Note to self: Don't invite John Kerry to speak at any banquets. He'll screw up the opening jokes. Sen. Kerry botched a joke yesterday. It's big news at a time when nothing really important is happening in the world. According to Associated Press,

Kerry told the students that if they studied hard they could do well, but if they didn't "you get stuck in Iraq." His office said he neglected to add the punch line: "Just ask President Bush."

Without any platform to speak of, the Republicans have seized on Kerry's statement as evidence that voters must stay the course and reject the Democrats in next week's mid-term elections. Here is what one rightist said about Kerry's comment:

"He is a liberal, a leftist, and this is the typical attitude they have toward our military," House Republican Leader John Boehner said on Fox News. "It goes to show you what liberal Democrats would do if they were to take control of the House and Senate."

The party that is prosecuting a quagmire in Iraq, costing the deaths of nearly 3,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are questioning the Democrats' commitment to the military. Does anyone remember the news about the Bush administration's failure to provide soldiers with enough body armor? What about cuts in veterans' benefits? What about lies which drove young men to war, where they suffer substantial physical and psychological damage?

On right wing talk radio, Republicans think that Kerry's mis-statement is the kind of thing that can affect the upcoming elections. Here's Kerry'sexcellent response to the relentless Republican attacks:

Senator John Kerry issued the following statement in response to White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, assorted right wing nut-jobs, and right wing talk show hosts desperately distorting Kerry’s comments about President Bush to divert attention from their disastrous record:

“If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have.

The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it. These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor.

Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men. And this time it won’t work because we’re going to stay in their face with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their distortions. No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq.”

All of this obscures the real news in Iraq: things are getting much, much worse. The below article is from today's New York Times:

November 1, 2006 Military Charts Movement of Conflict in Iraq Toward Chaos

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 — A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos, in a chart that the military is using as a barometer of civil conflict.

A one-page slide shown at the Oct. 18 briefing provides a rare glimpse into how the military command that oversees the war is trying to track its trajectory, particularly in terms of sectarian fighting.

The slide includes a color-coded bar chart that is used to illustrate an “Index of Civil Conflict.” It shows a sharp escalation in sectarian violence since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, and tracks a further worsening this month despite a concerted American push to tamp down the violence in Baghdad.

In fashioning the index, the military is weighing factors like the ineffectual Iraqi police and the dwindling influence of moderate religious and political figures, rather than more traditional military measures such as the enemy’s fighting strength and the control of territory.

The conclusions the Central Command has drawn from these trends are not encouraging, according to a copy of the slide that was obtained by The New York Times. The slide shows Iraq as moving sharply away from “peace,” an ideal on the far left side of the chart, to a point much closer to the right side of the spectrum, a red zone marked “chaos.” As depicted in the command’s chart, the needle has been moving steadily toward the far right of the chart.

An intelligence summary at the bottom of the slide reads “urban areas experiencing ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns to consolidate control” and “violence at all-time high, spreading geographically.” According to a Central Command official, the index on civil strife has been a staple of internal command briefings for most of this year. The analysis was prepared by the command’s intelligence directorate, which is overseen by Brig. Gen. John M. Custer.

. . .

In the Oct. 18 brief, the index moved still another notch toward “chaos.” That briefing was prepared three days before General Abizaid met in Washington with President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to take stock of the situation in Iraq.

American casualties in Iraq

A recent summary of U.S. casualties in Iraq shows that 44,000 American soldiers have been killed or injured in the war. The analysis shows the following:

Total Dead

As of Nov. 1, 2006, 2,817 Americans have died in Iraq of all causes; 239 military personnel have been killed from other countries (U.K.: 120; "other:" 119), for a grand total of 3,055 casualties from the coalition forces. (See these and more data at http://icasualties.org/oif/

The data at www.icasualties.org for American military fatalities include:

2,268 deaths from hostile fire, which occurs in many forms; and 550 non-combat deaths.

Among the deaths resulting from hostile fire:

improvised explosive devices (IEDs) caused at least 998, or 35 percent of all deaths, which exceeds all other causes.

Although the other subcategories at www.icasulaties.org includes some causes listed more than once and other poorly organized or unexplained entries (from what DOD appears to have provided), other hostile fire causes attributed in the data include:

unspecified hostile fire: 425, or 15 percent;

small arms fire: 272, or 10 percent;

mortar attacks: 85, or 3 percent;

rocket propelled grenades (RPGs): 104, or 4 percent;

cars bombs: 76, or 3 percent;

suicide car bombs: 54, or 2 percent;

other suicide bombers: 30, or 1 percent.

The leading cause of non-hostile deaths were vehicle accidents (201 deaths, or 7 percent of the total). Other causes included:

helicopter accidents: 74, or 3 percent;

weapon accidents: 76, or 3 percent.

"friendly fire:" 8, or 0.3 percent;

homicides: 7, or 0.2 percent; and

suicides: 3, or 0.1 percent.

(See various details at http://icasualties.org/oif/Stats.aspx.)

Wounded: Contrary to the approximate 20,000 wounded that the press typically reports, the www.icasualties.org website reports the following:

14,414 wounded--no medical air transport required;

6,273 wounded--medical air transport required;

6,430 non-hostile injuries--medical air transport required;

17,662 diseases--medical air transport required.

Assuming medical air transport is an indicator of serious wounds, injuries, or sickness, these data can also be described as follows:

6,273 seriously wounded;

6,430 seriously injured in non-hostile events (e.g. vehicle accidents)

17,662 seriously ill (e.g. serious heat prostration)

A total of 30,365 seriously wounded, injured, or sick--all causes.

For those not receiving medical air transport:

14,414 wounded who could be treated without air evacuation.

Grand Total: 44,779.

Olbermann, again

Here's our old friend Olbermann once again slamming the Bush administration for its despicable cynicism over John Kerry's botched joke and the issues that truly matter in this time of need.

It is against the law to tell the truth

One of the most interesting things about the Iraq war is how frequently military commanders announce that things are not going well. But the President and his minions then tell the public otherwise. Bob Woodward's recent book, State of Denial, establishes once again that the President's public statements about progress in Iraq are totally at odds with the military's assesement of things. The other day, the New York Times published a chart prepared by military experts making it clear that Iraq is descending into chaos. Now some people want the newspaper prosecuted for telling the truth.

What's really at stake

Somehow trivia trumps all news during election season. The world is falling apart and our social fabric is tearing at the seams, but apologists for the status quo try to divert our attention from what's important. People are dying every day in Iraq and it is widely believed that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead from the war. Hundreds of thousands!

Thanks to Robert Parry, former award-winning reporter for Associated Press, we are reminded of what's really important. The country has reached a turning point on constitutional liberties. These are decisions which will never be rescinded, in my view. This article should be read in full, so I will reprint it here.

consortiumnews.com

America's Point of No Return

By Robert Parry
November 2, 2006

Now that George W. Bush has reframed Election 2006 around John Kerry’s “botched joke” and the notion that a Democratic victory means “the terrorists win,” Americans must begin looking seriously at what the continuation of Republican majorities in Congress would mean for the country.

In many ways, Election 2006 not only marks the last chance to exact some accountability from those responsible for the disastrous Iraq War and other failures, but it also represents a point of no return for a nation hurtling toward a future of endless warfare abroad and a new-age totalitarianism at home.

Indeed, one could argue that the trivialization of this important U.S. election – with major U.S. news outlets devoting two days of breathless coverage to Senator Kerry’s clunky joke – is confirmation of America’s rapid descent into a dark fantasy world incapable of separating meaningful fact from silly irrelevancies.

More than 2,800 American soldiers are dead along with possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in what is likely just a small down-payment in blood for President Bush’s Iraq War – yet the U.S. press corps is obsessed with Kerry’s supposed affront to the troops, though the joke seemed actually to be aimed at Bush and the former Democratic presidential nominee isn’t even on the ballot.

All that’s left now is for the Washington pundits – many of the same people who climbed aboard the Iraq War bandwagon in 2002-03 – to explain to the nation on Election Night how Bush and his political team brilliantly engineered a dramatic come-from-behind win or how the Kerry gaffe and the overconfident Democrats blew it.

But the recent goofiness aside, the stakes for the Nov. 7 congressional elections remain extremely high and are likely to get even higher.

The elections have become a referendum on whether the United States will wage a virtually endless “World War III” against Muslim radicals – a kind of global version of Iraq – and whether the U.S. Constitution will be effectively repealed, replaced by a new system without “unalienable rights” for citizens and with an all-powerful President.

If Bush follows the pattern of 2002 and 2004, he will interpret a Republican victory on Nov. 7 as a mandate for pursuing and expanding his policies.

Plenary Powers

Continued Republican majorities in the House and Senate will amount to an endorsement of Bush’s assertion of “plenary” – or unlimited – powers as Commander in Chief for the duration of the “war on terror.”

The founding notion of the United States – that power rests in the hands of the citizens who possess unshakeable rights spelled out in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – will have effectively come to an end.

Rather than citizens possessing “unalienable rights,” Bush will get to decide which rights are allotted to which Americans. After all, if Bush possesses unlimited “plenary” powers, that means other Americans only get to have the rights that he is willing to share, much like a Medieval monarch granting favors to his subjects.

That is the tradeoff of liberty for safety at the heart of Bush’s argument for a Republican victory. As Bush has stated repeatedly, he views the fundamental duty of the government as protecting Americans, rather than the traditionalist view that the primary responsibility of the President and other officials is to defend the Constitution.

During a typical stump speech on Oct. 28 in Sellersburg, Indiana, Bush explained his view of his historical legacy:

“When people look back at this period of time, the question will be, did we do everything in our power to protect the American people and win the war on terror? And we are in a war. It came to our shores on September the 11th, 2001, and on that day, I vowed to use every element of national power to defend the American people and to defeat the terrorists.”

Bush’s words were greeted with cheers and chants of “USA! USA! USA!”

Yet, Bush’s goal of doing “everything in our power” to make Americans safe and to eliminate something as vague as terror is a recipe for totalitarianism.

Bush began asserting his claim to unlimited power shortly after the 9/11 attacks, though often in secret or in patchwork ways that left the larger meaning unclear.

For instance, in spring 2002, Bush ordered the indefinite military detention of American citizen Jose Padilla as an “enemy combatant.” Administration officials deemed Padilla a “bad guy” who was contemplating a radioactive “dirty bomb” attack, though no such charges were ever filed and no evidence ever presented in court.

The point of the Padilla case was that Bush could override habeas corpus rights of a fair trial and detain anyone he wanted indefinitely. Only 3 ½ years later – facing likely reversal by the U.S. Supreme Court – did Bush turn Padilla over to the civilian courts to face unrelated charges of supporting a terrorist group.

But Bush now knows he has four solid Supreme Court votes for his reinterpretation of the U.S. system of government – John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. All Bush needs is one more vacancy among the five other justices to secure the court’s blessing for his all-powerful executive.

Tribunal Law

Bush also has relied on the Republican majority in Congress to save the kangaroo courts he devised for trying alleged “unlawful enemy combatants.” After a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court struck down Bush’s tribunal plan in June, Bush and GOP leaders pushed through a legislative version.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 explicitly stripped non-U.S. citizens of habeas corpus rights, but also included vague wording that would seem to cast American citizens who allegedly aid terrorists into the same draconian system.

“Any person is punishable as a principal under this chapter who commits an offense punishable by this chapter, or aids, abets, counsels, commands, or procures its commission,” according to the law, passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in September and signed by Bush on Oct. 17.

“Any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States ... shall be punished as a military commission … may direct.” [Emphases added]

The references to “any person” and specifically to those with “an allegiance or duty to the United States” would seem to apply to American citizens, placing them inside the military commissions and outside the reach of regular civilian courts.

Another provision of the law states that once a person is detained, “no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause of action whatsoever … relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission under this chapter, including challenges to the lawfulness of procedures of military commissions.”

That court-stripping provision – barring “any claim or cause of action whatsoever” – would seem to deny American citizens habeas corpus rights just as it does for non-citizens. If a person can’t file a motion with a court, he can’t assert any constitutional rights, including habeas corpus.

Other constitutional protections in the Bill of Rights – such as a speedy trial, the right to reasonable bail and the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” – appear to be beyond an American detainee’s reach as well.

Padilla asserted in court papers that he was not only held in a small isolation cell but tortured, including threats of execution and long periods in “stress positions” – actions allegedly taken even before the Military Commissions Act was passed, solely on Bush’s authority. [NYT, Nov. 2, 2006]

The new tribunal law also applies to alleged spies, defined as “any person” who “collects or attempts to collect information by clandestine means or while acting under false pretenses, for the purpose of conveying such information to an enemy of the United States.”

Since the Bush administration and its political allies often have accused American journalists of conveying information to terrorists via stories citing confidential sources, it’s conceivable that this provision could apply to such articles, either for journalists or their sources.

It’s also likely that Bush would execute these powers during a serious terrorist incident inside the United States. Amid public anger and fear, Bush or some future President could begin rounding up citizens and non-citizens alike with little thought about a limited interpretation of the law.

It could take years before the U.S. Supreme Court even addresses these detentions and – given the increasingly right-wing make-up of the Court – there would be no assurance that the justices wouldn’t endorse the President’s extraordinary powers.

All-Powerful President

Since 9/11, Bush also has asserted his right to ignore the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a court warrant for searches and seizures. Bush took that action in secret when he approved the wiretapping of Americans making or receiving overseas phone calls. Bush bypassed a special court created to handle such matters under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

When the secret wiretapping was revealed by the New York Times in December 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales defended the program, citing inherent presidential powers during wartime.

Through extensive use of so-called “signing statements,” Bush also has claimed the right to ignore or reinterpret laws as he sees fit.

Bush’s rationale for his unlimited power is being sold to his excited supporters as he stumps for Republican candidates in the days before Election 2006. In the Indiana speech, Bush portrayed the choice in stark terms, between his sensible approach to the “war on terror” and the recklessness of the Democrats.

“When al-Qaeda or an al-Qaeda affiliate is making a phone call from outside the United States to inside the United States, we want to know why,” Bush said. “In this new kind of war, we must be willing to question the enemy when we pick them up on the battlefield.”

Referring to the capture of alleged 9/11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Bush said, “when we captured him, I said to the Central Intelligence Agency, why don’t we find out what he knows in order to be able to protect America from another attack.”

Bush then contrasted his eminently reasonable positions with those held by the nutty Democrats.

“When it came time on whether to allow the Central Intelligence Agency to continue to detain and question terrorists, almost 80 percent of the House Democrats voted against it,” Bush said, as the crowd booed the Democrats.

“When it came time to vote on whether the NSA [National Security Agency] should continue to monitor terrorist communications through the Terrorist Surveillance Program, almost 90 percent of House Democrats voted against it.

“In all these vital measures for fighting the war on terror, the Democrats in Washington follow a simple philosophy: Just say no. When it comes to listening in on the terrorists, what’s the Democratic answer? Just say no. When it comes to detaining terrorists, what’s the Democrat answer?”

Crowd: “Just say no!”

Bush: “When it comes to questioning terrorists, what’s the Democrat answer?”

Crowd: “Just say no!”

Bush: “When it comes to trying terrorists, what’s the Democrat’s answer?”

Crowd: “Just say no!”

Yet, Bush realizes that the Democrats are not opposed to eavesdropping on terrorists, or detaining terrorists, or questioning terrorists, or bringing terrorists to trial.

What Democrats – and many conservatives – object to are Bush’s methods: his tolerance of abusive interrogation techniques; his assertion of unlimited presidential authority; his abrogation of habeas corpus rights to a fair trial; and his violation of existing laws, such as FISA which already gives the President broad powers to engage in electronic spying inside the United States, albeit with the approval of a special court.

Bush’s critics argue that all his “war on terror” objectives can be achieved without throwing out more than two centuries of American constitutional traditions or violating human rights, such as prohibitions against torture.

In Bush’s exaggerated attacks on his enemies and the frenzy of his followers, Bush’s rallies sometimes have the look and feel of proto-fascism.

Endless War

Another crucial issue before the voters on Nov. 7 is whether Bush will continue getting a blank check to wage the “global war on terror,” which might well mean extending the conflict to Iran in the months ahead, especially if it resists demands for curtailing its nuclear ambitions.

Bush and his military advisers also have cited both Iran and Syria as allegedly supporting insurgents inside Iraq and aiding Hezbollah militants in Lebanon. If the Republicans hold both houses on Congress, Bush might well see that outcome as a carte blanche to double up on his Iraq wager by escalating and expanding the conflict.

That would presumably please neoconservative activists and prominent Republicans, such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who have spoken eagerly about waging “World War III” against Islamic militants around the globe.

Since much of the “World War III” talk is tossed about in a cavalier fashion, it is not clear if its promoters have weighed the likely consequences of fighting a global conflict with many of the world’s one billion Muslims. How the United States would muster the vast numbers of troops needed for such an endeavor has never been explained.

In his stump speeches, Bush agrees that Election 2006 represents a crucial turning point for the nation, although his warning is of the dire consequences from a Democratic victory.

Bush urged the crowd in Sellersburg, Indiana, to contact their friends and “remind them the outcome of this election will determine whether this government does its most fundamental job, and that is to protect the American people.”

On Oct. 30 in a speech in Statesboro, Georgia, Bush added, “However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses.”

Despite the sometimes over-heated rhetoric, Election 2006 does come down to these fundamental questions:

Does the public’s desire for more safety from terrorists trump the nation’s historic commitment to constitutional liberties? Should the United States abandon its founding principles as a Republic where citizens possess “unalienable rights” and trade that in for a system where one man decides where to wage war and whom to imprison?

Is “World War III” between the United States and Islamic militants inevitable or should other alternatives be tried first aimed at reducing tensions and isolating the hard-core extremists?

Granted, these are difficult and complex issues for the U.S. press corps to explain. It’s a lot easier to frame a story around John Kerry’s joke.

But no American should go to the polls on Nov. 7 – whether voting Republican or Democratic – without recognizing what that vote will mean. The United States is at a dangerous crossroads. Indeed, it may be at a point of no return.

Saddam gets the death penalty. No surprise here. If you believe in Hell, Saddam will be there for a very long time. But that's not the story. The story is one that goes under-reported even as the U.S. wages endless war in Iraq: how did our goverment get away with supporting Saddam for so long when he was far more dangerous than at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003?

The death sentence stems from a particular episode in 1982. According to the New York Times, "The case centered on the execution of 148 men and boys from the town after an alleged assassination attempt against Mr. Hussein by men firing from a nearby orchard on July 8, 1982. Mr. Hussein’s lawyers contended at the trial that the would-be assassins were Iranian-backed Shiite militants, and that he was justified in ordering the crackdown on the town because Iraq was at war with Iran at the time."

How many Americans know that Saddam was one of our closest allies during the 1980's? If you consider that a majority of Americans actually thought that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 at the time of the invasion, probably very few. The U.S. government creates its own reality. And an uninformed public goes along with it, sending their children to fight in a quagmire.

There is no dispute that the United States had a close relationship with Saddam during the Reagan administration. Our government supported Iraq in its war with Iran (but we also sent Iran weapons, just in case). We know that Saddam was a vicious butcher who terrorized his people and used chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war.

A famous photograph of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam in 1983 is the smoking gun. For a very comprehensive account of our relationship with Saddam's Iraq during the early 1980's, including links to government documents that support the narrative, click here.

Wikipedia tells us that "On 9 June, 1992, Ted Koppel reported on ABC's Nightline that "It is becoming increasingly clear that George Bush Sr., operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into [an aggressive power]" and "Reagan/Bush administrations permitted — and frequently encouraged — the flow of money, agricultural credits, dual-use technology, chemicals, and weapons to Iraq.”

The right wing will acknowledge that we supported Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. They will argue that we had to take sides and that Iran was worse. Not so simple. As Newsweek reported in 2002,

The history of America’s relations with Saddam is one of the sorrier tales in American foreign policy. Time and again, America turned a blind eye to Saddam’s predations, saw him as the lesser evil or flinched at the chance to unseat him. No single policymaker or administration deserves blame for creating, or at least tolerating, a monster; many of their decisions seemed reasonable at the time. Even so, there are moments in this clumsy dance with the Devil that make one cringe. It is hard to believe that, during most of the 1980s, America knowingly permitted the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission to import bacterial cultures that might be used to build biological weapons. But it happened.

After the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, the U.S. government continued to support Saddam. Ross Baker, who has done some excellent reporting on this issue, has written that

Much of what Saddam received from the West was not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology -- ultra sophisticated computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military applications. We've learned by now that a vast network of companies, based in the U.S. and abroad, eagerly fed the Iraqi war machine right up until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait.

And we've learned that the obscure Atlanta branch of Italy's largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, relying partially on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $ 5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. Some government-backed loans were supposed to be for agricultural purposes, but were used to facilitate the purchase of stronger stuff than wheat. Federal Reserve and Agriculture department memos warned of suspected abuses by Iraq, which apparently took advantage of the loans to free up funds for munitions. U.S. taxpayers have been left holding the bag for what looks like $ 2 billion in defaulted loans to Iraq.

All of this was not yet clear in August 1989, when FBI agents raided U.S. branches of BNL, hitting the jackpot in Atlanta. The branch manager in that city, Christopher Drogoul, was charged with making unauthorized, clandestine, and illegal loans to Iraq -- some of which, according to the indictment, were used to purchase arms and weapons technology. Yet three months after the raid, White House officials went right on backing Saddam, approving $ 1 billion more in U.S. government loan guarantees for farm exports to Iraq, even though it was becoming clear that the country was beating plowshares into swords.

At the time, inquiring minds wondered whether Drogoul could possibly have acted alone in such a mammoth operation, as the U.S. government alleged. Was there a formal, secret plan to arm Iraq? And did the U.S. government engage in a massive coverup when evidence of such a plan began to emerge?

In fact, we now know that in February 1990, then Attorney General Dick Thornburgh blocked U.S. investigators from traveling to Rome and Istanbul to pursue the case. And that the lead investigator lacked the basic financial know-how to handle such an investigation, and made an extraordinarily feeble effort to get to the bottom of things. More damningly, we know know that mid-level staffers at the commerce department altered Iraqi export licenses to obscure the exported materials' military function -- before sending the documents on to Congress, which was investigating the affair.

Eventually, it would turn out that elements of the U.S. government almost certainly knew that Drogoul was funneling U.S.-backed loans -- intended for the purchase of agricultural products, machinery, trucks, and other U.S. goods -- into dual-use technology and outright military technology. And that the British government was fully aware of the operations of Matrix Churchill, a British firm with an Ohio branch, which was not only at the center of the Iraqi procurement network but was also funded by BNL Atlanta. (Precision equipment supplied by Matrix Churchill was reportedly a target this January when the Western allies renewed their attack on Iraq).

Our support for Saddam stopped on August 2, 1990, when he invaded Kuwait. War was back in style as the first President Bush -- vice president during the 1980s when the Reagan administration supported Saddam -- compared Saddam to Hitler and pursued a war policy. The U.S. military crushed Saddam's army, but when the war ended Bush betrayed the Kurds who wanted to overthrow the dictator. This story is well-known to students of U.S. foreign policy, but still unknown to probably 75 percent of the American public who are understandably disgusted by Saddam's crimes. As an opinion piece in the Washington Post reported in 2003,

Just 12 years ago, the Shiite Muslims who constitute a majority in Iraq and in the city of Baghdad were betrayed by the United States -- an act that may have cost them as many as 100,000 lives. That recent history -- of which the Shiites are understandably a good deal less forgetful than we -- explains why the Shiites in the south initially greeted invading American and British forces with a good deal more reserve than expected. And as the continuing turmoil in southern towns and cities makes clear, building a democratic state in Iraq over the long term will depend to a large degree on how strong and lasting a trust we can build among these people.

The spontaneous Shiite uprising of 1991 consumed the southern part of Iraq right up to the approaches to Baghdad. Rebels came to U.S. troops, who were then deployed in the Euphrates Valley, begging for U.S. intervention. The Shiite political parties sent emissaries to the few Americans who would see them. To this day, I am haunted by the desperation in the appeals made to me by one group, as they realized time was running out for their countrymen.

Many of the problems we face now and in the future with Shiites likely have to do with the way the first Bush administration responded to those appeals. On Feb. 15, 1991, President George H.W. Bush called on the Iraqi military and people to overthrow Saddam Hussein. On March 3, an Iraqi tank commander returning from Kuwait fired a shell through one of the portraits of Hussein in Basra's main square, igniting the southern uprising. A week later, Kurdish rebels ended Hussein's control over much of the north.

But although Bush had called for the rebellion, his administration was caught unprepared when it happened. The administration knew little about those in the Iraqi opposition because, as a matter of policy, it refused to talk to them. Policymakers tended to see Iraq's main ethnic groups in caricature: The Shiites were feared as pro-Iranian and the Kurds as anti-Turkish. Indeed, the U.S. administration seemed to prefer the continuation of the Baath regime (albeit without Hussein) to the success of the rebellion. As one National Security Council official told me at the time: "Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime."

The practical expression of this policy came in the decisions made by the military on the ground. U.S. commanders spurned the rebels' plea for help. The United States allowed Iraq to send Republican Guard units into southern cities and to fly helicopter gunships. (This in spite of a ban on flights, articulated by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf with considerable swagger: "You fly, you die.") The consequences were devastating. Hussein's forces leveled the historical centers of the Shiite towns, bombarded sacred Shiite shrines and executed thousands on the spot. By some estimates, 100,000 people died in reprisal killings between March and September. Many of these atrocities were committed in proximity to American troops, who were under orders not to intervene.

A recent book tracing the roots of the 2003 Iraq war puts it this way: "Having incited a rebellion against Saddam Hussein, the U.S. government stood by while the rebels were slaughtered. This failure would haunt the U.S. occupation twelve years later, when U.S. commanders were met not with cordial welcomes in the south but with cold distrust. In retrospect, Macgregor concluded, the 1991 war amounted to a "strategic defeat" for the United States."

So the first Bush administration did not help the Kurds overthrow Saddam in 1991. Why? Ask Colin Powell:

Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged in his autobiography that Bush's rhetoric "may have given encouragement to the rebels." But he said that the Shiites, as well as the Kurds in the north, never had a chance of succeeding, and that their success was not a goal for the administration.

"Our practical intention was to leave Baghdad enough power to survive as a threat to an Iran that remained bitterly hostile toward the United States," Powell said in his book, "My American Journey."

In criminal law in this country, you are as guilty as an accomplice if you help the kingpin kill someone. If Fred robs a bank and Mel drives the getaway car, the Mel goes to jail, too. Saddam a scumbag? No doubt. The Reagan and Bush I administrations? Saddam should make room in his cell.

Limiting the Damage
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
November 6, 2006

President Bush isn’t on the ballot tomorrow. But this election is, nonetheless, all about him. The question is whether voters will pry his fingers loose from at least some of the levers of power, thereby limiting the damage he can inflict in his two remaining years in office.

There are still some people urging Mr. Bush to change course. For example, a scathing editorial published today by The Military Times, which calls on Mr. Bush to fire Donald Rumsfeld, declares that “this is not about the midterm elections.” But the editorial’s authors surely know better than that. Mr. Bush won’t fire Mr. Rumsfeld; he won’t change strategy in Iraq; he won’t change course at all, unless Congress forces him to.

At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all his officials are doing a heckuva job. Just last week he declared himself “pleased with the progress we’re making” in Iraq.

In other words, he’s the sort of man who should never have been put in a position of authority, let alone been given the kind of unquestioned power, free from normal checks and balances, that he was granted after 9/11. But he was, alas, given that power, as well as a prolonged free ride from much of the news media.

The results have been predictably disastrous. The nightmare in Iraq is only part of the story. In time, the degradation of the federal government by rampant cronyism — almost every part of the executive branch I know anything about, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been FEMAfied — may come to be seen as an equally serious blow to America’s future.

And it should be a matter of intense national shame that Mr. Bush has quietly abandoned his fine promises to New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast.

The public, which rallied around Mr. Bush after 9/11 and was still prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt two years ago, seems to have figured most of this out. It’s too late to vote Mr. Bush out of office, but most Americans seem prepared to punish Mr. Bush’s party for his personal failings. This is in spite of a vicious campaign in which Mr. Bush has gone further than any previous president — even Richard Nixon — in attacking the patriotism of anyone who criticizes him or his policies.

That said, it’s still possible that the Republicans will hold on to both houses of Congress. The feeding frenzy over John Kerry’s botched joke showed that many people in the news media are still willing to be played like a fiddle. And if you think the timing of the Saddam verdict was coincidental, I’ve got a terrorist plot against the Brooklyn Bridge to sell you.

Moreover, the potential for vote suppression and/or outright electoral fraud remains substantial. And it will be very hard for the Democrats to take the Senate for the very simple reason that only one-third of Senate seats are on this ballot.

What if the Democrats do win? That doesn’t guarantee a change in policy.

The Constitution says that Congress and the White House are co-equal branches of government, but Mr. Bush and his people aren’t big on constitutional niceties. Even with a docile Republican majority controlling Congress, Mr. Bush has been in the habit of declaring that he has the right to disobey the law he has just signed, whether it’s a law prohibiting torture or a law requiring that he hire qualified people to run FEMA.

Just imagine, then, what he’ll do if faced with demands for information from, say, Congressional Democrats investigating war profiteering, which seems to have been rampant. Actually, we don’t have to imagine: a White House strategist has already told Time magazine that the administration plans a “cataclysmic fight to the death” if Democrats in Congress try to exercise their right to issue subpoenas — which is one heck of a metaphor, given Mr. Bush’s history of getting American service members trapped in cataclysmic fights where the deaths are anything but metaphors.

But here’s the thing: no matter how hard the Bush administration may try to ignore the constitutional division of power, Mr. Bush’s ability to make deadly mistakes has rested in part on G.O.P. control of Congress. That’s why many Americans, myself included, will breathe a lot easier if one-party rule ends tomorrow.

I agree that the Democrats do not offer significant differences from the Republicans, but if you firmly believe in the "lesser of two evils" theory of voting, Election Day was a rousing success. I also agree that this time around the Democrats did not offer serious alternatives to the horrendous war in Iraq, but the most significant consequence of this election was that anti-war sentiment drove many people to oust the incumbents. Has this ever happened before? I don't think so. It did not happen in Vietnam, and in 1968 and 1972, years that most of us associated with hippies and anti-war rallies, voters chose the hawkish militarist, Richard Nixon, as President.

It's a big deal when a war actually causes the warmongers to lose power. War is an easy way to gain power in this country. George W. Bush did it in 2004. To lose power because of a war signals monumental incompetence. It's so easy to retain power these days. Incumbents get to draw the boundaries of their legislative districts, almost guaranteeing that most of their constituants belong to their party. These electoral fortresses are almost always impenetrable. Not this time. People are pissed off at the Iraq War and President Bush, who could have been thrown out of office if voters had a chance to do so yesterday.

I don't expect the Democrats to try to impeach President Bush. But simple obstructionism wouldn't be a bad idea. Whatever Bush is for, I'm against. I hope the new office-holders feel the same way. Voters told pollsters that corruption was one of the motivating issues this time around. The Republicans were in power too long and treated the Capitol building like their sandbox. I hope to God the Democrats revive the time-honored practice of Congress investigatng the Presidency and other offices and departments under his control. There is much work to do, including a serious examination into the mis-use of intelligence to push the Iraq War onto the American people. Get these people under oath!

Locally, two big wins for progressive challengers to some particularly odious Bush supporters. This year, my office donated some space to John Hall, a Democrat challenging Sue Kelly, a typical Republican Bush-backer. Hall made a name for himself in the 1970's as a rock star with the band Orleans, sabatoging popular culture with soft-rock drivel like "Still the One" and "Dance with Me." But he also appeared at the No-Nukes concerts back then and became a political activist. He prevailed in Republican territory.

Up north, in Albany, a particularly deplorable Republican, John Sweeney, lost to a political newcomer, Kirstin Gillibrand , who came out of nowhere to knock out one of the guys who tried to disrupt the 2000 Presidential recount in Florida.

In Pennsylvania, a particularly offensive Republican, Rick Santorum, was ousted. This gay-hating reactionary poisoned the national conversation with language that even Republicans should have been ashamed of. After the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex relationships are protected by the Constitution, Santorum said that he

had "a problem with homosexual acts"; that the right to privacy "doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution"; that, "whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, whether it's sodomy, all of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family"; and that sodomy laws properly exist to prevent acts that "undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family". When the Associated Press reporter asked whether homosexuals should not then engage in homosexual acts, Santorum replied, "Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality".

That's right, he compared homosexuality with "man on dog." Santorum's legacy is that his name is now associated with a disgusting bodily emission. Getting a low-life out of Congress is my definition of success.

Click here to see how much progress has been made over the past few days. Read about how the Republicans have systematically taken the wrong side on nearly every issue. There was no silver lining in 2004 when Bush won re-election. There is a silver lining now. Can the Democrats do any worse?

The world couldn't handle another two years of Republican dominance in the United States. Neither could we. The electoral wipe-out on Tuesday was like going to the bathroom. Out with the bad.

Some good will come out of this. It became obvious to Bush that he couldn't have Rumsfeld dangling from his neck anymore. Much of the critical investigative reporting over the past few years has concerned Rumsfeld and his incompetent handling of the Iraq War. The blood of thousands of soldiers and civilians is on Rumsfeld's hands.

I do not anticipate this Congress will vote for national health insurance or force Bush to adopt global warming treaties. But Congress can stop the next war and bring the Iraq war to a close. The history of U.S. warfare, though, tells us that administrations that want war will get war, and they will wage it underground if necessary.

Many people do not know what Congress actually does, besides voting on bills. Congress is supposed to investigate the Executive Branch, or the Presidency. Congress has subpoena power and can force administration witnesses to tell the truth. If they don't tell the truth, then into the slammer they go.

The golden age of Congressional investigations was the 1970's, when lawmakers were uncovering the rotting corpse that was the U.S. presidency. Some of the best scholarship about U.S. foreign policy and domestic surveillance still draws from these investigations.

There was the Rockefeller Commission, not a congressional investigation but a rare instance when the president himself organized an inquiry into misconduct and wrongdoing. According to Wikipedia, "U.S. President's Commission on CIA activities within the United States was set up under President Gerald Ford in 1975 to investigate the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies within the United States. The commission was led by the Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, and is sometimes referred to as the Rockefeller Commission. The commission was created in response to a December 1974 report in The New York Times that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s. The commission was responsible for, among other things, the investigation and publication of Project MKULTRA, a CIA mind control study."

Congress had its own committee to investigate the CIA back then, the Church Committee. "The Church Committee is the common term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) in 1975. A precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee investigated intelligence gathering for illegality by the CIA and FBI after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair." The Wikipedia page for the Church Committee will make you appreciate the power of the Internet. Someone downloaded the lengthy report which is filled with horror stories about the CIA and FBI. You will wonder how the United States allowed these abuses and outrages to happen.

And who can forget the Watergate Committee? "The Senate Watergate Committee was a special committee convened by the United States Senate to investigate the Watergate first break-in and the ensuing Watergate scandal after it was learned that the Watergate burglars had been directed to break into and wiretap the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee by the Committee to Re-elect the President, President Richard Nixon's re-election campaign fundraising organization. The Committee played a pivotal role in gathering evidence that would lead to the indictment of forty administration officials and the conviction of several of Nixon's aides for obstruction of justice and other crimes. Its revelations prompted the introduction of articles of impeachment against the President in the House of Representatives, which led to Nixon's resignation."

The above summary of the Watergate Committee makes your mouth water, doesn't it?

Our political system is broken and corrupt. Even good people in government are vulnerable to this corruption, fueled by money and power, but mostly money. Politicians spend much of their time fund-raising and being sweet-talked by lobbyists. They have to move to the center to avoid strong criticism that they are left-wing or anti-military. They have to shake hands with people you don't want to know.

But, for now, there is no greater satisfaction than watching corrupt and bankrupt politicians pack their bags and return home. Including Rumsfeld. These people should be forced to push shopping carts at the Grand Union of their choice. Things will change on January 1, 2007 when the new Congress takes office. It's better than the alternative, but they will undoubtedly disappoint us.

One good thing about the Republican wipe-out on Election Day was that Donald Rumsfeld was shown the door. Most of the books about the Iraq War focus on Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. He pushed for war and did not commit enough troops and alienated everyone around him, including military generals. Bush was tone-deaf to the criticism, deeming himself the "Decider" when people asked if he was going to fire Rumsfeld.

The opposition makes a lot of hay about the Bush-Rove electoral strategy of stealing elections, if not by technical means then by psychological means. In recent months, that was in full force as Republican mouthpieces told the American people that the Democrats would leave the country exposed to more terrorist attacks and that the party is weak and does not want to fight a war on terror. This was, of course, bullshit, but the Republicans have defined themselves for generations as the war party as well as the party that will dig deeper into the gutter to win elections. The Democrats may be bad, but the Republicans are despicable.

This time around, though, the Bush-Rove strategy did not work. If they knew what they were doing, they would have fired Rumseld a month ago and allowed the Republican candidates to profit from the good will generated by this gesture. Maybe the message this time around is that Bush-Rove is overrated or that this malevolent force is winding down like an aged playboy at a college fraternity party. The obvious means to win over disaffected independent voters -- firing Rumsfeld -- did not materialize. This is a sure sign that the Republicans need a vacation.

The problem is that Rumsfeld's replacement is no romp in the park. It's been 15 years, but the last time Robert Gates came into our lives he was a highly controversial choice for CIA director and his name was interwoven throughout the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980's, when Ronald Reagan's administration got caught in the mousetrap of lies and war.

It's telling that Bush relied on his father's friends to bail him out. So many Bush administration officials worked for Bush I and the Reagan administration, where Bush I was the Rolodex king who knew everyone in Washington. A little-noticed feature of the current Bush administration is the many Reagan-Bush I holdovers who have no business being anywhere near a government office.

You would think that a guy who plead guilty to withholding relevant information from Congress years ago would be passed over for a highly influential job in a subsequent administration. Not under the Bush II administration. During the 1980's, when Reagan waged a terror war against the people of Central America, one of his henchman was Elliott Abrams, handling the dirty work in a series of civil wars that killed thousands and served no logical purpose other than the expansion of American power. OK, you say, Abrams was a bad guy who was on the wrong side of things back then. What's his crime? Here's his crime:

Abrams clashed regularly with church groups and human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, over the Reagan administration's foreign policies. They accused him of covering up atrocities committed by the military forces of US-backed governments, such as those in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and the rebel Contras in Nicaragua.

In early 1982, when reports of the El Mozote massacre of civilians by the military in El Salvador began appearing in U.S. media, Abrams told a Senate committee that the reports of hundreds of deaths at El Mozote "were not credible," and that "it appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas." The massacre had come at a time when the Reagan administration was attempting to bolster the human rights image of the Salvadoran military. Abrams implied that reports of a massacre were simply FMLN propaganda and denounced US investigative reports of the massacre as misleading. He later claimed Washington's policy in El Salvador a "fabulous achievement."

When Congress shut down funding for the Contras with the 1982 Boland Amendment, the Reagan administration began looking for other avenues for funding the group. As part of this strategy, Abrams flew to London using a fake name to solicit a $10 million contribution from the Sultan of Brunei.

. . .

During the Iran-Contra Affair, Abrams was indicted for giving false testimony about his role in the illicit money-raising schemes by the special prosecutor handling the case, but he pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses of withholding information to Congress in order to avoid a trial and a possible jail term. Quoted in a 30 May 1994 article in Legal Times, Abrams spoke of his prosecutors as "filthy bastards", the proceedings against him "Kafkaesque," and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee "pious clowns" whose raison d'etre was to ask him "abysmally stupid" questions.[1] President George H. W. Bush pardoned Abrams along with a number of other Iran-Contra defendants shortly before leaving office in 1992.

This man is now a high-ranking foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush.

Others like Abrams also work for Bush. There's John Negroponte, another Reagan-era Central American warrior who went to bed with fascist dictators and used the little country of Honduras as a military staging ground to fight an illegal war in neighboring Nicaragua. According to Wikipedia:

In 1995, The Baltimore Sun published an extensive investigation of U.S. activities in Honduras. Speaking of Negroponte and other senior U.S. officials, an ex-Honduran congressman, Efraín Díaz, was quoted as saying:

Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.

Substantial evidence subsequently emerged to support the contention that Negroponte was aware that serious violations of human rights were carried out by the Honduran government, but despite this did not recommend ending U.S. military aid to the country. Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, on September 14, 2001, as reported in the Congressional Record, aired his suspicions on the occasion of Negroponte's nomination to the position of UN ambassador:

Based upon the Committee's review of State Department and CIA documents, it would seem that Ambassador Negroponte knew far more about government perpetrated human rights abuses than he chose to share with the committee in 1989 or in Embassy contributions at the time to annual State Department Human Rights reports.

Among other evidence, Dodd cited a cable sent by Negroponte, in 1985, that made it clear that Negroponte was aware of the threat of "future human rights abuses" by "secret operating cells" left over by General Alvarez after his deposition in 1984.

Negroponte today is today the Director of National Intelligence under George W. Bush.

So what about Gates? Same story. He got caught up in the Iran-contra scandal and, in a rational world, his name would come off the short list of potential replacements for Secretary of Defense or any other position of prominence. "Critics have charged that Gates concocted evidence to show that the Soviet Union was stronger than it actually was, and that he repeatedly skewed intelligence to promote a particular world view." This is the same problem that brought us to war in Iraq: manipulated intelligence.

It's a sad indictment on the American political system that trivia like John Kerry's botched joke about the troops in Iraq had the potential to sway the election but Bush's decision to hire the recycled criminals and low-lifes from the Reagan-Bush I administrations gets little attention. Yet, the newspapers have not dug into Gates' past, maybe because they are so happy to see Rumsfeld gone they do not want to look a gift horse in the mouth. The below piece from Consortium News, however, summarizes Gates nicely, and it's actually worse than I thought.

The Secret World of Robert Gates

By Robert Parry
November 9, 2006

Robert Gates, George W. Bush’s choice to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, is a trusted figure within the Bush Family’s inner circle, but there are lingering questions about whether Gates is a trustworthy public official.

The 63-year-old Gates has long faced accusations of collaborating with Islamic extremists in Iran, arming Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq, and politicizing U.S. intelligence to conform with the desires of policymakers – three key areas that relate to his future job.

Gates skated past some of these controversies during his 1991 confirmation hearings to be CIA director – and the current Bush administration is seeking to slip Gates through the congressional approval process again, this time by pressing for a quick confirmation by the end of the year, before the new Democratic-controlled Senate is seated.

If Bush’s timetable is met, there will be no time for a serious investigation into Gates’s past.

Fifteen years ago, Gates got a similar pass when leading Democrats agreed to put “bipartisanship” ahead of careful oversight when Gates was nominated for the CIA job by President George H.W. Bush.

In 1991, despite doubts about Gates’s honesty over Iran-Contra and other scandals, the career intelligence officer brushed aside accusations that he played secret roles in arming both sides of the Iran-Iraq War. Since then, however, documents have surfaced that raise new questions about Gates’s sweeping denials.

For instance, the Russian government sent an intelligence report to a House investigative task force in early 1993 stating that Gates participated in secret contacts with Iranian officials in 1980 to delay release of 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran, a move to benefit the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

“R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part” in a meeting in Paris in October 1980, according to the Russian report, which meshed with information from witnesses who have alleged Gates’s involvement in the Iranian gambit.

Once in office, the Reagan administration did permit weapons to flow to Iran via Israel. One of the planes carrying an arms shipment was shot down over the Soviet Union on July 18, 1981, after straying off course, but the incident drew little attention at the time.

The arms flow continued, on and off, until 1986 when the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal broke.

Iraqgate Scandal

Gates also was implicated in a secret operation to funnel military assistance to Iraq in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration played off the two countries battling each other in the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War.

Middle Eastern witnesses alleged that Gates worked on the secret Iraqi initiative, which included Saddam Hussein’s procurement of cluster bombs and chemicals used to produce chemical weapons for the war against Iran.

Gates denied those Iran-Iraq accusations in 1991 and the Senate Intelligence Committee – then headed by Gates’s personal friend, Sen. David Boren, D-Oklahoma – failed to fully check out the claims before recommending Gates for confirmation.

However, four years later – in early January 1995 – Howard Teicher, one of Reagan’s National Security Council officials, added more details about Gates’s alleged role in the Iraq shipments.

In a sworn affidavit submitted in a Florida criminal case, Teicher stated that the covert arming of Iraq dated back to spring 1982 when Iran had gained the upper hand in the war, leading President Reagan to authorize a U.S. tilt toward Saddam Hussein.

The effort to arm the Iraqis was “spearheaded” by CIA Director William Casey and involved his deputy, Robert Gates, according to Teicher’s affidavit. “The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq,” Teicher wrote.

Ironically, that same pro-Iraq initiative involved Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan’s special emissary to the Middle East. An infamous photograph from 1983 shows a smiling Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein.

Teicher described Gates’s role as far more substantive than Rumsfeld’s. “Under CIA Director [William] Casey and Deputy Director Gates, the CIA authorized, approved and assisted [Chilean arms dealer Carlos] Cardoen in the manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and other munitions to Iraq,” Teicher wrote.

Like the Russian report, the Teicher affidavit has never been never seriously examined. After Teicher submitted it to a federal court in Miami, the affidavit was classified and then attacked by Clinton administration prosecutors. They saw Teicher’s account as disruptive to their prosecution of a private company, Teledyne Industries, and one of its salesmen, Ed Johnson.

But the questions about Gates’s participation in dubious schemes involving hotspots such as Iran and Iraq are relevant again today because they reflect on Gates’s judgment, his honesty and his relationship with two countries at the top of U.S. military concerns.

About 140,000 U.S. troops are now bogged down in Iraq, 3 ½ years after President George W. Bush ordered an invasion to remove Saddam Hussein from power and eliminate his supposed WMD stockpiles. One reason the United States knew that Hussein once had those stockpiles was because the Reagan administration helped him procure the material needed for the WMD production in the 1980s.

The United States also is facing down Iran’s Islamic government over its nuclear ambitions. Though Bush has so far emphasized diplomatic pressure on Iran, he has pointedly left open the possibility of a military option.

Political Intelligence

Beyond the secret schemes to aid Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, Gates also stands accused of playing a central role in politicizing the CIA intelligence product, tailoring it to fit the interests of his political superiors, a legacy that some Gates critics say contributed to the botched CIA’s analysis of Iraqi WMD in 2002.

Before Gates’s rapid rise through the CIA’s ranks in the 1980s, the CIA’s tradition was to zealously protect the objectivity and scholarship of the intelligence. However, during the Reagan administration, that ethos collapsed.

At Gates’s confirmation hearings in 1991, former CIA analysts, including renowned Kremlinologist Mel Goodman, took the extraordinary step of coming out of the shadows to accuse Gates of politicizing the intelligence while he was chief of the analytical division and then deputy director.

The former intelligence officers said the ambitious Gates pressured the CIA’s analytical division to exaggerate the Soviet menace to fit the ideological perspective of the Reagan administration. Analysts who took a more nuanced view of Soviet power and Moscow’s behavior in the world faced pressure and career reprisals.

In 1981, Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl of the CIA’s Soviet office was the unfortunate analyst who was handed the assignment to prepare an analysis on the Soviet Union’s alleged support and direction of international terrorism.

Contrary to the desired White House take on Soviet-backed terrorism, Ekedahl said the consensus of the intelligence community was that the Soviets discouraged acts of terrorism by groups getting support from Moscow for practical, not moral, reasons.

“We agreed that the Soviets consistently stated, publicly and privately, that they considered international terrorist activities counterproductive and advised groups they supported not to use such tactics,” Ekedahl said. “We had hard evidence to support this conclusion.”

But Gates took the analysts to task, accusing them of trying to “stick our finger in the policy maker’s eye,” Ekedahl testified

Ekedahl said Gates, dissatisfied with the terrorism assessment, joined in rewriting the draft “to suggest greater Soviet support for terrorism and the text was altered by pulling up from the annex reports that overstated Soviet involvement.”

In his memoirs, From the Shadows, Gates denied politicizing the CIA’s intelligence product, though acknowledging that he was aware of Casey’s hostile reaction to the analysts’ disagreement with right-wing theories about Soviet-directed terrorism.

Soon, the hammer fell on the analysts who had prepared the Soviet-terrorism report. Ekedahl said many analysts were “replaced by people new to the subject who insisted on language emphasizing Soviet control of international terrorist activities.”

A donnybrook ensued inside the U.S. intelligence community. Some senior officials responsible for analysis pushed back against Casey’s dictates, warning that acts of politicization would undermine the integrity of the process and risk policy disasters in the future.

Working with Gates, Casey also undertook a series of institutional changes that gave him fuller control of the analytical process. Casey required that drafts needed clearance from his office before they could go out to other intelligence agencies.

Casey appointed Gates to be director of the Directorate of Intelligence [DI] and consolidated Gates’s control over analysis by also making him chairman of the National Intelligence Council, another key analytical body.

“Casey and Gates used various management tactics to get the line of intelligence they desired and to suppress unwanted intelligence,” Ekedahl said.

Career Reprisals

With Gates using top-down management techniques, CIA analysts sensitive to their career paths intuitively grasped that they could rarely go wrong by backing the “company line” and presenting the worst-case scenario about Soviet capabilities and intentions, Ekedahl and other CIA analysts said.

Largely outside public view, the CIA’s proud Soviet analytical office underwent a purge of its most senior people. “Nearly every senior analyst on Soviet foreign policy eventually left the Office of Soviet Analysis,” Goodman said.

Gates made clear he intended to shake up the DI’s culture, demanding greater responsiveness to the needs of the White House and other policymakers.

In a speech to the DI’s analysts and managers on Jan. 7, 1982, Gates berated the division for producing shoddy analysis that administration officials didn’t find helpful.

Gates unveiled an 11-point management plan to whip the DI into shape. His plan included rotating division chiefs through one-year stints in policy agencies and requiring CIA analysts to “refresh their substantive knowledge and broaden their perspective” by taking courses at Washington-area think tanks and universities.

Gates declared that a new Production Evaluation Staff would aggressively review their analytical products and serve as his “junkyard dog.”

Gates’s message was that the DI, which had long operated as an “ivory tower” for academically oriented analysts committed to an ethos of objectivity, would take on more of a corporate culture with a product designed to fit the needs of those up the ladder both inside and outside the CIA.

“It was a kind of chilling speech,” recalled Peter Dickson, an analyst who concentrated on proliferation issues. “One of the things he wanted to do, he was going to shake up the DI. He was going to read every paper that came out. What that did was that everybody between the analyst and him had to get involved in the paper to a greater extent because their careers were going to be at stake.”

A chief Casey-Gates tactic for exerting tighter control over the analysis was to express concern about “the editorial process,” Dickson said.

“You can jerk people around in the editorial process and hide behind your editorial mandate to intimidate people,” Dickson said.

Gates soon was salting the analytical division with his allies, a group of managers who became known as the “Gates clones.” Some of those who rose with Gates were David Cohen, David Carey, George Kolt, Jim Lynch, Winston Wiley, John Gannon and John McLaughlin.

Though Dickson’s area of expertise – nuclear proliferation – was on the fringes of the Reagan-Bush primary concerns, it ended up getting him into trouble anyway. In 1983, he clashed with his superiors over his conclusion that the Soviet Union was more committed to controlling proliferation of nuclear weapons than the administration wanted to hear.

When Dickson stood by his evidence, he soon found himself facing accusations about his fitness and other pressures that eventually caused him to leave the CIA.

Dickson also was among the analysts who raised alarms about Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, another sore point because the Reagan-Bush administration wanted Pakistan’s assistance in funneling weapons to Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

One of the effects from the exaggerated intelligence about Soviet power and intentions was to make other potential risks – such as allowing development of a nuclear bomb in the Islamic world or training Islamic fundamentalists in techniques of sabotage – pale in comparison.

While worst-case scenarios were in order for the Soviet Union and other communist enemies, best-case scenarios were the order of the day for Reagan-Bush allies, including Osama bin Laden and other Arab extremists rushing to Afghanistan to wage a holy war against European invaders, in this case, the Russians.

As for the Pakistani drive to get a nuclear bomb, the Reagan-Bush administration turned to word games to avoid triggering anti-proliferation penalties that otherwise would be imposed on Pakistan.

“There was a distinction made to say that the possession of the device is not the same as developing it,” Dickson told me. “They got into the argument that they don’t quite possess it yet because they haven’t turned the last screw into the warhead.”

Finally, the intelligence on the Pakistan Bomb grew too strong to continue denying the reality. But the delay in confronting Pakistan ultimately allowed the Muslim government in Islamabad to produce nuclear weapons. Pakistani scientists also shared their know-how with “rogue” states, such as North Korea and Libya.

“The politicization that took place during the Casey-Gates era is directly responsible for the CIA’s loss of its ethical compass and the erosion of its credibility,” Goodman told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1991. “The fact that the CIA missed the most important historical development in its history – the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union itself – is due in large measure to the culture and process that Gates established in his directorate.”

Confirmation Battle

To push through Gates’s nomination to be CIA director in 1991, the elder George Bush lined up solid Republican backing for Gates and enough accommodating Democrats – particularly Sen. Boren, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman.

In his memoirs, Gates credited his friend, Boren, for clearing away any obstacles. “David took it as a personal challenge to get me confirmed,” Gates wrote.

Part of running interference for Gates included rejecting the testimony of witnesses who implicated Gates in scandals beginning with the alleged back-channel negotiations with Iran in 1980 through the arming of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s.

Boren’s Intelligence Committee brushed aside two witnesses connecting Gates to the alleged schemes, former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe and Iranian businessman Richard Babayan. Both offered detailed accounts about Gates’s alleged connections to the schemes.

Ben-Menashe, who worked for Israeli military intelligence from 1977-87, first fingered Gates as an operative in the secret Iraq arms pipeline in August 1990 during an interview that I conducted with him for PBS Frontline.
At the time, Ben-Menashe was in jail in New York on charges of trying to sell cargo planes to Iran (charges which were later dismissed). When the interview took place, Gates was in a relatively obscure position, as deputy national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush and not yet a candidate for the top CIA job.

In that interview and later under oath to Congress, Ben-Menashe said Gates joined in meetings between Republicans and senior Iranians in October 1980. Ben-Menashe said he also arranged Gates’s personal help in bringing a suitcase full of cash into Miami in early 1981 to pay off some of the participants in the hostage gambit.

Ben-Menashe also placed Gates in a 1986 meeting with Chilean arms manufacturer Cardoen, who allegedly was supplying cluster bombs and chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein’s army. Babayan, an Iranian exile working with Iraq, also connected Gates to the Iraqi supply lines and to Cardoen.
Gates has steadfastly denied involvement in either the Iran-hostage caper or the Iraqgate arms deals.
“I was accused on television and in the print media by people I had never spoken to or met of selling weapons to Iraq, or walking through Miami airport with suitcases full of cash, of being with Bush in Paris in October 1980 to meet with Iranians, and on and on,” Gates wrote in his memoirs. “The allegations of meetings with me around the world were easily disproved for the committee by my travel records, calendars, and countless witnesses.”

But none of Gates’s supposedly supportive evidence was ever made public by either the Senate Intelligence Committee or the later inquiries into either the Iran hostage initiative or Iraqgate.
Not one of Gates’s “countless witnesses” who could vouch for Gates’s whereabouts was identified. Though Boren pledged publicly to have his investigators question Babayan, they never did.

Perhaps most galling for those of us who tried to assess Ben-Menashe’s credibility was the Intelligence Committee’s failure to test Ben-Menashe’s claim that he met with Gates in Paramus, New Jersey, on the afternoon of April 20, 1989.
The date was pinned down by the fact that Ben-Menashe had been under Customs surveillance in the morning. So it was a perfect test for whether Ben-Menashe – or Gates – was lying.
When I first asked about this claim, congressional investigators told me that Gates had a perfect alibi for that day. They said Gates had been with Senator Boren at a speech in Oklahoma. But when we checked that out, we discovered that Gates’s Oklahoma speech had been on April 19, a day earlier. Gates also had not been with Boren and had returned to Washington by that evening.

So where was Gates the next day? Could he have taken a quick trip to northern New Jersey? Since senior White House national security advisers keep detailed notes on their daily meetings, it should have been easy for Boren’s investigators to interview someone who could vouch for Gates’s whereabouts on the afternoon of April 20.
But the committee chose not to nail down an alibi for Gates. The committee said further investigation wasn’t needed because Gates denied going to New Jersey and his personal calendar made no reference to the trip.
But the investigators couldn’t tell me where Gates was that afternoon or with whom he may have met. Essentially, the alibi came down to Gates’s word.
Ironically, Boren’s key aide who helped limit the investigation of Gates was George Tenet, whose behind-the-scenes maneuvering on Gates’s behalf won the personal appreciation of the senior George Bush. Tenet later became President Bill Clinton’s last CIA director and was kept on in 2001 by the younger George Bush partly on his father’s advice.
Now, as the Bush Family grapples with the disaster in Iraq, it is turning to an even more trusted hand to run the Defense Department. The appointment of Robert Gates suggests that the Bush Family is circling the wagons to save the embattled presidency of George W. Bush.
To determine whether Gates can be counted on to do what’s in the interest of the larger American public is another question altogether.

Most people know very little about criminal law. But we do know about the Fifth Amendment. "I'm taking the Fifth," we say. The Fifth Amendment says that you have the right not to incriminate yourself. This means the police have to prove their case against you with other evidence, like forensics or eyewitnesses. You can confess if you want to, but you don't have to.

Now, there are confessions, and then there are "confessions." Then you have confessions like this which are more baffling then your average case. Of course, the police know it's a lot easier to prove a case when the guy confesses. There are many problems with confessions, and some people actually walk off death row after "confessing" to a crime they did not commit. Confessions are often retracted, and when it gets easier for the police, they may try aggressively to get confessions in the next case. That's how abuses occur.

A recent case from the west coast has raised eyebrows about confessions and the Fifth Amendment. The police were questioning this guy who decided during the interrogation that he did not want to talk any further. It is settled law that the police have to stop the interrogation if the suspect decides he does not want to participate. This grows out of the "you have the right to remain silent" theory of criminal law that we hear on TV all the time. But that's no television talking point. You really do have the right to remain silent, and the police can't force you to talk.

This guy during questioning said two things to the police: "Uh! I'm through with this!" and "I plead the Fifth." The officer did not stop the questioning and said, "Plead the Fifth. What's that?" On further questioning the suspect confessed to the crime. His lawyer asked the court to dismiss the confession because it was improperly obtained. The court denied the request, claiming that the suspect's statements were too ambiguous to convey to the officer that he did not want to talk any further. The Court of Appeals agreed, concluding it was reasonable for the trial court to find that these comments were too ambiguous. One judge on the Court of Appeals disagreed, writing that "It is rare to see such a pristine invocation of the Fifth Amendment and extraordinary to see such flagrant disregard of the right to remain silent."

The suspect could not have been any clearer had he pulled out a copy of the Constitution and pointed to the Fifth Amendment, which clearly says that you have the right not to incriminate yourself: "No person shall . . . be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." Legal observers are perplexed by this decision, as am I. But in some ways, it's not that surprising, and it highlights some faults in the legal system.

First, while Federal courts are required to review the constitutionality of a criminal conviction obtained in State court, thanks to a terrible law signed by President Clinton in 1996, state courts are allowed to misintrepret the Constitution so long as they do not misintrepret our founding document unreasonably. They are given the benefit of the doubt in interpreting the Constitution. What this means is that a guy could have been convicted in State court in violation of the Constitution, but that conviction will stand so long as the State court's error was reasonable. This line of thinking grows out of the belief that the States deserve some breathing room in resolving constitutional issues. So there are two constitutional standards in our system of justice: the State version and the Federal version, even though the State and Federal systems are interpreting the same Constitution.

Second, if you over-analyze anything, it loses clarity and you see something different. If you stare at the clouds long enough, it looks like a tuna fish sandwich. If you stare at the stapler long enough, it looks like something from outer space. If you over-analyze a simple legal problem, turns into something far more complicated. The result is that a guy who literally quotes the Constitutional protection against self-incrimination is in jail because somehow that statement was confusing to the police and OK by the courts.

Everyone makes fun of Fox News because the 24-hour news channel is much more conservative than the other news networks, and some of the commentators sound like they are on paid leave from the Republican National Committee. In fact, Dick Cheney insists in writing that the hotels he stays at have the TV's tuned into Fox News.

When the Democrats won the mid-terms elections on November 8, Fox News probably wasn't happy (and neither was its audience), but there's nothing they can do about it. Or is there? One tactic is to suggest that the insurgents in Iraq are happy that the Democrats won. How do we know this? Someone found a memo outlining this strategy.

The question is, did anyone at Fox News comply with the directive? The people at www.NewsHounds.us run a website where masochists watch Fox all day and report on what what they saw. They think that a particular news report on the insurgents' reaction to the U.S. elections is too close for comfort. Rest assured, there's no insubordination at Fox News!

The Supreme Court does not hear too many student First Amendment cases. This may be a good thing. The last time the Court ruled in favor of students in a First Amendment case was 1969, when a very different judicial lineup said that a school in Iowa could not prevent students from wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. The Court issued language in that case which continues to pop up in cases today: "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

A recent case that the Supreme Court is now considering taking up actually involves speech that took place outside the schoolhouse gate. Court watchers are calling it the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case. Here's some commentary on the case from the Student Press Law Center.

It all started when a high school student in Alaska posted a large banner that said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus." It was off school property but visible by classmates and teachers who gathered outside for a school-sponsored event celebrating the Olympics. The general rule is that schools can censor student speech if it's part of a school-sponsored event (like the student newspaper) or disruptive to the educational mission. Schools can also censor speech that is vulgar, lewd or obscene. While the Bong Hits 4 Jesus banner probably drew guffaws and distracted the students from paying homage to the Olympics, the court said that the school could not censor it. Since the banner was kind of satirical and nonsensical and, at worst, made fun of the school's anti-drug policy, it was legal.

Even smart asses have First Amendment rights. That includes the Bong Hits kid. Since his banner was not on school property and was not vulgar or obscene, I am not sure why the Supreme Court has been sitting on the application to hear the case for so long. This means that someone on the Court wants to hear the case but that there is also opposition on the Court to taking the case.

Is there a way for the Supreme Court to rule against the student? Since the student's right to post the banner seems clear, the only way the Court can do that is by modifying the law governing students' rights. This has happened before. In the area of First Amendment rights for public employees who blow the whistle on government misconduct, the Supreme Court regularly takes up a case that allows the Court to scale back these rights and to make it easier for public employers to discipline whistle-blowers and others who speak out on the job. These cases are premised on an authoritarian principle: public offices need leeway to maintain an efficient workplace, even if the public employee's speech is extremely important.

According to the Boston Globe, the school district wants the Supreme Court to intervene because the banner made reference to drugs. "Superintendent Peggy Cowan said clarification is needed on the rights of administrators when it comes to disciplinary action of students who break the district's drug message policy. 'The district's decision to move forward is not disrespectful to the First Amendment or the rights of students,' she said. 'This is an important question about how the First Amendment applies to pro-drug messages in an educational setting.'"

One of the casualties of the war on drugs has been the Constitution. Unreasonable searches and seizures by the police are permitted in the interests of finding drugs, and courts have made all kinds of exceptions to general legal principles in order to fight drug use. Indeed, the legal papers submitted to the Supreme Court says that the law needs to be clarified in the area of drug-related speech by students. These papers were written by Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who published a soft-core pornographic account of President Clinton in 1998 in an effort to get him impeached. Now Starr is attempting to sully the Constitution by scaling back First Amendment rights for the very students who are taught every day that we live in a free country.

About a year ago people estimated that the Iraq War was costing the American people $6 billion per month. That's a lot of cash. "According to current estimates, the cost of the Iraq War could exceed $700 billion. In current dollars, the Vietnam War cost U.S. taxpayers $600 billion." Think about this next time you are looking in the sofa cushions and under the car seat for gas money. So, said Rip Van Winkle after waking up from a long sleep, "How are things going?" Read the first two news bits and then keep reading for the surprise ending.

Iraq invasion a disaster, Blair admits

By George Jones, Political Editor
London Daily Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:28am GMT 19/11/2006

Tony Blair conceded last night that the invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain had been a "disaster".

Tony Blair gave a frank assessment of the invasion of Iraq on al-Jazeera
His frankest assessment of the prospect that the country could descend into civil war came as Margaret Hodge, a long-standing political ally, was said to have described the conflict as Mr Blair's "big mistake in foreign affairs".

At a private meeting in London, Mrs Hodge, the industry minister, is reported to have accused him of "moral imperialism".

Interviewed yesterday on al-Jazeera television's new English-language channel, Mr Blair was challenged by Sir David Frost over the daily murders, bombings and kidnappings in Iraq.

Sir David said the West's military intervention, which has cost 2,858 American and 125 British lives, had been "pretty much of a disaster".

Mr Blair responded: "It has, [but] what I say to people is why is it difficult in Iraq? It is not difficult because of some accident in planning. It is difficult because there is a deliberate strategy — al-Qa'eda with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shia militias on the other — to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war."

Kissinger: Iraq Military Win Impossible

By TARIQ PANJA
The Associated Press
Sunday, November 19, 2006; 4:45 PM

LONDON -- Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday.

Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq's regional neighbors _ including Iran _ if progress is to be made in the region.

"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," he told the British Broadcasting Corp.

But Kissinger, an architect of the Vietnam war who has advised President Bush about Iraq, warned against a rapid withdrawal of coalition troops, saying it could destabilize Iraq's neighbors and cause a long-lasting conflict.

Tony Blair, Bush's poodle, and Henry Kissenger, Mr. War himself, think the War in Iraq is going miserably. When you have a problem, what do you do? Well, what have the conservatives said liberals do when confronted with a social ill? Throw money at it.

Military may ask $127B for wars

By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY
November 16, 2006

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is preparing its largest spending request yet for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a proposal that could make the conflict the most expensive since World War II.

The Pentagon is considering $127 billion to $160 billion in requests from the armed services for the 2007 fiscal year, which began last month, several lawmakers and congressional staff members said. That's on top of $70 billion already approved for 2007.

Since 2001, Congress has approved $502 billion for the war on terror, roughly two-thirds for Iraq. The latest request, due to reach the incoming Democratic-controlled Congress next spring, would make the war on terror more expensive than the Vietnam War.

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., who will chair the Senate Budget Committee next year, said the amount under consideration is "$127 billion and rising." He said the cost "is going to increasingly become an issue" because it could prevent Congress from addressing domestic priorities, such as expanding Medicare prescription drug coverage.

Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., who put the expected request at $160 billion, said such a sizable increase still "won't solve the problem" in Iraq.

Bill Hoagland, a senior budget adviser to Senate Republicans, said: "At a minimum, they were looking at $130 (billion). If it goes higher than that, I'm not surprised."

The new request being considered for the war on terror would be about one-fourth what the government spends annually on Social Security — and 10 times what it spends on its space program.

The White House called the figures premature. "They don't reflect a decision by the administration," said budget office spokeswoman Christin Baker. "It is much too early in the process to make that determination."

Before the Iraq war began in 2003, the Bush administration estimated its cost at $50 billion to $60 billion, though White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey had suggested in 2002 that it could cost as much as $200 billion.

Growing opposition to the war contributed to Democrats' takeover of the House and Senate in this month's elections. Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha, an early critic of the war who lost his bid Thursday to be the House Democratic leader, vowed to use his clout as chairman of the House panel that reviews the Pentagon budget "to get these troops out of Iraq and get back on track and quit spending $8 billion a month."

"The war's been an extraordinarily expensive undertaking, both in lives and in dollars," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H.

The new request is top-heavy with Army and Air Force costs to replace and repair equipment and redeploy troops, Hoagland said. That's why the 2007 cost is likely to top the war's average annual price tag.

Overall, he said, "we're easily headed toward $600 billion." That would top the $536 billion cost of Vietnam in today's dollars. World War II cost an inflation-adjusted $3.6 trillion.

If you want to see why the death penalty should be eliminated in the United States, read The Innocent Man, by John Grisham. Read it over Thanksgiving while the others are watching football.

Grisham is known for his page-turning legal fiction, but his more recent books were subpar. The Innocent Man is non-fiction examining several particularly unjust criminal convictions in the Oklahoma justice system. The convictions are so outrageous that if Grisham passed the story off as fiction the publisher would have told him to take a hike. As fiction, this stuff is like a college student's attempt to criticize criminal justice in America. But as non-fiction, you will not believe how innocent people can be railroaded onto death row on almost no evidence whatsoever, coerced confessions and unscrupulous prosecutors who want someone's head on a stick without truly looking for the killer.

The main target in the book is Ron Williamson, a guy who had a promising future as a Major League Baseball player, drafted by the Oakland A's. But like many promising baseball players, he bounced around the minor leagues for years before retiring in his mid-20's. He developed a mental illness and a drinking problem and when a young woman in his neighborhood was stabbed to death, poor Ron was the obvious suspect since no one liked him anyway.

You might think this all happened in less enlightened times, but it took place in the 1980's. Ron and others spent years in jail as they exhausted their appeals and finally convinced a federal judge that the conviction was an outrage, based on almost no evidence and the fact that Ron was mentally-ill. The judge overturned the conviction on a Habeas Corpus petition by Ron's lawyers only a few days before his execution. For years, Ron was screaming in his jail cell that he was innocent. The Innocence Project, a New York City organization that works to free the wrongly-convicted, took his case and won his freedom.

If you don't want to buy the book, read about Williamson's story here, here , here and here.

What happened to Ron Williamson could happen to anyone. The guy he was convicted with was probably sent to jail because he was merely friends with Ron. You could be arrested tomorrow for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A jury of your "peers" could convict you on with no evidence simply because the prosecutor told them you committed the crime. There is no fail-safe to prevent wrongful convictions, but there is a way to prevent wrongful executions: abolish the death penalty.

Thanksgiving is about thanks. Thanks to Bob Dylan for this.

It's alright ma (I'm only bleeding)

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool's gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.

Temptation's page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover
That you'd just be
One more person crying.

So don't fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It's alright, Ma, I'm only sighing.

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.

An' though the rules of the road have been lodged
It's only people's games that you got to dodge
And it's alright, Ma, I can make it.

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done
That can win what's never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks
They really found you.

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
Insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not fergit
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to.

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him.

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he's in.

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it's alright, Ma, if I can't please him.

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.

Domestic surveillance is the product of paranoid government. Paranoia fuels any government that lies to its people and maintains a large national security apparatus. This applies to both Democratic and Republican administrations.

For the past couple of years, many have complained about warrantless surveillance within U.S. borders. Not much attention has been paid to warrantless surveillance of peace activists, though. This is unfortunate, because from time to time the tip of the iceberg is exposed. The old Cointelpro surveillance program that Congress tried to shut down in the 1970's has never really gone away.

The New York Times reported on November 21 that "An antiterrorist database used by the Defense Department in an effort to prevent attacks against military installations included intelligence tips about antiwar planning meetings held at churches, libraries, college campuses and other locations, newly disclosed documents show."

Once again, a narrow mandate to protect against terrorist violence is being used to monitor peaceful activity that poses no threat to anyone except the authoritarians who want robotic compliance with the political order. According to the Times, "One tip in the database in February 2005, for instance, noted that 'a church service for peace' would be held in the New York City area the next month. Another entry noted that antiwar protesters would be holding 'nonviolence training' sessions at unidentified churches in Brooklyn and Manhattan."

Government officials who run the program say that this was all a mistake and that they are purging the files of this information. But we hear this all the time. Constant negligence turns into de facto policy.

The head of the office that runs the military database, which is known as Talon, said Monday that material on antiwar protests should not have been collected in the first place.

. . .

Mr. Baur said that those operating the database had misinterpreted their mandate and that what was intended as an antiterrorist database became, in some respects, a catch-all for leads on possible disruptions and threats against military installations in the United States, including protests against the military presence in Iraq. “I don’t think the policy was as clear as it could have been,” he said.

These documents surfaced after the American Civil Liberties Union got them through the Freedom of Information Law. Read about it here.

According to the ACLU, this surveillance covers all sorts of peaceful and non-violent activity. It can cut pretty close to home. The ACLU says:

The documents released today consist of nine reports from the Pentagon’s Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) database that describe as “threats” several planned demonstrations at military recruitment stations, including sites on college campuses. One report focuses on a planned protest at the Sacramento Military Entrance Processing Station by “a Sacramento chapter of a US domestic group.” According to the report, “this specific group is deeply into ‘counter-recruiting,’” and views the station “as their last chance to influence a decision to enlist.” Commanders of the Sacramento and San Jose stations were advised of the protests by the San Francisco Joint Terrorism Task Force. The report notes that “it appears this protest will most likely be peaceful, but some type of vandalism is always a possibility.”

Funny that these documents are now seeing the light of day. Even people protesting military recruiters are being spied upon. I am representing some anti-war protesters who have congregated outside a military recruitment office to protest the war and educate potential soldiers about recruitment. This is information that recruiters will never tell young men and women who enter the office. This case has the potential to create an exception to the general rule that you have no First Amendment rights on private property. The judge has ruled that even though the protesters have gathered in a private shopping plaza, the First Amendment applies because a U.S. government recruiting center is located there. Read about the case here.

Have any spies gone to these protests to take notes? And what about the fundraiser held last week to celebrate the protesters and raise money for court costs? It was a joyous afternoon with music, music, more music and some speeches. Were the political police there? Here's the scary part: we may never know.

I don't think the Democrats are going to impeach President Bush anytime soon.That might be seen as too radical a move after sitting on the political sidelines for so long.That does not mean the Democrats will give Bush what he wants for the next two years. It's more likely that the Democrats -- who now control both houses of Congress -- will obstruct the Bush agenda and rip out the rug from under him, rendering him totally ineffective until the next President is sworn in. That's fine by me. Maybe a slow death is better than a quickie.

Bipartisanship can be a bad thing when the dominant political party throws a bone to corrupt politicians and foregoes serious oversight. If Congress decides to go all the way, though, here's a list of things for the impeachment shitlist. All ya gotta do is cruise through some of the liberal/leftist websites to read up on the many crimes of the Bush administration. Here's one showing that Bush "authoriz[ed] the kidnapping, disappearing, and perhaps even the torturing of detainees" in violation of "the Geneva Conventions and the Treaty Against Torture." And if they could impeach President Clinton over lies about oral sex, what about George W's lies? Or the absolute disaster that we have created in Iraq? Or would we rather shop?

Why do all the arguments on impeachment begin and end with lawbreaking? Why aren't horrendous policy choices part of the equation? I guess bad policies and programs are not "high crimes and misdemeanors" under the Constitution. But I think a good prosecutor could find a way to show that the endless stream of violence and horror in Iraq is somehow the product of the President's high crimes. Or at least a misdemeanor. Typical story on the fire that Bush set in the Middle East follows:

BAGHDAD, Iraq Nov 24, 2006 (AP)— Militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive as Iraqi soldiers stood by, and seven Sunni mosques came under attack as Shiites took revenge for the slaughter of at least 215 people in the Sadr City slum.

A U.S. helicopter opened fire into the Shiite enclave after militiamen fired on it from the ground, residents said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

With the government trying to avert a civil war, two simultaneous bombings in Tal Afar, in northern Iraq, killed at least 23 people. On Thursday, Sunni-Arab insurgents unleashed bombings and mortar attacks in Sadr City, the deadliest assault since the U.S.-led invasion.

Members of the Mahdi Army militia burned four mosques and several homes while killing 12 other Sunni residents in the once-mixed Hurriyah neighborhood until American forces arrived, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein. Gunmen loyal to radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr began taking over the neighborhood this summer and a majority of its Sunni residents already had fled.

The gunmen attacked the four mosques with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and automatic rifles. Residents said the militiamen prevented them from entering the burned buildings to remove the dead, and they and Hussein said Shiite-dominated police and Iraqi military stood idly by.

Later Friday, militiamen raided al-Samarraie Sunni mosque in the el-Amel district and killed two guards, police 1st. Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razaq said. Two other Sunni mosques in west Baghad also were attacked, police said.

Somebody really should pay for this.

Americans are shopping while Iraq burns
By BOB HERBERT
New York Times
Sunday, November 26, 2006

The competing television news images on the morning after Thanksgiving were of the unspeakable carnage in Sadr City — where more than 200 Iraqi civilians were killed by a series of coordinated car bombs — and the long lines of cars filled with holiday shopping zealots that jammed the highway approaches to American malls that had opened for business at midnight.

A Wal-Mart in Union, N.J., was besieged by customers even before it opened its doors at 5 a.m. on Friday. “All I can tell you,” said a Wal-Mart employee, “is that they were fired up and ready to spend money.”

There is something terribly wrong with this juxtaposition of gleeful Americans with fistfuls of dollars storming the department store barricades and the slaughter by the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including old people, children and babies. The war was started by the U.S., but most Americans feel absolutely no sense of personal responsibility for it.

Representative Charles Rangel recently proposed that the draft be reinstated, suggesting that politicians would be more reluctant to take the country to war if they understood that their constituents might be called up to fight. What struck me was not the uniform opposition to the congressman’s proposal — it has long been clear that there is zero sentiment in favor of a draft in the U.S. — but the fact that it never provoked even the briefest discussion of the responsibilities and obligations of ordinary Americans in a time of war.

With no obvious personal stake in the war in Iraq, most Americans are indifferent to its consequences. In an interview last week, Alex Racheotes, a 19-year-old history major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said: “I definitely don’t know anyone who would want to fight in Iraq. But beyond that, I get the feeling that most people at school don’t even think about the war. They’re more concerned with what grade they got on yesterday’s test.”

His thoughts were echoed by other students, including John Cafarelli, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, who was asked if he had any friends who would be willing to join the Army. “No, definitely not,” he said. “None of my friends even really care about what’s going on in Iraq.”

This indifference is widespread. It enables most Americans to go about their daily lives completely unconcerned about the atrocities resulting from a war being waged in their name. While shoppers here are scrambling to put the perfect touch to their holidays with the purchase of a giant flat-screen TV or a PlayStation 3, the news out of Baghdad is of a society in the midst of a meltdown.

According to the United Nations, more than 7,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in September and October. Nearly 5,000 of those killings occurred in Baghdad, a staggering figure.

In a demoralizing reprise of life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the U.N. reported that in Iraq: “The situation of women has continued to deteriorate. Increasing numbers of women were recorded to be either victims of religious extremists or ‘honor killings.’ Some non-Muslim women are forced to wear a headscarf and to be accompanied by spouses or male relatives.”

Journalists in Iraq are being “assassinated with utmost impunity,” the U.N. report said, with 18 murdered in the last two months.

Iraq burns. We shop. The Americans dying in Iraq are barely mentioned in the press anymore. They warrant maybe one sentence in a long roundup article out of Baghdad, or a passing reference — no longer than a few seconds — in a television news account of the latest political ditherings.

Since the vast majority of Americans do not want anything to do with the military or the war, the burden of fighting has fallen on a small cadre of volunteers who are being sent into the war zone again and again. Nearly 3,000 have been killed, and many thousands more have been maimed.

The war has now lasted as long as the American involvement in World War II. But there is no sense of collective sacrifice in this war, no shared burden of responsibility. The soldiers in Iraq are fighting, suffering and dying in a war in which there are no clear objectives and no end in sight, and which a majority of Americans do not support.

They are dying anonymously and pointlessly, while the rest of us are free to buckle ourselves into the family vehicle and head off to the malls and shop.

Would you consider hiring O.J. Simpson to work as a crime victim's advocate? How about O.J. as a probation officer? The prospect of O.J. serving in a law enforcement capacity is ridiculous. But decisions like this are made on a regular basis in the U.S. government, particularly since Presidents choose people for important foreign policy jobs by recycling old war horses from prior administrations.

I have written about this before in showing how the Bush administration is hiring people from the Reagan and Bush I administrations. Not everyone from those administration has blood on his hands, but the worst of the worst seem to bob to the surface every decade or so.

Having gotten rid of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, George W. has brought in a guy that we all forgot about, who was in up to his ears in the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980's, Robert Gates. True, Rumsfeld is substantially responsible for the debacle in Iraq, as recent books have chronicled his mismanagement and arrogance. And the latest news is that he "authorized the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the prison's former U.S. commander said in an interview on Saturday." But Gates? What's his crime?

It may seem quaint today but back in the 1980's, before the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was engaged in a lengthy cold war with the Russians, a conflict that allowed the U.S. government to engage in the most irresponsible foreign policy possible simply by citing the need to deter communist aggression. That aggression was sometimes real, but it was often imagined, and that was the pretext for U.S. intervention in Central and South America.

The central focus of this aggression during the 1980's was Nicaragua, a little country that posed no threat to anyone. But when the people of Nicaragua chased out the U.S.-backed dictator in 1979 and the Sandinistas took power that year, our government declared war against Nicaragua and organized a terrorist army, the Contras, to overthrow the Sandinistas. The Reagan administration dutifully classified the Sandinistas as Communist, shoe-horning that definition against a government that was elected in 1984 and had the support of the population. Not that it matters; people in other countries have the right to run their own affairs, right? We have no right to dictate that another country adopt the government of our choice.

Except that we do this all the time. Nicaragua was a threat because it turned away from American foreign policy, disallowing U.S. elites from controlling its resources. Foreign policy professionals and ideologues seized upon Nicaragua as the next battleground, making this small country the center of the universe. Here's a general overview of the U.S.-Sandinista relationship for which we should all be ashamed. Here's another. Just Google some of these buzzwords to read more about the U.S. war against Nicaragua in the 1980's and you will find that our current attempt to dominate the Middle East is nothing new.

So where does Gates fit into all of this? He wanted to bomb Nicaragua. Only a real sicko would propose this, but that was the environment during the 1980's when the Reagan administration declared that country a threat to our national security. Bombing Nicaragua would have been illegal and disasterous. Killing thousands of foreigners never seems to be a concern of the guys who pull the trigger, but any thinking person should be appalled by this revelation.

There's an old saying: killing one person is murder. Killing 10,000 is foreign policy. In a rational world, Gates would never find his way to the Pentagon to replace Rumsfeld. Just as O.J. Simpson would never be hired as a rape crisis counselor.