The Chair-Herding Pictures

Winter Reading

2008-05-01T17:35:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, I haven’t written much for the past few months. But I have been reading.

Armed Madhouse, by Greg Palast. The elections, the hurricane, the war, No Child Left Behind, voter IDs and why the Republican presidential candidate in 2008 could have a six million vote edge right now, today.

“Caging lists” are used to target registered voters through first-class mailings. Those who don’t respond can be challenged at the voting booth. Sounds fair, right? John Doe isn’t at that address. Guess what, John Doe might not be at that address because he is in Iraq. He also stands a chance of challenge if he lives in a senior citizen center or a transient facility or within a certain zip code — meaning a black neighborhood.

Then there are the “felon” purges, when registered voters are struck from the rolls because their names appear in a list of felons. Sounds good, right? Felons can’t vote.

Oh, but in some states they can! And why not? If they have served their sentence, on what basis is their right to vote further denied? Even if one believes that felons shouldn’t be allowed to vote, can one justify purging someone like me from the rolls because of a list of felons from another state?

I have a very common name; there were four Jerry Smiths in my sixth grade class. Is there a bad Jerry Smith out there who shares some variation of my name? Is that why I can’t vote? If the issue is a Constitutional right, who has the burden of proof? Should I have to prove that I am not that other guy, or should the state be required to prove that I am?

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I’m not worried at all about being disenfranchised — I’m a middle-aged white man! My name doesn’t sound black or Latin or Muslim or Native American or foreign in any way.

Not to change the subject, but the Supreme Court recently upheld an Indiana law on voter identification. In my opinion, a specialized voter ID amounts to a poll tax, which I thought was un-Constitutional. But I digress. Armed Madhouse is a great book. Try to grin as you read.

No Logo, by Naomi Klein. The apotheosis of branding, first as a marketing strategy and then as a model corporate structure. The Nike corporation is a perfect example. Nike sells a vision of sport. Nike doesn’t make any shoes or shirts; those are produced in foreign factories were labor is cheap and human rights are cheaper. Hey, free market, right?

The branding battle continuously encroaches on the very notion of public space. Imagine one extreme of the public/private property-rights “spectrum,” that point along the continuum where every cubic foot of space is privately owned and controlled. In such a world, there is no public space. Now you understand the drive to privatize public assets.

The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler. What will the passing of “cheap” fossil fuel prices bring? How high must fuel costs rise before they impact the price of “cheap” products from China? How about “cheap” crops? How about “cheap” plastic bags?

(Kunstler and Palast have differing perspectives on “peak oil.” However one dates the doom, fossil fuels clearly represent a finite resource with significant externalized costs. Oil production will decline at some point, but “cheap energy” will decline long before that.)

Freedom Evolves, by Daniel C. Dennett. Consciousness, free will, morality.

Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, by Susan Blackmore. I was about half-way through Freedom Evolves when I put it down to read Blackmore’s very short introduction. Then I returned to Dennett’s book.

Bush v Gore 2000. The decision is available online. You know, I’m funny about details. The first thing I noticed was its full title. Gore is correctly identified as Albert Gore, Jr. But President-to-be Bush is incorrectly identified as George W. Bush. I thought everyone knew his daddy was also named George.

Through crooksandliars.com, I found a link to an excellent explanation of the ruling. It is clear, informative, even humorous — except for the fact that it’s true. The decision should resolve any questions you might have about the 2000 election, the 2004 election, or the 2008 election yet to come.

(Incidentally, in an interview on CBS, Justice Antonin Scalia declined to discuss the decision. “Get over it,” he said. “It’s so old by now.” In the same interview, he denied that torture constitutes cruel and unusual punishment because, he explained, torture isn’t punishment.)

Care for some π?

This question came up at a party: When mathematicians calculate pi, how do they do it? What are they dividing into what? I didn’t know, so I looked it up.

Of course, an ancient Greek did it first. Using a sexagesimal mathematical system (based on the number 60), Archimedes investigated pi by inscribing regular polyhedrons inside and outside a unit circle.* As the number of sides of such polyhedrons increases, their peripheries approach pi.
Many people have learned to approximate pi by dividing 22 by 7. The result is a repeating decimal greater than pi but close enough for ordinary purposes. A German mathematician named Ludolph van Ceulen honed the parameters of pi down to a region between 22 divided by 7 and 223 divided by 71. The first 35 digits of each approximation were carved on his tombstone.

More recent mathematicians have calculated pi down to a surrealistically long series of digits. Still, Archimedes’s achievement stands out.

Pi, or something very like it, in sexagesimal notation.

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* The number 60 has many factors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60. And of course, 6 times 60 equals 360 — the number of degrees in a circle.

It never ceases to amaze me how much the ancient Greeks figured out and how much the later European Christians systematically forgot. The Dark Ages were dark for a reason. The Greeks established that the world was round. The proof is simple. They knew the moon orbited the earth, and they arrived at good approximations of the relative sizes of the earth and the moon. All that knowledge was stamped out after Christians were no longer the oppressed but the oppressors.

The Trap

2007-11-26T00:47:00.000-08:00

Q: What do Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, the Central Intelligence Agency, Milton Friedman, game theory, the Cold War, R. D. Laing, Prozac, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Isaiah Berlin, Henry Kissinger, al Qaeda, Michael Ledeen, economic models of human interactions, and shock therapy have in common?

A: They are all part of a remarkable series of B.B.C. documentaries on social engineering by filmmaker Adam Curtis: The Century of the Self,* The Power of Nightmares, and The Trap. Curtis examines the evolving theories of human motivation as they have been applied by admen, politicians, and intelligence agencies over the last 80 years. The result is a broad and disturbing view of the beliefs behind modern social control mechanisms.

From Sigmund Freud to market theories to fundamentalism, notions held by humans about humans have grown ever more abstract and therefore ever more removed from human experience. Furthermore, widely held beliefs have a certain Pygmalion effect** whether or not they are true. Therefore, they present the risk of incestuous influence — the tendency of institutions to believe their own propaganda or to craft stories to promote narrow interests. Organizational principles in one sphere of human activity do not necessarily carry over into other realms. For example, game theory used by the U.S. and Russia to reduce the threat of nuclear war was based on the assumption that an opponent will always cheat. (If the goal was to avoid war, I’m not sure the Russians were our “opponents”; but that is a question for another time.) Curtis shows how market models of control based on a similar assumption — that people are entirely motivated by self-interest — lead to atomization of society and denial of community.***

So, as the world hurtles backward to 1984, take some time to watch Curtis’s films. After all, if both the “good guys” and the “bad guys” knowingly benefit from the same belief system, maybe it’s time to rethink the system.

The Century of the Self:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

The Power of Nightmares:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

The Trap is available at:

http://adamcurtistrap.blogspot.com/

and

http://www.goodreads.ca/adamcurtis/

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* See “Why Are We In Iraq,” The Chair-Herding Pictures, 3/21/2007
** In Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a prince of Cyprus and a sculptor. He fell in love with a statue of a woman he named Galatea. The goddess Aphrodite granted Pygmalion’s wish and brought the statue to life.
*** It also invites corruption. Consider Enron. Executives were rewarded for improving the company’s bottom line, but that did not lead to efficiency. It led to executives gaming the system to maximize personal profits. They made a killing by killing the company.
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Lies My TV Told Me

2007-11-21T21:45:00.000-08:00

A week or so ago, while I was watching WTTW in Chicago, the station ran a “teaser” — a preview of an upcoming show. Commentator John Callaway had interviewed Tim Weiner about Weiner’s new book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. But when I heard them talking about President John Kennedy, my heart sank. The anniversary of Kennedy’s murder was approaching. I realized that it was time once again for main-stream media to smear the Kennedys.

Weiner offered the ridiculous claim that we will probably never really know what happened to J.F.K. and denied that declassified files shed any new light on the assassination, thereby proving he hadn’t done any homework. Then he accused John and Robert Kennedy of using the C.I.A. to threaten or kill foreign leaders.

Callaway didn’t do any homework, either. He did not, for example, ask Weiner about C.I.A. officer Everette Howard Hunt, Jr.’s confession in the case. He did not ask about any of the Agency figures identified by Hunt, like Cord Meyer, Frank Sturgis, William Harvey, and David Atlee Phillips. Callaway did not ask about Phillips’s admission, nearly thirty years ago, that the so-called “Mexico City” trip made by the alleged assassin was a fabrication. Other officers or assets have confessed knowledge of or participation in the assassination, but Callaway didn’t ask about any of them.

The Central Intelligence Agency killed President John Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy. After extensive investigations, the Agency exonerated itself in each case and reporters have duly reiterated the C.I.A.’s findings for decades. So, if you missed Callaway’s interview, don’t worry. There will be more such exercises in news fiction next year, around Thanksgiving.

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Rapture Ready

2007-10-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

I didn’t do much writing over the summer, but I still tried to keep up with events. Here are four more items to ponder.

No End in Sight
And no end in the planning stages either. You can watch the trailer at:

http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/

I won’t try to summarize the entire film here, but I can give you something of its flavor. When U.S. occupying forces took no action to protect Iraqi museums, many irreplaceable treasures of antiquity were stolen. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld rather infamously explained it all away by saying that “stuff happens.” His indifference to the looting of a culture speaks volumes — in English or Arabic.

That indifference extends all the way down to security contractors muscling their way through Iraq. The film includes a video taken by “security contractors” through the back window of their car as they drove around Baghdad randomly shooting at cars behind them. Hey, it was fun! The shooters even added a rock music sound track.

Trashed
This is the story of garbage — the garbage we dump, the garbage we breathe, the garbage we eat, the garbage we pay for, the garbage we generate to process garbage, etc. Watch the trailer at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgtLjHEKlnE

As the saying goes: Out of sight, out of mind. That’s definitely true of trash. To see what you’re missing, go to

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7

and see the work of Chris Jordan. His images make the magnitude of our consumption crisis all too clear.

(Below: detail from Chris Jordan’s picture of 2,000,000 plastic bottles, the number used in the United States every five minutes.)

But of course, after the Second Coming, we won’t have to worry about trash, either in the form of plastic bottles or non-believers.

Rapture Ready
What god wants and who he wants to do it to are critical to the protection of Israel so it can be destroyed in Armageddon when Jesus returns — or something like that. Visit

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/rapture-ready-the-unauth_b_57826.html

and watch Max Blumenthal’s film about the conference of Christians United for Israel. Senator Rick Santorum was there, along with former Representative Tom Delay. Asked about the Second Coming, Delay replied, “I live for it. I hope it comes tomorrow.” Senator Joseph Lieberman called C.U.F.I. founder John Hagee a modern-day Moses. Apparently, the Christians United for Israel believe the modern day Pharaoh is in Iran. To them, the conclusion is obvious. To me, the conclusion is terrifying.

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Water, Water Everywhere

2007-10-15T20:55:00.000-07:00

I know I haven’t written much recently. I spent a lot of my summer painting instead. Generally speaking, painting is much more spiritually rewarding than reading the news. Nevertheless, I was still paying attention. Here is one of the topics that caught my eye.

Thirst
You think water is nature’s gift to life? Why do you hate capitalism so much? Learn more at:

http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2004/thirst/about.html

I haven’t seen Thirst, but the details online are provocative. I was reminded of another documentary, The Corporation, which touched on the issue of water rights. In 2000, Bolivia tried to privatize the water supply of its third largest city, Cochabamba, by selling the system to a consortium of foreign companies, including Bechtel in the U.S. The poor in Cochabamba, living on $2 a day, would have to pay one fourth of their income for water. The contract was so broadly worded that it effectively outlawed the collection of rain water for drinking. Proponents claimed such an interpretation of the law was unenforceable. Alas, the enforceability of a given law often depends on the number of police available, not the idiocy of the law. Riots ensued; some people died; and the government backed down.

Privatizing water is all the rage these days. Last July, I found this snippet of news (left) on Democracy Now!

In August, my older brother informed me of another news item involving water — the letters “PWS” which appear on labels of Aquafina, bottled water from Pepsi. PWS stands for Public Water Source. Aquafina is municipal water in convenient (?) plastic bottles with only a modest mark-up of 7000%.

Water is essential for life; but the number of people on earth continues to rise, and the amount of clean, fresh water continues to fall. Is water a right? Or is it just another commodity?

Invictus

2007-09-20T22:04:00.000-07:00

On April 19, 1995, the north face of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed. Five days later, the front page of Advertising Age carried an article titled “The End of Innocence” and listed other stories inside:

“Invisible enemy”: ...compares consumer reaction now and during the Persian Gulf War. Page 3
“America has gaping wound”: But the carnage in Oklahoma City will galvanize us. Page 18
“Loose Lips Sink Ships”: How about stirring public with World War II theme? Page 42
“This changes nothing”: Bob Garner says Americans will let their guard down again. Page 43

Timothy McVeigh was a decorated veteran of the Persian Gulf War, the latest version of which we are fighting today; and disclosures in 1995 about Pearl Harbor rendered the “stirring…World War II theme” suspect. In “Road to Paranoia” (New Yorker, 6/19/1995), Michael Kelly decried “fusion paranoia” — a phenomenon that arose in connection with the Iran-hostage-contra-cocaine affair. Incredibly, it seems that both “right” and “left” wingers believed a secret arms-for-hostages deal with Iran had influenced the U.S. elections in 1980.

Convicted in 1997, Timothy McVeigh wanted an appeal and a new lawyer. His attorney, Stephen Jones (left), had been appointed by the court; and there was friction between the two men. Jones, believing that the accused has a right to confront his accusers, argued that he was denied a chance to question F.B.I. informant Carol Howe — a key witness in the case — or present evidence of a wider conspiracy. It would not have exculpated McVeigh, but it might have made people think. After the trial, the Chicago Tribune carried a front page article about the “fringe rants” of a cover-up, implying some sort of “center” where folks don’t fuss over details.

The early and easy simplifications of McVeigh have become uneasy over time. Who do you think he was? In a letter to the Union Sun and Journal in Lockport, New York, McVeigh wrote in part:

At a point when the world has seen communism falter as an imperfect system to manage people, democracy seems to be headed down the same road. No one is seeing the ‘big’ picture.

Maybe we have to combine ideologies to achieve the perfect utopian government. Remember, government sponsored health care was a communist idea. Should only the rich be allowed to live long? Does that say that because a person is poor, he is a lesser human being; and doesn’t deserve to live as long, because he doesn’t wear a tie to work?

What kind of talk is that? At his sentencing on August 14, 1997, McVeigh “sat down without exchanging the usual handshake with Mr. Jones,* who afterward would not comment on their relationship.” (The New York Times, 8/15/1997) McVeigh addressed the court before sentence was passed, but he didn’t say much.

I wish to use the words of Justice Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead to speak for me. He wrote, ‘Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.’ That all I have.

According to The New York Times, McVeigh’s remarks were so fleeting and “so cryptic that families of the bombing’s victims were not sure what he meant.”

“‘I don’t know if he was referring to the Waco deal or what,’ said Roy Sells, 63, a retired Air Force employee whose wife, Leora, was among the 168 people killed in the explosion at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995.

“‘I wish he would’ve quoted something from his own heart instead of out of somebody’s book,’ Mr. Sells said.”

McVeigh’s remarks might have sounded cryptic to Mr. Sells, but how did they sound to lawyers and judges in the federal system? After all, McVeigh was a man arrested with quotes from our founding fathers in his possession. Isn’t it at least possible that he quoted Brandeis because those words did convey what was in his heart?

Those words came from Olmstead v U.S. (1928), a Prohibition conspiracy case. Federal agents had obtained wiretap evidence by violating state laws, but federal laws did not exclude evidence acquired illegally. To Brandeis, that was an affront to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.

Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring a terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face…

Brandeis noted that when the Bill of Rights was adopted, “’the form that evil had theretofore taken’ had been necessarily simple. Force and violence were then the only means known to man by which a government could directly effect self-incrimination.” Technology had changed that. Surveillance no longer required breaking down doors and rummaging through drawers.

Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet…Whenever a telephone line is tapped, the privacy of the persons at both ends of the line is invaded, and all conversations between them upon any subject, and although proper, confidential, and privileged, may be overheard.

I have no doubt of McVeigh’s guilt. However, his reference to the example set by government bothers me. Were any of the conspirators linked to federal agencies? Was it a “sting” operation; was it entrapment; or was it something worse? The similarities between the Murrah Building bombing and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center are disconcerting, as is the Waco connection. Investigative records on Waco were housed in the Murrah building.

But what concerns me most of all is the Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Bill of 1995, forerunner of the Patriot Act. The legislation had been proposed by the F.B.I., the agency with so many informants in so many controversial cases. The Bill called for expanded powers of federal agencies to monitor domestic groups. It sought to criminalize activities protected under the First Amendment, streamline the appeal process, grant broad and exclusive executive authority to designate individuals or groups as offenders, and eliminate habeas corpus for designated suspects. It was stalled in Congress before the Oklahoma bombing. After that, President Clinton used the bombing to argue for the Bill. He got it in 1996, but without some of the most coveted powers. Then came 9/11 which, we are told, changed everything.

Six years later, U. S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while on his way out, was still seeking authority to “fast-track” execution appeals. He served a similar function in Texas under then-Governor George Bush, Jr., who took office in January of 1995. Will Gonzales’s replacement be more circumspect?

In a hand-written statement before his execution, Timothy McVeigh printed a poem by William Ernest Henley, titled Invictus.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were convicted on state and federal charges, so the authorities clearly perceived a conspiracy. Does that mean the case was solved?

I think McVeigh was the captain of his soul, but I don’t know under what flag he sailed. Nobody else has been charged in the bombing. Two possible JD2 matches died in custody, which strongly suggests that some people genuinely believed in the existence of John Doe #2 and urgently wanted to find him. Whether they wanted to prosecute him or silence him is an open question.

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* Jones, in collaboration with Peter Israel, wrote Others Unknown: The Oklahoma City Bombing Case and Conspiracy, first published in 1998, revised in 2001. As a law student in 1964, Jones was a personal assistant to Richard Nixon, but he was also a friend of Alger Hiss, the first U.S. representative to the United Nations and an alleged Soviet spy. (In the early 1950s, Congressman Nixon was a driving force in the investigation of Hiss. Hiss was acquitted of espionage and then convicted of perjury in his espionage trial. A F.B.I. informant was the key witness in the case and a typewriter which may or may not have been found was the critical physical evidence.) According to Jones, McVeigh obstructed his own defense and a wider conspiracy was behind the Oklahoma bombing.

The Deadline for Withdrawal

2007-08-18T00:45:00.000-07:00

Trentadue Who?

2007-08-17T23:45:00.000-07:00

I can remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. I was at work; I had just walked in the front door. Customers and employees were gathered around the tv; a friend of mine, almost in tears, told me what had happened. On the screen, medical personnel were running away from the site of the attack as the announcer explained the discovery of a second bomb inside the building, and later a third. It was April 19, 1995. The north façade of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was a pile of rubble. I remember thinking that people still trapped in the wreckage might die if help could not arrive in time. I also remember thinking something even worse — that the other bombs were set specifically to kill rescue workers.

Suspicion immediately fell upon Muslim extremists. After all, hadn’t they bombed the World Trade Center in 1993?* The Oklahoma story, however, took an unexpected turn when a state trooper stopped a car without a license plate. The driver admitted that he had a gun and a knife and he surrendered them. Why? He was Timothy McVeigh, a veteran of Desert Storm and definitely not a Muslim. Earlier that morning, he had become the worst mass-murderer in U.S. history. Presumably, he was making his escape; but he wasn’t speeding. Why did he give up his gun? Why didn’t he just shoot the cop and drive on?

And then there was the question of John Doe #2. A sketch of him based on witness accounts (below left), received wide media coverage. Another sketch of him (below center) became evidence at McVeigh’s trial. John Doe #2 had a muscular build and a dragon tattoo on his left arm. But McVeigh’s accomplice, a farmer named Terry Nichols (below right), wasn’t muscular and didn’t have a dragon tattooed on his arm, raising an obvious question. Who was John Doe #2?

Evidently, he was nobody. The hunt for him ended when authorities determined that the JD2 story didn’t pan out. There was no John Doe #2.

McVeigh and Nichols were convicted in separate trials. In 2001, McVeigh was executed. Then, very quietly, the hunt was on again; and the F.B.I revealed that Nichols had agreed to help identify the previously non-existent John Doe #2.

Whoever John Doe #2 was, he wasn’t the man on the left, Kenney Trentadue. Trentadue was stopped at the Mexican border on June 10, 1995, for driving on a suspended license. He was also wanted for parole violations. On August 18, he was transferred to Oklahoma City. Three days later, he seemingly committed suicide in his cell.

Reporter James Ridgeway, writing for Mother Jones magazine, presents the story of Kenney’s brother, Jesse Trentadue, a lawyer in Utah. Kenney’s body was covered by bruises, with slashes on the throat. Jesse wanted to know why. Several Freedom of Information Act filings and a dozen years later, Jesse has pieced together enough details of his brother’s death to put it in context. The evidence is not encouraging.

It was murder by interrogation. Kenney fit the description of John Doe #2; the Bureau tried to get information out of him that he didn’t have. And he wasn’t the only JD2 match to die in custody. Worst of all, federal informants apparently had relayed information about the bombing before the attack.

The John Does who bombed the Murrah Building are at large, and the truth about the bombing remains hidden from the public. Jesse Trentadue has exposed part of the cover-up, but it is likely to be a long time before full disclosure is compelled.

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* An excellent question. See A Higher Reason, The Chair-Herding Pictures, June 30, 2006. The bomb used in the 1993 attack on the Trade Center was built by a F.B.I. informant named Emad Salem. Salem recorded his telephone conversations with the targets of the investigation and with his F.B.I. handlers. He couldn’t understand why the Bureau failed to prevent the attack.
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Out for a Stroll

2007-08-17T21:54:00.000-07:00

Non-Remembrance of Things Past

2007-07-27T22:46:00.000-07:00

The attorney’s performance was amazing. Asked at the eleventh hour to aid the defense in a civil case, he quickly had the plaintiff’s witnesses, and the plaintiff himself, stumbling to correct their tales. But the judge wasn’t interested. It was a slander case brought by an itinerant preacher, Oliver Brindley “The Walking Bible” Owen (aka Jerry Owen), against KCOP-TV in Los Angeles. As far as Judge Jack A. Crickard was concerned, the circumstances surrounding the issue, especially the secrecy and malfeasance of the Los Angeles police, were off limits. Crickard found for the plaintiff. He ordered KCOP to pay $35,000 for reporting Owen’s possible involvement in the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. The defense attorneys, Michael Wayland and Vincent T. Bugliosi, lost. Yes, in 1975, Vincent Bugliosi, the man who had prosecuted the Charles Manson murder conspiracy, suspected a cover-up in R.F.K.’s death. He also faced a judge who didn’t want to hear it.

Owen’s connection to the assassination is too complex to relate here. But essentially, evidence indicated that Owen had a pre-existing relationship with Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the man falsely convicted of killing Senator Kennedy. Owen had arranged to meet Sirhan outside the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the murder, ostensibly to sell him a horse. Bugliosi managed to bring out some information about Owen, but Crickard effectively prevented disclosure of key details. Bugliosi noted in his closing argument for KCOP that:

we are talking about a conspiracy to commit murder, a conspiracy to assassinate someone who was a major candidate for the presidency of the United States, a conspiracy the prodigious dimensions of which would make Watergate look like a one-roach marijuana case.

In fact, before the trial, when another judge had ordered a review of the ballistics evidence in R.F.K.’s death, Bugliosi told the press:

Gentlemen, the time for us to keep on looking for additional bullets in this case has passed. The time has come for us to start looking for the members of the firing squad that night.

Vincent Bugliosi had no trouble recognizing a cover-up in Senator Kennedy’s assassination. And he learned that searching for the truth brought ridicule, not praise. A few weeks after the Owen vs. KCOP trial, he announced his candidacy for district attorney, pledging to uncover the facts in Robert Kennedy’s murder. The Los Angeles Times opposed him, claiming that “Bugliosi believes he has an emotional issue that he can exploit” in his quest for office. Bugliosi lost the election.

Three decades later, Bugliosi has redeemed himself; and he is no longer a conspiracy buff. This year, he published Reclaiming History: the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Weighing in at 1,612 pages, Reclaiming History is nearly twice as long as the Warren Report on President Kennedy’s murder. Drawing out the lie at greater length, however, doesn’t make it true. It remains an embarrassment of errors, omissions, and faulty reasoning.

Bugliosi appeared on the Colbert Report (6/21/2007) to promote his work, and he began by listing a number of “facts” which are simply not facts at all. And since Bugliosi is convinced that alleged assassin Lee Oswald acted alone, I couldn’t help wondering how he explains C.I.A. officer Everette Howard Hunt, Jr.’s confession in the J.F.K. murder. Alas, the topic never came up. Colbert cracked jokes; and Bugliosi responded in kind, calling Colbert a “clone of Oliver Stone.”

It was an odd remark considering Bugliosi’s work on the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Maybe, I thought, Stone is a clone of Bugliosi! — the young Bugliosi who recognized when a case was fixed.

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For an extensive account of Oliver Owen and Bugliosi’s role in the case, see The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: the Conspiracy and Coverup, by William Turner and Jonn Christian. It is full of information on the crime and praise for Bugliosi. Has Vincent forgotten the Walking Bible?

Sometimes, coincidences seem to stretch out forever, don’t they? For example, Oliver Owen had a friend named Gail Aiken. One of her brothers was William Bremer, Jr., who was convicted of a confidence swindle. His lawyer was Ellis Rubin. Rubin later represented Frank Sturgis, Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, and Virgilio Gonzalez after they were caught in the Watergate Hotel.

Gail had another brother, Arthur, the man who shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972. Everette Howard Hunt, Jr., of J.F.K. assassination fame and another Watergate burglar, was sent to search Arthur’s home after the shooting to find evidence implicating the Democrats. But Arthur Bremer turned out to be merely another lone nut seeking fame. Like Lee Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Bremer supposedly really wanted to kill Richard Nixon, but settled for another victim instead. It’s amazing how many lone assassins in America wanted to kill Richard Nixon but ended up killing somebody else.
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Let Justice be Undone

2007-07-27T22:29:00.000-07:00

George Bush, Jr. commuted the sentence of Irving Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Jr., thereby supposedly incurring the ire of both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats complained that Junior was simply making good on a deal; Republicans insisted that Scooter should have a full pardon. Wasn’t it punishment enough that he had to pay a $250,400 fine, that he may never be able to practice law again, that he may face probation? And didn’t Bill Clinton grant a bunch of pardons just before he left office?

Within days of his sentencing, Libby had paid his fine; and commutation may exempt him from probation. What bothers me, however, is the matter of his license. Exactly what kind of law does “Scooter” practice?

Yes, Clinton issued a lot of pardons before he left office. But who were the beneficiaries? He did not pardon Leonard Peltier, who certainly deserves it.* He did, however pardon Marc Rich, a billionaire international commodities trader. In 1983, Rich was indicted for tax evasion and for trading with Iran during the hostage crisis. His ex-wife had donated to the Democratic Party and the Clinton Library, but the Republicans were curiously uninterested. They insisted Rich was innocent. In any case, he really didn’t need Clinton’s mercy. He’d been living splendidly abroad since his indictment; he just couldn’t enter the United States without facing possible arrest. The pardon ended his torment.

Naturally, Rich had top-notch representation; his attorney was Irving Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Jr. When Clinton issued the pardon, Libby was on the phone congratulating poor Mr. Rich.

Rich, incidentally, had been indicted by then-U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani. Today, Giuliani is a 9/11 hero and a Republican presidential candidate who agrees with Bush’s decision to commute the sentence of Rich’s lawyer. Libby, you may recall, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame case, where the identity of a covert C.I.A. operative following evidence on weapons traffic was disclosed to retaliate against her husband because he contradicted the administration’s claim of attempted Iraqi uranium purchases prior to the 2003 invasion. Thankfully, Libby didn’t lie about a sexual indiscretion, or he would have been in real trouble.

Libby has clearly travelled in powerful circles for a long time, so it’s hard to know exactly how many backs are being scratched here. Unfortunately, that’s often the case. To “heal the nation” three decades ago, President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon might have committed while in office. (Believe me, the list is longer than “Watergate.”) And out-going President George Bush, Sr. pardoned Caspar W. Weinberger and others for the Iran-hostage-contra-cocaine operation.

Luckily, they weren’t caught in any lies about sexual indiscretions, or they might have been thrown in the pokey.

Do Presidents ever pardon deserving petitioners? Of course, although I fear that practice is in decline. Do Presidents ever abuse their power? We elect them in the hope that they will do what is right. But their conception of right and ours often vary.

The Libby controversy has brought renewed attention to presidential powers to override court decisions or by-pass the judicial system entirely. A tit-for-tat argument about which President freed the most people misses the point. Who is getting off the hook? By pardoning Rich and commuting Libby’s sentence, didn’t Bill and George serve the same constituency?

* Peltier was falsely convicted of killing two F.B.I. agents on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in 1975. See In the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matthiessen.

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And Now for Something Completely Different

2007-05-10T23:19:00.000-07:00

What has eight arms, three hearts, and blue blood?

Give up? Here are some more clues. It has W-shaped pupils, and each eye has two foveae instead of just one. And it comes in too many colors to list.

Still give up? I’m not surprised. I had no idea what that thing might be before I saw the NOVA program on cuttlefish, “Kings of Camouflage.” I was amazed.

In “normal mode,” so to speak, a cuttlefish looks like a small, brownish-grey squid. But if it wants to look like a piece of coral, that’s no problem.

The cuttlefish isn’t actually a fish. It’s a mollusk without a shell. It can change the texture and shape of its skin to produce the appearance of spikes. It has some 20 million pigmentation sacks in its skin layers, each independently controlled by muscles to expand or contract. It can be pink or yellow or neon blue, or all three at the same time. It can literally make waves of color ripple through its body.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about. I intended to write about beliefs held by humans concerning bees and C.C.D., or colony collapse disorder. On April 24, 2007, Bill Maher mentioned C.C.D. on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. On the Late, Late Show, Craig Ferguson made some jokes about C.C.D.

Bees are dying at an alarming rate. By some estimates, colonies have declined by 60% or more in the United States; and Europe has also been affected. Bees simply abandon the hive; they fly away and die. And humans need bees. Bees are our friends in the never-ending battle against starvation. Bees pollinate flowers which produce crops used to feed livestock and humans. Bees are vital for other reasons. No more bees, for example, means no more apples, which means no more apple seeds, which means no new apple trees. And humans need trees. Trees are our friends in the battle against global warming because trees love carbon dioxide. They pull it right out of the atmosphere.

A presentation before U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture, Subcommittee on Horticulture and Organic Agriculture, listed ten possible causes of C.C.D. The culprits include known bee parasites and viruses, hive management and feeding, lack of genetic diversity in queen bees, chemicals and pesticides in the environment, and so forth. Unfortunately, although those factors could adversely affect the health of a hive, they are not known to cause the classic symptom of C.C.D. — abandonment of the hive.

There are indications, however, that the increasing number of man-made electromagnetic fields in the environment may interfere with the bee’s navigational systems. A German study suggests that cell phone radiation has a significant effect on bees. That’s what most of the jokes on tv were about.

I certainly don’t know what causes C.C.D. But I know many of the factors detailed to the House committee are the result of human actions. And I know humans have a long history of underestimating “lower” animals.

Is it absurd to speculate that bees might be sensitive to part of the electromagnetic spectrum we can’t sense? Think about the cuttlefish. It shimmers with color even though it is color-blind! How is that possible? With two foveae in each eye, the cuttlefish can detect variations in the polarization of light — something humans can’t do without external contraptions. Humans have no sensory organ for thermal radiation, but pit vipers do. That’s how they find their prey. Butterflies can see light in the ultraviolet range of the electromagnetic spectrum — another feat beyond the powers of the human eye. There is growing evidence that loggerhead turtles navigate by sensing variations in the gravitational field of the earth.* They have no specific sensory organ to detect the field, but the capacity may depend on magnetic ions in the animal’s nervous system.

Bees are vastly more important to our survival than cell phones and wireless internet connections. Humans, regrettably, are notoriously arrogant about our abilities and dismissive of the natural world around us. If man-made electromagnetic fields are responsible for colony collapse disorder, will we admit it in time to avert disaster?

*See, for example, “Magnet-induced disorientation in hatchling loggerhead sea turtles”
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The Mighty Wurlitzer

2007-05-09T17:36:00.000-07:00

C.I.A. officer David Atlee Phillips called it The Mighty Wurlitzer. Put in a quarter and it would play your favorite tunes over and over, across the nation, for years on end.

He was referring to the Agency’s influence on mass media, the ability to plant a story in a variety of outlets and then just keep repeating it as if it was true. In newspapers and magazines, on television and radio, through a shifting array of advocates, a thousand times a day, as though it was widely accepted, for decades if necessary. And if the Agency preferred silence, the Wurlitzer could do that, too. Deafening silence.

(Left: a 1971 Wurlitzer 3500 “Zodiac” jukebox.)

Silence is what we heard when Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. died. He named names in the assassination of President Kennedy, all of them connected to the C.I.A. He didn’t merely tell his son about the plot; he made a twenty-minute cassette recording about the murder to be released after his death. An excerpt is available now on the internet; reportedly, the entire tape will be out soon.

A.B.C., N.B.C., and C.B.S. have insisted for nearly 45 years that the official fairy tale of John Kennedy’s murder was true. The New York Times, putatively the nation’s paper of record, has pushed the story just as long. Other news outlets have done the same. Now that Hunt has joined the list of operatives who have confessed, the networks and the newspapers have nothing to say.

In 1978, David Atlee Phillips admitted that a key part of the C.I.A.’s cover story — the “lone-assassin’s” trip to Mexico City — was false; the evidence was fabricated. Phillips was in a position to know since he helped create that tale. Mainstream media still hasn’t reported it. C.I.A. contract agent Robert Morrow wrote a book about his role in the murder. It’s a pretty bad book, but that’s not the point. Morrow’s confession never turned up on the six-o’clock news.

After Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK, was released in 1991, Chauncey Holt came forward with his confession. Mainstream media responded by laughing him off and calling Stone paranoid. More than twenty years ago, C.I.A. asset Marita Lorentz testified in open court about her knowledge of Hunt’s part in the murder. Don’t tell me; let me guess. You’ve never heard of Marita Lorentz. For some reason, the Mighty Wurlitzer doesn’t mention her.

The list of confessors doesn’t stop there; but in all likelihood, you’ve never heard of them. For years, authorities have claimed that if a conspiracy had existed, someone would have talked by now. Well, several people have talked; but the Wurlitzer continues to play the old single, “No Confessions.”

Of course, there are more recent numbers on the Wurlitzer play list. A favorite these days is “We Didn’t Lie,” the soulful plaint of Agency innocence in the intelligence plot leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Former C.I.A. director George Tenet received the Medal of Freedom for his service to his country. On Sixty Minutes (4/29/2007), Tenet delivered a powerful rendition of “We Didn’t Lie”; but it lacked sincerity. A group of former intelligence officers sent a letter to Tenet about his complicity in the pre-war deception. You can read their letter on the internet, but it hasn’t gotten any play on the Wurlitzer. I have excerpted a paragraph below. After noting the C.I.A.’s collaboration with the British to “fix” the intelligence around the Iraq war policy, the writers added:

By your silence you helped build the case for war. You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld. Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States. Instead of resigning in protest, when it could have made a difference in the public debate, you remained silent and allowed the Bush Administration to cite your participation in these deliberations to justify their decision to go to war. Your silence contributed to the willingness of the public to support the disastrous war in Iraq, which has killed more than 3300 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Former intelligence officers think there was some sort of arrangement to deceive the American public? Whose side are they on?

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The Politics of Amnesia

2007-05-07T17:44:00.000-07:00

I watched roughly twenty-five minutes of the Republican presidential candidates debate before I walked away in disbelief. I cannot fathom their world. With an exception now and then, they all struck me as disconnected from reality.

Do I exaggerate? Later in the evening, when my blood pressure returned to normal, I looked around on the internet for more details about the event. Consider the picture on the left.

The men with their hands raised are Senator Sam Brownback, Representative Tom Tancredo, and former governor Mike Huckabee. The assembled candidates had been asked who among them did not believe in evolution.

Long ago, when humans didn’t know about the theory of evolution, we still bred dogs to produce desirable traits. How did we do it? Now we live in an age when scientists are manipulating D.N.A., the very stuff of evolution. Yet three of the Republican contenders do not believe in evolution. Isn’t that rather like owning a computer and disputing the rules of addition? If they don’t believe in evolution, what do they think stem cell research is all about?

It wasn’t a real debate, of course; the candidates could not engage one another or elaborate on complex matters. I didn’t take notes, and many of the men on that stage were unfamiliar to me. Nevertheless, I recognized that they expressed broad agreement on key positions of the current Republican party. That’s what frightened me. I saw ten men afflicted with ideologically induced Alzheimer’s disease running for the Oval Office.

For instance, the debate was held in the President Ronald Reagan Library; and each candidate took an opportunity to remark upon, or lay claim to, the Reagan legacy. There was talk of Reagan’s optimism, his vision of America as a shining city on a hill. There was talk of family values and tax cuts.

A wittier wag than I once observed that we have to record history or we won’t know what we’re repeating! But that doesn’t mean everyone reads history. Republicans remember Reagan’s tax cuts and forget what followed. The man behind the numbers was David Stockman, who later wrote a book about the optimistic assumptions used to make the budget look good. The result was a $2 trillion gap between the “Rosy Scenario” and actual economic performance. George Bush, Sr. said, “Read my lips; no new taxes.” Still, when the budget went south, he supported more federal revenues. And his party attacked him! But Republicans today don’t recall that. They only recall how Reagan cut taxes.

Reagan made a deal with the Axis of Evil: the Iran-Israel-contra-cocaine operation. The U.S. raised a mercenary army to attack Nicaragua, a country that has never attacked us. Reagan described the mercenaries as “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.” The army was funded in part by drug money from protected cocaine traffic in the U.S. But today’s Republicans don’t recollect that, either. All they remember is that Reagan cut taxes.

I heard China mentioned in the debate at least twice — once as a future threat and once as a nation using unfair trade practices. Has anybody told Wal-Mart? More to the point, the U.S. is currently borrowing roughly $50 billion per month, the bulk of it from Japan and China. Has anybody warned George Bush, Jr. that we have become dependent upon a trading partner that is our enemy?

We’re borrowing this money, of course, because we cut taxes and started the most expensive war in our history. If China wasn’t loaning us money, we wouldn’t be in Iraq today. I have noted in the past the neo-con goal of controlling China’s access to oil. Is China a threat because they might attack us, or is China a “threat” because shortsighted leaders in the U.S. are selling us off at a furious clip?

I heard talk in the debate of recent Republican successes — the proscription drug plan was cited as an example. I was stunned. That law was written by lobbyists who low-balled the costs and prevented the government from negotiating prices. It was legalized larceny, yet it was touted as a triumph of Republican leadership.

Naturally, candidates tried to distance themselves from the administration, but that doesn’t mean they embraced reality. South still isn’t up and right still isn’t sideways. We can’t afford another President spreading the Disney theory of history. We need someone better than that.

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Why Are We In Iraq?

2007-03-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

Why are We in Vietnam?, by Norman Mailer, was published in 1967. His protagonist is a Texas teenager on a hunting trip in Alaska before he is sent to fight on the other side of the world. The Dallas Times described it as “[a] shattering social commentary…The book is a tour de force, a treatise on human nature, society, and war in flip disguise.”

No such book has yet been written about Iraq, so the task has fallen to me. My protagonist, D, is the son of illegal aliens, brought to the United States in the early 1920s and educated in Indiana. A gifted student with an interest in medicine, he becomes a prominent psychologist just as the ideas of Sigmund Freud are taking hold in the United States. In the aftermath of World War II, D is recruited by the U.S. Army to assist in a massive study of returning veterans. D corresponds with Anna Freud and takes a job with Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, the father of public relations. In 1951, when Bernays is hired by United Fruit to build public support for a coup in Guatemala, D advises C.I.A. officer Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. on propaganda operations in the target nation.

D becomes wealthy with his own public relations firm. He also works for the C.I.A. occasionally, assisting in domestic operations. Meanwhile, the idea of controlling society by countering destructive subconscious impulses is replaced by another concept: Docility produced by manufacturing and then sating consumer desires, giving the population a sense of choice and self-worth. D sees no contradiction in this paradigm shift; he has long since internalized the belief that the ruling elite, although comprised of individuals, is somehow free of the primitive emotions that motivate everyone else. When the paradigm changes again with the rise of the human potential movement, D unhesitatingly finds a way to turn that into an ad campaign. In the course of his career, D never encounters a theory of human behavior that he can’t use for the benefit of his clients.

At the age of 75, he is consulted on ways to sell the first invasion of Iraq to the American public. He comes up with the pitch that Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait had dumped premature babies out of incubators and sent those incubators to Iraq. It works like a charm. Seven months before the second invasion, he succumbs to pneumonia. He dies believing that democracy is dangerous because ordinary people cannot be trusted to make informed, responsible decisions. For their own good, people must be given the illusion of choice without the prospect of choice.

I have no intention of writing the book I’ve described. But I did grow up in America during the ascension of Freudian thought. My stepfather was a clinical psychologist and my mother was a psychiatric nurse. For a time, my family lived in an apartment building for hospital staff on the grounds of Longcliff State Hospital, the largest state hospital in Indiana. I also grew up in the late stages of the Red Scare propaganda campaign that led to the invasion of Vietnam.

And unfortunately, Edward Bernays and Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. are not figments of my imagination. Nor is Anna Freud. More distressing, people like D certainly exist. Throughout the ages, business and government have sought techniques to manage public perceptions.

True or false or a bit of both, all models of motivation accepted by a significant faction of any society wield influence, if only because they have a Pygmalion effect. Even so, some general principles have been understood for centuries. Fear and secrecy, for example, have long been known to influence behavior.

Baseball season approaches, so I will close with a baseball analogy. Wrigley Field in Chicago is the home of the Chicago Cubs. It’s an old stadium with regularly spaced columns to support the upper decks. If you end up sitting behind one of those columns, you have an obstructed view. You may have to lean left or right to follow a play; you may miss a key play completely.

Mass media consolidation is building a Media Wrigley Field with much wider columns so all but prime ticket holders will have an obstructed view of the field.

If you can’t wait for my non-existent book, you can still watch a remarkable four-part series by the B.B.C. titled “The Century of the Self,” about the advent and success of modern public relations — or perception management or whatever spin is called these days. The series is available through Google video at the following addresses.

Part 1 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2637635365191428174
Part 2 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-678466363224520614
Part 3 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6111922724894802811
Part 4 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1122532358497501036

Our founding fathers thought that a successful democracy required an informed public. Suppose they were right. How, then, are we to judge our democracy today?

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Madam Secretary, Why Don't They Love Us?

2007-03-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

On Fox News Sunday (2/25/2007), Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained why Congress should not reconsider the 2002 authorization of discretionary force granted to George Bush. Jr.:

“It would be like saying that after Adolf Hitler was overthrown, we needed to change then, the resolution that allowed the United States to do that, so that we could deal with creating a stable environment in Europe after he was overthrown.”

The implied camparison between Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein is absurd. Hitler conquered Europe, invaded Russia, and killed millions. Hussein was steam-rolled twice and captured in a hole in the ground. The Roosevelt administration did not have to invent stories about German and Japanese aggression to sell a war. And there was no resolution that “allowed” us to prevail or which gave President Roosevelt extraordinary war powers.

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The next day, Congress declared war against Japan. Three days later, Germany delivered a declaration of war to the State Department’s European Division under Secretary of State Cordell Hull (left), one of Rice’s predecessors. Congress declared war against Japan and Germany in the quaint, pre-9/11, Constitutional way.

U.S. Presidents did not determine post-war plans for Europe. Over Republican opposition, Congress approved the Marshall Plan and President Truman signed it in 1948. It was named after General George Marshall (right), former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who became Secretary of State in 1947.

The U.S. occupied Germany and Japan through the early 1950s, but the Germans and Japanese did not shoot U.S. troops or plant roadside bombs. Now, flash forward. Through war and economic sanctions, the U.S. has killed more Iraqis than former U.S. client, Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown and hanged in a soap episode you can download on the internet. Inexplicably, some Iraqis are still targeting their liberators and anyone connected to those liberators. I don’t understand, Madam Secretary. Why don’t they love us?

A Short Correspondents Course

2007-01-30T22:21:00.000-08:00

It’s one of the most dramatic and important movies ever made in America; I’ll never forget the first time I saw it. The year was 1975; Geraldo Rivera was the host of the tv show Goodnight America. One night, comedian and black activist Dick Gregory appeared with researcher Robert Groden. They were there to discuss a film shot twelve years earlier by a Dallas dress manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder. In 26 seconds, using a home movie camera, he captured the assassination of President John Kennedy. A month after Australian tv aired the film, Rivera showed it to America for the first time.

The Zapruder film proved beyond question that a conspiracy was behind the murder. Yet the general public didn’t have a chance to watch that film as a motion picture until 1975. True, Life magazine had published a few selected stills from the movie. However, the movie is nearly 500 frames long. A series of disconnected, individual images simply doesn’t convey motion, which is what movies are all about. When the Zapruder film is seen as a motion picture, the effect is visceral. I can still recall the collective gasp of the studio audience when they saw the President’s head thrown back and to the left in a spray of blood.

But in 1975, Rivera had already been marginalized by his sensationalist style. The assassination itself had been marginalized, and the film really didn’t tell people anything they didn’t already suspect. It wasn’t a big story anymore.

Besides, big stories that lack official validation don’t “make” media careers; they tend to damage careers. Newsweek reporter Robert Parry broke the U.S.-Iran-contra story. The government denied it, and Parry lost his job. As it turned out, Parry was right; but he didn’t get his old job back. San Jose Mercury reporter Gary Webb cracked the U.S.-contra-cocaine connection. The paper back-tracked under political pressure; Webb was transferred to the suburbs to report on high school sports. Now, consider Bob Woodward and the Watergate scandal. Navy lieutenant Woodward had served in the Nixon White House before he abandoned his promising career to become a reporter. He was a rookie on the metro beat of the Washington Post when he landed a small story that turned into a huge one. As luck would have it, he had a secret source in the White House codenamed Deep Throat.

Robert MacNeil, of P.B.S. MacNeil/Leher news fame, was a younger man once. He worked for N.B.C. in 1963; he was on the press bus in Kennedy’s fateful motorcade. He heard shots and he got off the bus. He was photographed along with several other people at the west end of the grassy knoll, looking at the railroad tracks that ran by Dealey Plaza. He walked around; he talked to people. In search of a pay phone, he requested directions from a young man leaving the Texas School Book Depository who directed MacNeil to the building across the street. That young man apparently was the alleged assassin. MacNeil later suspected that a conspiracy had taken Kennedy’s life, but N.B.C. didn’t agree.

Retired C.B.S. newsman Dan Rather was younger once. He was on the west side of the railroad tracks when Kennedy was shot. Rather was involved in C.B.S.’s attempt to buy the Zapruder film the next day. He was the only reporter who saw the movie before it was “disappeared” for a dozen years. He described it on the air for C.B.S. Although his location at the time of the shooting and his viewing of the Zapruder film made him a potentially critical witness, Rather was not called to testify by the presidential commission investigating the murder.

After Rivera broadcast the film, Rather was criticized for his 1963 account. In fact, he had reported details which do not appear in the film as we know it today. What could he do? Forced to reconcile his memory of 1963 with the extant movie in 1975, he conceded that he must have made some mistakes. Decades later, when puzzling documents on George Bush, Jr.’s Air National Guard service emerged, Rather was again attacked for apparent mistakes.

I once thought that Dan Rather lied in 1963. Now, I think he told the truth, which might be why he wasn’t called as a witness. Today, it’s the movie I question. I think that in 1975, Rather held unfounded assumptions about that film, as most people did, including myself.

The same kinds of forces which frustrated public understanding in 1963 live on in 2007. Major events still touch people in a myriad of ways.

Rivera’s 1986 special about the excavation of a tunnel in Chicago once used by the Capone gang was a dud. Al Capone’s secret “vault” held nothing more than dirt and a bottle of gin. On the other hand, I found Rivera’s reports from New Orleans after hurricane Katrina genuinely moving. Nevertheless, he is a strident voice on the right. As a FOX war correspondent in 2001, he proclaimed he was “[i]tching for justice, or maybe just revenge.” He was a strong supporter of the invasion of Iraq, and he was criticized for some of his reports. On a radio program in Florida last December, after mumbling about a “midget” and a “slimeball,” he announced that he was ready to fight M.S.N.B.C. newsman Keith Olbermann! Rivera said he would make a pizza out of Olbermann.

Olbermann responded in part by saying that he could remember when Rivera used to be somebody. I can, too.

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The Death of a Dangerous Man

2007-01-30T22:15:00.000-08:00

One of the most influential criminals of our time has died of pneumonia at the age of 88.

He had his fingers in several significant pieces of history that we know of, and probably others that we don’t. He was so successful that he is generally not even thought of as a criminal. He was C.I.A. officer Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. (Seen left in a photo from the 1960s.)

Hunt was in charge of the propaganda campaign accompanying the 1954 coup in Guatemala. The U.S. organized the coup, codenamed Operation Success, at the behest of the United Fruit Company to protect their holdings in Guatemala.

Hunt played a similar role in Operation Zapata, the invasion of Cuba in 1961. The C.I.A. initially assisted Fidel Castro’s insurgency against Fulgencio Batista, who had lost the support of the Cuban military. The scheme was to then replace Castro with another version of Batista. The flip-flop took on added urgency after Castro arranged to buy oil from Russia. President Eisenhower authorized the first black ops against Cuba in 1959. Zapata was supposed to take place before the 1960 elections so Vice-President Richard Nixon would be swept into the Oval Office on a wave of patriotic fervor. But preparations for the invasion bogged down, and Nixon lost the election. Zapata then became an operation against the incoming administration.

Hunt is best known for his role in the Watergate affair — the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. As I noted last month (“A Free Man,” The Chair-Herding Pictures, 12/28/2006), Hunt and senior C.I.A. officer James McCord were the key figures in the operation against Nixon.

But Watergate wasn’t Hunt’s only crime during Nixon’s presidency. During the Pentagon Papers controversy in the early 1970s, Hunt forged diplomatic cables to make it appear as though President John Kennedy was behind the assassination of Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, murdered less than three weeks before Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas.

Which brings us to Hunt’s most important and least publicized crime. On November 21, 1963, Hunt and Frank Sturgis (also of Watergate fame) arrived in Dallas to deliver the rifles used to kill Kennedy the next day.

Evidence of Hunt’s role emerged in the course of a libel suit he brought against Liberty Lobby. In 1978, Liberty Lobby published an article about a C.I.A. document concerning the need to arrange an alibi for Hunt for the day of Kennedy’s assassination. Hunt sued, and he prevailed at first. But by the time Liberty Lobby’s appeal came to trial in 1984, they had a lot more information to work with. Under informed cross-examination, Hunt’s C.I.A. witnesses crumbled. His only non-Agency witnesses were his three children, who were between the ages of 10 and 13 when Kennedy was killed. Hunt claimed he was at home with them on the day of the assassination, and together they watched the television coverage over the weekend. Yet by Hunt’s own account, his children didn’t remember that. In fact, when his children first learned of allegations of his involvement in the assassination, they confronted him and demanded to know if the accusations were true. His children were not called to testify on his behalf. The jury found for Liberty Lobby.

Shortly before Abraham Lincoln’s death, he wrote a letter in which he expressed his fear for the future of our country. As a result of the Civil War, “corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.”

The huge increase in military spending brought about by World War II led President Eisenhower to warn us of “unwarranted power” wielded by the military/industrial complex. His successor was killed under conspicuously suspicious circumstances, and the war which followed was our longest war. Until recently, it was also our most expensive war. Today, we see increasing “corporatization” of the military and the government ostensibly for the sake of efficiency but actually to remove them from democratic control. In the face of massive debt, we see corporate figures with government titles spending obscene amounts of money for unarmored vehicles and voting machines that can’t count.

What we cannot see, though it certainly exists, is the small army of men like Everette Howard Hunt, Jr., ever ready to confuse power with patriotism.

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Privileged Victims

2007-01-11T21:42:00.000-08:00

Suppose I punch you and steal five bucks because I’m trying to pay off a gambling debt. Now, suppose you punch me and steal five bucks because you hate people like me. Which crime deserves the harsher sentence?

That is the issue behind laws which create special classes of perpetrators and victims for otherwise comparable transgressions. I slugged you and I got two weeks because I only wanted money. You slugged me and you got a year because of what you thought. Is that equal protection under the law?

Which brings me to the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The privileged victims are not of any particular race or religion. Instead, the victims are “animal enterprises,” such as the Huntington Life Sciences company in the United Kingdom which conducts experiments on animals for the manufacturers of cosmetics, cleaning solutions, or other products.

A group called Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC) was very successful in its efforts against Huntington Life Sciences. SHAC used letter-writing campaigns, email campaigns, and so forth to propagate its views. Through its website, SHAC publicized demonstrations against Huntington, its customers, and its employees. SHAC also reproduced letters from anonymous contributors who claimed to have engaged in illegal activities. Several suppliers stopped doing business with Huntington, which went into debt. Because Huntington has a lab in New Jersey, federal charges in the U.S. were brought against SHAC.

The SHAC Six were the first people to be prosecuted under the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992, and they were convicted in March of this year. But they were not found guilty of pouring blood on mink coats or releasing captive research animals. They were convicted of conspiring to inspire others to commit crimes. They were not convicted for what they did; they were convicted for what others have done or might do.

The New Jersey branch of the American Civil Liberties Union entered the case as amicus. Observing that criminal acts had occurred, the A.C.L.U. wrote that

[t]he court neither found that SHAC or its leaders engaged in the illegal activities or that SHAC “directs” the actions of the activists who undertook illegal acts “within the scope of their actual or apparent authority” from SHAC. Had the court been able to find as such, the court could have rightly entered an injunction. However, the judge did not enter an injunction based on that analysis. Rather, he found that SHAC incited “imminent lawlessness.” For the factual basis, he relied on the fact that SHAC “endorsed” illegal activities and posted information about the illegal activity, which the court said thereby encouraged more illegal activity. The ACLU-NJ argues that allowing an injunction to issue based on individuals’ “endorsement” of other people’s illegal activities, is improper and a violation of free speech and freedom of the press.

The National Lawyers Guild opposed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, ostensibly written to strengthen the Protection Act, because existing laws already protect businesses from offenses like trespass or vandalism. Furthermore, the language of the Act is unconstitutionally broad and vague. It could be interpreted to outlaw legal, expressive speech, silence whistleblowers, or criminalize boycotts. The Act violates the Fourteenth Amendment because it treats individual offenses on arbitrary grounds.

Animal rights activists are not widely understood or defended. Consequently, they present a good target for bad laws. The Animal Enterprise Protection Act “protects” an industry from legal activities by encroaching on the Constitution, which is why the right-wing favors it. If you can protect the profits of one industry, why not every industry?

Where is all this heading? On November 27, Newt Gingrich addressed a banquet in Manchester, New Hampshire. Here are some excerpts:

This is a serious, long term war. And it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country.

…we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech…

It will lead us to learn how to close down every website that is dangerous…

I want to suggest to you that we right now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren’t for the scale of the threat.

Gingrich said he is not a candidate for the presidency. However, he is

seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be President, it will happen.

It’s always fear with the Republicans these days, isn’t it? The sales pitch is never hope or progress. If we don’t privatize Social Security, benefits will be cut. If we don’t attack, we’ll be attacked. If we don’t torture prisoners or suspend habeas corpus, Americans will die. To preserve free speech, we may have to end it.

Remember, terrorists can be anybody — eco-terrorists, narco-terrorists, al Qaeda, religious organizations, ordinary citizens opposed to the U.S. regime, right-wing bombers, “dangerous” bloggers, or anyone designated a terrorist by the Oval Office. It is anybody’s guess how the far right might construe “suspect” places. But Gingrich truly is talking about a level of supervision beyond your worst nightmares. So he has to convince you that there is an imminent threat.

The greatest threat we face, however, doesn’t spring from “terrorists.” The threat comes from Newt Gingrich and others who are chipping away at the First Amendment while promising to defend it, along with the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments. The tag line is always the same: Hurry, hurry; be afraid. Give up your rights before terrorists steal them.

Fear and prejudice can be effective motivational tools, but they are not amenable to reason. The way to preserve liberty is with more liberty, not less. The best defense against bad ideas is better ideas in the marketplace of ideas. When a government seeks to limit speech, it’s always a bad sign. It is an admission that the government has no faith in its professed ideals or confidence in the support of its people. And that really is something to fear.

Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.
—Orleans Parish District Attorney Earling Carothers [Jim] Garrison, Playboy, October 1967, vol. 14, no. 10

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A Free Man

2006-12-28T19:06:00.000-08:00

President Gerald Ford died a free man at the age of 93, on the day after Christmas in 2006.

Ford attained his high position after President Richard Milhous Nixon’s first Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, resigned under a cloud of corruption investigations in his home state. Nixon selected then-Congressman Ford to be Vice-President. Nixon resigned under a cloud of suspicion in 1974, and Ford became President. He then granted Nixon a pardon.

Ford has been praised for his unpopular and supposedly courageous decision to pardon Nixon and “heal the nation.” But the nation wasn’t ill and didn’t need to be healed. The media huffed and puffed about a constitutional crisis, but no such crisis existed. Ford’s action served primarily to forestall public awareness of the Watergate affair and the involvement of the C.I.A. With one exception, all of the Watergate burglars were Agency officers or assets. The two men running the show, Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. and James McCord, were career intelligence officers with the highest clearance. The C.I.A. provided the burglars with money, disguises, electronic equipment, and lock-picking expertise. To this day, most people have no idea what Watergate was about.

Ford installed George Herbert Walker Bush as Director of Central Intelligence in the critical period preceding the House Select Committee on Assassinations inquiry into the murders of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Nixon’s chief-of-staff, H. R. Haldeman, noted that the C.I.A. obliterated a mountain of evidence connecting the Agency to Kennedy’s assassination. (Haldeman, H. R., with Joseph DiMona, The Ends of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, New York, Time Books, 1978, pp. 39-40)

And Ford didn’t merely pardon Nixon for Watergate; Ford issued a blanket pardon for any crimes Nixon may have committed as President.

I can think of at least one crime Nixon may have committed as President: The U.S.-backed assassination of Chilean President Salvador Allende on 9/11/1973. Nixon’s economic efforts to “make the [Chilean] economy scream” brought hardship to Chile but failed to unseat Allende. The alternative approach, killing him, worked better.

Allende’s successor, Augusto Pinochet, recently died a free man while under investigation for “disappearing” thousands of “dissidents.” Some of the victims were foreigners from the U.S., Spain, or France. During a visit to France 28 years after Allende’s murder, Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, was invited by the authorities to respond to certain inquiries. Kissinger promptly fled to Italy. Nixon died a free man in 1994. Henry Kissinger isn’t getting any younger; and he will most likely die a free man under a cloud of suspicion.

In 1963, 50-year-old Congressman Ford was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to serve on the Warren Commission which oversaw the federal investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy. The Commissioners classified important evidence for 75 years. Commissioner Allen Dulles had served for nine years as director of the C.I.A.; he was fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Newsweek magazine described Gerald Ford as “the C.I.A.’s best friend in Congress.”

The Warren Report became the most discredited document ever printed by the Government Printing Office, a record previously held by the Roberts Commission Report on the attack against Pearl Harbor.

When Indonesia was preparing to invade East Timor in 1975, their primary concern was U.S. opposition which might have led to the withholding of arms shipments to Indonesia. That December, Ford met Indonesian President Sukarno and gave him the green light. Ford then flew to Guam to deliver a speech on the anniversary of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor — as Indonesia began the surprise carnage in East Timor. The death toll in East Timor, considered as a percentage of the total population, was worse than the slaughter visited upon Europe by Adolph Hitler.

Yes, Ford did grant amnesty to U.S. citizens who went to Canada to escape the draft during the invasion of Vietnam. But that lone positive gesture was more than offset by the damage he did.

Gerald Ford died a free man at the age of 93, on the day after Christmas in 2006.

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24

2006-12-19T05:35:00.000-08:00

Even if you’ve never seen the tv series 24, you can easily grasp the idea behind it. A terrorist group is planning to unleash a deadly attack within the next 24 hours. Starting with scanty intelligence, U.S. security agencies are in a race against time; and counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer will take any action necessary — including torture — to get the information he needs to protect our country.

The ticking time bomb story has become a staple of right-wing political discourse. The Bush team used it to justify the invasion of Iraq by warning that we couldn’t wait for proof of Iraqi weapons programs to come in the form of a mushroom cloud. Why, to hear the administration tell it, we may be forced to invade Iran soon for the very same reason.

The notion of impending calamity is routinely enlisted to support a range of policies and procedures. And the context is always described in numbingly familiar terms: We have no time to lose; we must act even if the consequences are uncertain because the threat, however nebulous, is dire.

It certainly makes exciting television, with a cliff-hanger every 60 minutes. The real world, however, usually doesn’t follow the script.

Ten months ago, I wrote about Alfred McCoy’s appearance on Democracy Now, when he talked about techniques of torture. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and he is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Later, I worked on a review of a book by Sam Harris titled The End of Faith, which offers an argument for torture. In October of 2006, my study came full circle when I found “The Myth of the Ticking Time Bomb,” an article by McCoy in The Progressive.

Harris’s account is a version of the ticking-time bomb story described by Professor Allen Dershowitz, of Harvard Law School. Authorities have captured a terrorist with information about a nuclear device set to detonate in New York City. The suspect won’t talk and time is running out. Who could doubt that torture would be justified?

From there, Dershowitz asks if it wouldn’t be better for torture to be permissible under a regulatory warrant. Such warrants, issued by officials acting on the record, would simultaneously meet our intelligence needs while limiting abuse of torture. After all, duly constituted figures would never authorize the sort of methods employed at abu Ghraib, would they?

Unfortunately, experience has shown that Dershowitz’s faith in government officers is misplaced. George Bush, Jr. ordered the C.I.A. to establish secret prisons to circumvent U.S. law. If torture warrants proscribed certain practices, what would prevent a second dose of secrecy to get around those restrictions?

In The Progressive, Alfred McCoy deconstructs the ticking time bomb logic. First, he writes, the story rests on a number of unstated assumptions about the nature of intelligence work. Several improbable circumstances must arise for the Dershowitzian torture scenario to develop.

Second, the story assumes that useful intelligence can be gathered by employing torture. Over the centuries, however, that simply hasn’t been the case. Nearly two thousand years ago, Roman jurist Ulpian noted that the strong will resist and the weak will say anything to stop the pain. Christians once used torture to extract amazing confessions of witchcraft even though there are no witches.

Third, and perhaps most important in the current political environment, the torture of one suspect quickly becomes a rationale for torturing others. That progression occurred in the Battle of Algiers, when the French arrested one third of the male population of the Casbah and subjected most of them to torture. Arrest enough people and you do increase your chances of catching a bad guy. The French also summarily executed 3000 captives. They broke the resistance in Algiers and were nevertheless defeated. The C.I.A.’s Phoenix program in Vietnam produced tens of thousands of deaths. Nevertheless, Vietnam won.

So the choices are clear. Major success from limited, surgical torture is a fable, a fiction. But mass torture of thousands of suspects, some guilty, most innocent, can produce some useful intelligence…but at what cost?
—Alfred W. McCoy

Which leads to the fourth point in McCoy’s article: the political price of coercion. Torture undermines domestic and international support for the war whether it is in Algeria, Vietnam, or Iraq. Torture tells the world that the torturers deserve to be attacked.

McCoy’s fifth point addresses an unexpected motive behind the push for torture. Ironically, it was outlined in a Cold War C.I.A. document about Russia.

When feelings of insecurity develop within those holding power, they become increasingly suspicious and put great pressures upon the secret police to obtain arrests and confessions. At such times, police officials are inclined to condone anything which produces a speedy “confession,” and brutality may become widespread.

Viewed from that perspective, Bush’s authorization of torture may tell us more about his psychological makeup than our actual security needs.

The U.S. now holds hundreds of prisoners of no particular importance. The administration is reluctant to free them because they will reveal what they have endured, and that will damage U.S. prestige for years to come. Detaining them indefinitely blatantly violates the precepts we are supposedly defending. The solution in Vietnam, if it could be called that, was pump and dump. Find out what the detainee knows, even if it is useless, and then kill him.

Torture, “legal” or otherwise, always invites killing. The conclusion, item number six in McCoy’s account, is grim. If we will not renounce torture, then we must

…either legalize this brutality, à la Dershowitz and Bush, or accept that the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sponsored murder, à la Vietnam.

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The Ice Man

2006-12-06T01:10:00.000-08:00

It’s a long story, but I’ll try to make it quick. According to The Observer, December 3, 2006 (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1962643,00.html) —

The Immigration and Customs Executive, part of the Department of Homeland Security, hired an informant for an operation against a group of traffickers. The informant, Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, aka Lalo, was a former Mexican police officer who left the force to deal cocaine. He started working for us, so to speak, in 2000; and he gave information to the I.C.E., the D.E.A., the F.B.I., and the B.A.T.F. He successfully infiltrated the drug ring. His drug bosses enlisted him for the murder of a lawyer, and Lalo was wearing a wire. It was first degree murder, and the I.C.E. could hear the victim pleading for his life.

That information eventually reached the U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General. I.C.E. continued using Lalo, but the other agencies didn’t know that. Over the course of his work, Lalo was paid $220,000. And he killed a dozen more people. In 2004, in a case of mistaken identity, Lalo killed Luis Padilla, a U.S. citizen unconnected to the dealers; and I.C.E. had recordings of the event.

The drug bosses tried and failed to kill a D.E.A. agent; and Lalo was in contact with the would-be killers as the attempt unfolded. I.C.E. debriefed Lalo but wouldn’t allow the D.E.A. to question him. Sandy Gonzalez, the D.E.A. agent in charge of the El Paso office, wrote a letter to I.C.E. holding them responsible for Lalo’s murder spree. Gonzalez noted that I.C.E. had gone to “extreme lengths” to protect a “homicidal maniac.”

I.C.E. and the Department of Justice wanted to keep a lid on the story. Gonzalez, a 30-year veteran of the D.E.A., was told he would be downgraded. If he retired quickly and quietly, he would be given a positive reference for future employers. Otherwise, things might not be so positive. He resigned and then filed a lawsuit.

A gunman in El Paso tried to murder Lalo but missed and killed an innocent bystander instead. Lalo was taken into protective custody; and then I.C.E. began deportation proceedings against their valued informant to send him to Mexico, where he would certainly be killed. For now, he is in prison fighting to stay in the U.S. The drug boss he killed for cut a deal with the feds. He pleaded quilty to trafficking and all of the murder charges against him were dropped.

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One-Sided Bipartisanship

2006-11-20T17:29:00.000-08:00

The elections were barely over when the media wondered aloud if the new Democratic majority in Congress would work in a bipartisan fashion and refrain from vindictiveness or retaliation. The questions implied that all the political shenanigans of the past few years were directed against the Democrats who might now seek retribution. In reality, the Republicans have conspired against the entire nation. It is justice, not revenge, which demands a reckoning.

The administration lied to Congress, to the American people, and to the entire world to justify a pre-planned invasion of Iraq. They used the war to line the pockets of their friends and to rationalize attacks on the Constitution. Republicans excluded Democrats from the legislative process. They wrote laws in the dead of night, published them in the wee hours of the morning, and voted on them before lunch — all in an effort to eliminate bipartisanship. When they could not stop inquiries into abu Ghraib, they limited their investigation to twelve hours of discussion. By comparison, they spent over one hundred hours investigating President Clinton’s Christmas card mailing list.

Now that they have lost control of Congress, they say the Democrats must play fair, the Democrats must work with the Republicans. Hooey. The Republicans didn’t mind stirring up animosity when they spent seventy million dollars and two years investigating Clinton’s sexual indiscretions. But oh, the Democrats must not investigate the deceptions which led to the mess in Iraq or the massive fraud which followed because that would be wrong, that would be divisive.

The lame-duck Congress wants to end oversight of the money spent in Iraq. Proposed legislation would close the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction by October 1, 2007. Why? Because he was doing his job. Democrats are already preparing a bill to restore the Office, but that merely proves they are unwilling to work with the Republicans. And should they get that bill through Congress, Bush will not sign it.

Some time back, a group of models were featured in an ad campaign against the fur industry, but we won’t get to see that anymore. Consider the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, to Strengthen the Animal Enterprise Protection Act. The A.E.T.A. expands criminalization of animal-related activism, permitting prosecution of anyone involved in legal, non-violent actions that cause the “loss of profits” for “animal enterprises.” Bush is expected to sign the Act, and all those models will become terrorists.

Even if you think those animal rights people are loonies, is it really a good idea to start “protecting” businesses from actions which are not crimes? How long will it be before citizens who protest major polluters or boycott genetically engineered foods are also defined as “terrorists”? It is dangerous and irresponsible to throw that word around; and Republicans these days simply cannot be trusted anywhere near the word “profit.”

So how did this happen? Late on Friday night, November 10, the Act was added to the House calendar for the following Monday — so it could be passed on a voice vote alone with limited discussion. There’s bipartisanship for you! The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is a direct assault on the First Amendment to the Constitution; but for the neo-cons’s brave, new plutocracy, the only amendment that really matters is the Fifth.

After the elections, the C.I.A. admitted the existence of a directive signed by Bush ordering the Agency to establish prison facilities outside the United States. The purpose obviously was to circumvent U.S. law. If Democrats say that, however, pundits on the idiot box will question why the Dems hate America so much.

Our “diplomat” in the United Nations, John Bolton, was a recess appointment; but Bush is trying once again to push Bolton’s nomination through the Senate before the new Congress convenes. Ninety-five percent of Bush’s judicial appointments were confirmed; only the most extreme were denied seats on the federal bench. Bush has renominated them while Republicans still control Congress.

Disgraced majority leader Tom Delay, on his way out the door, expressed the true feelings of his fellow Republicans when he said, “It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle.”

A slicker defense of hostility to the public good can scarcely be imagined.

The elections are barely over, and I’m already tired of the media mouths who insist the Democrats must behave. Does anyone seriously believe Bush will change course simply because he’s wrong? The Senators and Representatives defeated on November 7 will do everything they can to prosecute the war against the United States before their terms expire. They have nothing to lose, a lot to gain, and no principles to stand in the way.

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Prohibiting Prohibition

2006-11-14T22:15:00.000-08:00

As a police officer in 1966, Norm Stamper, by his own account, enjoyed drug busts. He liked kicking down doors for a half a bag of marijuana or even a single seed. At the academy, he had learned the importance of drug arrests; and he worked hard to bump up the statistics.

“But after about fourteen months on the job, having had a principled prosecutor slap me upside the head and question my understanding of the Constitution, I began to understand that the seventeen or nineteen-year-old kid I had in the back seat of my police car was not a criminal at all.”

Forty years later, Stamper has a valuable and controversial perspective.

“I think the Drug War has been arguably the single most devastating, dysfunctional, harmful social policy since slavery.”
—Retired Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper

When the Nixon administration declared a War on Drugs three decades ago, Jack Cole was an undercover officer infiltrating groups of young people and college students. On weekends, when the kids were out of classes or off work, one of them might ask the others if they wanted to get high. Cole’s job was to ask that question if no one else did.

“If somebody simply passed a marijuana cigarette to me, they became a drug dealer. That hand-held marijuana cigarette would send that person to jail for seven years. Over a thousand young people went to jail as a direct result of what I did out there as one undercover agent, something that I’m certainly not proud of today.”
—Retired New Jersey State Police Lieutenant Jack Cole

The United States outlawed alcohol, and alcohol became a big money-maker for organized crime. Prohibition dramatically raised the level of violence on our streets as mobsters fought for control of the market. Our new prohibition, the drug war, has achieved the same result for a new generation of gangsters. Dealers don’t shoot their customers; they shoot other dealers. The innocent victims are the people who happen to get in the way of the bullets.

“Drug legalization is not to be construed as an approach to our drug problem. Drug legalization is about our crime and violence problem.”
—Retired Tonawanda Police Captain Peter Christ

Directly and indirectly, we all pay for the madness. The incarceration rate of black males in South Africa under apartheid in 1993 was 851 per 100,000. In the U.S. under drug prohibition in 2004, the incarceration rate was 4919 per 100,000. In many states, felons cannot vote; so the drug war is disproportionately disenfranchising the black community.

The huge amounts of money involved present the obvious potential for corruption of law enforcement. The huge number of arrests means more prisons, which has fueled a drive for privatization of prisons, which in turn has led to corporate influence in legislative and judicial processes. Private prisons hire lobbyists to push for mandatory minimum sentences to increase the prison population. We spend $69 billion on the Drug War every year, and we are nowhere near victory.

Syracuse city auditor Mitch Lewis studied the effectiveness of his city’s drug enforcement expenditures. He concluded that they weren’t effective.

“If we really want to improve our urban neighborhoods, the most important thing that we could do — the single most important thing that we could do — is end the war on drugs.”
—Syracuse City Auditor Mitch Lewis

Prohibition doesn’t work. It’s time to prohibit prohibition.

Want to learn more? Check out LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, at:

http://www.leap.cc/

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Reeling in the Net

2006-11-03T21:11:00.000-08:00

News, maps, entertainment, recipes, art, videos, music — all of this and more can be found on the internet. Increasingly, business is conducted on the internet; people use online banking services. And as electronic media merge, the internet will play an even greater role in our lives.

The core of electronic communication is the transmission lines, the wires that connect us. Those wires represent a basic system of our modern infrastructure, just as the interstate highway system links our cities, just as water and electrical utilities join individual homes into communities. Those same wires, however, represent a point of attack and control.

The past decade has seen a tremendous surge in media consolidation which has meant the end of thousands of small town newspapers and radio stations. Now, the phone and cable companies have their eyes on the next venue, the internet. There are proposals before Congress to give telephone and cable companies indirect control over the content of the internet by allowing them to create a two-tiered rate structure for information traveling the net.

We’ve been here before. There was a time when there were no oil pipelines, and railroads were the primary oil carriers. John D. Rockefeller’s company, Standard Oil, achieved preeminence through kickbacks to the railroad companies so they would charge higher rates for his competitors. A similar process led to the dominance of the Associated Press after the development of wire services.

For years, the telephone companies have stymied faster and more reliable public access to the internet. A decade ago, they were granted tax breaks and price hikes to finance a new fiber optic network. You’ve already paid for the network that they never built. Now they’re back, promising again to modernize the net — this time in exchange for control of it.

The stakes are high. The internet is not merely the conveyor of entertainment or financial services; it is the most powerful tool for advancing democracy since the invention of the printing press. The internet doesn’t merely bring the world into your home; it allows you to reach out to the world. Blogs and websites — right wing and left — have become such a force in political discourse that mainstream news outlets which once joked about the net now rely upon it. The scope of citizen participation may shift if net neutrality is not established.

What is net neutrality? Think of the electrical outlets in your home. They don’t discriminate between the appliances you use. The outlet in your kitchen works the same way for your toaster as it does for your microwave. Net neutrality means that the transmission facilities work the same for text traffic or videos, advertisements or emails.

The first effort to seize the net failed thanks to an outpouring of protest from groups across the political spectrum. Millions of Americans called, faxed, and emailed their representatives to support net neutrality. But with the coming elections and the possibility of a lame-duck Congress — and the certainty of a lame-duck President — the threat has grown more ominous. Outgoing Senators and Congressmen with nothing to lose and a lot to gain might well side with the telephone and cable companies. If they pass a bill ceding overall transmission control to a few big companies, is there any doubt that George Bush, Jr. will sign that bill?

The decisions made today will affect our society for decades to come. Don’t let politicians take the short view, and don’t assume they’ll do the right thing. The period from November to February may be critical to the future of media in this country. So call, write, fax, or email your representatives. Tell them you don’t want a variable rate program. Tell them the internet is a common carrier and should stay that way.

To learn more, watch “The Net at Risk”

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/net/index.html

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