ArticlesMar. week 2, 2005

Articles

(BACK)

Apology from Sen. Byrd unnecessary

By MOLLY IVINS, Creators Syndicate
March 8, 2005

AUSTIN, Texas — In the magical upside-down world of right-wing blogs, it is now an accepted article of faith that Sen. Robert Byrd compared George W. Bush to Hitler last week. Republicans are demanding an apology, many have taken to high dudgeon, and another pointless flapette is on.

Actually Byrd, a noted scholar of the Senate and its procedures, made an interesting speech opposing the "nuclear option" of cutting off Senate debate on judicial nominees. "Rumor has it there is a plot afoot in the Senate to curtail the right of extended debate in this hallowed chamber, not in accordance with its rules, mind you, but by fiat from the chair," said the elderly Byrd. He is also famed for his magniloquent speaking style, a splendid old-fashioned oratory known to older Americans who had to study rhetoric. Byrd tangentially mentioned Hitler, quoting historian Alan Bullock to make the following point:

"Hitler's originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the state: The correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal."

A point worth pausing over. Byrd went on to suggest the "nuclear option" ploy is similar in that it involves the same premise: If you can't win under the rules, you change the rules. Certainly a case of rhetorical overreach, but then, that is a hazard of public speaking.

The blogger Wonkette posted an amusing collection of Republican politicians comparing this, that and the other to Nazi Germany — a ruling on abortion, stem cell research, even the Kyoto protocol. In 2002, former Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas managed to find a tax bill like something "right out of Nazi Germany. I don't understand ... why all of a sudden we are passing laws that sound as if they are right out of Nazi Germany." Rhetorical overreach plagues many: George W. Bush once managed to invoke the tragic memory of 9-11 in aid of a capital gains tax cut.

Byrd's really quite thoughtful speech should appeal to conservatives with its emphasis on historical precedent, constitutional responsibilities, and the system of checks and balances. Byrd also made a spirited attack on Franklin D. Roosevelt for his misbegotten plan to "pack" the Supreme Court.

All of this was about Bush's decision to renominate 20 of his choices for the federal bench who never got a vote in his first term because of threatened filibusters. For some reason, Republicans have chosen to treat these rebuffs as though they were World War III, accusing Democrats of the dread "obstructionism." Their own record during the Clinton years of knocking off dozens of President Clinton's judicial nominees gives not the slightest pause.

The 20 retreads include some real dogs. One of these prizes is William G. Myers III, nominated for a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. His qualifications consist of having spent most of his adult life as a lobbyist for Western mining, timber and oil companies. Bush named him top lawyer in the Interior Department in 2001, apparently on the grounds that Myers once compared the federal government's management of federal lands to the tyranny of King George III.

Another gem is Janice Rogers Brown of California, nominated for the D.C. Court of Appeals, who described the New Deal as "the triumph of our socialist revolution" and praised an infamous line of Supreme Court cases from 1905 to 1937 striking down worker health and safety laws as infringing on the rights of business. (Of course your employer has a right to kill you — what are you, out of the mainstream?)

Still another prize in this package is Claude A. Allen, who believes abortion rights are causing genocide of black people. A supporter of abstinence education, Allen backed the administration's decision to remove information about condoms from the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control.

My personal fave is Priscilla Owen of the Texas Supreme Court, who is so far out that Alberto Gonzales once denounced one of her decisions as "an unconscionable act of judicial activism."

Then there's William Haynes, principal author and defender of the administration's dubious handling of several torture issues.

All in all, a lovely bunch of coconuts, with a collective record showing opposition to human rights, civil rights, abortion rights — pretty much everything but property rights.

Go, Byrd.

(BACK)

Presidential shell games

Jules Witcover

In his more than four years in the White House, he has shown himself to be the master of the old bait-and-switch: Offer the customers one thing, and when they nibble, peddle them something else.

The latest illustration of his political sleight of hand is his deceptive campaign to reform Social Security by allowing young and middle-age taxpayers to divert some of the payroll tax to stock market investment.

By admission of administration officials, the scheme would not address the solvency problem of Social Security, which Mr. Bush says will go "bankrupt" in 2018, or 2042, or 2052, depending on whose actuarial crystal ball is used.

The president declares the Social Security system to be in "crisis" when even in the narrow area of elderly care, a much more evident crisis exists in the Medicaid system.

The nation's governors, who descended on the White House a week ago, brought that information to him emphatically. They argued that his plan to cut federal funds for the state-operated supplementary health care program by $60 billion over 10 years would cripple it.

Unlike the federal administration, which can and does run up budget deficits like there's no tomorrow, most of the states are required to hold to a balanced budget each year. Dumping more of the Medicaid load onto them is the real crisis, they told the president.

This pattern of bait-and-switch - peddling "personal Social Security accounts" to taxpayers when solvency in the system is what needs to be addressed and low-balling the real crisis in Medicaid - has been a standard scam of this president and his administration. To wit:

The spectacle of this president repeatedly playing the bunco game with the American voter should come as no surprise. After all, as a candidate in 2000, he vowed in debate with Democratic nominee Al Gore that as president he would have no part in "nation-building," nor would the United States take on the job of the world's policeman.

He also pledged in 2000, and has reiterated the promise, that he would practice "compassionate conservatism." His fiscal 2006 budget, full of cuts in Medicaid, education, environmental protection and other programs, makes a mockery of the contention.

The old advice of John Mitchell, President Richard M. Nixon's attorney general, campaign manager and jailed conspirator in the Watergate crimes, remains valid today: "Watch what we do, not what we say."

Jules Witcover writes from The Sun's Washington bureau. His column appears Wednesdays and Fridays.

Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun

(BACK)

The Armageddon Nominee

Jim Lobe

March 07, 2005

In a breathtaking victory for right-wing hawks, President George W. Bush has nominated John Bolton—current undersecretary of state—to become his next ambassador to the United Nations.

Bolton, widely considered the most unilateralist and least diplomatic of senior U.S. officials during Bush's first term, will have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, where some Democrats—a few of whom were said to be stunned by the nomination—are expected to put up a fight.

One aide called the nomination "'incredible," particularly in light of recent indications—including his talks with European leaders at the end of last month—that Bush and his new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, intended to pursue a more multilateralist policy in his second term and was determined to smooth the rougher diplomatic edges of his foreign-policy team.

That notion had been bolstered by Rice's choice of Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, a longtime pragmatist and ''realist,'' as her deputy, despite Bolton's efforts—backed by Vice President Dick Cheney—to take the job.

The fact that he failed in his quest was taken as a clear sign that Rice was indeed moving toward a more multilateralist policy in defiance even of Cheney, the undisputed the leader of the coalition of aggressive nationalists, neoconservatives and Christian Right activists that dominated foreign policy from the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and the Pentagon until after the Iraq invasion.

Rice's acquiescence, (if not agreement) to allow Bolton to serve as her representative at the United Nations, however, will require foreign-policy analysts to reassess that judgement.

''This is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,'' said Heather Hamilton, vice president of programs for Citizens for Global Solutions (CGS), formerly the World Federalist Association. Hamilton called Bolton the ''Armageddon nominee."

The Armageddon allusion was to Bolton's longtime loyalty to former ultra-right Sen. Jesse Helms, who, upon retiring from public life, described Bolton as ''the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, if it should be my lot to be on hand for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in this world."

''His nomination sends the exactly the wrong message to the world about the Bush administration's willingness to work with other countries and in multilateral institutions. There's no one who has a greater track record of offending other countries, including our closest allies,'' Hamilton said.

Despite a round, bespectacled face, ruddy cheeks and a thick, drooping blonde moustache that give him an avuncular appearance, Bolton is known to be confrontational, combative and humorless.

He began excoriating evil in the Reagan administration when, despite a lack of experience in developing countries, he held a series of posts in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) before winding up as one of Attorney General Edwin Meese's top aides.

In that capacity, he resisted all efforts by Congress to investigate the Justice Department role in the Iran-Contra affair, as well as efforts by Sen. John Kerry to investigate drug and gun-running by the Nicaraguan contras in the mid-1980s.

His effectiveness gained him a promotion under President H.W. Bush to the position of assistant secretary of state for international organizations, a post he held until 1993 when he joined first the right-wing Manhattan Institute and then the neoconservative-dominated American Enterprise Institute (AEI), home to such prominent hawks as former UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle and Cheney's spouse, Lynne Cheney.

At a 1994 WFA panel discussion, Bolton asserted that, ''if the UN (secretariat) building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.''

By the time former Secretary of State James Baker tapped him to serve as a senior member of the G.W. Bush legal team in Florida after the 2000 election, Bolton had become senior vice president at AEI, a position he used during the latter half of the 1990s to speak out strongly in favor of fully normalizing ties with Taiwan—from which he had received money at the time, according to the Washington Post .

He also advocated withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and railed against ''nation building'' and international arms-control agreements. He viewed the United Nations and its Secretary General Kofi Annan as threats to U.S. sovereignty. At one point, Bolton suggested simply halting U.S. payments to the world body.

Bolton is also a longtime activist in the Federalist Society, an association of right-wing, nationalistic lawyers who have been particularly opposed to the application of international or foreign law in their decisions—a practice that they say threatens U.S. sovereignty. The Society is also strongly opposed to non-governmental organizations that seek the adoption of international law and standards in the United States. Along with AEI, the Society sponsors ''NGOWatch'' which seeks to expose such efforts, as well as the funding sources of NGOs that take such positions.

Given Bolton's history of far-right positions, Secretary of State Colin Powell was reported to have been deeply skeptical of Bolton when Cheney suggested him for the undersecretary position. Cheney, however, insisted.

But within just a few months, it became clear that Bolton was far more in tune with the neoconservative hawks around Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Pentagon hawks than with Powell's relatively moderate positions and demeanor.

In the summer of 2001, he shocked foreign delegations and non-governmental organizations at the UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons when he announced that Washington would oppose any attempt to regulate the trade in firearms or non-military rifles or any other effort that would "abrogat (e) the constitutional right to bear arms."

He played a similar role several months later when, amid the public shock that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the anthrax scare, Bolton single-handedly sabotaged a UN meeting to forge an international verification protocol designed to put teeth into a treaty on bioweapons. When he had finished, he reportedly told his colleagues, ''It's dead, dead, dead, and I don't want it coming back from the dead.''

Within the State Department, Bolton led the drive to renounce the U.S. signature on the 1998 Rome Statute that created the new International Criminal Court—the first permanent tribunal with jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. When Bush decided to withdraw the U.S. signature to the treaty, Bolton prevailed on Powell to permit him to sign the formal notification to Annan, an act he later described to the Wall Street Journal as "the happiest moment of my government service."

At the same time, Bolton was also engaged in a lengthy argument with U.S. intelligence agencies over his public charge that Cuba had an offensive biological warfare program. His assertion became an embarrassment after anonymous intelligence officials and retired senior military officers—including the former head of the U.S. Southern Command—told the media that no such evidence existed and charged that Bolton was politicizing intelligence.

In July 2003, Bolton was poised to testify to Congress that Syria's alleged programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction had developed to such an extent that they threatened regional stability, an assertion that reportedly provoked a ''revolt'' by U.S. intelligence analysts, who insisted that the evidence did not warrant such a conclusion.

Powell frequently complained to those closest to him that Bolton was undercutting him and appeared to be taking orders from Cheney and the Pentagon, rather than from his State Department superiors.

In a speech in Seoul that same month, for example, just as Pyongyang agreed to enter multilateral talks on its nuclear program as the administration had demanded, Bolton described life in North Korea as a ''hellish nightmare,'' and accused its leader, Kim Jong Il, of being a ''dictator'' or ''tyrant'' running a ''dictatorship'' or ''tyranny'' no less than a dozen times.

Some U.S. and Asian analysts said the speech appeared designed to provoke Kim to boycott the meeting. Indeed, the North Korean media described Bolton as ''rude human scum'' and a ''bloodthirsty vampire'' and demanded that he be withdrawn from the delegation that was to take part in the talks.

Bolton indeed did not show up. But, if Bush now gets his way, he will soon find himself at the heart of all U.S. multilateral diplomacy.

Jim Lobe writes for Inter Press Service, an international newswire, and for Foreign Policy in Focus, a joint project of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the New Mexico-based International Relations Center.

(BACK)

What rise in freedom?

By Robert Kuttner  

FREEDOM IS breaking out all over, so it seems. To hear supporters of George W. Bush, it's all due to the president's courageous decision to risk his presidency on the Iraq War.

Here's the storyline: Just as Bush's neoconservative advisers planned, ousting Saddam transformed not just Iraq but the balance of power in the Middle East. It gave ordinary Arabs and Muslims a sense of democratic possibility. Once Saddam went down, the other dominoes started falling.

Just read the headlines: Syria, respecting America's new muscle, is thrown off balance. Lebanon, long Syria's puppet, is demanding liberty. Egypt's despotic president (and US client) Hosni Mubarak is suddenly promising fair elections. Saudi Arabia's local elections are more authentic than usual. On the Palestine-Israel front, there's suddenly progress. Iran is negotiating about shutting down its nukes. And in Iraq itself, the process may be a mess but something real is happening.

Wow! If this picture is true, let's nominate George W. Bush for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The only trouble is, the picture isn't true.

For starters, each of these events has its own dynamics. The new Israel-Palestine reality reflects the death of Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon's decision to seize the moment, defy his party, and do a ''Nixon to China" by dismantling some Israeli settlements in Arab lands. This shift has nothing to do with Bush or Iraq. Indeed, the Bush administration has been less active in promoting a Palestine settlement than any in memory. (Watch out, when Fidel Castro finally dies and democracy comes to Cuba, Bush will take credit for that, too.)

Saudi Arabia remains a dictatorship and an intimate ally of the Bush administration. The prospect of genuine democracy breaking out there soon is laughable. Egypt, a place where the CIA sends highly sensitive prisoners to be tortured, is a similar story. If Iran is negotiating about its nuclear ambitions, it is thanks to European diplomacy and over US objections.

Lebanon's instability dates to the 1920s, when the French split it off from Syria as a Christian enclave. The French formula gave the Lebanese Christian Maronites power over what soon became a larger Muslim majority. The consequences: on-and-off civil war and Syrian protectorate of Muslims. Lebanon is reminiscent of other colonial legacies in places like Rwanda, Vietnam, India, and Iraq, where Western powers played brutal ethnic games of divide and rule. The United States has tried to intervene in Lebanon before and each time got its fingers burned.

What the whole Mideast region has in common is a sense of bottled-up popular grievances, many of them directed against the United States for propping up dictators that served American military and corporate interests (including, once, Saddam Hussein).

If genuine democracy breaks out, Bush might not like it. Al-Jazeera, the Arab world's mirror image of Fox News, is the closest thing to free Arab language media -- and the Bush administration keeps trying to strangle it. By the same token, the eventual government that emerges in Baghdad is not likely to be both genuinely democratic and pro-American.

But Bush is right that people everywhere want to be free. However, the fitful expansion of democracy has been more the fruit of local struggle and complex diplomacy than American military intervention. That's true of South Africa, where Bush's pals viewed Nelson Mandela as an untrustworthy Marxist; it's true of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, the Czech Republic, and the rest of the former Soviet empire.

Often, astute diplomacy and civil society initiatives work where invasions can't. The little-remembered Helsinki Process of the 1970s traded a US guarantee of no Western-sponsored ''regime change" in the Soviet bloc for Moscow's loosening of the screws. Civil society blossomed. American conservatives hated the deal. But before the Russians knew it, the Berlin Wall came down.

Bush is also right that democracy is contagious. As Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in The New Yorker after the Iraqis managed to hold an election, ''One can marvel at the power of the democratic idea. . . . Perhaps it can even survive the fervent embrace of George W. Bush."

So, rather than rejecting his odd embrace of universal freedom, let's hold Bush to his words. Let's have no double standards for despotic allies of convenience. Let's not manipulate other people's democracies behind the scenes. And if democracy is good enough for Iraqis, let's defend what Bush has not yet wrecked of democracy at home.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe

'What Democrats are up against in today's GOP'
By Gene Lyons, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Many Democrats still don't grasp what they're up against in today's Republican Party. Naive souls, they prefer to see national politics as a giant PTA meeting, and to comfort themselves with civics text bromides about the virtues of compromise and bipartisanship. Even in the face of the Clinton impeachment and the naked power play that decided the 2000 presidential election, they have trouble comprehending the sheer ruthlessness of the GOP political juggernaut. This is nothing new. Even during FDR's presidency, Will Rogers joked that he belonged to no organized political party: He was a Democrat. Today, however, the party simply must learn to effectively counter the well-organized army of think-tank, opinion page and cable TV propagandists who parrot the GOP party line, no matter how illogical or preposterous.

In effect, organizations like FOX News, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, Rush Limbaugh and right-wing talk radio are simply adjuncts of the Republican Party. To this add scores of Washington pundits often employed by tycoon-financed "think tanks" such as the American Heritage Institute, Cato Foundation, etc. For all the braying about "liberal media bias," which may be the most successful GOP "spin point," Democrats simply have no equivalent propaganda machine.

Unlike Democrats, typically all over the place, Republican-oriented pundits agree almost all the time--and not just substantively, but tactically, too. Faxes and e-mails go out from the Republican National Committee, and GOP sophists jump into line like the Rockettes.

According to David Brock, the onetime Republican "hit man" whose book, "The Republican Noise Machine," explains exactly how the system works, the White House's "explicit goal is to get us to the point where there are blue [state] facts and red [state] facts."

Judging by my e-mail, it's working. Hardly a day passes that I don't hear from perfectly decent, intelligent citizens who believe that there's proof Saddam's WMD were smuggled into Syria or that documents implicating him in 9/11 have been found. This was Orwell's great fear: that the very concept of objectivity would disappear from political discourse. "Collective solipsism," he called it; the ability to convince people that 2 + 2 = 5.

A few recent examples:

George W. Bush nominates a black woman as secretary of state, and pundits who have spent their careers decrying "political correctness" argue as one that Democrats opposing her must be hypocritical bigots.

He nominates for attorney general a guy who rationalized torture, and that man's ethnicity, too, becomes his only necessary credential. Only after Alberto Gonzales is confirmed by the Senate do some GOP pundits rediscover their consciences.

A former male escort infiltrates the White House press corps via the buddy system, and the very pundits who just months ago warned that Democrats would enshrine the "homosexual agenda" go silent. Or they pretend not to understand the difference between a gay reporter and a gay prostitute. No fatwa issues from radical clerics like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson; James Dobson keeps railing about the imagined sexual proclivities of a cartoon sponge.

What do such examples tell us? First, that neither the Bush White House nor most GOP pundits actually give a flying filigree about "political correctness," " family values, "" moral clarity" or any of it. What counts is winning. What counts is power.

One more example: Last week, I wrote that Howard Dean, recently elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, appears capable of giving his party a wake-up call because he's scrappy, smart and fearless. Hence, the GOP party line on Dean is that he's a snobbish elitist and an advocate of cultural decadence. Also crazy, because, as we all know, anybody who sees through Bush must be consumed by anger and hatred.

A GOP columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette took offense. On cue, he described Dean supporters as "shrill," " radical-left" "wacko," etc. "[W] hen Dean bemoans the success of Republican appeals on ' God, guns and gays, '" the fellow chided, "he forgets that most Americans still believe in God, don't want gay marriage and do want to keep their guns." Now anybody dumb enough to think Dean (or any American politician) has declared himself anti-God quit reading long ago. But it's a fact that Dean was the only Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 to get an A rating from the National Rifle Association. He jokes that Vermont has only two gun laws: You can't take a gun to school, and you can't carry a loaded gun in a car because it's unfair to deer. As Vermont governor, Dean opposed gay marriage. "Marriage is between a man and a woman," he said. "... Most Americans aren't going to support gay marriage, but most Americans will support equal rights." Know what? I'd wager that my antagonist, a college professor, knew all that. (I'd also entertain a side bet that this particular left-wing elitist owns more firearms than he does.) But in the fashion of Republican pundits everywhere, he played his audience for suckers.

Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

Copyright (c) 2005 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc.

(BACK)

More War Crimes

By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

Let me paint a word picture. An unarmed, wounded American soldier is lying helpless, bleeding and barely conscious on the floor of a church in a country with which the US is at war. An armed soldier of that country walks up to the wounded American. It so happens that a TV cameraman is present.

He films the foreign soldier shouting, "He's fucking faking he's dead!" One of his comrades says "And he's breathing". The first soldier again yells "He's faking he's fucking dead!" He then kills the helpless, wounded man with a burst of fire that blows his head off and spatters the room with blood and tiny bits of flesh and bone. One of the foreign soldiers says "He's dead, now."

Question One: What do you think the reaction of most of the American people would be to the murder of a wounded, unarmed US soldier lying helpless and barely conscious on the floor of a church in a foreign land?

Question Two: What was the reaction of most of the American people to the murder of a wounded, unarmed Iraqi lying helpless and barely conscious on the floor of a mosque in his own country?

First Answer: Shrieking outrage and demands for the foreigner to be tried and executed, whichever came first.
Second Answer: Unconcern.

The dialogue about faking it came from a CBS tape of a US soldier killing an Iraqi prisoner. The whole thing was recorded. It is undeniable that the crime was committed. The clips of the murder were played worldwide on television - except for the actual killing, because that was thought too vile, even for a television audience accustomed to the most explicitly horrible murder scenes. And nobody has dared take a poll as to how many Americans approve of the murder. Most TV reports called it "an incident", and it has dropped out of sight because, to put it bluntly, an American life is considered to be worth more than an Iraqi life. To many millions of Americans, the marine who murdered the helpless man is a hero. If you doubt this, please read on.

Think about another 'incident', when a squad of US soldiers opened fire on a car travelling along the Baghdad-Airport road on March 4, killing an Italian official. The lies began at once, and there is no point in describing what happened because the truth as told by eyewitnesses has already been denied by the military, and the official version will be accepted by much of the US media. It is not surprising that the media will toe the official line, as most of their readers and viewers automatically doubt what they are told by foreign or independent US sources (not that there are many of the latter, these days), and are uncomfortable with anything that smacks of criticism of US soldiers. This is because such criticism is considered unpatriotic and unforgivable, even if it is justified by first-hand evidence of brutality or murder. And if audiences are unhappy about what appears in the media, advertisers will be even more unhappy and will withdraw their business. In short: mainstream news cover in the US is directed by two major factors: advertising revenue and its precursor, audience prejudice. And advertisers get their financial messages from some very unpleasant bigots.

These are people like the beauty who commented on the killing of the Italian official and the wounding of the Italian journalist he was escorting to freedom (that's Bush freedom: it comes with free shrapnel wounds) as follows:

"Too bad the US troops didn't shoot her in the head and been done with trouble making people like her . . . Posted by bpb901 March 5."

We only have to look at the deranged outpourings on right wing blogs to realize there are millions of Americans who feel exactly the same way as bpb901. He or she is not in any way unusual. Unhinged and demented, yes ; badly in need of urgent mental treatment, certainly ; but out of the ordinary: no. (Bear in mind that The Economist of March 5-11 noted the uncomfortable statistic that "about one in five Americans now suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder".)
Think back to the 'incident' in January at Tal Afar in which US soldiers killed the mother and father of six kids.
Getty Images photographer Chris Hondros was there. He described the shambles like this:

"We have a car coming," someone called out as we entered an intersection. We could see the car about a 100 meters away. The car continued coming; I couldn't see it anymore from my perch but could hear its engine now, a high whine that sounded more like acceleration than slowing down. It was maybe 50 yards away now. "Stop that car!" someone shouted out, seemingly simultaneously with someone firing what sounded like warning shots -- a staccato, measured burst. The car continued coming. And then, perhaps less than a second later, a cacophony of fire, shots rattling off in a chaotic, overlapping din . . . . From the sidewalk I could see into the bullet-mottled windshield more clearly. The driver of the car, a man, was penetrated by so many bullets that his skull had collapsed, leaving his body grotesquely disfigured. A woman also lay dead in the front . . . the children continued to wail and scream, huddled against a wall, sandwiched between soldiers either binding their wounds or trying to comfort them . . . the teenaged girl kept shouting, "Why did they shoot us? We have no weapons! We were just going home!"

We know about the killing of the father and mother of six kids because a photographer was there and we've seen his evidence. Same for the murder of the wounded prisoner. And we know about the killing of the Italian official because there is a high-profile former hostage still alive to tell us what really happened. But if these 'incidents' had not involved independent witnesses we would have been told nothing about them. They would have gone unrecorded, as have unknown numbers of similar atrocities in and around many cities. The Washington Post of 7 March says US officials "have declined to estimate how many civilians . . . have been killed accidentally by US forces at checkpoints or elsewhere in Iraq" This is no surprise, because although countless Iraqis have been killed by being sprayed with bullets by delinquent troops, the stories recounted by Iraqi witnesses of these terrible events are ignored. There are many people with the mentality of the moron who wrote "Too bad the US troops didn't shoot her in the head and been done with trouble making people like her . . .", and none of them would for an instant condemn the murder of a helpless prisoner by a heroic marine. Neither would they be critical of the gallant troops who wiped out the parents of six children. It is a terrible thing to say, but it must be said: there are millions of Americans who would and do applaud these murders. In the case of the Italian murder, however, they seem to be a bit out of step with their hero, the deranged Bush.

Bush and Rumsfeld have grovelled to Italy's crooked prime minister, Berlusconi, because their troops murdered an Italian citizen and wounded another. There was a phone call of apology from Air Force One to Rome the moment the news broke, and the Bush media machine trotted out the usual garbage about the car being attacked "by coalition forces". (This phrase is used by the Bush people to try to avoid acknowledgement that US troops have been criminally incompetent yet again.) Bush spoke to Berlusconi "to express his regret about the incident that occurred earlier today," and to assure "prime minister Berlusconi that the incident will be fully investigated." But there is never an investigation of the murder of Iraqis. To the US military and to millions of tragically disturbed Americans they are non-persons.

Iraqi lives do not matter. Just as in Hitler's Germany the Nazis referred to various sections of the population (Jews, gypsies and other 'antisocial elements') as the "untermenschen" -- the sub-humans -- so do US troops and the crazed bigots who bay for blood refer to Iraqis as "ragheads" -- the sub-humans. The Nazi regime was founded and fostered by people who thought along the lines of "Too bad the US troops didn't shoot her in the head and been done with trouble making people like her . . .". If people are trouble-makers, well, don't try to live with them ; don't try to understand them ; don't try to treat them as human beings: just shoot them. Or torture them. Or both.

What the hell? The reasoning is that they are different to the superior people and therefore they should not be allowed to exist.

The attitude of millions of Americans is exactly that of the German supporters of fascism in the 1930s and early 1940s. They were encouraged to think of themselves as the Master Race and there were whole nations whose populations could be treated as inferiors, and they took pride in doing just that. The present wave of hysterical intolerance in the US makes the McCarthy years of persecution look benign, because the idea has been planted by Bush and his people that US citizens are superior in every possible way. There can be no admission of frailty, and no acceptance of equality. International law and treaties are ignored or treated with contempt, and human dignity has become irrelevant. Hysterical ultra-nationalism is thriving and gathering pace.

The director of the slippery slope to totalitarianism has beckoned his citizens, and they are responding with enthusiasm to his encouragement. War crimes are being committed by US troops and spooks on an extraordinary scale all round the world, but the biggest war crime is taking place in Washington: it is the twisting of the minds of the American people.

Brian Cloughley writes on military and political affairs. He can be reached through his website www.briancloughley.com

(BACK)

Blessings in Disguise

Voltaire was not a man of faith. He claimed that he prayed only once to God: "Oh. Lord, make my enemies ridiculous."

This prayer, Voltaire tells us wryly, was granted.

Freedom-loving, republic-preserving, excess in government-combating optimists in America have been similarly blessed.

Our enemies are again made ridiculous. The latest outrage might be the Bush appointment of neocon bully John Bolton as Negroponte’s replacement at the United Nations.

Arguably, this appointment is no worse than the outrage of Central American mobster John Negroponte as America’s representative to the United Nations and the president’s representative to 23 million occupied Iraqis.

Or is President Bush outdoing another of his outrageous outrages – that of appointing John Bolton to do arms control at the State Department in the first place?

Some see this as the continued rise of the neocons. But it looks to be just one more example of a pathetic and bankrupt George Walker Bush weakly showing gratitude for past neocon infusions of noble "missions" and counterfeit "courage."

Of course, to rational people, rewarding neoconservative policy failures and ideological idiocy seems unthinkable – mistakes and violation of the Constitution and other laws should be punished, the low and lying performers fired. But rational people miss the wondrous point of the Bush presidency.

It begins in the mind of poor George Walker Bush, and his life up to and including Texas governor. A morally impoverished Connecticut born and educated "Texan" with political bloodlines but no commitment to true conservatism, simmering with resentment of his Poppy and burning with embarrassment for one too many business failures, Dubya was a dream come true for neo-conservatism – a populist born-again Christian with instant political name recognition, and yet as intellectually and morally hollow as a dry well.

Until George was adopted by the neocons, he had no identifiable sense of mission or moral courage. For neo-conservatism, Dubya was the missing link. Here was mainstream acceptance, credibility, a promise of neocon dreams of transforming the Middle East into a vast security buffer for Israel, American oil, and the necessary Balkanization of aspiring Middle Eastern nation states, some increasingly uppity in their politics and economic perspectives.

Prior to his adoption by the neoconservative horde, George was the bad seed in a family that already seemed as troubled, lawless and whacked-out as any we might enjoy on reality television.

Like reality television, the entertainment is staged, and so is the neocon persistence in Washington. Staged, I mean. The show is just beginning.

The impossibility of intelligence reform – where ego driven mediocrities like Porter Goss reach the pinnacle of their career only to find the hours are long and that John Negroponte stands in his way at every turn – is another blessing God has granted those who love our vulnerable Republic. Trust that they will devour each other and the sounds of ripping flesh in the anterooms of the oval office will be music to the ears of those who suspect the politicization of intelligence is out of control.

Wolfowitz at the World Bank when that house of cards comes fluttering down? It couldn’t happen to a better guy. Global anti-Americanism compounded by extreme and unbacked American debt to those that do not enjoy our company, no longer buy anything we make, and don’t fear a military emasculated by morally festering occupations and cowardly senior leadership – I’d say the U.S., er…World Bank is in for some fun. Things have changed from the glory days of Bretton Woods and petro-dollar gluts. Who are we to begrudge such joy to Wolfie? Can no one rid us of this turbulent priest of neo-conservatism? Indeed, the most loyal insiders will have done exactly that by sending the logic-impaired empire maker from the Pentagon into the doomed World Bank

Bolton at the UN seems hideous. But in the run up to the midterm elections – where so many conservatives and the Republican Party have already awakened to the present and future disaster of the radical Bush presidency – its assault on the taxpayer, the military, the Republic, other countries, its disregard for the bill of rights, State’s rights, and citizen’s rights. The UN – or rather having the UN to kick – is of huge political importance. The UN exists to be shunted, admonished, ignored – and what better man that Bolton to do it? Bolton will serve Bush well – by helping shift the 2006 Republican voter blame for all the failed Bush foreign policy and much of his domestic policy to other known "evil" entities.

It is sheer genius to send Bolton the Unbearable to the UN – where he will be sabotaged every moment, in a million invisible ways, even as he sleeps. More importantly, Bolton as influential neocon is done for by the very irrelevance of the UN to Bush policy development.

Consider the coming Goss-Negroponte festival of bloody backstabbing, the immense financial catastrophe waiting like smoldering coals for the blast of hot air that is Paul Wolfowitz, and the irrelevant-by-definition United Nations serving the far higher purpose of driving an already marginally sane John Bolton into muttering madness.

We are indeed greatly blessed.

Here's a link to an archive of Karen's work: http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski-arch.html

(BACK)

March 9, 2005

Because in life, there comes a time,
When one must fight, and one must climb,
When we must rise and take a stand,
Or leave our butt prints in the sand.
~~author unknown

It's time.

Before this obscene, gaping hole gets any deeper, it's time we convinced the media to stop digging. As someone once said...and said...and said -- time is not on our side. Storm clouds are gathering on the dashboard of our democracy. We must act, sooner rather than later -- before we are faced with sudden horror like we've never known before. I couldn't agree more, because when you consider the media horror show of the last four years, it could get hairy out there unless we wake up, stand up, and do something about it...

It's time we told the media it's either them -- or us. We need to pass them by, boycott their advertisers, protest them -- shake them until their teeth rattle. It's time we realized there is no entity more to blame for the mess we're in nor for the needless loss of life than our shameless and treasonous media. The media is even more obscene than Bush and the glowering, power-mad warmongers who surround him in both his administration and in his Congress.

Face it. Bush gets away with murder for just one reason -- because the media allows it, encourages it, and spends big bucks producing it. Bush's war-on-evildoers-turned-war-on-terror-turned-regime-change-turned-crusade- for-freedom-and-democracy is a media-orchestrated production, complete with banners, flag backdrops, bells and whistles. In case you haven't noticed what the rest of the world knew at the outset -- the illusion of Bush as a strong, principled leader is also a media creation. Totally.

It is folly to think we can continue to sit on our butts and there will be no day of reckoning for the total breakdown of fundamental journalistic principles. I hate to keep dragging poor Walter Williams, the first University of Missouri Journalism dean, across these pages like some old worn-out "Weekend at Bernie's" skit, but the Journalist's Creed Williams wrote a century ago still applies today, and is a clear statement of journalistic ethics. Williams fervently believed that journalists were totally -- and only -- trustees for the public, and that anything less than accuracy and fairness in reporting the news was betrayal. He believed that suppressing or ignoring news that might embarrass the powerbrokers is indefensible.

Betrayal. Indefensible betrayal.

If Williams had an idealistic vision of what journalism should be, John Swinton, former Chief of Staff at the New York Times, was more realistic about what the business of journalism really is. In a confession before the New York Press Club, Swinton said --

"The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

Corporate giants such as Time-Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, Viacom, General Electric, and Vivendi own all media in this country; therefore, they own everything we see, hear, feel, smell or touch. They are our sensory masters. If it were not so, we would rise up against the racuous, political-agendae-driven, circle-jerk speculation by paid political activists that passes for today's news.

It's time we woke up and realized that not everyone who "journals" is a journalist, especially in the electronic media, and most notably on cable TV. Can you imagine the consternation of folks like Fox's Greta Van Susteren and CNN's Jeffery Toobin, attorneys who abandoned their law careers for the bright lights, if each were handed a pair of scissors and a jug of glue and told to "cut and paste" their transcripts, uh, after they pounded them out on manual typewriters?

How long would CNN's resident brain surgeon, Dr. Sonjay Gupta, last as a full-time "journalist" if Americans stopped dieting, refused a breakfast of Total cereal, and boycotted Walgreen's? Thanks to CNN, Dr. Gupta will save us a trip to the hospital -- he will come right into our homes and perform the lobotomies.

"Mainstream media" is the mother of all oxymorons. To really appreciate "fair and balanced" in action, see Robert Greenwald's "Outfoxed." Aside from daily humdrum chores of cleaning up George Bush's tortured rhetoric and rewriting quoted material to reflect what Bush meant to say rather than what he actually said -- aside from covering up or completely ignoring critical matters such as a revengeful White House leak blowing the cover of a covert CIA agent and endangering the lives of contacts throughout the world, a stolen election, a teetering economy, the unconstitutional silencing of an FBI translator, billions of taxpayers' dollars missing in Iraq, rampant abuse and torture of prisoners, the cruel abandonment of veterans -- the media continue to whoop it up in one huge journalistic Karaoke gig. There seems to be no end to their capacity to embarrass themselves by singing along to the propaganda track furnished them by the White House.

The entire mainstream media apparatus appears to be in "stand down" mode, much like NORAD was on the morning of September 11, 2001. With malice aforethought they ignore the destructive blips on their news screens, knowing full well the majority of Americans will not venture beyond what they are told to believe. Most Americans have no idea of what is actually going on in the world, either at home or abroad. Most accept without question Bush's recent pronouncement during his news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin --

"I live in a transparent country. I live in a country where decisions made by government are wide open and people are able to call people to me (sic) to account, which many out here do on a regular basis. Our laws and the reasons we have laws on the books are perfectly explained to people," he said. "Every decision we make is within the Constitution of the United States. We have a constitution that we uphold."

Think about that. Think about it while you're waiting for the media to report that policemen across this country are "tasering" our children in classrooms to shock them into submission -- zapping the elderly in nursing homes to keep them docile and obedient, handcuffing students and dragging them off to jail for wearing "anti-American" peace symbols on their T-shirts. Think about it while you're reading the repressive Patriot Acts I and II that literally strip the Bill of Rights from the US Constitution that Bush says he is so proud to uphold.

You'll have time to think, and to read, if you're waiting for the media to report that many veterans are being stripped of their pay and benefits, are being charged for food while lying wounded in hospitals, and are being charged a fee (tax) for their health coverage. You'll have plenty of time to think before the media breaks the news that, just last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was hit with a lawsuit in an Illinois federal court charging him with being directly responsible for the torture and abuse of detainees in US military custody. The lawsuit, far from being frivolous, was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First on behalf of eight men who were subject to such treatment and, if there is a God, Rumsfeld will be convicted of violating that most "quaint" of documents, the US Constitution, as well as federal statutes and international law.

Those who don't read foreign media will never know that the International Criminal Tribunal for Iraq (ICTI) this week found both Bush and Tony Blair guilty of a series of charges, and found they deserve life sentences for war crimes and genocide in Iraq.

Kohki Abe, a professor of law at Tokyo's Kanagawa University, said Bush and Blair should face the "maximum penalty available." He added that they should have been tried in the International Criminal Court, but admitted that, for "political reasons," they would not be prosecuted. Abe explained the ICTI had been set up so that acts such as those Bush and Blair are guilty of "do not go past without the criminals behind them being tried."

Like all thuggish bullies, George Bush, who is ever more deluded by both his senses and his judgment, is getting so full of himself he's itching for a new fight. Like he told a cheering crowd at the National Defense University this week, "We will fight the enemy, we will lift the shadows of fear and lead free nations to victory. No matter how long it takes." So, Bush is back on the hunt, and he says ironically that he will topple "tyrants who don't respect the rules of warfare..."

The darkness is closing around us. If ever there was a time in our history for the media to just do the right thing -- that time is NOW. It's time the media faced the fact that, sooner or later, Bush will pick a fight with someone who's capable of fighting back, and then ratings and profits won't matter. When that mushroom cloud hits the fan, it will affect us all, and it will be too late to do anything about it.

And nothing will remain but our butt prints in the sand.

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma freelance writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at rsamples@sirinet.net

© 2005 Sheila Samples