Political Waves » 2007 » June

Archive for June 29th, 2007

Do you see what I see?

The government, the court … gone too far — so far it’s sticking in America’s craw? It’s not just the Left unhappy, now, it’s the whole country. [I'll qualify that -- I thought the Supreme's giving Dubby the nation seven years ago went too far ... so what I mean is, even in the ass-over-tea-kettle, down-the-rabbit-hole, up's down, right's wrong, surrealistic world we live in today ... they've gone too far!] The nation, the Congress wants accountability … and the White House slams the door in their face. The public, the national sentiment, leans left toward a progressive “new deal” and the Supreme’s take us back in time to uglier ways of seeing our world.

I’m not one of those who thinks it can’t get worse — oh Hell yeah, it can. On the other hand, the Big Picture, which has become so glaringly apparent only a child could fail to notice, has taken on cartoon proportions worthy of Disney … if any of you have seen L’il Bush on Comedy Central, you’ll get my drift. The more distant the opposite ends of the spectrum move, the easier all this is to see … which may be the entire point of the energy curve.

Here’s the blowback on the Supreme’s recent activity — it was quick, harsh and outraged, and there will be more, I’m sure. The last piece is particularly interesting, and I think it reveals something about the Conservative go-for-the-throat outlook, which is based on competition.

Last night, the Dem candidates debated on PBS, and it was a love-in … they worked together, respectful of one another, and built on one anothers talking points. This doesn’t happen in the Red debates — perhaps we’re finally seeing the basic difference between these people: competition v. collaboration.

Yeah, I know — Hil will snip at Barack next time, Joe will snipe at John … but they’re all moving in the same direction, their diversity notwithstanding; it’s a race by definition and it won’t remain rosy, but the difference between parties is obvious to the point of wondering if they’re on the same planet. The Pub candidates all look alike, talk alike and hold their knives at the ready, while they babble about God, guns and gays — and the American public is no longer interested in that conversation, or pleased with that behavior.

One comment — the AP piece below only gives Kucinich and Gravel a nod; shame on them. These two continued to make cogent points, outside of the moderate zone, of course — and the base listened . Don’t bet they didn’t.

Below, the handpicked [by Cheney] High Court catches Hell from rational people — and, seriously now, their timing sucks; they were selected to preside over the Thirty-Year Reign, the Republican takeover, but their Little Emperor pissed in those Cheerio’s … we’ll have to wait and see who laughs last.

Articles on the Supreme’s in general, first — then their latest rulings.

Jude

Three Bad Rulings
New York Times Editorial
June 26, 2007

The Supreme Court hit the trifecta yesterday: Three cases involving the First Amendment. Three dismaying decisions by Chief Justice John Roberts’s new conservative majority.

Chief Justice Roberts and the four others in his ascendant bloc used the next-to-last decision day of this term to reopen the political system to a new flood of special-interest money, to weaken protection of student expression and to make it harder for citizens to challenge government violations of the separation of church and state. In the process, the reconfigured court extended its noxious habit of casting aside precedents without acknowledging it — insincere judicial modesty scored by Justice Antonin Scalia in a concurring opinion.

First, campaign finance. Four years ago, a differently constituted court upheld sensible provisions of the McCain-Feingold Act designed to prevent corporations and labor unions from circumventing the ban on their spending in federal campaigns by bankrolling phony “issue ads.” These ads purport to just educate voters about a policy issue, but are really aimed at a particular candidate.

The 2003 ruling correctly found that the bogus issue ads were the functional equivalent of campaign ads and upheld the Congressional restrictions on corporate and union money. Yet the Roberts court shifted course in response to sham issue ads run on radio and TV by a group called Wisconsin Right to Life with major funding from corporations opposed to Senator Russell Feingold, the Democrat who co-authored the act.

It opened a big new loophole in time to do mischief in the 2008 elections. The exact extent of the damage is unclear. But the four dissenters were correct in warning that the court’s hazy new standard for assessing these ads is bound to invite evasion and fresh public cynicism about big money and politics.

The decision contained a lot of pious language about protecting free speech. But magnifying the voice of wealthy corporations and unions over the voice of candidates and private citizens is hardly a free speech victory. Moreover, the professed devotion to the First Amendment did not extend to allowing taxpayers to challenge White House aid to faith-based organizations as a violation of church-state separation. The controlling opinion by Justice Samuel Alito offers a cockeyed reading of precedent and flimsy distinctions between executive branch initiatives and Congressionally authorized spending to deny private citizens standing to sue. That permits the White House to escape accountability when it improperly spends tax money for religious purposes.

Nor did the court’s concern for free speech extend to actually allowing free speech in the oddball case of an Alaska student who was suspended from high school in 2002 after he unfurled a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” while the Olympic torch passed. The ruling by Chief Justice Roberts said public officials did not violate the student’s rights by punishing him for words that promote a drug message at an off-campus event. This oblique reference to drugs hardly justifies such mangling of sound precedent and the First Amendment. ++

Not One More Roberts or Alito
E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post
Friday, June 29, 2007

Just say no.

The Senate’s Democratic majority — joined by all Republicans who purport to be moderate — must tell President Bush that this will be their answer to any controversial nominee to the Supreme Court or the appellate courts.

The Senate should refuse even to hold hearings on Bush’s next Supreme Court choice, should a vacancy occur, unless the president reaches agreement with the Senate majority on a mutually acceptable list of nominees.

And no Bush nominee to a lower court deserves any deference now that we learn that U.S. Appeals Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh may have misled the Senate during his confirmation hearings. Kavanaugh claimed he was not involved in administration discussions about setting the rules for the treatment of enemy combatants. The Post reported that he was.

Although a spokeswoman for Kavanaugh insisted that his testimony was “accurate,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said, “I don’t believe that he was truthful with us.”

As for the Supreme Court, we now know that the president’s two nominees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, are exactly what many of us thought they were: activist conservatives intent on leading a judicial counterrevolution. Yesterday’s 5 to 4 ruling tossing out two school desegregation plans was another milestone on the court’s march to the right.

Even after he was confirmed, Roberts was talking about something other than the 5 to 4 conservative court we saw this year on case after case. In a speech at Georgetown University Law School in May 2006, Roberts rightly argued that “the rule of law is strengthened when there is greater coherence and agreement about what the law is.” It’s a shame this quest for broader majorities had so little bearing on the 2007 Roberts-led court.

Especially troubling was the opinion offered by Roberts and Alito this week eviscerating the rather modest restrictions on sham “issue” ads in the McCain-Feingold law. The provision, which applies for 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election, is aimed at preventing large amounts of corporate and union money from getting around campaign finance restrictions.

Three conservative justices, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy, were willing to admit that in voiding this part of the law they were overturning a precedent set by the court only four years ago. But Roberts and Alito pretended to follow the earlier ruling while ripping its guts out. Scalia called this “faux judicial restraint.”

“The court (and, I think, the country) loses when important precedent is overruled without good reason,” Justice David H. Souter wrote for the dissenters. Exactly. But upsetting precedent, directly or indirectly, is a major goal of this new conservative majority.

As Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute noted this week in Roll Call, the issue-ad decision demonstrated “not a careful, conservative deference to Congress” but instead “a willingness by Roberts to toss aside Congress’ conclusions to fit his own ideological predispositions” — the very definition of judicial activism.

If another conservative replaces a member of the court’s moderate-to-liberal bloc, the country will be set on a conservative course for the next decade or more, locking in today’s politics at the very moment when the electorate is running out of patience with the right.

That’s why a majority of senators should warn Bush now that they will not take up his nominee unless he strictly construes the Constitution’s provision that he appoint justices with “the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” The rule should be: If the advice isn’t taken, there will be no consent.

And if conservatives claim to believe the president is owed deference on his court appointees, they will be — I choose this word deliberately — lying. In 2005 conservatives had no problem blocking Bush’s appointment of Harriet Miers because they could not count on her to be a strong voice for their legal causes. They revealed that their view of judicial battles is not about principle but power. When they went after Miers, conservatives lost the deference argument.

Much has been written about how the judicial confirmation process is broken. A more accurate view is that the ideological struggles in our politics have moved to the courts and that the formal processes of the Senate don’t deal well with such conflicts.

It would be far better to be honest about what’s going on. The Senate should be unapologetic in saying no, up front, to loading the bench with conservative judicial activists. If Bush is given this warning and still refuses to engage in serious consultation, the burden will be on him. ++

The Supreme Court Kowtows to The Dictator
Timothy Gatto, Smirking Chimp
Jun 28 2007

The decisions of the Supreme Court today are notification to the rest of the country that individual rights, and fairness in business, have no place in America. The Supreme Court has shown today that price fixing and racial segregation can now be protected by the highest court in the land. Black children will now attend black schools and the historic 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools, is now sitting on top of the dustbin of history. It was a noble attempt at justice and equality for all, but today it is no longer the law of the land and Americans can now look to the past to see what the future holds.

Capitalism, the system that Republicans “revere”, took it on the chin today also, with the ruling that “price fixing” does not constitute a violation of the 96-year-old rule that resale price maintenance agreements were an automatic part of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Supreme Court no longer believes that the market should set its own prices and that an arbitrary price set by manufacturers should be the law of the land. Personally, I don’t see where that is going to help the people of the United States or the manufacturers. If an item has an artificially fixed price that discounters cannot break, the items that are in question will end up sitting on shelves, overpriced. Regardless of the courts mandating a bottom line, if the item will not sell above the fixed price, stopping discounters from selling it at a lower price will not be in anyone’s interest.

Both of these decisions were brought to the court backed by the Bush Administration. In the case of the price fixing case, According to the New York Times, “The Bush administration, along with economists of the Chicago school, had argued that the blanket prohibition against resale price maintenance agreements was archaic and counterproductive because, they said, some resale price agreements actually promote competition”. As far as the racial make-up of school districts case, “The Bush administration participated as a “friend of the court” on behalf of the plaintiffs who challenged the diversity plans”.

So it begins. As more cases come onto this Roberts Court, expect to see our nation’s laws sent back to antiquity. Clarence Thomas, the only person of color on the bench should be ashamed of himself and what he has done to his own people. As a young student, Thomas entered the College of the Holy Cross, a Jesuit institution in Massachusetts, after the school began a black recruitment program. Thomas was the beneficiary of a similar minority program a few years later at Yale Law School. This is how he repaid the people that put him where he is now. Martin Luther King I believe is turning over in his grave. All of the pain and heartache of the Civil Rights Movement has been negated because of this one man’s vote. He should be ashamed, very ashamed. If there is a God, I would like to be a fly on the wall when Thomas goes to meet his maker. I’d want to be a little teensy, itsty, bitsy fly, because when God explodes on him, I wouldn’t want to suffer the consequences.

Of course it wasn’t just Clarence Thomas, four other men voted to set back the Civil Rights of minorities. The votes were the same, 5-4 on both cases. We can expect to see more of the same in the future. People often ask why should we impeach Bush and Cheney? After all they only have a year and a half left on their terms. First of all, God forbid another Supreme Court Justice dies or is incapacitated in the next year and a half. It will take decades to get the Supreme Court balanced again. There is another reason, with everything that is happening, unless we get the Bush Administration out of the White House, we can expect more of the same types of cases to be backed by the administration as a “friend of the Court”. The other thing that we have to consider is that if Bush will turn Civil Rights on its head, our democracy is in jeopardy also. Will he leave after his term is up? This remains to be seen. Now that he has the Supreme Court in his pocket, what’s to stop him from instigating another 9-11? Think about it. ++

Ace Supreme
digby, Hullabaloo

Via Adam B at Kos, I see that Scotusblog has compiled some interesting statistics about the latest Supreme Court term. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that they have a conservative majority after all, with Anthony Kennedy playing his Hamlet role mostly in service of conservative outcomes:

Nineteen of the twenty-four 5-4 cases broke down along strictly ideological lines and, as in most every recent Term, the Court’s five more conservative members won a greater share of 5-4 victories than the four more liberal justices. The Roberts-Scalia-Kennedy-Thomas-Alito combination prevailed in 13 of 24 (or 54%) 5-4 decisions, while the Stevens-Souter-Ginsburg-Breyer grouping prevailed in only six of 24 (25%) decisions.

As Adam B pointed out this has had some rather predictable results:

In one full term, this Court has severely curbed local efforts to promote racial diversity in schools, upheld a right-wing ban on a necessary medical procedure for women, curbed students’ free speech rights, crippled Congress’ ability to keep corporate money out of political advertising, prevented taxpayers from challenging the constitutionality of Bush’s faith-based initiatives, made it almost impossible for women to prevail on claims of longterm sex discrimination . . . and they’re just getting started.

I recall during the Alito fight that some people argued that there wasn’t really a fifth vote to overturn Roe or any number of other settled cases because good old Kennedy was still there. Everyone was supposed to gird themselves for the day Justice Stephens shuffled off his mortal coil. I thought that was nonsense because Justice John Roberts struck me as a very, very smooth operator who would know exactly how to manipulate someone with this kind of temperament:

From the beginning, Kennedy’s performance on the Court has been defined not by indecision but by self-dramatizing utopianism. He believes it is the role of the Court in general and himself in particular to align the messy reality of American life with an inspiring and highly abstracted set of ideals. He thinks that great judges, like great literary figures, have both the power and the duty to “impose order on a disordered reality,” as he told the Kennedy Center audience. By forcing legislators to respect a series of moralistic abstractions about liberty, equality, and dignity, judges, he believes, can create a national consensus about American values that will usher in what he calls “the golden age of peace.” This lofty vision has made Kennedy the Court’s most activist justice — that is, the justice who votes to strike down more state and federal laws combined than any of his colleagues…

Roberts certainly seemed like someone who would figure out how to stroke Kennedy’s famous ego and I’d bet money that’s exactly what he did. He’ll let him vote with the other side just enough to make him believe he’s still the independent swing vote and BMOC but he’ll make sure Kennedy swings the way he wants when it’s important. Grandiose utopians who believe their own hype are always easy to manipulate. Just ask Dick Cheney. ++

Dems Say March to Racial Unity Not Over
NEDRA PICKLER, AP
June 28, 2007

WASHINGTON — A historically diverse field of Democratic presidential candidates - a woman, a black, an Hispanic and five whites - denounced an hours-old Supreme Court affirmative action ruling Thursday night and said the nation’s slow march to racial unity is far from over.

“We have made enormous progress, but the progress we have made is not good enough,” said Sen. Barack Obama, the son of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first female candidate with a serious shot at the presidency, drew the night’s largest cheer when she suggested there was a hint of racism in the way AIDS is addressed in this country.

“Let me just put this in perspective: If HIV-AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34 there would be an outraged, outcry in this country,” said the New York senator.

In their third primary debate, the two leading candidates and their fellow Democrats played to the emotions of a predominantly black audience, fighting for a voting bloc that is crucial in the party’s nomination process.

One issue not raised by questioners, the war in Iraq, dominated the past two debates.

Queries about AIDS, criminal justice, education, taxes, outsourcing jobs, poverty and the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina all led to the same point: The racial divide still exists.

“There is so much left to be done,” Clinton said, “and for anyone to assert that race is not a problem in America is to deny the reality in front of our very eyes.”

While the first two debates focused on their narrow differences on Iraq, moderator Tavis Smiley promised to steer the candidates to other issues that matter to black America. In turn, the candidates said those issues mattered to them.

“This issue of poverty in America is the cause of my life,” said John Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential nominee.

Said Obama: “It starts from birth.”

Obama criticized President Bush’s No Child Left Behind program. “You can’t leave money behind … and unfortunately that’s what’s been done,” he said.

Clinton spoke of her efforts in Arkansas to raise school standards, “most especially for minority children.”

Delaware Sen. Joe Biden urged people to be tested for the AIDS virus, noting that he and Obama had done so. Cracked the Illinois senator: “I just want to make clear I got tested with Michelle,” his wife, Obama said drawing laughter from the predominantly black audience.

The debate was held at Howard University, a historically black college in the nation’s capital.

Black voters are a large and critical part of the Democratic primary electorate, making the debate a must-attend for candidates seeking the party’s presidential nomination.

A half century of desegregation law - and racial tension - was laid bare for the Democrats hours before they met. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court clamped historic new limits on school desegregation plans.

Clinton said the decision “turned the clock back” on history, and her competitors agreed.
The conservative majority cited the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case to bolster its precedent-shattering decision, an act termed a “cruel irony” by Justice John Paul Stevens in his dissent. The 1954 ruling led to the end of state-sponsored school segregation in the United States.

Obama, the only black candidate in the eight-person field, spoke of civil rights leaders who fought for Brown v. Board of Education and other precedents curbed by the high court. “If it were not for them,” he said, “I would not be standing here.”

Biden noted that he voted against confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion. He said he was tough on Roberts. “The problem is the rest of us were not tough enough,” he said, seeming to take a jab at fellow Democrats. “They have turned the court upside down.”

All the Democratic candidates in the Senate opposed the confirmation of conservative Justice Samuel Alito, another of President Bush’s nominees. Clinton, Biden and Obama voted against Roberts; Sen. Chris Dodd voted for his nomination.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, the first major Hispanic candidate, said race is about more than passing new laws and appointing new justices. “The next president is going to have to lead,” he said, vowing to do so.

Dodd said “the shame of resegregation in our country has been occurring for years.”

The nomination fight begins in Iowa and New Hampshire, two states with relatively few minorities. But blacks and other minority voters become critical in Nevada, South Carolina and Florida before the campaign turns to a multi-state primary on Feb. 5.

About one in 10 voters in the 2004 election were black, according to exit polls, and they voted 9-to-1 for Democrat John Kerry. In some states, blacks make up a bigger share of the voters. In South Carolina, for example, blacks made up about 30 percent of the electorate in 2004, but were more than half of the voters in the state’s Democratic primary.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, the country’s only black governor, introduced the candidates with a warning that a dispirited GOP “is not enough to elect a Democratic president nor should it be. We need to offer a more positive and hopeful vision … to run on what we are for and not just what we are against.”

Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel also debated. ++

Did Dr. King’s dream die on a summer Thursday?
Dennis Rahkonen, Smirking Chimp
Jun 29 2007

I don’t think I’ve ever feared for America’s future as much as on the 28th of June, 2007.

Not even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I was a boy ducking down beneath the edge of our bathtub, as a radio in the next room warned of possible nuclear war at any moment, and my sudsy float toys slipped away from trembling hands.

Not on 9/11, which I’d almost come to expect, given the foreign rage that Washington’s abysmally misguided policies were generating throughout especially the Islamic world.

On the third-to-last day of my favorite month, just hours ago, I clearly saw the specter of a fascist tomorrow.

The U.S. Supreme Court savaged Dr. King’s dream — and all those years of such hard struggle by so many — by deciding that race couldn’t be used in determining student make-up in our nation’s schools, thereby throwing open the gates to renewed, inevitable segregation.

And bigoted nativists succeeded in thwarting any possibility for immigrant civil rights, employing exactly the same sensationalized and ultimately groundless fears that had once been used to stifle progress for Blacks enduring second-class citizenship under Jim Crow.

Have we forgotten that “they’ll steal our jobs” and “cost the taxpayers” were central arguments for attempting to preserve Dixie apartheid? Many were the terrified, innocent souls whose last seconds of life passed with Kluxer ropes around their necks because of such scapegoating.

They’re the reason why Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were found in a Mississippi dam.

How long before we witness either official or vigilante attempts at ethnic cleansing, on up to an eleven-million- person scale? Think “witch hunt” or “pogrom.” Certainly Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs will continue stirring the hornet’s nest.

But who, if not white workers succumbing to a divide-and-conquer subterfuge, will be the ones finally, lethally stung?

My fear is matched by fury, for a surpassing fraud has allowed all this to happen.

I’m speaking of the false piety exhibited by white supremacists who keep their true motives hidden: “We seek a colorblind society. Race shouldn’t be considered, or even mentioned.”

It’s behind that shameful deceit that both benign neglect and malign intent do their awful dirty work, permitting the unrelieved existence of urban ghettos festering in joblessness, poverty, and pervasive dysfunction…precisely because witheringly damaging, long-standing racism isn’t being — hasn’t been — remedially addressed.

Tumbleweeds roll past young Native Americans passed out in the dust on desolate reservations, beside their empty bottles of cheap wine, or more costly drugs. Have you ever read the obituary page of an Indian newspaper? The ages at death are commonly, shockingly low.

When Dr. King spoke of judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, he plainly didn’t mean that we should ignore chronic, systemic injustices having their origin in racism, or fail to apply racially-corrective measures to the ongoing problem.

But that’s exactly what “colorblind” white, conservative demagogues are doing. They pretend the dead-ends and suffering their own implacable attitudes, and active bias, have caused no longer exist.

Or exist because of purported, individual character flaws among the dispossessed, rather than due to the crushing, unrelenting impact of an imposed evil grinding whole communities into the ground.

So what will happen to America when its dark-skinned population becomes our nation’s majority, as all demographic trends indicate?

How can we successfully compete with the rest of humanity when most of our kids are poorly educated via the inferiority of bad, underfunded, segregated schools in distressed enclaves of permanent impoverishment and despair?

Does someone harbor the Hitlerian notion that only “Aryan” kids matter, or are innately, solely capable of technical and scientific expertise? Tell that to the nonwhite Chinese, whose school children are running rings around our own in the hard sciences.

The thinly-disguised idea that “white is right,” and everyone else is expendable, carries the stench of anti-Semitism from the Nazi era.

To succeed in Germany, fascism needed the Jewish straw man.

For quite some time now, the United States has been beset by decidedly dangerous, antidemocratic, right-wing ambition. Well organized, and determined.

Yesterday we saw two manifestations of a singular social malevolence that, I’m very afraid, will one day ruin America.

I’ve always felt that Dr. King’s dream was so inspiringly powerful that I’d never lost faith in its eventual realization.

For the first time, I feel that maybe it either can’t be won, or won’t be won in this land until a new country arises like a Phoenix from fools’ ashes. ++

Brown’s legacy lives, but barely
Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Boston Globe
June 29, 2007

YESTERDAY, the US Supreme Court issued its long-anticipated decision about the constitutionality of policies in Seattle and Louisville that promote racial integration in schools. In a decision that can best be characterized as deeply divided, the court struck down these school districts’ plans, concluding that they violated some students’ right to equal protection, yet left open the opportunity for school districts to use some race-conscious measures to combat racial segregation. A majority of justices affirmed long-held principles that achieving racial diversity and avoiding racial isolation in schools are compelling state interests.

While this decision is neither as damaging nor as far-reaching as many feared it might be, there is no cause for celebration. This ruling removed a successful tool for combating the racial segregation that is a ubiquitous feature of the nation’s public schools. Its immediate effect will be to require local educators to refine their voluntary school desegregation plans. It should not prevent school districts from undertaking new plans designed to ameliorate racial segregation.

As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his blistering dissent, this decision “upsets settled expectations, creates legal uncertainty, and threatens to produce considerable further litigation, aggravating race-related conflict.” Judge John Paul Stevens went further, noting the “cruel irony” in the majority opinion’s evocation of Brown v. the Board of Education as justification for its position, proclaiming that “it is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.”

In fact, the perplexing nature of this decision becomes clear when considered in light of rulings from lower-court judges. Judge Alex Kozinski, a conservative member of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled earlier in favor of the Seattle plan, noting that it “does not segregate the races; to the contrary, it seeks to promote integration. There is no attempt to give members of particular races political power based on skin color. . . . The program does not use race as a criterion, but only to ensure that the population of each public school roughly reflects the city’s racial composition.”

Closer to home, the First Circuit in Comfort v. Lynn ruled in favor of the school district’s plan, determining it did not violate the 14th amendment precisely because it was designed to be inclusive, rather than to exclude. In affirming the “compelling interest” of racially diverse schools, Chief Justice Michael Boudin wrote: “. . . the negative consequences of racial isolation that Lynn seeks to avoid and the benefits of diversity that it hopes to achieve are rooted in the same central idea: that all students are better off in racially diverse schools.” The Supreme Court left the decision undisturbed.

If the fractured nature of yesterday’s 5-to-4 decision was hardly unexpected, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurring opinion does contain some small, and welcome, affirmation of the principles it articulated 53 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education. While agreeing with the majority that the plans illegally used race to classify students, he nonetheless stressed that “the decision today should not prevent school districts from continuing the important work of bringing together students of different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds.”

Kennedy’s opinion refuses to embrace the four-person plurality view that race cannot be considered in seeking to achieve educational equality. Now it is up to lawyers, civil rights and educational advocates, school districts, and school boards to craft original, creative, and constitutional remedies to combat racial isolation and foster diversity in schools and neighborhoods.

Many people across this nation who are participating in the voluntary school desegregation program, METCO, have internalized Brown v. Board of Education’s values. They have experienced the benefits of racially diverse classrooms.

Historian George Packer once wrote: “We will have a more just society as soon as we want one. Throughout American history this desire keeps rising to the surface, even at the unlikeliest moment.”

We find ourselves at such a moment. The unfortunate, but perhaps empowering, lesson of these rulings is that it will be up to the people, collectively, to determine what sort of schools we maintain and what moral lessons to teach there. Only time will tell whether the principles embraced in Brown continue to guide us in achieving racial integration, diversity, and equal opportunity in quality education. ++

Charles J. Ogletree Jr. is a professor at Harvard Law School and founding and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School.

Brown Fades to Black
A Brown Study
Harkavy, The Village Voice
June 29, 2007

Chief Justice John Roberts claimed in the Supreme Court’s backward-reeling White v. Black decision yesterday that “when it comes to using race to assign children to schools, history will be heard.”

But Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the minority in protest of the 5-4 upending of Brown, gave the country not only a history leson but also some lasting words to live by — something to get us out of this brown study caused by yesterday’s ruling.

Roberts distanced himself — and thus the entire country’s courts — from the democratic spirit by regarding racial equality as just another “verbal formulation”:

While the school districts use various verbal formulations to describe the interest they seek to promote — racial diversity, avoidance of racial isolation, racial integration — they offer no definition of the interest that suggests it differs from racial balance.

His past opinions, before he became the country’s chief justice, showed warmer regard for the rights of corporations than for the rights of people. But the depth of his icy disregard for the 1954 Brown decision was stunning.

Breyer warmed to the task. His memorable dissent is not only a good argument but good history.

Roberts said there was “no definition of the interest”? Here was Breyer’s take:

The compelling interest at issue here … includes an effort to eradicate the remnants, not of general “societal discrimination” [as Roberts's opinion said], but of primary and secondary school segregation; it includes an effort to create school environments that provide better educational opportunities for all children; it includes an effort to help create citizens better prepared to know, to understand, and to work with people of all races and backgrounds, thereby furthering the kind of democratic government our Constitution foresees. If an educational interest that combines these three elements is not “compelling,” what is?

Let the lawyers parse Roberts’s opinion; the rest of us can go to school on what Breyer wrote concerning Brown and all the history swirling around it, before it, and after it:

[Roberts's opinion for the plurality of the court] pays inadequate attention to this law, to past opinions’ rationales, their language, and the contexts in which they arise. As a result, it reverses course and reaches the wrong conclusion. In doing so, it distorts precedent, it misapplies the relevant constitutional principles, it announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by state and local governments to deal effectively with the growing resegregation of public schools, it threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation, and it undermines Brown’s promise of integrated primary and secondary education that local communities have sought to make a reality. This cannot be justified in the name of the Equal Protection Clause.

Context is everything, despite what such backward-time-travelers like Clarence Thomas think. Breyer noted:

In dozens of subsequent cases, this Court told school districts previously segregated by law what they must do at a minimum to comply with Brown’s constitutional holding. The measures required by those cases often included race-conscious practices, such as mandatory busing and race-based restrictions on voluntary transfers.

And the current cases, lumped together by the court for one overarchingly hidebound ruling, were no different. The Roberts Court simply made an ideologically based decision. Breyer didn’t say it like that. But he tore apart Roberts’s contention that there was no “definition of the interest” concerning racial equality. Rightly, Breyer noted the strong “public interest,” but, then, Roberts is more comfortable with corporate interest than public interest. Breyer wrote:

This Court has recognized that the public interests at stake in such cases are “compelling.” We have approved of “narrowly tailored” plans that are no less race-conscious than the plans before us. And we have understood that the Constitution permits local communities to adopt desegregation plans even where it does not require them to do so.

As I said, Breyer’s dissent is also a history lesson. And some of the recent history he painted is grim. Yes, Brown of course sparked massive integration, but that trend was already reversing even before yesterday’s decision. More from Breyer:

[T]he Court left much of the determination of how to achieve integration to the judgment of local communities. …

Overall these efforts brought about considerable racial integration. More recently, however, progress has stalled.

Between 1968 and 1980, the number of black children attending a school where minority children constituted more than half of the school fell from 77% to 63% in the Nation (from 81% to 57% in the South) but then reversed direction by the year 2000, rising from 63% to 72% in the Nation (from 57% to 69% in the South). Similarly, between 1968 and 1980, the number of black children attending schools that were more than 90% minority fell from 64% to 33% in the Nation (from 78% to 23% in the South), but that too reversed direction, rising by the year 2000 from 33% to 37% in the Nation (from 23% to 31% in the South).

As of 2002, almost 2.4 million students, or over 5% of all public school enrollment, attended schools with a white population of less than 1%. Of these, 2.3 million were black and Latino students, and only 72,000 were white. Today, more than one in six black children attend a school that is 99–100% minority. …

In light of the evident risk of a return to school systems that are in fact (though not in law) resegregated, many school districts have felt a need to maintain or to extend their integration efforts. The upshot is that myriad school districts operating in myriad circumstances have devised myriad plans, often with race-conscious elements, all for the sake of eradicating earlier school segregation, bringing about integration, or preventing retrogression. Seattle and Louisville are two such districts, and the histories of their present plans set forth typical school integration stories.

Roberts’s opinion danced around not only the topic of integration but also the word itself. He preferred to look with disdain upon what he called “racial balancing,” that buzz phrase used to good effect by foes of integration.

Unafraid to use the word “integration,” Breyer called him on it by defining the word, the concept, and its context. Here’s a civics lesson for your kids, courtesy of Breyer:

Regardless of its name, however, the interest at stake possesses three essential elements.

First, there is a historical and remedial element: an interest in setting right the consequences of prior conditions of segregation. This refers back to a time when public schools were highly segregated, often as a result of legal or administrative policies that facilitated racial segregation in public schools. It is an interest in continuing to combat the remnants of segregation caused in whole or in part by these school-related policies, which have often affected not only schools, but also housing patterns, employment practices, economic conditions, and social attitudes. It is an interest in maintaining hard-won gains. And it has its roots in preventing what gradually may become the de facto resegregation of America’s public schools. …

Second, there is an educational element: an interest in overcoming the adverse educational effects produced by and associated with highly segregated schools.

Third, there is a democratic element: an interest in producing an educational environment that reflects the “pluralistic society” in which our children will live. … It is an interest in helping our children learn to work and play together with children of different racial backgrounds. It is an interest in teaching children to engage in the kind of cooperation among Americans of all races that is necessary to make a land of three hundred million people one Nation.

Bong Hits For Roberts
Alec Dubro, Common Sense
June 28, 2007

What was Chief Justice John Roberts smoking? Nobody’s that straight anymore, are they? Could he have really believed that a banner reading “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” promoted drug use? And that the message was so dangerous that school authorities were correct in punishing the student who created the banner?

That’s certainly what he ruled in Morse v. Frederick. In this case, the principal of Juneau-Douglas High School (Alaska) suspended for 10 days senior student Joseph Frederick for hanging out the offending banner on private property across from the school during the Winter Olympics Torch Relay.

In a classic 5-4, right-left, split decision, the Roberts faction ruled that Frederick, and all like him, could be silenced. According to The Washington Post, “the court held that schools have the right to censor non-disruptive student speech if it ‘can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use.’”

First of all, “reasonably” can only be invoked if Jesus were present—which I suppose in Roberts’ world he always is—and could be induced to take a hit off the bong. Not probable. Nor would impressionable youth likely be swayed by the message—if, in fact, there was a message. Frederick’s banner was kind of dada-juvenile—the equivalent of saying, “Oxy-Contin for the Pope.” In short, slightly offensive in several ways, but essentially meaningless.

Roberts reminded me of those authorities in the 1960s who were always searching song lyrics to find out which words signified “drugs.” Almost invariably, they were either dead wrong or just dumb. And here the court played dumb in order to clamp down on expression. We can only conclude that Roberts, Alito, etc. were simply waiting for a case, any case, to make it before the high bench in order to create this sweeping ruling.

In the meantime, though, the Roberts court is continuing its unbroken streak of upholding and extending authority. All their business rulings essentially reinforce the feudal, master-servant relationship: if you work for me, I can dictate all your activities, including many done outside of work. In Morse v. Frederick, simply substitute school administration for management and you get the equivalent.

For younger people, this decision may seem like a new direction. I’ve seen several comments like, “This isn’t the country I grew up in anymore.” For those of us who went to school in the 1960s, though, it seems like the same old country. In 1964, I had a political sign removed from my college dormitory wall, and the dean of students refused to return it and said that the law was on his side. The sign came from the proto-leftist-humor magazine, The Realist, and it read [Bleep] Communism. It was decorated with hammers and sickles, stars and stripes, and was clearly satirical. Not to the political commissar of the University of Massachusetts, though. His authority must be maintained, no matter how foolish it makes him look.

And that seems to be Roberts’ outlook: this may be the dumbest decision anyone could make, on a subject that’s not worthy of the law’s time and money, but, by God, I’m gonna clamp down.

And speaking of money, who, exactly, was financing high school Principal Deborah Morse to carry this inane case to the Supreme Court?

As the saying goes, bad cases make bad law. ++

The Giant Sucking Sound of the Supreme Court
Bong Hits for Repression
PAUL KRASSNER, CounterPunch
June 28, 2007

The Supreme Court sucks so badly it turned itself inside out. An utterly outrageous 5-4 ruling has made it acceptable to suspend a high school student for an off-campus act like holding a 14-foot banner saying “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” That simple joke became a federal case ending with a dangerous precedent for suppressing free speech.

Chief Justice Roberts agreed with the school principal that “the banner would be interpreted by those viewing it as promoting illegal drug use, and that interpretation is plainly a reasonable one”–what a ton of bullshit!–and Justices Alito and Kennedy stated that their decision doesn’t address “political or social issues such as the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalized marijuana for medical use.”

So this is really about the war on pleasure. I once asked the late Peter McWilliams–leading activist in the medical marijuana movement who suffered from cancer and AIDS– “Would you agree with Dennis Peron, the co-author of Proposition 215 [California's medical marijuana referendum], who says–not as a joke–that all use of marijuana is medical?”

“In the general sense that everything we do for our health–both curative and preventative–is medical, I’d agree,” he replied. “Even a perfectly healthy person who smokes pot once a month purely for its euphoric effects could be said to be doing so to prevent becoming ill, in the sense that people take vitamin C every day to prevent becoming ill, for I believe that euphoria is both healing and health-maintaining ….

“While I was using marijuana to treat my nausea, I can’t tell you how much I missed getting high. Although I’d smoke it several times a day, the average high school student was getting high more times a month than I was. That’s because after the first month, I never got high, and I really enjoy marijuana’s high. Simply put, recreational marijuana you use to get high; medical marijuana you use to get by.” ++

Even in Agreement, Scalia Puts Roberts to Lash
LINDA GREENHOUSE, New York Times
June 28, 2007

WASHINGTON, June 27 — It’s not every day that one Supreme Court justice, even one as rhetorically unrestrained as Justice Antonin Scalia, characterizes another justice, let alone the chief justice of the United States, as a wimp and a hypocrite.

Yet Justice Scalia did something very close to that, not once but twice, in separate opinions on Monday. As a result, he has served to lift the curtain a bit on the differences within the powerful five-justice conservative bloc that has marched in lock step through much of the term, bent on reshaping the law and, in several important areas, well on the way toward doing so.

In the campaign finance case, he accused Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of “faux judicial modesty” for writing an opinion that in Justice Scalia’s view effectively overturned the court’s 2003 campaign finance decision “without saying so.” The clear implication was that the chief justice lacked the courage or honesty to overturn the precedent openly as Justice Scalia himself would have done.

“This faux judicial restraint is judicial obfuscation,” he said.

And Justice Scalia was scathing in his criticism of an opinion signed by Chief Justice Roberts that limited, but did not completely abolish, the right of taxpayers to go to court to challenge government expenditures that promote religion. Justice Scalia would have gone on to shut the courthouse door completely, not simply limiting but overturning the precedent that the new ruling invoked.

“Minimalism is an admirable judicial trait,” Justice Scalia said, “but not when it comes at the cost of meaningless and disingenuous distinctions.”

It made no difference that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another reliable member of the conservative bloc, was the author of that opinion that Chief Justice Roberts joined. Justice Scalia was clearly taking aim at the chief justice, openly mocking his much publicized goal of lowering the court’s temperature through unanimous and jurisprudentially modest decisions.

Justice Scalia is, of course, well known for his verbal barbs. Few colleagues during his 21 years on the court have escaped his insults, not even Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. He once accused Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of holding “irrational” views that “cannot be taken seriously.” A book published in 2004 under the title “Scalia Dissents” celebrated what it called the justice’s “unique communication skills.”

But what was notable about his attacks on Chief Justice Roberts this week was that the two were on the same side. They were in dispute not over outcomes, but over how far and how fast to move the law. As Prof. Jack M. Balkin of Yale Law School wrote on his blog, Balkinization, “It is the difference between bomb throwing and dismantling.”

Liberals are quick to point out that this may well prove to be a distinction without a difference, because throughout the term, these two justices have been arriving at the same bottom-line conclusions. Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky of Duke Law School observed that Chief Justice Roberts, who has taken the conservative position in every ideologically divided case this term, could hardly be described as less conservative than Justice Scalia.

Prof. Mark Tushnet of Harvard Law School, whose recent book, “A Court Divided,” explored the differences among Republican-appointed members of the Rehnquist court, said that “a consolidated conservative majority, not a divided conservative majority,” was now in charge.

But Justice Scalia has never been a particularly patient man, and at 71, with the conservative ascendancy at the court perhaps at its peak for the foreseeable future if Republicans lose the White House next year, he sees little to gain from incrementalism or its appearance. And even liberals who do not share his agenda concede his point that if a precedent is going to be overruled in all but name, it is better for all concerned to acknowledge the overruling as a fact.

“It’s neither minimalist nor restrained to overrule cases while pretending you are not,” Walter E. Dellinger III, who served as acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration, said in an online conversation on Slate. Mr. Dellinger’s point was that “there can also be a significant cost to the coherence of the system” if lower courts are in the dark as to which precedents they must still rely on.

Chief Justice Roberts, operating on a long timeline at 52, may be responding to a different imperative. Openly overturning numerous precedents early in his tenure would invite criticism that the Roberts court has an agenda to “radically shift American law,” said Thomas C. Goldstein, a student of the court who argues there often.

The conservative alliance at the court may be fractious but not fragile, strong enough to withstand Justice Scalia’s “tweaking and needling,” as Prof. Richard W. Garnett of Notre Dame Law School describes it.

“I look at it as a bit of a kabuki dance,” said Professor Garnett, who clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist and is close to the court’s conservatives. He said he had no doubt that Justice Scalia had “huge respect for the new chief as a person and as a lawyer.”

What is visible now, he said, is the latest iteration of the endless struggle between the need for stability in the law and the desire to correct previous mistakes.

“Different people who call themselves conservatives resolve that tension in different ways,” Professor Garnett said, adding that Justice Scalia was “laying down markers, making sure the arguments are out there to be used in later cases.” ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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.

Add comment June 29th, 2007

You Don’t Know Dick — the “next war” and “code red” … [updated]

Well, this isn’t a pleasant post — we’re talking about Iran, of course — and we need to be vigilant, especially now, as the Bushie administration comes under domestic as well as foreign attack. The first article here sets the tone, Uncle Dick the poster child for the dark ideologies at work … the creator of the bubble that the Dubby inhabits … and tireless in his work. Then there are two bits about military preparedness — speculation from the Independent — and three excellent analyses. All of these articles are Don’t Miss. The topic is too important.

It’s pretty much a no-brainer that the biggest diversion for such massive failure in governance would be a new war — and it’s crazy not to think that these people aren’t planning one. We have all the cookie crumbs to follow — musical chairs in the Joint Chiefs; an ADMIRAL in the top military pool when we’re fighting a ground war; FOUR carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf, now — USS Nimitz, USS Stennis, USS Enterprise, and next week a fourth strike group, the USS Truman will arrive in the Red Sea, within “shoutin’” distance. Israeli newspapers speak candidly about the buildup to war.

We’re not asleep any longer, we’re not so vain and puffed up that we’re confident in America’s might, we suddenly see the shadow behind the curtain — we’re learning. And teaching these rogues what we won’t stand for any more is a matter of being as tirelessly committed to truth as they are to mayhem, as loud and pushy as it takes to get their attention and let them know we’re on to them … so let’s get on it. The only way to keep this from happening, is to continue to discredit the government, demand accountability and keep them so busy at home putting out legal fires and handling public protest, they, themselves, are diverted.

Keep your Vision of their dissolving power, pray that each of their maneuvers hits snags and snafu’s and walls — their last dying gasp can’t be an attack on Iran if they don’t have any breath left. Write Nancy Pelosi a letter and tell her that, with 18 months left in office, just showing them up to be brutes and obstructionists isn’t enough — she’d better get tougher fast, because the angry public isn’t nearly as polite as is she. And it doesn’t take much stretch of the imagination to see a “homeland emergency” and a strike on Iran as the opportunity to seize this government under martial law and render her opinion, and ours, moot.

Jude

Update: commentary and article on the Armageddon model, bottom.

You Don’t Know Dick
Les Aucoin, HuffPo
June 28, 2007

It’s surprising that it took so long for Dick Cheney to be seen as the shadowy, macabre figure he has revealed himself to be — a tout of torture, a prophet of preemptive war, and a sorcerer of secrecy (not to mention a wholly self-owned branch of the U.S. government).

Before and after the 2000 election, when Cheney led the vice presidential search — and picked himself — the mainstream media equated his quiet manner and mellifluous voice with a moderate personal nature that happened to embrace orthodox conservatism. This proves they didn’t know dick about Cheney.

I did. Still do.

My epiphany occurred on a May morning in 1987, when Cheney and I found ourselves together in Red Square.

It was a heady era. We had accompanied then-House Speaker Jim Wright and other legislators to Moscow to meet Mikhail Gorbachev, the intriguing new Kremlin leader who offered hope for a thaw in, if not the end to, the Cold War. Even British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the archconservative “Iron Lady,” had announced after meeting the charismatic Gorbachev, “We can do business together.”

On our second morning in Moscow, my friend, U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA), and I rose early to jog before the start of a long day of meetings. What could be more indicative of the new US-Soviet era than two U.S. congressmen trotting through Red Square, past Lenin’s Tomb and the Kremlin, without clearance from a party apparatchik?

As we circled in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral for our return, a spectral figure emerged in the distant mist. If someone had said the hunched man in the overcoat was Karla, the ethereal cold-blooded Soviet spymaster in John Le Carré’s novels, you wouldn’t have gotten an argument from me.

It turned out to be not Karla but Cheney, the second-highest ranking Republican in the U.S. House, the senior Republican on the trip, George Bush Sr.’s soon-to-be secretary of defense — and, ultimately, the real-life American version of the funereal Karla.

Steam rising from our sweat suits, Dicks and I were anxious to share our exuberant moment with Cheney. “Imagine, Dick!” Norm exclaimed. “Here we are, standing in the middle of Red Square. What does it make you think?”

Cheney gave a thin smile and replied, “Just that I’m standing on Ground Zero.”

I knew Cheney for ten years as a fellow congressman and for four years when he was defense secretary and I, a member the House Defense Appropriations Committee.

When people ask me to describe Cheney, I say, “morbid.”

This is a man who believes in war (despite — perhaps because — he’s never been in one), feels no moral qualms about making the U.S. an attack-first nation, and subscribed to the nuclear doctrine perfected by Reagan’s defense secretary, Casper Weinberger: “1) to fight a protracted nuclear war; 2) to fight it on a global basis and, 3) to prevail” [emphases added].

Today the war believer — immersed in almost every Bush White House initiative, major and minor — is leading a highly veiled reorganization of U.S. military priorities, downgrading al Qaeda and upgrading nuclear-minded Iran.

Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Seymour Hersh reports that the policy “redirection” rests on the calculation that Iran is, or will become, the more potent enemy of the two. It is also based on the possibility that Tehran will fill the power vacuum created by the near total collapse of Iraqi society — and that Iraq’s predominate Shiite population will align itself with Tehran in building a de facto Greater Shiite Iran. (This is exactly the outcome of the US invasion that many independent analysts predicted, to Cheney’s scorn.)

Influenced by the vice president, Hersh reports, the Bush Administration has infiltrated U.S. Special Forces into Iran to gather intelligence on bombing targets for the four aircraft carrier strike groups poised in the Mediterranean Sea.

I don’t know if Cheney has stood in the Grand Bazaar in central Tehran.

But I know Dick, and I’m sure he has thought of his own name for it.. ++

Third US Super Carrier Task Force Heads To Gulf
DEBKAfile, Rense
6-22-7

According to DEBKAfile’s military sources, the US naval build-up off the shores of Iran marks rising military tensions in the region, accentuated by last week’s Hamas victory which has endowed Iran with a military foothold on Israel’s southwestern border.

The USS Enterprise CVN 65-Big E Strike Group, the US Navy’s largest air carrier, will join the USS Stennis and the USS Nimitz carriers, building up the largest sea, air, marine concentration the United States has ever deployed opposite Iran. This goes towards making good on the assurances of four carriers US Vice President Dick Cheney offered the Gulf and Middle East nations during his May tour of the region.

The “Big E” leads a strike group consisting of the guided-missile destroyers USS Arleigh Burke DDG 51, USS Stout DDG 55, Forrest Sherman DDG 98 and USS James E. Williams DDG 95, as well as the guided missile cruiser USS Gettysburg CG 64, the SS Philadelphia SSN 690 nuclear submarine and the USNS Supply T-AOE 6.

On its decks are the Carrier Air Wing CVW 1, whose pilots fought combat missions in the Gulf and Arabian Sea during 2006. The Air Wing is made up of F/Q-18 Super Hornet strike craft, the Sidewinders Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-86, the 251st Marine Fighter Attack Squadron MFA, and the Electronic Attack Squadron VAQ 137.

The 32nd Sea Control Squadron VS consists of S-3B Vikings. The Airborne Early Warning Squadron VAQ 3 flies E-2C Hawkeye craft. The Fleet Logistics Support Squadron VRC is based on C-2A Greyhounds.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report Washington is considering deploying the fourth US carrier for the region in the Red Sea opposite Saudi Arabian western coast to secure the three US carriers in the Gulf from the rear as well as the Gulf of Aqaba and Suez Canal. ++

Report: IAF preparing for Iran strike
Jerusalem Post
Jun. 22, 2007

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) has been training on long-range flights, including refueling in mid-flight, in preparation for potential strikes against Iranian nuclear targets.

The training program has been taking place for some time but has only been released for publication Friday, the Ma’ariv daily reported.

Intelligence assessments received by the defense establishment concur that once Iran passes the point of no return in its nuclear efforts, the entire Middle East will enter a frantic nuclear armament race. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are expected to take the lead should such a scenario become reality.

At the end of 2007 the US and Israel are expected to hold a joint assessment to ascertain the influence of economic sanctions against Iran.

A new package of upgraded sanctions prepared jointly by Israel and the US, includes exerting pressure on European governments to cancel US $22 billion in loan guarantees given annually to European companies trading with Iran.

The new package also includes sanctions against banks working with Iran, non-renewal of oil infrastructure in Iran and a long series of economic actions that are meant to seriously hurt the Iranian economy.

Following the end-of-year assessment, Washington will decide how to move forward in the struggle against Iran’s nuclear race.

Members of the international community - the US and Israel leading - are convinced that Iran’s race to enrich uranium is aimed at producing nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic, on its side, insists it is looking for energy sources that would be an alternative to fossil fuels.

Iran has so far remained defiant in face of the demands voiced by the international community that it make its nuclear program transparent to UN-mandated monitoring. ++

Cheney, master of stealth, readies himself for the final act of ‘imperial’ vice-presidency
Leonard Doyle in Washington, The Independent UK
29 June 2007

Operating in the shadows, where he can best achieve his deeply conservative aims, Dick Cheney enjoys the total confidence of President George Bush and is sometimes described as the “Imperial” Vice-President.

Towards the end of every re-elected US President’s second term, the opposition in Congress always smells the opportunity to assert itself. This time the target is Dick Cheney and subpoenas are raining down on his head from the Senate for the release of documents that could implicate him in illegal acts. His record for outflanking his enemies is such that there is little cause for optimism among his opponents who would have him impeached.

Whether giving a green light for the US to torture suspects to the point of “organ failure… or even death”, to rolling back environmental measures, or clearing the way for the invasion of Iraq, Cheney’s fingerprints are all over the most controversial aspects of the Bush years.

After more than six years of his rule, the US is waking up to the reality that it has been a Cheney-Bush affair in all but name and despite being written off on numerous occasions, the Vice-President’s ability to influence events remains unrivalled. Although he is approaching the final months of his career and will never run for office again, more surprises may be in store as he seeks to complete his agenda.

Cheney will have his heart pacemaker installed next month and even with mortality knocking on the door, there is every possibility he will engineer yet another foreign policy surprise, possibly against Iran.

Many have made the mistake of underestimating the office of the vice-president, which Franklin Roosevelt’s vice-president John Garner famously said was “not worth a bucket of warm piss”. Al Gore may have had similar thoughts as he operated in the shadow of Bill and Hillary Clinton for eight long years. Other vice-presidents, such as Dan Quayle, remained a laughing stock through their tenure.

Not Dick Cheney. Using a combination of stealth and extreme aggression to achieve his aims, he is increasingly recognised in as a man of near-unrivaled power. A four-part forensic investigation in The Washington Post this week has provided fresh details of the Vice-President’s elaborate network which he uses to control the presidency.

Three days after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, it was Cheney, rather than Bush who identified that, from Washington’s perspective, the rules of the game had now changed. In a rare appearance on Meet the Press, Cheney explained that the war on terrorism meant: “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.” As the first suspected terrorists had reached the US prison at Guantanamo Bay it was Cheney who shattered the limits on torturing prisoners. Without bothering to inform the then Secretary of State Colin Powell, Cheney appeared in the Oval Office with an executive order that would enable the US to keep suspects in detention indefinitely without rights.

“What the hell just happened?” Powell exploded. Condoleezza Rice was reported to be “incensed”. But as the former Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal commented in Salon.com yesterday: “Bush never bothered to ask Cheney about their opinions on the executive order or to call them; nor did he seem to care.”

Cheney’s influence seems also to have been under-appreciated by Tony Blair in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Sir Christopher Meyer, the former UK Ambassador to Washington, pointed out in his memoir, DC Confidential, that Blair overlooked Cheney’s ability to force Bush’s hand on the timing and conduct of the war. It was the “dryly humorous” Cheney, not Powell and Rice, that Blair needed to influence on the war.

It is the fresh details of Cheney’s secretive and loyal coterie of officials at work that provides the most telling insight into how he pulls the strings of the federal government.

The Post reveals that he has a “man-sized” safe in his office to keep the ordinary working papers out of reach of the National Archives and Records as provided by federal law. When the Archives demanded access to the papers, he tried to abolish the agency for daring to seek access to his documents.

The biggest charge against Cheney is that he has transformed the executive office into one of unlimited and unaccountable power. “Cheney has viewed recent American history as a struggle between the imperial presidency necessary in a brutish world and the naïve, undependable and in some cases disloyal constraints of Congress,” said Mr Blumenthal.

Most of all Cheney seems to ignore public opinion as he seeks to remake the US way of doing business at home and abroad. As he told Fox News last month: “We didn’t get elected to be popular. We didn’t get elected to worry about the fate of the Republican Party.”

What next? His opponents now wonder in the sunset months of the Cheney-Bush Presidency. ++

Iran: The Next War?
Glenn Greenwald, HuffPo
June 24, 2007

The following is an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald’s new book, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, to be released by Crown Publishing this Tuesday. The book is available now at Amazon.

Reuters, February 23, 2007:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Friday Iran should not show weakness over its nuclear program, a day after Tehran ignored a United Nations deadline to stop nuclear work which the West says could be used for making bombs. “If we show weakness in front of the enemy the expectations will increase but if we stand against them, because of this resistance, they will retreat.”

New York Times, on former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s farewell speech to the Pentagon, December 15, 2006:

“A conclusion by our enemies that the United States lacks the will or the resolve to carry out missions that demand sacrifice and demand patience is every bit as dangerous as an imbalance of conventional military power,” Mr. Rumsfeld said in a buoyant but sometimes emotional speech.

The simplistic and moralistic Bush mind-set — by which even the most vexing problems and complex conflicts are reduced to a contest of “strength” in the face of Evil — can perhaps be seen most clearly in the president’s treatment of Iran. Throughout 2006, the president’s Iran policy became mindlessly antagonistic, and was reduced eventually to the point where it was shaped by a handful of absolutist and moralistic premises which bordered on the cartoonish. Bush’s perspective amounts to this:

Iran is governed by Evil leaders. They are the moral and practical equivalent of Hitler’s Nazis. They are intent on regional, perhaps even world, domination. They are so insane and so Evil that they will attack other countries with nuclear weapons even if it means that they would then be annihilated. Particularly if they acquire nuclear weapons, they would pose a grave, imminent, and undeterrable threat to the United States. Their leaders do not fear death, and in fact crave it as a result of their religious extremism. They cannot be negotiated with because they are both Evil and deranged. The only feasible course of action with Iran is to treat it as a Nazi-like enemy, refuse to negotiate, and stop it by any means necessary, which — due to its leaders’ inability to be reasoned with — inevitably requires “regime change,” by military confrontation if necessary.

With those premises bolted into place, the Bush administration has transformed what was — especially after the 9/11 attacks — a rapidly improving and cooperative relationship with the Iranians into a bellicose chest-beating exercise whereby the likelihood of military confrontation of some sort increases every day. The two-dimensional Good vs. Evil framework that the president has applied to a complex and diverse Iran leaves virtually no other alternative.

Most disturbing, there is a great potential for military confrontation between Iran and the United States even if the president does not actively choose to attack. The proximity of Iran to Iraq, and the nature of the president’s rhetoric make an unintentional war — one that is sparked by miscalculation or misperception — increasingly likely.

In December 2006, media reports of increasing U.S. military activity in the Persian Gulf aimed at Iran began to emerge. On December 21, the New York Times confirmed that “the United States and Britain will begin moving additional warships and strike aircraft into the Persian Gulf region in a display of military resolve toward Iran.” The buildup includes “a second aircraft carrier and its supporting ships to be stationed within quick sailing distance of Iran by early next year.”

There is no doubt that these moves were intended to signal to the Iranians (as well as to what the Times describes as “Washington’s allies in the region who are concerned about Iran’s intentions”) that we are capable of an offensive military strike against Iran:

One purpose of the deployment, they said, is to make clear that the focus on ground troops in Iraq has not made it impossible for the United States and its allies to maintain a military watch on Iran.

Throughout 2006, it was unclear whether the president’s increasingly antagonistic rhetoric towards Iran was merely a political ploy to satiate his warmongering political base or whether, notwithstanding our incapacitating occupation of Iraq, the president himself really believed that war with Iran might be inevitable.

But the 2006 midterm elections did not put an end to the president’s militarism towards the Iranians. Quite the contrary, once the elections were over — and even with a clear anti-war message delivered by voters — the president began not only sending signals that he would escalate America’s military commitment to the war in Iraq but also intensify our hostile posture towards the Iranians.
* * *

Prohibited Debates

Just as all of the cartoonish demonization of the evil Saddam precluded a meaningful national debate about the consequences of invading Iraq, so, too, is the president’s embrace of the same caricature of the Iranians precluding meaningful debate about our policy towards Iran. Complex questions that the U.S. must resolve regarding our overall Middle East policy are urgent and pressing. Yet, in a virtual repeat of the debate-stifling war march into Iraq, arguments which treat these matters as nothing more complex than League of Justice cartoons — in which the Good heroes must and will defeat the Evil villains — dominates discourse, ensuring that no meaningful debate occurs.

The fundamental problem is that as a nation we do not actually debate the real issues because they are too politically radioactive, and because the simplistic appeals to Victory over Evil obscure, by design, the genuine limits on American power and the drain these conflicts are placing on finite American resources. The real issue is whether the U.S. wants to maintain its presence and controlling influence in the Middle East and, if so, (a) why does the U.S. want to do that?, and (b) what Americans are willing to sacrifice to preserve that dominance.

But Americans during the Bush presidency have had no significant, constructive discussion of whether the U.S. has any real interests in continuing to exert dominance in the Middle East, primarily because doing so requires a debate about the role of oil and our commitment to Israel, both of which are strictly off limits, as the president himself told us in a January, 2006 speech:

It may be the case that the U.S. should seek to preserve its influence in the Middle East. Perhaps we want to control oil resources or assume primary responsibility for ensuring a steady and orderly world oil market. Or perhaps we want to commit ourselves to defending Israel as the only real outpost of Middle Eastern democracy and/or an ally of one degree or another in protecting our vital strategic interests, if any, in that region.

There are coherent (if not persuasive) arguments, pro and con, for all of those positions, but these issues have been embargoed by social and political orthodoxy, and no examination of them is allowed (if one wants to continue to be heard in the mainstream). So we dance around the real questions and are stuck with superficial and contrived “debates” about what we are actually doing — about all the new Hitlers and the “Evil” we must confront and our need to be Churchill instead of Chamberlain — all of which obscures our choices, our limits and basic reality.

If preserving our dominance of the Middle East is a goal we want to prioritize, then we would need to decide what sacrifices we are willing to bear in order to reach it. We must determine whether and how we will massively expand our military, the increase in indiscriminate force we are willing to accept, and how we are going to pay for our imperial missions. Because as long as we are committed to dominating that region, we are going to be engaged in a long and likely endless series of brutal wars against religious fanatics and various nationalists who simply do not want us there and are willing to fight to the death — making all sorts of sacrifices themselves — to prevent us from dominating their countries.

Yet we lack the willingness — and perhaps the ability — to make the sacrifices necessary to maintain imperial dominion over that region. The president has literally pretended that this is not the case by insisting on our divine entitlement to magical victory over Evil, and depicting those who claim otherwise as people who hate the troops and do not want to win.

The damage done to the United States by the Bush administration over the last six years is truly severe. It is fundamental damage, and it requires much, much more than some tinkering around the edges. America urgently needs to debate and re-examine the core premises of our foreign policy and our role in the world. That, in turn, requires a willingness to transcend the taboos and most sacred orthodoxies and to dispense with the Manichean delusions that have substituted for rational debate.
* * *

The war advocates who unquestionably still have the president’s ear sought to transform the debate (prompted by the ISG Report) over whether we should negotiate with Iran into an argument that Iran is our real enemy. And they believe that Iran is our Enemy not only in Iraq, but generally, and that Iran should therefore be attacked, not negotiated with. Dismissing out of hand these wild-eyed, war-loving elements who are wholly detached from reality is tempting, but they continue to occupy places of high influence with the president (both inside and outside of the White House).

Worse, there are convincing signs that the president is one of them, i.e., that he now irreversibly shares their worldview that war with Islamic Extremism requires a progressive series of wars with various states, the next of which is Iran. Beyond doubt, if the president is convinced that some sort of military action is necessary or even warranted, nothing — not public opinion nor his supposed lame duck status nor the sheer insanity of the proposal — is going to stop him.

Few things have been as disturbing as the president’s now implacable belief - which he has been decreeing with increased frequency — that he is the modern-day Harry Truman, fighting a necessary war even in the face of widespread opposition from weak and blind people in his own country and around the world, but that he is destined to be vindicated by history. And, as he sees it, the more he fights against anti-war headwinds and the bolder he is in the risks he takes, the greater his vindication will be.

By 2007, it was alarmingly clear that geopolitical considerations do not determine what the U.S. will do vis-a-vis Iran. The president’s personality does.

And even if the president and/or his top advisors are less than clear about their intent with regard to Iran, it may not matter. Military build-ups of this sort, plainly aimed at one country in particular, can easily produce miscalculations or lead to unintended provocations. That danger is heightened incalculably when one of the parites to the increasing tensions has 150,000 troops occupying a country that borders the other one.

There are myriad constitutional questions about the type of Congressional authorization which would be required in order for the president to act militarily against Iran. But those would almost certainly be swept aside — as most constitutional dilemmas have been — by an administration that would claim that it already has such authorization either “inherently” or as a result of Iran’s involvement in our war in Iraq. If the president were really intent on war with Iran, it is very difficult to envision Congressional Democrats, or really anything else, stopping him.

When the president declared in early 2002 that Iran was “Evil,” it all but sealed the fate of U.S.-Iranian relations for the duration of his presidency. The president’s Manichean prison precludes him from following any course other than unmitigated belligerence once he embraces that moralistic premise, and indeed, nothing — not a deeply unpopular war in Iraq, nor the stinging repudiation of his policies by the American voters, nor the Baker-Hamilton Commission — has convinced him to change course even slightly with regard to Iran. He placed himself, or allowed himself to be placed, inside the suffocating confines of this Manichean prison, and despite the grave dangers and great harm it has engendered, he appears to have no ability, and worse, no incentive, to find an alternative for the last two years of his presidency. ++

Setting the Stage for the Next War
Scott Horton, No Comment at Harpers Magazine
June 23, 2007

If you’re not concerned about the prospects for another war in the Middle East in the near future, consider that you may be a sleepwalker. There is every reason to be concerned. The prospects are numerous. In the Gaza Strip and the West Bank a brutal conflict has erupted between forces which reflect two different generations of Palestinian radicalism. In Lebanon, foreign intrigue and assassinations continue, sucking Syria, the United States and Israel into one of the region’s oldest communitarian conflicts. The prospects for another summer war in Lebanon, likely involving one or more foreign participants, have to be seen as excellent. Syria itself is in the crosshairs in Washington. Olmert’s Government in Israel, still licking its wounds from last summer’s expeditionary catastrophe, wants to take the temperature down a few degrees and start a dialogue with the Syrians – but this initiative has given the last diehard neocons in Washington a conniption. Then of course we have Iraq, where Washington’s “surge” operations continue without conclusive result as a September deadline draws closer.

And yet none of these conflicts is the coming war that I see looming on the horizon. The coming war pits the United States against Iran. For the dead-ender neoconservatives (and indeed, neoconservatives are by their psychology just the sort of people who make excellent dead-enders), the solution to the current dilemma – a catastrophic failure in Iraq, badly miscast plans in Lebanon, an increasingly angry American electorate – is simple: we need a new war. Nothing focuses the mind and silences the opposition quite like a good little war, they believe. And while times may be difficult for the neocons generally, not to worry – they still have the key man. One man is the “decider” on questions respecting Iran. His name is Dick Cheney. And Mr. Cheney has already reached some key conclusions:

Sanctions are worthless – why after all, when I ran Halliburton, we could always find ways to get around them and have profitable dealings with Iran.

Iran is moving ahead with its plans to emerge as a nuclear weapons policy, is running far ahead of schedule, and will certainly achieve its objectives far ahead of the timeline that those numbskulls over at the National Intelligence Council have worked up

The only solution we can count on is a military solution

Because of the fickleness of the American electorate, the next government will not have the resolve and will to use military force that are the great strength of America under Bush, which counsels in favor of action now

The current hostage crisis (involving five Americans held by Tehran and five Iranians held by Washington) will furnish a perfectly decent causus bellum if managed properly, fed and fanned.

This is not, of course, the realist Cheney of the Bush 41 administration speaking. It’s the Cheney that Brent Scowcroft and numerous others no longer recognize. The post-heart attack, post-microstroke Dick Cheney. The Cheney who’s more than slightly crazy. The Cheney who will make any argument, no matter how absurd, to get where he wants to be. (Witness his claim revealed in the current news cycle, that the vice president is not a part of the Executive Branch – not, at least, for purposes of compliance with oversight about the maintenance and use of classified materials). And the Dick Cheney who is the trusted guide for George W. Bush in all those complicated foreign policy and national security issues that the dauphin-president never really could take the time away from mountain-biking to master.

So let us review how the stage is being set now for a war against Iran. We can say, of course, that war preparations are the essence of every sound military plan – that they should not be viewed as any sort of guaranty. A show of strength may avert war, as one of my Air Force friends correctly says. And to that I can only quote one of my best military analyst friends, who last night had one single word to cover all this: the word was “likely.” “I have come to the conclusion that a major military conflict between the United States and Iran is now likely,” he said. So what, exactly, does “likely” look like?

You might say that the soundest approach in feeling the path to any conflict is simple: “Watch what we do, and not what we say.” So what are the U.S. and the Iranians doing that makes a conflict seem “likely”?

Military Movements. The U.S. deployment of forces into striking range of Iran is now staggering, and largely unremarked upon. America has two carrier strike groups, the USS Nimitz and the USS Stennis, already in the Persian Gulf. Within a day, they will be joined by a third carrier strike group, the USS Enterprise. And next week a fourth strike group, the USS Truman will arrive in the Red Sea, bringing itself into range to support Iran-focal operations. So where does that put us? Four aircraft carriers, 12-16 destroyers, 4-8 submarines, 4-8 AEGIS cruisers, and over 200 strike aircraft. The world has not witnessed such a mustering of naval might since… the invasion of Iraq. And that’s just the naval side of things (though it does help explain the logic behind putting an admiral in charge of CENTCOM). The data on land force movements is harder to secure or track. But all around Iran, preparations have been put in place, including at the “lilypads” that Rumsfeld carefully secured and developed – on Azerbaijan’s Absheron peninsula; outside of Mary, Turkmenistan and in the Turkmen desert; in the Kyrgyz Republic; in Afghanistan; on islands in the Persian Gulf and in Pakistan. One of the distinctive tactical advantages that America will have in this conflict will be the ability to attack Iran from every direction.

Psychological Preparation. The American public must be prepared to support the war. It must understand the nature of the threat from Iran as existential. This will be pursued through a media psy-ops campaign along the same lines as used in the run up to the Iraq war. The stress will be on Iran’s nuclear program and the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons being used against the United States. Delivery systems are of course a serious problem with this analysis, but don’t expect stories to focus on that. Expect the story to emerge first among the likely suspects. In fact, take the time to pick up and read the current issue of Commentary. I have. It contains a media roadmap. Or just click on this link to watch Norman Podhoretz make the essence of the case for bombing Iran that he states in more detail in Commentary. But stay tuned to Fox News, the Weekly Standard, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal for the complete psy-ops feed.

The Hostage Crisis. Don’t expect either Washington or Tehran to take any meaningful steps to resolve this crisis. To the contrary: expect the war-parties in each capital to seize upon the five Iranians seized in Arbil and the Americans seized in Tehran as a basis to fan hatred and prepare the public for war. We know from Robin Wright’s reporting at the Washington Post that Condoleezza Rice attempted to defuse the situation by moving ahead on a release of the prisoners in U.S. custody, and that Cheney and Addington checked this move. “There can be no linkage,” they say – both the mullahs in Tehran and the Cheney clique in Washington. Of course not. They will demonize their respective hostages as spies and a threat to their national security. They will claim the hostages are part of a plot against them. Hostages form such a convenient casus belli—they’ve served that role for centuries.

Iran’s Nuclear Program. The suggestion that Iran’s nuclear program constitutes a menace is true. It needs to be grappled with carefully, and studied with detachment. I have a lot of confidence in the ability of American intelligence analysts to do that – if they are freed from the hysteria and persecution of Dick Cheney and his cabal. Yesterday, Iran’s Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi claimed that his country has produced 100 kg of low enriched uranium (LEU) and has 3,000 centrifuges operational. If Pourmohammadi’s past conduct is any guide, these claims are consciously inflated, but not baseless. More likely Iran is on target to achieve what he had claimed sometime before the end of the summer, but isn’t there yet. What does this mean? In practical terms, you would need 800 kg of LEU for a single bomb. This would put Iran on track to have that bomb sometime in 2008, which is well ahead of prior U.S. intelligence estimates.

Given the hyperbole surrounding this issue, however, a good measure of caution is appropriate. While it would be extremely foolish to dismiss the threat potential or its proximity, there is no basis to point to a meaningful threat in the current year – or even before the end of Bush’s term of office. Sober analysis will suggest this is something that requires an aggressive diplomatic approach, coordination with allies and earnest dialogue with Russia. All things that the Bush Administration has done so masterfully in the past.

The Regional Menace. The United States will portray Iran as a force for evil throughout the Middle East and beyond. The core will be claims that Iranian bombs and weapons are wounding and killing American soldiers in Iraq. This is a highly emotive and largely disingenuous argument (indeed, you could say that Russian bombs and weapons play a big role, for instance, and a large part of the explosives used were, as the New York Times documented, seized from stockpiles the U.S. left unguarded in the early months of the occupation). Iran will also be portrayed as the force behind Hizbollah in Lebanon and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

There is certainly some basis for the first claim, but the second is a fraud. Analysts need to consider these accusations, of course, but in light of the clearly articulated objectives of the war-party, they need to be treated with skepticism. And, of course, inside of Iran and throughout the Middle East, Iran will portray the United States as the region’s greatest threat. Iran will point to U.S. military cooperation with Israel as the core of American intervention in the region, and it will point to the tens of thousands of civilian deaths that resulted from a U.S. invasion of Iraq on a now completely disproven pretext. Iran will use the fact of good relations between the U.S. and its Middle Eastern allies as a means of destabilizing those nations. And these tactics are all likely to be very effective. In fact, Iran is emerging as a regional hegemon, and it has been empowered in these aspirations by the grossly inept conduct of Dick Cheney and his helpers.

Diplomatic Process. Today, Iran’s head nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani will meet with the European Union’s foreign policy commissioner Javier Solana. No one at this point is pinning any hopes for progress on this meeting. Iran will not offer any meaningful concessions on its nuclear program, and that is, at this point, all that really matters. This will set the stage for a third U.N. Security Council sanctions resolution sometime in August. The third resolution could have considerably more “teeth” to it, asset freezes against Iranian banks, firms and individuals, a formal travel ban, and possibly a ban on government export guarantees. An increasingly tightening sanctions environment could have real consequences for Iran economically, and for its nuclear program. The problem for this approach is, quite frankly, Dick Cheney and his language. He has done more to undermine the diplomatic approach than any single person in world history. As a result of his imprudent rhetoric, the key powers that need to be enlisted in this effort – such as Russia – are intensely skeptical of America’s intentions with respect to Iran.

Still, this is not to say that war is certain. It could still be averted. President Ahmadinejad could decide to resign and pursue a life of quiet introspection. Dick Cheney could decide that pressing health concerns necessitate his retirement from politics and retreat to his plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, for instance. But at the moment, these two men are driving the fate of tens of millions of human beings in the direction of a horrendous conflagration. In the world greatest democracy, there seems no resolve to put a stop to it. And who in Iran still hears the words of that greatest poet of the Farsi (or any other) language, Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī:

Hallaj

Bush Directive for a “Catastrophic Emergency” in America: Building a Justification for Waging War on Iran?
Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, IFCH
06/25/07

The US media consensus is that “the United States faces its greatest threat of a terrorist assault since the September 11 attacks” (USA Today, 12 February 2006) The American Homeland is threatened by ” Islamic terrorists”, allegedly supported by Tehran and Damascus.

America is under attack” by an illusive “outside enemy”.

Concepts are turned upside down. War becomes Peace. “Offense” becomes a legitimate means of “self-defense”.

In the words of President Bush:

The intent is to seek a pretext to wage a preemptive war.

A “terrorist attack on America” could be used to justify, in the eyes of an increasingly credulous public opinion, on “humanitarian grounds”, the launching of a major theater war directed against Iran and Syria.

Allegedly supported by Iran, the terrorists are said to possess nuclear capabilities. They are supposedly planning to explode “radiological dispersion devices” (RDD) or “dirty bombs” in densely populated urban areas in the US. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell had already forewarned in 2003 that, “It would be easy for terrorists to cook up radioactive ‘dirty’ bombs to explode inside the U.S. … How likely it is, I can’t say…” (10 February 2003).

The sheer absurdity that Al Qaeda might have advanced capabilities to wage a nuclear attack on America is, nonetheless, pervasive in US media reports. Moreover, numerous drills and exercises, simulating a terrorist attack using nuclear devices, have been conducted in recent years, creating the illusion that “the threat is real”:

History

Consistently since 911, the Bush administration has reminded Americans of the danger of a “Second 9/11″:

“You ask, ‘Is it serious?’ Yes, you bet your life. People don’t do that unless it’s a serious situation.”
(Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, December 2003)

“… Credible reporting indicates that Al Qaeda is moving forward with its plans to carry out a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process…
(Former DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, 8 July 2004)

“The enemy that struck on 9/11 is weakened and fractured yet it is still lethal and planning to hit us again.”
(Vice President Dick Cheney, 7 January 2006)

“We are still a nation at risk. Part of our strategy, of course, is to stay on the offense against terrorists who would do us harm. In other words, it is important to defeat them overseas so we never have to face them here. Nevertheless, we recognize that we’ve got to be fully prepared here at the homeland.”
(President George W. Bush February 8, 2006)

“Our main enemy is al Qaeda and its affiliates. Their allies choose their victims indiscriminately. They murder the innocent to advance a focused and clear ideology. They seek to establish a radical Islamic caliphate, so they can impose a brutal new order on unwilling people, much as Nazis and communists sought to do in the last century. This enemy will accept no compromise with the civilized world ….
(President George W. Bush, CENTCOM Coalition Conference, May 1, 2007)

We’re fighting a war on terror because the enemy attacked us first, and hit us hard. … Al Qaeda’s leadership has said they have the right to “kill four million Americans,… For nearly six years now, the United States has been able to defeat their attempts to attack us here at home. Nobody can guarantee that we won’t be hit again. …
(Vice President Dick Cheney, United States Military Academy Commencement, West Point, New York, May 26, 2007)

In the immediate wake of the invasion of Iraq (April 2003), various national security procedures were put in place which focused on the eventuality of a “Second 911″. These initiatives in the area of Homeland Security outlined the precise circumstances under which martial law could be declared in the case of a second major terrorist attack on America.

Under martial law, the military would take over several functions of civilian government including justice and law enforcement.

A terrorist attack on American soil of the size and nature of September 11, would lead —according to former CENTCOM Commander, General Tommy Franks– to the downfall of democracy in America. In an interview in December 2003, which was barely mentioned in the US media, General Franks outlined a scenario, which would result in the suspension of the Constitution and the installation of military rule in America:

Franks was obliquely alluding to a “Second 9/11″ terrorist attack, which could be used to galvanize US public opinion in support of a military government and police state.

The “terrorist massive casualty-producing event” was presented by General Franks as a crucial political turning point. The resulting crisis and social turmoil resulting from the civilian casualties, are intended to facilitate a major shift in US political, social and institutional structures, leading to the suspension of constitutional government.

It is important to understand that General Franks was not giving a personal opinion on the role of a “massive casuality producing event” in National Security doctirne. His statement very much reflects the dominant viewpoint both in the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security both on the concept of massive casualty producing event as well as how events might unfold in the case of a “Catastrophic Emergency”.

The statement comes from a man who has been actively involved in military and intelligence planning at the highest levels. In other words, the “militarisation of our country” is an ongoing operational assumption. It is part of the broader “Washington consensus”. It identifies the Bush administration’s “roadmap” of war and Homeland defense.

The “Global War on Terrorism” which constitutes the cornerstone of Bush’s National Security doctrine, provides the required justification for repealing the Rule of Law, ultimately with a view to “preserving civil liberties.”

US Northern Command

The Administration’s “Catastrophic Emergency” procedures are intimately related to military planning at the level of the Pentagon. In this regard, the formation of US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) in April 2002 (based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado) constitutes an important landmark in the evolving relationship between the Military and Homeland Security.

US Northern Command was created as a new command structure with the explicit mandate to defend the Homeland against foreign terrorists.

This mandate is defined in the Pentagon’s “Joint Doctrine for Homeland Security (JP-26)”. Even in the case where the “outside enemy” is fabricated (and this is known at the highest levels of the military-intelligence apparatus), a military coup d’Etat characterized by detailed command military/ security provisions, would become operational almost immediately.

NORTHCOM’s “Command Mission” encompasses a number of “non-military functions” including “crisis management” and “domestic civil support”. Under Northcom jurisdiction, the latter imply a process of “military support to federal, state and local authorities in the event of a terror attack.”

NORTHCOM has a mandate to “defend the homeland” against an illusive “outside enemy” (Al Qaeda), which is said to be threatening the security of America. According to Frank Morales, “the scenario of a military take-over of America is unfolding.” And Northern Command is the core military entity in this takeover and militarization of civilian institutions.

Dick Cheney’s “Contingency Plan”

Following the creation of NORTHCOM in 2002, “Defense of the Homeland” functions -including domestic counter-terrorism and national emergency procedures– have become increasingly integrated into the broader process of military planning by the Pentagon .

This integration should be understood as part of the Pentagon’s preemptive war doctrine, where a presumed or planned attack on the Homeland by “Islamic terrorists” becomes a justification for waging an “offensive” (defined as defensive) war in the Middle East.

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were used to wage war on Afghanistan, using the pretext (without a shred of evidence) that the Afghan Taliban government was a “State sponsor” of the 9/11 attacks.

In August 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney is reported to have instructed USSTRATCOM, based at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, to draw up a “Contingency Plan”, “to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States”. (Philip Giraldi, Attack on Iran: Pre-emptive Nuclear War, The American Conservative, 2 August 2005)

Dick Cheney’s “Contingency Plan” was predicated on the preemptive war doctrine. Implied in the “Contingency Plan” was the presumption that Iran would be behind the attacks.

The Vice president’s instructions were given to USSTRATCOM, which is in charge of the central planning and coordination of major overseas theater wars, rather than to NORTHCOM, whose mandate consists in defending the North American Homeland against terrorist attacks. .

Cheney’s “Contingency Plan” under USSTRATCOM jurisdiction, would draw on the possibility of a “Second 9/11″ attack to prepare for a major military operation directed against Iran, while pressure would also be exerted in the corridors of the United Nations on Tehran, in relation to its (non-existent) nuclear weapons program.

What is diabolical in this 2005 decision by the US Vice President is that the justification to wage war on Iran rests on Iran’s alleged involvement in a hypothetical terrorist attack on America, which has not yet occurred.

“Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections. (Ibid)

The Pentagon’s “Second 9/11″

In early 2006, (former) Secretary Don Rumsfeld approved a far-reaching military campaign plan to fight terrorism around the World, with a view to retaliating in the case of a second major terrorist attack on America. This Pentagon plan was, in essence, an extension of the Second 911 “Contingency Plan” agenda announced by Dick Cheney in 2005.

The Pentagon’s anti-terrorist plan was outlined in three secret documents, of which excerpts were leaked to the Washington Post.

These three documents consist of an overall “campaign plan” plus two “subordinate plans”. The second “subordinate plan” explicitly focuses on the possibility of “Second 9/11″ and how a second major attack on American soil might provide “an opportunity” to extend the US led war in the Middle East into new frontiers:

create both a justification and an opportunity that is lacking today

The presumption of this military document, is that a Second 911 attack “which is lacking today” would usefully create both a “justification and an opportunity” to wage war on “some known targets [Iran and Syria]“.

National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, NSPD-51/ HSPD 20

In May 2007, a major presidential National Security Directive is issued, (National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51/HSPD 20), NSPD 51 / HSPD 20 is a combined National Security Directive emanating from the White House and Homeland Security. It is tailor-made to fit the premises of both the Pentagon’s 2006 “Anti-terrorist Plan” as well Vice President Cheney’s 2005 “Contingency Plan”.

The directive establishes procedures for “Continuity of Government” (COG) in the case of a “Catastrophic Emergency”. The latter is defined in NSPD 51/HSPD 20 (henceforth referred to as NSPD 51), as “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 functions.”

“Continuity of Government,” or “COG,” is defined in NSPD 51 as “a coordinated effort within the Federal Government’s executive branch to ensure that National Essential Functions continue to be performed during a Catastrophic Emergency.”

NSPD 51 has barely been reported by the mainstream media. There was no press briefing by the White House or by DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, which would be the normal practice, given the significance and implications of NSPD 51. The text of NSPD /51 HSPD 20, announced by the White House is not even mentioned on the DHS’s website.

This Combined Directive NSPD /51 HSPD 20 grants unprecedented powers to the Presidency and the Department of Homeland Security, overriding the foundations of Constitutional government. NSPD 51 allows the sitting president to declare a “national emergency” without Congressional approval The adoption of NSPD 51 would lead to the de facto closing down of the Legislature and the militarization of justice and law enforcement:

NSPD 51 grants extraordinary Police State powers to the White House and Homeland Security (DHS), in the event of a “Catastrophic Emergency”. The Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counter terrorism (APHS/CT), who is slated to play a key role in the eventuality of Martial law, is a key White House adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend.

Foreign Policy Implications of NSPD 51: Role of the Vice President

While NSPD 51 has the appearances of a domestic national security decision, it is, nonetheless, an integral part of US foreign policy. It belongs to a longstanding military national security agenda. Were NSPD 51 to be invoked, Vice President Dick Cheney, who constitutes the real power behind the Executive, would essentially assume de facto dictatorial powers, circumventing both the US Congress and the Judiciary, while continuing to use President George W. Bush as a proxy figurehead.

NSPD 51, while bypassing the Constitution, nonetheless, envisages very precise procedures which guarantee the powers of Vice President Dick Cheney in relation to “Continuity of Goverment” under Martial Law:

In the case of a “Catastrophic Emergency”, NSPD 51 could potentially be used to justify the implementation of retaliatory military action against Iran in accordance with Dick Cheney’s 2005 “Contingency Plan”. If the “Catastrophic Emergency” were to be triggered by a terrorist attack, NSPD-51 could be invoked as “the justification and … opportunity … to retaliate against some known tar