Can Turkey Make the Transition to an EU Democracy?

Despite Turkey professing to be a democracy, the government has been dominated by the military for many years. They've seen to it that a candidate for office can't be openly religious in order to run for office. Like virtually every Muslim country, Turkey has a restive fundamentalist Muslim population. If it's not a majority, it's at least a large minority, perhaps a voting block that could not be denied if the military hadn't intervene with multiple coop de tats in the past.
Fundamentalism is resurgent all over the world, Turkey is no exception. What is most notable is that Turkey is up for consideration in the European Union. As a democracy with western values, it would qualify. What's clear is that the country is not yet a democracy because it has blocked a Muslim candidate for President because of how he practices his religion, not his politics.
New York Times

Turkey’s highest court on Tuesday blocked a presidential candidate with a background in Islamic politics, pitching the country into early elections and a referendum on the role of religion in its future.


In a 9-to-2 ruling, the court upheld an appeal by Turkey’s main secular political party, which sought to block Abdullah Gul, a close ally of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from becoming president, objecting to what they said were his Islamic credentials.


But Mr. Gul, an observant Muslim who is Turkey’s foreign minister, has kept Islam out of public policy in his four years in government, and his supporters said the decision was simply an attempt to hold on to power by Turkey’s secular elite, which has controlled the state since Ataturk’s revolution in 1923.


Turkey is an important American ally and its stability is seen as crucial in a troubled region. It shares borders with Iran, Iraq and Syria. It is a member of NATO and has good relations with Israel. It has also been critical for the American military in Iraq, providing an air base in the south of the country that supplies much of northern and central Iraq.


Mr. Gul, 56, an English speaker who has led Turkey’s push to join the European Union, tried to allay Turkish fears on Tuesday.


“If I had had a secret agenda as claimed, if those concerns were truly a part of my secret agenda, the European Union membership could not have been my policy,” he said.


Then, in a conciliatory tone unusual for members of his party, who ordinarily dismiss secular concerns as old-fashioned and unreasonable, Mr. Gul added, “But if there are concerns as such, we need to work together to understand and correct them.”


Heightening the tension was the arrest of more than 500 protestors, who were marching in an unauthorized May Day rally unrelated to the current political impasse. Television networks broadcast images of police officers in riot gear beating demonstrators and spraying them with pepper gas. The Turkish stock market continued its fall, and Mr. Erdogan made public remarks to restore faith in it.

Stoking the Fires of Domestic Terrorism

AlterNet: Blogs: PEEK: Attempted Abortion Clinic Bombing, and Hate Speech From The Right
One of the methods by which ordinary humans can be conditioned to carry out acts of mass violence, explains James Waller, is simple: acculturation, and conditioning. Mass violence becomes easier to perpetrate when it is directly against vilified, demonized, dehumanized groups within society. Hate speech, that vilifies societal groups, from random individuals certainly does damage, but when individuals, such as Ann Coulter, are given the ability to broadcast hate speech on a massive scale, the societal damage is proportionately greater and perhaps categorically different as well, because Coulter routinely speaks at events sponsored by large organizations with constituencies, arguably, in the millions: James Dobson's Focus On The Family, and Tony Perkins' Family Research Council, for example.
Fredrick Clarkson
Speaking at the recent Reclaiming America for Christ conference, (televangelist D. James Kennedy's annual political rally), Ann Coulter not only repeated her now infamous anti-gay slur to the Christian group, but she declared that she can "understand" the assassination of doctors who perform legal abortions.
Digby, on Hullaballoo
Perkins offered up the story of Phineas, grandson of Moses’ brother Aaron, from Numbers 25. Phineas was rewarded by God with an “everlasting priesthood” for killing an Israelite and his Midian lover because God had forbidden the mixing of the men of Israel with the women of that tribe.
The story is, essentially, the vindication of the criminalization of “miscegenation” — a sentiment consistent with Perkins’ past courting of such racist groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Council of Conservative Citizens, America’s largest white supremacist organization, according to journalist Max Blumenthal. (Perkins bought, on behalf of political client Senator Woody Jenkins, a phone-bank list from former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.)

Bush's Shadow Army

While Congress and the President is grandstanding about the funding bill for Iraq, the war goes on. News reports on heavy US casualties belie the effectiveness of the "surge". Meanwhile, Bush's Shadow Army continues it's mission without accountability, without oversight, and largely invisible to the American people.
AlterNet

It's the estimated 126,000 private military "contractors" who will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war. The 145,000 active duty U.S. forces are nearly matched by occupation personnel that currently come from companies like Blackwater USA and the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close personal and political ties with the Bush administration.


[..]"We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of Defense," said House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. "How in the hell do you justify that?"

The Nation

When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq--an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.


To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a "road map for change" at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the "Department's Total Force" as "its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors--constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions." This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors--conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.


Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations. "We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren't being counted, and the danger is that there's zero accountability," says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.


While the past years of Republican monopoly on government have marked a golden era for the industry, those days appear to be ending. Just a month into the new Congressional term, leading Democrats were announcing investigations of runaway war contractors. Representative John Murtha, chair of the Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Defense, after returning from a trip to Iraq in late January, said, "We're going to have extensive hearings to find out exactly what's going on with contractors. They don't have a clear mission and they're falling all over each other." Two days later, during confirmation hearings for Gen. George Casey as Army chief of staff, Senator Jim Webb declared, "This is a rent-an-army out there." Webb asked Casey, "Wouldn't it be better for this country if those tasks, particularly the quasi-military gunfighting tasks, were being performed by active-duty military soldiers in terms of cost and accountability?" Casey defended the contracting system but said armed contractors "are the ones that we have to watch very carefully." Senator Joe Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has also indicated he will hold hearings on contractors. Parallel to the ongoing investigations, there are several bills gaining steam in Congress aimed at contractor oversight.


Occupying the hot seat through these deliberations is the shadowy mercenary company Blackwater USA. Unbeknownst to many Americans and largely off the Congressional radar, Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power and protection within the US war apparatus. This company's success represents the realization of the life's work of the conservative officials who formed the core of the Bush Administration's war team, for whom radical privatization has long been a cherished ideological mission. Blackwater has repeatedly cited Rumsfeld's statement that contractors are part of the "Total Force" as evidence that it is a legitimate part of the nation's "warfighting capability and capacity." Invoking Rumsfeld's designation, the company has in effect declared its forces above the law--entitled to the immunity from civilian lawsuits enjoyed by the military, but also not bound by the military's court martial system. While the initial inquiries into Blackwater have focused on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically connected private army that has become the Bush Administration's Praetorian Guard.


Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince--the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding, the company largely consisted of Prince's private fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land located near the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina. Its vision was "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training." In the following years, Prince, his family and his political allies poured money into Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party's takeover of Congress and the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency.


[...]Among those calls was one from the CIA, which contracted Blackwater to work in Afghanistan in the early stages of US operations there. In the ensuing years the company has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the "war on terror," winning nearly $1 billion in noncovert government contracts, many of them no-bid arrangements. In just a decade Prince has expanded the Moyock headquarters to 7,000 acres, making it the world's largest private military base. Blackwater currently has 2,300 personnel deployed in nine countries, with 20,000 other contractors at the ready. It has a fleet of more than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a private intelligence division, and it is manufacturing surveillance blimps and target systems.


[...]Its largest obtainable government contract is with the State Department, for providing security to US diplomats and facilities in Iraq. That contract began in 2003 with the company's $21 million no-bid deal to protect Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer. Blackwater has guarded the two subsequent US ambassadors, John Negroponte and Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as other diplomats and occupation offices. Its forces have protected more than ninety Congressional delegations in Iraq, including that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. According to the latest government contract records, since June 2004 Blackwater has been awarded $750 million in State Department contracts alone. It is currently engaged in an intensive lobbying campaign to be sent into Darfur as a privatized peacekeeping force. Last October President Bush lifted some sanctions on Christian southern Sudan, paving the way for a potential Blackwater training mission there. In January the Washington, DC, representative for southern Sudan's regional government said he expected Blackwater to begin training the south's security forces soon.


Since 9/11 Blackwater has hired some well-connected officials close to the Bush Administration as senior executives. Among them are J. Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA and the man who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden after 9/11, and Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General, who was responsible for policing contractors like Blackwater during much of the "war on terror"--something he stood accused of not doing effectively. By the end of Schmitz's tenure, powerful Republican Senator Charles Grassley launched a Congressional probe into whether Schmitz had "quashed or redirected two ongoing criminal investigations" of senior Bush Administration officials. Under bipartisan fire, Schmitz resigned and signed up with Blackwater.


Despite its central role, Blackwater had largely operated in the shadows until March 31, 2004, when four of its private soldiers in Iraq were ambushed and killed in Falluja. [...] What is not so well-known is that in Washington after Falluja, Blackwater executives kicked into high gear, capitalizing on the company's newfound recognition. [...] But Blackwater was clearly positioning itself to make the most of its new fame. Indeed, two months later, Blackwater was handed one of the government's most valuable international security contracts, worth more than $300 million.


But while Blackwater enjoyed its new status as a hero in the "war on terror" within the Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress, the families of the four men killed at Falluja say they were being stonewalled by Blackwater as they attempted to understand the circumstances of how their loved ones were killed. After what they allege was months of effort to get straight answers from the company, the families filed a ground-breaking wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater in January 2005, accusing the company of not providing the men with what they say were contractually guaranteed safeguards. Among the allegations: The company sent them on the Falluja mission that day short two men, with less powerful weapons than they should have had and in Pajero jeeps instead of armored vehicles. This case could have far-reaching reverberations and is being monitored closely by the war-contractor industry--former Halliburton subsidiary KBR has even filed an amicus brief supporting Blackwater. If the lawsuit is successful, it could pave the way for a tobacco litigation-type scenario, where war contractors find themselves besieged by legal claims of workers killed or injured in war zones.


[...]"Private contractors like Blackwater work outside the scope of the military's chain of command and can literally do whatever they please without any liability or accountability from the US government," Katy Helvenston, whose son Scott was one of the Blackwater contractors killed, told the committee. "Therefore, Blackwater can continue accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money from the government without having to answer a single question about its security operators."


[...]Waxman alleged that Blackwater and the other subcontractors were "adding significant markups" to their subcontracts for the same security services that Waxman believes were then charged to US taxpayers. "It's remarkable that the world of contractors and subcontractors is so murky that we can't even get to the bottom of this, let alone calculate how many millions of dollars taxpayers lose in each step of the subcontracting process," says Waxman.


[...]In violation of military policy against LOGCAP contractors' using private forces for security instead of US troops, KBR had entered into a subcontract with ESS that was protected by Blackwater; those costs were allegedly passed on to US taxpayers to the tune of $19.6 million. Blackwater said it billed ESS $2.3 million for its services, meaning a markup of more than $17 million was ultimately passed on to the government. Three weeks after the hearing, KBR told shareholders it may be forced to repay up to $400 million to the government as a result of an ongoing Army investigation.


It took more than two years for Waxman to get an answer to a simple question: Whom were US taxpayers paying for services?


[...]While much of the publicity Blackwater has received stems from Falluja, another, more recent incident is attracting new scrutiny. On Christmas Eve inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, an American Blackwater contractor allegedly shot and killed an Iraqi bodyguard protecting a senior Iraqi official. For weeks after the shooting, unconfirmed reports circulated around the Internet that alcohol may have been involved and that the Iraqi was shot ten times in the chest. The story then went that the contractor was spirited out of Iraq before he could be prosecuted. Media inquiries got nowhere--the US Embassy refused to confirm that it was a Blackwater contractor, and the company refused to comment.


Then the incident came up at the February 7 Congressional hearing. As the session was drawing to a close, Representative Kucinich raced back into the room with what he said was a final question. He entered a news report on the incident into the record and asked Blackwater counsel Howell if Blackwater had flown the contractor out of Iraq after the alleged shooting. "That gentleman, on the day the incident occurred, he was off duty," Howell said, in what was the first official confirmation of the incident from Blackwater. "Blackwater did bring him back to the United States."


"Is he going to be extradited back to Iraq for murder, and if not, why not?" Kucinich asked.


"Sir, I am not law enforcement. All I can say is that there's currently an investigation," Howell replied. "We are fully cooperating and supporting that investigation."


Kucinich then said, "I just want to point out that there's a question that could actually make [Blackwater's] corporate officers accessories here in helping to create a flight from justice for someone who's committed a murder."


[...]In an attempt to clarify these matters, Senator Barack Obama introduced comprehensive new legislation in February. It requires clear rules of engagement for armed contractors, expands MEJA and provides for the DoD to "arrest and detain" contractors suspected of crimes and then turn them over to civilian authorities for prosecution. It also requires the Justice Department to submit a comprehensive report on current investigations of contractor abuses, the number of complaints received about contractors and criminal cases opened. In a statement to The Nation, Obama said contractors are "operating with unclear lines of authority, out-of-control costs and virtually no oversight by Congress. This black hole of accountability increases the danger to our troops and American civilians serving as contractors." He said his legislation would "re-establish control over these companies," while "bringing contractors under the rule of law."


Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House intelligence committee, has been a leading critic of the war contracting system. Her Iraq and Afghanistan Contractor Sunshine Act, introduced in February, which bolsters Obama's, boils down to what Schakowsky sees as a long overdue fact-finding mission through the secretive contracting bureaucracy. Among other provisions, it requires the government to determine and make public the number of contractors and subcontractors (at any tier) that are employed in Iraq and Afghanistan; any host country's, international or US laws that have been broken by contractors; disciplinary actions taken against contractors; and the total number of dead and wounded contractors. Schakowsky says she has tried repeatedly over the past several years to get this information and has been stonewalled or ignored. "We're talking about billions and billions of dollars--some have estimated forty cents of every dollar [spent on the occupation] goes to these contractors, and we couldn't get any information on casualties, on deaths," says Schakowsky. "It has been virtually impossible to shine the light on this aspect of the war and so when we discuss the war, its scope, its costs, its risks, they have not been part of this whatsoever. This whole shadow force that's been operating in Iraq, we know almost nothing about. I think it keeps at arm's length from the American people what this war is all about."


[...]While not by any means a comprehensive total of the number of contractor casualties, 770 contractor deaths and 7,761 injured in Iraq as of December 31, 2006, were confirmed by the Labor Department. But that only counts those contractors whose families applied for benefits under the government's Defense Base Act insurance. Independent analysts say the number is likely much higher. Blackwater alone has lost at least twenty-seven men in Iraq. And then there's the financial cost: Almost $4 billion in taxpayer funds have been paid for private security forces in Iraq, according to Waxman. Yet even with all these additional forces, the military is struggling to meet the demands of a White House bent on military adventurism.


[...]A week after Donald Rumsfeld's rule at the Pentagon ended, US forces had been stretched so thin by the "war on terror" that former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared "the active Army is about broken." Rather than rethinking its foreign policies, the Administration forged ahead with plans for a troop "surge" in Iraq, and Bush floated a plan to supplement the military with a Civilian Reserve Corps in his January State of the Union address. "Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush said. The President, it seemed, was just giving a fancy new title to something the Administration has already done with its "revolution" in military affairs and unprecedented reliance on contractors. Yet while Bush's proposed surge has sparked a fierce debate in Congress and among the public, the Administration's increasing reliance on private military contractors has gone largely undebated and underreported.


[...]Kucinich says he plans to investigate the potential involvement of private forces in so-called "black bag," "false flag" or covert operations in Iraq. "What's the difference between covert activities and so-called overt activities which you have no information about? There's no difference," he says. Kucinich also says the problems with contractors are not simply limited to oversight and transparency. "It's the privatization of war," he says. The Administration is "linking private war contractor profits with warmaking. So we're giving incentives for the contractors to lobby the Administration and the Congress to create more opportunities for profits, and those opportunities are more war. And that's why the role of private contractors should be sharply limited by Congress."


MORE

Heroin is "Good for Your Health"

Before the Taliban, Afghanistan was the major exporter of opium products, most of it illegally processed into heroin and sold on the streets. The Taliban banned growing opium poppies.
Now since the US invaded, poppy growing is back with a vengence. While it's clear, it is the sole source of income for some of the back country, the farmers don't see the outragious profits. All that money is seen by the traffickers and end up in the world's banks. I'm sure they are willing to turn a blind eye and share in the bonanza $120 billion a year provides them.
So if the world's banks have a vested interest in the opium trade, why would it disappear. While I don't buy that NATO and US military encourages production, they certainly are looking the other way. They have no choice because they are already short of soldiers. But as for the policy makers in Washington, one has to wonder. With a history of Iran-Contra selling drugs to fund arms, and the Reagan policy of supporting insurgency in the Soviet Union by promoting Islamic fundamentalism and opium trade, I suspect there is more than just a tolerant relationship.
GlobalResearch.ca

The Senlis Council, an international think tank specialising in security and policy issues is proposing the development of licit opium exports in Afghanistan, with a view to promoting the production of pharmaceutical pain-killers, such as morphine and codeine. According to the Senlis Council, "the poppies are needed and, if properly regulated, could provide a legal source of income to impoverished Afghan farmers while, at the same time, depriving the drug lords and the Taliban of much of their income." (John Polanyi, Globe and Mail, 23 September 2006)


The Senlis Council offers an alternative where "regulated poppy production in Afghanistan" could be developed to produce needed painkillers. The Senlis statement, however, fails to address the existing structure of licit opium exports, which is characterised by oversupply .


The Senlis' campaign is part of the propaganda campaign. It has contrbuted to providing a false legitimacy to Afghanistan's opium economy. (See details of Senlis Project), which ultmately serves powerful vested interests.


How much opium acreage is required to supply the pharmaceutical industry? According to the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which has a mandate to exame issues pertaining to the supply of and demand for opiates used for medical purposes, "the supply of such opiates has for years been at levels well in excess of global demand".(Asian Times, February 2006) The INCB has recommended reducing the production of opiates due to oversupply.


At present, India is the largest exporter of licit opium, supplying approximately 50 percent of licit sales to pharmaceutical companies involved in the production of pain-killing drugs. Turkey is also a major producer of licit opium.


India's opium latex "is sold to licensed pharmaceutical and/or chemical manufacturing firms such as Mallinckrodt and Johnson & Johnson, under rules established by the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs and the International Narcotics Control Board, which require an extensive paper trail." (Opium in India)


The area allocated to licit State controlled opium cultivation in India is of the order of a modest 11,000 hectares, suggesting that the entire demand of the global pharmaceutical industry requires approximately 22,000 hectares of land allocated to poppy production. Opium for pharmaceutical use is not in short supply. The demand of the pharmaceutical industry is already met.


The United Nations has announced that opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has soared. There was a 59% increase in areas under opium cultivation in 2006. Production of opium is estimated to have increased by 49% in relation to 2005.


The Western media in chorus blame the Taliban and the warlords. Western officials are said to believe that "the trade is controlled by 25 smugglers including three government ministers." (Guardian, op. cit).


Yet in a bitter irony, US military presence has served to restore rather than eradicate the drug trade. Opium production has increased 33 fold from 185 tons in 2001 under the Taliban to 6100 tons in 2006. Cultivated areas have increased 21 fold since the 2001 US-led invasion.


What the media reports fail to acknowledge is that the Taliban government was instrumental in 2000-2001 in implementing a successful drug eradication program, with the support and collaboration of the UN.


Implemented in 2000-2001, the Taliban's drug eradication program led to a 94 percent decline in opium cultivation. In 2001, according to UN figures, opium production had fallen to 185 tons. Immediately following the October 2001 US led invasion, production increased dramatically, regaining its historical levels.


The Vienna based UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that the 2006 harvest will be of the order of 6,100 tonnes, 33 times its production levels in 2001 under the Taliban government (3200 % increase in 5 years).


Cultivation in 2006 reached a record 165,000 hectares compared with 104,000 in 2005 and 7,606 in 2001 under the Taliban


According to the UN, Afghanistan supplies in 2006 some 92 percent of the world's supply of opium, which is used to make heroin.


The UN estimates that for 2006, the contribution of the drug trade to the Afghan economy is of the order of 2.7 billion. What it fails to mention is the fact that more than 95 percent of the revenues generated by this lucrative contraband accrues to business syndicates, organized crime and banking and financial institutions. A very small percentage accrues to farmers and traders in the producing country.


(See also UNODC, The Opium Economy in Afghanistan,
http://www.unodc.org/pdf/publications/afg_opium_economy_www.pdf , Vienna, 2003, p. 7-8)


"Afghan heroin sells on the international narcotics market for 100 times the price farmers get for their opium right out of the field".(US State Department quoted by the Voice of America (VOA), 27 February 2004).

A Natural Healing

It's not often that I find good news worth sharing. But this story is a gem. Every time I think the world is falling apart, I hear a story like this that warms my heart and melts my cynicism.
AlterNet

They went to kindergarten together, sharing crayons and sleeping carpets, chocolate milk and peanut butter sandwiches. They navigated the treacherous waters of adolescence, laughing their way through disastrous first dates and drivers ed. They gossiped about teachers, cried over broken hearts, and struggled with algebra.


For as long as Turner County High School's seniors can remember, they've always been together -- black and white, rich and poor. And now less than a month from graduation, they wanted to be together one more time, experiencing one of high school's most sacred traditions: the prom.


In the process, their simple wish would shatter another time-honored tradition in Ashburn, Ga., and change history.


Although segregation ended in this farming community years ago, some say the old ways never truly died. And every spring, while schools around the country planned junior/senior proms, Turner County's parents and students planned two unofficial private proms -- one for the white students, and one for the black.


Within the school's hallways, the parties weren't discussed. No posters were hung, no fliers distributed, no tickets sold. But everyone knew. It was so common that it was considered normal here in rural Georgia.


Because the parties are private, no one tracks the number of towns still holding separate proms, but most people here say fewer places seem to be continuing the practice.


[..]Mandy Alberson's eyes are shining as she inspects herself in the mirror at His and Hers Hairstyles in downtown Ashburn. Consulting a folded piece of paper, the senior, who is white, compares her tiara-topped tresses to the drawing in her hand. "Is this going to hold?" she wails to stylist Luana Moore. "It's gotta last 'til tomorrow morning for 'Good Morning America!' "


The cellphone in her lap rings. It's James Hall, the senior class president, who is African-American. He's got his own problems. A television crew is following him everywhere he goes, and he's not sure if he and his date will be able to meet Mandy and her date at Applebee's after all. They'll meet up at the prom. "I love that boy," Mandy says, clicking the phone closed.


Giddy with excitement, she explains that she and James have been planning this night since middle school. Even then the two friends knew they wanted one prom for everyone. When the school year began, the four senior class officers -- two black and two white -- came to principal Chad Stone and asked for his support. To their surprise, the first-year administrator gave it, wholeheartedly, even agreeing to devote $5,000 of his discretionary funds to the cause.

Rove in the Hotseat, Again...

With the amount of heat the Bush Administration is under, one wonders how they are getting anything done. Gonzales is mortally wounded, the cabal that was Iraq has been split up. Condi is running State and leaving Cheney out of the loop. By now, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich has drafted the Articles of Impeachment on Cheney.
Now it would appear Rove is in trouble. The whole White House could get caught up with this one.
Los Angeles Times

But the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.


The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.


First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part.


"We will take the evidence where it leads us," Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. "We will not leave any stone unturned."

Update: The Special Counsel is also under investigation. There is no reason to expect objectivity here.

Terror in the Weather Forecast

When we ignore the health of the environment of this planet, we endanger our children and grandchildren. Past environmental concerns have been about water and air pollution, loss of species and habitat.
But the equation has changed. Environmental damage has already happened. The outcome is global warming. The consequence is expanding deserts, war over arable land, water rights, mass starvation and pestilence on a scale we've never seen. We are now facing lost human habitat for hundreds of millions of people.
Events promise to drive other events and the spiral of increasingly damaging consequences may well put at risk the survival of the human species.
Serious problems are already inevitable. Huge portions of the earth have become increasingly hot and dry. Deserts are expanding. The SWern US is headed for dust bowl conditions. Bangladesh is losing land by rising ocean waters by the day. We won't have the option for ethanol when we need the arable land we have for food.
New York Times OP-ED
Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Trudeau Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”

Evidence is fast accumulating that, within our children’s lifetimes, severe droughts, storms and heat waves caused by climate change could rip apart societies from one side of the planet to the other. Climate stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous — and more intractable — than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war or the proliferation of nuclear weapons among rogue states today.


Congress and senior military leaders are taking heed: Legislation under consideration in both the Senate and the House calls for the director of national intelligence to report on the geopolitical implications of climate change. And last week a panel of 11 retired generals and admirals warned that climate change is already a “threat multiplier” in the world’s fragile regions, “exacerbating conditions that lead to failed states — the breeding grounds for extremism and terrorism.”


Addressing the question of scientific uncertainty about climate change, Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, a former Army chief of staff who is now retired, said: “Speaking as a soldier, we never have 100 percent certainty. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.”


In the future, that battlefield is likely to be complex and hazardous. Climate change will help produce the kind of military challenges that are difficult for today’s conventional forces to handle: insurgencies, genocide, guerrilla attacks, gang warfare and global terrorism.


In the 1990s, a research team I led at the University of Toronto examined links between various forms of environmental stress in poor countries — cropland degradation, deforestation and scarcity of fresh water, for example — and violent conflict. In places as diverse as Haiti, Pakistan, the Philippines and South Africa, we found that severe environmental stress multiplied the pain caused by such problems as ethnic strife and poverty.


Rural residents who depend on local natural resources for their livelihood become poorer, while powerful elites take control of — and extract exorbitant profits from — increasingly valuable land, forests and water. As these resources in the countryside dwindle, people sometimes join local rebellions against landowners and government officials. In mountainous areas of the Philippines, for instance, deforestation, soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have increased poverty and helped drive peasants into the arms of the Communist New People’s Army insurgency.


Other times, people migrate in large numbers to regions where resources seem more plentiful, only to fight with the people already there. Or they migrate to urban slums, where unemployed young men can be primed to join criminal gangs or radical political groups.


Climate change will have similar effects, if nations fail to aggressively limit carbon dioxide emissions and develop technologies and institutions that allow people to cope with a warmer planet.


The recent report of Working Group II of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies several ways warming will hurt poor people in the third world and hinder economic development there more generally. Large swaths of land in subtropical latitudes — zones inhabited by billions of people — will experience more drought, more damage from storms, higher mortality from heat waves, worse outbreaks of agricultural pests and an increased burden of infectious disease.


The potential impact on food output is a particular concern: in semiarid regions where water is already scarce and cropland overused, climate change could devastate agriculture. (There is evidence that warming’s effect on crops and pastureland is a cause of the Darfur crisis.) Many cereal crops in tropical zones are already near their limits of heat tolerance, and temperatures even a couple of degrees higher could lead to much lower yields.


By weakening rural economies, increasing unemployment and disrupting livelihoods, global warming will increase the frustrations and anger of hundreds of millions of people in vulnerable countries. Especially in Africa, but also in some parts of Asia and Latin America, climate change will undermine already frail governments — and make challenges from violent groups more likely — by reducing revenues, overwhelming bureaucracies and revealing how incapable these governments are of helping their citizens.

Virginia Tech: Copy Cat Violence or Social Statement

AlterNet dares to make unpopular observatations and ask uncomfortable questions. Thats why I read them every day. You just get cheerleading from the mainstream news sources, no real leadership.
Here the author asks the tough questions about the Virginia Tech killings. While I don't agree with articles conclusions or many of the commenters, I do think these questions need to be asked.
For a mental health professionals analysis of news reports and a suggestion what we can do, read here.

In his book "No Easy Answer," Brooks Brown, a former Columbine student and childhood friend of one of the Columbine killers, explained how the rage rebellion context reached his school:

The end of my junior year (1998), school shootings were making their way into the news. The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Miss. Two months later, in West Paducah, Ky., Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. ...


Violence had plagued inner-city schools for some time, but these shootings marked its first real appearance in primarily white, middle- to upper-middle-class suburbs. ...


When we talked in class about the shootings, kids would make jokes about how "it was going to happen at Columbine next." They would say that Columbine was absolutely primed for it because of the bullying and the hate that were so prevalent at our school.

The schoolyard shootings in Pearl, Paducah and Jonesboro in 1997 might have seemed little more than isolated incidents if they didn't already have a context in the office massacres that had been leaving behind blood-spattered workplace corpses for over a decade. The three schoolyard shootings happened one after another, creating a snowball effect that helped propel the schoolyard massacre coastward and into cities, to Pennsylvania and Oregon, and later, of course, to Columbine High in Littleton, Colo.


In fact, many schoolyard shooters very consciously saw their massacres as rebellions, however poorly expressed or thought through. Michael Carneal, who slaughtered three students in a high school prayer class in West Paducah, was found to have downloaded the Unabomber's manifesto as well as something called "The School Stopper's Textbook: A Guide to Disruptive Revolutionary Tactics; Revised Edition for Junior High/High School Dissidents," which calls on students to resist schools' attempts to mold students and enforce conformity. The preface starts off, "Liberate your life -- smash your school! The public schools are slowly killing every kid in them, stifling their creativity and individuality, making them into nonpersons. If you are a victim of this, one of the things you can do is fight back." Many of Carneal's school essays resembled the Unabomber manifesto. He had been bullied and brutalized, called "gay" and a "faggot." He hated the cruelty and moral hypocrisy of so-called normal society and the popular crowd. Rather than just complain about it all the time like the Goths he befriended, he decided to act.


And now that the media has started digging up the early life of Cho Seung-Hui, the same pattern emerges. Former classmates of Seung-Hui say he "was pushed around and laughed at as a schoolboy" because of his "shyness and the strange, mumbly way he talked":

Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va. [with Seung-Hui] ... recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said. "As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, 'Go back to China.'"

Luke Woodham, the high school killer in Pearl, Miss., whose murder spree preceded Carneal's by two months, was even more explicit in his rebellion. Minutes before starting his schoolyard rampage, Woodham handed his manifesto to a friend, along with a will. "I am not insane," he wrote. "I am angry. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society, push us and we will push back. ... All throughout my life, I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do? Yes, you will. ... It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help. It was a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can't pry your eyes open, if I can't do it through pacifism, if I can't show you through the displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet."


The Columbine killers openly declared that their planned massacre was intended to ignite a nationwide uprising. "We're going to kick-start a revolution, a revolution of the dispossessed!" Eric Harris said in a video diary he made before the killings. "I want to leave a lasting impression on the world," he added in another entry. And they certainly did leave an impression, including on Cho Seung-Hui, who referred to "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" in his "multimedia manifesto."


If the immediate goal of an armed uprising is to spark wider sympathy and a wider rebellion, then many of these rage uprisings have succeeded.


One of the most troubling and censored aspects of schoolyard massacres is how popular they are with a huge number of kids -- witness the threats issued the day after Cho Seung-Hui's Virginia Tech massacre to the campuses of University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, St. Edward's in Austin, Texas, and two high schools in southeastern Louisiana.


The popularity of the Columbine massacre helped spawn several more schoolyard shootings and untold numbers of school-massacre plots, many of which were uncovered, and many of which were the inventions of paranoid adults.

"They said specifically it would be bigger than Columbine," New Bedford Police Chief Arthur Kelly said." -- Associated Press, "New Bedford police say they foiled Columbine-like plot," Nov. 24, 2001

Across America, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris became anti-heroes in the aftermath of their school shooting. In a Rocky Mountain News article titled "Surfers Worship Heroes of Hate," dated Feb. 6, 2000, the journalist details the mass popularity of the Columbine killers: "They made hate-filled videotapes about the day the deed they were planning would make them cult heroes. Now, they appear to have gotten what they wanted -- at least online." The article goes on to quote some of the message boards devoted to Klebold and Harris:

In a Yahoo! club devoted to the killers, a 15-year-old Elizabeth, N.J., girl writes: "They are really my heroes. They are in a way gods ... since I don't believe in 'GOD' or any of that other crap that goes along with it. They are the closest thing we can get to it, and I think they are good at it. They stood up for what they believe in, and they actually did something about it."

A 14-year-old Toronto girl is also cited as belonging to 20 (!) online fan clubs devoted to Klebold and Harris. The point of the article is that the Internet shows just how sick our kids are. It does not consider the possibility that maybe the kids aren't simply evil but have valid[?] reasons for making Klebold and Harris into heroes. Perhaps they are considered heroes for valid[?] reasons, and the Net allows us easier access into the unofficial truth.


The reason Klebold and Harris's hero status is expressed online is obvious: It's the one place where you can exchange ideas with a reasonable hope of maintaining anonymity.


Initially it was thought that Columbine's Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were drug-addled dropouts, Nazi-enthused homosexuals, children of broken homes, Goth-geeks, Trench Coat Mafiosi, Internet/video game freaks or Marilyn Manson goons. But the truth was far more commonplace, and that's what was so disturbing about their massacre. Both came from two-parent homes, both loved their parents and both were highly intelligent but erratic students. They weren't Nazis or drug addicts. They weren't Goths, Trench Coat Mafiosi, or Marilyn Manson fiends; they weren't even gay, as some had theorized.


Some schoolyard shooters were honors students, some were bad students; some were geeks, some were fairly popular; and some were anti-social, others seemed to be easy-going and "not at all the type." Some have been girls, a fact strangely overlooked by most. Like their rage counterparts in the adult world, school shooters could be literally any kid except perhaps those who belonged to the popular crowd, the school's version of the executive/shareholding class. That is to say, about 90 percent of each suburban school's student body is a possible suspect.


And once again, I believe this at the very least suggests that the source of these rampages must be the environment that creates them, not the killers themselves. And by environment I don't mean something as vague as society but rather the schools and the people they shoot and bomb.


It isn't the schoolyard shooters who need to be profiled -- they can't be. It is the schools that need to be profiled.


The fact is that the schoolyard shooters were clear about their intentions: They wanted to "pry your eyes open."

I'm hard pressed to buy that there are any "valid" reasons for the Columbine killers to be considered heros. But indeed it is happening among a few on the web. The concept of a dispossessed underclass seems to resonate in some circles. We should be concerned and willing to do something about the social process of ostracizing and bullying in our schools and work places.

Does Obama Have What It Takes?

Hillary has got to be running scared. Obama has bested her in funding, supporters and is leading her in the critical So. Carolina primary race. The latest is that Hillary has taken a dive in the polls, and with Obama closing fast.
PRNewsWire.com

With fully ten months to go before the first primary elections for the 2008 presidential elections, Senator Hillary Clinton maintains a modest lead among potential Democratic voters over Senator Barack Obama. However, Senator Obama has more potential support than Senator Clinton among Republicans and Independents.


These are some of the results of a Harris Poll of 2,401 U.S. adults surveyed online by Harris Interactive(R) between April 3 and 16, 2007. Like all polls conducted well before an election, it should not be read as a prediction. Rather, it is a snap shot of the presidential "horse race", at a very early stage in the race.


The survey includes a sub-sample of 844 adults who say they expect to vote in a Democratic primary or caucus. When asked who they would be most likely to vote for, 37 percent picked Senator Clinton and 32 percent picked Senator Obama. No other potential candidates came close. Former Senator John Edwards, whose wife's cancer has received widespread media coverage, was picked by 14 percent of potential Democratic voters while former Vice President and Oscar- Winner Al Gore was selected by 13 percent. Three percent chose New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson while Senator Joe Biden and Congressman Dennis Kucinich were each chosen by one percent.

Personally, I've been supporting Edwards. I'm pretty tired of all the smooth talking politicians and Edwards tells us what he intends to do. But Obama has some magic that no one else has. He may just be impossible to beat. Street Prophets describes it best.

Obama laid out last night the beginnings of a simple, effective and powerful frame for his campaign. If he sticks to this script, he'll best Hillary and any Republican candidate out there. His only real competition will be John Edwards, for reasons that should soon become clear.


Here's the frame:


"Our politics is broken". In this formulation, to use Jeffrey Feldman's diagnostics, is a designed to help us do something. Specifically, it is a tool designed to connect us to other people, and it no longer functions properly.


"We have developed an 'incapacity to recognize ourselves in each other'; we have come to believe that 'we are not fundamentally connected' - but as [I] said at the 2004 convention, 'I am my brother's keeper, and my sister's, too.'"


The result of this breakdown is the violence Obama mentioned last night: not just the physical violence of the VTech shootings, but verbal, economic, and cultural violence as well.


The "fix" to broken politics is to reclaim a particular political tradition. Call this the "Abraham, Martin and John" frame, or more properly "Abraham, Martin and Robert," since Obama cited Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy in his speech:


Lincoln: government is "of the people, by the people, for the people"


MLK: "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice"


RFK: "whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded."


In short, we fix politics by restoring to the people the power to "do the right thing," that is, work together to solve problems.


The result of the fix will be a populace empowered to create political and cultural change for themselves. Obama mentioned as problematic "a coarsening culture, cynicism, and despair," as well as inner-city issues no doubt tailored to the audience. Still, this is an endlessly adaptable frame, and will no doubt continue to turn up in many different contexts.


So there's the frame. In short: is a that enables us to create . When it's broken, our connections to one another suffer. When it's fixed, we advance on moral and pragmatic grounds. It wasn't this articulate in Obama's speech, either because he had to do a quick rewrite due to the day's events, or because he's still working out all the kinks. Either way, it's got a lot of potential.

Al Qaeda Targets North Africa

A new Al Qaeda is emerging in North Africa. Though not directly associated with the bin Ladin group, they have declared allegiance in a drive for headlines and have taken to attack the general population as in Iraq. The remnants of the Islamists who fought a civil war in Algeria now want to export terror beyond their borders.
The Daily Star

Moroccan King Mohammad VI on Friday urged North African countries to work together against terrorism, warning his country risks attacks similar to the bombings that hit Algeria.


"We are ready to work with all the leaders of the five Maghreb states to ensure the protection of our people and our countries, and protect against the risks and perils of them turning into a hideous and awful base for terrorism," he said in a condolence message to Algerian President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika.


Two suicide car bombings in Algiers on Wednesday killed 33 people and wounded more than 220. Al-Qaeda's branch in North Africa, formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, claimed responsibility.


The day before, three suicide bombers blew themselves up and a fourth was killed by police in the Moroccan city of Casablanca, fuelling regional fears of resurgence in militant activity following crackdowns by North African governments.

PINR in it's recent Intelligence Brief attributes the Algerian attack to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, formerly known as the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (G.S.P.C.). Their assessment persuasively concludes that the events in Casablanca were not coordinated with the Algerian attack in any organized way. The Casablanca event was poorly conceived and foiled by police. The Algerian event was "successful", "hitting the heart of Algerian political power and killing tens of people".
The recent enactment of a "policy of national reconciliation has paradoxically prompted the resurgence of Algerian terrorism." PINR notes that:

in the past, Algerian authorities have tried to depict Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb as a region-wide organization that controls all terrorist activities in the area, but this statement has never been supported by any evidence and seems biased toward an overestimation of its structure in order to obtain more military aid from the United States.


On the contrary, the latest operations seem to confirm that Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is still based on the structure and organization of the former G.S.P.C. Algeria acts as the epicenter of Islamic terrorism in the region: the G.S.P.C. is the only group capable of ambushing a military patrol and hitting the prime minister's office in less than ten days; the degree of coordination and discipline needed to achieve these operations is unknown in places like Libya, Tunisia and even Morocco.


In this sense, the renaming of the organization and its affiliation to al-Qaeda (with all the advantages stemming from the use of this world-famous brand, including wider media coverage) can be seen as a major offensive by the G.S.P.C. to impose its regional control and thus become the most important terrorist group in the area.

With Eye on Iran, Rivals Also Want Nuclear Power

Nuclear technology is now a race for all the countries in the Middle East. I'm sure many of them are fully intending to go to nuclear weapons, truly the only way to deter a threat of invasion or nuclear blackmail.
I can't believe this is good news for the world. I can't believe this new development helps Israel. Clearly, we will be seeing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East like the world has never seen.
Will they be so reluctant to use them? All we need is a radial group to take over one of the government and I believe, eventually, we will see nuclear war in the Middle East.
New York Times

Two years ago, the leaders of Saudi Arabia told international atomic regulators that they could foresee no need for the kingdom to develop nuclear power. Today, they are scrambling to hire atomic contractors, buy nuclear hardware and build support for a regional system of reactors.


So, too, Turkey is preparing for its first atomic plant. And Egypt has announced plans to build one on its Mediterranean coast. In all, roughly a dozen states in the region have recently turned to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna for help in starting their own nuclear programs. While interest in nuclear energy is rising globally, it is unusually strong in the Middle East.


“The rules have changed,” King Abdullah II of Jordan recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “Everybody’s going for nuclear programs.”


The Middle East states say they only want atomic power. Some probably do. But United States government and private analysts say they believe that the rush of activity is also intended to counter the threat of a nuclear Iran.


By nature, the underlying technologies of nuclear power can make electricity or, with more effort, warheads, as nations have demonstrated over the decades by turning ostensibly civilian programs into sources of bomb fuel. Iran’s uneasy neighbors, analysts say, may be positioning themselves to do the same.

Wholesale Discrimination

cbs5.com - More Credit Reports Ruined By Feds' Terror List
A little known Treasury Department terror watch list is causing trouble for people trying to buy homes and cars. CBS 5 Investigates first uncovered the problems last year. Now, a report released Tuesday by civil rights lawyers provides new evidence showing the problem is becoming more widespread.
The 250-page list, posted publicly on a Treasury Department Web site, is being used by credit bureaus, health insurers and car dealerships, as well as employers and landlords, according to the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The list includes some of the world's most common names, such as Gonzalez, Lopez, Ali, Hussein, Abdul, Lucas and Gibson, and companies are often unsure how to root out mismatches. Some turn consumers away rather than risk penalties of up to $10 million and 30 years in prison for doing business with someone on the list, the group said.

Obama Leads in So. Carolina Polls

Obama's Up, Clinton's Down and Edwards Has Got Trouble
the most interesting news from the campaign trail at the moment is actually coming out of South Carolina, which is scheduled to hold a critical primary January 29. That's a week after New Hampshire votes and so South Carolina could be a definitional player in the process leading up to the "Super-Duper Tuesday" primaries of February 5, 2008.
Unlike Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina is a state with a substantial African-American population. Additionally, its Democratic politics are defined by traditional Democratic constituencies: people who live in cities, public employees, dockworkers and, yes, people of color.
So who is ahead in South Carolina?
A new Insider Advantage survey, which was not conducted on behalf of any of the campaigns, gives Illinois Senator Barack Obama ☼ a substantial lead.
Obama's at 34 percent.
New York Senator Hillary Clinton ☼ has 20 percent.
Former North Carolina Senator, John Edwards is pulling 17 percent.
The numbers are great for Obama, who has only begun to establish his campaign in the state.
They are very bad news for Clinton, who has put enormous effort into South Carolina, going so far as to hire key political players in the African-American community in an attempt to thwart the Obama surge.
They are even worse news for Edwards, who needs to do well in South Carolina, a state where he won the 2004 Democratic primary, to maintain what credibility he may have as a Democrat who can win in the south. No serious observer of the race doubts that Edwards has done a better job than the other frontrunners of staking out coherent progressive stances on the issues. Clinton continues to try and make the mushy middle sound interesting.
Obama leans left -- indeed, his record on a number of issues, including the war, is one of getting things right when the others did not -- but his campaign so far has tended to be weak when it comes to specifics. His personal story and his rhetoric are his strengths, and that could be enough to bump Edwards aside.

Motives Behind Prosecutor's Firings

Tomorrow Gonzales testifies to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the firings of US Prosecutors. This morning the news had his latest CYA statement about having a hazy memory of the affair.
Some people still say the President can choose whomever he wants to prosecute federal cases. If that were true, every President could cover any wrong-doing by party hacks by simply threatening the job of the prosecutor. One can be sure that this has happened in the past. But a wholesale firing at the top is about manipulating rule of law. AlterNet has an interesting theory of the reason behind the firings.

[..]the Supreme Court declared in Berger v. United States that a prosecutor's job is to see that justice is done, not to politicize justice. The mass ouster of the top prosecutors had more to do with keeping a grip on power -- by manipulating voting rights -- than with doing justice. And like the Watergate scandal, the evidence points to a cover-up.


This cover-up revolves around efforts by the Bush administration to disenfranchise African-American voters in communities where the vote would likely be close. George W. Bush came to power in 2000 by a razor- thin margin awarded him by the Supreme Court. During the 2004 election, there were allegations of attempts to disenfranchise African-American voters, especially in Ohio. Yet no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African-American or Native American voters from 2001 to 2006.


Instead, the administration instigated efforts that would further disenfranchise these voters. U.S. attorneys were instructed to prosecute "voter fraud" cases. "Voter fraud" has "become almost synonymous with 'voting while black,'" the New York Times' Paul Krugman observed. Also, Republican lawmakers enacted voter ID laws which established new hurdles for voters to jump.


Former staffers in the Justice Department's civil rights division said they were "repeatedly overruled when they objected to Republican actions, ranging from Georgia's voter ID law to Tom DeLay's Texas redistricting, that they believed would effectively disenfranchise African-American voters," Krugman added.


The administration's effort to prosecute voter fraud is a sham. The New York Times reports that voter experts have found "widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud." [..]


The Bush administration has been hyping voter fraud since the last election; Karl Rove called it an "enormous and growing" problem. Two of the fired U.S. attorneys, David Iglesias from Albuquerque and John McKay from Seattle, were dismissed because they refused to file voter fraud charges after being warned to do so by well-placed Republicans. Others were fired for pursuing investigations of Republicans.


Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales' former right-hand man, wrote in an email that the qualification to be a U.S. attorney was to be a "loyal Bushie."


[..]Likewise, there is a suspicious 16-day gap in the email records between the Justice Department and the White House just before seven of the U.S. attorneys were fired in December. Moreover, many of the communications about the matter were conducted using email accounts of the Republican National Committee instead of government accounts, possibly in violation of the Presidential Records Act.


The Los Angeles Times reported that senior Justice Department officials prepared documentation to justify the firings after the dismissals. One Justice Department official threatened to "retaliate" against the eight fired U.S. attorneys if they continued to publicly speak about their dismissals.


Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who heads the Justice Department, denied he was involved in discussions about the firings. But Sampson testified that Gonzales was consulted at least five times and signed off on the plan to fire the U.S. attorneys. "I don't think it's entirely accurate what he [Gonzales] said," Sampson told the Senate Judiciary Committee.


Gonzales is reportedly sweating bricks over his own testimony before that Committee, slated for April 17. As a result of Gonzales' stonewalling in response to the House Judiciary Committee's request for documents, committee chairman Rep. John Conyers has subpoenaed the records. If the Justice Department defies the subpoena, the Judiciary Committee, and the full Congress, could cite the department for contempt of Congress, and a federal grand jury could issue criminal indictments for obstruction of justice.


The White House has indicated it will not allow Karl Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers to testify under oath. Why the resistance unless they intend to lie?


Alberto Gonzales should be fired, not just for malfeasance in the U.S. attorney affair, but also for advising Bush to violate the Geneva Conventions which led to torture and abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. Recall that Gonzales told Bush the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and "obsolete." Those were the same words the Nazi lawyers used at Nuremberg to describe the Geneva Conventions.


Firing Gonzales may temporarily stanch the flood of accusations about the U.S. attorney matter. But the corruption, the lawbreaking, and the cover-up go deeper -- all the way up to the Oval Office. Hopefully, Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers will put impeachment back on the table.

Walter Reed: A Case of Neglect

Here is an article that helps create a new scapegoat for the Bush Administration trying to avoid responsibility for severely cutting funding for veteran health care. All money went to Iraq. Funding for anything else was severely cut, especially in the military and veteran programs. CBS News helps Bush by attributing the blame to the "Pentagon", a behomouth that includes no real accountability.

Money woes and Pentagon neglect are to blame for shoddy outpatient conditions and bureaucratic delays at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, an independent review has concluded.


The blistering report called for major changes in troop care and cautioned that problems probably extend to Army hospitals around the country.


“The American ethic is that America always takes care of its wounded,” said John O. “Jack” Marsh, Army secretary during the Reagan administration and co-chairman of the review. “We must make certain that America continues that ethic.”


Co-chairman Togo D. West, secretary of the Army and Veterans Affairs under President Clinton, blasted the Pentagon's “virtually incomprehensible” inattention to maintenance at Walter Reed as well as an “almost palpable disdain” for troop care.


“Although Walter Reed's rich tradition remains to this day unchallenged, its high reputation has not been maintained,” he said.

Another Bush Slime-ball Caught

Another of Bush' cronies has been shown to be the slime-ball he is. Wolfowitz, the man we can thank for the Iraq debacle, went to the World Bank to root out third world corruption, and spread a little manure of his own by giving his girlfriend a big fat raise.
Al Jazeera

"I take full responsibility for the details of the agreement," he said, after explaining that he had followed advice given by the bank's ethics committee on the employment of his Libyan-born partner, Shaha Riza.


She was transferred from the World Bank's communications office to the US state department in line with bank regulations to avoid a conflict of interest after Wolfowitz's appointment in mid-2005. While still on the World Bank payroll, she was rapidly promoted and ended up with a $200,000 package - more than Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state.


Wolfowitz acknowledged that the situation surrounding Riza "had the potential to harm this institution" and stressed that he had initially wanted no involvement in her employment terms. Given his romantic involvement with her, he faced a "painful personal dilemma when I was new to the institution" but had made a "good-faith effort to promote my understanding of that advice" of the ethics committee.


The committee's advice had been to "promote and relocate" Riza out of the World Bank, he said, although that is disputed by some bank staff. According to a Financial Times report published on Thursday, Wolfowitz personally ordered the hefty pay rises given to Riza. It cited two people who had seen a memo from Wolfowitz to the head of human resources spelling out the terms of the package.

The truth is, Wolfowitz was given a golden parachute by Bush to reward him for falling on his sword for Bush. He was never the right man for the job, he just wanted to be near his girl friend and to make the world safe for multi-nationals.
MSNBC.com

Some experts in international development praise what Wolfowitz tried to do at the World Bank, demanding that governments, especially in Africa, reduce corruption as a condition of receiving bank funds. But rather than moving the whole bank in that direction—creating a broad-based consensus as a savvy manager might do—Wolfowitz sought to achieve this goal by bringing in a coterie of ideologically pure acolytes who proceeded to offend most World Bank careerists. Even while claiming, as he did in his e-mail message, that “I believe deeply in the mission of the institution,” Wolfowitz seemed to have little use for or trust in the institution. “He set out with a series of objectives that I think were pretty reasonable, but he built up a lot of antibodies within the World Bank and among the executive directors,” says Dennis de Tray, a Washington-based economist and former World Bank official. “Wolfowitz and the cabal sent signals to the staff that their expertise was unneeded and uninteresting.” So powerful did the internal rebellion against Wolfowitz’s tactics grow—well before the Riza story broke—that Britain, a stalwart U.S. ally, led a campaign to remove Wolfowitz’s sole decision-making authority on bank lending.


Wolfowitz’s entire career in Washington, dating back nearly 40 years, has been largely about leading small right-wing insurgencies against establishment thinking. In 1969, he joined forces with fellow neocon Richard Perle for the first time when the two ran a committee that sought to undermine the Nixon-Kissinger push for an antiballistic-missile treaty.

“War on Drugs” Is Class Warfare

AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: The U.S. “War on Drugs” Is an Assault on South America’s Poorest
Like elsewhere in the Chapare, Eterazama is surrounded by small coca farms. The tropical climate allows farmers to produce coca year-round, harvesting their crop every three to four months. Most of the region's coca is produced by small farmers who travel for miles by bike, car and on foot to sell their leaves at legal, union-controlled markets in towns like this. Coca purchased at town markets is usually resold in larger city markets. The union controls sales as tightly as possible, and those caught selling coca outside the legal, union-controlled markets are not allowed back.
For many farmers in the Chapare, the alternative to growing coca is unemployment and hunger. "We need to take care of our coca as if it were a child so that the whole family can survive," Zurita said. "The coca gives us food. It takes care of our education and healthcare because here education and healthcare are not free. When we sell coca, we are able to buy school supplies for our children so they can study."

Sudan and Chad Clash

The disaster that is Darfur has turned into a border war between Sudan and Chad. Two of the poorest countries in the world now spend their money and men on war while the population gets caught in the cross fire. I suspect global warming will lead to a lot of these conflagrations in the future.
washingtonpost.com

Sudanese Janjaweed militiamen killed as many as 400 people in the volatile eastern border region near Sudan, leaving an "apocalyptic" scene of mass graves and destruction, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday.


The attacks took place March 31 in the border villages of Tiero and Marena, about 550 miles from Chad's capital, N'Djamena. Chadian officials initially said that 65 people had died but that the toll was certain to rise.


"Estimates of the number of dead have increased substantially and now range between 200 and 400," the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said. "Because most of the dead were buried where their bodies were found -- often in common graves owing to their numbers -- we may never know their exact number."


The attackers encircled the villages and opened fire, pursued fleeing villagers, robbed women and shot the men, UNHCR said. Many who survived the initial attack died later from exhaustion and dehydration, often while fleeing.


Sudan and Chad repeatedly have traded accusations of backing rebels in each other's countries, and both have denied the allegations. Both countries also have signed peace deals promising to stop the border fighting.


U.N. officials have warned of the possibility of increasing violence in the region where Chad, Sudan and the Central African Republic meet. Fighting in Sudan's western Darfur region has left as many as 450,000 dead from violence and disease.


Sudanese leaders are accused of unleashing the pro-government Arab militia, the Janjaweed, which is blamed for widespread attacks and rapes against ethnic Africans.


On Monday, the Sudanese military said 17 of its soldiers were killed repelling a Chadian army raid on a Sudanese border town in western Darfur.


In a statement, Osman Mohamed al-Aghbash, a Sudanese army spokesman, said a Chadian army unit consisting of 140 trucks and seven armored vehicles crossed into Sudan and attacked For Baranga, a small town within several miles of the Chad border.

Another Enemy of the People

Sometimes it seems that the Bush Administration is so determined to carry out it's agenda, it's willing to chew off it's own leg to get it's way. Now the Bush Administration has turned to harassing a conservative law professor who dared to make a speech critical of the Bush Administration.
Has anyone any doubts how fascistic these guys are? Bush's comment, "You're either with us or against us" takes on a new meaning.
Balkinization

Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University. For those who do not know, Professor Murphy is easily the most distinguished scholar of public law in political science. His works on both constitutional theory and judicial behavior are classics in the field. Bluntly, legal scholarship that does not engage many themes in his book, briefly noted below, Constitutional Democracy, may be legal, but cannot be said to be scholarship. As interesting, for present purposes, readers of the book will discover that Murphy is hardly a conventional political or legal liberal. While he holds some opinions, most notably on welfare, similar to opinions held on the political left, he is a sharp critic of ROE V. WADE, and supported the Alito nomination. Apparently these credentials and others noted below are no longer sufficient to prevent one from becoming an enemy of the people.


"On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press this past Thanksgiving."


"When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk. At this point, I should note that I am not only the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel. I fought in the Korean War as a young lieutenant, was wounded, and decorated for heroism. I remained a professional soldier for more than five years and then accepted a commission as a reserve office, serving for an additional 19 years."


"I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That'll do it," the man said. "

Iglesias: Why I Was Fired

Bush and the Republicans have systematically undermined rule of law to benefit themselves and to further a fascistic agenda to roll back our civil rights under the guise of "never ending war." This in and of itself undermines the Constitution and American values and is in my mind an impeachable offense.
We see just how far our system has been undermined when a President who can't keep his pants zipped is impeached where as a President who would be king is still supported by a major political party.
There are so many impeachable offenses, yet none so far appears to be sticking. Hopefully, the latest will.
New York Times

WITH this week’s release of more than 3,000 Justice Department e-mail messages about the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, it seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters.


Of course, as one of the eight, I’ve felt this way for some time. But now that the record is out there in black and white for the rest of the country to see, the argument that we were fired for “performance related” reasons (in the words of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty) is starting to look more than a little wobbly. MORE

washingtonpost.com

Mr. Iglesias, it turns out, was a late addition to the target list. He was a "diverse up-and-comer" considered for promotion and, in a March 2005 assessment, was placed in the category of "recommend retaining; strong U.S. attorneys who have produced well, managed well and exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general." Indeed, Mr. Iglesias's name didn't turn up on the list of those to be terminated until Nov. 7, 2006. How and why? The answers, though still incomplete, do not paint the Bush administration in an attractive light.


It was already known, before testimony last month by D. Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, that two New Mexico Republicans -- Sen. Pete V. Domenici and Rep. Heather A. Wilson -- had called Mr. Iglesias before the election to inquire about a criminal investigation involving a Democratic politician. Mr. Domenici, having reached Mr. Iglesias at his home, hung up when the prosecutor informed him that no indictment would be forthcoming before the election; he also placed repeated calls to the attorney general and deputy attorney general complaining about Mr. Iglesias.


In addition, New Mexico Republican Party Chairman Allen Weh complained to White House adviser Karl Rove about Mr. Iglesias. And, last but not least, President Bush himself passed on to the attorney general complaints about U.S. attorneys, including Mr. Iglesias, who were allegedly failing to aggressively pursue voter fraud cases.


Mr. Sampson's testimony showed that Mr. Iglesias was added to the list after Mr. Rove also complained to the attorney general about Mr. Iglesias's supposedly poor performance on voter fraud. This revelation not only adds to the evidence undercutting the attorney general's professions of ignorance about the whole episode; it deepens the sense that the judgment about whom to fire was influenced, if not dictated, by political considerations.