Protesters cry foul over election hires
By Craig Gustafson
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
May 23, 2007
It doesn't take much to rile up opponents of electronic voting.
So when San Diego County decided to hire two new elections officials who critics say have questionable backgrounds the ensuing conflict was inevitable.
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About 35 protesters lashed out at county officials yesterday inside and outside of a Board of Supervisors meeting for their decision to hire Deborah Seiler and Michael Vu as the county's top two elections officials.
Seiler, who will take over as registrar of voters June 4, spent 15 years working for two electronic voting-machine companies – Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Pacific Systems – before leading elections in Solano County. The county uses Diebold machines.
Vu, who was hired as assistant registrar last month, is regularly criticized by voting-rights advocates for his role as elections chief in Ohio's Cuyahoga County. His tenure there was marred when two of his employees received felony convictions for rigging the 2004 presidential recount to avoid a thorough review of ballots. Vu has staunchly defended the employees.
“San Diego has become the laughingstock of the country for election integrity,” said attorney Ken Simpkins, co-founder of Psephos, a nonprofit organization that monitors elections.
“It cannot be an accident that the most controversial elections officials in the country . . . are here in San Diego,” he told supervisors. “An agenda to deprive citizens of clean elections appears to be in place and the people most likely to benefit from such an agenda are incumbents who set the policy for our elections.”
Chief Administrative Officer Walt Ekard adamantly defended his decision to hire Seiler and Vu, saying they served honorably in their previous jobs and will ensure the integrity of elections here.
“I understand there are those of you who disagree with my hires,” Ekard said. “I have heard you. I have listened to you. I disagree with you and that's it.”
Several protesters yelled over Ekard's comments and board Chairman Ron Roberts ejected two of the loudest from the meeting. As one woman was leaving, she shouted, “Everything you're doing is wrong and you're subverting democracy, and we won't have it!”
Supervisor Pam Slater-Price called protesters' behavior “rude and totally unacceptable.” She said those concerned about electronic voting can cast absentee ballots, as she does each election.
Protesters took their message outside of the County Administration Center in downtown San Diego. They held signs that read “Seiler + Vu = Sleaze x 2” and “From taxpayer to Diebold” with pictures of dollars bills being exchanged.
Protesters called on county officials to halt the purchase of any more electronic voting machines until California Secretary of State Debra Bowen finishes a review of the systems in use. Bowen announced the review two weeks ago.
Psephos also plans to look at the possibility of launching an initiative that would make the registrar an elected position.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Welcome To The New Police State
Welcome To The New Police State
By Dick Allgire
5-18-7
http://www.rense.com/general76/amdd.htm
In the old days in The United States of America, a journalist didn't have to get permission to conduct an interview in a public place. But this is a new America, a place where armed security agents watch your every move and require their permission to exercise what used to be a first amendment right.
I've been a television news reporter for 33 years. I first began covering news when Richard Nixon was about to resign. I've gone to airports many times to film-yes we used to use film- and lately to video-tape and interview famous and infamous people getting on and getting off airplanes. I've been around a while and I've covered a lot of stories at airports. Things have changed.
I want to tell you what happened to me today (May 17, 2007) at Honolulu International Airport. I was assigned to meet and interview Nainoa Thompson, navigator of the Polynesian Voyaging Canoe Hokule'a. He and his crew were departing for Japan to sail their Hawaiian canoe on the final leg of an historic voyage. It was arranged for our crew to meet them on the sidewalk outside the check-in area. All I needed was a quick couple of sound bites with Nainoa and two of the young crew members who were leaving to fulfill a cultural mission of goodwill and Aloha.
I arrived with a news photographer at the Honolulu Airport and we paid to park in the parking garage. We walked to the public sidewalk in front of the check-in area where we met Nainoa and the young crewmembers. We turned on the camera and began talking with them.
This is something I have done at least a hundred times over the past 33 years. In the USA a reporter used to be able to go to any public place and interview someone without being rousted by authorities.
This was not a restricted area. We did not attempt to board an airplane, or walk past the security gate, or get out on to a runway. We were not taping near any TSA checkpoint. We were out on the sidewalk at a public facility.
While I was interviewing an 18-year old Hawaiian, asking how he felt about taking a voyage on a Hawaiian canoe several uniformed security agents walked up and stopped the interview. They insisted that we cease videotaping. They demanded to know what we were doing, who authorized us to be there, and whether we had permission.
EXCUSE ME???
In the United States of America that I grew up in a reporter was allowed to interview anyone in any public place, about anything, at any time, without requesting or having to be granted permission by unformed goons. Pardon me- I mean low wage security guards.
I snapped, and perhaps I should apologize to these poor rent-a-cops. I did not say it to their faces, but as I turned to go to the airport security office I did mutter an obscenity: "This is the f&#^ing United States. You don't need permission to do an interview in a public place. This is not supposed to be a goddamned fascist state!"
They heard me. Now I was asking for trouble. They called for backups. Several more armed security guards surrounded my cameraman. He told them, "It's not big deal; we're just trying to interview some people about sailing on the Hokule'a."
I went to the security office and got "permission" from airport authorities to do something that is supposed to be guaranteed under our (former) Constitution.
It saddens me to see America slipping into a state that allows armed security guards to demand "authorization" for something that used to be taken for granted. I never before had to get "permission" from "authorities" to talk to someone in a public place. I brought this up in the security office when they were so graciously "granting" me permission to resume my interview. A security guard in front of a bank of television surveillance monitors told me, "Things are different after 911."
I wonder- what does a well known television reporter interviewing young Hawaiian kids in a public place about sailing on a canoe have to do with 911? How is this a threat?
And the saddest thing for me is this- young people growing up today will simply submit. They won't even remember a time when a reporter- or any citizen- could go to an airport and talk to someone without having to get permission from authorities.
Dick Allgire
KITV News, Honolulu
By Dick Allgire
5-18-7
http://www.rense.com/general76/amdd.htm
In the old days in The United States of America, a journalist didn't have to get permission to conduct an interview in a public place. But this is a new America, a place where armed security agents watch your every move and require their permission to exercise what used to be a first amendment right.
I've been a television news reporter for 33 years. I first began covering news when Richard Nixon was about to resign. I've gone to airports many times to film-yes we used to use film- and lately to video-tape and interview famous and infamous people getting on and getting off airplanes. I've been around a while and I've covered a lot of stories at airports. Things have changed.
I want to tell you what happened to me today (May 17, 2007) at Honolulu International Airport. I was assigned to meet and interview Nainoa Thompson, navigator of the Polynesian Voyaging Canoe Hokule'a. He and his crew were departing for Japan to sail their Hawaiian canoe on the final leg of an historic voyage. It was arranged for our crew to meet them on the sidewalk outside the check-in area. All I needed was a quick couple of sound bites with Nainoa and two of the young crew members who were leaving to fulfill a cultural mission of goodwill and Aloha.
I arrived with a news photographer at the Honolulu Airport and we paid to park in the parking garage. We walked to the public sidewalk in front of the check-in area where we met Nainoa and the young crewmembers. We turned on the camera and began talking with them.
This is something I have done at least a hundred times over the past 33 years. In the USA a reporter used to be able to go to any public place and interview someone without being rousted by authorities.
This was not a restricted area. We did not attempt to board an airplane, or walk past the security gate, or get out on to a runway. We were not taping near any TSA checkpoint. We were out on the sidewalk at a public facility.
While I was interviewing an 18-year old Hawaiian, asking how he felt about taking a voyage on a Hawaiian canoe several uniformed security agents walked up and stopped the interview. They insisted that we cease videotaping. They demanded to know what we were doing, who authorized us to be there, and whether we had permission.
EXCUSE ME???
In the United States of America that I grew up in a reporter was allowed to interview anyone in any public place, about anything, at any time, without requesting or having to be granted permission by unformed goons. Pardon me- I mean low wage security guards.
I snapped, and perhaps I should apologize to these poor rent-a-cops. I did not say it to their faces, but as I turned to go to the airport security office I did mutter an obscenity: "This is the f&#^ing United States. You don't need permission to do an interview in a public place. This is not supposed to be a goddamned fascist state!"
They heard me. Now I was asking for trouble. They called for backups. Several more armed security guards surrounded my cameraman. He told them, "It's not big deal; we're just trying to interview some people about sailing on the Hokule'a."
I went to the security office and got "permission" from airport authorities to do something that is supposed to be guaranteed under our (former) Constitution.
It saddens me to see America slipping into a state that allows armed security guards to demand "authorization" for something that used to be taken for granted. I never before had to get "permission" from "authorities" to talk to someone in a public place. I brought this up in the security office when they were so graciously "granting" me permission to resume my interview. A security guard in front of a bank of television surveillance monitors told me, "Things are different after 911."
I wonder- what does a well known television reporter interviewing young Hawaiian kids in a public place about sailing on a canoe have to do with 911? How is this a threat?
And the saddest thing for me is this- young people growing up today will simply submit. They won't even remember a time when a reporter- or any citizen- could go to an airport and talk to someone without having to get permission from authorities.
Dick Allgire
KITV News, Honolulu
Friday, May 11, 2007
And what would "Pro-Semitism" look like, pray tell..?
That question shut up one of my little Zionist squabble-mates in another forum -- what does "pro-Semitism" look like? Would it be a disproportionately high number of Jews in Congress? Would it be the unquestioning, eternal support, nay, fealty and the forging of foreign policy to please... Semites?
Really, what would "pro-Semitism" be?
The right hates Jews because we killed their messiah; the left hates Jews because we don't lay down and let ourselves be butchered by Arab haters. So what are we to do?
Play the victim card again. It works every time. You've got your "shitty little country" now. Take your claws out of my nation's government and get by on your own. You have more than enough money and do not need nor deserve 20% of the US foreign aid budget.
As if it's a sin to notice such things. "The old adage has it that, when visiting a foreign country, to ascertain who really runs things, one need determine only who is spoken about in whispers, if at all."
A Jewish President? No, I don't think so. Is that "anti-Semitic"? No, it's pro-American. Fuck off and die.
Really, what would "pro-Semitism" be?
The right hates Jews because we killed their messiah; the left hates Jews because we don't lay down and let ourselves be butchered by Arab haters. So what are we to do?
Play the victim card again. It works every time. You've got your "shitty little country" now. Take your claws out of my nation's government and get by on your own. You have more than enough money and do not need nor deserve 20% of the US foreign aid budget.
As if it's a sin to notice such things. "The old adage has it that, when visiting a foreign country, to ascertain who really runs things, one need determine only who is spoken about in whispers, if at all."
A Jewish President? No, I don't think so. Is that "anti-Semitic"? No, it's pro-American. Fuck off and die.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Holocaust archive "under embargo"
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/print/20070507badarolsenarchive.html
Holocaust archive coming to D.C.
Edwin Black
The International Tracing Service's secret Holocaust archive at Bad Arolsen, Germany, is preparing to transfer millions of images of concentration-camp prisoner documents to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum under embargo, according to sources.
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- The International Tracing Service's secret Holocaust archive at Bad Arolsen, Germany, is preparing to transfer millions of images of concentration-camp prisoner documents to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum under embargo, according to sources in Germany and the United States familiar with the transfer.
A May 14 meeting of the 11-nation committee that oversees the archive is expected to authorize the partial transfer, but only on condition that an embargo be imposed on accessing the materials.
The embargo is needed because three of the 11 nations that must ratify the release of the documents -- Greece, Belgium and France -- have yet to sign the authorization agreement.
European sources familiar with the process suggested that Belgium and France would not sign the agreement until after this summer or even early next year because of domestic electoral considerations. Still, the process of data transfer is being accelerated to prepare for the eventual release.
The Holocaust museum has agreed to keep the documents secret until authorized by the 11-government committee -- meaning that for now, at least, the archive's legacy of secrecy will transfer as well.
Museum officials declined to confirm the information or provide details on the pending transfer.
JTA has learned, however, that the transfer will include 10 million digitized images of documents to be transported in several 500-gigabyte hard drives that plug into any computer via a simple USB connection. Small, lightweight, portable drives obviate the prospect of managing linear miles of archival documents.
The museum plans to assemble the raw images into a database with a search engine that can be accessed from one or more terminals in the museum's archive. The gargantuan collection will instantly double the size of the museum's holdings.
While the museum archive is among the most helpful in the Holocaust community, its small staff, handful of microfilm-reader machines and several computer terminals often cannot keep up with user requests, especially in the summer.
In addition to on-site usage of the archive, some 8,000 requests come to the museum each year via mail, phone and e-mail, and the archive staff tries to fulfill those as soon as possible. The backlog for inquiries at Bad Arolsen in 2006 exceeded 425,000, according to a recent congressional report prepared by the State Department.
The Bad Arolsen collection includes records of more than 19 million individuals. Holocaust museum sources admit that massive linguistic training would be needed before the staff could even begin to provide information.
Sources suggest that the information would be accessed mainly via a few on-site computer terminals at the museum. Terminal access would be strictly prohibited from outside the building, even though remote access is routinely available for government and historical databases.
As the museum gears up to receive the trove, several members of the U.S. Congress, the archival community and members of grassroots Holocaust groups are questioning why the museum should be given the documents.
Some 75 percent of Bad Arolsen's holdings provide information on non-Jewish Holocaust victims, which has led several experts on Nazi documentation to say that the collection would be more suited to the National Archives and its regional network.
Critics also are concerned that the museum's unwritten taboo on issues relating to corporate involvement in the Holocaust is inconsistent with a collection that largely involves slave labor. The museum repeatedly has refused to discuss questions involving IBM, General Motors, Ford, Standard Oil, the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and other leading American corporate icons that funded, supported, participated or profited from the Holocaust.
Paul Shapiro, the museum's point man for Bad Arolsen, told JTA that he has quietly assembled a list of companies he has seen in Bad Arolsen archives, but it remains secret. Museum officials refused to discuss "Shapiro's list."
Most of all, some survivor groups are asking why the records would be housed in Washington, where many elderly survivors cannot access them because of the cost, the logistics and their frail health.
"I don't think Washington would be an appropriate place for the documents because the majority of survivors live in New York or Miami," said Leo Rechter, president of the National Association of Holocaust Survivors. "We know that 50,000 survivors live in New York City. Relatively few live in Washington, D.C. The majority of survivors are not computer savvy.
"From a practical point of view, a copy should be here in New York where anyone can easily get to it," he said. "We can arrange rides downtown if need be to ask a clerk to help. But in Washington, these files would be just another museum attraction."
David Mermelstein, co-chairman of Miami Holocaust Survivors of Dade County, agreed.
"If the files are in Washington, it would be a problem. It should be in Florida, Brooklyn, Chicago and Los Angeles, he said. "We have 10,000 survivors here. Most of them of them do not use computers or they have bad eyesight."
Nonetheless, museum officials said they will not permit archival access via the open Internet or via terminals at libraries and universities around the country, the way other databases of documents are commonly accessed. Museum officials declined to explain their motives for restricting access.
However, Mermelstein passionately argued for unrestricted access.
"Every day," he said, "there are people dying not knowing what happened to their loved ones. With the documents here in Florida, we can ensure that anyone could get a ride to the library so they could ask someone to check their name."
One congressional source close to the Bad Arolsen transfer asked, "What am I missing? Why can't these documents be located near the survivors themselves?"
Edwin Black is The New York Times' best-selling author of the award-winning "IBM and the Holocaust" and is responsible for a series of investigations revealing the contents of the ITS archives at Bad Arolsen. His stories on the subject can be viewed at http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/BadArolsenArticles.php.
Holocaust archive coming to D.C.
Edwin Black
The International Tracing Service's secret Holocaust archive at Bad Arolsen, Germany, is preparing to transfer millions of images of concentration-camp prisoner documents to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum under embargo, according to sources.
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- The International Tracing Service's secret Holocaust archive at Bad Arolsen, Germany, is preparing to transfer millions of images of concentration-camp prisoner documents to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum under embargo, according to sources in Germany and the United States familiar with the transfer.
A May 14 meeting of the 11-nation committee that oversees the archive is expected to authorize the partial transfer, but only on condition that an embargo be imposed on accessing the materials.
The embargo is needed because three of the 11 nations that must ratify the release of the documents -- Greece, Belgium and France -- have yet to sign the authorization agreement.
European sources familiar with the process suggested that Belgium and France would not sign the agreement until after this summer or even early next year because of domestic electoral considerations. Still, the process of data transfer is being accelerated to prepare for the eventual release.
The Holocaust museum has agreed to keep the documents secret until authorized by the 11-government committee -- meaning that for now, at least, the archive's legacy of secrecy will transfer as well.
Museum officials declined to confirm the information or provide details on the pending transfer.
JTA has learned, however, that the transfer will include 10 million digitized images of documents to be transported in several 500-gigabyte hard drives that plug into any computer via a simple USB connection. Small, lightweight, portable drives obviate the prospect of managing linear miles of archival documents.
The museum plans to assemble the raw images into a database with a search engine that can be accessed from one or more terminals in the museum's archive. The gargantuan collection will instantly double the size of the museum's holdings.
While the museum archive is among the most helpful in the Holocaust community, its small staff, handful of microfilm-reader machines and several computer terminals often cannot keep up with user requests, especially in the summer.
In addition to on-site usage of the archive, some 8,000 requests come to the museum each year via mail, phone and e-mail, and the archive staff tries to fulfill those as soon as possible. The backlog for inquiries at Bad Arolsen in 2006 exceeded 425,000, according to a recent congressional report prepared by the State Department.
The Bad Arolsen collection includes records of more than 19 million individuals. Holocaust museum sources admit that massive linguistic training would be needed before the staff could even begin to provide information.
Sources suggest that the information would be accessed mainly via a few on-site computer terminals at the museum. Terminal access would be strictly prohibited from outside the building, even though remote access is routinely available for government and historical databases.
As the museum gears up to receive the trove, several members of the U.S. Congress, the archival community and members of grassroots Holocaust groups are questioning why the museum should be given the documents.
Some 75 percent of Bad Arolsen's holdings provide information on non-Jewish Holocaust victims, which has led several experts on Nazi documentation to say that the collection would be more suited to the National Archives and its regional network.
Critics also are concerned that the museum's unwritten taboo on issues relating to corporate involvement in the Holocaust is inconsistent with a collection that largely involves slave labor. The museum repeatedly has refused to discuss questions involving IBM, General Motors, Ford, Standard Oil, the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and other leading American corporate icons that funded, supported, participated or profited from the Holocaust.
Paul Shapiro, the museum's point man for Bad Arolsen, told JTA that he has quietly assembled a list of companies he has seen in Bad Arolsen archives, but it remains secret. Museum officials refused to discuss "Shapiro's list."
Most of all, some survivor groups are asking why the records would be housed in Washington, where many elderly survivors cannot access them because of the cost, the logistics and their frail health.
"I don't think Washington would be an appropriate place for the documents because the majority of survivors live in New York or Miami," said Leo Rechter, president of the National Association of Holocaust Survivors. "We know that 50,000 survivors live in New York City. Relatively few live in Washington, D.C. The majority of survivors are not computer savvy.
"From a practical point of view, a copy should be here in New York where anyone can easily get to it," he said. "We can arrange rides downtown if need be to ask a clerk to help. But in Washington, these files would be just another museum attraction."
David Mermelstein, co-chairman of Miami Holocaust Survivors of Dade County, agreed.
"If the files are in Washington, it would be a problem. It should be in Florida, Brooklyn, Chicago and Los Angeles, he said. "We have 10,000 survivors here. Most of them of them do not use computers or they have bad eyesight."
Nonetheless, museum officials said they will not permit archival access via the open Internet or via terminals at libraries and universities around the country, the way other databases of documents are commonly accessed. Museum officials declined to explain their motives for restricting access.
However, Mermelstein passionately argued for unrestricted access.
"Every day," he said, "there are people dying not knowing what happened to their loved ones. With the documents here in Florida, we can ensure that anyone could get a ride to the library so they could ask someone to check their name."
One congressional source close to the Bad Arolsen transfer asked, "What am I missing? Why can't these documents be located near the survivors themselves?"
Edwin Black is The New York Times' best-selling author of the award-winning "IBM and the Holocaust" and is responsible for a series of investigations revealing the contents of the ITS archives at Bad Arolsen. His stories on the subject can be viewed at http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/BadArolsenArticles.php.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
The Chutzpah Industry
Saturday, May 5, 2007
The Chutzpah Industry
by JON WIENER
[from the May 21, 2007 issue]
Alan Dershowitz is at it again: First he tried to get California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to stop the University of California Press (UCP) from publishing a book highly critical of him, and now he's trying to get DePaul University to deny tenure to the author. The object of his fury? Norman Finkelstein, with whom Dershowitz has been feuding for years. The subject? Israel, of course.
Dershowitz has been telling anyone who will listen, as well as many who didn't ask, that Finkelstein's book Beyond Chutzpah--published by UCP in 2005 despite Dershowitz's efforts--is "wholly illegitimate" and "part of a conspiracy to defame" him. (In his book Finkelstein called Dershowitz's The Case for Israel "among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict." For more, see my "Giving Chutzpah New Meaning," July 11, 2005. Disclosure: A Nation editor served as a freelance editor of Beyond Chutzpah.)
In the fall, before their vote on tenure for Finkelstein, members of the DePaul political science department received an unsolicited packet from Dershowitz containing his "dossier of Norman Finkelstein's most egregious academic sins, and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions." This kind of intervention in a tenure case is virtually unprecedented. It's one thing to have over-the-top debates, especially on Israel and Palestine; we call that freedom of speech. But it's another thing when one of the parties tries to get the other one fired and publication of his book stopped--we call that illegitimate interference.
The procedures governing tenure review require that department chairs solicit evaluations by outside experts in the field. Freelance submissions by declared enemies are pretty much unheard of. DePaul's Faculty Governance Council objected to Dershowitz's intervention and, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, voted unanimously in November to write to administrators at both DePaul and Harvard, where Dershowitz teaches, expressing "the council's dismay at Professor Dershowitz's interference in Finkelstein's tenure and promotion case." Michael Budde, chair of DePaul's political science department, told the New York Times that Dershowitz's campaign "shows no respect for the integrity of our process and institution."
Tenure votes are among the most carefully guarded secrets in the academy, but not in this case. In separate meetings, both the political science department and a committee of the college voted to give Finkelstein tenure. The department vote, according to The Chronicle, was 9 to 3, and the College Personnel Committee's was 5 to 0. The confidential departmental report, according to The Chronicle, concluded that "while not all members of the department share a love of polemic and inflammatory rhetoric as practiced by Norman and his adversaries, there is clearly a substantial and serious record of scholarly production and achievement." But Charles Suchar, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, recommended against tenure. In what The Chronicle called "language similar to that used by Mr. Dershowitz," the dean wrote, "I find the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein's published books to border on character assassination and, in my opinion, they embody a strategy clearly aimed at destroying the reputation of many who oppose his views."
Among the numerous comments on the case, the most thoughtful come from University of Chicago historian Peter Novick, who has written the definitive book on the history of US Holocaust commemoration (see my "Holocaust Creationism," July 12, 1999). He's been a sharp critic of Finkelstein's writing, declaring that many of the assertions in Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry are "pure invention" and calling the book "a twenty-first century updating of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'" But Novick objects to the way Dershowitz portrayed him--as an ally in the campaign to block Finkelstein's tenure.
At Dershowitz's suggestion, the political science chair asked Novick for "the clearest and most egregious instances" of Finkelstein's malfeasance. Novick replied that while inviting outside opinions on a candidate for tenure was common, soliciting "the dirt" was totally improper, and he wouldn't satisfy such a request. Novick then published key parts of his letter in The Chronicle to publicly disassociate himself from Dershowitz's tactics.
"Of course Finkelstein's work--like that of all of us--is 'flawed,'" Novick wrote. The question, he said, is "whether, on balance, the positive contribution of the totality of his scholarly work outweighs its faults." His own published criticisms of Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry "reflect my values, my sensibility, who I am...but I don't confuse those criticisms with holy writ." Novick then appealed for "pluralism" in the academy: "There are those who relish the adversarial role, who delight in combat, whose greatest joy is in advancing a cause... such people are often inclined to stretch evidence to the breaking point, and occasionally beyond.... Professor Finkelstein seems to be of that number, as does Professor Dershowitz." That was not his own style, Novick said. While it would be "disastrous," he wrote, "to have a university composed exclusively of people like Finkelstein and Dershowitz," it would be "equally undesirable to have a university composed exclusively of people like me."
Finally, Novick wrote that "Dershowitz's highly publicized intervention has, it seems to me, made it impossible for DePaul to reject Finkelstein's bid for tenure without everyone concluding that DePaul had capitulated to Dershowitz's bullying." If the administration denied him tenure on legitimate scholarly grounds, he said, they'd have to live with the fallout.
Novick told me that he thinks Finkelstein and Dershowitz "deserve each other." But he added that "it's not Finkelstein who's threatening Dershowitz's employment." DePaul's final decision, to be made by the university president, is expected in June.
The Chutzpah Industry
by JON WIENER
[from the May 21, 2007 issue]
Alan Dershowitz is at it again: First he tried to get California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to stop the University of California Press (UCP) from publishing a book highly critical of him, and now he's trying to get DePaul University to deny tenure to the author. The object of his fury? Norman Finkelstein, with whom Dershowitz has been feuding for years. The subject? Israel, of course.
Dershowitz has been telling anyone who will listen, as well as many who didn't ask, that Finkelstein's book Beyond Chutzpah--published by UCP in 2005 despite Dershowitz's efforts--is "wholly illegitimate" and "part of a conspiracy to defame" him. (In his book Finkelstein called Dershowitz's The Case for Israel "among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict." For more, see my "Giving Chutzpah New Meaning," July 11, 2005. Disclosure: A Nation editor served as a freelance editor of Beyond Chutzpah.)
In the fall, before their vote on tenure for Finkelstein, members of the DePaul political science department received an unsolicited packet from Dershowitz containing his "dossier of Norman Finkelstein's most egregious academic sins, and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions." This kind of intervention in a tenure case is virtually unprecedented. It's one thing to have over-the-top debates, especially on Israel and Palestine; we call that freedom of speech. But it's another thing when one of the parties tries to get the other one fired and publication of his book stopped--we call that illegitimate interference.
The procedures governing tenure review require that department chairs solicit evaluations by outside experts in the field. Freelance submissions by declared enemies are pretty much unheard of. DePaul's Faculty Governance Council objected to Dershowitz's intervention and, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, voted unanimously in November to write to administrators at both DePaul and Harvard, where Dershowitz teaches, expressing "the council's dismay at Professor Dershowitz's interference in Finkelstein's tenure and promotion case." Michael Budde, chair of DePaul's political science department, told the New York Times that Dershowitz's campaign "shows no respect for the integrity of our process and institution."
Tenure votes are among the most carefully guarded secrets in the academy, but not in this case. In separate meetings, both the political science department and a committee of the college voted to give Finkelstein tenure. The department vote, according to The Chronicle, was 9 to 3, and the College Personnel Committee's was 5 to 0. The confidential departmental report, according to The Chronicle, concluded that "while not all members of the department share a love of polemic and inflammatory rhetoric as practiced by Norman and his adversaries, there is clearly a substantial and serious record of scholarly production and achievement." But Charles Suchar, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, recommended against tenure. In what The Chronicle called "language similar to that used by Mr. Dershowitz," the dean wrote, "I find the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein's published books to border on character assassination and, in my opinion, they embody a strategy clearly aimed at destroying the reputation of many who oppose his views."
Among the numerous comments on the case, the most thoughtful come from University of Chicago historian Peter Novick, who has written the definitive book on the history of US Holocaust commemoration (see my "Holocaust Creationism," July 12, 1999). He's been a sharp critic of Finkelstein's writing, declaring that many of the assertions in Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry are "pure invention" and calling the book "a twenty-first century updating of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'" But Novick objects to the way Dershowitz portrayed him--as an ally in the campaign to block Finkelstein's tenure.
At Dershowitz's suggestion, the political science chair asked Novick for "the clearest and most egregious instances" of Finkelstein's malfeasance. Novick replied that while inviting outside opinions on a candidate for tenure was common, soliciting "the dirt" was totally improper, and he wouldn't satisfy such a request. Novick then published key parts of his letter in The Chronicle to publicly disassociate himself from Dershowitz's tactics.
"Of course Finkelstein's work--like that of all of us--is 'flawed,'" Novick wrote. The question, he said, is "whether, on balance, the positive contribution of the totality of his scholarly work outweighs its faults." His own published criticisms of Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry "reflect my values, my sensibility, who I am...but I don't confuse those criticisms with holy writ." Novick then appealed for "pluralism" in the academy: "There are those who relish the adversarial role, who delight in combat, whose greatest joy is in advancing a cause... such people are often inclined to stretch evidence to the breaking point, and occasionally beyond.... Professor Finkelstein seems to be of that number, as does Professor Dershowitz." That was not his own style, Novick said. While it would be "disastrous," he wrote, "to have a university composed exclusively of people like Finkelstein and Dershowitz," it would be "equally undesirable to have a university composed exclusively of people like me."
Finally, Novick wrote that "Dershowitz's highly publicized intervention has, it seems to me, made it impossible for DePaul to reject Finkelstein's bid for tenure without everyone concluding that DePaul had capitulated to Dershowitz's bullying." If the administration denied him tenure on legitimate scholarly grounds, he said, they'd have to live with the fallout.
Novick told me that he thinks Finkelstein and Dershowitz "deserve each other." But he added that "it's not Finkelstein who's threatening Dershowitz's employment." DePaul's final decision, to be made by the university president, is expected in June.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
One Thin Slice at a Time -- FISA expansion
Intelligence Chief Decries Constraints
Update of Surveillance Law Urged
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 2, 2007; A07
Court orders in January that brought President Bush's warrantless terrorist surveillance program under existing law have limited the intelligence that agencies can collect, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told a Senate committee yesterday.
"We are actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting," McConnell said during an unusual public session of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the administration's proposal to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).
The intelligence collection program was secretly instituted under presidential authority shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was disclosed by the news media in December 2005. It permitted warrantless intercepts of telephone calls and e-mails between the United States and locations overseas if one participant was believed to be a member of al-Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.
In January, the administration agreed to bring the program under the oversight of the secret FISA court, which approves warrants in terrorism and espionage investigations. That reversed Bush's position that he had the authority to order the program on his own. In a January letter to some lawmakers, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said the administration was satisfied the new arrangement would have the "speed and agility" to protect the nation from terrorists.
Yesterday, McConnell and other intelligence officials said that the new FISA oversight has been implemented. They justified the new proposal as necessary to expand the information that can be collected by the National Security Agency, which runs the surveillance program.
When Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) asked McConnell whether the current FISA court orders that govern the interceptions "are not sufficient for what you want them to be," the intelligence chief replied: "We are missing things."
Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), the panel's vice chairman, said flatly that the NSA is missing "vital intelligence."
Senators on both sides of the aisle raised questions about the administration's proposed changes to existing laws. A key revision would shift the focus of warrants from the means of communication and where the interception is to take place to who the subject of the surveillance is.
Another provision that attracted interest would relieve telecommunication companies from liability for cooperating with the initial surveillance program or, under the proposed approach, if they were ordered by the attorney general to turn over customer information without a FISA court warrant.
Democrats on the committee made clear that they want a revised surveillance law that would prohibit future presidents from initiating another warrantless intercept program based on the constitutional authority to protect the nation, as Bush did.
"There is nothing in this bill that confines the president to work within FISA," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).
Lawmakers also raised questions about a provision that would allow the government to retain "significant intelligence information" taken in the search of a U.S. citizen's home if a FISA warrant permitting the search is later denied. FISA allows FBI agents to surveil a subject for a short period on an emergency basis before seeking a warrant, but if the warrant is denied, current law allows the retention only of information involving imminent death or harm.
The FISA court almost never turns down a warrant request. Data for 2006 show that it signed off on 2,176 warrants, the Associated Press reported yesterday. One application for a warrant was denied in part, and 73 required changes before being approved.
That would be 3.4% of the requests tweaked prior to approval.
Update of Surveillance Law Urged
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 2, 2007; A07
Court orders in January that brought President Bush's warrantless terrorist surveillance program under existing law have limited the intelligence that agencies can collect, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told a Senate committee yesterday.
"We are actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting," McConnell said during an unusual public session of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the administration's proposal to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).
The intelligence collection program was secretly instituted under presidential authority shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was disclosed by the news media in December 2005. It permitted warrantless intercepts of telephone calls and e-mails between the United States and locations overseas if one participant was believed to be a member of al-Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.
In January, the administration agreed to bring the program under the oversight of the secret FISA court, which approves warrants in terrorism and espionage investigations. That reversed Bush's position that he had the authority to order the program on his own. In a January letter to some lawmakers, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said the administration was satisfied the new arrangement would have the "speed and agility" to protect the nation from terrorists.
Yesterday, McConnell and other intelligence officials said that the new FISA oversight has been implemented. They justified the new proposal as necessary to expand the information that can be collected by the National Security Agency, which runs the surveillance program.
When Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) asked McConnell whether the current FISA court orders that govern the interceptions "are not sufficient for what you want them to be," the intelligence chief replied: "We are missing things."
Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), the panel's vice chairman, said flatly that the NSA is missing "vital intelligence."
Senators on both sides of the aisle raised questions about the administration's proposed changes to existing laws. A key revision would shift the focus of warrants from the means of communication and where the interception is to take place to who the subject of the surveillance is.
Another provision that attracted interest would relieve telecommunication companies from liability for cooperating with the initial surveillance program or, under the proposed approach, if they were ordered by the attorney general to turn over customer information without a FISA court warrant.
Democrats on the committee made clear that they want a revised surveillance law that would prohibit future presidents from initiating another warrantless intercept program based on the constitutional authority to protect the nation, as Bush did.
"There is nothing in this bill that confines the president to work within FISA," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).
Lawmakers also raised questions about a provision that would allow the government to retain "significant intelligence information" taken in the search of a U.S. citizen's home if a FISA warrant permitting the search is later denied. FISA allows FBI agents to surveil a subject for a short period on an emergency basis before seeking a warrant, but if the warrant is denied, current law allows the retention only of information involving imminent death or harm.
The FISA court almost never turns down a warrant request. Data for 2006 show that it signed off on 2,176 warrants, the Associated Press reported yesterday. One application for a warrant was denied in part, and 73 required changes before being approved.
That would be 3.4% of the requests tweaked prior to approval.
Command to open fire heard on Kent State tape
Report: Command to open fire heard on Kent State tape
CLEVELAND, Ohio (AP) -- A static-filled recording of war protesters yelling, followed by a voice and gunfire, was released Tuesday by a survivor of the Kent State University shooting who claims the tape proves a military order was given to fire on demonstrators.
"The evidence speaks for itself," said Alan Canfora, 58, one of nine students wounded during the National Guard shooting. Four students were killed in the 1970 shootings, which followed several days of protests over the Vietnam War.
Canfora played two versions of the tape -- the original and an amplified version -- in which he says a Guard officer issues the command, "Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!"
To the casual listener, the word "point" can be heard followed by the sound of shots being fired. There is no indication on the tape of who said the word.
The tape, played to a group of reporters and students at a small university theater, was given to Yale University for its Kent State archives in 1979 by an attorney who represented students in a lawsuit filed against the state over the shooting, Canfora said. He found out about the tape six months ago while researching the shooting.
Canfora said he will turn over copies of the tape to federal and state officials with an appeal to reopen the investigation over how the firing began.
"We're hoping for new investigations and new truths," he said. "We need truth, we need healing."
After the shooting, the FBI investigated whether an order had been given to fire and said it could only speculate. One theory was that a Guardsman panicked or fired intentionally at a student and that others fired when they heard the shot.
After an initial investigation, the case was reopened in 1973 when a grand jury indicted eight Guardsmen. They were acquitted of federal civil rights charges the next year.
Larry Shafer, a Guardsman who said he fired during the shootings and was among those charged, told the Kent-Ravenna Record-Courier newspaper Tuesday that he was unaware of the tape and that "point" would not have been part of a proper command.
"I never heard any command to fire. That's all I can say on that," said Shafer, a Ravenna city councilman and former fire chief. "That's not to say there may not have been, but with all the racket and noise, I don't know how anyone could have heard anything that day."
The reel-to-reel audio recording was made by a student who placed a microphone at a windowsill of a dormitory overlooking the anti-war rally, Canfora said. The student turned the tape over to the FBI, which kept a copy.
Stan Pottinger, who helped prosecute the Guardsmen when he was an assistant attorney general with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department, said Tuesday from New York that he doubts anything was overlooked then.
He said he could not specifically recall the tape, but that audio recordings and film were carefully studied.
"I'm so curious about this," he said of a possible order to fire. "That was a major part of our effort."
But he said justice has been served.
"The Guardsmen were acquitted, the case was closed, the families expressed enormous gratitude for the reopening of the case, and that was it," he said.
But only a small portion of the tape was reviewed during various investigations, Canfora said.
Joseph Lewis, 55, of Scappoose, Oregon, shot in the abdomen and ankle in 1970, joined Canfora at the news conference and said he believes the tape recorded a military command to fire.
"It sure sounds like an order to fire. On that day I did not hear an order to fire. I seem to hear one on this tape," Lewis said.
Scott Wilson, an FBI spokesman, said Tuesday that he was unaware of any request to look into the matter.
The Ohio National Guard had no comment on the tape's release, spokesman James Sims said Tuesday.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Fuck! Then don't read this story! I'll print it out and tape it in a scrapbook or stick it in a file cabinet, k?
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/01/kent.state.ap/index.html
CLEVELAND, Ohio (AP) -- A static-filled recording of war protesters yelling, followed by a voice and gunfire, was released Tuesday by a survivor of the Kent State University shooting who claims the tape proves a military order was given to fire on demonstrators.
"The evidence speaks for itself," said Alan Canfora, 58, one of nine students wounded during the National Guard shooting. Four students were killed in the 1970 shootings, which followed several days of protests over the Vietnam War.
Canfora played two versions of the tape -- the original and an amplified version -- in which he says a Guard officer issues the command, "Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!"
To the casual listener, the word "point" can be heard followed by the sound of shots being fired. There is no indication on the tape of who said the word.
The tape, played to a group of reporters and students at a small university theater, was given to Yale University for its Kent State archives in 1979 by an attorney who represented students in a lawsuit filed against the state over the shooting, Canfora said. He found out about the tape six months ago while researching the shooting.
Canfora said he will turn over copies of the tape to federal and state officials with an appeal to reopen the investigation over how the firing began.
"We're hoping for new investigations and new truths," he said. "We need truth, we need healing."
After the shooting, the FBI investigated whether an order had been given to fire and said it could only speculate. One theory was that a Guardsman panicked or fired intentionally at a student and that others fired when they heard the shot.
After an initial investigation, the case was reopened in 1973 when a grand jury indicted eight Guardsmen. They were acquitted of federal civil rights charges the next year.
Larry Shafer, a Guardsman who said he fired during the shootings and was among those charged, told the Kent-Ravenna Record-Courier newspaper Tuesday that he was unaware of the tape and that "point" would not have been part of a proper command.
"I never heard any command to fire. That's all I can say on that," said Shafer, a Ravenna city councilman and former fire chief. "That's not to say there may not have been, but with all the racket and noise, I don't know how anyone could have heard anything that day."
The reel-to-reel audio recording was made by a student who placed a microphone at a windowsill of a dormitory overlooking the anti-war rally, Canfora said. The student turned the tape over to the FBI, which kept a copy.
Stan Pottinger, who helped prosecute the Guardsmen when he was an assistant attorney general with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department, said Tuesday from New York that he doubts anything was overlooked then.
He said he could not specifically recall the tape, but that audio recordings and film were carefully studied.
"I'm so curious about this," he said of a possible order to fire. "That was a major part of our effort."
But he said justice has been served.
"The Guardsmen were acquitted, the case was closed, the families expressed enormous gratitude for the reopening of the case, and that was it," he said.
But only a small portion of the tape was reviewed during various investigations, Canfora said.
Joseph Lewis, 55, of Scappoose, Oregon, shot in the abdomen and ankle in 1970, joined Canfora at the news conference and said he believes the tape recorded a military command to fire.
"It sure sounds like an order to fire. On that day I did not hear an order to fire. I seem to hear one on this tape," Lewis said.
Scott Wilson, an FBI spokesman, said Tuesday that he was unaware of any request to look into the matter.
The Ohio National Guard had no comment on the tape's release, spokesman James Sims said Tuesday.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Fuck! Then don't read this story! I'll print it out and tape it in a scrapbook or stick it in a file cabinet, k?
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/01/kent.state.ap/index.html
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Columbine parents launch appeal of decision to seal depositions
Columbine parents launch appeal of decision to seal depositions
BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 26, 2007
DENVER - A lawyer for the parents of two Columbine High School victims filed formal notice Thursday that they will appeal a federal judge's decision to keep statements by the gunmen's parents secret for 20 years.
U.S. District Judge Lewis T. Babcock ruled April 2 that depositions by the parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold would remain sealed for 20 years. The depositions were made for a civil lawsuit that was settled out of court.
Several Columbine parents, scholars and law-enforcement officials had argued the depositions should be opened at least to researchers in hopes they could help prevent future school shootings.
Attorney Barry K. Arrington filed the notice of appeal in U.S. District Court on behalf of parents Brian Rohrbough, Susan Petrone and Dawn Anna. The notice does not discuss the grounds for appeal and Arrington did not immediately return a call.
Rohrbough and Petrone are the parents of Daniel Rohrbough and Dawn Anna is the mother of Lauren Townsend. Their children were among 12 students who were killed at Columbine on April 20, 1999.
Harris and Klebold also shot and killed teacher Dave Sanders before taking their own lives.
BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 26, 2007
DENVER - A lawyer for the parents of two Columbine High School victims filed formal notice Thursday that they will appeal a federal judge's decision to keep statements by the gunmen's parents secret for 20 years.
U.S. District Judge Lewis T. Babcock ruled April 2 that depositions by the parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold would remain sealed for 20 years. The depositions were made for a civil lawsuit that was settled out of court.
Several Columbine parents, scholars and law-enforcement officials had argued the depositions should be opened at least to researchers in hopes they could help prevent future school shootings.
Attorney Barry K. Arrington filed the notice of appeal in U.S. District Court on behalf of parents Brian Rohrbough, Susan Petrone and Dawn Anna. The notice does not discuss the grounds for appeal and Arrington did not immediately return a call.
Rohrbough and Petrone are the parents of Daniel Rohrbough and Dawn Anna is the mother of Lauren Townsend. Their children were among 12 students who were killed at Columbine on April 20, 1999.
Harris and Klebold also shot and killed teacher Dave Sanders before taking their own lives.
Am I an anti-Semite?
I would only be an anti-Semite if you define Semitism as holding as a cultural birthright what the India-Indians call "the left-hand path." An endless, insidious low-voltage grift which dovetails precisely with the us-versus-them mentality that prevents assimilation. Imagine my surprise after years of guessing at the shape of Israel-US relations and having the Mearshimer and Walt paper published (IN GREAT BRITAIN!!!) last year.
The media tweaking and manipulation -- would that also be part of the definition of Semitism? I have no issues with either Jewish culture nor lobbying. But when lobbying is too successful and involves an insular (Cicero's quote was 'their tendency to act as a clique') group -- hmm. Bad news for the host organism.
So, what is Semitism to you?
The media tweaking and manipulation -- would that also be part of the definition of Semitism? I have no issues with either Jewish culture nor lobbying. But when lobbying is too successful and involves an insular (Cicero's quote was 'their tendency to act as a clique') group -- hmm. Bad news for the host organism.
So, what is Semitism to you?
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Iran attacks US warship in Gulf of Tonkin
'Iran's Quds Force helped kill 5 US troops in Iraq'
Continued violence claims at least 29 lives across country
By Agence France Presse (AFP)
Friday, April 27, 2007
US General David Petraeus, head of the coalition forces in Iraq, accused Iran's secretive Quds Force Thursday of helping an armed network that killed five US soldiers in January in the Shiite shrine city of Kerbala. Petraeus acknowledged in Washington that a complex and "very tough" situation existed in Iraq, but also accused Iran's Quds Force of helping an Iraqi network to murder five US soldiers in Kerbala.
On January 20, gunmen disguised in US military-style uniforms breezed past checks and attacked a provincial security building during a visit by American troops to their Iraqi counterparts. One US soldier died in the assault and four were captured. Their bodies were later found by Iraqi police.
The assault came nine days after US forces seized five Iranians from the northern city of Irbil. They are still being detained.
In March, the military announced the arrest of two brothers, Qais and Laith Khazali, in connection with the murders of five soldiers. Petraeus now says the Khazalis were supported by Iran's Quds Force.
"There is no question that the Al-Khazali network was connected to the Iranian Quds Force - received money, training, arms, ammunition, and at some points in time even advice and assistance," he told reporters.
The bloodshed in Iraq continued on Thursday, leaving at least 29 people dead.
The province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, was again a focus of violence when a suicide bomber blew up a vehicle at a joint Iraqi Army and police checkpoint, killing nine soldiers.
Another 15 people were wounded in the bombing in the town of Khalis, 10 of them soldiers, a security official said.
Diyala has become one of the fiercest battlegrounds in Iraq, the new focus of Sunni Al-Qaeda fighters who have been pushed out of western Iraq and Baghdad by an over-two-month-old US and Iraqi security operation.
In Baghdad itself, a car bomb in the southern Jadiriyya district killed six people and wounded 18, a Defense Ministry official said. Another five were killed in other attacks in the capital.
In Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, gunmen shot dead the wife and daughter of Hashim Hassan al-Majid, brother of Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as Chemical Ali, police said. Emmanuel Goldstein has been linked to him.
Ali, a cousin of Saddam who served as his defense minister, is currently facing charges of genocide over the deaths of tens of thousands of Kurds during the 1988 military campaign in northern Kurdistan.
Elsewhere seven people were killed, including three Kurdish militiamen in Zammar, northwest of the main city of Mosul in north Iraq.
Deputy Premier Barham Saleh met with Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, on Thursday to discuss the country's security.
Saleh also met with other senior clerics in this Shiite holy city, including Grand Ayatollah Mohammad al-Yaqoubi, the spiritual leader of the Fadhila party, whose 15 legislators withdrew from the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance last month.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari arrived in Ankara Thursday for talks on an upcoming international meeting on his country's security, the Anatolia news agency reported.
Zebari, on a regional tour to drum up support for the May 3-4 conference of foreign ministers in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, was to meet with his Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul late Thursday before leaving Friday morning.
He flew in from Tehran, where he sought to convince Iranian leaders to attend the conference.
Iran is reluctant to attend, irked that the talks will also be attended by the US and other world powers.
Turkish diplomats have said Turkey would participate in the talks even though there was "resentment" in Ankara over Baghdad's failure to consult regional countries when choosing Egypt as the venue. - AFP
Continued violence claims at least 29 lives across country
By Agence France Presse (AFP)
Friday, April 27, 2007
US General David Petraeus, head of the coalition forces in Iraq, accused Iran's secretive Quds Force Thursday of helping an armed network that killed five US soldiers in January in the Shiite shrine city of Kerbala. Petraeus acknowledged in Washington that a complex and "very tough" situation existed in Iraq, but also accused Iran's Quds Force of helping an Iraqi network to murder five US soldiers in Kerbala.
On January 20, gunmen disguised in US military-style uniforms breezed past checks and attacked a provincial security building during a visit by American troops to their Iraqi counterparts. One US soldier died in the assault and four were captured. Their bodies were later found by Iraqi police.
The assault came nine days after US forces seized five Iranians from the northern city of Irbil. They are still being detained.
In March, the military announced the arrest of two brothers, Qais and Laith Khazali, in connection with the murders of five soldiers. Petraeus now says the Khazalis were supported by Iran's Quds Force.
"There is no question that the Al-Khazali network was connected to the Iranian Quds Force - received money, training, arms, ammunition, and at some points in time even advice and assistance," he told reporters.
The bloodshed in Iraq continued on Thursday, leaving at least 29 people dead.
The province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, was again a focus of violence when a suicide bomber blew up a vehicle at a joint Iraqi Army and police checkpoint, killing nine soldiers.
Another 15 people were wounded in the bombing in the town of Khalis, 10 of them soldiers, a security official said.
Diyala has become one of the fiercest battlegrounds in Iraq, the new focus of Sunni Al-Qaeda fighters who have been pushed out of western Iraq and Baghdad by an over-two-month-old US and Iraqi security operation.
In Baghdad itself, a car bomb in the southern Jadiriyya district killed six people and wounded 18, a Defense Ministry official said. Another five were killed in other attacks in the capital.
In Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, gunmen shot dead the wife and daughter of Hashim Hassan al-Majid, brother of Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as Chemical Ali, police said. Emmanuel Goldstein has been linked to him.
Ali, a cousin of Saddam who served as his defense minister, is currently facing charges of genocide over the deaths of tens of thousands of Kurds during the 1988 military campaign in northern Kurdistan.
Elsewhere seven people were killed, including three Kurdish militiamen in Zammar, northwest of the main city of Mosul in north Iraq.
Deputy Premier Barham Saleh met with Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, on Thursday to discuss the country's security.
Saleh also met with other senior clerics in this Shiite holy city, including Grand Ayatollah Mohammad al-Yaqoubi, the spiritual leader of the Fadhila party, whose 15 legislators withdrew from the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance last month.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari arrived in Ankara Thursday for talks on an upcoming international meeting on his country's security, the Anatolia news agency reported.
Zebari, on a regional tour to drum up support for the May 3-4 conference of foreign ministers in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, was to meet with his Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul late Thursday before leaving Friday morning.
He flew in from Tehran, where he sought to convince Iranian leaders to attend the conference.
Iran is reluctant to attend, irked that the talks will also be attended by the US and other world powers.
Turkish diplomats have said Turkey would participate in the talks even though there was "resentment" in Ankara over Baghdad's failure to consult regional countries when choosing Egypt as the venue. - AFP
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Are Rove's missing e-mails the smoking guns of the stolen 2004 election?
Are Rove's missing e-mails the smoking guns of the stolen 2004 election?
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
April 25, 2007
E-mails being sought from Karl Rove's computers, and recent revelations about critical electronic conflicts of interest, may be the smoking guns of Ohio's stolen 2004 election. A thorough recount of ballots and electronic files. preserved by a federal lawsuit, could tell the tale.
The major media has come to focus on a large batch of electronic communications which have disappeared from the server of the Republican National Committee, and from White House advisor Rove's computers. The attention stems from the controversial firing of eight federal prosecutors by Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales.
But the time frame from which these e-mails are missing also includes a critical late night period after the presidential election of 2004. In these crucial hours, computerized vote tallies may have been shifted to move the Ohio vote count from John Kerry to George W. Bush, giving Bush the presidency.
Earlier that day, Rove and Bush flew into Columbus. Local election officials say they met with Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in Columbus. Also apparently in attendance was Matt Damschroder, executive director of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections.
These four men, along with Ohio GOP chair Bob Bennett, were at the core of a multi-pronged strategy that gave Bush Ohio's twenty Electoral College votes, and thus the presidency. Bennett and Damschroder held key positions on election boards in the state's two most populous counties, with the biggest inner city concentrations of Democratic voters.
There were four key phases to the GOP's election theft strategy:
1. Prior to the election, the GOP focused on massive voter disenfranchisement, with a selective reduction of voter turnout in urban Democratic strongholds. Blackwell issued confusing and contradictory edicts on voter eligibility, registration requirements, and provisional ballots; on shifting precinct locations; on denial and misprinting of absentee ballots, and more. Among other things, election officials, including Bennett, stripped nearly 300,000 voters from registration rolls in heavily Democratic areas in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo.
2. On election day, the GOP focussed on voter intimidation, denial of voting rights to legally eligible ex-felons, denial of voting machines to inner city precincts, malfunctioning of those machines, destruction of provisional ballots and more.
In Franklin, Cuyahoga and other urban counties, huge lines left mostly African-American voters waiting in the rain for three hours and more. A Democratic Party survey shows more than 100,000 voters failed to vote due to these lines, which plagued heavily Democratic inner city precincts (but not Republican suburban ones) throughout the state. The survey shows another 50,000 ballots may have been discarded at the polling stations. In addition, to this day, more than 100,000 machine-rejected and provisional ballots remain uncounted. The official Bush margin of victory was less than 119,000 votes.
3. After the final tabulation of the votes, and the announcement that Bush had won, the GOP strategy focussed on subverting a statewide recount. A filing by the Green and Libertarian Parties required Ohio's 88 county boards of election to conduct random precinct samplings, to be followed by recounts where necessary.
A lawsuit was filed to delay the seating of Ohio's Electoral College delegation until after the recount was completed. Among other things, the plaintiffs sued to get access to Rove's laptop. But Blackwell rushed to certify the delegation before a recount could be completed. The issue became moot, and the suit was dropped. In retaliation, Blackwell tried to impose legal sanctions on the attorneys who filed it.
But two felony convictions have thus far resulted from what prosecutors have called the "rigging" of the recount in Cuyahoga County (where Bennett has been forced to resign his chairmanship of the board of elections). More are likely to follow.
The practices that led to these convictions were apparently repeated in many of Ohio's 88 counties. The order to violate the law---or at least tacit approval to do so---is almost certain to have come from Blackwell.
4. Ultimately, however, it is the GOP's computerized control of the vote count that may have been decisive. And here is where Rove's e-mails, and the wee hours of the morning after the election, are crucial.
Despite the massive disenfranchisement of Ohio Democrats, there is every indication John Kerry won Ohio 2004. Exit polls shown on national television at 12:20am gave Kerry a clear lead in Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. These "purple states" were Democratic blue late in the night, but, against virtually impossible odds, all turned Bush red by morning.
Along the way, Gahanna, Ohio's "loaves & fishes" vote count, showed 4,258 ballots for Bush in a precinct where just 638 people voted. Voting machines in Youngstown and Columbus lit up for Bush when Kerry's name was pushed. Rural Republican precincts registered more than 100% turnouts, while inner city Democratic ones went as low as 7%. Warren County declared a "Homeland Security" alert, removed the ballot count from public scrutiny, then recorded a huge, unlikely margin for Bush.
These and many more instances of irregularities and theft were reported at www.freepress.org and then confirmed by U.S. Representative John Conyers and others who researched the election.
But the most critical reversals may have come as exit polls indicated that despite massive Democratic disenfranchisement, and even with preliminary vote count manipulations, Kerry would win Ohio by 4.2%, a margin well in excess of 200,000 votes.
The key to that reversal may be electronic. It has now become widely known that the same web-hosting firm that served a range of GOP websites, including the one for the Republican National Committee, also hosted the official site that Blackwell used to report the Ohio vote count.
This astonishing conflict of interest has been reported at the epluribusmedia.org on-line investigative service. Cross-postings have come from luaptifer at Dailykos and blogger Joseph Cannon's Cannonfire.blogspot.com. They all confirm that the RNC tech network's hosting firm is SMARTech.com, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. SMARTech hosts georgew.bush.com, mc.org and gop.com among other Republican web domains, in a bank basement.
Furthermore, the same hosting site that handled redirections from Blackwell's "official" site also handled the White House e-mail accounts that have become central to investigations of the Gonzales purge of eight federal prosecutors, some of whom were themselves involved in vote fraud investigations.
Conflicts of interest in programming services and remote-access capability appear throughout the RNC's computer networks, Rove's secret White House e-mail, and the electronic vehicles used by Blackwell to finally reveal his "official" presidential vote counts for Ohio 2004.
One factor may be Ohio's electronic touch-screen voting systems, on which were cast more than 800,000 votes in an election decided by about one-seventh that total. Such vulnerabilities, among other things, have been confirmed in exhaustive reports by Conyers's Committee, by the Government Accountability Office, by the Carter-Baker Commission, by Princeton University, by the Brennan Center, and by others.
But overall, the electronic record of every vote in Ohio was transmitted to the Secretary of State's office, and hosted in real time in Chattanooga. Under such circumstances, the joint hosting of the White House e-mail system and accessibility by Blackwell and Rove to the same computer networks linked to the Ohio vote count, takes on an added dimension.
Mike Connell, a Republican computer expert, helped create the software for both Ohio's official 2004 election web site, and for the Bush campaign's partisan web site during the 2000 election. The success of Connell's GovTech Solutions has been attributed by Connell to his being "loyal to my network," including the Bush family.
Blackwell shared those loyalties. Like Connell, he worked for the Bush-Cheney campaign, serving as its Ohio co-chair. He was also in control of the vote count that was being reported on software Bush loyalist Connell helped design.
It was in a crucial period after midnight on election night 2004 that these paired conflicts of interest may have decided the election. As exit polls showed a decisive Kerry victory, there was an unexplained 90-minute void in official reporting of results. By this time, most of the vote counts were coming in from rural areas, which are traditionally Republican, and which, ironically, usually report their results earlier than the Democratic urban areas.
In this time span, Kerry's lead morphed into a GOP triumph. To explain this "miraculous" shift, Rove invented a myth of the greatest last-second voting surge in US history, allegedly coming from late-voting fundamentalist Republicans. No significant evidence exists to substantiate this claim. In fact, local news reports indicate the heaviest turnouts in most rural areas came early on election day, rather than later.
According to a January 13, 2005, release from Cedarville University, a small Ohio-based Christian academy, Connell's GovTech Solutions helped make the shared server system run "like a champ…through the early morning hours as users from around the world looked to Ohio for their election results."
After 2am, despite exit polls showing very much the opposite outcome, those results put Bush back in the White House.
In January, 2005, the U.S. Congress hosted the first challenge to a state's Electoral College delegation in our nation's history. At the time, the compromised security of the official Ohio electronic reporting systems was not public knowledge. But the first attempt to subpoena Karl Rove's computer files had already failed.
Now a second attempt to gain such access is being mounted as the Gonzales scandal deepens.
Congressman Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) has raised "particular concerns about Karl Rove" and his electronic communications about the Gonzales firings.
Rove claims both his own computer records and the RNC's servers have been purged of e-mails through the time the Ohio vote was being reversed. Rove's attorney, Robert Kuskin, has told a Congressional inquiry that Rove mistakenly believed his messages to the RNC "were being archived" there.
But the RNC says it has no e-mail records for Rove before 2005. Rob Kelner, an RNC lawyer says efforts to recreate the lost records have had some success. But it's not yet known whether communications from the 2004 election can be retrieved.
Nor is it known whether the joint access allowed to top GOP operatives Rove and Blackwell was responsible for the election-night reversal that put Bush back in the White House.
But there remains another avenue by which the real outcome of Ohio 2004 could be discovered. Longstanding federal law protected Ohio's ballots and other election documentation prior to September 3, 2006. Blackwell gave clear orders that these crucial records were to be destroyed on that date.
Prior to the expiration of the federal statutory protection, a civil rights lawsuit was filed in the federal court of Judge Algernon Marbley, asking that the remaining records be preserved. The request was granted in what has become known as the King-Lincoln Bronzeville suit (co-author Bob Fitrakis is an attorney in the case, and Harvey Wasserman is a plaintiff).
Thus, by federal law, the actual ballots and electronic records should be available for the kind of exhaustive recount that was illegally denied---or "rigged," as prosecutors in Cleveland have put it---by Blackwell, Bennett and their cohorts the first time around.
Ohio's newly-elected Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has agreed to take custody of these materials, and to bring them to a central repository, probably in Columbus.
This means that an exhaustive recount could show who really did win the presidential election of 2004.
It may also be possible to learn what roles---electronic or otherwise--- Karl Rove and J. Kenneth Blackwell really did play during those crucial 90 minutes in the deep night, when the presidency somehow slipped from John Kerry to George W. Bush.
--
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at www.freepress.org and, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, from the New Press. Fitrakis is publisher, and Wasserman is senior editor, of www.freepress.org.
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
April 25, 2007
E-mails being sought from Karl Rove's computers, and recent revelations about critical electronic conflicts of interest, may be the smoking guns of Ohio's stolen 2004 election. A thorough recount of ballots and electronic files. preserved by a federal lawsuit, could tell the tale.
The major media has come to focus on a large batch of electronic communications which have disappeared from the server of the Republican National Committee, and from White House advisor Rove's computers. The attention stems from the controversial firing of eight federal prosecutors by Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales.
But the time frame from which these e-mails are missing also includes a critical late night period after the presidential election of 2004. In these crucial hours, computerized vote tallies may have been shifted to move the Ohio vote count from John Kerry to George W. Bush, giving Bush the presidency.
Earlier that day, Rove and Bush flew into Columbus. Local election officials say they met with Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in Columbus. Also apparently in attendance was Matt Damschroder, executive director of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections.
These four men, along with Ohio GOP chair Bob Bennett, were at the core of a multi-pronged strategy that gave Bush Ohio's twenty Electoral College votes, and thus the presidency. Bennett and Damschroder held key positions on election boards in the state's two most populous counties, with the biggest inner city concentrations of Democratic voters.
There were four key phases to the GOP's election theft strategy:
1. Prior to the election, the GOP focused on massive voter disenfranchisement, with a selective reduction of voter turnout in urban Democratic strongholds. Blackwell issued confusing and contradictory edicts on voter eligibility, registration requirements, and provisional ballots; on shifting precinct locations; on denial and misprinting of absentee ballots, and more. Among other things, election officials, including Bennett, stripped nearly 300,000 voters from registration rolls in heavily Democratic areas in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo.
2. On election day, the GOP focussed on voter intimidation, denial of voting rights to legally eligible ex-felons, denial of voting machines to inner city precincts, malfunctioning of those machines, destruction of provisional ballots and more.
In Franklin, Cuyahoga and other urban counties, huge lines left mostly African-American voters waiting in the rain for three hours and more. A Democratic Party survey shows more than 100,000 voters failed to vote due to these lines, which plagued heavily Democratic inner city precincts (but not Republican suburban ones) throughout the state. The survey shows another 50,000 ballots may have been discarded at the polling stations. In addition, to this day, more than 100,000 machine-rejected and provisional ballots remain uncounted. The official Bush margin of victory was less than 119,000 votes.
3. After the final tabulation of the votes, and the announcement that Bush had won, the GOP strategy focussed on subverting a statewide recount. A filing by the Green and Libertarian Parties required Ohio's 88 county boards of election to conduct random precinct samplings, to be followed by recounts where necessary.
A lawsuit was filed to delay the seating of Ohio's Electoral College delegation until after the recount was completed. Among other things, the plaintiffs sued to get access to Rove's laptop. But Blackwell rushed to certify the delegation before a recount could be completed. The issue became moot, and the suit was dropped. In retaliation, Blackwell tried to impose legal sanctions on the attorneys who filed it.
But two felony convictions have thus far resulted from what prosecutors have called the "rigging" of the recount in Cuyahoga County (where Bennett has been forced to resign his chairmanship of the board of elections). More are likely to follow.
The practices that led to these convictions were apparently repeated in many of Ohio's 88 counties. The order to violate the law---or at least tacit approval to do so---is almost certain to have come from Blackwell.
4. Ultimately, however, it is the GOP's computerized control of the vote count that may have been decisive. And here is where Rove's e-mails, and the wee hours of the morning after the election, are crucial.
Despite the massive disenfranchisement of Ohio Democrats, there is every indication John Kerry won Ohio 2004. Exit polls shown on national television at 12:20am gave Kerry a clear lead in Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. These "purple states" were Democratic blue late in the night, but, against virtually impossible odds, all turned Bush red by morning.
Along the way, Gahanna, Ohio's "loaves & fishes" vote count, showed 4,258 ballots for Bush in a precinct where just 638 people voted. Voting machines in Youngstown and Columbus lit up for Bush when Kerry's name was pushed. Rural Republican precincts registered more than 100% turnouts, while inner city Democratic ones went as low as 7%. Warren County declared a "Homeland Security" alert, removed the ballot count from public scrutiny, then recorded a huge, unlikely margin for Bush.
These and many more instances of irregularities and theft were reported at www.freepress.org and then confirmed by U.S. Representative John Conyers and others who researched the election.
But the most critical reversals may have come as exit polls indicated that despite massive Democratic disenfranchisement, and even with preliminary vote count manipulations, Kerry would win Ohio by 4.2%, a margin well in excess of 200,000 votes.
The key to that reversal may be electronic. It has now become widely known that the same web-hosting firm that served a range of GOP websites, including the one for the Republican National Committee, also hosted the official site that Blackwell used to report the Ohio vote count.
This astonishing conflict of interest has been reported at the epluribusmedia.org on-line investigative service. Cross-postings have come from luaptifer at Dailykos and blogger Joseph Cannon's Cannonfire.blogspot.com. They all confirm that the RNC tech network's hosting firm is SMARTech.com, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. SMARTech hosts georgew.bush.com, mc.org and gop.com among other Republican web domains, in a bank basement.
Furthermore, the same hosting site that handled redirections from Blackwell's "official" site also handled the White House e-mail accounts that have become central to investigations of the Gonzales purge of eight federal prosecutors, some of whom were themselves involved in vote fraud investigations.
Conflicts of interest in programming services and remote-access capability appear throughout the RNC's computer networks, Rove's secret White House e-mail, and the electronic vehicles used by Blackwell to finally reveal his "official" presidential vote counts for Ohio 2004.
One factor may be Ohio's electronic touch-screen voting systems, on which were cast more than 800,000 votes in an election decided by about one-seventh that total. Such vulnerabilities, among other things, have been confirmed in exhaustive reports by Conyers's Committee, by the Government Accountability Office, by the Carter-Baker Commission, by Princeton University, by the Brennan Center, and by others.
But overall, the electronic record of every vote in Ohio was transmitted to the Secretary of State's office, and hosted in real time in Chattanooga. Under such circumstances, the joint hosting of the White House e-mail system and accessibility by Blackwell and Rove to the same computer networks linked to the Ohio vote count, takes on an added dimension.
Mike Connell, a Republican computer expert, helped create the software for both Ohio's official 2004 election web site, and for the Bush campaign's partisan web site during the 2000 election. The success of Connell's GovTech Solutions has been attributed by Connell to his being "loyal to my network," including the Bush family.
Blackwell shared those loyalties. Like Connell, he worked for the Bush-Cheney campaign, serving as its Ohio co-chair. He was also in control of the vote count that was being reported on software Bush loyalist Connell helped design.
It was in a crucial period after midnight on election night 2004 that these paired conflicts of interest may have decided the election. As exit polls showed a decisive Kerry victory, there was an unexplained 90-minute void in official reporting of results. By this time, most of the vote counts were coming in from rural areas, which are traditionally Republican, and which, ironically, usually report their results earlier than the Democratic urban areas.
In this time span, Kerry's lead morphed into a GOP triumph. To explain this "miraculous" shift, Rove invented a myth of the greatest last-second voting surge in US history, allegedly coming from late-voting fundamentalist Republicans. No significant evidence exists to substantiate this claim. In fact, local news reports indicate the heaviest turnouts in most rural areas came early on election day, rather than later.
According to a January 13, 2005, release from Cedarville University, a small Ohio-based Christian academy, Connell's GovTech Solutions helped make the shared server system run "like a champ…through the early morning hours as users from around the world looked to Ohio for their election results."
After 2am, despite exit polls showing very much the opposite outcome, those results put Bush back in the White House.
In January, 2005, the U.S. Congress hosted the first challenge to a state's Electoral College delegation in our nation's history. At the time, the compromised security of the official Ohio electronic reporting systems was not public knowledge. But the first attempt to subpoena Karl Rove's computer files had already failed.
Now a second attempt to gain such access is being mounted as the Gonzales scandal deepens.
Congressman Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) has raised "particular concerns about Karl Rove" and his electronic communications about the Gonzales firings.
Rove claims both his own computer records and the RNC's servers have been purged of e-mails through the time the Ohio vote was being reversed. Rove's attorney, Robert Kuskin, has told a Congressional inquiry that Rove mistakenly believed his messages to the RNC "were being archived" there.
But the RNC says it has no e-mail records for Rove before 2005. Rob Kelner, an RNC lawyer says efforts to recreate the lost records have had some success. But it's not yet known whether communications from the 2004 election can be retrieved.
Nor is it known whether the joint access allowed to top GOP operatives Rove and Blackwell was responsible for the election-night reversal that put Bush back in the White House.
But there remains another avenue by which the real outcome of Ohio 2004 could be discovered. Longstanding federal law protected Ohio's ballots and other election documentation prior to September 3, 2006. Blackwell gave clear orders that these crucial records were to be destroyed on that date.
Prior to the expiration of the federal statutory protection, a civil rights lawsuit was filed in the federal court of Judge Algernon Marbley, asking that the remaining records be preserved. The request was granted in what has become known as the King-Lincoln Bronzeville suit (co-author Bob Fitrakis is an attorney in the case, and Harvey Wasserman is a plaintiff).
Thus, by federal law, the actual ballots and electronic records should be available for the kind of exhaustive recount that was illegally denied---or "rigged," as prosecutors in Cleveland have put it---by Blackwell, Bennett and their cohorts the first time around.
Ohio's newly-elected Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has agreed to take custody of these materials, and to bring them to a central repository, probably in Columbus.
This means that an exhaustive recount could show who really did win the presidential election of 2004.
It may also be possible to learn what roles---electronic or otherwise--- Karl Rove and J. Kenneth Blackwell really did play during those crucial 90 minutes in the deep night, when the presidency somehow slipped from John Kerry to George W. Bush.
--
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at www.freepress.org and, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, from the New Press. Fitrakis is publisher, and Wasserman is senior editor, of www.freepress.org.
Working for the Clampdown
April 23, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
Working for the Clampdown
What might the president do with his new power to declare martial law?
by James Bovard
How many pipe bombs might it take to end American democracy? Far fewer than it would have taken a year ago.
The Defense Authorization Act of 2006, passed on Sept. 30, empowers President George W. Bush to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist “incident,” if he or other federal officials perceive a shortfall of “public order,” or even in response to antiwar protests that get unruly as a result of government provocations.
The media and most of Capitol Hill ignored or cheered on this grant of nearly boundless power. But now that the president’s arsenal of authority is swollen and consecrated, a few voices of complaint are being heard. Even the New York Times recently condemned the new law for “making martial law easier.”
It only took a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to raze one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president’s ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened these restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the U.S. without the express permission of Congress. But there is a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act.
Section 1076 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from “Insurrection Act” to “Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act.” The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The new law expands the list to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition”—and such “condition” is not defined or limited.
These new pretexts are even more expansive than they appear. FEMA proclaims the equivalent of a natural disaster when bad snowstorms occur, and Congress routinely proclaims a natural disaster (and awards more farm subsidies) when there is a shortfall of rain in states with upcoming elections. A terrorist “incident” could be something as stupid as the flashing toys scattered around Boston last fall.
The new law also empowers the president to commandeer the National Guard of one state to send to another state for up to 365 days. Bush could send the Alabama National Guard to suppress antiwar protests in Boston. Or the next president could send the New York National Guard to disarm the residents of Mississippi if they resisted a federal law that prohibited private ownership of semiautomatic weapons. Governors’ control of the National Guard can be trumped with a simple presidential declaration.
The story of how Section 1076 became law vivifies how expanding government power is almost always the correct answer in Washington. Some people have claimed the provision was slipped into the bill in the middle of the night. In reality, the administration clearly signaled its intent and almost no one in the media or Congress tried to stop it.
The Katrina debacle seems to have drowned Washington’s resistance to military rule. Bush declared, “I want there to be a robust discussion about the best way for the federal government, in certain extreme circumstances, to be able to rally assets for the good of the people.” His initial proposal generated a smattering of criticism and no groundswell of support. There was no “robust discussion.” On Aug. 29, 2006, the administration upped the ante, labeling the breached levees “the equivalent of a weapon of mass effect being used on the city of New Orleans.” Nobody ever defined a “weapon of mass effect,” but the term wasn’t challenged.
Section 1076 was supported by both conservatives and liberals. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, co-wrote the provision along with committee chairman Sen. John Warner (R-Va.). Sen. Ted Kennedy openly endorsed it, and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), then-chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was an avid proponent.
Every governor in the country opposed the changes, and the National Governors Association repeatedly and loudly objected. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned on Sept. 19 that “we certainly do not need to make it easier for Presidents to declare martial law,” but his alarm got no response. Ten days later, he commented in the Congressional Record: “Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.” Leahy further condemned the process, declaring that it “was just slipped in the defense bill as a rider with little study. Other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”
Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein wrote an excellent article in December on how the provision became law with minimal examination or controversy. A Republican Senate aide blamed the governors for failing to raise more fuss: “My understanding is that they sent form letters to offices. If they really want a piece of legislation considered they should have called offices and pushed the matter. No office can handle the amount of form letters that come in each day.”
Thus, the Senate was not guilty by reason of form letters. Plus, the issue was not on the front page of the Washington Post within the 48 hours before the Senate voted on it. Surely no reasonable person can expect senators to know what they were doing when they voted 100 to 0 in favor of the bill? In reality, they were too busy to notice the latest coffin nails they hammered into the Constitution.
This expansion of presidential prerogative illustrates how every federal failure redounds to the benefit of leviathan. FEMA was greatly expanded during the Clinton years for crises like the New Orleans flood. It, along with local and state agencies, floundered. Yet the federal belly flop on the Gulf Coast somehow anointed the president to send in troops where he sees fit.
“Martial law” is a euphemism for military dictatorship. When foreign democracies are overthrown and a junta establishes martial law, Americans usually recognize that a fundamental change has occurred. Perhaps some conservatives believe that the only change when martial law is declared is that people are no longer read their Miranda rights when they are locked away. “Martial law” means obey soldiers’ commands or be shot. The abuses of military rule in southern states during Reconstruction were legendary, but they have been swept under the historical rug.
Section 1076 is Enabling Act-type legislation—something that purports to preserve law-and-order while formally empowering the president to rule by decree. The Bush team is rarely remiss in stretching power beyond reasonable bounds. Bush talks as if any constraint on his war-making prerogative or budget is “aiding and abetting the enemy.” Can such a man be trusted to reasonably define insurrection or disorder? Can Hillary Clinton?
Bush can commandeer a state’s National Guard any time he declares a “state has refused to enforce applicable laws.” Does this refer to the laws as they are commonly understood—or the laws after Bush fixes them with a signing statement?
Some will consider concern about Bush or future presidents exploiting martial law to be alarmist. This is the same reflex many people have had to each administration proposal or power grab from the Patriot Act in October 2001 to the president’s enemy-combatant decree in November 2001 to the setting up the Guantanamo prison in early 2002 to the doctrine of preemptive war. The administration has perennially denied that its new powers pose any threat even after the evidence of abuses—illegal wiretapping, torture, a global network of secret prisons, Iraq in ruins—becomes overwhelming. If the administration does not hesitate to trample the First Amendment with “free speech zones,” why expect it to be diffident about powers that could stifle protests en masse?
On Feb. 24, the White House conducted a highly publicized drill to test responses to IEDs going off simultaneously in ten American cities. The White House has not disclosed the details of how the feds will respond, but it would be out of character for this president to let new powers he sought to gather dust. There is nothing more to prevent a president from declaring martial law on a pretext than there is to prevent him from launching a war on the basis of manufactured intelligence. And when the lies become exposed years later, it could be far too late to resurrect lost liberties.
Senators Leahy and Kit Bond (R-Mo.) are sponsoring a bill to repeal the changes, but it is not setting the woods on fire on Capitol Hill. Leahy urged his colleagues to consider the Section 1076 fix, declaring, “It is difficult to see how any Senator could disagree with the advisability of having a more transparent and thoughtful approach to this sensitive issue.”
He deserves credit for fighting hard on this issue, but there is little reason to expect most members of Congress to give it a second look. The Section 1076 debacle exemplifies how the Washington establishment pretends that new power will not be abused, regardless of how much existing power has been mishandled. Why worry about martial law when there is pork to be harvested and photo ops to attend? It is still unfashionable in Washington to worry about the danger of the open barn door until after the horse is two miles down the road.
_____________________________________
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy and eight other books.
April 23, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
Working for the Clampdown
What might the president do with his new power to declare martial law?
by James Bovard
How many pipe bombs might it take to end American democracy? Far fewer than it would have taken a year ago.
The Defense Authorization Act of 2006, passed on Sept. 30, empowers President George W. Bush to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist “incident,” if he or other federal officials perceive a shortfall of “public order,” or even in response to antiwar protests that get unruly as a result of government provocations.
The media and most of Capitol Hill ignored or cheered on this grant of nearly boundless power. But now that the president’s arsenal of authority is swollen and consecrated, a few voices of complaint are being heard. Even the New York Times recently condemned the new law for “making martial law easier.”
It only took a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to raze one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president’s ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened these restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the U.S. without the express permission of Congress. But there is a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act.
Section 1076 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from “Insurrection Act” to “Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act.” The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The new law expands the list to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition”—and such “condition” is not defined or limited.
These new pretexts are even more expansive than they appear. FEMA proclaims the equivalent of a natural disaster when bad snowstorms occur, and Congress routinely proclaims a natural disaster (and awards more farm subsidies) when there is a shortfall of rain in states with upcoming elections. A terrorist “incident” could be something as stupid as the flashing toys scattered around Boston last fall.
The new law also empowers the president to commandeer the National Guard of one state to send to another state for up to 365 days. Bush could send the Alabama National Guard to suppress antiwar protests in Boston. Or the next president could send the New York National Guard to disarm the residents of Mississippi if they resisted a federal law that prohibited private ownership of semiautomatic weapons. Governors’ control of the National Guard can be trumped with a simple presidential declaration.
The story of how Section 1076 became law vivifies how expanding government power is almost always the correct answer in Washington. Some people have claimed the provision was slipped into the bill in the middle of the night. In reality, the administration clearly signaled its intent and almost no one in the media or Congress tried to stop it.
The Katrina debacle seems to have drowned Washington’s resistance to military rule. Bush declared, “I want there to be a robust discussion about the best way for the federal government, in certain extreme circumstances, to be able to rally assets for the good of the people.” His initial proposal generated a smattering of criticism and no groundswell of support. There was no “robust discussion.” On Aug. 29, 2006, the administration upped the ante, labeling the breached levees “the equivalent of a weapon of mass effect being used on the city of New Orleans.” Nobody ever defined a “weapon of mass effect,” but the term wasn’t challenged.
Section 1076 was supported by both conservatives and liberals. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, co-wrote the provision along with committee chairman Sen. John Warner (R-Va.). Sen. Ted Kennedy openly endorsed it, and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), then-chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was an avid proponent.
Every governor in the country opposed the changes, and the National Governors Association repeatedly and loudly objected. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned on Sept. 19 that “we certainly do not need to make it easier for Presidents to declare martial law,” but his alarm got no response. Ten days later, he commented in the Congressional Record: “Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.” Leahy further condemned the process, declaring that it “was just slipped in the defense bill as a rider with little study. Other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”
Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein wrote an excellent article in December on how the provision became law with minimal examination or controversy. A Republican Senate aide blamed the governors for failing to raise more fuss: “My understanding is that they sent form letters to offices. If they really want a piece of legislation considered they should have called offices and pushed the matter. No office can handle the amount of form letters that come in each day.”
Thus, the Senate was not guilty by reason of form letters. Plus, the issue was not on the front page of the Washington Post within the 48 hours before the Senate voted on it. Surely no reasonable person can expect senators to know what they were doing when they voted 100 to 0 in favor of the bill? In reality, they were too busy to notice the latest coffin nails they hammered into the Constitution.
This expansion of presidential prerogative illustrates how every federal failure redounds to the benefit of leviathan. FEMA was greatly expanded during the Clinton years for crises like the New Orleans flood. It, along with local and state agencies, floundered. Yet the federal belly flop on the Gulf Coast somehow anointed the president to send in troops where he sees fit.
“Martial law” is a euphemism for military dictatorship. When foreign democracies are overthrown and a junta establishes martial law, Americans usually recognize that a fundamental change has occurred. Perhaps some conservatives believe that the only change when martial law is declared is that people are no longer read their Miranda rights when they are locked away. “Martial law” means obey soldiers’ commands or be shot. The abuses of military rule in southern states during Reconstruction were legendary, but they have been swept under the historical rug.
Section 1076 is Enabling Act-type legislation—something that purports to preserve law-and-order while formally empowering the president to rule by decree. The Bush team is rarely remiss in stretching power beyond reasonable bounds. Bush talks as if any constraint on his war-making prerogative or budget is “aiding and abetting the enemy.” Can such a man be trusted to reasonably define insurrection or disorder? Can Hillary Clinton?
Bush can commandeer a state’s National Guard any time he declares a “state has refused to enforce applicable laws.” Does this refer to the laws as they are commonly understood—or the laws after Bush fixes them with a signing statement?
Some will consider concern about Bush or future presidents exploiting martial law to be alarmist. This is the same reflex many people have had to each administration proposal or power grab from the Patriot Act in October 2001 to the president’s enemy-combatant decree in November 2001 to the setting up the Guantanamo prison in early 2002 to the doctrine of preemptive war. The administration has perennially denied that its new powers pose any threat even after the evidence of abuses—illegal wiretapping, torture, a global network of secret prisons, Iraq in ruins—becomes overwhelming. If the administration does not hesitate to trample the First Amendment with “free speech zones,” why expect it to be diffident about powers that could stifle protests en masse?
On Feb. 24, the White House conducted a highly publicized drill to test responses to IEDs going off simultaneously in ten American cities. The White House has not disclosed the details of how the feds will respond, but it would be out of character for this president to let new powers he sought to gather dust. There is nothing more to prevent a president from declaring martial law on a pretext than there is to prevent him from launching a war on the basis of manufactured intelligence. And when the lies become exposed years later, it could be far too late to resurrect lost liberties.
Senators Leahy and Kit Bond (R-Mo.) are sponsoring a bill to repeal the changes, but it is not setting the woods on fire on Capitol Hill. Leahy urged his colleagues to consider the Section 1076 fix, declaring, “It is difficult to see how any Senator could disagree with the advisability of having a more transparent and thoughtful approach to this sensitive issue.”
He deserves credit for fighting hard on this issue, but there is little reason to expect most members of Congress to give it a second look. The Section 1076 debacle exemplifies how the Washington establishment pretends that new power will not be abused, regardless of how much existing power has been mishandled. Why worry about martial law when there is pork to be harvested and photo ops to attend? It is still unfashionable in Washington to worry about the danger of the open barn door until after the horse is two miles down the road.
_____________________________________
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy and eight other books.
April 23, 2007 Issue
Here Come the Gun Grabbers
Tom Gresham Gets it Right
I have nothing to add, Tom hits the nail on the head.
Here Come The Gun Banners
April 16, 2007, just might be a turning point in the battle to restore gun rights to Americans. The tragedy at Virginia Tech today, with more than 30 people being killed in a premeditated murder spree, will be the fulcrum upon which the anti-gun rights forces leverage their efforts to restrict (destroy, if possible) your right to not only own guns, but to protect yourself and your family.
Quite simply, this is the mass shooting the anti-self defense forces have been waiting for, as we will see over the coming days and weeks. The papers are already drawn up; the proposed restrictions were penned long ago; they have merely been waiting for this moment.
Lost in the coming cacophony will be the utter failure of the “perfect” gun law — a total gun ban. You see, on that university campus, no one is allowed to have a gun for self protection in dorms or classrooms. It is the latest in a long string of murderous failures of “gun free” zones, or as they are better called, “victim-rich environments.”
According to the school’s “Campus and Workplace Violence Prevention Policy”:
“The university’s employees, students, and volunteers, or any visitor or other third party attending a sporting, entertainment, or educational event, or visiting an academic or administrative office building or residence hall, are further prohibited from carrying, maintaining, or storing a firearm or weapon on any university facility, even if the owner has a valid permit, when it is not required by the individual’s job, or in accordance with the relevant University Student Life Policies.
Any such individual who is reported or discovered to possess a firearm or weapon on university property will be asked to remove it immediately. Failure to comply may result in a student judicial referral and/or arrest, or an employee disciplinary action and/or arrest.”
(Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Policy 5616, Campus and Workplace Violence Prevention Policy, http://www.policies.vt.edu/5616.pdf)
A similar situation to the one that happened at Virginia Tech occurred on January 16th, 2002 at Appalachian Law School in Grundy, Virginia. A disgruntled former student began a similar shooting spree. The difference in this case was that the attack was stopped by three individuals, two of whom were legally armed with handguns. Unfortunately, the attack was not stopped until three people had been killed and three more wounded. Why did it take so long to stop the attack? The good guys had to retrieve their guns from their parked cars before they could confront the gunman. ALS was a gun-free zone, you know.
Barely more than a year ago House Bill 1572 couldn’t even make it out of committee in the Virginia General Assembly. The bill would have made it legal for students and staff at Virginia universities to have guns for their own protection. Today’s shooter did not wait for such a law, and took advantage of the government-mandated victim-state.
When House Bill 1572 was defeated, state newspapers reported: “Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. ‘I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.’”
Once again, the desire to “feel safe” prompts decisions which actually make people less safe.
What does it mean to America’s gun owners? It certainly sounds the battle cry for those who enacted, then lost, the ability to ban full-capacity magazines for defensive firearms. Expect a quick call for limiting magazine capacity–and thus, the ability to fully protect yourself and your family. There may well be calls for the banning of all autoloading (semi-automatic) firearms, even though those have been in use for more than 100 years.
Fortunately, the political landscape is much different than it was when the Brady Bill and the Clinton Gun Ban were passed in the early 1990s. Those acts helped pull together a fragmented firearms industry which, until then, had kept out of politics, leaving that to the NRA. The firearms industry now understands the threat, as do individual gun owners who use guns for recreation, but especially for self-protection. Passage of the so-called “assault weapon” ban resulted in the Republican Party taking control of Congress, according to President Bill Clinton. The gun issue is largely credited with keeping a Republican in the White House since then. Elected officials of all stripes know that any proposal to infringe on gun rights is a third rail, capable of cutting short almost any political career.
Certainly, some closet gun banners will be emboldened by this tragedy and will come forward, counting on a groundswell of public outrage to carry the day for repressive gun control laws, much as it did in England and Australia after those countries experienced similar shootings. The disturbing fact that the violent crime rate skyrocketed in both countries following the confiscation of guns from honest people will not quell the zeal of those who dream of a country where the criminals are free to prey on the defenseless.
They long for the day when they can bring the failed experiment of “gun free” zones to every town, neighborhood, and home in America.
Until Monday, April 16, it was thought that gun control would be an issue politicians would try to duck over the next 18 months. That may have changed. What has not changed, though, is the awareness of the American public that they need firearms for personal protection. The vivid images of helpless people during Hurricane Katrina being victimized by thugs, with no police to help, crystallized the understanding that each of us is responsible for our own safety,. Today, we all know we can certainly take advantage of help from official sources, but we also are clear that we should never give up our ability to help ourselves.
Today’s shootings are terrible. Our hearts go out to the victims and their families. We don’t want to inject politics into this, but to ignore this is to pretend the sun doesn’t rise each day. The assault on our rights surely will come.
Whether we gun owners get swept away by a tsunami of gun restrictions, or swim to the top with logic and organized persuasion depends, I think, on the intensity and the quality of our reaction. One thing is for sure. This is the fight which will determine the future of gun rights, the firearms industry, our ability to protect our families, and the strength of our Constitutional protections.
I have nothing to add, Tom hits the nail on the head.
Here Come The Gun Banners
April 16, 2007, just might be a turning point in the battle to restore gun rights to Americans. The tragedy at Virginia Tech today, with more than 30 people being killed in a premeditated murder spree, will be the fulcrum upon which the anti-gun rights forces leverage their efforts to restrict (destroy, if possible) your right to not only own guns, but to protect yourself and your family.
Quite simply, this is the mass shooting the anti-self defense forces have been waiting for, as we will see over the coming days and weeks. The papers are already drawn up; the proposed restrictions were penned long ago; they have merely been waiting for this moment.
Lost in the coming cacophony will be the utter failure of the “perfect” gun law — a total gun ban. You see, on that university campus, no one is allowed to have a gun for self protection in dorms or classrooms. It is the latest in a long string of murderous failures of “gun free” zones, or as they are better called, “victim-rich environments.”
According to the school’s “Campus and Workplace Violence Prevention Policy”:
“The university’s employees, students, and volunteers, or any visitor or other third party attending a sporting, entertainment, or educational event, or visiting an academic or administrative office building or residence hall, are further prohibited from carrying, maintaining, or storing a firearm or weapon on any university facility, even if the owner has a valid permit, when it is not required by the individual’s job, or in accordance with the relevant University Student Life Policies.
Any such individual who is reported or discovered to possess a firearm or weapon on university property will be asked to remove it immediately. Failure to comply may result in a student judicial referral and/or arrest, or an employee disciplinary action and/or arrest.”
(Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Policy 5616, Campus and Workplace Violence Prevention Policy, http://www.policies.vt.edu/5616.pdf)
A similar situation to the one that happened at Virginia Tech occurred on January 16th, 2002 at Appalachian Law School in Grundy, Virginia. A disgruntled former student began a similar shooting spree. The difference in this case was that the attack was stopped by three individuals, two of whom were legally armed with handguns. Unfortunately, the attack was not stopped until three people had been killed and three more wounded. Why did it take so long to stop the attack? The good guys had to retrieve their guns from their parked cars before they could confront the gunman. ALS was a gun-free zone, you know.
Barely more than a year ago House Bill 1572 couldn’t even make it out of committee in the Virginia General Assembly. The bill would have made it legal for students and staff at Virginia universities to have guns for their own protection. Today’s shooter did not wait for such a law, and took advantage of the government-mandated victim-state.
When House Bill 1572 was defeated, state newspapers reported: “Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. ‘I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.’”
Once again, the desire to “feel safe” prompts decisions which actually make people less safe.
What does it mean to America’s gun owners? It certainly sounds the battle cry for those who enacted, then lost, the ability to ban full-capacity magazines for defensive firearms. Expect a quick call for limiting magazine capacity–and thus, the ability to fully protect yourself and your family. There may well be calls for the banning of all autoloading (semi-automatic) firearms, even though those have been in use for more than 100 years.
Fortunately, the political landscape is much different than it was when the Brady Bill and the Clinton Gun Ban were passed in the early 1990s. Those acts helped pull together a fragmented firearms industry which, until then, had kept out of politics, leaving that to the NRA. The firearms industry now understands the threat, as do individual gun owners who use guns for recreation, but especially for self-protection. Passage of the so-called “assault weapon” ban resulted in the Republican Party taking control of Congress, according to President Bill Clinton. The gun issue is largely credited with keeping a Republican in the White House since then. Elected officials of all stripes know that any proposal to infringe on gun rights is a third rail, capable of cutting short almost any political career.
Certainly, some closet gun banners will be emboldened by this tragedy and will come forward, counting on a groundswell of public outrage to carry the day for repressive gun control laws, much as it did in England and Australia after those countries experienced similar shootings. The disturbing fact that the violent crime rate skyrocketed in both countries following the confiscation of guns from honest people will not quell the zeal of those who dream of a country where the criminals are free to prey on the defenseless.
They long for the day when they can bring the failed experiment of “gun free” zones to every town, neighborhood, and home in America.
Until Monday, April 16, it was thought that gun control would be an issue politicians would try to duck over the next 18 months. That may have changed. What has not changed, though, is the awareness of the American public that they need firearms for personal protection. The vivid images of helpless people during Hurricane Katrina being victimized by thugs, with no police to help, crystallized the understanding that each of us is responsible for our own safety,. Today, we all know we can certainly take advantage of help from official sources, but we also are clear that we should never give up our ability to help ourselves.
Today’s shootings are terrible. Our hearts go out to the victims and their families. We don’t want to inject politics into this, but to ignore this is to pretend the sun doesn’t rise each day. The assault on our rights surely will come.
Whether we gun owners get swept away by a tsunami of gun restrictions, or swim to the top with logic and organized persuasion depends, I think, on the intensity and the quality of our reaction. One thing is for sure. This is the fight which will determine the future of gun rights, the firearms industry, our ability to protect our families, and the strength of our Constitutional protections.
Soldier: Army ordered me not to tell truth about Tillman
Soldier: Army ordered me not to tell truth about Tillman
Story Highlights
• Soldier says his account of incident was altered after he wrote it
• Inspector general says investigators did not inspect computer
• Last soldier to see NFL hero alive says he was ordered not to divulge truth
• "The truth is always more heroic than the hype," Jessica Lynch tells panel
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The last soldier to see Army Ranger Pat Tillman alive, Spc. Bryan O'Neal, told lawmakers that he was warned by superiors not to divulge -- especially to the Tillman family -- that a fellow soldier killed Tillman.
O'Neal particularly wanted to tell fellow soldier Kevin Tillman, who was in the convoy traveling behind his brother at the time of the 2004 incident in Afghanistan.
"I wanted right off the bat to let the family know what had happened, especially Kevin, because I worked with him in a platoon and I knew that he and the family all needed to know what had happened," O'Neal testified. "I was quite appalled that when I was actually able to speak with Kevin, I was ordered not to tell him."
Asked who gave him the order, O'Neal replied that it came from his battalion commander, then-Lt. Col. Jeff Bailey.
"He basically just said ... 'Do not let Kevin know, that he's probably in a bad place knowing his brother's dead,' " O'Neal told House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman. "And he made it known I would get in trouble, sir, if I spoke with Kevin on it being fratricide."
The military instead released a "manufactured narrative" detailing how Pat Tillman died leading a courageous counterattack in an Afghan mountain pass, Kevin Tillman told the committee. (Watch Kevin Tillman accuse the military of lyingVideo)
Also Tuesday, former Pfc. Jessica Lynch told the House panel that the military lied about her capture.
Lynch testified that after her vehicle was attacked in Iraq in March 2003, she suffered a mangled spinal column, broken arm, crushed foot, shattered femur and even a sexual assault.
But it only added insult to injury, literally, when she returned to her parents' home in West Virginia, which "was under siege by media all repeating the story of the little girl 'Rambo' from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting," Lynch said. (Watch Lynch set the record straightVideo)
"It was not true," she said before gently chiding the military. "The truth is always more heroic than the hype."
Waxman, D-California, said the military "invented" tales about Tillman and Lynch. (Watch Lynch describe her bond with the Tillman familyVideo)
"The bare minimum we owe our soldiers and their families is the truth," Waxman said. "That didn't happen for two of the most famous soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars."
Brother calls tale 'calculated lies'
As the tide was turning in the U.S. battle against Afghan insurgents -- and as media outlets prepared to release reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq -- the military saw Pat Tillman's death as an "opportunity," Kevin Tillman told the panel.
Even after it became clear the report was bogus, the military clung to the "utter fiction" that Pat Tillman was killed by a member of his platoon who was following the rules of engagement, the brother said.
"Revealing that Pat's death was a fratricide would have been yet another political disaster during a month already swollen with disasters," Kevin Tillman said. "The facts needed to be suppressed. An alternative narrative had to be constructed, crucial evidence destroyed."
Tillman bristled at the military claim that the initial report was merely misleading.
Clearly resentful, he told the panel that writing a field report stating that his brother had been "transferred to an intensive care unit for continued CPR after most of his head had been taken off by multiple .556 rounds is not misleading."
"These are deliberate and calculated lies," he said.
Pat Tillman, who became a national hero after he gave up a lucrative contract with the NFL's Arizona Cardinals to join the Army's elite Rangers force, was awarded the Silver Star, the military's third-highest combat decoration, after the Army said he was killed leading a counterattack.
O'Neal testified that his superiors had him write a statement about the incident for Tillman's Silver Star commendation. He said the final version contained false statements about enemy fire that had been inserted by someone else.
Thomas F. Gimble, the Defense Department's acting inspector general, said that investigators could not determine who altered O'Neal's statement and that no attempt was made to examine the document's electronic history.
The Army later acknowledged not only that Tillman was killed by his fellow soldiers, but that officers in Tillman's chain of command knew the counterattack story was bogus.
Still, Senior Chief Petty Officer Stephen White told the official heroism-under-fire story at a May 3, 2004, memorial service for Tillman.
"It's a horrible thing that happened with Pat," White, a Navy SEAL who was Tillman's friend, told the committee. "I'm the guy that told America how he died, basically, at that memorial. It was incorrect. That does not sit well with me."
Though the military blamed the erroneous report on an inadequate initial investigation, Mary Tillman told ESPN Radio last month that everyone involved in the shooting knew immediately that her son had been shot three times in the head by a member of his platoon.
"The Tillman family was kept in the dark for more than a month," Waxman said. "Evidence was destroyed. Witness statements were doctored. The Tillman family wants to know how all of this could've happened."
Lynch: Truth 'not always easy'
Lynch's testimony began with a recollection of the March 23, 2003, attack and her purported rescue nine days later.
As she and her fellow 11 soldiers drove through Nassiriya, Iraq, they noticed armed men standing in the streets and on rooftops. Three soldiers were quickly killed when a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into their vehicle, Lynch said.
The other eight died in the ensuing fighting or from injuries suffered during the fighting, she said. Lynch later woke up at Saddam Hussein General Hospital.
"When I awoke, I did not know where I was. I could not move. I could not call for help. I could not fight," she said, explaining she had a six-inch gash in her head and numerous broken bones. "The nurses at the hospital tried to soothe me, and they even tried unsuccessfully at one point to return me to Americans."
On April 1, U.S. troops came for her.
"A soldier came into the room. He tore the American flag from his uniform, and he handed it to me in my hand and he told me, 'We're American soldiers, and we're here to take you home.' And I looked at him and I said, 'Yes, I'm an American soldier, too,' " she recalled.
She was distraught to come home and find herself billed as a hero when two of her fellow soldiers had fought bravely until the firefight's end and another had died after picking up soldiers and removing them from harm's way.
"The American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don't need to be told elaborate lies," she said. "I had the good fortune to come home and to tell the truth. Many soldiers, like Pat Tillman, did not have that opportunity.
"The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype," she said.
Lynch became a celebrity after U.S. troops filmed what they said was a daring raid on the hospital. Hospital staffers, however, said there were no Iraqi troops at the hospital when the purported rescue took place.
In the March 23, 2003, attack, Lynch, the Army claimed, was shot and stabbed during a fierce gun battle with Iraqi troops that left 11 of her comrades dead. It was later learned that Lynch never fired a shot during the firefight because her gun was jammed with sand.
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/04/24/tillman.hearing/index.html
Story Highlights
• Soldier says his account of incident was altered after he wrote it
• Inspector general says investigators did not inspect computer
• Last soldier to see NFL hero alive says he was ordered not to divulge truth
• "The truth is always more heroic than the hype," Jessica Lynch tells panel
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The last soldier to see Army Ranger Pat Tillman alive, Spc. Bryan O'Neal, told lawmakers that he was warned by superiors not to divulge -- especially to the Tillman family -- that a fellow soldier killed Tillman.
O'Neal particularly wanted to tell fellow soldier Kevin Tillman, who was in the convoy traveling behind his brother at the time of the 2004 incident in Afghanistan.
"I wanted right off the bat to let the family know what had happened, especially Kevin, because I worked with him in a platoon and I knew that he and the family all needed to know what had happened," O'Neal testified. "I was quite appalled that when I was actually able to speak with Kevin, I was ordered not to tell him."
Asked who gave him the order, O'Neal replied that it came from his battalion commander, then-Lt. Col. Jeff Bailey.
"He basically just said ... 'Do not let Kevin know, that he's probably in a bad place knowing his brother's dead,' " O'Neal told House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman. "And he made it known I would get in trouble, sir, if I spoke with Kevin on it being fratricide."
The military instead released a "manufactured narrative" detailing how Pat Tillman died leading a courageous counterattack in an Afghan mountain pass, Kevin Tillman told the committee. (Watch Kevin Tillman accuse the military of lyingVideo)
Also Tuesday, former Pfc. Jessica Lynch told the House panel that the military lied about her capture.
Lynch testified that after her vehicle was attacked in Iraq in March 2003, she suffered a mangled spinal column, broken arm, crushed foot, shattered femur and even a sexual assault.
But it only added insult to injury, literally, when she returned to her parents' home in West Virginia, which "was under siege by media all repeating the story of the little girl 'Rambo' from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting," Lynch said. (Watch Lynch set the record straightVideo)
"It was not true," she said before gently chiding the military. "The truth is always more heroic than the hype."
Waxman, D-California, said the military "invented" tales about Tillman and Lynch. (Watch Lynch describe her bond with the Tillman familyVideo)
"The bare minimum we owe our soldiers and their families is the truth," Waxman said. "That didn't happen for two of the most famous soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars."
Brother calls tale 'calculated lies'
As the tide was turning in the U.S. battle against Afghan insurgents -- and as media outlets prepared to release reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq -- the military saw Pat Tillman's death as an "opportunity," Kevin Tillman told the panel.
Even after it became clear the report was bogus, the military clung to the "utter fiction" that Pat Tillman was killed by a member of his platoon who was following the rules of engagement, the brother said.
"Revealing that Pat's death was a fratricide would have been yet another political disaster during a month already swollen with disasters," Kevin Tillman said. "The facts needed to be suppressed. An alternative narrative had to be constructed, crucial evidence destroyed."
Tillman bristled at the military claim that the initial report was merely misleading.
Clearly resentful, he told the panel that writing a field report stating that his brother had been "transferred to an intensive care unit for continued CPR after most of his head had been taken off by multiple .556 rounds is not misleading."
"These are deliberate and calculated lies," he said.
Pat Tillman, who became a national hero after he gave up a lucrative contract with the NFL's Arizona Cardinals to join the Army's elite Rangers force, was awarded the Silver Star, the military's third-highest combat decoration, after the Army said he was killed leading a counterattack.
O'Neal testified that his superiors had him write a statement about the incident for Tillman's Silver Star commendation. He said the final version contained false statements about enemy fire that had been inserted by someone else.
Thomas F. Gimble, the Defense Department's acting inspector general, said that investigators could not determine who altered O'Neal's statement and that no attempt was made to examine the document's electronic history.
The Army later acknowledged not only that Tillman was killed by his fellow soldiers, but that officers in Tillman's chain of command knew the counterattack story was bogus.
Still, Senior Chief Petty Officer Stephen White told the official heroism-under-fire story at a May 3, 2004, memorial service for Tillman.
"It's a horrible thing that happened with Pat," White, a Navy SEAL who was Tillman's friend, told the committee. "I'm the guy that told America how he died, basically, at that memorial. It was incorrect. That does not sit well with me."
Though the military blamed the erroneous report on an inadequate initial investigation, Mary Tillman told ESPN Radio last month that everyone involved in the shooting knew immediately that her son had been shot three times in the head by a member of his platoon.
"The Tillman family was kept in the dark for more than a month," Waxman said. "Evidence was destroyed. Witness statements were doctored. The Tillman family wants to know how all of this could've happened."
Lynch: Truth 'not always easy'
Lynch's testimony began with a recollection of the March 23, 2003, attack and her purported rescue nine days later.
As she and her fellow 11 soldiers drove through Nassiriya, Iraq, they noticed armed men standing in the streets and on rooftops. Three soldiers were quickly killed when a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into their vehicle, Lynch said.
The other eight died in the ensuing fighting or from injuries suffered during the fighting, she said. Lynch later woke up at Saddam Hussein General Hospital.
"When I awoke, I did not know where I was. I could not move. I could not call for help. I could not fight," she said, explaining she had a six-inch gash in her head and numerous broken bones. "The nurses at the hospital tried to soothe me, and they even tried unsuccessfully at one point to return me to Americans."
On April 1, U.S. troops came for her.
"A soldier came into the room. He tore the American flag from his uniform, and he handed it to me in my hand and he told me, 'We're American soldiers, and we're here to take you home.' And I looked at him and I said, 'Yes, I'm an American soldier, too,' " she recalled.
She was distraught to come home and find herself billed as a hero when two of her fellow soldiers had fought bravely until the firefight's end and another had died after picking up soldiers and removing them from harm's way.
"The American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don't need to be told elaborate lies," she said. "I had the good fortune to come home and to tell the truth. Many soldiers, like Pat Tillman, did not have that opportunity.
"The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype," she said.
Lynch became a celebrity after U.S. troops filmed what they said was a daring raid on the hospital. Hospital staffers, however, said there were no Iraqi troops at the hospital when the purported rescue took place.
In the March 23, 2003, attack, Lynch, the Army claimed, was shot and stabbed during a fierce gun battle with Iraqi troops that left 11 of her comrades dead. It was later learned that Lynch never fired a shot during the firefight because her gun was jammed with sand.
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/04/24/tillman.hearing/index.html
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all
Tuesday April 24, 2007
The Guardian
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2 Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3 Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".
4 Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5 Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7 Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8 Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9 Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10 Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all
Tuesday April 24, 2007
The Guardian
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2 Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3 Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".
4 Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5 Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7 Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8 Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9 Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10 Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
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