Lots of Ghosts in Iraq

Posted by Harkavy at 4:10 PM, October 29, 2004

Hurry up and get the voting over with, Americans, so we can go ahead and bomb the shit out of Fallujah. A major attempt to "pacify" the city is scheduled, but not until after Tuesday. Wouldn't look good for the Bush regime to launch Operation Fuck 'Em All until after the polls close.

But now that we may have broken the magic six-figure barrier, maybe this war thing will get a little easier. The Lancet, a big-time British medical journal, just published a peer-reviewed article estimating that more than 100,000 civilians have been killed, most by air strikes. The Independent (U.K.) says The Lancet piece is "the first scientific study of the human cost of the Iraq war." The authors of the article used detailed on-the-ground interviewing and then extrapolated from "cluster samples." Their closing "interpretation":

Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths, and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. We have shown that collection of public-health information is possible even during periods of extreme violence. Our results need further verification and should lead to changes to reduce non-combatant deaths from air strikes.

How many Iraqis will die in the next big assault on rebellious Fallujah may never be known. Right from the start of the U.S. invasion in March 2003, American authorities contemptuously dismissed even the idea of putting numbers and names to the corpses, and that includes those of women and children.

General Tommy Franks was widely quoted as saying early on, "We don't do body counts." But others are. Over at Iraq Body Count, the latest estimate is that 14,000 to 16,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the invasion.

Why the disparity in figures? It's a big, dangerous country, enveloped in chaos, and the occupation authorities and their puppet regime that nominally has stepped in aren't interested in counting the corpses.

But the numbers may be even higher. Adding further confusion is that The Lancet study bases its six-figure estimate without considering Fallujah, because it's the most dangerous and deadly area and would thus skew the "cluster samples" upon which the figures are based.

By the way, "violent deaths were mainly attributed to coalition forces," and "most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children."

Reuters reports today that "U.S. planes have launched almost daily air strikes on what the military says are safe houses used by a network of Iraqi and foreign fighters led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." The latest raid killed three Iraqi men, and three more civilians were wounded.

"A full-scale U.S.-led offensive," Reuters's Michael Georgy wrote, "could be as devastating as a Marine attack in April that Washington called off after a world outcry over civilian casualties in Fallujah. Local doctors reported more than 600 dead in the fighting."

Hey, that ain't nothing. Brigadier General Dennis Hejlik told reporters on Friday, according to Reuters, "We are gearing up for a major operation. If we do so, it will be decisive and we will whack them."

You Think You're Scared

Posted by Harkavy at 10:42 AM, October 29, 2004

On the morning of 9/11, George W. Bush looked like a child left behind. The president inexplicably continued to sit in a Florida classroom reading The Pet Goat after he had been told that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

That may be part of the reason that for his role in Fahrenheit 9/11, Bush has outpolled Gollum of The Lord of the Rings as the movie Villain of the Year, according to Total Film, a British magazine, which plans to publish the polls results next week. The news washes up on our shores from the London Evening Standard, via this story in The Register.

Lester Haines of The Register noted that in the poll of 10,000 readers, Bush also "eclipsed the contributions of Doctor Octopus, Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and Elle Driver (Kill Bill)." Haines quoted Total Film editor Matt Mueller as having told the Standard:

It is possible that people have been a little bit tongue in cheek here, but they are also saying that Bush was very scary in Fahrenheit 9/11. He was absolutely terrifying in that film. He looked like a man who had lost control—the famous scene where he sits there in a school, absolutely paralyzed, after being told about the twin towers, is just one example.

Educate Yourself

Posted by Harkavy at 9:31 AM, October 29, 2004

Before the Bush regime destroys public education, you'd better hit the books.

The latest crack in the facade of the No Child Left Behind Act just became visible in Philadelphia, where the Inquirer reported that "school accountability gains that Pennsylvania education officials lauded resulted from lower standards, not improved performance."

Educators are caught in a bind: The new federal "standards" are impossibly high, even for good schools, and especially because the Bush regime and its pals in Congress didn't provide the funding for the new law's massive revamping and retooling. Schools that "fail" are in danger of being converted to charter status.

As we've said before, Bush's vaunted No Child Left Behind maneuvers are designed to suffocate public schools. In the '80s era, neocons tried to do it by calling for the abolishment of the U.S. Department of Education—Ronald Reagan himself promised to abolish it. (For background, read this PBS piece from 1996.) Now they're smarter and are drilling holes in the foundation of public education from within.

It's a beautiful union-busting maneuver. The two main groups of unionized workers left in the U.S. are teachers and government employees. If the conservative cabal can privatize in those sectors, America's labor movement, already laboring, will be on death's door as far as political power goes.

Educators Ken Goodman and Yetta Goodman warn of the broader, more disturbing implications. In the introductory material for their book Save Our Neighborhood Schools, they note:

Around the world there are countries trying to achieve what America had, our universal system of free, public, inclusive, neighborhood elementary and secondary schools which we count on to provide the education they need for full productive participation in a democratic society.

In developing countries children of those with money are sent to private schools of varying quality depending on what their parents can afford. The public schools, meagerly funded by local and/or central governments, serve the children of the working poor. Large numbers of even poorer rural and urban children either don't go to school or leave within the first few years.

We have worked extensively with schools and education authorities in Central and South America and the Caribbean, in Asia, Oceania, and Africa. We have seen heroic teachers teaching 40-50 children in tiny, dimly lit rooms. And we've met taxicab teachers in private and public schools in Mexico, Peru, and Argentina. They teach in the morning in one school and jump in a taxi to teach in another school in the afternoon. Every economic downturn drives families of even moderate means to take their children out of costly private schools. Even in developed nations only a fraction of those that make it through secondary schools go on to some form of higher education.

The Goodmans insist that the No Child Left Behind Act "does not have good intentions," adding:

It is a major part of a sustained campaign being waged to transform American education from one in which almost all our children and young people attend common, neighborhood schools administered by an elected board of concerned citizens of each community under state laws, into a system which more closely matches the system of third world nations.

It's kind of humorous, in a way, how the Bush regime snookered Democrats in Congress into supporting this Draconian legislation in 2001. But it was couched as "reform," so there you have it. Veteran educator Gerald Bracey sussed it out quickly. Recalling his reaction for this Seattle Post-Intelligencer story by Deborah Bach, Bracey said last spring:

When it first came out, what struck me so much about it is it was totally unlike anything else coming out of the Bush agenda. This is probably the most anti-regulatory administration since before the Great Depression.

Everything [Bush has] done except for No Child Left Behind is very obviously aimed at helping corporate America and rolling back regulations. With No Child Left Behind, here comes this 1,100-page law with very strict requirements and hundreds of pages of regulations. I looked for an ulterior motive, and it wasn't very hard to find one.

And that motive is vouchers. The religious right wants them so it can get public funding of religious schools and stamp out the secular, humanistic garbage that's infecting America's youth. The neocon right wants them so it can privatize education.

Sounds like a conspiracy theory, right? Well, it's no theory. Media Transparency offers more on this in its "privatization" section:

The conservative movement, being thoroughly anti-union, has at its heart a desire to rid the United States of the two remaining unionized sectors of the national economy: public education (teachers unions), and public employees. In service of these goals, the movement has moved aggressively against both public schools and public school teachers.

Of course, the movement is also interested in converting to private profit the estimated $300+ billion annually spent on public primary and secondary education.

The vibrant Black Commentator has jumped into this issue right from the online mag's beginnings only a few years ago. Here's a sliver from its explosive December 2003 dissection of the pro-voucher movement promoted by right-wing foundations:

Vouchers are key to GOP ambitions to create an "alternative" Black political leadership and to simultaneously sunder the ties between African Americans and organized labor, particularly teachers unions. Beginning with a bucket of gold and a gaggle of hungry hustlers, Republicans have in a few short years succeeded in buying space for vouchers in the Black and general public discourse. An illusory voucher "movement" has been manufactured, despite the fact that nobody Black ever marched for vouchers and suburban whites want no part of such schemes.

But one of the savviest and most blunt pieces comes out of TeacherProfessionalism.com, a Minnesota group. Belying the boring title "A Brief Framework for Understanding the Anti-Public School Movement," Tom Siebold is neither brief nor confining himself to education. Here's part of his analysis:

Money and influence from the neoconservative secular right, combined with grassroots power from the religious right, has resulted in a dramatic reshaping of the American political landscape. One important point of intersection between the two is the movement to dismantle public education.

Siebold breaks it down:

The secular right, which consists of influential military, political, and corporate leaders, is outraged by social change spawned by women's rights, civil rights, worker rights, the ecology movement, unionism, corporate regulations, etc. In response they have spent vast sums of money to fight back. Armed with big bankrolls and convenient access to media outlets, dedicated social/political warriors are fighting to reshape America with a new conservative mindset commonly dubbed neoconservatism. … Neoconservatives see society as an economic hierarchy where a corporate elite works to save the nation from the liberal tendencies of the masses.

Although they are powerful, the small number of neocons makes it almost impossible for them to win elections on their own. This is where the religious right becomes useful. Legions of citizens from organizations like Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and the Christian Coalition are convinced that America has been betrayed by liberal leaders who have undermined core values and set the nation adrift in a sea of secular humanism and decadence. By pushing "hot button" issues like moral relativism, homosexuality, secularism, multiculturalism, sexual freedom, liberal courts, and a general deterioration of the Christian ethnocentric order, charismatic figures like Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Gary Bauer can rally large numbers of voters. Karl Rove estimates that over 15 million voters from the religious right turned out for Bush in 2000.

Wonder how many will turn out next Tuesday? There will be huge numbers of "believers" flocking to the polls. That may be enough to save the monumentally bungling Bush.

Putting On the Full Armor of God

Posted by Harkavy at 6:12 PM, October 28, 2004

Back in early February 2003, a mere six weeks before the U.S. invaded Iraq, a nation's leaders gathered for a formal day of prayer. The leader of the country was there, along with his top military person, his chief spy, and more than half of that nation's lawmakers.

Various people spoke at this ceremony. Finally, the nation's chief spy walked up to the podium and, with no introductory remarks, told the audience:

God teaches us to be resolute in the face of evil, using all of the weapons and armor that the word of God supplies.

Citing one of the major works of his nation's dominant religion, the chief spy continued:

We're told, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stance against the devil's schemes. Our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the principalities, against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Therefore, put on the whole armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground and after you have done everything to stand, stand firm then with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of justice in place and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes with the gospel of peace.

Take up the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, and pray at all times.

Citing another tract of his nation's religious works, the chief spy continued:

At the same time, the word of God also calls us to a life of forgiveness and mercy. … We are told, love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back, despairing of no one, and your reward will be great and you will be the sons and daughters of most high, because He is kind to the ungrateful and selfish.

Be merciful even as your father is merciful. Do not judge and you will not be judged. Do not condemn and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you.

A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you give will be the measure you get back. The word of the Lord.

And having said that, George Tenet sat down.

The National Prayer Breakfast, on February 6, 2003, at the Washington Hilton in D.C., was nearly over. The invasion of Iraq would begin the next month. Questions about how good the armor was wouldn't arise until later.

Greased Polls

Posted by Harkavy at 1:28 PM, October 28, 2004

We're being constantly strafed by obvious propaganda in these last few days of the most expensive—and potentially most costly, if you know what I mean—presidential campaign in history.

But we're also being shelled by friendly fire. And these wounds ought to convince people not to trust the bullshit that pollsters are spreading around and that newspapers are passing off as news.

The usually reliable (see this AIPAC story) Robin Wright of The Washington Post recently based an entire story on a poll of Iraqis by the International Republican Institute. In the story, Wright noted that religious leaders were leading in the poll. The whole story was spin city by the U.S. government and its puppet regime in Iraq, even though Wright noted that chief puppet Ayad Allawi was losing ground.

Despite that bad news, the story's slant was ridiculous. Wright quoted an unidentified congressional staff member as saying:

"We had convinced everyone—Americans and Iraqis—that things might change with the return of sovereignty, but, in fact, things went the other way."

When exactly were Iraqis "convinced" that things might change? There is no evidence of that whatsoever.

The story's full of other bull, too, like this paragraph:

Despite the current strife, about two-thirds of Iraqis do not believe civil war is imminent, the poll found. Asked if their households had been hurt by violence, injuries, death or monetary loss over the past year, only 22 percent of those questioned said yes—a figure that surprised pollsters and U.S. officials.

And elsewhere, Wright noted:

More than 45 percent of Iraqis also believe that their country is heading in the wrong direction, and 41 percent say it is moving in the right direction.

That close, eh? Don't believe it. We don't know how the poll's questions were worded, let alone any other details of its methods. So who or what is this International Republican Institute? Wright tells us (kind of) at the end:

The IRI, founded in 1983, is a private, nonprofit organization that has worked in more than 60 countries to advance democracy worldwide. With U.S. grants, it has been in charge of public opinion polls in advance of the election.

Why was IRI picked by the Bush regime to conduct polling in Iraq? Go to Wikipedia's entry, which includes this detail:

The International Republican Institute, or IRI, is a Washington, D.C.–based political organization in the United States. The IRI is loosely affiliated with the Republican Party and works closely with other rightist think tanks and foreign policy groups, including the National Endowment for Democracy. Some of its funding comes from the federal government.

IRI's stated mission is to "support the growth of political and economic freedom, good governance and human rights around the world by educating people, parties and governments on the values and practices of democracy." However, it has also been linked to efforts to foment a violent military coup in Haiti.

IRI was set up by the GOP's cold warriors in 1983. By complete coincidence, Dick Cheney got the IRI's Freedom Award in late 2001, and this year's winner was Condoleezza Rice. Past winners include Ronald Reagan, Lynne Cheney, Bill Frist, and Colin Powell. And our current Afghan puppet, Hamid Karzai.

Yes, when I think of "freedom," I think of that bunch. Check out Cheney's acceptance speech here. And go to the IRI's website and you'll see that its own story on the poll of Iraqis is headlined this way: "Optimistic Outlook on the Future and Support for Democracy."

Now why did the estimable Washington Post give a poll by this partisan group so much ink? I expect that behavior out of TV nitwits, not the print media.

If you're going to write about polls, at least consider the source. A good U.S. fount of Iraqi and American opinions is available at PIPA, run by the Center on Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. Another careful and exhaustive poll of Iraqi opinion was conducted by the BBC last spring. (See this Bush Beat item, "Our Man in Baghdad.")

How—and how often—these numbers are drummed into our brains is another matter. I'm in the camp of those who think that polls produce self-fulfilling prophecies. The constant reporting by the mass media on poll results is destructive, not just a waste of time. Most polls are done poorly, reported poorly, and vastly overemphasized. News organizations rely on them, instead of doing the heavy-duty reporting that organizations like the Center for Public Integrity do. Check out the center's latest report on the communications industry, "Networks of Influence."

Numerous other watchdog groups—even congressmen like Henry Waxman and Carl Levin—do the kind of investigative reporting that most news organizations shy away from. (The Washington Post is not one of those news organizations; its coverage of the Bush regime has far outstripped that of The New York Times.)

For more on this perspective, either watch Canadian news or read up on CBC's chief news editor, Tony Burman. You get only a taste of this from the U.S. press.

This morning, for instance, the Post's own director of polling, Richard Morin, wrote a lengthy apologia on behalf of pollsters. Only near the end of this story do you get a hint of another side of the media, as represented by people like Burman. To Morin's credit, he does give Burman a say, even if most readers won't get that far:

At least one news organization has decided to stop doing pre-election polls altogether. Not because they're inaccurate but because they're addictive.

"They suck all of the oxygen out of the coverage by reducing the whole thing to who's up and who's down," says Tony Burman, chief news editor of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. "Besides, the methodology is really becoming suspect. The response rate has become low, and reliability has suffered. So we decided not to commission them on our own and be very restrained in covering them."

The CBC abruptly quit pre-election polling in May, weeks before the Canadian national election. The goal, Burman wrote in an e-mail to staff, was "to ensure that more coverage and attention during the campaign will be devoted to the actual issues in front of the electorate—leaving the determination of actual 'voter preference' to the voters on election day."

Burman urges his counterparts in this country to do the same. "There is a lot of empty coverage in the United States devoted to horse-race polls that just fill up the airtime. It's the quintessential example of lazy journalism." He says he's "not lecturing anyone on it. We're just happy that we're getting the balance right."

Morin, of course, counters by ending his defense of polls with a section titled "Still a Valuable Tool." One of his points is this:

Pre-election polls in 2000 were the most accurate in nearly three decades. Pollsters point to data showing that in 2002, nearly nine out of 10 candidates who were ahead in surveys conducted immediately before the election ended up winning, with the overwhelming majority of these polls coming within 3 percentage points of the winner's victory margin.

Morin neglects to mention that, as I've pointed out before, more than 80 percent of U.S. House races in 2002 were won by landslide margins—more than 20 percentage points—because of gerrymandering. Wow, and the pollsters got those set-up races right? Congratulations.

Yes, he and other people who overplay polls are indeed valuable tools.

In One Ear, Out the Other

Posted by Harkavy at 8:16 PM, October 27, 2004

In the last frantic month of the presidential campaign, the GOP has finally caught on to recycling—even while it continues to spew irritants at us through its monopoly enterprises.

Call this episode an example of swing-state Swift-boat economics—recycling as only the GOP would do it: The Sinclair Broadcast Group, a GOP sugar daddy and the prime producer of its own Swift boat swill (last week's Stolen Honor pseudo-show), is also raking in revenue from other Swift boat propagandists.

It's a good way for Sinclair to recoup some of the money it lost for pre-empting prime time last Friday to sprinkle its own fairy dust on cathodized Americans.

And this set-up just keeps recycling wads of money from one anti-Kerry operation to another, paying for hit pieces every time the cash lands on someone's desk.

Sinclair's station in Pensacola, Florida, WEAR-TV, raked in a cool $142,111.50 on October 19 for airing anti-Kerry ads placed by the Swift Boat Vets for Truth, according to Federal Election Commission records of Section 527 "electioneering" committees. This specific 105-page report, covering only the week of October 15-21, shows that the Swift Boat Vets took in $3.8 million, mostly from millionaires, and spent $3.4 million on propaganda campaigns. Do we even have to point out how insane this spending is? (Yes, pro-Kerry forces do the same thing.)

Back to Sinclair: On the same day, October 19, the huge pro-Bush chain, the nation's largest single cluster of TV stations, also scored $4,471 through WTWC-TV in Tallahassee, Florida, from the Swift Boat Vets.

And in the other major battleground state, Ohio, Sinclair's WSYX-TV, in Columbus, hauled in $59,925. On October 20.

Keep in mind that we're talking about only one campaign committee giving money to one media conglomerate in one short period of time. And whatever cash Sinclair might take in from anti-Bush committees is just so much gravy.

For more information on the increasing corporatization of media outlets—electronic or otherwise—consult Columbia Journalism Review's Who Owns What.

One of the best watchdog orgs these days is Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which recently reported on the flip side of the Sinclair sordidness: Viacom's refusal to air anti-Bush ads. Check out the story here, in which FAIR notes that Viacom czar Sumner Redstone announced support of Bush over Kerry, after which its networks, which include MTV and Comedy Central (it also owns CBS), rejected anti-Bush ads. FAIR adds:

The independent progressive group Compare Decide Vote produced an ad comparing the presidential candidates' policy positions on issues important to young people, which the group says was accepted for placement by MTV Network's Comedy Central. Two days later, the station rejected the ad, citing an MTV Networks policy against running advocacy ads (Washington Post, 10/13/04).

"The reason behind our policy distinction between issue-ads and political campaign ads is simply that across all our properties, we talk about these issues every day," explained a Viacom spokesperson (Media Daily News, 10/13/04).

That reasoning—that outside perspectives on important political issues are blocked because Viacom's own coverage of the issues is sufficient—is undermined by CBS's recent decision to hold until after the election a 60 Minutes story on forged documents that the Bush administration used to sell the Iraq war. The network said it "would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election." (See FAIR Action Alert, 9/28/04.)

Don't Give a Hoot. Don't Say, 'Pollute.'

Posted by Harkavy at 8:53 AM, October 27, 2004

The Bush regime is big on global warnings, but when it comes to global warming, forget it.

Big polluters run from the phrase "global warming" the way vampires flee sunlight. And the U.S. State Department feels the same way. It can hardly even bear to say the phrase, referring to it as "global climate change."

The absurdity of this is reminiscent of Lysenkoism, the idiotic, ideological denial of genetics and other state-disapproved science in the Stalin era. Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet version of James G. Watt, ruled science; biologists and others were sent to gulags and even killed for their ideas. (See this Wikipedia entry.)

But science—and reality—can't be held back forever. In fact, the State Department under Bush and Colin Powell talks out of both sides of its mouth, as we already know thanks to Powell's mass deception at the U.N. in February 2003. (See this Bush Beat review of his artless performance.)

The Bush regime, funded heavily by big polluters, has bitterly resisted the Kyoto treaty, which requires countries to reduce emissions, but only if enough polluting countries agree to the accord. Now, Russia has finally done so, ratifying the contentious deal only a few days ago. As Peter Baker of The Washington Post explains:

The treaty, which commits industrial nations to curb production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that many scientists blame for global warming, required ratification by countries responsible for at least 55 percent of the world's emissions. Because the United States opted out of the agreement in 2001, only Russia, with 17 percent, could put it over the threshold.

But as I say, the U.S. continues to talk out of both sides of its mouth. In an official State Department report designed to be read by investors and business people—not the general public—on Uzbekistan and the frighteningly polluted Aral Sea, Tatyana Isaeva of the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent wrote in March 2003:

Global warming is an international problem. It concerns industrially developed and developing countries, as well as transitional economies.

There, the U.S. said it.

Why the House Always Wins

Posted by Harkavy at 10:36 AM, October 26, 2004

One of the many scandals sourly churning in the guts of the Bush regime that won't fully vomit into public view until after next week's vote is a massive electoral corruption case centered in Texas and swirling dizzily around House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

This is not an international incident, like the brewing Kazakhgate mess. But it's not just a local case, either. Focusing on influence-peddling in Texas, it explains a lot about how the country has been gerrymandered into the kind of non-democracy in which the vast majority of congressional races are practically uncontested—and why the House remains controlled by the conservative cabal. See the Center for Voting and Democracy's "Dubious Democracy" and this previous Bush Beat item from September 3.

The DeLay scandal is already at the stage at which pols are raising money from other pols to pay for lawyers to argue that the method they used to previously raise money to pay for other lawyers to hound other pols was not technically illegal.

This is the kind of hangover you get from being drunk with power.

Political Money Line reports this morning that the Tom DeLay Legal Expense Trust raised $185,300 during the third quarter of this year. He's defending himself from an ethics complaint filed by fellow Texas congressman Chris Bell. Money poured into DeLay from nine other congressmen, including Hal Rogers of Kentucky.

Rogers, hungering to become the next chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, is getting in good practice: He held a summer fundraiser for the DeLay legal defense fund that scooped up more than $100,000, most of it from construction and highway contractors, according to Political Money Line. I'd like to personally welcome Rogers to the national arena. If George W. Bush wins a second term, and the GOP machine keeps rolling along, Rogers will be there to help pave the way.

The DeLay scandal pits the powerful Republican, who practically re-gerrymandered Texas's congressional districts in 2002, against veteran district attorney Ronnie Earle of Austin, one of the few DA's in the country whose official website features not only court dockets and press releases but also planting schedules for vegetables.

DeLay, however, could be the one getting buried. Go to Congressman Bell's website to see the official complaint and a host of good stories on the topic, including Lou Dubose's terrific Salon piece from March 2004 that lays out the sordid tale involving Indian tribes, the Texas House speaker, scared legislators, and D.C. lobbyists like Jack Abramoff who are major Bush fundraisers and DeLay's pals. The watchdog group Texans for Public Justice helped spur Ronnie Earle to bring a host of indictments of various characters in this drama.

My colleague Wayne Barrett also plowed this fertile ground last spring in "Inside Bush's Indian Bureau."

Oh, and while you're watching the third game of the World Series tonight, and you hear the announcers paying tribute to various Fox celebrities and others, keep in mind that baseball's owners and execs, whose PACman games I talked about yesterday, are also paying tribute: They chipped in $5,000 in June 2003 to DeLay's PAC.

Playing Ball in D.C.

Posted by Harkavy at 9:20 AM, October 25, 2004

What an entertaining World Series so far, no matter what Yankee fans say. And of course every broadcast carries the obligatory tag that all rights are owned by the "Office of the Commissioner of Major League Baseball." The games take your mind off politics, right?

You wish. The insane election spending spree continues—Political Money Line reports that "electioneering" committees have raised nearly half a billion dollars so far this cycle, with million-dollar contributions pouring in nearly every frightful day this month. That doesn't even count the regular fundraising by pols and PACs. And one of the newer PACs is controlled by baseball commissioner Bud Selig. The "Office of the Commissioner of Major League Baseball Political Action Committee" didn't even exist during the 2000 presidential election. So far this cycle, however, it has distributed more than $340,000 from baseball owners and front-office executives to a host of Congress members.

Arch-conservative Jim Bunning got $10,000, according to Federal Election Commission records. OK, he's a former pitcher. But so did House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and so did Wisconsin rep Jim Sensenbrenner. Baseball officials even greased Rick Santorum's PAC with $2,000.

Turns out that Sensenbrenner was an outspoken opponent of Selig's proposed contraction of the Minnesota Twins a few years ago.

Selig knows how to clump the shit and move it around—he's a board member of Oil-Dri, the world's largest maker of cat litter, as I used to point out in the Voice. Baseball's execs have spread some money around, and they've probably quelled forever all threats from Congress to repeal baseball's fortunate exemption from antitrust laws now that they've placed a team in D.C., the former Montreal Expos. Just another toy for the congressmen to play with, starting next year. Think of them being entertained by lobbyists in the new D.C. stadium's skyboxes.

Way down below them will be the average D.C. resident. The U.S. leads the world in wealth inequality, and the gap is continually widening. And income inequality in the District of Columbia is wider than in any other major U.S. city, according to an analysis of census data by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute:

The study found that the average income of the top fifth of DC’s households equaled $186,830 in 1999. This was 31 times higher than the average income of the bottom fifth of households—$6,126.

While Atlanta and Miami have income gaps similar to DC’s, income inequality is much less pronounced in most other cities. In the typical city in the analysis—which includes central cities of the nation’s 40 largest metro areas—the income of the top fifth of households is 18 times the income of the bottom fifth.

As the income gap in D.C. continues to widen, the House, which controls life and politics there because D.C. doesn't have its own Congress member, recently passed a measure to allow assault weapons in the nation's capital—over the objections of a host of liberal Congress members, D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Mayor Anthony Williams, Police Chief Charles Ramsey, the D.C. City Council, and numerous District businesses. Check out watchdog congressman Henry Waxman's riff on this. The federal ban on assault weapons expired last month, by the way.

But Congress didn't need guns to conduct this holdup. D.C.'s new baseball stadium will be yet another egregious case of corporate welfare. In fact, even baseball officials, used to largesse from municipalities all over the country, called the deal to finance the bonds used to pay for the stadium the sweetest sweetheart deal they'd seen:

To pay back the bonds, the District would rely mainly on a tax on the District's big businesses and new and existing sales taxes within the stadium. Less than 18 percent of the money to pay for the District's stadium would come from the team—through rent payments—over the first 20 years of the deal, according to projections.

Other cities typically have demanded that teams pay 33 percent or more of construction costs, according to statistics compiled by teams and the Sports Business Journal.

When the boondoggle was announced in late September, Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins was a voice of sanity, but she was drowned out by the har-de-har-har crowd of the ailing capital city's officials and all the politicians and lobbyists who will be using the stadium's soon-to-be-smoke-filled luxurious skyboxes. Here's how Jenkins laid it out:

Washingtonians will have to subsidize $440 million in stadium building projects, which Mayor Anthony A. Williams will have to sell to the D.C. Council as a "good investment" despite a wealth of unbiased and informed research that shows it's a bad one. A stadium isn't a good investment, according to Stanford University economist Roger Noll, "it's a toy." While the emerald chessboard folks and rotisserie wonks may think new business and concession taxes are a fair price to pay for the whap of the old horsehide, some lower-income residents don't agree, and neither do 70 percent of Washingtonians polled last summer who objected to public financing, and neither do three incoming members of the D.C. Council.

"Any independent study shows that as an investment, it's silly," says Noll, the co-author of Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums. "If they're trying to sell it on grounds of actually contributing to economic growth and employment in D.C., that's wrong. There's never been a publicly subsidized stadium anywhere in the United States that had the effect of increasing employment and economic growth in the city in which it was built."

D.C. officials trumpeted this deal by saying that big businesses in the District will assume the tax burden. Yeah, right. As Jenkins noted:

The promoters of baseball in Washington tell you that taxpayers won't feel a thing. But you will indeed feel it, and here's how. The city intends to tax big business to pay for the stadium. Two things will happen. First, businesses will raise their prices, and the effective income of district residents will therefore go down. And two, when a gap opens between prices in the District and prices in Maryland, people will stop buying in the District and shop there instead.

Here is something else you should understand about what you're getting, and giving: In order to succeed financially, the new team will need loyal fans who are willing to buy good reserved seats and attend games 20 or 30 times a season. These days it costs a family of four about $150 to go to a game. That adds up to about $3,000 a year. Who can afford that? Wealthy people.

"They're the real beneficiaries of the subsidy," says Noll. "It's taxing ordinary people for a stadium attended by upper income people, and then the income generated goes to even higher income people, namely players and owners. Basically, you're taxing people who make $30,000 a year to generate a toy for people who make $200,000 a year, and income for people who make millions of dollars a year."

Other numbers to keep in mind are those that you never see juxtaposed in the mainstream media. As I pointed out in early September, the richest 1 percent of American households own 38 percent of all wealth, and fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of the U.S. population gave 83 percent of all itemized campaign contributions in the 2002 elections.

And a Puppet Shall Lead Them

Posted by Harkavy at 11:22 PM, October 24, 2004

From the Suspicions Confirmed Dept.:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest collection of churches, is finally winding down its meal service for hurricane victims in the Southeast. That's the bad news.

The even worse news is that, now that the Baptists have even more of a presence in that part of the country than they did before, they're going to shift into "long-term ministry."

The church's members remind every American not only that the sole way to "salvation" is to believe in Jesus Christ in exactly the way the Southern Baptists believe but also that their denomination is "the third-largest disaster relief agency in the country, behind the Red Cross and the Salvation Army."

Church official Jim Burton told faithful readers of the Baptist Press that the 16 million "Southern Baptists need to remember that disasters aren't over when the cleanup ends" and that they need to keep supporting Baptist officials "in the affected states as they develop their long-term strategy not just of the physical rebuild but also of the emotional and spiritual rebuild."

Let's face it: These religious nuts can't wait to get their hooks in, especially through their annual summer "mobilization" of 24,000 missionaries called World Changers.

"The annual objective of World Changers, which is primarily the rehabilitation of substandard housing and sharing the Gospel, is going to blend well with the long-term recovery efforts of disaster relief," Burton said.

Of more immediate concern is how many of these faithful will flock to the polls next week.

Numerous observers, including The New York Times in this story by David D. Kirkpatrick, have noted how hard George W. Bush's handlers are working to get the evangelicals to say amen.

Skirting on the edge of election laws, former Christian Coalition chief salesman Ralph Reed told the sect's pastors this summer at the annual Southern Baptist confab, "Without advocating on behalf of any candidate or political party, you can make sure that everyone in your circle of influence is registered to vote."

The call-response is locked in: The Southern Baptists organized "I Vote Values," their first-ever major voter registration drive, Kirkpatrick wrote. Now that it's the 21st century, the Southern Baptists are no longer afraid to provide a link on their voter-registration website to even The Washington Post, especially when it's to an October 15 story headlined "Evangelical Leaders Appeal to Followers to Go to Polls." You should read it too.

Key, of course, is the favorite tactic of Bush-Cheney '04 Inc.: fear. In this case, it's fear of them heathen homosexuals.

Who knows how many people will actually turn out to vote in this strange and scary election season. But for sure a lot of Southern Baptists will. And amid all the soup-ladling and soul-saving is the steady drumbeat of anti-gay rhetoric.

Baptist preacher Dwight McKissic, a black man, spread that message in a speech earlier this month at the denomination's huge seminary in Forth Worth. As a Baptist Press story noted, McKissic "could offer no guarantee" that "the battle against same-sex unions would be won." But, referring to the black soldiers in the movie Glory, he said:

On the verge of a suicide battle and after an all-night prayer meeting, they said, "If we go down, we’re going down standing up."

All this talk about "going down standing up"—that's a different missionary position for religious sects in America.

Tonight! One of the World's Craziest Videos!

Posted by Harkavy at 12:26 PM, October 22, 2004

With the presidential vote less than two weeks away, TV viewers in the capital city of the key battleground state of Ohio will tune in to the conservative-owned Fox network tonight and see some totally outrageous behavior, not to mention one of the world's craziest videos.

No, really. That's what's showing on Fox tonight, in Columbus and everywhere else: Totally Outrageous Behavior airs at 8, followed at 8:30 by The World's Craziest Videos.

But stay in your chairs, Ohioans. Change channels to the Sinclair chain's ABC affiliate, WSYX, and wait until 9 for the hastily assembled pseudo-show A POW Story: Politics, Pressure, and the Media. The Yahoo TV listings describe it this way: "Host Jeff Barnd examines media bias and the influence of documentaries, including Stolen Honor, during the 2004 political campaigns."

A far better description of this crazy video is in this morning's brilliant Salon piece (available only through paid subscription or with a limited pass but I don't care) by Eric Boehlert, who notes:

At midweek, Sinclair officials signaled that even they were unsure what the program would look like, so it's impossible to predict what the show's final content will be. But given Sinclair's stated goals of the program—to address "allegations of media bias by media organizations that ignore or filter legitimate news"—along with Sinclair's obvious Republican sympathies, A POW Story appears to be another blunt instrument with which to bash Kerry.

Unlike Sinclair, Boehlert deals with facts, such as the time in 1996 when Sinclair CEO David Smith was busted during a prostitution sting in Baltimore. "Smith, as part of his plea agreement," Boehlert writes, "ordered his newsroom employees to produce a series of reports on a local drug counseling program, which counted toward Smith's court-ordered community service."

For other facts, such as background on Stolen Honor's creator, Carlton Sherwood, see not only Boehlert's piece but also this entry in Disinfopedia, which tells of the close ties between Sherwood and Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge. (For Ridge's war of terror in Ohio, see this Bush Beat item.)

Sherwood, whose previous "investigations" uncovered "persecution" of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, has time and again talked bullshit about John Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony that catalogued atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers.

Like the totally outrageous Fox News video this past March 12, reprised in this World Net Daily story, when Sherwood criticized Kerry this way:

He knew as an officer that those were lies. It never happened. He was principally responsible for cementing the image of Vietnam veterans as drugged-out psychopaths who were totally unrestrained and who were a murderous horde.

Sherwood has also said that "everything that came from the Winter Soldiers hearing has been utterly discredited through volumes and volumes of books." (Read this Media Matters piece.)

How many times am I going to have to say this? Take a look at Nick Turse's Voice piece, "Swift Boat Swill," which shows that the U.S. military's own records in the National Archives back up Kerry's testimony.

For those wondering what Sherwood's Stolen Honor actually says, the World Net Daily story does give a taste of the narration, including this:

In other wars, captured Americans subjected to the hell of an enemy prison were considered heroes. In other wars, they were not abandoned. In Vietnam, they were betrayed.

Sherwood's point is that Kerry betrayed them, not only with his testimony but by becoming a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

That war is over. As Herman Edwards said in an entirely different context, "Hello?!"

But Edwards also said, "You play to win the game!" Which is why, I guess, the anti-Kerry forces just can't stop picking the scabs off old war wounds, instead of helping them heal.

I wish I could watch tonight's show, but I don't live in Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Des Moines, Kansas City, Paducah, Minneapolis, Madison, or Milwaukee. And I don't live in either of the Charlestons—the one in South Carolina or the one in West Virginia. Or in any of the 30 or so other cities where Sinclair affiliates were commanded to air the pseudo-show precariously perched atop fragments of Stolen Honor.

I guess I'll wait for the sequel: Stolen Election.

No Pain, No Gain

Posted by Harkavy at 5:27 PM, October 21, 2004

Some of CACI's experience in Iraq has been nothing but torture. Luckily, it has paid off: The defense contractor implicated in the Abu Ghraib horrors just reported that its profits for this year's financial first quarter are up 52 percent over last year's.

"The company said its quarterly revenue from Defense Department contracts alone rose 86 percent from the comparable quarter a year earlier," The Washington Post reported. "Revenue from Pentagon customers totaled $277.8 million."

The great news propelled CACI to its all-time high per-share price during the October 20 trading session, according to CBS MarketWatch.

CACI's total revenue for the quarter was $388.7 million, compared with only $235.7 million in the same period last year. CEO Jack London (not that one) credited the company's "ability to deliver value-added service to new and existing customers."

However, CACI interrogators won't be delivering advice, direction, or other services any longer to Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick. On the same day CACI proclaimed its great financial news, Frederick was sentenced in Baghdad to eight years in prison himself for abusing Abu Ghraib prisoners.

What awful timing for CACI. One of its 36 employees at Abu Ghraib, according to the military's probe last spring known as the Fay report, allegedly encouraged Frederick to abuse a detainee, didn't stop the sergeant from almost asphyxiating him, and allegedly used Frederick's mere presence as a threat to prisoners.

To feel the company's pain, read the Fay report and refer back to this Bush Beat item.

CACI has really had its name dragged through the mud—similar to the way, as the Post paraphrased the Fay report, "an unidentified CACI interrogator grabbed a prisoner from a vehicle, pulled him to the ground and dragged him to an interrogation booth as the prisoner tried to stand."

But you have to try to stand up. Only Tuesday, CACI stood up to California State Treasurer Phil Angelides, representing the giant retirement fund CALPERS, which owns CACI stock, for his "continuing misguided harassment" of CACI in connection with the firm's work at Abu Ghraib. Maybe someone encouraged this California official to abuse CACI—the way the Fay report says CACI employees encouraged U.S. soldiers to abuse Abu Ghraib's prisoners.

But enough is enough! In the statement issued formally to investors on October 19, the defense contractor said:

CACI has not been charged or found guilty of any misconduct. We have said from the beginning that if any of our employees are found guilty of misconduct, we will take appropriate action. The vast majority of our investors continue to support the company, as do our customers. Our financial performance continues to be outstanding and to provide excellent returns for our investors. If Angelides and the fund want to walk away from a more than 50 percent return on their investment since August of this year in CACI, we fully support their decision.

If CACI sounds near tears, well, can you blame it? Corporations are people, too, according to U.S. law. (Read the Center for Public Integrity's bio of CACI here.) Think of the humiliation—like the time, according to another accusation in the Fay report and recounted by the Post, that a CACI employee at Abu Ghraib humiliated a prisoner by shaving his head and beard and forcing him to wear red panties.

You'd think that a thriving company would see red itself if a pack of critics was yapping at its heels—like the time, the Fay report alleged, that CACI interrogators used dogs to terrorize prisoners.

But terror is CACI's business, and helping U.S. government employees deal with it is part of it. "We will continue to support their missions," CEO London said, "in the defense of our nation and in the global war against terrorism."

Fighting Terror in Ohio

Posted by Harkavy at 7:46 AM, October 21, 2004

In his never-ending mission to stave off threats to the United States of America, Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge, operating under Code Yellow, has traveled to Ohio to secure that endangered state for the Bush regime.

In a stirring October 15 address to the state's police officials, gathered for the Ohio Conference on Law Enforcement, Ridge said, "We know that there are many fronts in the war on terrorism."

Apparently, Ohio is the front. Ridge and his 20 or so top aides have pledged to remain above partisan politics, but the Associated Press's Katherine Pleger Shrader parsed Homeland Security's travel records and discovered that nearly 60 percent of their travel in the past seven months has been to the 17 most hotly contested states in the presidential race.

Shrader noted that one of the trips forwarding the department's mission of protecting America was that of Sue Mencer, head of the Office of Domestic Preparedness, who "traveled to the Marysville, Ohio, firehouse to deliver a grant that had been awarded weeks earlier."

"It seems that the Bush administration has once again taken its eye off of Osama bin Laden and placed it squarely on the Nov. 2 election," AP quoted House member Carolyn Maloney of New York as saying.

Shrader quoted Ridge as having vowed, "We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security." Well, then, Tom, good job of responding to threats.

Ohio's law enforcement officials can certainly feel protected: Their federal funds are not in any danger of drying up.

Amid the Bush administration's continual slashing of federal funds to the states for education and social welfare programs, Ridge reminded Ohio's cops on October 15, "Our job in the federal government is to get resources to local officials quickly so they can purchase tools, provide training, and protect their communities," adding, "The administration has provided Ohio with more than $266 million in homeland security funds. And you are spending those funds wisely."

And more money is on the way, earmarked for Ohio's Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program. "Over $15 million in homeland security dollars will fund this program," Ridge said.

Invoking college football—"If Ohio State’s defensive line was as sturdy as the State of Ohio’s homeland security line of defense, the Buckeyes would still be undefeated"—and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—"We Americans of today, together with our allies, are passing through a period of supreme test"—Ridge said, "This is, indeed, the test of our times. But I am certain that, together, we will meet this test—just as we have met many great challenges in the past."

What new "challenges" will America face in the next two weeks? Just before the Republican National Convention, Ridge raised the alert level. If he does it right before the election, maybe local law enforcement will be asked to scramble into action and lock things down in the battleground states, perhaps scaring "liberals" away from the polls—or trapping urban, mostly Democratic, voters in huge traffic jams.

At least the troops in Ohio will be well-funded and prepared to help Ridge in his mission.

Dear Bush Beat:
Smile when you say that about me in 'quote marks' . . .

Posted by Harkavy at 4:45 PM, October 20, 2004

Nancy Emmert of Coleman, Texas, writes:

From your column: "Does this avowal of journalistic integrity also mean... ?"

What they mean is what they said—a concept apparently foreign to all liberals, especially liberal "journalists."

Thank you for reading. What I was talking about, and which you noted, Nancy, was this statement by Sinclair's news veep, Joe DeFeo: "We have not ceded, and will not in the future cede, control of our news reporting to any outside organization or political group." And what I said, the last paragraph of this morning's item, was this:

Does this avowal of journalistic integrity also mean that Sinclair's owners and executives will stop pouring money and propaganda into George W. Bush's campaign?

In a perverse way, DeFeo was being truthful about "control." Last spring, as I've already noted, Sinclair banned several stations from airing Ted Koppel's recitation of the names of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq. That was nothing more than the Smith family, which owns Sinclair, trying to censor the news, and doing the bidding—unwitting or not—of U.S. government officials whose political campaigns the Smiths have also strongly supported with cash. It's not the "liberals" who are refusing to allow coverage of the continual arrival of coffins from the Iraq battleground. See former CNN journalist Ralph Begleiter's stout fight against that censorious policy. He's simply doing his journalistic duty of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

I tilt to the left because leaning the other way tends to put your nose unwillingly up the asses of America's corporate citizens, their politician flunkies, and a lot of other people and lawyers with authoritarian impulses. You wind up stuck, getting paraded around their clown circus to do their bidding. They don't care if some of you simply fall between the cracks and are trapped. They want to keep most of the rest of you dumb and debt-ridden and divided along racial and class lines. If you stay unorganized and immobilized, you won't talk among yourselves and maybe get wise. They want to choose who you sleep with and in what forsaken foreign country you're going to die, things like that. My cranky impulse is to keep raking and re-raking the corporate compost heap, so that people can take a look at some of the rot.

Now, I don't deny that there are greedy, authoritarian schmucks on the left, too, only not as many. Two last things: Even George Bush the Elder wouldn't have invaded Iraq. And how much money do you make? If you make more than $250,000 a year, maybe you should vote for Bush. If you don't, maybe you ought to check your own lean existence.

Or not. You can cast your lot with the likes of the Smiths, whose Sinclair conglomerate controls not only the horizontal and vertical on 24 percent of the nation's TV sets, but also the slant.

And the Smiths are oblique about it, to boot. Last spring, they sent their now famous Washington bureau chief, Jon Leiberman, to Iraq, along with corporate hackflack Mark Hyman, to report on the "good news" over there. If you believe that's journalism, then those of you TV viewers who are tethered to Sinclair's stations should just let your imaginations run loose this Friday evening. Nothing personal against the Smiths, but think of them over there in their Baltimore bunker, saying to you: "For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all you see and hear."

On Saturday morning, don't forget to pull your nose out of corporate America's ass long enough to go downtown to pick up your seed pods.

Well. Burger King decided to boycott Sinclair for a day. I just decided to boycott Burger King forever.

"Super," sighs me.

Dumbreddown writes:

Kerry can "speak for" Mary Cheney and won't let others speak for themselves.

Did you see Stolen Honor yet? Or are you waiting for your DVD to arrive by mail, like I am?

I thought John Kerry loved being in the spotlight. Now he doesn't. What happened?

Thank you for reading. Yes, Dumbreddown, Kerry was in the spotlight in 1971, when he told a Senate committee about U.S. soldiers' atrocities in Vietnam.

You doubt that those things happened? Is that what you think Stolen Honor will tell you? Take a look at my colleague Nick Turse's September 21 Voice article, "Swift Boat Swill." The National Archives, as Turse reported, have hundreds of files of official U.S. military investigations that back up every point Kerry made in his courageous cataloging of horror from the tragic, still-wrong-40-years-later Vietnam War.

Endredi writes:

Did you also call Michael Moore's film a "pseudo-doc"?

Thank you for reading, Endredi. Yes, as a matter of fact, I would—at least compared with the documentaries of, say, Les Blank or Frederick Wiseman. And Moore was ham-handed. He could have used the deft touch Errol Morris displayed in dissecting Fred A. Leuchter Jr. in Mr. Death.

Moore, to his credit, used wit, humor, irony. I'm not expecting any of those qualities in Stolen Honor, but I am expecting some humorless bullshit that runs counter to the historical record by several thousand degrees more than Fahrenheit 9/11.

While you and I are waiting for Stolen Honor, I know of an excellent documentary source for events that aren't 40 years old: Paul Thompson's astounding 9-11 Timeline, which is online at the Center for Cooperative Research.

Lily Meowerson writes:

Is it possible to say something nice about George W. Bush? Check out this video.

Vern Essig of Riggins, Idaho, writes:

I have always been considered a right-wing radical. Lately, I have been labeled left-wing, liberal, and other things not mentionable. This is because I opposed the war, and before the first building had fallen halfway down [on 9/11], I said, "Implosion, inside job." Common sense and reasoning should tell anyone not brain-dead that planes did not knock down those buildings.

Choosing between Bush and Kerry is like choosing between AIDS and cancer. I will have to vote for Kerry as the only way to get rid of Bush. We will have to deal with the problem of getting rid of Kerry later. I am a Marine veteran of the battle of Chosin in Korea in 1950.

Thank you for reading. I know it's little consolation, Vern, but I've also been called some unmentionable names—several times, in fact, by an Idaho-born politician in Arizona named Hawley Atkinson. By the way, I've been to beautiful, bizarre Idaho, and there are a lot of severely disturbed people there. Like the Aryan Nations crew. I'd say you're pretty "normal," Vern. For Idaho.

Your view of Kerry strikes me as quite pragmatic. As for your suspicions about 9/11, see the next letter.

Stephen Collins writes:

Here's something that makes you go Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!! Click here. (Turn the volume up.)

Thank you for reading. What you referred me to, Stephen, was the famous Pentagon Strike flash video. The music's great, the images are fascinating.

See the video's homepage for more info. And read Carol Morello's October 7 Washington Post story about the backstory of the video itself.

Concerning the video's conspiratorial backstory of 9/11? The music's great, the images are fascinating.

Big Beef About Sinclair's Anti-Kerry Plans

Posted by Harkavy at 8:01 AM, October 20, 2004

This just in from the presidential election's front lines:

Sinclair's Swift boat, its specially outfitted video cannon bristling as it steams toward the battleground state of Ohio, has been heavily damaged by anti-flak weapons and is changing course.

According to media reports, Sinclair is in such a pickle that it may be unable to fire the special anti-Kerry weapon. As usual with 21st century warfare reporting, those reports are highly misleading.

One of New York City's major burghers, state comptroller Alan Hevesi, who controls a bundle of Sinclair shares, attacked the company—the nation's largest TV-station conglomerate—for launching the attack because the move was imperiling its stock market value.

But it was a bigger burger—Burger King, in fact—that lobbed the biggest grenade at Sinclair. The fast-food giant announced that it was withdrawing all its ads from all Sinclair stations all day on the date the weapon is broadcast—now scheduled for Friday, October 22.

"Burger King wants to maintain neutrality during this election," spokesman Eric Anderson told Bill Carter of The New York Times.

This is believed to be the first time the fast-food giant has come out publicly against whoppers.

Hevesi, who by himself controls the huge New York State Common Retirement Fund, which owns more than 250,000 shares of Sinclair, wrote a nasty letter to company CEO David D. Smith, the Times and the Associated Press reported. His letter, according to the AP, included this riff:

Given the stock's already poor performance, it would seem that any bad news would risk reducing investor interest and, thus, risk a lower stock price.

Hevesi also questioned the independence of Sinclair's directors, according to stock market rules. Yeah, well, I did the same thing yesterday, in this Bush Beat item.

Sinclair's stock took another hit on Wall Street yesterday.

But the real impetus for this firestorm was the courageous stand of Sinclair's Washington bureau chief, Jon Leiberman, who went all medieval Beale on his bosses. Leiberman got fired for speaking out. Thing is, the rest of the media just don't seem to get it.

They're reporting this morning that Sinclair has "backed off" because it won't air the entire pseudo-doc Stolen Honor, as it originally planned to. (The Times' headline early this morning: "Broadcaster Plans to Show Only Parts of Film.") But Leiberman finally became enraged because he knew that such a plan, which already had been announced, doesn't mean Sinclair has "backed off." The chain is still going ahead with a show, but the pseudo-doc's anti-Kerry rants will be camouflaged by a thin coating of "coverage" and other material that Sinclair ordered its news department to put together. That's what got Leiberman the most upset, and rightly so.

It's still a powerful weapon—maybe even more powerful than if Sinclair had simply aired the pseudo-doc's rant that Kerry "betrayed" his fellow Vietnam War vets three decades ago by coming out against the war and detailing atrocities committed by fellow soldiers.

Couched as "coverage," Sinclair's latest plan for the anti-Kerry attack gives too much play to a non-issue, moving it out of the realm of commentary and into "news."

Sinclair is of course defiant. Its news veep, Joe DeFeo, said, according to AP, "We have not ceded, and will not in the future cede, control of our news reporting to any outside organization or political group."

Does this avowal of journalistic integrity also mean that Sinclair's owners and executives will stop pouring money and propaganda into George W. Bush's campaign?

Sinclair's Swift Boat? Abandon Ship!

Posted by Harkavy at 11:41 AM, October 19, 2004

What's worse than the nation's largest TV chain ordering its stations in key states like Ohio to interrupt prime time to air a pseudo-documentary hit piece just days before a presidential election?

After announcing its plans to run the hit piece this week and getting roundly criticized, Sinclair's best brains—probably meaning its former chief lobbyist and now chief spokesman, Mark Hyman—came up with this idea:

Order the news staff to cobble together a "news special" with snippets of the pseudo-doc and other stuff so that you can pass off this propaganda, which properly should carry the "commentary" label, as "coverage."

The giant chain's Washington bureau chief, Jon Leiberman, finally couldn't take it and spoke out, telling the Baltimore Sun on Sunday that the company's conduct was "indefensible." (If you're registered with The Sun, you can read David Folkenflik's story here.)

Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post does his usual solid job reporting this sorry affair. Leiberman called Stolen Honor a "slanted documentary," Kurtz wrote, "and said there was no way for Sinclair, which owns the nation's largest collection of network affiliates, to verify the allegations." Kurtz went on to quote Leiberman as saying this:

Call it commentary, call it an editorial … but don't call it news. Viewers aren't going to trust us if we call it news. … I couldn't be part of this special and call it news when what it is is political propaganda.

Leiberman was fired for violating Sinclair's company policy, which prohibits its journalists from speaking without permission. Or, as Kurtz put it, with just a subtle touch of irony:

The Baltimore-based firm, which has drawn harsh criticism from Kerry and the Democrats, found itself explaining why it dismissed a top journalist for speaking to the media.

You have to understand, though, that Mark Hyman, whose hare-brained scheme Leiberman objected to, is not a journalist. He started as a D.C. lobbyist for Sinclair in 1997 and then was promoted to vice president of "corporate relations." From his Baltimore corporate aerie, he dispenses daily commentaries called "The Point." It's some rich stuff, lemme tell you. Check out Hyman's Sunday (October 17) "Point," entitled "Media Bias." (Here's the main page for Hyman's commentaries. Click here for a video of "Media Bias.") This is how he smugly starts off:

Bias in the media has reared its ugly head again after another spate of scandals has rocked some of the largest media outlets in the last several months.

Critics point to survey after survey, which reveal that most of America's newsrooms are filled with journalists with a strong liberal tilt in their personal views, as a cause for concern.

The "real problem," Hyman says, is that "balance and fairness have been shortchanged." Honest to God, he says that. And he adds: "That many newsrooms don't present balanced reporting illustrates that it is the process that is flawed and that ethical standards are lacking."

But Hyman goes on to say that, "fortunately" for America, "cable news shows, talk radio and the Internet provide something of a watchdog function."

That's really rich, because Hyman ends his commentary this way:

Here's another point to consider. For those media outlets that keep an eye on the financial bottom line in an increasingly competitive landscape, a shift to more balanced, honest and accurate reporting is what may eventually drive newsrooms back to the center if for no other reason than to stop the hemorrhage of readers and viewers who are flocking to new media news sources. And that's the Point. I'm Mark Hyman.

Yes, Mark, the bottom line. It was only on October 4 that the Sinclair Broadcast Group said in an Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it was lowering its revenue estimates because of "cancellations resulting from the recent hurricanes which impacted eight of the Company’s television stations in the Southeast."

But it's an Ohio-based storm that's smacking into Sinclair. Jon Friedman of CBS MarketWatch reported Monday that shares of Sinclair Broadcasting Group dropped almost 8 percent on Monday "in the aftermath of the political firestorm that the company created."

The Street dubbed Sinclair's ham-handed anti-Kerry plans one of the five dumbest things on Wall Street.

People are starting anti-Sinclair boycotts. Any boycott of any media outlet gives me the creeps, but after all, Sinclair has conducted media boycotts of its own: Hyman ordered stations to not run Ted Koppel's Nightline reading of the names of U.S. casualties in Iraq. (See this Bush Beat item from a few days ago.)

This company has a long history of arrogance. After the spate of publicized corporate scandals a few years ago, corporations were required to have "independent" directors on their boards' audit committees. Sinclair officials disdain that, pointing out in their SEC filings that though one of their directors doesn't meet the regulatory test for being "independent" (he's directly involved in business dealings with company owners), they're putting him on the audit committee anyway. So much for "ethical standards."

Lobbyist and public-relations hack Hyman's résumé contains much bragging about his former work with the CIA. Check out what Bob Fitrakis says about Hyman in this column in The Free Press, an alternative news site in the Ohio capital of Columbus.

Particularly amusing is Hyman's boasting in his corporate bio. He doesn't pass up a chance to link himself with "the Company"—and I don't mean Sinclair. The bio notes: "The military organizations in which he has served have been awarded four CIA National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Commendations during his service." Wow! The organizations won? While you were in them? Terrific! And then there's this passage:

A Captain in the Naval Reserve, he has served in leadership positions in CIA’s National Warning Staff, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, and he is currently a Commanding Officer in the Naval Reserve’s Space and Network Warfare Program.

"Network warfare"? Sorry, Mark, that still doesn't make you a journalist.

Dear Bush Beat:
Prompt replies appreciated . . .

Posted by Harkavy at 12:34 PM, October 18, 2004

Stephen Galperin of New Hampshire writes:

Got a big laugh out of "Hearing Voices" (October 8). In my not so humble opinion, Bush has been hearing voices for years, with or without a radio.

Seriously though, if he was being coached during the first debate, he should fire the coach.

I enjoy Bush Beat and have become a regular reader.

Thank you for reading. As you probably know, Stephen, the Battle of Bush's Bulge continues. Was George W. Bush wired during the debates? Has he been wired before? Intrepid reporter Dave Lindorff wrote another piece on it for Salon (check out the photos here), and the White House's denials seem ludicrous. Lindorff's own website contains a hilarious recounting of his sparring with administration officials.

Personally, I think Bush is lucky to have such high-tech help. I hear voices, too, but they come in through my dental fillings. Peter Carlson of The Washington Post partially confirms this phenomenon near the end of his 2002 riff on the pleasure of pull quotes.

Joel Dobson writes, concerning the Bush-bulge controversy:

Am I the only one to tie these two pieces together? Obviously, Der Bushführer is getting comments directly from the Man himself—and I don't mean Rove.

Thank you for reading. You know, Joel, I don't think Bush listens to Europeans other than Tony Blair. I mean, during their first debate, John Kerry derided Bush's "coalition," and Bush replied:

My opponent says we didn't have any allies in this war. What's he say to Tony Blair? What's he say to Alexander Kwasniewski of Poland?

As it turns out, Bush himself ought to say to Alexander Kwasniewski, "Hey, bub, where do you think you're going?" Poland was already making plans to withdraw its troops from Iraq when Bush said that. Someone must have told Bush. Was he not listening?

Of course, there's a reason Poland was such a "faithful" ally. Derrick Z. Jackson of The Boston Globe had it figured out back in February 2003, before we even invaded Iraq. Jackson's analysis is re-posted here. Following is an excerpt:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently criticized the "old Europe"' of France and Germany, which oppose a U.S. invasion of Iraq. One of the countries he smiles upon in his "new Europe" is Poland. One of the reasons is because the government and Lockheed bought Poland's support. The White House will plunder the Treasury for a $3.8 billion, below-market-rate loan to help Poland buy 48 F-16s. According to The New York Times, that loan is more than all direct loans for military aid to the rest of the world combined for the last decade.

In addition, Lockheed offered $3 billion in "offsets" in the form of jobs in Poland to build engines for the fighter and parts for commercial U.S. aircraft and to help the nation modernize steel mills and its high-tech sector. The government has defended the deals by saying they need them to "build influence" in the region. Critics call it what it is: bribes and corporate welfare.

Jonah Rubin of the University of Chicago writes:

First off, love your column. By far one of the best sources of info-they-don't-want-you-to-know on the 'net.

However, I do wish you would refer to Palestinians as Palestinians, rather than as Arabs. We don't call Germans "whites" when we are talking specifically about Germany, so why should we call Palestinians "Arabs" when talking specifically about Palestine?

More importantly, the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinians is separate, although not unrelated, from the conflict between Israel and various Arab states. When you refer to the struggle to liberate Palestine as part of the larger Arab-Israeli conflict, you play into the hands of those who like to lump Iraq, Al Qaeda, Palestine, and various other groups together as Muslim terrorism. Check out this piece in Haaretz on the findings of Israel´s leading think tank for more on this issue.

Palestinian resistance and terrorist movements in response to Israeli occupation are Palestinian and should be referred to as such, in the same way that Basque resistance and terrorism aren't "white" terrorism.

Keep up the great work.

Thank you for reading, and for your kind words. I don't buy all of your argument, Jonah, but you do have a good point. I sometimes think this is basically a turf war that religious nuts on both sides keep stirring to turn it into Jew vs. Arab. The article you referred me to was about the latest annual study from the Jaffee Center, The Middle East Strategic Balance 2003-2004. I found the story extremely frightening and depressing, especially this paragraph:

The deputy head of the [Jaffee] Center, Dr. Ephraim Kam, said that the United States seemed closer to the possible use of force to prevent Iran from completing its nuclear program. According to Kam, any Israeli military operation against Iran would require dialogue with the United States because U.S. forces are currently positioned between the two countries.

But that scary news is not the fault of Haaretz, which is an excellent news resource, especially for Americans, whose own newspapers don't do a very good job covering the Israeli-Palestinian death dance. I'd also suggest New York City's own Forward, which covers, from a different angle, the politics of the right-wing Israeli government and its pals in the U.S.

The Forward's political stance may not be my cup of borscht, but one of my ancestors wrote for it a century ago, and as a lexicographer, he faced some of the same problems I grapple with. For example, in trying to describe the Bush Error, I'm often at a loss for words, especially in capturing the president's cronies, handlers, and factotums. Here's an excerpt from a July 2001 Philologos column in the Forward that has proved helpful to me:

Is a jerk the same as a shmegegge? And where does "shmegegge" come from? This is what reader Ed Rheingold asks after some admirable research on his part turned up the following published English definitions of this Yiddish word: 1) An idiot 2) A contemptible person 3) A maladroit, untalented type 4) A sycophant, a shlepper 5) A galoot, a bird-brain 6) Baloney, malarkey.

On the whole, I would say that a shmegegge and a jerk are close relatives, the shmegegge being more hapless and the jerk more obnoxious, which perhaps gives the shmegegge, like the shnook, a greater claim on our affections. (Re "shnook," the well-known lexicographer David Shulman has written in to correct my statement of March 16 that it represents a softening of "schmuck." Not at all, Mr. Shulman says, citing the authority of the Oxford English Dictionary to observe that "shnook" comes from either Yiddish shnuk, "snout," or German schnucke, "small sheep.") The word "shmegegge" derives, according to Alexander Harkavy's Yiddish-English Dictionary, from megege, an "idler" or "dawdler," prefixed by the contemptuous Yiddish "sh-," as in "dawdler-shmawdler." The source of the Yiddish word appears to be the Polish mitrga, meaning the same thing.

Protesters of Torture—and Vice Versa

Posted by Harkavy at 11:46 AM, October 17, 2004

It was a stunning reversal of the general stifling of dissent in the U.S., and it no doubt will be lost in the pre-election mania. But finally a blow for freedom: A federal appellate court in the South just struck down the government's scheme to force protesters through metal detectors during next month's annual rally against the U.S. military's torture-and-terror training school at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Abu Ghraib, our newest torture center, is still fresh in our minds. But the place formerly known as the School of the Americas, though it still functions, is an ugly part of our more distant history, and echoes of that past keep reverberating: The Bush regime's ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, has a claim to infamy connected with this U.S. training academy for terrorists. I'll get back to Negroponte in a minute, but first, the federal court's surprising October 15 ruling.

A three-judge panel of the conservative 11th Circuit struck down the government's attempt to use 9/11 as an excuse to deny people their Constitutional rights.

Since 9/11, the government has been searching protesters at what used to be known as the School of the Americas. Considering that the annual rally has grown to 15,000 people, that technique slows things to a crawl and takes the heart out of the protesters—remember the government-managed protests at Republican Square Garden only six weeks ago?

The court's three-judge panel said the searches "eviscerate the Fourth Amendment" and added,

In the absence of some reason to believe that international terrorists would target or infiltrate this protest, there is no basis for using Sept. 11 as an excuse for searching the protesters.

See the actual ruling against the officials of Columbus, Georgia, here. The key part is that the appellate judges found that the city's "search policy violated both the First and Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The plaintiffs are entitled to a permanent injunction against its implementation."

This important story hasn't gotten much attention; an Associated Press dispatch ran deep inside this morning's Washington Post.

But maybe this ruling signifies part of a backlash against the use of the "war on terror" to abuse our liberties—like the Patriot Act and John Ashcroft's sweep of Muslims off our streets. In this particular case, Judge Gerald Tjoflat, on behalf of the panel, wrote:

We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the War on Terror is over, because the War on Terror is unlikely ever to be truly over. September 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country.

Roy Bourgeois, the priest who started the annual protests at Fort Benning, Georgia, and who runs the excellent School of the Americas Watch, was quoted as saying,

I felt that they were using 9/11 as an excuse, along with the Patriot Act, to interfere with our First Amendment rights. They are using this to get around what the Constitution is really rooted in.

This year's protest by the priest and his posse, an annual call to shut down this "School of Assassins," is scheduled for November 19-21.

Before you go, here's some reading material. Start with this story about Bourgeois by Kateri Wozny in The Pulse of the Twin Cities, in which she writes:

"President Bush says, 'We have to go after these terrorist training camps, wherever they are and shut them down,'" Bourgeois said. "We [protesters] say: A good place to start is in our backyard, here at this school."

As the S.O.A. Watch movement grew, major media outlets began to take interest …. In 1996, The Washington Post reported that the S.O.A was teaching torture to Latin American soldiers, a scandal that caused some U.S. Congress members to introduce bills calling for closing the school. In response, the Pentagon changed the name of the school to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

As for the school itself, a valuable resource about its "security cooperation" is this August 2000 backgrounder from the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service, re-posted by the Federation of American Scientists. As alumni newsletters go, this is one of the most macabre. Here's a sample:

Observers point out that School alumni include: 48 out of 69 Salvadoran military members cited in the U.N. Truth Commission’s report on El Salvador for involvement in human rights violations (including 19 of 27 military members implicated in the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests), and more than 100 Colombian military officers alleged to be responsible for human rights violations by a 1992 report issued by several human rights organizations. School graduates have also included several Peruvian military officers linked to the July 1992 killings of nine students and a professor from La Cantuta University, and included several Honduran officers linked to a clandestine military force known as Battalion 316, responsible for disappearances in the early 1980s.

Yes, where are these School of the Americas alums now? Not everyone connected with Battalion 316 has disappeared. One of them is John Negroponte. Just this past April, Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service dug into the memory hole to retrieve some nightmares in "Congress Ignores 'Dirty War' Past of New Iraq Envoy". Here's an excerpt:

Negroponte was sent by the incoming administration of then President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) to Tegucigalpa in early 1981 to transform Honduras into a military and intelligence base directed against Nicaragua and the left-wing insurgents in neighboring El Salvador—a mission he largely accomplished in the four years he spent running what at that time was Washington's biggest embassy in the Americas.

Sound familiar? Now Negroponte has succeeded Jerry Bremer as Iraq's pasha, and the Bush regime is building a huge embassy complex in Baghdad that serves not only as our locus of power in the oil-rich Middle East but also as a handy outpost to protect our business interests in oil-rich Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries. Here's a little more history from the frontal Lobe:

[Negroponte] and the station chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, Donald Winter, formed a close alliance with General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, the army's ambitious and murderous commander who admired—and implemented—the "dirty war" tactics that he had learned from the Argentine military in the late 1970s.

Gee, is it possible that history keeps repeating itself? As long as we let exactly the same schnooks run the government, what do you expect? "Until Negroponte's arrival," Lobe wrote, "Honduras was a sleepy, relatively untroubled backwater in the region whose military, unlike those of its neighbors, was seen as relatively progressive, if corrupt, and loathe to resort to actual violence against dissidents." Lobe continued:

But with the support of the CIA and the Argentines, Alvarez moved to change that radically, according to declassified documents as well as detailed and award-winning reporting by the Baltimore Sun in the mid-1990s.

A special intelligence unit of the Honduran Armed Forces, called Battalion 316, was put together by Alvarez and supplied and trained by the CIA and the Argentines. It was a death squad that kidnapped and tortured hundreds of real or suspected "subversives," "disappeared" at least 180 of them—including U.S. missionaries—during Negroponte's tenure. Such activities were previously unknown in Honduras.

At the same time, Negroponte, who was often referred to as "proconsul" by the Honduran media, oversaw the expansion of two major military bases used by U.S. forces and Nicaraguan contras, and, after the U.S. Congress put strict limits on the training of Salvadoran soldiers in-country, he "persuaded" the government to build a Regional Military Training Center on Honduran territory, despite the fact that Honduras and El Salvador were traditional enemies who had fought a bloody war less than 15 years before.

Throughout this period, Negroponte steadfastly defended Alvarez, at one point calling him "a model professional," and repeatedly denied anything was amiss on the human rights front in Honduras despite rising concern in Congress about reports of disappearances and killings by death squads.

The promoters of Swift boat swill want to talk about war? Let's talk about war. To bring yourself up to date on American foreign policy and its homeland roots, a good place to start is this little refresher course in American history from Howard Zinn's 2002 book Terrorism and War, in which Zinn reacts to George W. Bush's statement after 9/11 that "America is a peaceful nation." As Zinn notes:

They want us to act as if we were born yesterday. They want us to forget the history of our government. Because if you forget history, if you were born yesterday, then you'll believe anything.

The Most Candid Corporate Document Ever Written

Posted by Harkavy at 1:21 PM, October 15, 2004

With the Bush-Kerry vote less than a month away, there's no better time to look at Enron's latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Enron's new "forward-looking statement," filed October 12, has to be the most candid, honest, and forthright corporate document ever written.

While some of Enron's key human operatives are still at large and proclaiming their innocence, and Enron's political pals are either keeping quiet or engaging in doublespeak about how they helped this corruption to take place, Enron the corporate entity has confessed to investors.

Yes, Enron has confessed.

In boldface type.

On one beautifully printed page produced by Enron itself and, for a change, absolutely free of charge to consumers and taxpayers.

If you like, scroll on down just a little ways and read the passage now. (Or, click here, go to page 2, and print it out. It's suitable for framing—and I don't mean only as an indictment of the Bush regime.)

But if you first want some context, here it is:

"Forward-looking statements" are mandatory in such SEC filings and in other legal documents. These cover-your-corporate-ass passages are usually typed out in all capital letters—the same communicative style that many insane people use. In SEC documents, such passages are commonly boilerplate and not particularly compelling to read, even if you're the type to pore over corporate records.

In Enron's case, however, the cover-your-ass days are mostly gone. Ensnarled in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan—trading briefs instead of energy futures—Enron is a going-away concern.

Check out the company's homepage, which says, "Enron is in the midst of restructuring various businesses for distribution as ongoing companies to its creditors and liquidating its remaining operations." Then click here for information about "Jobs at Enron." (Sorry, there are no listings for either "energy trader" or "journalist.")

Of course, the company still has to file SEC reports. And they still must contain "forward-looking statements." But these ain't boilerplate.

Why read this now? Keep in mind that during the 2000 presidential campaign, Enron and its CEO, Ken Lay, were special friends of George W. Bush—and vice versa: Thanks to GOP-induced deregulation, Enron diddled Americans out of billions of dollars; its executives plowed huge amounts of money into Bush's war chest before the company's schemes collapsed. Forget that irrelevant nonsense about Swift boats that's being pounded into your brains. The way that Enron mushroomed and then exploded is real and relevant. It explains a lot about why you're in your current straits. You need details? Start with the Enron entries at Wikipedia and Disinfopedia; both sites also have copious links, including the Bush administration and Enron.

OK, you're now ready to read the most candid corporate passage ever written. Please note the insane coincidence that it happens to be "Section 8." Here it is:

Section 8 – Other Events

Item 8.01. Other Events.

On October 12, 2004, the Company and certain other debtor-in-possession subsidiaries of the Company (collectively with the company, the "Debtors") filed their monthly operating report for May 2004 with the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York (the "Bankruptcy Court"). The monthly operating report is attached as an exhibit to this Current Report on Form 8-K.

Forward-looking Statements.

This Form 8-K, including exhibits attached hereto, contains statements that are forward-looking within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and that actual results could differ materially as a result of known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including: various regulatory issues, the outcome of the Company's Chapter 11 process, numerous ongoing external investigations in which the Company is fully cooperating (including investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, the Internal Revenue Service, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the National Association of Securities Dealers Inc., the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the California and Connecticut Attorneys General, and numerous Congressional committees and state agencies), the outcome of numerous lawsuits and claims, general economic conditions, future trends, and other risks, uncertainties, and factors disclosed in the Company's most recent reports on Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K filed with the SEC.

The information contained in the Monthly Operating Report attached hereto has been prepared in accordance with applicable law under the United States Bankruptcy Code and is not to be used for investment purposes. As explained in a November 8, 2001, Form 8-K filed by the Company with the SEC, the previously issued financial statements of the Company for the fiscal years ended December 31, 1997, through 2000 and for the first and second quarters of 2001 and the audit reports covering the year-end financial statements for 1997 through 2000 should not be relied upon. In addition, as explained in an April 22, 2002, Form 8-K filed by the Company, the financial statements of the Company for the third quarter of 2001 should not be relied upon.

As explained in a July 11, 2003 Form 8-K filed by the Company with the SEC, the Company continues to believe that the existing common and preferred stock of the Company have no value. However, the proposed joint Chapter 11 plan filed by the Debtors with the Bankruptcy Court provides the Company’s stockholders with a contingent right to receive recovery in the very unlikely event that the aggregate value of the Company’s assets exceeds the total amount of allowed claims.

If I'm hearing you right, corporate citizen Enron, you just said, "We're flat-ass busted in Bankruptcy Court, and we're in deep shit with a whole bunch of agencies and governments and all kinds of lawyers and people. And don't believe our past financial statements; they were bullshit. So were the reports by our auditors. Oh, and by the way, our stock is worthless, and so are your chances of getting your money back."

Thank you for sharing, Enron. Would you like a tissue?

State of Siege

Posted by Harkavy at 11:45 PM, October 14, 2004

John Kerry's supporters in Ohio are crying for help. But the wrong kind is on the way: a preemptive attack during prime time by Swift boats.

We interrupt next week's scheduled reprogramming of the pseudo-doc Stolen Honor for a word from Ohcat, an Ohioan who somehow got this October 11 message through to us from a battleground in the southwestern part of the state:

I wanted to let all of you know in New York that when Dick Cheney came into Batavia, Ohio, we were holding signs and screaming pro-Kerry phrases. … I wasn't sure if anyone knows that in Ohio we're fighting as hard as we can to get that Rat Bastard out of our White House.

We can't even have signs in our front yards. There have been numerous home movies of people taking Kerry signs out of yards and off of our cars. We are scared, but we are fighting down here. Today, as the vice president came down Highway 32 to go yap it up at the airport, we were at the busiest intersection on the way, getting yelled at and flipped off. I have never felt so proud.

I didn't want it to go unnoticed, so I e-mailed you. In Cincinnati, the media is totally pro-Bush, and the commercials are numerous and horrific. We are scared, but not giving up. Please read this and know there are a lot of Democrats in Ohio, but there are also a lot of people who don't want the rest of America to know.

Ohcat signed the note "Not Giving Up Hope in Ohio." But it's no surprise things are tense there for Kerry people. The media in southwestern Ohio? Carl Lindner, the notorious "Banana Republican" (see this 1996 Mother Jones profile), owns the dominant Cincinnati Enquirer.

Even what little coverage Cheney's stop in Batavia got in the national press was skewed. The headline in the usually solid San Jose Mercury News: "Friendly Crowd Cheers Cheney in Republican Stronghold County." "Friendly" because you had to have tickets to get in—tickets that were carefully parceled out by the GOP. And Cheney spoke in his own little "green zone," the local airport, well-protected from any potential protesters. (Only a few days before, Kerry spoke in northeastern Ohio, but at a local junior college, where anyone could go see him.)

We noted last month the Bush-Cheney campaign's Soviet-like behavior in Iowa. Some of the national media have also caught on. Mike Allen of The Washington Post wrote a shrewd piece about a week ago on how George W. Bush's handlers keep him isolated from the American public. Wouldn't do for the populace to get a close look at this emperor's new clothes, would it?

The Post's Allen noted that Dubya has held only 15 solo press conferences since taking office, far fewer than any other president in at least the past 60 years. He used to talk to small groups of local-yokel reporters "as his campaign bus rolled through their state," Allen wrote, but "such roundtables have tailed off."

That doesn't mean Bush's handlers have stopped brown-nosing the press. Allen came up with a prime anecdote:

For the extraordinary state of Ohio, Bush made an extraordinary effort. On September 1, two executives and a reporter from the Columbus Dispatch were ushered up the front steps of Air Force One—a treatment unheard of for journalists.

The White House suggested the venue after the newspaper asked Bush to meet with its editorial board. The front-page headline that emerged from the 45-minute interview was a quote from the president: "The Country's Getting Better."

Private sessions are always more fruitful for the Bush-Cheney regime. The official government transcript of Cheney's speech in Batavia, Ohio, contains not only the usual insertions of "(Applause)" but also—I kid you not—a record of the crowd of rapt faithfuls supposedly responding in one voice when Cheney quotes to them what he says Kerry said. It's recorded for posterity this way:

CHENEY: Something Senator Kerry said in the first presidential debate reveals a similar mind set, the same lack of understanding of the danger we face. He said that before America acts, we must pass a quote "global test."

AUDIENCE: Booo!

Wait till the huge Sinclair TV chain (it reaches 24 percent of the country) gets through brainwashing Ohio, where it beams its pro-Bush message from TV towers in Cincinnati, Dayton, and Columbus. (Sinclair's got a Fox attitude in the latter two markets.)

The Independent (U.K.) recently reminded us that Sinclair's upcoming interruption of prime time to air the anti-Kerry Stolen Honor isn't its first shot at infamy:

Earlier this year, the company, which between 1996 and mid-2004 donated 89 per cent of its total $2.3 million in political contributions to Republicans, ordered seven of its ABC affiliates not to run a program in which the veteran anchor Ted Koppel read the names of American soldiers killed in Iraq.

You don't agree with Sinclair's ham-handed politicizing? Tough. It's a publicly traded company, but the Smith family of Maryland, which runs the day-to-day operations, also controls almost 90 percent of the voting stock, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Keep this sentence from the Sinclair 2003 annual report in mind:

The Smiths exercise control over most matters submitted to a stockholder vote, and may have interests that differ from yours.

Oh, almost forgot. There's at least one more October surprise for swing-state Ohio:

Carl Lindner (see above) gave $500,000 just last week to the Progress for America Voter Fund, according to Political Money Line. Billing itself as "the leading organization dedicated to promoting the conservative issue agenda and rebutting liberal distortions," Progress for America has raised $30 million since late May to blitz the airwaves. Read up on this group, one of what the Center for Public Integrity calls the campaign season's "Silent Partners."

Well, not that silent. One of the three members of Progress for America's advisory board is C. Boyden Gray, Reynolds tobacoo heir, corporate lobbyist, anti-environmentalist, and Bush-Cheney Inc.'s fix-it guy during the Florida Fiasco of '00.

Gray was also Bush the Elder's lawyer during Iran/Contra. Who better for an October surprise all these years later?

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Posted by Harkavy at 11:44 AM, October 13, 2004

It seems like a even swap to me: Ohio dumps its toxic nuclear garbage on Texas, and Texas dumps its toxic Swift-boat propaganda garbage on Ohio.

And the same guy, Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, is carrying out both operations.

For some reason, few news outlets even mentioned in passing that the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Vets and P.O.W.'s for Truth, one of many Section 527 "electioneering" committees, raised $3.6 million in only nine days late last month, a whopping $2 million of which came from longtime GOP donor Simmons (and $1 million more from legendary corporate raider Boone Pickens).

Latest figures show that electioneering committees nationwide are pumping more than $200 million into media blitzes on behalf of—or against—Democrats, Republicans, and ballot issues. (Check out OpenSecrets.org's 527 Committees page and its Swift Boat Veterans for Truth page.)

Nick Anderson of the Los Angeles Times pointed out yesterday that the Swift Boat Veterans committee "spent about $600,000 to criticize Kerry's Vietnam War–era protests on cable TV and broadcasts in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Nevada."

Back in August, former National Guard absentee George W. Bush declared from his Texas ranch, concerning John Kerry's war record, "I think Senator Kerry served admirably. He ought to be—he ought to be proud of his record." Bush also criticized Section 527 committees in general as "bad for the system."

So are radium 226, a carcinogen thought to cause bone and nasal cancer, and thorium, which is linked to cancer of the lung, pancreas, and blood.

That deadly stuff is now stored in Fernald, Ohio, but its containers are decaying and probably leaking. (Take a tour of the "Feed Materials Production Center," as it was known for years in an effort to fool local residents into thinking it was a harmless feed plant, instead of a uranium-processing plant for nuclear weapons.)

Simmons has long wanted to give this dangerous stuff a permanent home in Texas. (Bush liked the idea when he was Texas governor.) You can learn all about Simmons in "A Radioactive Recipe for Profit" in Mother Jones and "Simmons Would Make Billions, Sticking Texas With Nuke Liability" in Lobby Watch. Lobby Watch's glowing summation of his bidness career, during which he's poured money into Bush's campaigns: "Billionaire corporate raider Harold Simmons controls Contran and Valhi, holding companies that run an empire of sugar, manufacturing, metal, chemical, oil, real estate, insurance, and other interests."

It figures that one of Simmons's committees that funnels money to politicians is named CONPAC. You just can't make this shit up. You can't get rid of it, either.

Officials in Nevada and Utah have sternly rejected the federal government's attempt to move the Ohio radioactive waste to their states. Texas, on the other hand, is welcoming it. Waste Control Specialists, one of Simmons's companies, wants to store this stuff—which includes waste from the Manhattan Project—in Andrews, Texas, near the New Mexico border. The dream is to make this spot a national dumping ground for nuke waste.

"I think that most Texans don't know anything about this," the Sierra Club's Margot Clarke told Scott Streater of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "They don't know that truckloads of nuclear waste are going to be on our highways from all over the country coming to West Texas."

Streater reported Sunday on the latest formal application by Simmons's company to import tons of uranium waste from Ohio. Company officials are sanguine—veep Dean Kunihiro says, "We don't feel that either the environment or public health is jeopardized in any way"—but environmentalists' blood is already boiling—even though that's not expected to happen to a lot of people until the nuke waste is transported to Texas and starts leaking. Clarke told Streater: "It's obvious that stuff poses a danger. Otherwise, why would other states work so hard to prevent it from coming there?"

Why is she so worried? Maybe because Texas officials have already determined, as Streater reports, that "the company's 4,000-page application lacks required data on the impact of potential accidents and information on the socioeconomic makeup of the area."

The company is also seeking a permit to import other radioactive waste, prompting Texas legislator Lon Burnam to tell Streater, "This process is going to essentially guarantee that we will become the nation's nuclear waste dump."

Well, you dumped Bush on us. It's the least we can do for you.

Do They Take Us for Fools? Yes.

Posted by Harkavy at 3:02 PM, October 12, 2004

At least this morning's New York Times got the headline right: "A Tax Bill, Full of Breaks, Passes Senate."

But to honor Jacques Derrida—"I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe, a suction point rather than that very hard weapon"—I can't help but parse the story's first paragraph, thereby making my life, and yours, more complicated and, more or less, in a relative sense, vis-à-vis, ceteris proximally paribus, more frustrating. But I'm still not as bad as the U.S. Senate, which deconstructed our future.

The first paragraph in Edmund L. Andrews's story:

After nearly three years of jockeying by legions of business groups, the Senate passed a $137 billion corporate tax bill on Monday that gave something to almost everyone.

"Something to almost everyone"? Only if you're a corporate citizen. Considering what the senators have done to us ugly bags of mostly water, let's hope that they will someday be hoist by their own Picard.

On down in the story, Andrews does give voice to John McCain, who said of the corporate tax bill, "It is the worst example of the influence of special-interest groups I have ever seen."

But as for depth, well, Andrews merely splashes around in the shallow end, saying:

Technically, the new law is projected to be revenue-neutral for the Treasury because it pays for the new tax breaks by closing down many tax shelters, eliminating some tax preferences, and increasing customs fees on imported goods.

He just parroted the official line. Go to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for a reality check. The center's Joel Friedman, writing just before the bill passed, noted that the bill finances "a raft of new corporate tax cuts" and then really started plucking the chicken:

Many are narrowly focused, special-interest tax breaks that offer no benefit to the economy as a whole. These tax cuts only serve to erode the corporate tax base at a time when corporate tax revenues have fallen to historically low levels, and evidence of corporations engaging in tax-avoidance schemes is abundant. …

In fact, despite an official cost estimate that shows the bill to be deficit neutral, the measure is likely to lead to higher deficits in the future. The bill includes a number of temporary tax cuts, many of which are candidates for inclusion in the growing list of "extenders"—those temporary tax cuts that are routinely extended. If these new tax breaks are extended in coming years without being paid for—a likely scenario in the absence of pay-as-you-go rules that require the cost of such tax to cuts be offset—the result will be higher deficits.

Congress and the Bush regime just played the ol' shell game with this bill and the misnamed "middle-class tax-cut" bill (which came up in the Cheney-Edwards debate; see this Bush Beat item).

Regarding the corporate tax bill, the Times' Andrews naively writes that George W. Bush "has indicated he will sign the measure despite White House concerns that it is overloaded with special-interest provisions." That's malarkey about White House "concerns." The Bush regime, which includes leaders of the GOP-controlled Congress, knew that senators of both parties would waddle over to the trough and slurp up the bill's "surplus" so they could excrete it as a steaming pile of pork-barrel projects. The structure of this session's two major tax bills is all part of the White House's shrewd strategy to reward corporations at our expense.

No parsing is necessary to understand the conclusion reached by the center's Friedman:

The corporate tax package should not be viewed in isolation. It should be seen in the context of the "middle class" package signed into law on October 4. The tax cuts in that legislation cost $146 billion through 2014, with none of the costs being offset. The revenue-raising provisions in the corporate tax bill could have been used to offset nearly all of those costs.

In other words, Congress could have extended those popular "middle-class" tax cuts without damaging the budget. Instead, Congress chose a far more fiscally irresponsible approach. It used the revenue raised from repealing an illegal export subsidy and closing corporate tax shelters to pay for a dizzying array of new, mostly corporate tax breaks, while using deficit-financing for the "middle-class" bill.

Information Highway Robbery

Posted by Harkavy at 9:40 AM, October 12, 2004

The plot sickens. Last week's mysterious seizure in England of computers used by the worldwide IndyMedia activist news collective is becoming more clear—as in clear and present danger.

An international journalists group contends that the goal of the FBI-led seizure (see this Bush Beat item) was election-related intimidation, not just the temporary disruption of the network, though several IndyMedia sites are still down. You may ask how the FBI can seize computers outside its jurisdiction. Are you saying that has stopped our government lately?

The ruckus has barely been covered in the mainstream press, but a Mathaba.net story posted this morning notes that the International Federation of Journalists has called for investigation. Here's an excerpt from the story that also includes a characterization of the amorphous IndyMedia collective:

IndyMedia sites, which provide challenging and independent reporting, particularly of political and social justice issues, are open forums where any member of the public can publish their comments. The IFJ believes the seizure may be linked to a September 30 court case in San Jose, California, in which IndyMedia San Francisco and two students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania successfully opposed an application by Diebold Election Systems Inc. to remove documents claiming to reveal flaws in the design of electronic voting machines, which are due to be used widely in the forthcoming U.S. presidential election.

Diebold was trying to remove from the Web the postings of e-mail archives that included internal company memos about problems with the machines. Meanwhile, IndyMedia's own machines were functioning quite nicely until the FBI and cops from several other countries stepped in. A total of 21 of IndyMedia's more than 140 sites worldwide were shut down, and some are still offline today. (Keep checking IndyMedia's FBI Coverage page for updates on the saga.) Lots of great information on IndyMedia sites is posted anonymously, which makes it tough for cops and governments to track down. But the computers seized from Rackspace, IndyMedia's Internet service provider, contained hard disks full of juicy information for police agencies to browse through and copy before returning them.

Mathaba's story quotes IFJ General Secretary Aidan White as saying, "We have witnessed an intolerable and intrusive international police operation against a network specializing in independent journalism. The way this has been done smacks more of intimidation of legitimate journalistic inquiry than crime-busting." The story continues:

Initial reports suggested FBI officers themselves had seized the servers. The seizure follows visits by the FBI to IndyMedia personnel in the U.S. inquiring about the publication on the French site IndyMedia Nantes of photographs of Swiss undercover police photographing protesters. The photographs remain available on other websites.

Statewatch.org, in Great Britain, notes that this attack on IndyMedia is a team effort by the U.S., U.K., Italy, and Switzerland—the latter two supposedly asked the U.S. for help in suppressing the material on IndyMedia sites, and the U.S. went to British authorities, cited a treaty between the two countries, and got permission from Britain's Home Office to seize the computers used by IndyMedia at Rackspace. The FBI insists that it was just trying to help out the other countries in their investigation. Hmmm.

Whoever came up with the idea of trying to squelch IndyMedia this way, it's only the latest example of electronic warfare against activists and journalists. Some of these attacks by the U.S. government and others may be in retaliation for IndyMedia coverage of globalization summits and protesters. After all, IndyMedia was born out of anti-globalization activists' networking for the big WTO protest in Seattle during the Clinton regime. As for Italy's involvement, Statewatch says, "It is not known what grounds the Italian authorities used, though the government has been hostile to IndyMedia ever since its coverage of Genoa in 2001."

Back in the U.S., for details of the Diebold murk, see this story on IndyBay.org, part of the IndyMedia collective. Diebold, the biggest maker of electronic voting machines, was ordered on September 30 in U.S. District Court in San Jose to pay damages and fees for illegally threatening ISPs for copyright violation while knowing that the documents posted by Indymedia weren't copyrighted. Diebold also had argued that the documents and memos about problems with its voting machines had no "public interest" value. In finding against Diebold's intimidation tactics, Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that IndyMedia's posting of Diebold memos and other documents was proper, saying in part:

The e-mail archive was posted or hyperlinked to for the purpose of informing the public about the problems associated with Diebold’s electronic voting machines. It is hard to imagine a subject the discussion of which could be more in the public interest. If Diebold’s machines in fact do tabulate voters’ preferences incorrectly, the very legitimacy of elections would be suspect.

It's a little difficult to find the memos, but one site that hasn't been shut down is erstwhile presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich's Voting Rights page, a comprehensive look at the controversy about security flaws in electronic voting machines.

Flaws, you ask? Yeah, problems that, according to the Kucinich site's summary of one major study, "allow a person to vote multiple times, view ballots already cast, modify party affiliation on ballots, and cause votes to be miscounted." Oh, I forgot a couple of things: The flaws would allow someone to "create, delete, and modify votes on a voting machine and tamper with audit logs and election results."

Diebold's own site is certainly in no danger from authorities, probably because the company's CEO is so civic-minded. You can go there to read Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell's September 2003 vow in a fundraising letter (after he returned from a trip to George W. Bush's Crawford ranch) that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year."

After the letter was leaked last year, O'Dell was blasted in the press. He promised to be "more sensitive," but insisted to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, "I'm not doing anything wrong or complicated, but it obviously did leave me open to the criticism I've received. I've taken it personally; it's very painful, it may have injured our company, and I feel really badly about that."

We feel your pain, Walden, but for different reasons.

The Plain Dealer story provided the chilling context:

Because the fundraising revelations fell closely on the heels of security questions raised about Diebold's machines in a later-questioned Johns Hopkins University study, O'Dell's critics began to suggest that Diebold should not be allowed to be involved in elections.

The company was at the time vying for a place on Ohio's favored-vendor list, which it has since won.

Activists have tweaked the establishment in several ways electronically. There's the little matter of trying to make sure that our upcoming vote is at least a little more democratic than Afghanistan's or Iraq's. But I'd say that the authorities have other reasons to be really, really pissed off at IndyMedia. In late August, several lists of Republican National Convention delegates were posted on IndyMedia sites. The lists included home and e-mail addresses and the New York–area hotels at which they were staying. The Associated Press's Curt Anderson reported at the time that a federal grand jury, at the behest of the Secret Service, began investigating and subpoenaed a Web hosting service, Calyx Internet Access, for IndyMedia contact info.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a tiger that guards the Internet flow of info from the constant threat of elephants and dinosaurs (and their lawyers and other cheetahs), is helping IndyMedia investigate the attacks on its sites. And the old-school ACLU jumped into the RNC-IndyMedia fray; its associate legal director, Ann Beeson, put the Secret Service probe into perspective:

"This type of investigation is really a form of intimidation and a message to activists that they will pay a price for speaking out.

"The posting of publicly available information about people who are in the news should not trigger an investigation. Indeed, if the mere posting of the delegates' names is cause for alarm, then the Secret Service should be investigating the many Republican websites where the same kind of information is available."

The Campaign Enters Its Prime Time

Posted by Harkavy at 9:16 AM, October 11, 2004

As George W. Bush and John Kerry continue to argue down the home stretch, the propaganda is simply gushing—it's a beautiful sight if you're an oilman. It's agit-prop for the Chief Prop.

The country's largest chain of TV stations—it reaches 24 percent of the population, including several swing states—will preempt regular programming to show the anti-Kerry "documentary" Stolen Honor, which accuses Kerry of betraying American prisoners during the Vietnam War, The Washington Post reports this morning.

The major networks had already rejected the piece, but Sinclair's top execs are "strong financial supporters of Bush's campaign," the Post's Paul Farhi writes.

Meanwhile, if you're a dude with a sign that says "No War for Oil," you face arrest. Check out Jonathan M. Katz's Slate story, "An Old Law Turns Protesters Into Threats Against President," re-posted here on The Smirking Chimp. Katz, writing in late September, recites a litany of repression by authorities, like removing people wearing anti-Bush T-shirts from crowds.

One thing that won't even be mentioned in the campaign home stretch, of course, is the continuing tragic and deadly battle between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Why should it even come up? It's only the key to peace in the Middle East, as numerous sober commentators have pointed out.

Go back to this Bush Beat item about General Tony Zinni. If you've seen it, read Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery's current piece about Ariel Sharon's own brand of propaganda, "Don't Believe a Word." Avnery rips the covers off Sharon's "unilateral disengagement" in Gaza, saying that it's "really a right-wing plan for annexing most of the West Bank, burying the peace process, and deceiving public opinion in Israel and abroad."

Avnery says he's more convinced than ever that that's the case, now that Sharon confidant Dov Weisglass (the Israeli prime minister's version of Karl Rove) has basically confirmed it. As Avnery put it:

In an interview with Haaretz, [Weisglass] stated that the sole aim of the plan was to "freeze" the peace process. The real purpose of the "disengagement" is to block negotiations with the Palestinians for dozens of years and to prevent any discussion about the West Bank, while at the same time extending the Israeli settlements in a way that will put an end to any possibility of a future Palestinian state.

In the meantime, life in Israel—for Arabs and Jews—is hell. There's a blazing TV documentary series, Eye on Palestine, that's now airing in the Arab world, portraying how everyday life for Palestinians is crushing and humiliating and dangerous. Forget American TV "reality" shows. This is reality, tracking the normal lives of ordinary Palestinians. Read Palestinian activist Daoud Kuttab's smart piece on the TV series—it also includes lots of background for ignorant Westerners—here on Beirut's Daily Star site.

While you in America are bombarded with Vietnam bullshit, you won't see or hear anything in the next few weeks about John Ashcroft's disgraceful and unconstitutional roundup of Muslims right here in the U.S.A.—another black mark against the Bush regime.

The Sinclair chain of TV stations won't be running Persons of Interest, a real documentary that peers into that frightening idiocy. (I reviewed that film in the Voice; read it here.)

Indymedia Is Turned Off by the FBI. For Real.

Posted by Harkavy at 2:09 AM, October 11, 2004

In the past few days, IndyMedia, the international media network site of anti-globalization and social-justice activists, has had its servers seized, shutting down its network in many parts of the planet.

The strange and disturbing saga threatening to cripple this massive global dissent network may revolve around nothing more than photos of undercover Swiss cops that were posted on a French IndyMedia site. The exact reasons for the court order or who actually holds the servers haven't been spelled out to officials in the IndyMedia collective.

IndyMedia was set up as an activist network in 1999 for planning and covering the WTO protests in Seattle. Since then, it has mushroomed into a planetwide clearinghouse for all sorts of independent newsgathering. The network of activists has not been accused of breaking any laws. But all of the material actually on some of its key servers and hard disks was seized. This current creepiness apparently is the work of the FBI, acting on behalf of Italian and Swiss authorities. Gee, what terrific cooperation.

On October 9, IndyMedia reported that "the request to seize IndyMedia servers hosted by a U.S. company in the U.K. originated from government agencies in Italy and Switzerland. More than 20 IndyMedia sites, several internet radio streams and other projects were hosted on the servers. They were taken offline on October 7 after an order was issued to Rackspace Inc., one of IndyMedia's Web hosting providers."

Agence France Presse had sorted it out a day earlier, reporting October 8 from D.C. that the FBI claimed to be only cooperating when it served a subpoena on Rackspace demanding the actual servers. The French press agency's article said, in part:

The FBI acknowledged that a subpoena had been issued but said it was at the request of Italian and Swiss authorities.

"It is not an FBI operation," FBI spokesman Joe Parris told AFP. "Through a legal assistance treaty, the subpoena was on behalf of a third country." The FBI spokesman said there was no U.S. investigation but that the agency cooperated under the terms of an international treaty on law enforcement.

Rackspace, a U.S. Web hosting company with offices in London, said it complied with a court order "pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, which establishes procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering." The company declined to elaborate.

"The order was so short-term that Rackspace had to give away our hard drives in the U.K.," the Independent Media Center said. Italian news reports said access to IndyMedia had been cut as a result of an FBI operation at U.S. and British locations.

Mauro Bulgarelli, a member of Italy's Green party, called it a "provocation and intimidation effort" against the alternative media.

And sweeping, too. Plus, the timing is suspicious, considering that a major radfest is about to take place in London. IndyMedia says—for now—on its U.K. site: "An additional server was taken down at Rackspace that provided streaming radio to several radio stations, including one covering the European Social Forum in London."

IndyMedia workers paint a grim picture of recent events:

The last few months have seen numerous attacks on independent media by the U.S. federal government. In August, the Secret Service used a subpoena in an attempt to disrupt the NYC [IndyMedia Center] before the Republican National Convention by trying to get IP logs from an ISP in the U.S. and the Netherlands. Last month, the FCC shut down community radio stations around the U.S. Two weeks ago, the FBI requested that IndyMedia takes down a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police, and IMC volunteers in Seattle were visited by the FBI on the same issue.

The Guardian (U.K) reports that "American authorities have shut down 20 independent media centers by seizing their British-based Web servers." Many IndyMedia outlets were silenced, in such outposts as Basque country, Uruguay, Marseille, western Massachusetts, Belgium, Portugal, Czech Republic, Brazil, parts of Germany. Silenced, at least temporarily, is the global IndyMedia Radio site.

Confused? So is IndyMedia's network of local activists and news gatherers. If you can still get on this Indymedia site, you can read statements from Rackspace, the Internet Service Provider that was ordered to turn over its servers. And there's this passage from IndyMedia on its British site, which explains—kind of—what's going on. I'll quote it at length in case you can't get to IndyMedia:

The FBI's latest anti-free-press actions began at the beginning of October, when they visited IndyMedia's ISP demanding the removal of identifying information from photographs of undercover police officers that was posted on the Nantes IndyMedia website.

When asked what the U.S. government was doing requesting the removal of information from a French-run website that contained information about Swiss police actions, the FBI stated that this was a "courtesy" to the Swiss government. The FBI agents stated that no laws had been broken, and no crimes had been committed. However, because no identifying information was posted on the website in question, it was unclear what actions the FBI was requesting.

FBI took the hard drives of Global IMC servers in the U.S.A. and the U.K. It appears that a court order was issued to Rackspace (IndyMedia's service provider with offices in the U.S. and in London) to physically remove the hard drives from Global IndyMedia servers (backup servers are now in place). Rackspace was given no time to defend against the order before it was acted upon and turned over the hard drives, both in the U.S. and the U.K. The servers hosted numerous local IMCs, and the reason for the seizure is not known.

Jennifer O'Connell of Rackspace, which is caught in the middle, sent this response to IndyMedia a few days ago:

Unfortunately, we have received a federal order to provide your hardware to the requesting agency. We are complying at this time. Our datacenter technicians are building you a new server which will be online as soon as possible. Your account manager will notify you once the new server is online and available.