IF we had done as Jimmy Carter advised back in the late 70s we would have been totally energy self-sufficient by now. We would have no reason for the country to be led by its nose via lies and nationalistic propaganda by Bush and his oil thugs into the Middle East's arcane troubles and the Iraq war. Bush's energy bill, created by the oil/energy industry, is just another lying stab in the back to the American people.
Lost Energy
Washington Post Editorial
Sunday, June 26, 2005
HERE'S A PREDICTION: At some point -- maybe 10 years from now, maybe 20 -- the energy bill currently wending its way through the Senate will be seen as an enormously significant lost opportunity. This is not because the bill itself is so terrible; it's not, though it may become far worse in the process of being reconciled with the more pro-pollution, pro-oil-industry version approved by the House. No, this is a lost opportunity precisely because many senators have come to the right conclusions about the direction energy policy should take, but the body as a whole is not yet willing to act on them.
By this, we mean that at a time of rising oil prices, global warming and increasing political instability in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations that produce the cheapest crude oil, the United States must reorient its energy policy in a far more dramatic way. Economic, environmental and security concerns should by now have led all American politicians to the same conclusion: It is time to decrease this country's dependence on fossil fuels.
More specifically, any politicians who care about the future economic, environmental and political stability of this country should right now be seeking to end the de facto subsidies for the oil and gas industries, aggressively promote research into new forms of ethanol and biofuel, limit automobile fuel consumption, and tax or cap the carbon emissions created by the burning of fossil fuels, which most scientists believe to be an important cause of global warming. With taxes and market incentives, it would be possible today to encourage the rapid deployment of existing technology and dramatically reduce this country's dependence on petroleum.
Neither the White House nor congressional leaders nor the Republican Party as a whole has yet accepted this case, perhaps because none has managed to overcome the pressure of the automobile, utility, oil, gas and other lobbies that spend enormous amounts of money trying to protect the status quo. But, despite heavy White House lobbying, a handful of Senate Republicans did break with party orthodoxy last week on at least the environmental issue. They voted in favor of a "sense of the Senate" resolution that recognizes for the first time that climate change is a scientific fact, that carbon emissions contribute to climate change and that mandatory controls eventually will have to be deployed. Some in the Senate also recognize that energy policy is too important to this country's security to fall victim to partisan welfare: Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), a leader on this bill, is to be commended for producing something this time around that a wider range of senators could accept.
But although better than its predecessor, this energy bill is essentially a status quo bill: It still doesn't shift this country as far in the direction of alternative fuels as it should go, and of course it does not dare raise taxes on petroleum use in any way. Notwithstanding the self-congratulatory rhetoric you will hear if the bill passes this week, it's nothing to be proud of.
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Friday, June 24, 2005
BUSH'S LYING IS COSTING US THE WAR ON TERRORISM
June 25, 2005 NYT EDITORIAL
Three Things About Iraq
To have the sober conversation about the war in Iraq that America badly needs, it is vital to acknowledge three facts:
The war has nothing to do with Sept. 11. Saddam Hussein was a sworn enemy of Washington, but there was no Iraq-Qaeda axis, no connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attacks on the United States. Yet the president and his supporters continue to duck behind 9/11 whenever they feel pressure about what is happening in Iraq. The most cynical recent example was Karl Rove's absurd and offensive declaration this week that conservatives and liberals had different reactions to 9/11. Let's be clear: Americans of every political stripe were united in their outrage and grief, united in their determination to punish those who plotted the mass murder, and united behind the war in Afghanistan, which was an assault on terrorists. Trying to pretend otherwise is the surest recipe for turning political dialogue into meaningless squabbling.
The war has not made the world, or this nation, safer from terrorism. The breeding grounds for terrorists used to be Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia; now Iraq has become one. Of all the justifications for invading Iraq that the administration juggled in the beginning, the only one that has held up over time is the desire to create a democratic nation that could help stabilize the Middle East. Any sensible discussion of what to do next has to begin by acknowledging that. The surest way to make sure that conversation does not happen is for the administration to continue pasting the "soft on terror" label on those who want to talk about the war.
If the war is going according to plan, someone needs to rethink the plan. Progress has been measurable on the political front. But even staunch supporters of the war, like the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a hearing this week that President Bush was losing public support because the military effort was not keeping pace. A top general said this week that the insurgency is growing. The frequency of attacks is steady, or rising a bit, while the repulsive tactic of suicide bombings has made them more deadly.
If things are going to be turned around, there has to be an honest discussion about what is happening. But Mr. Rumsfeld was not interested. Sneering at his Democratic questioners, he insisted everything was on track and claimed "dozens of trained battalions are capable of conducting anti-insurgent operations" with American support. That would be great news if it were true. Gen. George Casey, the commander in Iraq, was more honest, saying he hoped there would be "a good number of units" capable of doing that "before the end of this year."
Americans cannot judge for themselves because the administration has decided to make the information secret. Senator John McCain spoke for us when he expressed his disbelief at this news. "I think the American people need to know," he said. "They are the ones who are paying for this conflict."
Three Things About Iraq
To have the sober conversation about the war in Iraq that America badly needs, it is vital to acknowledge three facts:
The war has nothing to do with Sept. 11. Saddam Hussein was a sworn enemy of Washington, but there was no Iraq-Qaeda axis, no connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attacks on the United States. Yet the president and his supporters continue to duck behind 9/11 whenever they feel pressure about what is happening in Iraq. The most cynical recent example was Karl Rove's absurd and offensive declaration this week that conservatives and liberals had different reactions to 9/11. Let's be clear: Americans of every political stripe were united in their outrage and grief, united in their determination to punish those who plotted the mass murder, and united behind the war in Afghanistan, which was an assault on terrorists. Trying to pretend otherwise is the surest recipe for turning political dialogue into meaningless squabbling.
The war has not made the world, or this nation, safer from terrorism. The breeding grounds for terrorists used to be Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia; now Iraq has become one. Of all the justifications for invading Iraq that the administration juggled in the beginning, the only one that has held up over time is the desire to create a democratic nation that could help stabilize the Middle East. Any sensible discussion of what to do next has to begin by acknowledging that. The surest way to make sure that conversation does not happen is for the administration to continue pasting the "soft on terror" label on those who want to talk about the war.
If the war is going according to plan, someone needs to rethink the plan. Progress has been measurable on the political front. But even staunch supporters of the war, like the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a hearing this week that President Bush was losing public support because the military effort was not keeping pace. A top general said this week that the insurgency is growing. The frequency of attacks is steady, or rising a bit, while the repulsive tactic of suicide bombings has made them more deadly.
If things are going to be turned around, there has to be an honest discussion about what is happening. But Mr. Rumsfeld was not interested. Sneering at his Democratic questioners, he insisted everything was on track and claimed "dozens of trained battalions are capable of conducting anti-insurgent operations" with American support. That would be great news if it were true. Gen. George Casey, the commander in Iraq, was more honest, saying he hoped there would be "a good number of units" capable of doing that "before the end of this year."
Americans cannot judge for themselves because the administration has decided to make the information secret. Senator John McCain spoke for us when he expressed his disbelief at this news. "I think the American people need to know," he said. "They are the ones who are paying for this conflict."
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
GOP USING RIGHT-WING ABSURDISTS/HYPOCRITES TO GO AFTER PBS
Nothing surprising here. Just another example of the hypocritical GOP going right-wing apeshit in destroying America.
June 21, 2005
Public Broadcasting Monitor Had Worked at Center Founded by Conservatives
By STEPHEN LABATON
WASHINGTON, June 20 - A researcher retained secretly by the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to monitor the "Now" program with Bill Moyers for political objectivity last year, worked for 20 years at a journalism center founded by the American Conservative Union and a conservative columnist, an official at the journalism center said on Monday.
The decision by the chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, to retain the researcher, Fred Mann, without the knowledge of the corporation's board, to report on the political leanings of the guests of "Now" is one of several issues under investigation by the corporation's inspector general.
At the request of two Democratic lawmakers, investigators are examining whether Mr. Tomlinson has violated any rules as he has sought, he says, to ensure that public television and radio provide greater program balance.
His critics, including some lawmakers and executives of public broadcasting, say he has sought to tilt the corporation, which provides $400 million to radio and television stations and producers, toward a conservative agenda.
One of Mr. Tomlinson's Democratic critics, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, called on him to resign on Monday.
"As a result of your recent attempts to inject partisan politics into the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, I am writing to urge you to step down as chairman," Mr. Lautenberg wrote. "Your conduct has undermined the C.P.B. and its mission of quality public broadcasting free of political interference. Under current circumstances, with investigations of your conduct pending, it is hardly possible for you to effectively carry out your duties as chairman of the C.P.B."
Mr. Tomlinson issued a statement saying he would not resign. "While I respect Senator Lautenberg's strongly held views on this subject, I see no reason to step down from the chairmanship," he said. "I am confident that the inspector general's report will conclude that all of my actions were taken in accordance with the relevant rules and regulations."
On Monday the board interviewed candidates for the position of president. The vacancy was created by the resignation of Kathleen Cox, who stepped down in April after the board did not renew her contract.
Mr. Tomlinson has said his top choice for the job is Patricia Harrison, an assistant secretary of state and a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. He has said that Ms. Harrison would have strong credibility with the White House and with Republicans in Congress, some of whom are threatening to cut the corporation's budget substantially.
Public television and radio stations have opposed that choice, saying it would further inject politics into public broadcasting at precisely the wrong time. The three Democratic and independent members of the board oppose her selection, board members said, as do some Congressional Democrats.
Until last year, Mr. Mann worked at the National Journalism Center, which for the last few years has been run by the Young America's Foundation. The foundation describes itself on its Web site as "the principal outreach organization of the conservative movement" and as being committed to the ideas of "individual freedom, a strong national defense, free enterprise and traditional values."
The Young America's Foundation shares some top officials with its politically active counterpart, Young Americans for Freedom, although the two are separate entities.
The National Journalism Center was founded in 1977 by the American Conservative Union and M. Stanton Evans, a syndicated columnist.
Mark LaRochelle, a top official at the National Journalism Center, said Mr. Mann told him last year that he was working on the Moyers project for the broadcasting corporation. He said Mr. Mann had run the alumni relations, job bank and internship program at the center, where he got to know Mr. Tomlinson. While Mr. Mann worked at the National Journalism Center, he helped place interns in the Washington bureau of Reader's Digest.
The editor in chief of Reader's Digest at the time was Mr. Tomlinson, and its top editor in its Washington bureau was a friend of Mr. Tomlinson's, William Schulz. In April, Mr. Tomlinson persuaded the board of the corporation to appoint Mr. Schulz to be one of two ombudsmen to monitor public radio and television for objectivity.
There was no response on Monday to voice messages and e-mail messages left for Mr. Mann.
Mr. Moyers has been a source of agitation for Mr. Tomlinson and other conservatives. They say that "Now" under Mr. Moyers (who left the show last year and was replaced by David Brancaccio) was consistently critical of Republicans and the Bush administration.
Last week Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, said that in response to a request, Mr. Tomlinson sent data from Mr. Mann's reports.
Mr. Dorgan said that data concluded in one episode of "Now" that Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, was a "liberal" because he questioned the White House policy on Iraq and that a second "Now" segment on financial waste at the Pentagon was "anti-Defense." Mr. Hagel is known as a mainstream conservative member of the Senate and a maverick who has at times been critical of the Bush administration.
The inspector general at the corporation is now looking at steps taken by Mr. Tomlinson to ensure what he calls greater balance in programming, including his decision to approve $14,170 in payments to Mr. Mann without the knowledge of the corporation's board.
June 21, 2005
Public Broadcasting Monitor Had Worked at Center Founded by Conservatives
By STEPHEN LABATON
WASHINGTON, June 20 - A researcher retained secretly by the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to monitor the "Now" program with Bill Moyers for political objectivity last year, worked for 20 years at a journalism center founded by the American Conservative Union and a conservative columnist, an official at the journalism center said on Monday.
The decision by the chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, to retain the researcher, Fred Mann, without the knowledge of the corporation's board, to report on the political leanings of the guests of "Now" is one of several issues under investigation by the corporation's inspector general.
At the request of two Democratic lawmakers, investigators are examining whether Mr. Tomlinson has violated any rules as he has sought, he says, to ensure that public television and radio provide greater program balance.
His critics, including some lawmakers and executives of public broadcasting, say he has sought to tilt the corporation, which provides $400 million to radio and television stations and producers, toward a conservative agenda.
One of Mr. Tomlinson's Democratic critics, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, called on him to resign on Monday.
"As a result of your recent attempts to inject partisan politics into the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, I am writing to urge you to step down as chairman," Mr. Lautenberg wrote. "Your conduct has undermined the C.P.B. and its mission of quality public broadcasting free of political interference. Under current circumstances, with investigations of your conduct pending, it is hardly possible for you to effectively carry out your duties as chairman of the C.P.B."
Mr. Tomlinson issued a statement saying he would not resign. "While I respect Senator Lautenberg's strongly held views on this subject, I see no reason to step down from the chairmanship," he said. "I am confident that the inspector general's report will conclude that all of my actions were taken in accordance with the relevant rules and regulations."
On Monday the board interviewed candidates for the position of president. The vacancy was created by the resignation of Kathleen Cox, who stepped down in April after the board did not renew her contract.
Mr. Tomlinson has said his top choice for the job is Patricia Harrison, an assistant secretary of state and a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. He has said that Ms. Harrison would have strong credibility with the White House and with Republicans in Congress, some of whom are threatening to cut the corporation's budget substantially.
Public television and radio stations have opposed that choice, saying it would further inject politics into public broadcasting at precisely the wrong time. The three Democratic and independent members of the board oppose her selection, board members said, as do some Congressional Democrats.
Until last year, Mr. Mann worked at the National Journalism Center, which for the last few years has been run by the Young America's Foundation. The foundation describes itself on its Web site as "the principal outreach organization of the conservative movement" and as being committed to the ideas of "individual freedom, a strong national defense, free enterprise and traditional values."
The Young America's Foundation shares some top officials with its politically active counterpart, Young Americans for Freedom, although the two are separate entities.
The National Journalism Center was founded in 1977 by the American Conservative Union and M. Stanton Evans, a syndicated columnist.
Mark LaRochelle, a top official at the National Journalism Center, said Mr. Mann told him last year that he was working on the Moyers project for the broadcasting corporation. He said Mr. Mann had run the alumni relations, job bank and internship program at the center, where he got to know Mr. Tomlinson. While Mr. Mann worked at the National Journalism Center, he helped place interns in the Washington bureau of Reader's Digest.
The editor in chief of Reader's Digest at the time was Mr. Tomlinson, and its top editor in its Washington bureau was a friend of Mr. Tomlinson's, William Schulz. In April, Mr. Tomlinson persuaded the board of the corporation to appoint Mr. Schulz to be one of two ombudsmen to monitor public radio and television for objectivity.
There was no response on Monday to voice messages and e-mail messages left for Mr. Mann.
Mr. Moyers has been a source of agitation for Mr. Tomlinson and other conservatives. They say that "Now" under Mr. Moyers (who left the show last year and was replaced by David Brancaccio) was consistently critical of Republicans and the Bush administration.
Last week Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, said that in response to a request, Mr. Tomlinson sent data from Mr. Mann's reports.
Mr. Dorgan said that data concluded in one episode of "Now" that Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, was a "liberal" because he questioned the White House policy on Iraq and that a second "Now" segment on financial waste at the Pentagon was "anti-Defense." Mr. Hagel is known as a mainstream conservative member of the Senate and a maverick who has at times been critical of the Bush administration.
The inspector general at the corporation is now looking at steps taken by Mr. Tomlinson to ensure what he calls greater balance in programming, including his decision to approve $14,170 in payments to Mr. Mann without the knowledge of the corporation's board.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
NO ONE BELIEVES BUSH ANYMORE
June 19, 2005
Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks
By FRANK RICH
TO understand how the Bush administration has lost the public opinion war on Iraq it may be helpful to travel in H. G. Wells's time machine back to Oct. 30, 1938.
That was the Sunday night that Orson Welles staged the mother of all fake news events: his legendary radio adaptation of another Wells fantasy, "The War of the Worlds." The audience was told four times during the hourlong show that it was fiction, but to no avail. A month after Munich, Americans afflicted with war jitters were determined to believe the broadcast's phony news flashes that Martians had invaded New Jersey. Mobs fled their homes in a "wave of mass hysteria," as The New York Times described it on Page 1, clogging roads and communications systems. Two days later, in an editorial titled "Terror by Radio," The Times darkly observed that "what began as 'entertainment' might readily have ended in disaster" and warned radio officials to mind their "adult responsibilities" and think twice before again mingling "news technique with fiction so terrifying."
That's one Times editorial, it can be said without equivocation, that didn't make a dent. Nearly seven decades later the mingling of news and fiction has become the default setting of American infotainment, and Americans have become so inured to it that the innocent radio listeners bamboozled by Welles might as well belong to another civilization. Nowhere is the distance between that America and our own more visible than in the hoopla surrounding the latest adaptation of "The War of the Worlds," the much-awaited Steven Spielberg movie opening June 29.
Like its broadcast predecessor, the new version has already proved to be a launching pad for an onslaught of suspect news bulletins. This time the headlines are less earthshaking than an invasion from outer space, but they are no less ubiquitous: in repeated public appearances, most famously on "Oprah," the Spielberg movie's star, the 42-year-old Tom Cruise, has fallen to his knees and jumped on couches to declare his undying love for the 26-year-old Katie Holmes, the co-star of another summer spectacular, "Batman Begins." Forget about those bygone Hollywood studio schemes to concoct publicity-generating off-screen romances for its stars-in-training. Here is a lavishly produced freak show, designed to play out in real time, enthusiastically enacted by the biggest star in the business. On Friday, after popping the big question to Ms. Holmes at the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Cruise promptly dragged his intended to a news conference.
But though the audience for this drama is as large as, if not larger than, that for Welles's, there's one big difference. The Cruise-Holmes romance is proving less credible to Americans in 2005 than a Martian invasion did to those of 1938. A People magazine poll found that 62 percent deem the story a stunt. To tabloid devotees, the reasons for Mr. Cruise's credibility gap are the perennial unsubstantiated questions about his sexuality and his very public affiliation with a church, Scientology, literally founded by a science-fiction writer. But something bigger is going on here. The subversion of reality that Welles slyly introduced into modern American media in 1938 has reached its culmination and a jaded public is at last in open revolt.
The boundary between reality and fiction has now been blurred to such an extent by show business, the news business and government alike that almost no shows produced by any of them are instantly accepted as truth. The market for fake news has become so oversaturated that a skeptical public is finally dismissing most of it as hooey until proven otherwise (unless it is labeled as fake news from the get-go, as it is by Jon Stewart). We'll devour the supposedly real Cruise-Holmes liaison for laughs but give it no more credence than a subplot on "Desperate Housewives."
Welles unwittingly set us on the path toward the utter destabilization of reality with "War of the Worlds," and then compounded the syndrome with his subsequent film masterpiece "Citizen Kane," a fictional biography of a thinly disguised William Randolph Hearst that invented the pseudo-journalistic docudrama. But it's only in the past few years that Welles's ideas have been taken completely over the top by his trashy heirs. Not only do we have TV movies bastardizing the history of celebrities living and dead, but there is also a steady parade of "real" celebrities playing themselves in their own fictionalized "reality" shows. (This summer alone, Bobby Brown, Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee, Hugh Hefner's girlfriends and Paris Hilton's mother are all getting their own series.) The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as "a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island."
Politicians who dive into this game by putting on their own reality shows think they are being very clever. But like Mr. Cruise, they're being busted by a backlash. John Kerry was the first to feel it: his stagy military pageant, complete with salute, at the Democratic National Convention came off as so phony that the greater (but more subtle) fictions of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth struck many as relatively real by comparison. George W. Bush proved a somewhat more accomplished performer - in his first term. With the help of Colin Powell and some nifty props, he effortlessly sold the country on Saddam W.M.D.'s. He got away with using a stunt turkey as the photo-op centerpiece during his surprise Thanksgiving 2003 visit to the troops in Iraq. His canned "Ask the President" campaign town-hall meetings - at which any potentially hostile questioner was either denied admittance or hustled out by goons - were slick enough to be paraded before unsuspecting viewers as actual news on local TV outlets, in the tradition of Welles's bogus "War of the Worlds" bulletins.
But the old magic is going kaput. Mr. Bush's 60-stop Social Security "presidential roadshow," his latest round of pre-scripted and heavily rehearsed faux town-hall meetings, hasn't repeated the success of "Ask the President." Support for private Social Security accounts actually declined as the tour played out and Mr. Bush increasingly sounded as if he were protesting too much. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," the president said on May 24. He sounded as if he were channeling Mr. Cruise's desperate repetitions of his love for his "terrific lady."
The shelf life of the fakery that sold the war has also expired. On June 7, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found for the first time that a majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq has not made the United States safer. A week later Gallup found that a clear majority (59 percent) wants to withdraw some or all American troops. Most Americans tell pollsters the war isn't "worth it," and the top reasons they cite, said USA Today, include "fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found" and "the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States." The administration can keep boasting of the Iraqi military's progress in taking over for Americans and keep maintaining that, as Dick Cheney put it, the insurgency is in its "last throes." But when even the conservative Republican congressman who pushed the House cafeteria to rename French fries "freedom fries" (Walter B. Jones of North Carolina) argues for withdrawal, it's fruitless. Once a story line becomes incredible, it's hard to get the audience to fall for it again.
This, too, echoes the history of the Welles hoax. Three years after his "War of the Worlds," the real nightmare that America feared did arrive. Yet some radio listeners at first thought that the reports from Pearl Harbor were another ruse. Welles would later recall in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich that days after the Japanese attack, Franklin Roosevelt sent him a cable chiding him for having cried wolf with his faked war "news" of 1938.
Such is the overload of faked reality for Americans at this point that it will be far more difficult for the Bush administration than it was for F.D.R. to persuade the nation of an imminent threat without appearing to cry wolf. Nor can it easily get the country to believe that success in Iraq is just around the corner. Too many still remember that marvelous aircraft-carrier spectacle marking the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq - a fake reality show adapted, no less, from a Tom Cruise classic, "Top Gun." Some 25 months and 1,500 American deaths later, nothing short of a collaboration by Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg could make this war fly in America now.
Last week I misstated the Friday evening on which the Pentagon buried its report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards. It was June 3, not May 27.
Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks
By FRANK RICH
TO understand how the Bush administration has lost the public opinion war on Iraq it may be helpful to travel in H. G. Wells's time machine back to Oct. 30, 1938.
That was the Sunday night that Orson Welles staged the mother of all fake news events: his legendary radio adaptation of another Wells fantasy, "The War of the Worlds." The audience was told four times during the hourlong show that it was fiction, but to no avail. A month after Munich, Americans afflicted with war jitters were determined to believe the broadcast's phony news flashes that Martians had invaded New Jersey. Mobs fled their homes in a "wave of mass hysteria," as The New York Times described it on Page 1, clogging roads and communications systems. Two days later, in an editorial titled "Terror by Radio," The Times darkly observed that "what began as 'entertainment' might readily have ended in disaster" and warned radio officials to mind their "adult responsibilities" and think twice before again mingling "news technique with fiction so terrifying."
That's one Times editorial, it can be said without equivocation, that didn't make a dent. Nearly seven decades later the mingling of news and fiction has become the default setting of American infotainment, and Americans have become so inured to it that the innocent radio listeners bamboozled by Welles might as well belong to another civilization. Nowhere is the distance between that America and our own more visible than in the hoopla surrounding the latest adaptation of "The War of the Worlds," the much-awaited Steven Spielberg movie opening June 29.
Like its broadcast predecessor, the new version has already proved to be a launching pad for an onslaught of suspect news bulletins. This time the headlines are less earthshaking than an invasion from outer space, but they are no less ubiquitous: in repeated public appearances, most famously on "Oprah," the Spielberg movie's star, the 42-year-old Tom Cruise, has fallen to his knees and jumped on couches to declare his undying love for the 26-year-old Katie Holmes, the co-star of another summer spectacular, "Batman Begins." Forget about those bygone Hollywood studio schemes to concoct publicity-generating off-screen romances for its stars-in-training. Here is a lavishly produced freak show, designed to play out in real time, enthusiastically enacted by the biggest star in the business. On Friday, after popping the big question to Ms. Holmes at the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Cruise promptly dragged his intended to a news conference.
But though the audience for this drama is as large as, if not larger than, that for Welles's, there's one big difference. The Cruise-Holmes romance is proving less credible to Americans in 2005 than a Martian invasion did to those of 1938. A People magazine poll found that 62 percent deem the story a stunt. To tabloid devotees, the reasons for Mr. Cruise's credibility gap are the perennial unsubstantiated questions about his sexuality and his very public affiliation with a church, Scientology, literally founded by a science-fiction writer. But something bigger is going on here. The subversion of reality that Welles slyly introduced into modern American media in 1938 has reached its culmination and a jaded public is at last in open revolt.
The boundary between reality and fiction has now been blurred to such an extent by show business, the news business and government alike that almost no shows produced by any of them are instantly accepted as truth. The market for fake news has become so oversaturated that a skeptical public is finally dismissing most of it as hooey until proven otherwise (unless it is labeled as fake news from the get-go, as it is by Jon Stewart). We'll devour the supposedly real Cruise-Holmes liaison for laughs but give it no more credence than a subplot on "Desperate Housewives."
Welles unwittingly set us on the path toward the utter destabilization of reality with "War of the Worlds," and then compounded the syndrome with his subsequent film masterpiece "Citizen Kane," a fictional biography of a thinly disguised William Randolph Hearst that invented the pseudo-journalistic docudrama. But it's only in the past few years that Welles's ideas have been taken completely over the top by his trashy heirs. Not only do we have TV movies bastardizing the history of celebrities living and dead, but there is also a steady parade of "real" celebrities playing themselves in their own fictionalized "reality" shows. (This summer alone, Bobby Brown, Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee, Hugh Hefner's girlfriends and Paris Hilton's mother are all getting their own series.) The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as "a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island."
Politicians who dive into this game by putting on their own reality shows think they are being very clever. But like Mr. Cruise, they're being busted by a backlash. John Kerry was the first to feel it: his stagy military pageant, complete with salute, at the Democratic National Convention came off as so phony that the greater (but more subtle) fictions of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth struck many as relatively real by comparison. George W. Bush proved a somewhat more accomplished performer - in his first term. With the help of Colin Powell and some nifty props, he effortlessly sold the country on Saddam W.M.D.'s. He got away with using a stunt turkey as the photo-op centerpiece during his surprise Thanksgiving 2003 visit to the troops in Iraq. His canned "Ask the President" campaign town-hall meetings - at which any potentially hostile questioner was either denied admittance or hustled out by goons - were slick enough to be paraded before unsuspecting viewers as actual news on local TV outlets, in the tradition of Welles's bogus "War of the Worlds" bulletins.
But the old magic is going kaput. Mr. Bush's 60-stop Social Security "presidential roadshow," his latest round of pre-scripted and heavily rehearsed faux town-hall meetings, hasn't repeated the success of "Ask the President." Support for private Social Security accounts actually declined as the tour played out and Mr. Bush increasingly sounded as if he were protesting too much. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," the president said on May 24. He sounded as if he were channeling Mr. Cruise's desperate repetitions of his love for his "terrific lady."
The shelf life of the fakery that sold the war has also expired. On June 7, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found for the first time that a majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq has not made the United States safer. A week later Gallup found that a clear majority (59 percent) wants to withdraw some or all American troops. Most Americans tell pollsters the war isn't "worth it," and the top reasons they cite, said USA Today, include "fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found" and "the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States." The administration can keep boasting of the Iraqi military's progress in taking over for Americans and keep maintaining that, as Dick Cheney put it, the insurgency is in its "last throes." But when even the conservative Republican congressman who pushed the House cafeteria to rename French fries "freedom fries" (Walter B. Jones of North Carolina) argues for withdrawal, it's fruitless. Once a story line becomes incredible, it's hard to get the audience to fall for it again.
This, too, echoes the history of the Welles hoax. Three years after his "War of the Worlds," the real nightmare that America feared did arrive. Yet some radio listeners at first thought that the reports from Pearl Harbor were another ruse. Welles would later recall in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich that days after the Japanese attack, Franklin Roosevelt sent him a cable chiding him for having cried wolf with his faked war "news" of 1938.
Such is the overload of faked reality for Americans at this point that it will be far more difficult for the Bush administration than it was for F.D.R. to persuade the nation of an imminent threat without appearing to cry wolf. Nor can it easily get the country to believe that success in Iraq is just around the corner. Too many still remember that marvelous aircraft-carrier spectacle marking the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq - a fake reality show adapted, no less, from a Tom Cruise classic, "Top Gun." Some 25 months and 1,500 American deaths later, nothing short of a collaboration by Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg could make this war fly in America now.
Last week I misstated the Friday evening on which the Pentagon buried its report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards. It was June 3, not May 27.
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN...
Iraq Behind The Script
Jonathan Schell
June 17, 2005
Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, is the Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published by Nation Books. This article first appeared in TomDispatch.com and will appear in the upcoming issue of The Nation Magazine .
Sometimes the truth of a large, confusing historical enterprise can be glimpsed in a single news report. Such is the case in regard to the Iraq War, it seems to me, with the recent story in The Washington Post by Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru called "Building Iraq's Army: Mission Improbable." Shadid and Fainaru did something that is rarely done: spend several days with a unit of Iraq's new, American-trained forces. (The typical treatment of the topic consists of a few interviews with American officers in the Green Zone in Baghdad, leading to some estimation of how long it will take to complete the job.) The Post story starts with the lyrics of a song the soldiers of the unit, called Charlie Company, were singing out of earshot of their American overseers. It was a ballad to Saddam Hussein, and it ran:
We have lived in humiliation since you left
We had hoped to spend our life with you
The American press often discusses the political makeup of the insurgency, but no one until now has suggested that some of the very forces being trained by the United States might be longing for the return of Saddam. To the extent that this is the case—or that these forces are otherwise opposed to the occupation—the United States, far from improving "security," is now training the future resistance to itself. Indeed, the soldiers of Charlie Company told Shadid and Fainaru that 17 of them had quit in recent days. They added that every one of them planned to do the same as soon as possible. Their reasons were simple. They were bitter at the United States. "Look at the homes of the Iraqis," one soldier remarked. "The people have been destroyed." When asked by whom, he answered, "Them"—and pointed to the Americans leading the patrol. The Iraqis had enlisted in the new army only for the salary—$340 per month, an enviable sum in today's ruined Iraq. But the money had come at the price of self-respect. The new recruits had been bought off and hated themselves for it. One said that after they had all quit, "We'll live by God, but we'll have our respect."
One might wonder whether the reporters had deliberately or unknowingly picked an exceptionally rebellious unit. But in fact, Charlie Company was selected by the U.S. Army itself, presumably eager to put its best foot forward.
The American officers' response to their sullen recruits is of a piece with the entire American effort in Iraq. The officers treat their charges as if, owing to certain mysterious personal defects, they somehow are not quite up to the job they have been given. After a typical episode in which the unit was attacked and ran away (four hailed taxis to make their escape), Sgt. Rick McGovern, who leads the unit, dressed them down. "You are all cowards," he informed them. He went on, "My soldiers are over here, away from our families for a year. We are willing to die for you to have freedom. You should be willing to die for your own freedom." The tongue-lashing assumed that the Iraqis and the American shared a cause that, as the story shows, was actually 100 percent missing. Iraqi men who hate the American occupation are not cowards if they decline to shoot other men who are fighting the occupation. On the contrary, the more courage they had, the less they would engage in such a fight. The men of Charlie Company do indeed lack courage—courage to turn down the money they accept for pretending to fight for a cause they despise. Their most cowardly moment, given their beliefs, was when they sat still while Sergeant McGovern called them cowards. One soldier, Amar Mana, explained the situation in the clearest terms: "We don't want to take responsibility," he said. "The way the situation is, we wouldn't be ready to take responsibility for a thousand years."
And so the Americans and the Iraqis of Charlie Company, like the United States and Iraq in general today, are led, by choice on the one side and by bribery and compulsion on the other, to play roles in a script that has little or nothing to do with the situation they are actually in. In this situation, it is not necessary to form a whole sentence to tell a lie. Use of single words or phrases—"Iraqi sovereignty," "freedom," "election," "security," "democracy," "anti-Iraqi forces," even "courage" and "cowardice"—involve the speaker in deception, for they are the constitutive elements of a framework of thought and belief that is itself a fabrication.
The American occupation of Iraq is something new, but the fundamental error of the United States has a long pedigree. It is the imprisonment of the human mind in ideology backed by violence. The classic example is Stalin's Russia, under which decades of misrule were rationalized as a "stage" on the way to the radiant future of true communism. As for the miserable present, it was amusingly called "actually existing communism." The future, when it came, of course was not communism at all but the disintegration of the whole enterprise. All the "stages" turned out to lead nowhere.
Once the mind is in the grip of such a system, every "actually existing" horror can be seen as a mere imperfection in a beautiful larger picture, every defeat a stage on the way to the glorious future. The simpler and more coherent an ideology, the better it can withstand the assault of fact. So today in Iraq, every act of torture, every flattened city, every gushing sewer, every car bombing and beheading, is presented as a bump on the road to "freedom" for Iraq, or for the Middle East, or even for the whole world, in which our president has promised an "end to tyranny." (It's apparently a rule of ideology that the more sordid the reality, the more grandiosely splendid the eventual goal must be.)
But a moment comes—perhaps it is a sudden defeat, or perhaps it is merely reading a story like Shadid and Fainaru's—when the fantasy dissolves, and then one is left face to face with the factual truth. All the "exceptions" turn out to be the rule. When that happens with respect to Iraq, America's grotesque misadventure there—born of lies, sustained by lies and productive of more lies every day it continues—will be brought to a close.
Jonathan Schell
June 17, 2005
Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, is the Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published by Nation Books. This article first appeared in TomDispatch.com and will appear in the upcoming issue of The Nation Magazine .
Sometimes the truth of a large, confusing historical enterprise can be glimpsed in a single news report. Such is the case in regard to the Iraq War, it seems to me, with the recent story in The Washington Post by Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru called "Building Iraq's Army: Mission Improbable." Shadid and Fainaru did something that is rarely done: spend several days with a unit of Iraq's new, American-trained forces. (The typical treatment of the topic consists of a few interviews with American officers in the Green Zone in Baghdad, leading to some estimation of how long it will take to complete the job.) The Post story starts with the lyrics of a song the soldiers of the unit, called Charlie Company, were singing out of earshot of their American overseers. It was a ballad to Saddam Hussein, and it ran:
We have lived in humiliation since you left
We had hoped to spend our life with you
The American press often discusses the political makeup of the insurgency, but no one until now has suggested that some of the very forces being trained by the United States might be longing for the return of Saddam. To the extent that this is the case—or that these forces are otherwise opposed to the occupation—the United States, far from improving "security," is now training the future resistance to itself. Indeed, the soldiers of Charlie Company told Shadid and Fainaru that 17 of them had quit in recent days. They added that every one of them planned to do the same as soon as possible. Their reasons were simple. They were bitter at the United States. "Look at the homes of the Iraqis," one soldier remarked. "The people have been destroyed." When asked by whom, he answered, "Them"—and pointed to the Americans leading the patrol. The Iraqis had enlisted in the new army only for the salary—$340 per month, an enviable sum in today's ruined Iraq. But the money had come at the price of self-respect. The new recruits had been bought off and hated themselves for it. One said that after they had all quit, "We'll live by God, but we'll have our respect."
One might wonder whether the reporters had deliberately or unknowingly picked an exceptionally rebellious unit. But in fact, Charlie Company was selected by the U.S. Army itself, presumably eager to put its best foot forward.
The American officers' response to their sullen recruits is of a piece with the entire American effort in Iraq. The officers treat their charges as if, owing to certain mysterious personal defects, they somehow are not quite up to the job they have been given. After a typical episode in which the unit was attacked and ran away (four hailed taxis to make their escape), Sgt. Rick McGovern, who leads the unit, dressed them down. "You are all cowards," he informed them. He went on, "My soldiers are over here, away from our families for a year. We are willing to die for you to have freedom. You should be willing to die for your own freedom." The tongue-lashing assumed that the Iraqis and the American shared a cause that, as the story shows, was actually 100 percent missing. Iraqi men who hate the American occupation are not cowards if they decline to shoot other men who are fighting the occupation. On the contrary, the more courage they had, the less they would engage in such a fight. The men of Charlie Company do indeed lack courage—courage to turn down the money they accept for pretending to fight for a cause they despise. Their most cowardly moment, given their beliefs, was when they sat still while Sergeant McGovern called them cowards. One soldier, Amar Mana, explained the situation in the clearest terms: "We don't want to take responsibility," he said. "The way the situation is, we wouldn't be ready to take responsibility for a thousand years."
And so the Americans and the Iraqis of Charlie Company, like the United States and Iraq in general today, are led, by choice on the one side and by bribery and compulsion on the other, to play roles in a script that has little or nothing to do with the situation they are actually in. In this situation, it is not necessary to form a whole sentence to tell a lie. Use of single words or phrases—"Iraqi sovereignty," "freedom," "election," "security," "democracy," "anti-Iraqi forces," even "courage" and "cowardice"—involve the speaker in deception, for they are the constitutive elements of a framework of thought and belief that is itself a fabrication.
The American occupation of Iraq is something new, but the fundamental error of the United States has a long pedigree. It is the imprisonment of the human mind in ideology backed by violence. The classic example is Stalin's Russia, under which decades of misrule were rationalized as a "stage" on the way to the radiant future of true communism. As for the miserable present, it was amusingly called "actually existing communism." The future, when it came, of course was not communism at all but the disintegration of the whole enterprise. All the "stages" turned out to lead nowhere.
Once the mind is in the grip of such a system, every "actually existing" horror can be seen as a mere imperfection in a beautiful larger picture, every defeat a stage on the way to the glorious future. The simpler and more coherent an ideology, the better it can withstand the assault of fact. So today in Iraq, every act of torture, every flattened city, every gushing sewer, every car bombing and beheading, is presented as a bump on the road to "freedom" for Iraq, or for the Middle East, or even for the whole world, in which our president has promised an "end to tyranny." (It's apparently a rule of ideology that the more sordid the reality, the more grandiosely splendid the eventual goal must be.)
But a moment comes—perhaps it is a sudden defeat, or perhaps it is merely reading a story like Shadid and Fainaru's—when the fantasy dissolves, and then one is left face to face with the factual truth. All the "exceptions" turn out to be the rule. When that happens with respect to Iraq, America's grotesque misadventure there—born of lies, sustained by lies and productive of more lies every day it continues—will be brought to a close.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
BUSH'S CULTURE OF DEATH OVER LIFE
A 'culture of life,' but for whom?
By Molly Ivins
AUSTIN - As a longtime fan of both George Bushes' eccentric grasp of English, I enjoyed this gem from W.:
"See, in my line of work, you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." (Bush in Greece, N.Y., May 24, once more explaining his Social Security plan to a town hall meeting of perfectly average citizens, except they had all been pre-screened to allow only those who agree with him into the hall.)
"Catapulting the propaganda" would explain his performance at the press opportunity that same day at which he appeared surrounded by babies born from frozen embryos. He used the phrase "culture of life" at least 27 dozen times (I think I exaggerate, but maybe not). "The use of federal dollars to destroy life is something I simply do not support," he said to the press the following day.
Meanwhile, back in Baghdad, federal dollars are being used to destroy life at a pretty good clip because Bush decided to wage an elective war against a country that presented little or no threat to us. And according to the Downing Street memo, he knew it, too.
The destruction of life in Iraq is more dramatic than taking a blastocyst smaller than a pinpoint out of a petri dish. The more than 1,600 American dead so far -- not much culture of life there. The 15,000 wounded, many of them irreparably -- not so good there, either.
Estimates of Iraqi deaths are all over the lot -- a British medical journal claimed 100,000 last year, the Iraq Body Count Web site says between 21,000 and 25,000. The U.S./U.N. sanctions are widely believed to have killed many thousands, most of them babies, even after the oil-for-food program was instituted.
The New York Times reports that the doctors in Iraq are being threatened by insurgents and so are fleeing what was a showcase system under Saddam. We'd all have to agree, so far there's no progress on bringing a culture of life to Iraq.
What I don't get is the disconnect in Bush's mind. One must assume he figures in Iraq, "You gotta break eggs to make an omelet." He said at the photo-op with the adorable children who had been produced from frozen embryos and adopted by other parents, "The children here today remind us that there is no such thing as a spare embryo."
Nonsense. Fertility treatments that help couples to have children leave far too many excess embryos for all of them to be adopted. They are simply discarded by the laboratories, thrown out. What in the world is he talking about?
Seems to me the anti-abortion people are getting as nutty as the gun lobby, which lets cop-killer bullets on the street, wants to allow .50-caliber rifles that can bring down an airplane and stops efforts to close loopholes that let dealers sell to terrorists and criminals. Plus a bunch of other nutcase stuff that is not only harmful to society, but opposed by the great majority of Americans.
Anti-abortion people are even going after the process of judicial bypass for girls who cannot fulfill the parental consent restriction.
Look, 60 percent of the American people are in favor of funding stem-cell research.
Do we have a First Amendment issue here? Is this the case of a few people imposing their religious views on everybody? I don't know enough about stem-cell research to tell you that it will produce miracle cures for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other diseases, as some scientists claim. But it's not only worth a shot, it would be criminal not to do it. The people who are ill are here, now, human beings in terrible suffering.
Bush is prepared to use his first-ever veto.
Didn't stop the bankruptcy bill, didn't stop all those tax cuts for the very rich, didn't stop that gross agriculture bill -- but this he will veto. He says we will "cross a critical ethical line by creating new incentives for the ongoing destruction of emerging human life."
And he doesn't think starting an unnecessary war was crossing a critical ethical line?
It's the old slippery slope argument.
All of law is a process of drawing lines on slippery slopes. The difference between misdemeanor theft and felony theft is one penny. The difference between misdemeanor and felony drug possession is one gram. The difference between a pig and a hog is one pound. We're always drawing distinctions, and it is necessary to do so -- hunting rifles, OK; .50-caliber rifles, don't be a fool.
This is a don't-be-a-fool argument.
"Culture of life"?
Whose life?
By Molly Ivins
AUSTIN - As a longtime fan of both George Bushes' eccentric grasp of English, I enjoyed this gem from W.:
"See, in my line of work, you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." (Bush in Greece, N.Y., May 24, once more explaining his Social Security plan to a town hall meeting of perfectly average citizens, except they had all been pre-screened to allow only those who agree with him into the hall.)
"Catapulting the propaganda" would explain his performance at the press opportunity that same day at which he appeared surrounded by babies born from frozen embryos. He used the phrase "culture of life" at least 27 dozen times (I think I exaggerate, but maybe not). "The use of federal dollars to destroy life is something I simply do not support," he said to the press the following day.
Meanwhile, back in Baghdad, federal dollars are being used to destroy life at a pretty good clip because Bush decided to wage an elective war against a country that presented little or no threat to us. And according to the Downing Street memo, he knew it, too.
The destruction of life in Iraq is more dramatic than taking a blastocyst smaller than a pinpoint out of a petri dish. The more than 1,600 American dead so far -- not much culture of life there. The 15,000 wounded, many of them irreparably -- not so good there, either.
Estimates of Iraqi deaths are all over the lot -- a British medical journal claimed 100,000 last year, the Iraq Body Count Web site says between 21,000 and 25,000. The U.S./U.N. sanctions are widely believed to have killed many thousands, most of them babies, even after the oil-for-food program was instituted.
The New York Times reports that the doctors in Iraq are being threatened by insurgents and so are fleeing what was a showcase system under Saddam. We'd all have to agree, so far there's no progress on bringing a culture of life to Iraq.
What I don't get is the disconnect in Bush's mind. One must assume he figures in Iraq, "You gotta break eggs to make an omelet." He said at the photo-op with the adorable children who had been produced from frozen embryos and adopted by other parents, "The children here today remind us that there is no such thing as a spare embryo."
Nonsense. Fertility treatments that help couples to have children leave far too many excess embryos for all of them to be adopted. They are simply discarded by the laboratories, thrown out. What in the world is he talking about?
Seems to me the anti-abortion people are getting as nutty as the gun lobby, which lets cop-killer bullets on the street, wants to allow .50-caliber rifles that can bring down an airplane and stops efforts to close loopholes that let dealers sell to terrorists and criminals. Plus a bunch of other nutcase stuff that is not only harmful to society, but opposed by the great majority of Americans.
Anti-abortion people are even going after the process of judicial bypass for girls who cannot fulfill the parental consent restriction.
Look, 60 percent of the American people are in favor of funding stem-cell research.
Do we have a First Amendment issue here? Is this the case of a few people imposing their religious views on everybody? I don't know enough about stem-cell research to tell you that it will produce miracle cures for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other diseases, as some scientists claim. But it's not only worth a shot, it would be criminal not to do it. The people who are ill are here, now, human beings in terrible suffering.
Bush is prepared to use his first-ever veto.
Didn't stop the bankruptcy bill, didn't stop all those tax cuts for the very rich, didn't stop that gross agriculture bill -- but this he will veto. He says we will "cross a critical ethical line by creating new incentives for the ongoing destruction of emerging human life."
And he doesn't think starting an unnecessary war was crossing a critical ethical line?
It's the old slippery slope argument.
All of law is a process of drawing lines on slippery slopes. The difference between misdemeanor theft and felony theft is one penny. The difference between misdemeanor and felony drug possession is one gram. The difference between a pig and a hog is one pound. We're always drawing distinctions, and it is necessary to do so -- hunting rifles, OK; .50-caliber rifles, don't be a fool.
This is a don't-be-a-fool argument.
"Culture of life"?
Whose life?
A Report on Mesopotamia by T.E. Lawrence
June 14, 2005
BACK TO THE FUTURE: DEALING WITH THE LOOMING DEBACLE
by
Larry C Johnson
Wishful thinking is no substitute for empirical analysis and a policy grounded in reality. The Bush Administration is coming slowly and uncertainly to this realization, particularly in Lebanon. Now that the premature euphoria about the birth of democracy has collapsed under the weight of the political realities of that godforsaken country we will now see whether the Administration can keep its counter terrorism policy intact. For starters Lebanon is host to Hezbollah. In the past Lebanon was not identified as a State Sponsor of terrorism because it was under the thumb of Syria. That excuse no longer holds.
So what are our new pals in Lebanon doing? Setting terrorists free!! As my friend Pat Lang observed, "Nobody is saying anything about the dozen or so Jihadi activists who Saad Hariri bought out of jail last week. He paid their fines, bail, etc because he needed the political support of the families and other tribal associates. I guess he has been trying to "line up" both the Shia zealots (Hizb Allah_ and the Sunni ones as well)."
For people who truly want to understand what lies before us I recommend doing two things: 1) Watch the movie The Battle of Algiers and 2) Read the following "Report" by Lawrence of Arabia. It is Deja Vu all over again.
A Report on Mesopotamia by T.E. Lawrence
By Ex.-Lieut.-Col. T.E. Lawrence
Sunday Times
August 22, 1920
[Mr. Lawrence, whose organization and direction of the Hedjaz against the Turks was one of the outstanding romances of the war, has written this article at our request in order that the public may be fully informed of our Mesopotamian commitments.]
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster.
The sins of commission are those of the British civil authorities in Mesopotamia (especially of three 'colonels') who were given a free hand by London. They are controlled from no Department of State, but from the empty space which divides the Foreign Office from te India Office. They availed themselves of the necessary discretion of war-time to carry over their dangerous independence into times of peace. They contest every suggestion of real self- government sent them from home. A recent proclamation about autonomy circulated with unction from Baghdad was drafted and published out there in a hurry, to forestall a more liberal statement in preparation in London, 'Self-determination papers' favourable to England were extorted in Mesopotamia in 1919 by official pressure, by aeroplane demonstrations, by deportations to India.
The Cabinet cannot disclaim all responsibility. They receive little more news than the public: they should have insisted on more, and better. They have sent draft after draft of reinforcements, without enquiry. When conditions became too bad to endure longer, they decided to send out as High commissioner the original author of the present system, with a conciliatory message to the Arabs that his heart and policy have completely changed.*
Yet our published policy has not changed, and does not need changing. It is that there has been a deplorable contrast between our profession and our practice. We said we went to Mesopotamia to defeat Turkey. We said we stayed to deliver the Arabs from the oppression of the Turkish Government, and to make available for the world its resources of corn and oil. We spent nearly a million men and nearly a thousand million of money to these ends. This year we are spending ninety-two thousand men and fifty millions of money on the same objects.
Our government is worse than the old Turkish system. They kept fourteen thousand local conscripts embodied, and killed a yearly average of two hundred Arabs in maintaining peace. We keep ninety thousand men, with aeroplanes, armoured cars, gunboats, and armoured trains. We have killed about ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. We cannot hope to maintain such an average: it is a poor country, sparsely peopled; but Abd el Hamid would applaud his masters, if he saw us working. We are told the object of the rising was political, we are not told what the local people want. It may be what the Cabinet has promised them. A Minister in the House of Lords said that we must have so many troops because the local people will not enlist. On Friday the Government announce the death of some local levies defending their British officers, and say that the services of these men have not yet been sufficiently recognized because they are too few (adding the characteristic Baghdad touch that they are men of bad character). There are seven thousand of them, just half the old Turkish force of occupation. Properly officered and distributed, they would relieve half our army there. Cromer controlled Egypt's six million people with five thousand British troops; Colonel Wilson fails to control Mesopotamia's three million people with ninety thousand troops.
We have not reached the limit of our military commitments. Four weeks ago the staff in Mesopotamia drew up a memorandum asking for four more divisions. I believe it was forwarded to the War Office, which has now sent three brigades from India. If the North-West Frontier cannot be further denuded, where is the balance to come from? Meanwhile, our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the wilfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad. General Dyer was relieved of his command in India for a much smaller error, but the responsibility in this case is not on the Army, which has acted only at the request of the civil authorities. The War Office has made every effort to reduce our forces, but the decisions of the Cabinet have been against them.
The Government in Baghdad have been hanging Arabs in that town for political offences, which they call rebellion. The Arabs are not at war with us. Are these illegal executions to provoke the Arabs to reprisals on the three hundred British prisoners they hold? And, if so, is it that their punishment may be more severe, or is it to persuade our other troops to fight to the last?
We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. All experts say that the labour supply is the ruling factor in its development. How far will the killing of ten thousand villagers and townspeople this summer hinder the production of wheat, cotton, and oil? How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?
BACK TO THE FUTURE: DEALING WITH THE LOOMING DEBACLE
by
Larry C Johnson
Wishful thinking is no substitute for empirical analysis and a policy grounded in reality. The Bush Administration is coming slowly and uncertainly to this realization, particularly in Lebanon. Now that the premature euphoria about the birth of democracy has collapsed under the weight of the political realities of that godforsaken country we will now see whether the Administration can keep its counter terrorism policy intact. For starters Lebanon is host to Hezbollah. In the past Lebanon was not identified as a State Sponsor of terrorism because it was under the thumb of Syria. That excuse no longer holds.
So what are our new pals in Lebanon doing? Setting terrorists free!! As my friend Pat Lang observed, "Nobody is saying anything about the dozen or so Jihadi activists who Saad Hariri bought out of jail last week. He paid their fines, bail, etc because he needed the political support of the families and other tribal associates. I guess he has been trying to "line up" both the Shia zealots (Hizb Allah_ and the Sunni ones as well)."
For people who truly want to understand what lies before us I recommend doing two things: 1) Watch the movie The Battle of Algiers and 2) Read the following "Report" by Lawrence of Arabia. It is Deja Vu all over again.
A Report on Mesopotamia by T.E. Lawrence
By Ex.-Lieut.-Col. T.E. Lawrence
Sunday Times
August 22, 1920
[Mr. Lawrence, whose organization and direction of the Hedjaz against the Turks was one of the outstanding romances of the war, has written this article at our request in order that the public may be fully informed of our Mesopotamian commitments.]
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster.
The sins of commission are those of the British civil authorities in Mesopotamia (especially of three 'colonels') who were given a free hand by London. They are controlled from no Department of State, but from the empty space which divides the Foreign Office from te India Office. They availed themselves of the necessary discretion of war-time to carry over their dangerous independence into times of peace. They contest every suggestion of real self- government sent them from home. A recent proclamation about autonomy circulated with unction from Baghdad was drafted and published out there in a hurry, to forestall a more liberal statement in preparation in London, 'Self-determination papers' favourable to England were extorted in Mesopotamia in 1919 by official pressure, by aeroplane demonstrations, by deportations to India.
The Cabinet cannot disclaim all responsibility. They receive little more news than the public: they should have insisted on more, and better. They have sent draft after draft of reinforcements, without enquiry. When conditions became too bad to endure longer, they decided to send out as High commissioner the original author of the present system, with a conciliatory message to the Arabs that his heart and policy have completely changed.*
Yet our published policy has not changed, and does not need changing. It is that there has been a deplorable contrast between our profession and our practice. We said we went to Mesopotamia to defeat Turkey. We said we stayed to deliver the Arabs from the oppression of the Turkish Government, and to make available for the world its resources of corn and oil. We spent nearly a million men and nearly a thousand million of money to these ends. This year we are spending ninety-two thousand men and fifty millions of money on the same objects.
Our government is worse than the old Turkish system. They kept fourteen thousand local conscripts embodied, and killed a yearly average of two hundred Arabs in maintaining peace. We keep ninety thousand men, with aeroplanes, armoured cars, gunboats, and armoured trains. We have killed about ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. We cannot hope to maintain such an average: it is a poor country, sparsely peopled; but Abd el Hamid would applaud his masters, if he saw us working. We are told the object of the rising was political, we are not told what the local people want. It may be what the Cabinet has promised them. A Minister in the House of Lords said that we must have so many troops because the local people will not enlist. On Friday the Government announce the death of some local levies defending their British officers, and say that the services of these men have not yet been sufficiently recognized because they are too few (adding the characteristic Baghdad touch that they are men of bad character). There are seven thousand of them, just half the old Turkish force of occupation. Properly officered and distributed, they would relieve half our army there. Cromer controlled Egypt's six million people with five thousand British troops; Colonel Wilson fails to control Mesopotamia's three million people with ninety thousand troops.
We have not reached the limit of our military commitments. Four weeks ago the staff in Mesopotamia drew up a memorandum asking for four more divisions. I believe it was forwarded to the War Office, which has now sent three brigades from India. If the North-West Frontier cannot be further denuded, where is the balance to come from? Meanwhile, our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the wilfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad. General Dyer was relieved of his command in India for a much smaller error, but the responsibility in this case is not on the Army, which has acted only at the request of the civil authorities. The War Office has made every effort to reduce our forces, but the decisions of the Cabinet have been against them.
The Government in Baghdad have been hanging Arabs in that town for political offences, which they call rebellion. The Arabs are not at war with us. Are these illegal executions to provoke the Arabs to reprisals on the three hundred British prisoners they hold? And, if so, is it that their punishment may be more severe, or is it to persuade our other troops to fight to the last?
We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. All experts say that the labour supply is the ruling factor in its development. How far will the killing of ten thousand villagers and townspeople this summer hinder the production of wheat, cotton, and oil? How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?
Sunday, June 12, 2005
LET THEM EAT CAKE - BUSH POLICIES
More babies, young kids going hungry in US
Sat Jun 11,11:00 PM ET
Increasing numbers of young American children are showing signs of serious malnourishment, fueled by a greater prevalence of hunger in the United States, while, paradoxically, two-thirds of the US population is either overweight or obese.
In 2003, 11.2 percent of families in the United States experienced hunger, compared with 10.1 percent in 1999, according to most recent official figures, released on National Hunger Awareness Day held this year on Tuesday, June 7.
Some pediatricians worry that cuts in welfare aid proposed in President George W. Bush's 2006 budget will only exacerbate the situation. By contrast Bush plans to keep tax cuts for more affluent sectors of the population, they note.
In the working class port city of Baltimore, Maryland, Dr. Maureen Black, a pediatrician, sees numbers of underweight babies in her clinic specialized in infant malnutrition located in one of the poorer areas.
"In the first year of life, children triple their birth weight," said Black, "and if children do not have enough to eat during those very early very times, you first see that their weight will falter and then their height will falter."
"If their height falters enough and they experience stunting under age two, they are then at risk for academic and behaviour problems" at school, said Black.
Dr. Deborah Frank, a professor of pediatrics at Boston University's School of Medicine, who also runs a specialised clinic for malnourished babies, has similar concerns.
"We are seeing more and more very young babies under a year of age which is a particular concern because they are most likely to die of under nutrition, and also their brains are growing very very rapidly," said Frank, in a telephone interview.
"A baby's brain increases 2.5 times in size in the first year of life," she says, adding that if the baby fails to get the nutritional building blocks he or she needs for the brain to develop, a child can have lifelong difficulties in behaviour and learning.
But infant-child protection centers do not exist in the United States, unlike it other countries, such as France, which makes children below the age of three or four years old somewhat invisible to authorities, laments Frank. "They don't come to my clinic until they are already quite underweight.
"Recently I have been alarmed because we are getting more children who are so ill that they go to hospital rather than they come to the clinic first" a situation which, in 20 years of practising medicine, Frank had seen reverse.
Some children in the United States occasionally look like the malnourished children we see in some parts of Africa, however, welfare programs targeting society's poorest ensures that problem is generally avoided, the pediatricians say.
Paradoxically, malnutrition is not always due to lack of food -- rather to the quality of the food being consumed.
"People often ask me how many children go to bed hungry. The answer is the parents work very hard so they don't go to bed feeling hungry. The parents try to fill the baby up with french fries and soda pop," said Frank.
In some areas, green vegetables and fruit are impossible to buy -- even in a can, because there may be no supermarket. Moreover, such items are costly.
"What happens in America is -- what seems bizarre -- that some of the recommendations that we give to families to prevent underweight of children are the same as we give to prevent overweight," said Black. "We recommend families not to give their children junk food."
In some families, eating junk food will mean one child is obese while the other is underweight, said Black. "The first will eat junk food and nothing else, the second will eat junk food and everything else."
Sat Jun 11,11:00 PM ET
Increasing numbers of young American children are showing signs of serious malnourishment, fueled by a greater prevalence of hunger in the United States, while, paradoxically, two-thirds of the US population is either overweight or obese.
In 2003, 11.2 percent of families in the United States experienced hunger, compared with 10.1 percent in 1999, according to most recent official figures, released on National Hunger Awareness Day held this year on Tuesday, June 7.
Some pediatricians worry that cuts in welfare aid proposed in President George W. Bush's 2006 budget will only exacerbate the situation. By contrast Bush plans to keep tax cuts for more affluent sectors of the population, they note.
In the working class port city of Baltimore, Maryland, Dr. Maureen Black, a pediatrician, sees numbers of underweight babies in her clinic specialized in infant malnutrition located in one of the poorer areas.
"In the first year of life, children triple their birth weight," said Black, "and if children do not have enough to eat during those very early very times, you first see that their weight will falter and then their height will falter."
"If their height falters enough and they experience stunting under age two, they are then at risk for academic and behaviour problems" at school, said Black.
Dr. Deborah Frank, a professor of pediatrics at Boston University's School of Medicine, who also runs a specialised clinic for malnourished babies, has similar concerns.
"We are seeing more and more very young babies under a year of age which is a particular concern because they are most likely to die of under nutrition, and also their brains are growing very very rapidly," said Frank, in a telephone interview.
"A baby's brain increases 2.5 times in size in the first year of life," she says, adding that if the baby fails to get the nutritional building blocks he or she needs for the brain to develop, a child can have lifelong difficulties in behaviour and learning.
But infant-child protection centers do not exist in the United States, unlike it other countries, such as France, which makes children below the age of three or four years old somewhat invisible to authorities, laments Frank. "They don't come to my clinic until they are already quite underweight.
"Recently I have been alarmed because we are getting more children who are so ill that they go to hospital rather than they come to the clinic first" a situation which, in 20 years of practising medicine, Frank had seen reverse.
Some children in the United States occasionally look like the malnourished children we see in some parts of Africa, however, welfare programs targeting society's poorest ensures that problem is generally avoided, the pediatricians say.
Paradoxically, malnutrition is not always due to lack of food -- rather to the quality of the food being consumed.
"People often ask me how many children go to bed hungry. The answer is the parents work very hard so they don't go to bed feeling hungry. The parents try to fill the baby up with french fries and soda pop," said Frank.
In some areas, green vegetables and fruit are impossible to buy -- even in a can, because there may be no supermarket. Moreover, such items are costly.
"What happens in America is -- what seems bizarre -- that some of the recommendations that we give to families to prevent underweight of children are the same as we give to prevent overweight," said Black. "We recommend families not to give their children junk food."
In some families, eating junk food will mean one child is obese while the other is underweight, said Black. "The first will eat junk food and nothing else, the second will eat junk food and everything else."
AN ARMY OF NIXONS $%@# AMERICA UNDER BUSH
Yeah, that's right. The Bush White House FUCKS America every minute of every day. It's way past time to just say it as crudely as they act and point it out every time you see it happening. These Corporate Stalinists only care to subvert America for their greedy vile pro-business-over-everything-sane ends (so much so Eisenhower's son quit the Republican party) while using a Madison Avenue/CIA marketing campaign to cover their tracks with patriotic knee-jerk imagery and the take no prisoners savagery. Time to start hacking the political machine you bought and void its anti-American warranty!
June 12, 2005
Don't Follow the Money
By FRANK RICH
THE morning the Deep Throat story broke, the voice on my answering machine was as raspy as Hal Holbrook's. "I just want you to remember that I wrote 'Follow the money,' " said my caller. "I want to know if anybody will give me credit. Watch for the accuracy of the media!"
The voice belonged to my friend William Goldman, who wrote the movie "All the President's Men." His words proved more than a little prescient. As if on cue, journalists everywhere - from The New York Times to The Economist to The Washington Post itself - would soon start attributing this classic line of dialogue to the newly unmasked Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt. But the line was not in Woodward and Bernstein's book or in The Post's Watergate reportage or in Bob Woodward's contemporaneous notes. It was the invention of the author of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Marathon Man" and "The Princess Bride."
This confusion of Hollywood's version of history with the genuine article would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the Deep Throat coverage. Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he "follow the money" into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old showing signs of dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with Larry King? How did Vanity Fair scoop The Post? How does Robert Redford feel about it all? Such were the questions that killed time for a nation awaiting the much-heralded feature mediathon, the Michael Jackson verdict.
Richard Nixon and Watergate itself, meanwhile, were often reduced to footnotes. Three years ago, on Watergate's 30th anniversary, an ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn't explain what the scandal was, and no one was racing to enlighten them this time around. Vanity Fair may have taken the trouble to remind us that Watergate was a web of crime yielding the convictions and guilty pleas of more than 30 White House and Nixon campaign officials, but few others did. Watergate has gone back to being the "third-rate burglary" of Nixon administration spin. It is once again being covered up.
Not without reason. Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the long national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt fun by casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. "The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before" was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."
The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon .
This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished. To foster it, Nixon's special counsel, Charles W. Colson, embarked on a ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust action against the networks if they didn't run pro-Nixon stories. Watergate tapes and memos make Mr. Colson, who boasted of "destroying the old establishment," sound like the founding father of today's blogging lynch mobs. He exulted in bullying CBS to cut back its Watergate reports before the '72 election. He enlisted NBC in pro-administration propaganda by browbeating it to repackage 10-day-old coverage of Tricia Nixon's wedding as a prime-time special. It was the Colson office as well that compiled a White House enemies list that included journalists who had the audacity to question administration policies.
Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment on Mr. Felt - and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. "I want kids to look up to heroes," Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC's "Today" show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring "the confidence of the president of the United States." Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times's Deep Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The "Today" host, Matt Lauer, didn't mention any of this - or even that his guest had done jail time. None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he was ubiquitous - ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only as a "former White House counsel."
Had anyone been so rude (or professional) as to recount Mr. Colson's sordid past, or to raise the question of whether he was a hero or a traitor, the genealogical line between his Watergate-era machinations and those of his present-day successors would have been all too painfully clear. The main difference is that in the Nixon White House, the president's men plotted behind closed doors. The current administration is now so brazen it does its dirty work in plain sight.
In the most recent example, all the president's men slimed and intimidated Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths for its errant Koran story; led by Scott McClellan, they said it was unthinkable that any American guard could be disrespectful of Islam's holy book. These neo-Colsons easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, both of whom said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths were unrelated to Newsweek. Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon mimicry: a Pentagon report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards was released two weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the Memorial Day weekend's little-read papers.
At other times the new Colsons top the old one. Though Nixon aspired to punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding, he never imagined that his apparatchiks could seize the top executive positions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor did he come up with the brilliant ideas of putting journalists covertly on the administration payroll and of hiring an outside P.R. firm (Ketchum) to codify an enemies list by ranking news organizations and individual reporters on the basis of how favorably they cover a specific administration policy (No Child Left Behind). President Bush has even succeeded in emasculating the post-Watergate reform that was supposed to help curb Nixonian secrecy, the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
THE journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get to connect those dots on the news media's center stage of television. You are more likely to hear instead of how Watergate inspired too much "gotcha" journalism. That's a rather absurd premise given that no "gotcha" journalist got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the false intimations of incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American officials to sell a war that now threatens to match the unpopularity and marathon length of Vietnam.
Only once during the Deep Throat rollout did I see a palpable, if perhaps unconscious, effort to link the White House of 1972 with that of 2005. It occurred at the start, when ABC News, with the first comprehensive report on Vanity Fair's scoop, interrupted President Bush's post-Memorial Day Rose Garden news conference to break the story. Suddenly the image of the current president blathering on about how hunky-dory everything is in Iraq was usurped by repeated showings of the scene in which the newly resigned Nixon walked across the adjacent White House lawn to the helicopter that would carry him into exile.
But in the days that followed, Nixon and his history and the long shadows they cast largely vanished from the TV screen. In their place were constant nostalgic replays of young Redford and flinty Holbrook. Follow the bait-and-switch.
June 12, 2005
Don't Follow the Money
By FRANK RICH
THE morning the Deep Throat story broke, the voice on my answering machine was as raspy as Hal Holbrook's. "I just want you to remember that I wrote 'Follow the money,' " said my caller. "I want to know if anybody will give me credit. Watch for the accuracy of the media!"
The voice belonged to my friend William Goldman, who wrote the movie "All the President's Men." His words proved more than a little prescient. As if on cue, journalists everywhere - from The New York Times to The Economist to The Washington Post itself - would soon start attributing this classic line of dialogue to the newly unmasked Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt. But the line was not in Woodward and Bernstein's book or in The Post's Watergate reportage or in Bob Woodward's contemporaneous notes. It was the invention of the author of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Marathon Man" and "The Princess Bride."
This confusion of Hollywood's version of history with the genuine article would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the Deep Throat coverage. Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he "follow the money" into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old showing signs of dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with Larry King? How did Vanity Fair scoop The Post? How does Robert Redford feel about it all? Such were the questions that killed time for a nation awaiting the much-heralded feature mediathon, the Michael Jackson verdict.
Richard Nixon and Watergate itself, meanwhile, were often reduced to footnotes. Three years ago, on Watergate's 30th anniversary, an ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn't explain what the scandal was, and no one was racing to enlighten them this time around. Vanity Fair may have taken the trouble to remind us that Watergate was a web of crime yielding the convictions and guilty pleas of more than 30 White House and Nixon campaign officials, but few others did. Watergate has gone back to being the "third-rate burglary" of Nixon administration spin. It is once again being covered up.
Not without reason. Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the long national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt fun by casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. "The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before" was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."
The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon .
This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished. To foster it, Nixon's special counsel, Charles W. Colson, embarked on a ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust action against the networks if they didn't run pro-Nixon stories. Watergate tapes and memos make Mr. Colson, who boasted of "destroying the old establishment," sound like the founding father of today's blogging lynch mobs. He exulted in bullying CBS to cut back its Watergate reports before the '72 election. He enlisted NBC in pro-administration propaganda by browbeating it to repackage 10-day-old coverage of Tricia Nixon's wedding as a prime-time special. It was the Colson office as well that compiled a White House enemies list that included journalists who had the audacity to question administration policies.
Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment on Mr. Felt - and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. "I want kids to look up to heroes," Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC's "Today" show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring "the confidence of the president of the United States." Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times's Deep Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The "Today" host, Matt Lauer, didn't mention any of this - or even that his guest had done jail time. None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he was ubiquitous - ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only as a "former White House counsel."
Had anyone been so rude (or professional) as to recount Mr. Colson's sordid past, or to raise the question of whether he was a hero or a traitor, the genealogical line between his Watergate-era machinations and those of his present-day successors would have been all too painfully clear. The main difference is that in the Nixon White House, the president's men plotted behind closed doors. The current administration is now so brazen it does its dirty work in plain sight.
In the most recent example, all the president's men slimed and intimidated Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths for its errant Koran story; led by Scott McClellan, they said it was unthinkable that any American guard could be disrespectful of Islam's holy book. These neo-Colsons easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, both of whom said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths were unrelated to Newsweek. Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon mimicry: a Pentagon report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards was released two weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the Memorial Day weekend's little-read papers.
At other times the new Colsons top the old one. Though Nixon aspired to punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding, he never imagined that his apparatchiks could seize the top executive positions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor did he come up with the brilliant ideas of putting journalists covertly on the administration payroll and of hiring an outside P.R. firm (Ketchum) to codify an enemies list by ranking news organizations and individual reporters on the basis of how favorably they cover a specific administration policy (No Child Left Behind). President Bush has even succeeded in emasculating the post-Watergate reform that was supposed to help curb Nixonian secrecy, the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
THE journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get to connect those dots on the news media's center stage of television. You are more likely to hear instead of how Watergate inspired too much "gotcha" journalism. That's a rather absurd premise given that no "gotcha" journalist got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the false intimations of incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American officials to sell a war that now threatens to match the unpopularity and marathon length of Vietnam.
Only once during the Deep Throat rollout did I see a palpable, if perhaps unconscious, effort to link the White House of 1972 with that of 2005. It occurred at the start, when ABC News, with the first comprehensive report on Vanity Fair's scoop, interrupted President Bush's post-Memorial Day Rose Garden news conference to break the story. Suddenly the image of the current president blathering on about how hunky-dory everything is in Iraq was usurped by repeated showings of the scene in which the newly resigned Nixon walked across the adjacent White House lawn to the helicopter that would carry him into exile.
But in the days that followed, Nixon and his history and the long shadows they cast largely vanished from the TV screen. In their place were constant nostalgic replays of young Redford and flinty Holbrook. Follow the bait-and-switch.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
THE BIG FIX IS IN! FEDS DROP BIG TOBACCO PENALTY!
Ha ha! It is to laugh. The government (which under Ashcroft wanted to dump this case) has asked for nothing significant in the penalty of decades of tobacco companies' lies and manipulation. Yes, here's another example of the rich and powerful $#%@ing on the people via the cozy insider action of the Bush administration.
washingtonpost.com
Tobacco Escapes Huge Penalty
U.S. Seeks $10 Billion Instead of $130 Billion
washingtonpost.com
Tobacco Escapes Huge Penalty
U.S. Seeks $10 Billion Instead of $130 Billion
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 8, 2005; A01
After eight months of courtroom argument, Justice Department lawyers abruptly upset a landmark civil racketeering case against the tobacco industry yesterday by asking for less than 8 percent of the expected penalty.
As he concluded closing arguments in the six-year-old lawsuit, Justice Department lawyer Stephen D. Brody shocked tobacco company representatives and anti-tobacco activists by announcing that the government will not seek the $130 billion that a government expert had testified was necessary to fund smoking-cessation programs. Instead, Brody said, the Justice Department will ask tobacco companies to pay $10 billion over five years to help millions of Americans quit smoking.
Before it was cut, the cessation program was the most significant financial penalty still available to the government as part of its litigation, which had been the largest civil racketeering and conspiracy case in U.S. history. The government contended that six tobacco companies engaged in a 50-year conspiracy to defraud and addict smokers and then conceal the dangers of cigarettes.
"We were very surprised," said Dan Webb, lawyer for Altria Group's Philip Morris USA and the coordinating attorney in the case. "They've gone down from $130 billion to $10 billion with absolutely no explanation. It's clear the government hasn't thought through what it's doing."
The Justice Department offered little explanation for the figure. Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum Jr. and members of the trial team declined to answer questions as the court session ended. In 2001, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft tried to settle or shelve the government's racketeering case against the industry before a public outcry forced its revival.
"It feels like a political decision to take into consideration the tobacco companies' financial interest rather than health interests of 45 million addicted smokers," said William V. Corr, director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "The government proved its case, but the levels of funding are a shadow of the cessation treatment program that the government's own expert witness recommended."
Sources and government officials close to the case said the trial lawyers wanted to request $130 billion for smoking-cessation programs but were pressured by leaders in the attorney general's office, particularly McCallum, to make the cut. Arguments within the Justice Department continued behind the scenes through yesterday morning, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the controversy over the matter.
When the case began in 2004, the government sought to force the tobacco industry to pay $280 billion in allegedly ill-gotten profits. But in February, a federal appeals court ruled that the administration could not seek that penalty.
Michael Fiore, the government expert who recommended $130 billion for cessation programs, is a medical professor and director of a tobacco research center who chaired the subcommittee on tobacco cessation in the Department of Health and Human Services' Interagency Committee on Smoking and Health.
His testimony was widely considered to represent the sum the government was seeking for a cessation program, though Justice Department lawyers had made no formal demand until yesterday.
The strength of the government's case hinged on a large collection of internal tobacco company documents, many of which were never before made public. The government began its case in September by showing on an oversized projection screen the written memos of tobacco executives and scientists as they described their plans to keep customers in the dark about whether their habit was addictive or dangerous and to encourage young people to smoke.
Facing those same internal documents in another suit,the tobacco industry in 1998 agreed to pay $246 billion to settle a lawsuit filed by states to recover their costs for the medical treatment of smokers.
Justice Department spokeswoman Cynthia Magnuson said the department could ask the court to force the industry to pay more in future years for cessation programs, which include a staffed help line for smokers, treatment programs and possibly free medications. She suggested the penalty was designed to comply with the recent appeals court ruling that such penalties could not be used to punish past fraud. Sources close to the case said the cessation program is either a valid penalty or it's not; the dollar figure should not change that.
"This proposal has been designed to be a forward-looking remedy to prevent and restrain future wrongful conduct consistent with the recent Circuit Court opinion in this case," she said.
U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler, who is presiding over the case, is expected to decide in the next few months whether the government proved its case of an industry-wide conspiracy and whether to order any penalties against the companies. Among the other remedies the government is still seeking are an industry-funded anti-smoking educational campaign and a court injunction to stop the companies from targeting youth in their marketing.
The government also wants the judge to appoint a court monitor to watch over industry practices and ensure that tobacco companies do not commit fraud in the future. Kessler has repeatedly expressed concern about how such proposals would work.
Defendants in the case include Philip Morris USA; R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Brown & Williamson, which have merged to form Reynolds American Inc.; British American Tobacco; the Lorillard Tobacco unit of Loew's Corp.; and Vector Group Ltd.'s Liggett Group Inc. They began their closing arguments today.
Anti-smoking advocates assailed the decision as a self-inflicted blow that would help the tobacco companies' bottom line and miss a well-earned chance to help American smokers.
William B. Schultz, a former Justice Department official who oversaw the lawsuit under the Clinton administration, said that "it's disappointing, to say the least, that at the final stages of this litigation they have pulled their punches in such a significant way. This is the loss of a significant opportunity to advance public health. Smoking is the number one preventable disease. It kills 400,000 people a year."
Lead government attorney Sharon Eubanks had summed up the trial early yesterday, saying the government had proved the industry engaged in a "decades-long pattern of . . . misrepresentations, half-truths, deceptions and lies that continue to this day."
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
MORE DENIAL FROM THE ABYSS
Spin. Smoke. Mirrors. Whatever. The NY TIMES reports the army can't even meet its recently LOWERED recruiting goals. This administration just throws out everything but the truth on what is happening with the war, the economy. Take your pick. And then they call you a liar or unpatriotic for questioning them for being liars (and greedy, stupid and small). Its war in Iraq if failing. It's creating more terrorists. It's making the world more dangerous for America and it's not only losing out on new recruits, officers are bailing like never before.
And YET! Where are the red state conservatives' children? Why are they not signing up to go to war? We should have a GLUT of WHITE, right wing, Christian, conservative recruits! If there is no hypocrisy among conservatives their children should be the patriots they claim they are (since they cast vile dispersions on any questioning the administration or its war) and flooding the army. Hell, Bush's daughters and all his male nephews should be in the military and serving over in Iraq. But they aren't. And it's sad to see fairly decent conservatives back this corrupt regime while led by the nose via its false nationalism and greed over tax cuts. It's nothing but a "get mine while I can" group of opportunists with no moral understanding. Or an intellectual one. And let's face it. These people aren't dumb because they are keeping their kids out of the military. Only they would never admit the real reason why.
"At long last. Have you no decency, sir?" --- Army Attorney Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy
Sam
June 8, 2005 NYT
After Lowering Goal, Army Falls Short on May Recruits
By ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, June 7 - Even after reducing its recruiting target for May, the Army missed it by about 25 percent, Army officials said on Tuesday. The shortfall would have been even bigger had the Army stuck to its original goal for the month.
On Friday, the Army is expected to announce that it met only 75 percent of its recruiting goal for May, the fourth consecutive monthly shortfall in the number of new recruits sent to basic training. Just over 5,000 new recruits entered boot camp in May.
But the news could have appeared worse. Early last month, the Army, with no public notice, lowered its long-stated May goal to 6,700 recruits from 8,050. Compared with the original target, the Army achieved only 62.6 percent of its goal for the month.
Army officials defended the shift on Tuesday, saying it was not uncommon to change monthly goals at midyear. They said that the latest change reflected the reality that the Army was not going to meet its May goal, and that it made more sense to shift some of that quota to the summer months, traditionally a better season for recruiters to attract new high school graduates.
"We typically reallocate monthly goals during the course of the year," said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman, who said that the Army still expected to meet its overall annual goal of shipping 80,000 new recruits to boot camp. "The summer is relatively easier for recruiting."
Because of a series of recent incidents in which Army recruiters were found to be breaking or bending rules to meet their monthly quotas, two senior Army officials acknowledged that the shift in May could leave the impression that the Army was playing "a shell game" with its recruiting figures, shifting its goals to make the numbers look better than they are. But the two officials, who were speaking on condition of anonymity because the monthly figures have not yet been made public, said that impression was not justified.
The Pentagon has delayed until Friday the public release of May recruiting figures for all the armed services, a decision some military officials say is an effort to minimize what has become a drumbeat of bad news for the Army and the Marine Corps at the beginning of each month. Previously, each service, as well as the National Guard and the Reserve, released their monthly figures on different days at the start of each month, with each gaining some media attention.
But a Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said, "Any large organization with data that is of public interest would want to present it in a way that makes sense and is complete for the entire organization."
The Army's figures for May put the service about 8,300 soldiers behind its projected year-to-date number of enlistees sent to basic training by now. "The trend line is going against them," said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.
The Army has tried to reverse the trend by adding 1,000 recruiters since last September, starting a new advertising campaign, offering selected enlistment bonuses of more than $20,000 and pairing returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan with recruiters to attract soldiers.
Harvey Perritt, a spokesman for the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, said the original May quota was set months ago when officials expected an early surge in recruiting. That did not happen. By April, only 50 percent of the training positions at the Army's five major training centers were filled, down from 92 percent in the corresponding period a year earlier, Mr. Perritt said. The Army then reallocated some of the May quota.
"The shifting of the goal suggests to me that the Army is aggressively working the problem and not passively sitting by and letting the mission slip away," said Beth J. Asch, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation.
Two recruiters in the New York area, insisting on anonymity because the Army has ordered all recruiters not to talk to reporters, said their mission for June had not been changed, nor had the goals for July, August and September.
One of the recruiters said he doubted that the summer would yield more recruits than the spring. "The summer is supposed to be big, but I don't think it's going to happen," he said. "I don't see much interest among the high school seniors."
To help offset the recruiting shortfalls, the Army is also trying to keep more soldiers. A memorandum from the Army's top personnel officer last month outlined a plan to reduce attrition among first-term enlistees by 1 percent, and retain 3,000 soldiers.
The memorandum, first reported last week by The Wall Street Journal, requires the approval of more senior-level brigade commanders, instead of battalion commanders, to discharge soldiers for pregnancy, drug or alcohol abuse, or poor fitness.
Colonel Hilferty said the Army was ahead of this year's goal to re-enlist 64,162 soldiers, which is 8,000 more than last year's target. Aided by tax-free re-enlistment bonuses, virtually every Army unit that has served or is serving in Iraq or Afghanistan has exceeded its re-enlistment goals in the past two years.
Monday, May 30, 2005
An Editorial That Speaks The Truth About Our War Dead
Minneapolis - St. Paul Star Tribune Editorial:
Memorial Day/Praise bravery, seek forgiveness
Published May 30, 2005
Nothing young Americans can do in life is more honorable than offering themselves for the defense of their nation. It requires great selflessness and sacrifice, and quite possibly the forfeiture of life itself. On Memorial Day 2005, we gather to remember all those who gave us that ultimate gift. Because they are so fresh in our minds, those who have died in Iraq make a special claim on our thoughts and our prayers.
In exchange for our uniformed young people's willingness to offer the gift of their lives, civilian Americans owe them something important: It is our duty to ensure that they never are called to make that sacrifice unless it is truly necessary for the security of the country. In the case of Iraq, the American public has failed them; we did not prevent the Bush administration from spending their blood in an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. President Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let them. Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes. Perhaps it happened because Americans, understandably, don't expect untruths from those in power. But that works better as an explanation than as an excuse.
The "smoking gun," as some call it, surfaced on May 1 in the London Times. It is a highly classified document containing the minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting at 10 Downing Street in which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair on talks he'd just held in Washington. His mission was to determine the Bush administration's intentions toward Iraq.
At a time when the White House was saying it had "no plans" for an invasion, the British document says Dearlove reported that there had been "a perceptible shift in attitude" in Washington. "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The (National Security Council) had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
It turns out that former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill were right. Both have been pilloried for writing that by summer 2002 Bush had already decided to invade.
Walter Pincus, writing in the Washington Post on May 22, provides further evidence that the administration did, indeed, fix the intelligence on Iraq to fit a policy it had already embraced: invasion and regime change. Just four days before Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003, Pincus writes, the National Security Council staff "put out a call for new intelligence to bolster claims" about Saddam Hussein's WMD programs. The call went out because the NSC staff believed the case was weak. Moreover, Pincus says, "as the war approached, many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein's alleged weapons programs." But no one at high ranks in the administration would listen to them.
On the day before Bush's speech, the CIA's Berlin station chief warned that the source for some of what Bush would say was untrustworthy. Bush said it anyway. He based part of his most important annual speech to the American people on a single, dubious, unnamed source. The source was later found to have fabricated his information.
Also comes word, from the May 19 New York Times, that senior U.S. military leaders are not encouraged about prospects in Iraq. Yes, they think the United States can prevail, but as one said, it may take "many years."
As this bloody month of car bombs and American deaths -- the most since January -- comes to a close, as we gather in groups small and large to honor our war dead, let us all sing of their bravery and sacrifice. But let us also ask their forgiveness for sending them to a war that should never have happened. In the 1960s it was Vietnam. Today it is Iraq. Let us resolve to never, ever make this mistake again. Our young people are simply too precious.
Memorial Day/Praise bravery, seek forgiveness
Published May 30, 2005
Nothing young Americans can do in life is more honorable than offering themselves for the defense of their nation. It requires great selflessness and sacrifice, and quite possibly the forfeiture of life itself. On Memorial Day 2005, we gather to remember all those who gave us that ultimate gift. Because they are so fresh in our minds, those who have died in Iraq make a special claim on our thoughts and our prayers.
In exchange for our uniformed young people's willingness to offer the gift of their lives, civilian Americans owe them something important: It is our duty to ensure that they never are called to make that sacrifice unless it is truly necessary for the security of the country. In the case of Iraq, the American public has failed them; we did not prevent the Bush administration from spending their blood in an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. President Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let them. Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes. Perhaps it happened because Americans, understandably, don't expect untruths from those in power. But that works better as an explanation than as an excuse.
The "smoking gun," as some call it, surfaced on May 1 in the London Times. It is a highly classified document containing the minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting at 10 Downing Street in which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair on talks he'd just held in Washington. His mission was to determine the Bush administration's intentions toward Iraq.
At a time when the White House was saying it had "no plans" for an invasion, the British document says Dearlove reported that there had been "a perceptible shift in attitude" in Washington. "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The (National Security Council) had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
It turns out that former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill were right. Both have been pilloried for writing that by summer 2002 Bush had already decided to invade.
Walter Pincus, writing in the Washington Post on May 22, provides further evidence that the administration did, indeed, fix the intelligence on Iraq to fit a policy it had already embraced: invasion and regime change. Just four days before Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003, Pincus writes, the National Security Council staff "put out a call for new intelligence to bolster claims" about Saddam Hussein's WMD programs. The call went out because the NSC staff believed the case was weak. Moreover, Pincus says, "as the war approached, many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein's alleged weapons programs." But no one at high ranks in the administration would listen to them.
On the day before Bush's speech, the CIA's Berlin station chief warned that the source for some of what Bush would say was untrustworthy. Bush said it anyway. He based part of his most important annual speech to the American people on a single, dubious, unnamed source. The source was later found to have fabricated his information.
Also comes word, from the May 19 New York Times, that senior U.S. military leaders are not encouraged about prospects in Iraq. Yes, they think the United States can prevail, but as one said, it may take "many years."
As this bloody month of car bombs and American deaths -- the most since January -- comes to a close, as we gather in groups small and large to honor our war dead, let us all sing of their bravery and sacrifice. But let us also ask their forgiveness for sending them to a war that should never have happened. In the 1960s it was Vietnam. Today it is Iraq. Let us resolve to never, ever make this mistake again. Our young people are simply too precious.
Monday, May 23, 2005
Unfortunate Son And The Bastards That Lied And Exploited His Death
So the Army not only LIED about what happened to Tillman, they EXPLOITED it at the time. And there's never ANY responsibility taken (in this administration). But here's what I don't understand. All these red states that voted for Bush and the war, why aren't their sons and daughters FLOODING the military right now? They should have to be turning potential recruits away. I know several people whose kids could join up but they haven't. And they don't want to give back any tax cut to FUND the war either. Tillman gave up over three and a half million dollars AND HIS LIFE. This is why Eisenhower's son quit the GOP. It's NOT the GOP, it's the corporate elite/CIA/neocons leading people by the noise while evoking nationalism and lying to them to usurp our democracy to make a buck. It's disgusting and the most vile anti-American attack on our values in history.
Tillman family criticize Army's friendly-fire probe
Mon May 23, 6:20 AM ET
The parents of Army Ranger Pat Tillman are frustrated and angry over the military's investigations into the former professional football player's friendly-fire death in Afghanistan in 2004, The Washington Post reported on Monday.
A report by Brig Gen. Gary Jones of the Army Special Operations Command found that the U.S. Army determined within days of his death that Tillman had been killed mistakenly by fellow Rangers but did not tell his family or the public for weeks and even destroyed evidence.
In separate interviews, Tillman's parents, who are divorced, said they are do not believe they will ever get the full story, the newspaper reported.
Pat Tillman walked away from a $3.6 million contract with the NFL's Arizona Cardinals to sign up as an elite Army ranger, along with his brother, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He was hailed as a hero and a role model.
The Army's initial public account of Tillman's death on April 22, 2004, in a remote canyon near the Pakistani border indicated he had been slain by enemy fire during an ambush.
"The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting," Mary Tillman told the newspaper.
Patrick Tillman Sr. blamed high-ranking Army officers for presenting "outright lies" to the family and to the public, The Washington Post said.
"They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy," said Tillman, a San Jose, Calif. lawyer.
Army officials said on Friday that the Army "reaffirms its heartfelt sorrow to the Tillman family and all families who have lost loved ones during this war," The Post reported.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Officers Plot Exit Strategy
When are my conservative friends going to wake up from their comas and realize how they have been led by blind nationalism into a snake pit by the arrogant White House neocons? How many Americans and Iraqis must die? How many billions of dollars of our taxpayer money must be flushed down the crapper (at the expense of fighting the problems of poverty, poor education and disease here at home)? And for what? Bush is doing EXACTLY what the Muslim terrorists WANT HIM TO DO. Bankrupt America! Overtax the military (making America less secure in the long process). Bin Laden said so (in his speech before the last presidential election). This isn't some new trick! It's been going on in that part of the world for centuries (Reread your history. Check out your Kipling on Afghanistan.) And Bush and the neocons played right into their trap. Muslim fundamentalism and terror is growing STRONGER under Bush (The Pentagon acknowledged so in a report to the Senate). Blowing things up won't stop terrorism but being SMARTER than the terrorist will make it become a shrivelled version of itself. If anyone thinks George Bush has the brains to lead in an innovative and effective manner then you've already swallowed the Kool Aid and are comatose to a living death state. At least read this report and learn what the best and brightest in our military know. They love America but they understand the people in control have no clue so they are getting out while they still can. Meanwhile it's all going to hell under Bush.
Many young lieutenants and captains, key leaders in combat, are deciding against Army careers in light of the open-ended war on terrorism.
By Mark Mazzetti
Times Staff Writer
May 22, 2005
KILLEEN, Texas — Army Capts. Dave Fulton and Geoff Heiple spent 12 months dodging roadside bombs and rounding up insurgents along Baghdad's "highway of death" — the six miles of pavement linking downtown Baghdad to the capital city's airport. Two weeks after returning stateside to Ft. Hood, they ventured to a spartan conference room at the local Howard Johnson to find out about changing careers.
Lured by a headhunting firm that places young military officers in private-sector jobs, the pair, both 26, expected anonymity in the crowded room.
Instead, as Fulton and Heiple sipped Budweisers pulled from Styrofoam coolers next to the door, they spotted nearly a dozen familiar faces from their cavalry battalion, which had just ended a yearlong combat tour in Iraq.
The shocks of recognition came as they exchanged quick, awkward glances with others from their unit, each man clearly surprised to see someone else considering a life outside the military.
"This is a real eye-opener," said Fulton, a West Point graduate who saw a handful of cadets from his class. "It seems like everyone in the room is either from my squad or from my class."
More than three years after the Sept. 11 attacks spawned an era of unprecedented strain on the all-volunteer military, it is scenes like this that keep the Army's senior generals awake at night. With thousands of soldiers currently on their second combat deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan and some preparing for their third this fall, evidence is mounting that an exodus of young Army officers may be looming on the horizon.
It is especially troubling for Pentagon officials that the Army's pool of young captains, which forms the backbone of infantry and armored units deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, could be the hardest hit.
Last year, Army lieutenants and captains left the service at an annual rate of 8.7% — the highest since 2001. Pentagon officials say they expect the attrition rate to improve slightly this year. Yet interviews with several dozen military officers revealed an undercurrent of discontent within the Army's young officer corps that the Pentagon's statistics do not yet capture.
Young captains in the Army are looking ahead to repeated combat tours, years away from their families and a global war that their commanders tell them could last for decades. Like other college grads in their mid-20s, they are making decisions about what to do with their lives.
And many officers, who until recently had planned to pursue careers in the military, are deciding that it's a future they can't sign up for.
The officers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan just wrapped up a year of grueling counterinsurgency operations — a type of combat the U.S. largely avoided after its struggle in Vietnam and that many in the Pentagon believe is the new face of war. They were in Iraq during last spring's uprisings in Fallouja and Najaf, June's transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government and block-to-block fighting during the retaking of Fallouja in November.
These officers have, in most cases, more counterinsurgency experience than any of their superiors. And they are the people the Army most fears losing.
The officers interviewed for this article are proud of what they accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they are generally optimistic that the two nations can eventually emerge as functioning, if unstable, democracies.
Those just returning from Iraq ended their combat tours on a positive note with successful parliamentary elections in January, which had been the singular focus of their deployment.
Yet their pride is tempered by uncertainty about what lies ahead in an unconventional war in which victory may never be declared.
"The undefined goals of the war on terror are making it really hard for the Army to keep people right now," Fulton said.
By the time they make captain, young officers are usually approaching the end of their four- or five-year commitment. Army spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty said the attrition rate for junior officers was not yet alarming, and the Army had several initiatives in place to help retain those deciding whether to make a career out of the military.
The Pentagon hopes that by next year, a significant troop reduction in Iraq will allow the Army to slow the pace of troop deployments, giving soldiers two years at home for every year in battle.
Yet Pentagon officials admit it is uncertain that this can happen by 2006.
"I still don't know if we can make it," said a senior Army officer at the Pentagon. "You tell me what Iraq is going to look like next year."
Meanwhile, the Army is dispatching combat units to Iraq and Afghanistan after soldiers have had just one year at home, a pace that is taking a toll around the country.
Timothy Muchmore, a civilian Army official at the Pentagon and a retired tank officer, said he was worried about an exodus of young officers. He summed up the problem this way:
"You take a junior officer, you send them overseas for a year. They win a lot of medals, and they're a hero. But when you send them back a second time, the odds go up that they won't make it home alive and it becomes even harder on their family. Are they any more of a hero for having served a second time? No.
"The guys returning from Iraq and Afghanistan believe they have done at least the minimum for the security of their country, and they are proud of their service," he said. "But the world is now their oyster."
Private-sector pitch
Inside the overheated conference room at the Howard Johnson in Killeen, Fulton and Heiple listened to a well-rehearsed pitch about what the world might have to offer.
At the front of the room, Andrew Hollitt, a beefy, gregarious former Army officer turned headhunter spoke in marketing terms about how eager private-sector employers were for young, combat-tested officers and senior noncommissioned officers.
"You are a commodity that brings a tremendous amount to the table," he told the packed room, sipping from a can of Budweiser. "I can sell something that I believe in. And it's people like you."
The Lucas Group was not trying to persuade them to leave the Army, Hollitt said, only to present them with another set of options.
"I am red, white and blue on the inside," the recruiter assured the capacity crowd.
In a telephone interview after the recruiting session, Hollitt said he had yet to see the same volume of young soldiers contact the Lucas Group as he did during the late 1990s, when the military drawdown forced the Pentagon to slash its numbers and push young officers out of the service.
At the same time, he said, the pace of Army deployments was clearly having an effect — and that the quality of those leaving was very high. "I am seeing the highest caliber of candidates now that I have seen in five years of doing this," he said. "The companies we work with are absolutely, unbelievably impressed."
Employers such as General Electric Co., Home Depot Inc. and others are always on the lookout for managerial talent, Hollitt said, and mid-level commanders tested in war are considered experienced leaders.
By the time they make captain, he said, the officers usually have command experience leading an infantry or armor company, which forces them to make life-and-death decisions on a daily basis.
After the session was over, Heiple and Fulton were wary about what they had just heard. And it was not that the average starting salaries of $50,000 to $70,000 were much more than they had earned in Iraq when combat pay and bonuses were included.
Instead, one of their biggest concerns about working in the civilian world was that it was "cheesier" and less serious than what they currently do for a living.
"I kind of worry that the corporate world is a lot like 'Office Space,' " said Heiple, referring to the 1999 movie that parodied American office park culture.
Combat experience
The 1st Cavalry Division was considered for the assault on Baghdad in 2003 but ended up staying stateside as commanders in Washington and the Middle East decided to pare down the invasion force.
When the division was notified that it would be heading to Iraq in 2004, a year after the fall of Baghdad, the 1st Cav's officers thought they had missed out on the action.
"I thought we were going to be the third string of the JV," Heiple said.
Far from being over, the war in Iraq had entered its bloodiest stage, and Heiple and Fulton's battalion was in charge of patrolling Baghdad's restive Al Rashid district. Their unit had the Sisyphean task of trying to secure Baghdad's airport highway, the road many in the battalion called the "shooting gallery" because of the constant attacks against U.S. troops.
Over time and through grim experience, they learned the brutal rules that govern counterinsurgency warfare.
They point with a certain amount of pride to a January incident that occurred soon after the battalion's most respected and indispensable Iraqi interpreter, Ethar, was assassinated.
Ethar had been lured to an insurgent safe house by another Iraqi interpreter who had been paid off by insurgents. There, Ethar was brutally beaten and shot in the head. Soldiers found his body while on patrol.
News of the death hit the battalion hard, and they planned their revenge. Acting on information from an Iraqi source, the battalion hit multiple targets around west Baghdad in a single night, which some of the battalion's officers only half-jokingly called "the night of justice."
"We took down the whole cell" in a night, Fulton recalled, capturing or killing all the insurgents on their target list.
"It was personal, and it felt really good," he added.
Heiple, a native of Jonestown, Pa., said he would not have traded for anything the experience of leading troops in combat or of earning the 1st Cavalry's trademark Stetson hat and gold spurs — given to cavalry soldiers when they have served in a combat zone.
Yet, with these achievements behind him, the Notre Dame graduate said he was looking for a life with more stability. Heiple decided while he was in Iraq that he would leave the Army when his commitment expires next month. He plans to move with his girlfriend to Austin, where he hopes to attend law school at the University of Texas.
Heiple's decision to leave the Army did not come suddenly. At 26, he felt his window of opportunity to change careers was closing. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he wanted to follow a different path.
"I can only wait so long," Heiple said.
Fulton spent eight years of his youth in the Congo, where his father worked as a bush pilot. His family relocated to Haiti in 1990 and spent three years there before they were evacuated before U.S. troops landed on the island in 1994.
Fulton then moved to Redlands, Calif. When he was in high school there, the military piqued his interest and he visited an Army recruiting station. His test scores led one recruiter to suggest that he instead apply to West Point. During his senior year, the late Rep. Sonny Bono (R-Palm Springs) nominated Fulton for his military commission to the armed forces academy in New York state.
Fulton returned from Iraq in March and went on a cruise to Mexico with his wife during his 30-day leave. His wife, Fulton said, wants him to leave the military more than anything.
In June, the two will move with their 3-year-old son to Ft. Knox, Ky., where Fulton will begin a six-month course on commanding armored units.
He will still have a year left of his Army commitment when the course is completed, yet Fulton admits that given the Army's current pace of deployments, he is leaning toward leaving the service.
"If West Point didn't have a five-year commitment," he said, "I'd probably be pursuing something else right now. I know my wife would like me to choose something else immediately."
Careers in the balance
A college graduate with an Army ROTC scholarship usually owes four years of active duty to the military, along with a period in the Army Reserves or National Guard. A West Point graduate owes five.
Army officials know that if they are able to persuade captains to remain in uniform a few years past their initial commitment, the odds are good they will eventually commit to a full 20-year military career.
But in the words of one Army captain, a West Point graduate who spent 10 months in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 and plans to leave the Army next year: "A lot of guys making their decision at the five-year mark are not making their decision for [just] the next three years. They are making their decision about whether to make a career out of the military.
"The guys in my age group are looking ahead and deciding that's not a life they want to live."
Mid-level officers around the country are confronting the same choice. The 1-34 armor battalion of the 1st Infantry Division returned last year to Ft. Riley, Kan., after a year in Iraq's so-called Sunni Triangle, the region of heaviest conflict. The battalion is expecting to return to Iraq later this year, and many young officers are choosing to get out before then.
Capt. Eric Emerling, the battalion's fire support officer, is one of three captains who decided to leave after returning from Iraq. Emerling said he initially looked forward to a career in the Army. When he returned, his superiors offered him command of an artillery battery, a milestone promotion for a career officer.
But he and his wife decided in January that they did not want to commit to a future of "repeated deployments for the next 13 years."
"What tipped the scale is that I have a 2-year-old daughter. I want more stability for her," Emerling said by telephone, his little girl in the background competing for her father's attention. "I missed the first half of her life. I'm not willing to do that again."
The 27-year-old captain is moving to Connecticut, where he has a job with a landscaping company. He said he was concerned about the Army's future, with many of the military's young leaders planning their exits.
"I see how many people are getting out here at my local unit level. It's a bit of a worry," he said. "We lost a lot of lieutenants and captains."
Life outside the zone
Heiple and Fulton live in an apartment complex in Georgetown, Texas, an Austin suburb 30 miles south of Ft. Hood's main gate. When searching for housing after they returned from Iraq, they specifically sought apartments some distance from the base.
Killeen, with its infrastructure catering to thousands of soldiers and their families, provides constant reminders of military life. But in Georgetown, a soldier walking the streets in desert camouflage is a rarity.
The young officers are coming to the end of their post-deployment "reintegration" period — several weeks of administrative briefings and counseling sessions before they are allowed to leave post for 30 days to visit friends and family.
With their feet propped up on a coffee table piled high with newspapers, DVD cases and back issues of the Economist, Heiple and Fulton watch "Matrix Revolutions" on the recently purchased 50-inch flat screen television in the living room of their neighbor — Capt. Vincent Tuohey, another member of their battalion just back from Iraq.
With distractions such as basketball, bars and new electronic equipment, there is plenty for the young officers to focus on besides their time in Iraq, or on the steady stream of violent news out of the country.
Said Heiple: "You don't purposefully avoid the news. But you don't go out of your way to find it, either."
Tuohey, a Harvard graduate from Annapolis, Md., who earned a master's degree from Cambridge University in Britain, served the last year as an executive officer for a cavalry unit in west Baghdad.
Like all of the soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division who just returned to Ft. Hood, Tuohey is readjusting to life outside a combat zone.
He is edgy sitting in traffic, having taught himself in Iraq to maneuver his Bradley fighting vehicle to avoid city traffic and the inevitable insurgent attacks. The first time he got into a car when he returned to Ft. Hood, his heart began racing and he broke out in a sweat.
Tuohey was a lieutenant during his deployment in Iraq and is proud that most of the decision-making for counterinsurgency missions fell to the Army's youngest officers.
"At no time before has the Army had LTs [lieutenants] who have made decisions like that on a daily basis," he said.
As he sees it, the military now has an entire generation of young officers who are battle-hardened and knowledgeable about battling insurgencies.
Even in Iraq, he said, senior commanders were keenly aware of those officers who might be considering leaving the military and applied various degrees of pressure to persuade them to remain in uniform.
They appeal to the sense of mission, Tuohey said, and the sense of purpose of military life that doesn't exist in the outside world. And they usually bring up an example of a friend who left the Army only to regret the decision.
Yet Tuohey, who was promoted to captain upon returning to Ft. Hood, said he was not sure whether he would stay in the Army when his commitment ended next year. He said he was tempted to work on Wall Street.
It's not the money he's after. It's the fact that an Army that was gutted after the Cold War was promising him a future of perpetual deployments fighting a war that could last for decades.
That is not a future he is sure he can commit to.
"What's the end point?" he asked. "When do you declare victory?"
Many young lieutenants and captains, key leaders in combat, are deciding against Army careers in light of the open-ended war on terrorism.
By Mark Mazzetti
Times Staff Writer
May 22, 2005
KILLEEN, Texas — Army Capts. Dave Fulton and Geoff Heiple spent 12 months dodging roadside bombs and rounding up insurgents along Baghdad's "highway of death" — the six miles of pavement linking downtown Baghdad to the capital city's airport. Two weeks after returning stateside to Ft. Hood, they ventured to a spartan conference room at the local Howard Johnson to find out about changing careers.
Lured by a headhunting firm that places young military officers in private-sector jobs, the pair, both 26, expected anonymity in the crowded room.
Instead, as Fulton and Heiple sipped Budweisers pulled from Styrofoam coolers next to the door, they spotted nearly a dozen familiar faces from their cavalry battalion, which had just ended a yearlong combat tour in Iraq.
The shocks of recognition came as they exchanged quick, awkward glances with others from their unit, each man clearly surprised to see someone else considering a life outside the military.
"This is a real eye-opener," said Fulton, a West Point graduate who saw a handful of cadets from his class. "It seems like everyone in the room is either from my squad or from my class."
More than three years after the Sept. 11 attacks spawned an era of unprecedented strain on the all-volunteer military, it is scenes like this that keep the Army's senior generals awake at night. With thousands of soldiers currently on their second combat deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan and some preparing for their third this fall, evidence is mounting that an exodus of young Army officers may be looming on the horizon.
It is especially troubling for Pentagon officials that the Army's pool of young captains, which forms the backbone of infantry and armored units deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, could be the hardest hit.
Last year, Army lieutenants and captains left the service at an annual rate of 8.7% — the highest since 2001. Pentagon officials say they expect the attrition rate to improve slightly this year. Yet interviews with several dozen military officers revealed an undercurrent of discontent within the Army's young officer corps that the Pentagon's statistics do not yet capture.
Young captains in the Army are looking ahead to repeated combat tours, years away from their families and a global war that their commanders tell them could last for decades. Like other college grads in their mid-20s, they are making decisions about what to do with their lives.
And many officers, who until recently had planned to pursue careers in the military, are deciding that it's a future they can't sign up for.
The officers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan just wrapped up a year of grueling counterinsurgency operations — a type of combat the U.S. largely avoided after its struggle in Vietnam and that many in the Pentagon believe is the new face of war. They were in Iraq during last spring's uprisings in Fallouja and Najaf, June's transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government and block-to-block fighting during the retaking of Fallouja in November.
These officers have, in most cases, more counterinsurgency experience than any of their superiors. And they are the people the Army most fears losing.
The officers interviewed for this article are proud of what they accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they are generally optimistic that the two nations can eventually emerge as functioning, if unstable, democracies.
Those just returning from Iraq ended their combat tours on a positive note with successful parliamentary elections in January, which had been the singular focus of their deployment.
Yet their pride is tempered by uncertainty about what lies ahead in an unconventional war in which victory may never be declared.
"The undefined goals of the war on terror are making it really hard for the Army to keep people right now," Fulton said.
By the time they make captain, young officers are usually approaching the end of their four- or five-year commitment. Army spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty said the attrition rate for junior officers was not yet alarming, and the Army had several initiatives in place to help retain those deciding whether to make a career out of the military.
The Pentagon hopes that by next year, a significant troop reduction in Iraq will allow the Army to slow the pace of troop deployments, giving soldiers two years at home for every year in battle.
Yet Pentagon officials admit it is uncertain that this can happen by 2006.
"I still don't know if we can make it," said a senior Army officer at the Pentagon. "You tell me what Iraq is going to look like next year."
Meanwhile, the Army is dispatching combat units to Iraq and Afghanistan after soldiers have had just one year at home, a pace that is taking a toll around the country.
Timothy Muchmore, a civilian Army official at the Pentagon and a retired tank officer, said he was worried about an exodus of young officers. He summed up the problem this way:
"You take a junior officer, you send them overseas for a year. They win a lot of medals, and they're a hero. But when you send them back a second time, the odds go up that they won't make it home alive and it becomes even harder on their family. Are they any more of a hero for having served a second time? No.
"The guys returning from Iraq and Afghanistan believe they have done at least the minimum for the security of their country, and they are proud of their service," he said. "But the world is now their oyster."
Private-sector pitch
Inside the overheated conference room at the Howard Johnson in Killeen, Fulton and Heiple listened to a well-rehearsed pitch about what the world might have to offer.
At the front of the room, Andrew Hollitt, a beefy, gregarious former Army officer turned headhunter spoke in marketing terms about how eager private-sector employers were for young, combat-tested officers and senior noncommissioned officers.
"You are a commodity that brings a tremendous amount to the table," he told the packed room, sipping from a can of Budweiser. "I can sell something that I believe in. And it's people like you."
The Lucas Group was not trying to persuade them to leave the Army, Hollitt said, only to present them with another set of options.
"I am red, white and blue on the inside," the recruiter assured the capacity crowd.
In a telephone interview after the recruiting session, Hollitt said he had yet to see the same volume of young soldiers contact the Lucas Group as he did during the late 1990s, when the military drawdown forced the Pentagon to slash its numbers and push young officers out of the service.
At the same time, he said, the pace of Army deployments was clearly having an effect — and that the quality of those leaving was very high. "I am seeing the highest caliber of candidates now that I have seen in five years of doing this," he said. "The companies we work with are absolutely, unbelievably impressed."
Employers such as General Electric Co., Home Depot Inc. and others are always on the lookout for managerial talent, Hollitt said, and mid-level commanders tested in war are considered experienced leaders.
By the time they make captain, he said, the officers usually have command experience leading an infantry or armor company, which forces them to make life-and-death decisions on a daily basis.
After the session was over, Heiple and Fulton were wary about what they had just heard. And it was not that the average starting salaries of $50,000 to $70,000 were much more than they had earned in Iraq when combat pay and bonuses were included.
Instead, one of their biggest concerns about working in the civilian world was that it was "cheesier" and less serious than what they currently do for a living.
"I kind of worry that the corporate world is a lot like 'Office Space,' " said Heiple, referring to the 1999 movie that parodied American office park culture.
Combat experience
The 1st Cavalry Division was considered for the assault on Baghdad in 2003 but ended up staying stateside as commanders in Washington and the Middle East decided to pare down the invasion force.
When the division was notified that it would be heading to Iraq in 2004, a year after the fall of Baghdad, the 1st Cav's officers thought they had missed out on the action.
"I thought we were going to be the third string of the JV," Heiple said.
Far from being over, the war in Iraq had entered its bloodiest stage, and Heiple and Fulton's battalion was in charge of patrolling Baghdad's restive Al Rashid district. Their unit had the Sisyphean task of trying to secure Baghdad's airport highway, the road many in the battalion called the "shooting gallery" because of the constant attacks against U.S. troops.
Over time and through grim experience, they learned the brutal rules that govern counterinsurgency warfare.
They point with a certain amount of pride to a January incident that occurred soon after the battalion's most respected and indispensable Iraqi interpreter, Ethar, was assassinated.
Ethar had been lured to an insurgent safe house by another Iraqi interpreter who had been paid off by insurgents. There, Ethar was brutally beaten and shot in the head. Soldiers found his body while on patrol.
News of the death hit the battalion hard, and they planned their revenge. Acting on information from an Iraqi source, the battalion hit multiple targets around west Baghdad in a single night, which some of the battalion's officers only half-jokingly called "the night of justice."
"We took down the whole cell" in a night, Fulton recalled, capturing or killing all the insurgents on their target list.
"It was personal, and it felt really good," he added.
Heiple, a native of Jonestown, Pa., said he would not have traded for anything the experience of leading troops in combat or of earning the 1st Cavalry's trademark Stetson hat and gold spurs — given to cavalry soldiers when they have served in a combat zone.
Yet, with these achievements behind him, the Notre Dame graduate said he was looking for a life with more stability. Heiple decided while he was in Iraq that he would leave the Army when his commitment expires next month. He plans to move with his girlfriend to Austin, where he hopes to attend law school at the University of Texas.
Heiple's decision to leave the Army did not come suddenly. At 26, he felt his window of opportunity to change careers was closing. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he wanted to follow a different path.
"I can only wait so long," Heiple said.
Fulton spent eight years of his youth in the Congo, where his father worked as a bush pilot. His family relocated to Haiti in 1990 and spent three years there before they were evacuated before U.S. troops landed on the island in 1994.
Fulton then moved to Redlands, Calif. When he was in high school there, the military piqued his interest and he visited an Army recruiting station. His test scores led one recruiter to suggest that he instead apply to West Point. During his senior year, the late Rep. Sonny Bono (R-Palm Springs) nominated Fulton for his military commission to the armed forces academy in New York state.
Fulton returned from Iraq in March and went on a cruise to Mexico with his wife during his 30-day leave. His wife, Fulton said, wants him to leave the military more than anything.
In June, the two will move with their 3-year-old son to Ft. Knox, Ky., where Fulton will begin a six-month course on commanding armored units.
He will still have a year left of his Army commitment when the course is completed, yet Fulton admits that given the Army's current pace of deployments, he is leaning toward leaving the service.
"If West Point didn't have a five-year commitment," he said, "I'd probably be pursuing something else right now. I know my wife would like me to choose something else immediately."
Careers in the balance
A college graduate with an Army ROTC scholarship usually owes four years of active duty to the military, along with a period in the Army Reserves or National Guard. A West Point graduate owes five.
Army officials know that if they are able to persuade captains to remain in uniform a few years past their initial commitment, the odds are good they will eventually commit to a full 20-year military career.
But in the words of one Army captain, a West Point graduate who spent 10 months in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 and plans to leave the Army next year: "A lot of guys making their decision at the five-year mark are not making their decision for [just] the next three years. They are making their decision about whether to make a career out of the military.
"The guys in my age group are looking ahead and deciding that's not a life they want to live."
Mid-level officers around the country are confronting the same choice. The 1-34 armor battalion of the 1st Infantry Division returned last year to Ft. Riley, Kan., after a year in Iraq's so-called Sunni Triangle, the region of heaviest conflict. The battalion is expecting to return to Iraq later this year, and many young officers are choosing to get out before then.
Capt. Eric Emerling, the battalion's fire support officer, is one of three captains who decided to leave after returning from Iraq. Emerling said he initially looked forward to a career in the Army. When he returned, his superiors offered him command of an artillery battery, a milestone promotion for a career officer.
But he and his wife decided in January that they did not want to commit to a future of "repeated deployments for the next 13 years."
"What tipped the scale is that I have a 2-year-old daughter. I want more stability for her," Emerling said by telephone, his little girl in the background competing for her father's attention. "I missed the first half of her life. I'm not willing to do that again."
The 27-year-old captain is moving to Connecticut, where he has a job with a landscaping company. He said he was concerned about the Army's future, with many of the military's young leaders planning their exits.
"I see how many people are getting out here at my local unit level. It's a bit of a worry," he said. "We lost a lot of lieutenants and captains."
Life outside the zone
Heiple and Fulton live in an apartment complex in Georgetown, Texas, an Austin suburb 30 miles south of Ft. Hood's main gate. When searching for housing after they returned from Iraq, they specifically sought apartments some distance from the base.
Killeen, with its infrastructure catering to thousands of soldiers and their families, provides constant reminders of military life. But in Georgetown, a soldier walking the streets in desert camouflage is a rarity.
The young officers are coming to the end of their post-deployment "reintegration" period — several weeks of administrative briefings and counseling sessions before they are allowed to leave post for 30 days to visit friends and family.
With their feet propped up on a coffee table piled high with newspapers, DVD cases and back issues of the Economist, Heiple and Fulton watch "Matrix Revolutions" on the recently purchased 50-inch flat screen television in the living room of their neighbor — Capt. Vincent Tuohey, another member of their battalion just back from Iraq.
With distractions such as basketball, bars and new electronic equipment, there is plenty for the young officers to focus on besides their time in Iraq, or on the steady stream of violent news out of the country.
Said Heiple: "You don't purposefully avoid the news. But you don't go out of your way to find it, either."
Tuohey, a Harvard graduate from Annapolis, Md., who earned a master's degree from Cambridge University in Britain, served the last year as an executive officer for a cavalry unit in west Baghdad.
Like all of the soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division who just returned to Ft. Hood, Tuohey is readjusting to life outside a combat zone.
He is edgy sitting in traffic, having taught himself in Iraq to maneuver his Bradley fighting vehicle to avoid city traffic and the inevitable insurgent attacks. The first time he got into a car when he returned to Ft. Hood, his heart began racing and he broke out in a sweat.
Tuohey was a lieutenant during his deployment in Iraq and is proud that most of the decision-making for counterinsurgency missions fell to the Army's youngest officers.
"At no time before has the Army had LTs [lieutenants] who have made decisions like that on a daily basis," he said.
As he sees it, the military now has an entire generation of young officers who are battle-hardened and knowledgeable about battling insurgencies.
Even in Iraq, he said, senior commanders were keenly aware of those officers who might be considering leaving the military and applied various degrees of pressure to persuade them to remain in uniform.
They appeal to the sense of mission, Tuohey said, and the sense of purpose of military life that doesn't exist in the outside world. And they usually bring up an example of a friend who left the Army only to regret the decision.
Yet Tuohey, who was promoted to captain upon returning to Ft. Hood, said he was not sure whether he would stay in the Army when his commitment ended next year. He said he was tempted to work on Wall Street.
It's not the money he's after. It's the fact that an Army that was gutted after the Cold War was promising him a future of perpetual deployments fighting a war that could last for decades.
That is not a future he is sure he can commit to.
"What's the end point?" he asked. "When do you declare victory?"
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Can The Bush Administration And The GOP Senate Sink Any Lower?
Meanwhile the Bush administration is CRYING about Newsweek who came out and ADMITTED its mistakes in covering the war. It's beyond obscene how twisted and corrupt Bush and his people are but what's even more un-American is how the GOP and its acolytes toady for them in utter disregard for the principles and ideals that are the foundation of this nation.
May 18, 2005
Galloway v the US Senate: transcript of statement
By Times Online
George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators today who have accused him of corruption
George Galloway after arriving in the Senate committee room to give evidence (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
"Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.
"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.
"Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.
"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.
"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.
"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.
"You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.
"Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.
"Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.
"Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.
"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realise played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.
"There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.
"You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.
"I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.
"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].
"Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.
"Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.
"Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?
"Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.
"You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph 's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph 's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.
"And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.
"But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor . The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.
"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.
"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday , purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.
"The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.
"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.
“I told the world that Iraq , contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.
"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.
If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain , we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq 's wealth.
"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad , the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq 's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq 's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.
"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.
"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."
May 18, 2005
Galloway v the US Senate: transcript of statement
By Times Online
George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators today who have accused him of corruption
George Galloway after arriving in the Senate committee room to give evidence (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
"Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.
"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.
"Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.
"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.
"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.
"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.
"You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.
"Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.
"Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.
"Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.
"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realise played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.
"There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.
"You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.
"I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.
"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].
"Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.
"Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.
"Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?
"Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.
"You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph 's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph 's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.
"And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.
"But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor . The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.
"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.
"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday , purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.
"The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.
"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.
“I told the world that Iraq , contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.
"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.
If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain , we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq 's wealth.
"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad , the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq 's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq 's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.
"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.
"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."
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