to prosecute these guys. It’s common knowledge that most of the guys at Guantanamo are nobodies. Many were turned in by bounty hunters. But the guys that Bush transferred to Guantanamo Bay are guys that everybody agrees are bad guys. The sticking point is that they have tortured them for years and the evidence against them is totally tainted by rendition and torture. These are guys that people definitely want to see put on trial.
By moving them to Guantanamo Bay, Bush is basically challenging Congress and saying, “If you want to put Khaled Sheikh Mohammed on trial, you’re going to have to retroactively authorize torture, rendition, and the black site program.”
If Congress does authorize the president’s version of the bill, they’re not only retroactively authorizing torture, they’re creating a legal framework for the future. That would create a system where disappearing and torturing people would become a part of the law. ++
Outrage And Shame
by tristero
Friday, September 22, 2006
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/
From Marty Lederman:
[I]t only takes 30 seconds or so to see that the Senators have capitualted entirely, that the U.S. will hereafter violate the Geneva Conventions by engaging in Cold Cell, Long Time Standing, etc., and that there will be very little pretense about it. In addition to the elimination of habeas rights in section 6, the bill would delegate to the President the authority to interpret “the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions” “for the United States,” except that the bill itself would define certain “grave breaches” of Common Article 3 to be war crimes.
So tell me, my fellow Americans:
How does it feel knowing that your government will pass laws permitting the violation of the Geneva Conventions against torture?
How does it feel knowing the taxes you pay from money you earned are going towards the salary of legally sanctioned torturers?
How does it feel knowing that the only political party with an organization large enough to stand in opposition to the American fascists in charge of this country’s legislature and executive were actually boasting that they were not going to get involved in one of the most important moral debates of our time?
And how does it feel to have George W. Bush, that paragon of moral probity, mental stability, and well-informed intelligence, granted the legal right to determine what is and isn’t torture?
I’ll tell you how I feel. I am outraged and ashamed.
Kudos to Digby for calling this exactly right from the start. Shame, shame, shame on the cowards in both parties that permitted this disgracefully grotesque farce to happen. This is as inexcusable a stupidity as the neglect that permittted the 9/11 attacks, the idiotic reasoning and intellectual blindness that advocated and executed the Bush/Iraq war, and the failure to prepare for Katrina. What the hell is going on, that a country that prides itself on its heritage of freedom and liberty, that fought such an awful war over the degrading enslavement of human beings - that such a country would vote to permit some of the most repulsive and evil practices human beings are capable of and place the power to do so directly in the hands of a moral midget? ++
Reclaiming The Issues: “Keep George Out Of Jail”
Thom Hartmann
Thursday, September 21, 2006 by CommonDreams.org http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0921-28.htm
The Republicans are trying to keep George W. Bush out of jail. So far, the media and the Democrats haven’t done much to stop them.
On the surface, it seems the Republicans are having a debate about “wiretapping terrorists” and “harsh interrogation of prisoners.” These frames about the current “rebellion” by McCain, Graham, Warner, et al, are today embraced by both the Republican Party and the mainstream media.
But the real issue is whether Republicans in Congress will trade the principles of democracy and the rule of law to keep George W. Bush and several of his colleagues out of jail, or whether they’ll uphold the rule of law and American democracy while abandoning him to face the consequences of his illegal acts.
On June 29, 2006, in the Hamden Case, the US Supreme Court ruled that Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration had violated the Geneva Convention and other international treaties with regard to the treatment and prosecution of detainees in the so-called “war on terror.”
The logic of the decision could subject Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and Rumsfeld - along with those down the chain of command who followed their orders - to prosecution as war criminals both in the United States and internationally. If they violated Common Article 3 and others of the Geneva Conventions, they could be subject to lengthy imprisonment in the US for violating US laws, as well as being brought before the United Nation’s International Court of Justice at The Hague, the same as Slobodan Milosevic.
A hastily convened conference call by the Justice Department to discuss the ruling caused Brian Roehrkasse at the Department of Justice Public Affairs Office to comment to those on the call that “the Supreme Court’s holding indicates the military commissions, as currently constituted by DOD, while robust in affording enemy combatants more process than this or any other country has ever afforded enemy combatants, are not consistent with current congressional statutes, especially the UCMJ and treaty provisions, Common Article 3.”
A plain English translation would be close to: “The Supreme Court said we’ve broken US law, we’ve broken the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and we’ve broken the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3.”
About six weeks later, on August 17, 2006, Federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled in Detroit that George W. Bush and his administration had committed numerous felonies with regard to wiretapping American citizens without a legal warrant, including violating the FISA act (which carries a 5-year prison term as the penalty for each violation) and violating the Constitution (which carries impeachment as its penalty). Later in the day, the Department of Homeland Security facilitated the arrest in Thailand of John Mark Karr for killing JonBenet Ramsey, sweeping the story off the front page and out of the weekend news analysis shows, but the ruling is still there.
Thus the Republicans are scrambling.
If either of these precedents carry forward or are seriously prosecuted - as could happen if Democrats take either the House or the Senate and gain the power to investigate crimes of the Bush Administration, or could simply happen as the normal course of events if lawyers in the Justice Department and the United Nations enforce the law - Republicans are faced with the very real possibility that George W. Bush and others in his administration could go to prison. Impeachment is a virtual given.
Thus the spin. And the compromises. And the debates within the Republican Party. And the corporate media’s efforts to limit the discussion to the “wiretapping debate” and the “prisoner interrogation/torture debate.”
Scratch the veneer off, though, and you quickly see that this is really about keeping George out of jail.
This one will be interesting to watch.
Will the Republicans bail George out the way Osama’s half-brother, Salem Bin Laden (who soon thereafter died in a plane crash in Texas), did when Dubya’s Harken Oil Company was going bust? Will they keep him from being prosecuted the way his father did when Poppy shut down an SEC investigation of Junior’s inside trading? Will they keep him out of federal custody the way his daddy did when Dubya left the Texas Air National Guard to desert the military and go on a year-long drinking binge in Alabama?
And will the Democratic Party seize the frame - or use as an October Surprise - the fact of George W. Bush’s vulnerability to criminal prosecution?
Or will the Republicans - and maybe even Poppy Bush (who’s spending an eerie amount of time with his new surrogate son, Bill Clinton) - simply decide that after sixty years it’s finally time for George to fend for himself, and leave our laws intact?
It could, after all, be the best way for a “maverick” Republican like McCain to reclaim the Republican party and pin all the blame for five years of High Crimes And Misdemeanors on Dubya, paving the way for a “cleaner” Republican slate in the ‘08 elections. Many of these same Republicans, remember, were pushing hard for jail time for Bill Clinton for lying to a Grand Jury about having sex in the Oval Office - and were quite vocal about how a president could be both impeached and prosecuted for crimes.
The next few weeks - and the fine print in the “compromises” being hammered out among Republicans in the Senate right now - will tell. ++
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
September 22nd, 2006