Ball & Jax

Did McCain get Iraqis killed?

2007-04-06T22:26:00.000-06:00

Remember John McCain's little stroll through a Baghdad market last week?

BAGHDAD, April 1 (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain toured a Baghdad market on Sunday and said afterwards the American people were not being told the "good news" about the war in Iraq.

McCain, a strong supporter of President George W. Bush's plan to send nearly 30,000 more troops as part of his new strategy in Iraq, said the media had a responsibility to report both the positive and the negative in the four-year-old war that is growing increasingly unpopular in the United States.

Reporters in Iraq say they don't show good news because the terrorists then kill the people they report on. And sure enough, I saw this item today in a news recap from Iraq.

The latest massacre of Iraqi children came as 21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital. The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.

So did McCain get 21 people killed for a photo-op? If this news gets any play, and it is likely to given the flap over his statements, he will be accused of negligence at least.

How much responsibility does he bear, and how does this bear on his presidential aspirations?

Clinton Says Bush Has No Authority ‘To Do Anything With Respect to Iran.’ Too bad she is wrong.

2007-03-15T17:36:00.000-06:00

In an interview with Think Progress, Senator Hillary Clinton said:

Well, I think that the President should not assume that he has any authority to do anything with respect to Iran. He needs to come to the Congress, and neither the resolution regarding Afghanistan or Iraq give him authority to take offensive action.

That's tough talk, but not founded in law. The section of the US Code that is known as the War Powers Resolution limits the President's ability to initiate hostilities thusly:

(c) Presidential executive power as Commander-in-Chief; limitation

The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to

(1) a declaration of war,

(2) specific statutory authorization, or

(3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.

And in fact, the administration recently tried to make the case than Iran is attacking our troops:

The long-awaited Baghdad briefing had plenty of props. There were two tables stacked with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, a PowerPoint slide show and, perhaps most importantly, a particularly nasty weapon known as an EFP, or explosively formed penetrator.

A trio of American military officials led the show. Their mission: rolling out the administration’s case that Iran is supporting attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.

While this didn't play well, and the administration backed off of its claims, the charge has been laid and can be repeated often enough to give the President cause to start bombing Iran. While each charge may be discredited later, the bombs will have already fallen. Besides, the Iranians are undeniably meddling in Iraq, lending plausibility to the allegations.

This highlights the problems Congress faces in preventing an attack on Iran. By design of the Framers, the Executive is able to act more quickly than the Legislature. Most of the time this is a good thing, but when a President wants a war, he tends to get it. As a rule, Congress can only react to his policies.

Which brings us back to Senator Clinton. More than any other member of Congress, she should understand this reality. After all, as First Lady, she was party to military interventions in Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Kosovo, none of which were authorized by Congress, all of which were deemed legal.

I bring this up not simply to bash Ms. Clinton for this contradiction, but to raise an important question about her as a Presidential candidate.

She puts forth a more hawkish countenance than her Democratic rivals, refusing to call her 1992 vote on the Iraq authorization of force a mistake, and not ruling out the use of force against Iran. As we should know by now, a President's view of Executive war making power is of vital importance to the nation's welfare.

So which is it for Hillary: the philosophy of Congressional participation she advocates now, or the unilateral interventionism of her husband's presidency?

How about the other Presidential candidates? What are their views?

Shouldn't we know this before we vote?

Old Gimlet Eye rides again - The Plot To Seize The White House

2007-03-15T17:32:00.000-06:00

As I write this, I have on my desk a copy of Jules Archer's classic account of the 1930's fascist conspiracy, allegedly backed by prominent corporate leaders, to overthrow FDR and prevent the enactment of his New Deal.

Out of print since shortly after the hardback edition was published in 1973, this amazing book is available again for a reasonable price. The hardback edition is quite scarce and sells for hundreds of dollars. Rumor has it that the DuPont family, implicated in the plot, bought and destroyed many copies.

I read this book years ago, and found it to be a quick, engrossing read. Not only does it succinctly outline the events of the day, providing concrete evidence that not all Americans support our form of government, but it provides a biography of an American original - the hero of this true story, Smedley Darlington Butler.

Known as "Old Gimlet Eye" to his troops, the two time Medal of Honor awardee was the pride of the Marine Corps, and a combat tested leader who commanded from the front lines. He served from 1898 to 1931, in Cuba during the war with Spain, China during Boxer Rebellion, Honduras, Nicaragua, Veracruz, Haiti, France in WWI, and back to China in the late 1920's. He was even loaned to the city of Philadelphia in 1924, at the behest of President Calvin Coolidge, serving as Director of Public Safety to fight rampant corruption and racketeering.

After retiring at the rank of Major General, he was a popular public speaker and veteran's advocate, foiled the aforementioned plot, and wrote a forgotten polemic on war profiteering, the prescient War is a Racket.

I don't know if, after all these years, a new printing will propel this piece of history to wider circulation or not, but I feel it is a story we as Americans dare not forget. Rather, we should spread far and wide the story of Old Gimlet Eye and the debt of gratitude we owe his memory.

I also posted this at E.ThePeople for increased Googlage.

Spooky - The decline of George W. Bush

2007-02-01T11:27:00.000-07:00

I've been around long enough to experience the slow decline of aging, but the following video about President Bush (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan), is somewhat alarming.

There could be any number of reasons, and I agree with Sullivan that pre-senile dementia isn't the likeliest. But I have to admit his public speaking has gone seriously downhill. I remember a while back replaying his speech to Congress after 9/11 on the White House website, and being struck how much better he spoke then, but I wrote it off as good preparation for a speech he cared deeply about.

It's well known that the Presidency wears on Presidents, and in times of trouble the toll is greater. Consider Abraham Lincoln in May of 1860 and then in April of 1865. There are plenty of other examples in the historical record.

I know that many of the President's detractors will seize upon this as evidence of the deterioration of an alcoholic or the result of youthful drug abuse, and call more loudly for his removal. I expect that his defenders will respond with stinging denunciations of the left's blind hatred and unpatriotic fervor. Such is the state of the partisan divide today.

As usual the partisans miss the point, arguing starboard versus port while the ship sinks.

As the President goes, so goes the nation. It's in all of our best interests for the President to do well! If Mr. Bush is merely distracted by the pressures of his office, and it only manifests itself in his formal speeches, it's one thing. But if he is diminished mentally, to the point of negatively affecting his decision making, it is a great concern.

Remember, this is the man who can order the launch of nuclear missiles, among many other decisions that profoundly impact our collective welfare.

How good do you feel about the President's decisions lately?

From CBS News Baghdad reporter: Help.

2007-01-27T16:43:00.000-07:00

I don't know Lara Logan, but I am passing on her letter and a link to her report from Haifa Street in Baghdad. If ever there was a symbol of the elusiveness of progress in Iraq, Haifa Street is it.

From: lara logan
Subject: help

The story below only appeared on our CBS website and was not aired on CBS. It is a story that is largely being ignored, even though this is taking place every single day in central Baghdad, two blocks from where our office is located.

Our crew had to be pulled out because we got a call saying they were about to be killed, and on their way out, a civilian man was shot dead in front of them as they ran.

I would be very grateful if any of you have a chance to watch this story and pass the link on to as many people you know as possible. It should be seen. And people should know about this.

If anyone has time to send a comment to CBS – about the story – not about my request, then that would help highlight that people are interested and this is not too gruesome to air, but rather too important to ignore.

Many, many thanks.

I watched this video & I don't see why it wasn't fit for the evening news. However, I don't watch TV news, so I don't know what the normal fare is.

You can watch it here.

What do you think? Is this too much, or necessary viewing as Ms. Logan contends?

--UPDATE--

A controversy has arisen over the footage of fallen Iraqi soldiers in Logan's report. This footage was also used in an Al Qaeda propaganda video. Of course, CBS denies that the Al Qaeda video was the source of Logan's footage.

I can't get too excited by this, since the Logan's video source does nothing to discredit the views presented, or the implications of her story.

Bill Moyers at the National Conference for Media Reform

2007-01-24T18:36:00.000-07:00

Check it out. The two parts total about an hour, but it's worth the time.

Part 1.

Part 2.

When I hear Moyers talk about the dangers of media consolidation, I am reminded of how the juntas of yesteryear always seized the television, radio, and newspapers first.

What's in a name?

2007-01-11T13:00:00.001-07:00

How we label our problems plays a big part in how we deal with them.

A while back I read that the USDA decided to quit reporting the state of American well being in terms of hunger, preferring "low food security" as a more precise label.

The U.S. government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience "very low food security."

Every year, the Agriculture Department issues a report that measures Americans' access to food, and it has consistently used the word "hunger" to describe those who can least afford to put food on the table. But not this year.
Mark Nord, the lead author of the report, said "hungry" is "not a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon being measured in the food security survey." Nord, a USDA sociologist, said, "We don't have a measure of that condition."

The USDA said that 12 percent of Americans -- 35 million people -- could not put food on the table at least part of last year. Eleven million of them reported going hungry at times. Beginning this year, the USDA has determined "very low food security" to be a more scientifically palatable description for that group.

Charitably assuming this isn't more spin, how will such a neutral term motivate anyone to tackle the problem? I can relate to hunger, everyone can. But "low food security" is just too abstract to move most people. If the USDA wants to eliminate hunger in the United States, and they say they do, why aren't they making more of an effort to claim a bigger share of the public's attention?

I can't answer those questions charitably. I can say that any effort to stamp out hunger would require money from the Federal pot, and a lot of projects dip into that pot. Either taxes would have to be raised, or some other federal program would have to be cut.

I can't help but note that "low food security" is less likely to incite the People to insist on such action, and I also can't help noticing how much of our federal budget goes to arms and the war, as well as to subsidies to large corporations.

Are we spending too much on guns, and too little on butter?

What if those people with low housing security, whom we call homeless, were called refugees instead? Would the People decide we should pass on some new warships or fighter jets to solve the problem?

Of course, we call torture "harsh interrogation techniques", and kidnapping "rendition" as we travel our fearful path from the attacks of 9/11. It's a harsh new world that demands we recognize and combat the threat of militant Islam, which killed almost 3,000 Americans on that day. The headlines pound these facts home on a daily basis.

But there are no headlines riveting our attention on a deadlier enemy, one that claims 3,000 American lives every two days - cancer. We hear plenty of news of people who "fight" cancer or "lose the battle" with cancer. "Cancer survivor" is a common appellation in the public discourse. I think almost every American knows someone who has, or has had, this disease.

One in three people will have cancer in their lives, but have you ever seen a headline screaming "epidemic"? If we started using that word, what would happen?

Hunger, refugees, epidemic. They are just names.

So why don't our "leaders" use them?

Only in Washington - the neocons are in the saddle again!

2007-01-05T18:57:00.000-07:00

It looks like the President is going to increase troop levels in Iraq, employing the so called "surge" option. Isn't it funny - not "ha ha" funny but "what the fuck?" funny - how an election result widely seen as a vote to end the war is leading to an escalation of the war?

Only in Washington!

It's been something to watch the post election full court press for more troops from the American Enterprise Institute, The Weekly Standard, and good old John McCain and Joe Lieberman. I even heard one of the AEI guys take a beating from George McGovern and Dennis Kucinich on Democracy Now!, which is an unabashedly anti-war advocate. AEI has been showing powerpoints to policy makers, and they want escalation really bad!

This was actually commented on by the LA Times, in an article by Peter Spiegel entitled Old guard back on Iraq policy. It's a good read, names names, and is the first time I've seen a major US newspaper point out the singers in the pro-war choir. While anybody who is interested can find this stuff out on the internet, it isn't usually emphasized in the mainstream print media, and so the majority of Americans probably don't know the names William Kristol, Frederick Kagan, or Jack Keane.

What's really amazing is that these are the same people who pushed so hard to invade Iraq in the first place. Yep, here are the neocons speaking out again, which is not surprising. Some of these folks have been pushing war with Iraq and reshaping the Middle East since 1997, with the inception of the (notorious in some circles) Project for a New American Century. The thing that gets me is that anybody listens to them.

Only in Washington would these discredited hacks get a hearing.

So I got curious about where these people get their money, since they are so relentless. Peter Spiegel didn't know about AEI, but he told me the Weekly Standard is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Yeah, that Rupert Murdoch - the Fox News guy. I discovered that retired General Jack Keane, an equity consultant, is also on the board of directors for General Dynamics and owns a few thousand shares of stock in the world's 6th largest defense company.

Peter Spiegel has met some of these people and thinks they are sincere in their support of the war and have no ulterior financial motive. I'm inclined to agree, but I also know that some corporations have profited handsomely from the opportunities the Iraq war has presented. Did they spend any money to create those opportunities? I think that question should be fair game.

AEI's financial reports show that they received $73 million in donations from individuals, corporations, and foundations in 2003, 2004, and 2005. That's 84% of their revenue, and where it comes from is mostly not public knowledge. I don't know about AEI, but where I work we give big customers special treatment.

I'm not much on conspiracy theories, and I don't see a conspiracy here, but I'm a big fan of full disclosure. If someone wants to hawk war, that's their right. But the public should know if they get money from defense contractors, oil companies, or some other concern that stands to profit.

For those of you who do like conspiracy theories, try this on for size. If you want to write letters to the war hawks to complain, here are their addresses:

The American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036

The Weekly Standard
1150 17th Street, NW
Suite 505
Washington, DC 20036

Project for the New American Century
1150 17th Street, NW
Suite 510
Washington, DC 20036

Only in Washington!

Update:

I'm not the only wondering why these people have any credibility left. Glenn Greenwald has a column in The American Conservative, called Selective Amnesia, that addresses this phenomenon:

Yet there seems to be no accountability for these pro-war pundits. On the contrary, they continue to pose as wise, responsible experts and have suffered no lost credibility, prominence, or influence. They have accomplished this feat largely by evading responsibility for their prior opinions, pretending that they were right all along or, in the most extreme cases, denying that they ever supported the war.

Hanging Saddam - A small lesson learned

2006-12-29T17:59:00.000-07:00

I will leave it to others to draw the larger conclusions about the hanging of Saddam Hussein. I haven't much to say about his passing, but I did learn something about Amy Carter as a result.

Way back when, her father, Jimmy Carter - President at the time - quoted her as saying that she felt the largest problem in her thirteen year old world was "nuclear weaponry - and the control of nuclear arms." Many people, myself included, scoffed. How could a child that age see beyond her Barbie dolls to the problems of the adult world? President Daddy was making political hay at his daughters expense. Shame, shame!

Fast forward to the present - I have a nine year old daughter, and she has an opinion about Saddam Hussein. She understands that he killed innocent people in horrible ways, but says that it was wrong to execute him. When I asked why, she said it violates the constitutional prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment." How about that? She put her finger on the core issue of the death penalty debate.

My kid is no prodigy. She does OK in school, but can't keep her room clean and fights incessantly with her little sister. However, once in a while she will come out with a question that shows she has her eyes open to what's going on with the adults, and thinks about it.

We had a serious chat about the death penalty, and I found that topic to be easier than when she asked about tax cuts. If you want to test your command of a subject, explain it to a child!

I guess I owe Amy Carter an apology. We can see today the looming threat of nuclear proliferation. It's not so unreasonable that a President's daughter in 1980 might see it too.

Besides, grown ups aren't the only ones who worry about the world we are leaving to our children.

Amy Goodman on the Media

2006-12-11T17:47:00.000-07:00

Since the video with the smart-mouthed little girl worked so well, I am going to put up something a little more substantive.

This is a documentary called Independent Media In A Time Of War, and it's worth the half hour it takes to watch it. It's anti-war, but that's not the primary message here - rather, it's about how the mainstream media promoted the Iraq war and excluded dissenting voices.

If you favor freedom of speech and press, this is a must see.

Be warned, however, there are some graphic parts unsuitable for kids.

O'Reilly Backtalk

2006-12-11T17:30:00.000-07:00

OK, I have reservations about a kid using this kind of language, but it has it's humorous moments and gives me a chance to try posting a YouTube link the way my hero, Susie at Suburban Guerilla does.

We should we have invaded Texas instead!

2006-12-10T14:09:00.000-07:00

I was randomly surfing the other day, when I found this article from 2003 on the Christian Science Monitor website

Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and anti-government literature.

"Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal," says Daniel Levitas, author of "The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right."

I never heard of this, did you? A WMD in Texas, 175 miles from Crawford? The good people of Law Enforcement who caught this wacko and his friends before they could do us harm were surely feted in the media and basked in the gratitude of the nation.

Well, they weren't, and they didn't, and there's an explanation:

But outside Tyler, Texas, the case is almost unknown. In the past nine months, there have been two government press releases and a handful of local stories, but no press conference and no coverage in the national newspapers.

Experts say the case highlights the increased cooperation and quicker response by US agencies since Sept. 11. But others say it points up just how political the terror war is. "There is no value for the Bush administration to highlighting domestic terrorism right now," says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. "But there are significant political benefits to highlighting foreign terrorists, especially when trying to whip up support for war."

Now hold on Mr. Journalism Professor! We all knew that while this was a scary bunch of hombres, the big threat was those Muslim nutjobs who hate us: the Hamas, Hezbollahs, al Qaedas, Iranians, Shias, Sunnis, Wahabbis, Salafists, Taliban, and others among the 42 foreign terrorist organizations listed by the State Department, and that's where we focused.

But wait, there's more:

Experts say the case is important not only because of what it says about increased government cooperation, but also because it shows how serious a threat the country faces from within. "The lesson in the Krar case is that we have to always be concerned about domestic terrorism. It would be a terrible mistake to believe that terrorism always comes from outside," says Mark Potok at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

The fact is, the number of domestic terrorist acts in the past five years far outweighs the number of international acts, says Mark Pitcavage of the fact-finding department at the Anti-Defamation League. "We do have home-grown hate in the United States, people who are just as ill-disposed to the American government as any international terrorist group," he says.

Levitas estimates that there are approximately 25,000 right-wing extremist members and activists and some 250,000 sympathizers. The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 708 hate groups in 2002.

I had to check that out, and it's true. According to the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, of the 115 incidents of terrorism in the US since they started tracking domestic terrorism in 1998, 110 were the work of Americans.

Was Jensen on to something? There's been a lot of attention given to foreign terrorists in our media and public debate, but not so much to the domestic ones. Plus, the people most worked up about foreign terrorists were the ones in favor of invading Iraq.

How would your views on the War on Terror have been different had you known about this?

And you pro-war folks, were you misled?

In Memory of Gary Webb - The Perils of Telling the Truth.

2006-12-10T14:04:00.000-07:00

Two years ago today, Gary Webb died. He had lost his career, reputation, and his family, and had nothing to live for. Deeply depressed, he committed suicide.

How many people have heard of Gary Webb?

Webb was a crackerjack, Pulitzer prize winning investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News who in 1995 unearthed the story of his life, the Contra-Cocaine affair and it's link to the LA crack epidemic. His editor agreed, and it was published in the Mercury-News as a series, with great expectations. However, Webb was not hailed as the next great Pulitzer candidate. Instead, he was pilloried by the major media as having gotten it wrong - an unprecedented attack on a fellow journalist allegedly orchestrated by the CIA.

His editor abandoned him, he was discredited, forced from his job, and his wife took their children and left him. He later published a book, an incredible story called Dark Alliance that was mostly ignored, sank into anonymity, and finally took his own life.

Telling the truth is not always the safest course of action.

Yes, Webb's story was true, confirmed by Congressional hearings and CIA investigations. So when you get news from the major US media, remember Gary Webb, and this cautionary tale. The media isn't always in the truth business. It has a dark alliance of its own, serving unseen masters and not necessarily the public interest.

I'll leave you now with Webb's own words:

Do we have a free press today? Sure we do. It's free to report all the sex scandals it wants, all the stock market news we can handle, every new health fad that comes down the pike, and every celebrity marriage or divorce that happens. But when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff -- stories like Tailwind, the October Surprise, the El Mozote massacre, corporate corruption, or CIA involvement in drug trafficking -- that's where we begin to see the limits of our freedoms. In today's media environment, sadly, such stories are not even open for discussion.

Back in 1938, when fascism was sweeping Europe, legendary investigative reporter George Seldes observed (in his book, The Lords of the Press) that "it is possible to fool all the people all the time -- when government and press cooperate." Unfortunately, we have reached that point.

and a eugoly, written by a man who suffered a similar fate.

RIP Gary Webb (August 31, 1955 – December 10, 2004)

A Martyr for Peace, "Without fear I go now to God - your future is what you will choose today."

2006-11-27T22:09:00.000-07:00

These are the last words of Malachi Ritscher's suicide note, before he doused himself in gasoline and burned himself to death by an off-ramp in downtown Chicago on November 3rd.

Why did he do it?

Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country. I will not participate in your charade - my conscience will not allow me to be a part of your crusade.

He killed himself over Iraq, and more.

My actions should be self-explanatory, and since in our self-obsessed culture words seldom match the deed, writing a mission statement would seem questionable. So judge me by my actions. Maybe some will be scared enough to wake from their walking dream state - am I therefore a martyr or terrorist? I would prefer to be thought of as a 'spiritual warrior'. Our so-called leaders are the real terrorists in the world today, responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden.

I have had a wonderful life, both full and full of wonder. I have experienced love and the joy and heartache of raising a child. I have jumped out of an airplane, and escaped a burning building. I have spent the night in jail, and dropped acid during the sixties. I have been privileged to have met many supremely talented musicians and writers, most of whom were extremely generous and gracious. Even during the hard times, I felt charmed. Even the difficult lessons have been like blessed gifts. When I hear about our young men and women who are sent off to war in the name of God and Country, and who give up their lives for no rational cause at all, my heart is crushed. What has happened to my country? we have become worse than the imagined enemy - killing civilians and calling it 'collateral damage', torturing and trampling human rights inside and outside our own borders, violating our own Constitution whenever it seems convenient, lying and stealing right and left, more concerned with sports on television and ring-tones on cell-phones than the future of the world.... half the population is taking medication because they cannot face the daily stress of living in the richest nation in the world.

I too love God and Country, and feel called upon to serve. I can only hope my sacrifice is worth more than those brave lives thrown away when we attacked an Arab nation under the deception of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'. Our interference completely destroyed that country, and destabilized the entire region. Everyone who pays taxes has blood on their hands.

He killed himself for America.

How easy it would be to dismiss Malachi Ritscher as a nutjob. He clearly wasn't normal, but what I've read about him shows that he lived a regular life. He suffered from depression, but kept it together enough to be consistent in his work, recording live jazz for bands who otherwise couldn't afford to cut a CD. He was a loner who was well liked, and was active in the anti-war movement. Plus, there's this little known fact: unlike other forms of suicide, self-immolation is generally undertaken by people who are not mentally ill.

It would be easy to dismiss Malachi Ritscher's self-immolation as just another roadside attraction in Freak Show America, and have it take its place with OJ, Jon Benet, Michael Jackson, the Runaway Bride, Terri Schiavo, and the rest of the tabloid cast. But that dog won't hunt. We will never know anything of what was in Malachi's heart or mind when he committed suicide, but we have his statement of principle, ordinary writing and pedestrian anti-war rhetoric that it is, but nonetheless principled. No freak show here.

We could dismiss this act as an aberration, a political anomaly with no precedent, but we would be forgetting our own history. Malachi Ritscher is not alone in American history. He joins Norman Morrison, Alice Herz, Roger LaPorte, George Winne, Florence Beaumont, Timothy Brown, Richard Breeze, and a man whose name I never could find. Follow these links. Don't worry, there are no awful pictures, but there isn't much information either. All of these people were protesting a war, Vietnam or Desert Storm, and we have collectively ignored their final gestures and forgotten their names.

How many of these names did you recognize?

Now there's Malachi Ritscher, and the media is busy writing him off as mental. This is consistent with our history. Also consistent with our history is this:

There will be more.

RIP Malachi Ritscher(1954-2006)

Three Guys on 52nd Street, A Parable of Partisanship

2006-11-24T23:57:00.000-07:00

There were three men I used to watch as I loitered in front of the Port Authority in NYC. Two of the men, who I dubbed Republican and Democrat, would start a loud, passionate, and profanely funny political argument on the sidewalk. A crowd inevitably gathered, including the third man, a short fellow, who moved through them trying for a better view.

I'll bet you can guess what I called him. Yep, same as the cop who dispersed the crowd and took complaints - pickpocket!

Finally, after the unhappy marks were gone, the three men and the cop would split the take.

Privatization’s Dark Antonym

2006-11-12T20:19:00.000-07:00

In 1976, on a bathroom wall at the Washington, DC Trailways bus station, I read the following joke:

If pro is the opposite of con, what's the opposite of progress.

It was good for a chuckle at a dark time in my life, and I've always kept my eye out for funny antonyms since then. An antonym, for those not familiar with the word, is a word having a meaning opposite to that of another word. Think wet versus dry.

So what's the antonym of privatize?

I hear that word all over the place. We debate privatizing Social Security, the National Parks, the U.S. Postal Service, NASA, the schools, the roads, the military, and even the Amazon rainforest.

To hear the politicians talk, everything is better if you privatize it!

So the antonym of a word so bandied about our public discourse is equally well known, right? It's not a secret word, but the fact that it is the opposite of privatize isn't exactly talked up. I had to think about it for a few minutes before I made the connection.

Now the better educated of you reading this are laughing at me, so for the sake of discussion I will spill the beans.

The antonym of privatize is nationalize.

Now, there's a word that is simply un-American. We don't do that! South American radicals nationalize. Middle Eastern nutjobs nationalize. People who nationalize come to bad ends!

And Americans don't talk about it. It's not an option - a total non-starter!

Why is that?

Take out the garbage, don't sweep it under the rug

2006-11-12T19:27:00.000-07:00

Many, and I include myself, feel that our government is broken & the country is on the wrong track.

Before it can be fixed, we have to know where it's broken.

To me that means Congressional investigations and all the negative hoopla that surrounds them. It'll suck, but that's how American checks and balances work. It isn't pretty or pleasant, but it works.

Executive power grabs, Congressional corruption, war profiteering, Katrina negligence with thousands of dead, and doctored Iraq intel with tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands dead are things I want to see fixed, and they aren't gonna fix themselves.

Odds are the White House will resist, obstruct, pillory, and delay every Congressional inquiry of this sort. They'll cry partisan witch hunt, scream dirty politics, we'll all be sick of the acrimony, and gridlock will paralyze the Congress.

Good. Bring it on!

If the boat is sinking far from land, which is more important: Steaming ahead at full speed or plugging the leaks?

So my message to the people pimping bipartisan harmony and singing Kumbaya with Bush in DC is this:

Wake up and smell the corpses!

The Privitization of Cut and Run

2006-11-03T23:11:00.000-07:00

Start with this news item:

Manhattan security company Kroll has withdrawn its bodyguard teams from Iraq and Afghanistan after it lost four workers in Iraq, its parent company said Wednesday.

Michael Cherkasky, president and chief executive of Kroll owner Marsh & McLennan Cos., told The Associated Press that the business in the two countries wasn't worth risking the lives of their employees.

Toss in this tidbit:

Bechtel Corp. went to Iraq three years ago to help rebuild a nation torn by war. Since then, 52 of its people have been killed and much of its work sabotaged as Iraq dissolved into insurgency and sectarian violence.

Now Bechtel is leaving.

The San Francisco engineering company's last government contract to rebuild power, water and sewage plants across Iraq expired on Tuesday. Some employees remain to finish the paperwork, but essentially, the company's job is done.

Bechtel's contracts were part of an enormous U.S. effort to put Iraq back on its feet after decades of wars and sanctions. That rebuilding campaign, once touted as the Marshall Plan of modern times, was supposed to win the hearts of skeptical Iraqis by giving them clean water, dependable power, telephones that worked and modern sanitation. President Bush said he wanted the country's infrastructure to be the very best in the Middle East.

But Bechtel -- which charged into Iraq with American "can-do" fervor -- found it tough to keep its engineers and workers alive, much less make progress in piecing Iraq back together.

"Did Iraq come out the way you hoped it would?" asked Cliff Mumm, Bechtel's president for infrastructure work. "I would say, emphatically, no. And it's heartbreaking."

And I'm seeing a potential threat.

These companies are no shrinking violets. They have worked in some rough places. If they are leaving, it's past merely bad in Iraq.

But that's not what's troubling me. As usual, it's Halliburton. What if they decide to cease operations in Iraq?

The preceding examples highlight the big difference between civilian contractors and our troops. One's duty is to its stockholders; the other's is to our country. If it becomes unprofitable enough, contactors will leave.

Halliburton has 30,000 employees in Iraq, and supplies our soldiers with food, clean water, and housing among other logistics services.

Can military logistics take up the slack if they leave? If not, will we be forced to withdraw our forces to save them?

Are some things too important to outsource?

I believe so, and will vote accordingly.

How about you?

Fall Down. Go Boom

2006-11-01T19:39:00.000-07:00

Man, I hate losing a PC. There's nothing like it to point out the holes in your backup plan.

I'm not a novice in this department. I've been wearing out PC's since 1988, and I am regular with my backups.

So I'm back with a new PC, minus a few evenings to get everything back the way I want it.

Funny thing about new PC's. They have all of these stickers telling you what's under the hood. The faceplate of my new Compaq Presario is just covered in the things.

I bet burglars like that.

Take me...take me...take me.

After Pat's Birthday, by Kevin Tillman

2006-10-22T15:27:00.000-06:00

Thought I would share this :

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

RIP, Pat Tillman, killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004.

Know Your Rights - The Military Commissions Act

2006-10-22T14:46:00.000-06:00

Our rights are unalienable, and endowed by our creator. It says so in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

Here in the US, we have secured our rights by instituting a Republic whose powers and limitations are defined in the Constitution.

The source of our latest controversy in the War on Terror is that the Congress, at the President's urging, has passed a law, the Military Commissions Act, that in the eyes of many Americans exceeds the limits set by the Constitution. Their beef is that the law defines a class of people, alien unlawful enemy combatants, who don't get the safeguards against Government power that we enjoy.

These people can't go to court to challenge their detention (Habeas Corpus), or get a speedy trial. In fact, they can be held without any kind of hearing, for any length of time, at the Government's discretion. They can be questioned using any kind of technique that the President says is OK, and their interrogators have retroactive immunity from prosecution for what they've done.

I can't get too excited about all this, if it's Khalid Shaikh Mohammed we are talking about, but how about Maher Arar? How many innocent people do we lock away without legal recourse to make sure the bad guys don't walk on a technicality?

That's the question from a legal and political perspective, and we can rely on the courts and elected representatives to sort it out, if we want. Or we can read the law, the Constitution, Supreme Court rulings, legal commentaries, and make up our own minds. It's our choice: the liberal position of preserving civil rights, or the conservative stand of protecting us from terrorists.

However, there is another question to which the positions of left or right, Democrat or Republican, don't apply. If we believe the Declaration of Independence, each of us may one day face alone the creator who made all men equal, and have to answer for allowing our Government to deny the rights of innocents.

What will you say?

Opportunity Cost

2006-10-13T08:05:00.000-06:00

is the cost of what you couldn't do because of what you chose to do.

A few weeks ago, I heard the following exchange on Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: There has been much discussion in the United States that the U.S. took its eye off of Afghanistan, and distracted by Iraq. Could the $300 billion that we have spent in Iraq have been better spent stabilizing Afghanistan and rebuilding Afghanistan?

PRES. KARZAI: Three hundred billion dollars? You give that to Afghanistan, and we’ll be heaven in less than a year.

The normally unflappable Karzai sounded like a desert dweller seeing a lake for the first time.

We have greatly increased hatred for the US by creating a hell in Iraq. What if we had created "heaven" in Afghanistan instead?

We will never know.

Lay down with dogs, get up with fleas - The Christian right gets scammed!

2006-10-12T22:20:00.000-06:00

I should be unsympathetic, but I'm from the Bible-belt, and have seen the power of true Christian faith first hand. So I have mixed emotions when I read this:

More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities.

The office’s primary mission, providing financial support to charities that serve the poor, never got the presidential support it needed to succeed, according to the book.

Entitled “Tempting Faith,” the book is not scheduled for release until Oct. 16, but MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” has obtained a copy.

“Tempting Faith’s” author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo’s previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Kuo, who has complained publicly in the past about the funding shortfalls, goes several steps further in his new book.

He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”

“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.

More seriously, Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races.

Nineteen out of the 20 targeted races were won by Republicans, Kuo reports. The outreach was so extensive and so powerful in motivating not just conservative evangelicals, but also traditionally Democratic minorities, that Kuo attributes Bush’s 2004 Ohio victory “at least partially … to the conferences we had launched two years before.”

With the exception of one reporter from the Washington Post, Kuo says the media were oblivious to the political nature and impact of his office’s events, in part because so much of the debate centered on issues of separation of church and state.

In fact, the Bush administration often promoted the faith-based agenda by claiming that existing government regulations were too restrictive on religious organizations seeking to serve the public.

Substantiating that claim proved difficult, Kuo says. “Finding these examples became a huge priority.… If President Bush was making the world a better place for faith-based groups, we had to show it was really a bad place to begin with. But, in fact, it wasn’t that bad at all.”

In fact, when Bush asks Kuo how much money was being spent on “compassion” social programs, Kuo claims he discovered the amount was $20 million a year less than during the Clinton Administration.

The money that was appropriated and disbursed, however, often served a political agenda, Kuo claims, with organizations friendly to the administration often winning grants.

More pointedly, Kuo quotes an unnamed member of the review panel charged with rating grant applications as saying she stopped looking at applications from “those non-Christian groups,” as did many of her colleagues.

“Tempting Faith” contains several other controversial claims about Kuo’s office, the Bush White House and even the 1994 Republican revolution in Congress.

Calls and e-mails to the White House have not been returned.

My first reaction was, "What did you expect? These are politicians!"

It's truly amazing that after all of the disapointments evangelicals have sufferred at the hands of politicians, their leaders still haven't figured it out:

James Dobson, Charles W. Colson and other stalwarts of the conservative Christian movement defended the Bush administration and questioned the timing of the book's publication, a month before the midterm elections. Some suggested that Kuo had betrayed the White House.

Or maybe they have:

As a candidate for Senator in Louisiana, a state legislator named Tony Perkins received about ten percent of the statewide vote. As a Washington lobbyist, Tony Perkins is a celebrity. To the 1,000 or so pastors and activists attending the Family Research Council’s Washington Briefing this weekend, he is responsible for carrying their voice into the inner sanctums of the White House. As such, to leaders of these state groups, he has enhanced their personal brand.

So he received star treatment: rounds of applause, a harried young entourage, and even a walk-and-talk with 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl, who, with camera crew and producers, were filming a segment on “values voters.”

"Celebrity", "inner sanctums of the White House", "enhanced their personal brand", and "star treatment" aren't exactly what I would call attributes of Christian living, but they are certainly desirable for a politician, which is what these "religious leaders" have become.

Christians need to wake up and realize that salvation doesn't come from the political process. Jesus didn't teach his followers to put their faith in government. Why follow people who believe such things?

Jesus said, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." Saving sinners is not the government's duty, and saving democracy is not the church's.

The American Way

2006-10-10T19:29:00.000-06:00

I was writing something about the presumption of innocence the other day, when these three words slipped out: The American Way.

For a brief, shining moment, the towers stood again, and we were the good guys, basking in the admiration and respect of the rest of the world. From that vantage, I saw us complete, rather than in the dribs and flashes daily life only provides.

We have strayed. Oh, how far we have strayed!

Let's cut the bullshit that permeates our political discourse. The cold facts show the following:

We invded a nation that did nothing to us, and didn't ask for our help. Quibble all you want, but there were no WMD's, no mushroom cloud, and no partnership with Al Qaeda. Saddam was a brutal tyrant, but Iraqis were better off under Saddam.

We debate what torture is and isn't because our leaders tell us they need new "coercive techniques" to get information from captives, but have never proven that the old techniques don't work. Nobody's demanded that proof. In the meantime, we have undeniably tortured people to death.

We pass laws to strip the people we detain of the ability to contest their detention, get a speedy trial, or even see a judge. We argue that they are terrorists and don't deserve such rights. But we have disappeared innocent people, and put them through hell.

We spy on our own people, and equate criticism of the government with aiding the enemy. Citizens are intimidated and the press is cowed when they exercise their First Amendment rights.

It's all justified in the name of defeating evil terrorists, which turns out to be a dubious rationale, though you may buy all the excuses offered. Just get this straight:

It's not the American Way.

Americans don't start wars, we finish them.

Americans don't torture prisoners, we treat them lawfully and win their cooperation.

Americans uphold the Bill of Rights and the rule of law.

Americans may disagree, but we work together.

Tyrants are cowards. Americans are brave.

Our society has always had its problems, 9/11 didn't change that. But we kept in our hearts a vision of America - “Bring us your tired, your weak, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” - that was real for all our faults, and others could see that and responded to it.

Now, we live by the one percent doctrine, "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty."

That's not the American Way. That's cowardice!

9/11 WTC Demolition Conspiracy Revealed!!!

2006-09-27T19:06:00.000-06:00

I love conspiracy theories! I love 'em, love 'em, love 'em!

They're fabulous entertainment, and here's the latest. This one is quite well done, focusing on the steel construction of the World Trade Center towers and how the jets alone couldn't have brought them down.

Oh, it's got the usual stuff, the rate of fall, explosive squibs, and all of that. But it's got shots of wreckage I've never seen, photos of other buildings that collapsed, explanations of how controlled demolitions work, and much, much more! It is so, so deliciously plausible that the towers and WTC 7 were brought down by demolition.

But I won't accept that as fact.

Please don't be glum, my conspiracy buff friends! I'm not out to rain on your parade. I aim to point the way to take this from theory to fact to general acceptance, if indeed the towers were imploded.

You see stodgy plodders like me understand that a theory is just a plausible explanation for an observed phenomenon. Before such can be accepted by methodical truth seekers, it must predict something that can be observed or tested. Scientists want a paper describing the theory and testing in exhaustive detail, so that they can recreate the test and satisfy themselves that you were sound in your methodology.

Oy, that's not entertaining at all! Please stick with me, it gets better.

If you can do this, you will gain allies who can hold a press conference, have reporters come, and be believed!

So how do you test the demolition theory? Metal!

You see, imploding a building requires that support beams be cut with high energy explosives. These substances leave traces in the remains of the beams. Find that metal, get it tested for explosive residue, and learn the truth.

Does that sound like a daunting task? Take heart. For inspiration, consider the story of the guys who exposed the CIA's network of rendition flights. They tested the theory that prisoners were sent to other countries by predicting the necessity of a CIA flight network and then found those flights.

They used the internet and a worldwide network of airplane spotter enthusiasts to gather their observations, and blew the CIA's cover. I'm thinking there are a whole lot more 9/11 conspiracy buffs than airplane spotters. You just need to track down WTC metal, and get it to this guy. He'll do the rest.

I'm pulling for you because, as I said, it's a plausible explanation. And if you do, the next step is answering the question: who did it?

Our government? As Richard Clarke pointed out, "The government is not sufficiently competent to pull off such conspiracies and too leaky to keep them secret." You've seen this government in action! What Clarke says makes sense.

So, if the Feds didn't do it, who did?

I'll just point out that Osama bin Laden grew up in the family business, the bin Laden Group, which is the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia.

Do you think he knows any demolition experts? It's plausible, isn't it? It would be massively embarrassing to the government if al Qaeda not only got 19 hijackers past our security, but three demolition teams and their explosives as well. Wouldn't that explain our government's reluctance to even consider the possibility?

It could be true.

But I won't accept it as fact, and now you know why.

But don't get distracted, take it one step at a time. You've got metal to find!

When your friends laugh at your enemy's jokes, they are no longer your friends

2006-09-26T22:16:00.000-06:00

I finally got around to listening to Hugo Chavez's speech to the U.N. General Assembly today on my iPod. I heard him say:

I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is in their own house. The devil is right at home. The devil -- the devil, himself, is right in the house.

And the devil came here yesterday. (crossing himself)

Yesterday, the devil came here. Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of.

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.

And the U.N. General Assembly laughed and applauded!

Chavez concluded with:

You know that my personal doctor had to stay in the plane. The chief of security had to be left in a locked plane. Neither of these gentlemen was allowed to arrive and attend the U.N. meeting. This is another abuse and another abuse of power on the part of the Devil. It smells of sulfur here, but God is with us and I embrace you all.
May God bless us all. Good day to you.

And the U.N. General Assembly applauded - sustained applause for 40 solid seconds.

Of course, the US press commented on Chavez's rudeness, but they missed the crudeness of the insult, or chose to ignore it. It's pretty plain that Chavez had seen this little tidbit in US News and World Report:

Animal House in the West Wing

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we're learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

The UN delegates obviously got the joke, and we missed it entirely.

So contemplate this.

President Clinton was the butt of plenty of jokes over the Lewinsky affair, but nobody dissed him in the UN.

Does it say something about how we are viewed; that five years after 9/11 gave us the overwhelming support and sympathy of the world, our enemy comes to our country, stands on our soil, and makes our President the subject of a fart joke?

And what does it say that the joke is warmly received by those who were so firmly in our corner five years ago?

And finally, what does it say that we are too clueless to get the goddamned joke?

Colin Powell was wrong. The world is well past doubting the "moral basis for our fight against terrorism".

Peter Bergen's Letterman Countdown of 9/11's Causes

2006-09-18T20:38:00.000-06:00

Folks, this is da bomb. You should read the whole thing.

Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at The New America Foundation, and this article is one of the most useful short takes on why 9/11 happened.

He also has a list of plausible, but flawed theories, that is almost as enlightening.

None of the following explanations is alone sufficient to explain the attacks, but together they do help us to understand 9/11. They are ranked in ascending order of importance.

10. Radicalisation caused by the Afghan jihad. While there is no evidence that the CIA trained or funded Bin Laden or his followers, the Afghan war against the Soviet Union nonetheless radicalised a generation of Arab militants. They swapped business cards, gained battlefield experience and came to believe that they had played a big role in the destruction of the Soviet Union. All of these factors would lead to the founding of al Qaeda in 1988, established to take the jihad to other parts of the globe.

9. A particular reading of Islamic texts. In the many discussions of the "root causes" of Islamist terrorism, Islam itself is rarely mentioned. But if you were to ask Bin Laden, he would say that his war is about the defence of Islam. We need not believe him but we should nevertheless listen to what our enemies are saying. Bin Laden bases justification of his war on a corpus of Muslim beliefs and he finds ammunition in the Koran to give his war Islamic legitimacy. He often invokes the "sword" verses of the Koran, which urge unprovoked attacks on infidels. Of course, that is a selective reading of the Koran and does not mean Islam is an inherently violent faith, but to believers the book is the word of God.

8. Decline and stagnation in the middle east and the "humiliation" of the Islamic world. Bernard Lewis is the best-known exponent of the idea that the Muslim world is in a crisis largely attributable to centuries of decline, symbolised by the fate of the once powerful Ottoman empire and its ignominious carve-up by the British and French after the first world war. Lewis also argues that the problems of the middle east were later compounded by the import of two western ideas -- socialism and secular Arab nationalism -- neither of which delivered on their promises of creating prosperous and just societies. The economic and political failures in much of the Muslim world are underlined by statistics such as the fact that the non-oil revenues of all of the gulf states add up to less than the GDP of Finland.

Three weeks after 9/11, as the US began launching air strikes against Taliban positions, a video of Bin Laden sitting on a rocky outcrop was broadcast on Al-Jazeera. On the tape, Bin Laden said, "What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. The Islamic world has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for 80 years... Neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live in it in Palestine, and not before the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad." So in his first statement following 9/11, Bin Laden emphasised the "humiliation" of the Muslim world and the negative effect of US policies in the middle east. In this sense, Bin Laden seems to agree with Bernard Lewis. Indeed, Bin Laden often talks about the "humiliation" suffered by Muslims at the hands of the west. For Bin Laden, the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that carved up the Ottoman empire between the French and British has the same resonance that the 1919 treaty of Versailles did for Hitler. It must be avenged and reversed.

7. The spread of communications technology. The humiliation felt by some Muslims is amplified by the communications revolution. The umma, the global community of Muslims, is far more aware of conflicts around the Islamic world -- and the role of the west in some of those conflicts -- than was the case a decade ago. The creation of Al-Jazeera in 1996 coincided with Bin Laden’s first call for a holy war against the US. Since then Arabic satellite channels and jihadist websites have proliferated, sensitising Muslims to the oppression of their co-religionists in Kashmir, Palestine, the Balkans and so on. These grievances have fuelled the spread of al Qaeda’s ideology and underpinned the rage of the 9/11 hijackers.

6. Authoritarian middle east regimes helped incubate the militants. Sayyid Qutb, the Lenin of the militant jihadist movement, and later Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s number two, were radicalised by their time in the jails of Cairo. It is no accident that so many members of al Qaeda have been Egyptians and Saudis.

5. The alienation of Muslim immigrants in the west. Three of the four 9/11 pilots and two key planners, Ramzi bin al Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, became more militant while living in the west. Perceived discrimination, alienation and homesickness seem to have turned them all in a more radical direction. This is true for other anti-western terrorists. Swati Pandey and I have examined the biographies of 79 terrorists responsible for five of the worst recent anti-western terrorist attacks. We found that one in four of these terrorists had attended colleges in the west.

4. US foreign policies in the middle east, in particular its support of Israel. By Bin Laden’s own account, this is why al Qaeda is attacking America. His critique has never been cultural; he never mentions Madonna, Hollywood, homosexuality or drugs in his diatribes. US support for Israel, especially the support it gave to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982, first triggered Bin Laden’s anti-Americanism, which during the 1980s took the form of urging a boycott of US goods. He was later outraged by the "defiling" export of 500,000 US troops to Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

3. Bin Laden is an astute tactical leader and rational political actor fighting a deeply felt religious war against the west. Like others before him, Bin Laden has made a rational choice to adopt terrorism as a shortcut to transforming the political landscape. It is clear from the 9/11 commission report that Bin Laden intervened to make two key decisions that ensured the success of the attacks. The first was to appoint Mohammed Atta to be the lead hijacker; Atta would carry out his responsibilities with grim efficiency. The second was to rein in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s plans for ten planes to crash into targets in Asia and on the east coast of America simultaneously. That number of attacks would have been hard to synchronise and might not have succeeded.

2. 9/11 was the collateral damage of a clash within Islam. The view that 9/11 was the result of a conflict within the Muslim world was brilliantly articulated in early 2002 by middle east scholar Michael Scott Doran in a Foreign Affairs essay, "Somebody Else’s Civil War." Doran argued that Bin Laden’s followers "consider themselves an island of true believers surrounded by a sea of iniquity and think that the future of religion itself, and therefore the world depends on them and their battle." In particular, Egyptians in al Qaeda, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, hold this view, inheriting it from Sayyid Qutb, who believed that most of the modern middle east is living in a state of pagan ignorance. The Egyptian jihadists believed that they should overthrow the "near enemy"-middle east regimes run by "apostate" rulers. Bin Laden took the next step, urging Zawahiri that the root of the problem was not the "near enemy" but the "far enemy," the US, which propped up the status quo in the middle east.

1. The 9/11 attacks were the fruit of Bin Laden’s flawed strategic reasoning. Bin Laden’s total dominance of al Qaeda meant the organisation was hostage to his strategic vision. His analysis of US foreign policy was based on the US withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983, after the attack on the barracks that killed 241 American servicemen, and from Somalia in 1993 after 18 US soldiers were killed in Mogadishu. From these retreats, Bin Laden concluded that the US was a paper tiger, capable of withstanding only a few strikes before it would withdraw, leaving client regimes in the middle east vulnerable. But the US response to 9/11 was to destroy the Taliban regime and decimate al Qaeda. Although 9/11 was a tactical success for al Qaeda, it actually threatened the organisation’s future.

Some of the harshest critics of the 9/11 attacks have been al Qaeda insiders such as Abd-Al-Halim Adl, who in June 2002 wrote to the 9/11 operational commander, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying: "Today we must completely halt all external actions until we sit down and consider the disaster we caused. The east Asia, Europe, America, horn of Africa, Yemen, Gulf, and Morocco groups have fallen."

To conclude, 9/11 was collateral damage in a civil war within the world of political Islam. On one side there are those, like Bin Laden, who want to install Taliban-style theocracies from Indonesia to Morocco. On the other side there is a silent majority of Muslims who are prepared to deal with the west, who do not see the Taliban as a workable model for modern Islamic states, and who reject violence. Bin Laden adopted a war against "the far enemy" in order to hasten the demise of the "near enemy" regimes in the middle east. And he used 9/11 to advance that cause. That effort has, so far, largely failed.

Yet Bin Laden and his attacks on the US have shaped an ideological movement that will outlive him. Binladenism has drawn tremendous energy from the war in Iraq, and will probably gain further adherents from the conflict in Lebanon. Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak was prescient when he warned in 2003 that the Iraq war would spawn "100 new Bin Ladens." It is that new generation of militants that is Bin Laden’s legacy.

Given the way things have been going, clear thinking is a precious commodity. Without it, I fear we will exhaust ourselves running from crisis to crisis, war to war. We don't have unlimited resources, and the world won't let us run a tab forever.

We have to spend less in blood and treasure for more weakening of the terrorists who stalk us. Right now, that ratio is horribly against us. Consider, 9/11 cost al Qaeda $400,000 to $500,000; Iraq is is going to cost us what? $1,000,000,000,000?

Unsustainable, and in keeping with bin Laden's plan to bleed us dry.

That's why Bergen's column is important. To effectively fight them, we have to know the enemy and what motivates them.

9/11 - Five Years On

2006-09-11T19:50:00.000-06:00

I drove to work listening to music and entered the building thinking about the football game the night before. When I saw the crowd in the conference room, I knew something bad had happened. I hadn't seen a crowd like that at work since the Challenger blew up.

I saw the planes hit and the towers fall at my desk, courtesy of our T1 line and streaming video. I remember speaking with a coworker in the hall who wailed, "What will the markets do?". I paused, stunned at his words, and responded, "That's not important now." It's funny, I can remember exactly where we stood, but can't remember who I was speaking with.

My wife and I reached out to family and friends in NYC and Washington. We were lucky. A friend who worked in WTC 1 was on vacation, and my cousin, who was at a meeting in the Pentagon, escaped harm.

In the days that followed, I heard more about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda than I had ever heard before, saw pictures of Afghanistan on TV instead of in National Geographic, and watched President Bush gain stature as he reassured the country we would heal and defeat those who had attacked us.

The year that followed was a down year. There was a lot of patriotic fervor and display, which in the past had always boosted my morale, but somehow felt false this time. I felt an undercurrent of intolerance and jingoism, a willingness to strike out at dissenters, and it chilled me even though I was no dissenter, but heartily in favor of striking back against Al Qaeda. It smacked of McCarthyism.

That spring, Colorado caught fire; at least that's what the governor said. He got slammed for hyperbole, but I knew what he meant. Smoke was everywhere, friends and coworkers fled their homes, and a hacking, asthmatic cough was my constant companion.

That summer brought a drought, everybody's lawn died, and the area farmers were in misery.

So when September 11, 2002 rolled around, I studiously avoided the media blitz of coverage and remembrance. It was still too soon, too fresh a pain.

The war drums were beating for Iraq, and I felt that was a mistake. Most of my friends were surprised to hear this from me, but they seemed to respect my argument that we hadn't finished job one, Al Qaeda, and were spreading our forces too thin.

However, only my town gassed anti-war protestors, a low point for our community.

I was all too soon proven right, but I got past that, for time and family and work have a healing effect.

On September 11, 2003, I sat alone at my computer after the kids went to bed and watched the videos of the WTC. I felt the familiar sadness and a cold resentment toward our leaders who had abandoned their duty to defeat bin Laden and bring him to justice.

I don't look at 9/11 pictures now. It's not that I avoid them, but I've put them in context.

I changed after 9/11, as many Americans did. I walk into work thinking about the lecture or debate I listened to in the car, or the court opinion I read the night before. Where I used to open the morning paper to the sports section and comics, now I read the news and editorials first. I used to read science fiction and mysteries, now I read non-fiction, history, politics, economics, and law. Of course, there are more mysteries now.

I keep a well thumbed copy of the Constitution in my pocket, write my Congressmen periodically, and occasionally the editor of the newspaper. I tune out celebrity gossip, but can still talk football even though I only watch a game or two a year.

I cherish my family and my friends more than before, because I know that there will be another attack. And while I pray that we make it though OK, I will not live in fear of it.

Our enemy profits from such fear, for it diminishes our Republic.

Until next year, keep the faith.

God Bless America, and keep her free!

Heck of a job Rummy!

2006-09-10T21:52:00.000-06:00

It's late & I'm tired. These two tidbits won't help me sleep.

Eustis chief: Iraq post-war plan muzzled:

Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.

In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a post-war plan.

U.S. count of Baghdad deaths excludes car bombs, mortar attacks:

U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren't counting scores of dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the country's sectarian violence.

In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.

That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.

But it eliminates from tabulation huge numbers of people whose deaths are certainly part of the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Not included, for example, are scores of people who died in a highly coordinated bombing that leveled an entire apartment building in eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Great, just wonderful. Heck of a job!

9/11 Turns Five and Ground Zero is STILL a Hole In The Ground

2006-09-10T17:35:00.000-06:00

Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, caught crap when he defended the pace of rebuilding in New Orleans by mentioning NYC's Ground Zero:

That's alright. You guys in New York can't get a hole in the ground fixed and it's five years later. So let's be fair.

He was accused of disrespecting the dead and what Tim Russert referred to as "holy ground". Of course, he groveled for forgiveness on Meet the Press, like a good politician, but that doesn't change the truth of what he said.

Ground Zero has not been fixed. It's STILL a hole in the ground.

Does this show respect for the people who died there, that we can't manage to build them a monument of any kind? No park with trees and a pool in the footprint of the towers, no wall with the names of the victims? Or if poignant aint your thing, where's the 250 story Fuck You bin Laden, America Will NOT be Cowed by Terrorists! tower?

Nagin isn't the issue here, we are. Right there in NYC we are confronted by the inescapable evidence. We haven't done the right thing by our dead citizens for five long years, for lack of will, money, consensus, determination, or moral rectitude - take your pick. We have come up short.

Tomorrow is the five year anniversary of 9/11, and everybody's pushing their spin on the war on terror, Iraq, Islam, bin Laden, you name it. Not me. I'm gonna be taking a hard look at the USA, because things aren't entirely right here at home.

Now maybe you don't agree that Ground Zero is indicative of any problem, and I'll happily admit it is only a single example. But turn your attention back to Ray Nagin and his city, and tell me every thing is hunky-dory.

New Name for Blog

2006-09-07T19:50:00.000-06:00

For the few who come here more than once and notice such things, I changed the name of the blog. I've been meaning to do it for quite some time, much like the 10 or 15 topics I've been meaning to post on.

Surely, by now you know I'm a lazy SOB!

When assumption trumps objectivity

2006-09-07T19:48:00.000-06:00

From the Al Jazeera website:

After four weeks of devastating Israeli air raids across Lebanon, American news network NBC began its Nightly News bulletin with its anchorman, Brian Williams, asking: "Does the US really have any influence in this war?"

Hours earlier on sister network MSNBC, anchorwoman Chris Jansing seemed to be at a similar loss. "Can anything be done to stop the violence?" she asked.

But to an American audience, the thought of a Syrian or Iranian news anchor posing the same questions would be fit for a comedy skit.

After all, the Syrians and Iranians wield an obvious "influence" over the course of the conflict according to the NBC channels, which like CNN, Sky and many other Western new organisations reported relentlessly on claims that Hezbollah’s rocket imports were made possible through the help of its two "rogue" allies.

But where was the parallel analysis of multi-billion dollar weapons shipments bound for Israel from the United States? Most Western broadcasters reported religiously on the number of rockets fired at Israel each day of the month-long conflict, often comparing fresh figures with those of previous days and weeks, even peppering the audit with analysis and commentary.

Absent however was almost any accounting of the daily tonnage of US-manufactured munitions dropped from an unknown fleet of US-manufactured jets levelling an untold number of Lebanese homes and villages.

Sanitised

On American television screens, the US role in this conflict was a relatively sanitised one, pictured as diplomatic rather than military; seen across negotiating tables and in visits to foreign capitals - a far less sinister role than that repeatedly attributed to the Iranians and Syrians over allegations of their financial and logistical support.

In fact, so penetrating was the alleged connection that some channels, such as Bloomberg Television, began referring to Hezbollah on second reference as merely "the Syrian- and Iranian-backed group". But why did Bloomberg not choose to identify Israel, the largest official recipient of US foreign military assistance for decades, as "the US-backed state"?

Whether the decision was deliberate or unconscious, the prevailing notion of non-military US involvement is just one of many underlying assumptions communicated by the US media about the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, assumptions that were continually reinforced in comments made by anchors and by hired analysts.

Viewed as part of an overall package, the assumptions appear to reflect US foreign policy, particularly the relationship with Israel, much more than the pursuit of journalistic objectivity.

More......

I don't watch TV news, so mostly I don't care about this kind of stuff. It's just working the refs to me.

However, given the amount of actual grief Al Jazeera has received at American hands for their biases, it's instructive to see them turn the tables.

No matter what you think of Israel, the fact that they buy much of their weaponry from us is well documented. That they use our military aid to do it is no secret. So, why be coy? They are our friend and we support them, and we do have influence over some of their actions.

Who are we fooling, except people who depend on US TV news for information?

Oh, yeah..... Voters.

Iraq: Is it time for us to go?

2006-08-06T14:07:00.000-06:00

General John Abizaid, in testimony before Congress admitted the possibility that Iraq could slip into civil war:

"I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war," Gen. John Abizaid testified at a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Fueling this possibility, he said, was the combination of "sectarian violence, al Qaeda terrorists, insurgents and Shia militants."

"Failure to apply coordinated regional and international pressure ... will further extremism" and could lead to a widening and more perilous conflict, he said.

But that isn't what the troops are saying:

While American politicians and generals in Washington debate the possibility of civil war in Iraq, many U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad say it has already begun.

Army troops in and around the capital interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds.

So, if Iraq has descended into civil war, should we have troops there?

I know that many want to stay the course and win, but how do we win a civil war, when it's not our war anymore? Will our soldiers become pawns in a violent Sunni/Shi'a contest if we stay? Will Shi'a anger over Israel's attack on the Hizbullah make them targets in Iraq?

If we leave, will Iran move in and set up a friendly Iraqi regime? Will the Kurds break off from Iraq? Will Turkey stand for that, or invade northern Iraq to subdue the Kurds? Will Saudi mujahideen returning from Iraq destabilize their homeland? Will we have to go back with a much bigger force to secure the oil in ten years time?

Have we reached the point where we are in a lose/lose situation?

One definition of quagmire is a difficult, precarious, or entrapping position.

Are we there now?

Lebanon Evacuation: PR before People?

2006-07-22T00:29:00.000-06:00

From the American Prospect Online Edition:

WHY IT'S TAKING SO LONG. A reliable source tells me that the reason the United States has been so slow in evacuating its citizens from Lebanon is that the public diplomacy (i.e., P.R.) issues raised by evacuating under Israeli assault are so complicated. Individuals within the State Department, I am told, have been reluctant to create an impression that the Israeli assault on Lebanon is as bad as it is or that civilian U.S. citizens are being threatened by U.S. ally Israel. If a conflict this severe had broken out in, say, Indonesia, the American embassy would have been shut down the next day and its personnel and families rapidly brought to safety. That's how things normally work. (See Laura Rozen on the evacuation from Albania here.) In this case, however, the diplomatic message sent by shutting down the U.S. embassy in the face of Israeli bombing would have contradicted the U.S. government message of support for the Israeli mission against Hezbollah terrorists, which, when added to the general concern within lower-level diplomatic circles about ever creating a Fall of Saigon-style visual for the news media, have led the Americans to be slower than they could have been about getting U.S. citizens out of harm's way.

On Monday, Steve Clemons raised concerns about "sending a cruise ship, a slow moving huge target, into a war zone" to evacuate Americans. However, it seems to me that such a move would be perfectly consistent with attempting to downplay the severity of the conflict and the nature of the Israeli threat to American citizens in Lebanon.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

Man, I hope that "reliable source" got it wrong, and this is just a bad rumor!

In the Dark, You see the Darndest Things.

2006-01-07T15:04:00.000-07:00

The New York Times recently revealed that:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

The ensuing flap has largely focused on the legality and extent of this program, and many people don't see why it's a big deal. After all, domestic spying isn't anything new. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has approved thousands of surveillances since its inception in 1979. If you have nothing to hide, why be worried, especially if it catches terrorists before they attack?

The difference. The NSA program is controlled completely within the executive branch, and the President says that this is constitutionally within his wartime powers:

Bush's constitutional argument, in the eyes of some legal scholars and previous White House advisers, relies on extraordinary claims of presidential war-making power. Bush said yesterday that the lawfulness of his directives was affirmed by the attorney general and White House counsel, a list that omitted the legislative and judicial branches of government. On occasion the Bush administration has explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the president's war-making powers in legal briefs as "plenary" -- a term defined as "full," "complete," and "absolute."

Think about it. If the President can do anything he deems necessary to protect us, and no other government institution can hold him accountable or even know what he is doing, aren't the rest of us in the dark? Who will stop him if he makes a mistake? If this "absolute" power corrupts him, as conventional wisdom says it will, how will anybody know?

Funny things happen in the dark.

We make the strangest friends:

Last year the US gave half a billion dollars in aid to Uzbekistan, about a quarter of it military aid. Bush and Powell repeatedly hail Karimov as a friend and ally. Yet this regime has at least seven thousand prisoners of conscience; it is a one party state without freedom of speech, without freedom of media, without freedom of movement, without freedom of assembly, without freedom of religion. It practices, systematically, the most hideous tortures on thousands. Most of the population live in conditions precisely analogous with medieval serfdom.

We move quietly toward war without debate:

According to Ulfkotte's report, "western security sources" claim that during CIA Director Porter Goss' Dec. 12 visit to Ankara, he asked Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to provide support for a possibile 2006 air strike against Iranian nuclear and military facilities. More specifically, Goss is said to have asked Turkey to provide unfettered exchange of intelligence that could help with a mission.

DDP also reported that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman and Pakistan have been informed in recent weeks of Washington's military plans. The countries, apparently, were told that air strikes were a "possible option," but they were given no specific timeframe for the operations.

Set up secret prisons:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

Buy covert propaganda:

Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.

And we consider the oddest alternatives:

In an April 2004 White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush proposed bombing the Arab TV network Al Jazeera's international headquarters in Qatar. The report was based on a memo stamped "Top Secret" that had been leaked by a Cabinet official in Blair's government.

Don't get me wrong. All of this could be in the best interests of the US, but without debate in Congress or the press, how do we know? Can we trust this President to always do the right thing? How about the next one?

My personal belief is that regardless of whether the President derives his power to conduct secret surveillance from statutory law (FISA) or the constitution, that power must be checked externally by either the courts or the Congress. I don't mean simply being advised, but required to consent, so that the executive branch cannot act solely on its own.

The Framers of the Constitution were incredibly well educated men, beneficiaries of a Renaissance education that few today can match. They studied the writings of the ancient Greek democracies and Roman republic in the original language. They also knew first hand the capriciousness of life under the unchecked tyranny of the English king. In our Constitution they left us the tools to sustain the freedom that has made this a wonderful country.

I am dismayed by those who so easily disregard the Framer's hard earned wisdom, simply because we face a new peril. This isn't the first time our country has faced frightening new challenges, and we do best when we stick to our principles.

Benjamin Franklin said when asked what kind of government the Constitutional Convention had wrought, "a republic, if you can keep it."

Some things never change, do they?

On the Justice of Roosting Chickens - The Immolation of Ward Churchill

2005-11-01T19:14:00.000-07:00

Ward Churchill is back in the news. Doesn't matter what for, it's just an ongoing public whipping. Ward Churchill, for those of you fortunate enough not to know, is a professor at the University of Colorado, and a pariah - reviled by pundits and politicians, a stench in the nostrils of God.

What was his crime? The trusty Denver Post sums it up:

Officials said they are committed to restoring public confidence in the university after months of questions about Ward Churchill, the tenured ethnic-studies professor whose 2001 essay about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 set off a scandal this year.

Though an internal investigation into Churchill absolved him of any wrongdoing in that essay, the public furor over one sentence - in which he compared some Sept. 11 victims to the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann - produced numerous questions about the integrity of Churchill's scholarship and academic credentials.

Churchill's ultimate fate awaits the outcome of an investigation by CU's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct.

In a 5000+ word essay on 9/11, one sentence started ten months of flogging. For the record, here's the offending sentence in context:

They did not license themselves to "target innocent civilians."

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . .

Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in and in many cases excelling at it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

That was tasteless venting, but not worth much attention in light of his major points:

9/11 was a case of chickens coming home to roost.
The attacks were retaliation for sanctions causing the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, and the ongoing bombing of Iraq.
The bombers considered themselves soldiers taking out military targets.
Our lines of defense, the FBI and CIA, are incapable of defending us.
What Al Qaeda has done to us is small in comparison to our crimes of aggression in the Middle East.
The terrorists are humanely giving us a chance to see the error of our ways.
We are too ignorant and full of hubris to learn the lesson.

So why have Churchill's chickens come home to roost over the "little Eichmanns" crack when he put forth such a provocative rant? Why indeed, when stunned Americans asked why someone would do such a thing? In the hundreds of thousands of words put forth over this, I haven't seen any discussion of Churchill's thesis.

Why isn't this news?

Perhaps it's the Nazi-phobia that has hold on public discourse. Have you noticed? Senators Byrd and Durbin, as well as Focus on the Family's Dr. Dobson have caught big flak for making Nazi comparisons. Did we fixate on that?

Clearly, but that's not a cause. It's a symptom.

In my opinion there is a cowardice stalking the conversation of our democracy. Any self examination is suspect, dismissed as "blaming America first" by jeering demagogues who equate patriotism with blind support of our government.

Losers! As if the government is America. We are America.

This crap is so September 10th. A determined enemy is demonizing our country to provoke 800 billion Muslims to attack it. Why does bin Laden's message resonate with so many of them? Why do people follow this freak? Now is no time to flinch away from any hard truths we may find.

If Churchill wants to argue that we brought this on ourselves, let him bring it on. Let's give him a public hearing, examine his case in the media, and tear it apart if it's bogus. And if he's right, let's put our fear aside, and profit from the knowledge.

And if we're too chicken to do that, where's the next roosting gonna be?

Bumper Sticker Idea:

2005-06-09T21:08:00.000-06:00

Because freedom isn't free,
Tax Focus on the Family!

That felt good to write!

Don't get me wrong. I don't begrudge James Dobson expressing his opinion, even though I think his call for government enforced morality would send our founding fathers running for their muskets, and that his anti-gay rights crusade has tarnished the reputation of my hometown. He's entitled to his first amendment rights, and should speak out about the judicial nomination mess, and Terri Shiavo, if that's what his conscience dictates. I don't have to agree with him.

It's just that I drive by the Focus campus twice a day, and admire the tasteful, opulent brick buildings, and it rubs me just a little bit wrong, that those buildings were raised by the fruits of Dr. Dobson's ministry. Add that his political power comes not from the recently created political arm of Focus, but the year over year growth of his publishing and broadcasting enterprise. Heap on the fact that this business is tax free, so Focus makes no material contribution to my city. Then cap it with the police I see protecting their tax free property whenever Focus is protested, or managing traffic for the safety and convience of attendees at their periodic conferences.

So I get rubbed the wrong way by Focus. It's not a major thing. They are my neighbor, and I try to let little things slide in the interest of good relations.

And they aren't bad neighbors. Dr Dobson's advice has helped many parents and their families. My kids like their play area, and they have a really nice bookstore. Plus, they are a tourist draw, and Colorado Springs needs tourists. It's a big part of the local economy.

So my petty resentment is a personal failing, un-Christian, a sin I should expiate by going to a service or praying in a chapel.

But Focus on the Family doesn't hold services or have a chapel. They freely share recordings and literature for a suggested donation, but don't share worship.

It's a funny sort of ministry, don't you think?

And there's the rub.

Free Mojtaba and Arash Day

2005-02-21T17:36:00.000-07:00

First I've heard of this, but I'm game. It's set for February 22.

This blog is little more than a scratch pad to help me clarify my thinking, but I appreciate the freedom to write about what I want.

Learn more at the Committee to Protect Bloggers blog.

Social Security and the Baby Boom

2005-01-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

I've been hearing and reading a lot about Social Security these days since the President made it the centerpiece of his second term agenda. He says there's a crisis brewing, and he is going to fix it. A plan is forthcoming and speculation is rampant, yada, yada, yada!

Since I was a young man, and began hearing of Social Security's problems, I assumed that I couldn't count on Social Security existing in the same form as my parents relied on. I have saved and invested, learned hard lessons not taught in school, had some successes, and depending on how health care costs go, have a shot at a modest, comfortable retirement.

As I get closer to retiring, and the long awaited diminishment (reform in Washington-speak) of Social Security, I'm junking my assumptions and actually studying the problem. So far, here's what I know.

Boomers - From Go ask Alice to Cialis, what a long strange trip it's been.

Ah, the Baby Boom! Born into the post WWII prosperity, we've had so much laid at our doorsteps. Spoiled hippies of the sixties and seventies, we are charged with sapping the morality of our nation. The "Me Decade" of the eighties and the materialism of nineties yuppies followed. It seems we're just a bad bunch.

And now, we're screwing up Social Security, the jewel of FDR's New Deal!

The problem, as we all have heard by now, is that the numbers of retirees drawing SS benefits will surge significantly as the Boomers retire. The current SS surplus will begin to dwindle, starting in 2018, and be depleted by 2042, when benefits will have to be cut by 27% to maintain a pay as you go system. Or, the government will have to take funds from the general fund to shore up SS benefits.

Social Security - The little Ponzi scheme that could.

How's it work? Well, here's the SloJoe view:

It's been described by critics as a Ponzi scheme, which is a con where investors pay in a principal amount with a guaranteed return, that comes from the principal of newer investors. Eventually, the scheme tanks when new investors quit coming, though the con artist splits with the money before that happens.

There's some truth to this. My payroll taxes are not being deposited in an interest earning account with my name on it that I will draw down when I retire. Instead, my money goes straight out the SS revolving door to pay the benefits of current retirees, the excess into special T-bills. When I retire, I'll be getting money that younger folks pay in.

The beauty of the deal is that, unlike the Ponzi scheme, the law ensures that younger working people chip in. A Ponzi scheme requires volunteers! As long as there are enough workers paying taxes, SS can keep the checks coming. Naturally, that's where the Boomers provide the rub.

Of course, that's the glass half empty view. Consider this. Although the government calls it social insurance, my taxes pay my parents benefits and provide them a safety net in their old age as they did for my grandparents and, hopefully, my kids will do for me and my wife.

The glass half full view is that SS is a contract between the generations to provide a basic level of security to the elderly and disabled. Pretty noble stuff, eh?

Anatomy of a crisis.

So where's the fire? If we have until 2042 before something gives, why the urgency to fix it now?

The reason I've heard is that the longer we procrastinate, the more it will cost to bail SS out. And that makes sense. I've been bitten that way myself. It's the old pay me now, or pay me later conundrum.

However, since I junked my assumptions, I've started looking at other people's assumptions too, including our buddies, those pillars of actuarial rectitude, the SS Trustees.

Like good analytical folks trying to predict the future, they factored in a boatload of things that could have an impact on their forecast which, after all, boils down to how much will they have to spend and how much will they take in. As they put it in Section V - ASSUMPTIONS AND METHODS UNDERLYING
ACTUARIAL ESTIMATES(a thrilling read):

The future income and cost of the OASDI program will depend on many demographic, economic, and program-specific factors. Trust fund income will depend on how these factors affect the size and composition of the working population and the level and distribution of earnings. Similarly, program cost will depend on how these factors affect the size and composition of the beneficiary population and the general level of benefits.

They aren't kidding, either! They looked at fertility, mortality, immigration, total population, life expectancy, productivity, inflation, average earnings, real-wage differentials, labor force and unemployment, gross domestic product, interest rate . . . you get the picture. They looked at a lot of important stuff and made their best estimate on each, put them together in a way they believe will most accurately predict how much cash SS will take in and pay out for the next 75 years.

It's serious stuff put together by serious people, and they recognized that they were making a big guess based on a whole bunch of other big guesses about an unknowable future. So they made three forecasts: a worst case called the high cost forecast, the intermediate forecast that is being quoted so much, and a best case forecast called, you guessed it, low cost.

Now, I'm not going to second guess the experts, so here are their words:

Significant uncertainty surrounds the intermediate assumptions. The Trustees have traditionally used low cost (alternative I) and high cost (alternative III) assumptions to indicate this uncertainty. Figure II.D7 shows the projected trust fund ratios for the combined OASI and DI Trust Funds under the intermediate, low cost, and high cost assumptions. The low cost alternative is characterized by assumptions that improve the financial condition of the trust funds, including a higher fertility rate, slower improvement in mortality, a higher real-wage differential, and lower unemployment. The high cost alternative, in contrast, features a lower fertility rate, more rapid declines in mortality, a lower real-wage differential, and higher unemployment.

So what do the other assumptions look like? Here's Figure II.D7:

In English, when the blue line hits the bottom of the graph, that's the year SS can't pay some part of benefits with its own money - the dreaded unfunded liability. What they are saying is that SS will remain solvent indefinitely in the best case. Also, it's really complicated and hard to predict the future, so they are guessing. It's scientific guessing, which is impressive, but it's still a guess.

So there's the crisis. Are you buying it? I'm not taking it on faith anymore.

Tap dancing on the third rail of politics.

So along comes the President, newly reelected, with a plan to save Social Security from this crisis. He speaks in stark, emphatic terms:

But if you're a youngster in America, you better understand that by the time -- if you're in the 20s and by the time you retire, if nothing is done about Social Security, the system will be bust. In other words, there won't be anything available for you.

I guess that's what you call an exaggeration! However, I expect the President to paint a bleak picture. He wants to reform Social Security. It doesn't really bother me. I try to be a rational actor about issues, and have a high threshold for Washington mendacity.

However, I was surprised by my reaction to a leaked memo that recommended cutting benefits by changing how they are calculated. It may affect me, and my first reaction was, OK, it it's necessary, I'll take the hit for my kids welfare. But then I considered that I wouldn't be the only one taking the hit. I'm the primary wage earner in my family, and my wife will be dependent on my retirement benefit. I got a little steamed. I discovered that, for the first time in my life, I could be a single issue voter! I'll be sure to share that with my Congress critters.

I don't think I'm the only one who will react that way.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...We won't get fooled again!

I not a fan of the ad hominem attack as a way to refute an argument. I think it is intellectually lazy and dishonest to say, The Republicans have manufactured a crisis because they want to destroy Social Security, and replace it with individual accounts that will provide a windfall for their rich brokerage house buddies, as some liberal pundits have been doing. They may be right, but it doesn't mean there isn't a problem.

After all, the high cost and intermediate forecasts above don't paint the rosiest of pictures!

That said, the people providing the information to support the administration's argument deserve some scrutiny for accuracy and veracity.

Oh, wait. Those people are part of the Bush administration, who told us about Iraqi WMD, didn't tell us about global warming, and do a lot of spending off budget. The forecasters may be honest, but they are in with a questionable bunch!

But, maybe the facts are suspect, as well as being guesses! And, not everybody at the SS Administration is happy about it:

Over the objections of many of its own employees, the Social Security Administration is gearing up for a major effort to publicize the financial problems of Social Security and to convince the public that private accounts are needed as part of any solution.

The agency's plans are set forth in internal documents, including a "tactical plan" for communications and marketing of the idea that Social Security faces dire financial problems requiring immediate action.

Social Security officials say the agency is carrying out its mission to educate the public, including more than 47 million beneficiaries, and to support President Bush's agenda.

. . . SNIP . . .

But agency employees have complained to Social Security officials that they are being conscripted into a political battle over the future of the program. They question the accuracy of recent statements by the agency, and they say that money from the Social Security trust fund should not be used for such advocacy.(emphasis mine)

Well, that is reassuring!

The bottom line - Swallowing the Camel.

If you are still reading this ramble, thanks for your patience.

In drawing conclusions, I think everybody will have to make up their own mind about this, depending on their values, their level of trust in what we are being told, and in the people doing the telling.

As for me, I don't buy the urgency. A forecast that ranges from a worst case funding shortfall in 2032 to a best case sustainable surplus dictates a cautious appraisal, not panic!

Plus, there are more pressing problems. Health insurance costs could completely derail a lot of people's retirement plans, and they aren't being addressed. The Medicare situation looks far more dire. And then there's the budget deficit and it's expansion of the national debt. Throw in Iraq and the Al Qeada problem, and Social Security's possible long term financial health fades to smoke on the horizon when the house is on fire!

Bottom line. We should keep an eye on how Social Security is doing, and not be stampeded. And, as always let's keep an eye on the Washington crowd and a hand on our wallets!

Memo to Crossfire

2004-10-21T21:20:00.000-06:00

Jon Stewart has a lot of nerve, doesn't he, calling his hosts on Crossfire partisan hacks?

How in the world can he, in good conscience, come onto the program and confront Carlson and Begala with what Crossfire viewers already know?

Crossfire is great entertainment. The format is terrific for stirring passions without challenging audience opinions. It's not a secret.

However, the hosts didn't make up the format, they're just making a living. Stewart's ire should be directed toward CNN, who elected to put on another "news" show which accepts sound bites in lieu of substance. That this allows our politicians to frame public discourse in narrow and emotionally loaded terms while avoiding accountability is beside the point. We Americans don't really care about that stuff, do we? It's not as if it's relevant to our daily life, is it?

So keep up the complicity fellows. You make the miserable news and D.C. mendacity fun!

And Mr. Carlson, a word of advice. Never heckle a professional comedian.

Ivor Roberts Gets Busted!

2004-09-27T17:37:00.000-06:00

Great Britain's ambassador to Italy. Per the International Herald Tribune:

Britain's ambassador to Italy has called President George W. Bush "the best recruiting sergeant" for Al Qaeda, Italian media reported Monday.

The comment, made at a closed-door conference last weekend, was denounced by one leading Italian newspaper editor, who issued an open letter criticizing the veteran ambassador, Sir Ivor Roberts.

Roberts was quoted as telling an annual Anglo-Italian gathering in Tuscany: "If anyone is ready to celebrate the eventual re-election of Bush, it's Al Qaeda."

This isn't the first time I've heard this line. Michael Scheuer, in his book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, argues that invading Iraq plays into the hands of Osama Bin Laden, who is trying to convince the Muslim world that Islam is under attack by the USA, and that a defensive jihad is the duty of every Muslim. It's a good book, with convincing points, although Scheuer has clearly lost his detachment, a fatal flaw in a CIA analyst. However, it is consistent with his first book, Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam & the Future of America, which is written dispassionately, thoroughly, and persuasively. The footnotes alone are worth the price of the book.

A major bone of contention in the current presidential campaign is whether invading Iraq has weakened Al Qaeda, and made us safer. If the Iraq war aided Al Qaeda in attracting new jihadis, can that be true?

. . . . . . . .

I had hoped to find a online link to an excerpt from one of his books where he makes his case, but will instead have to do this the old fashioned way, by typing from his book, Through Our Enemies Eyes (any typos are mine, not the author's):

Central to bin Laden's position, and key to understanding his actions and appeal, is his belief that Islam and the Muslim world are being attacked by a more modern, powerful, and predatory version of the medieval Catholic Crusaders: the United States, Britain, or the West generally, allied with Israel, India, and Russia, and supported by apostate Muslim regimes. Armed with this version of reality, bin Laden has said that Muslims are required by God to wage jihad to defend themselves, their creed, and their land against the new Crusaders. the West, bin Laden told Al-Quds Al-Arabi in 1994, wants to "keep Muslims weak and incapable of defending themselves."

U.S. support for Israel, the continued sanctioning and bombing of Iraq, and the West's occupation of holy sites in Saudi Arabia are, according to bin Laden, "crimes and sins committed by the Americans," and these actions are a "clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims." Therefore, bin Laden wrote in his August 1996 Declaration of Jihad, "It is no secret that warding off the American enemy is the top duty after faith and that nothing should take priority over it. . . .The main disease and cause of the affliction [in the Muslim world] is the occupying U.S. enemy. We should lie in wait for him until he is defeated, God willing."

Establishing the U.S.-led Crusaders as aggressors is vital to bin Laden in religious terms because it enables him to ask all Muslims to participate in a defensive jihad, just as they joined the Afghans' anti-Soviet defensive jihad. "Let all Muslims] know," bin Laden wrote in a letter the AP published in 1998, "that unless they take up the jihad, it will be an inescapable and inevitable catastrophe--a catastrophe in which faith and honor will be lost, as dignity and land have been lost. It will be a catastrophe with which we will turn [Muslims] into slaves in the hands of God's basest creatures, Jews and worshippers of the cross."

The aura of an offensive war waged by Christians against Islam is powerful in emotive terms, in terms of theological requirements, and in terms of collective historical memory. "In the technical language of the ulema," Professor Bernard Lewis has written, "religious duties may be collective, to be discharged by the community as a whole, or personal, incumbent on every individual Muslim. In an offensive war conducted by Muslims, the religious duty of the jihad may be discharged by volunteers and professionals. When the Muslim community is defending itself, however, jihad becomes and individual responsibility." Lewis's analysis was supported in April 2001 by the highly influential Egyptian Islamist scholar Shaykh al-Qaradawi--now in exile on Qatar--when he explained the difference between the two type of armed jihad recognized by Islamic jurisprudence. "First of all, there are two types of jihad," al-Qaradawi said.

"There is the call-up jihad and the defensive jihad. Muslim scholars call the call-up jihad collective duty. In other words, if some Muslims carry out this duty, the rest are absolved of it. This type of jihad calls for the recruitment of every rational, mature person who can fight. . . . As to the defensive jihad, it is when an enemy enters a country and occupies it. In this case everyone must carry out jihad, each according to his ability. This is called a state of public mobilization. In this case, all people resist."

So who is this Michael Scheuer, who writes as Anonymous? An article in Salon (free day pass required) describes him thusly:

A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Scheuer is a Republican who was the first in his family to go to college. He worked as a crane operator to put himself through school, obtaining a Ph.D. in British imperial history from the University of Manitoba in Canada. He joined the CIA in the early 1980s after answering a newspaper ad. In 1999, he was removed from the bin Laden desk for becoming, as Scheuer describes it, too "intense" about the threat from al-Qaida. He says his superiors called him "myopic" -- unable to recognize the larger picture that included diplomacy, politics and international relations. "After 3,000 dead Americans, I take that as a compliment," he says, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

So, if some small percentage of Muslims buy bin Laden's defensive jihad pitch, say one percent, then based on an estimated one to seven million Muslims who live in the U.S., we would have ten to seventy thousand Al Qaeda allies right here in our country. If our war in Iraq convinced an additional one percent of American Muslims that bin Laden is right, our troubles double. For me, Scheuer's book casts serious doubt on the current administration's claims that the war made us safer.

See, I told you I ramble. 'Til next time.

Well, Alrightee Then

2004-09-27T17:29:00.000-06:00

I think I can actually get some use out of this blog.

After all, it is free storage for people's ramblings, and I am known to ramble.

So I can ramble here, and provide helpful links to people I am boring in other forums. Plus I can get around length restrictions, too.

Of course, I'll have to figure out to do some of that cool stuff I see on other blogs.

Work, work, work. Blog, blog, blog. More to come, at some time.

Sheesh!

2004-08-12T20:58:00.000-06:00

I was just trying to post a comment on one of my favorite blogs, and I get dragged thru this!

So now I have my own blog. Beats the hell out of me what I will do with it or if I will even remember this damn thing.

So, let's start out right.

I won't be posting for a few days, since I'm going on vacation. Yes, after working my behind off for months, I'm taking the family and self into the mountains to hike, soak in a hot spring, and eat Mexican food. And yes, I'll have some books to read.

Since bloggin seems to require some blabbin, I'll share my reading plans. I'm currently reading The Fly Swatter by Nicholas Dawidoff and Molly Ivins' Who Let The Dogs In?. The question now is what else to take. In the queue are Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi, Living A Polical Life by Madeline Kunin, and Elizabeth George's A Place Of Hiding.

I'm leaning toward the mystery!

Adios