Morning Report 12/30/04
Bush Misoverestimates It

Posted by Harkavy at 3:31 PM, December 30, 2004

The unluckiest people in the path of history's deadliest tsunami were those on Sumatra, in Indonesia's Aceh province—and the luckiest were the executives of ExxonMobil.

The stupidest single person in the wake of the wake was George W. Bush, who missed a once-in-a-planet's-lifetime chance to win over the hearts of a billion Muslims. Why didn't he jump into action right away? All he had to do was say some words. But he kept on picking up sticks at his ranch, instead of doing his real job. There's never been a more lazy-ass president.

The storm didn't force the world's largest oil company to lift a finger, either. Australia's ABC News reported this morning that the death toll in Aceh alone could top 80,000. But the tsunami left untouched the very northern tip of Aceh, site of ExxonMobil's Arun natural-gas field. The industry news service Schlumberger put things in the right perspective in its Monday story "ExxonMobil: Indonesia Quake Caused 'Minor' Ops Disruption":

Despite the horrific toll in human suffering, analysts and government officials are breathing a sigh of relief that Indonesia has been spared the economic impact of serious earthquake-related damage to the liquid natural gas facilities in the quake-stricken province.

Indonesia, the only Asian member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, is the world's largest LNG exporter and relies heavily on petroleum revenues to support its sputtering economy, which has seen growth falling behind that of its regional neighbors in recent years.

The oil bidness in Aceh is where the murder, rape, and torture come in. In way, the people of Aceh who did survive are lucky: The killings have stopped, many of the killers probably swept away as if Travis Bickle's daydream had come true.

Even before the tsunami, Aceh was hell on earth. This is how the International Labor Rights Fund explains it:

In the past decade alone, ExxonMobil has extracted some $40 billion from its operations in Aceh, Indonesia, leaving in its wake a legacy of death, destruction, and environmental damage.

There have been credible reports dating back several years that Exxon Mobil Corporation, along with its predecessor companies, Mobil Oil Corporation and Mobil Oil Indonesia, hired military units of the Indonesian national army to provide "security" for their gas extraction and liquification project in Aceh, Indonesia. Members of these military units regularly have perpetrated ongoing and severe human rights abuses against local villagers, including murder, rape, torture, destruction of property, and other acts of terror. ExxonMobil apparently has taken no action to stop this violence, and instead, reportedly has continued to finance the military and to provide company equipment and facilities that have been used by the Indonesian military to perpetrate and literally cover up (in the form of mass graves) these criminal acts.

The ILRF has sued ExxonMobil over the tortures and murders, but the company vigorously denies involvement. What's darkly hilarious about this is that the U.S. State Department has encouraged D.C. federal judge Louis Oberdorfer to throw out the case, warning in 2002 that the lawsuit "would impact adversely on the interests of the United States," meaning our financial interests, as well as compromise our "war on terrorism." See, the lawsuit gets in the way with our close relationship with Indonesia's military—whose butts our own Paul Wolfowitz has long kissed. And of course, the suit is directed at ExxonMobil, a huge contributor to Bush.

The problem is this: As many people have pointed out, the State Department itself has catalogued and condemned the murders, tortures, and rapes in Aceh. The State Department's lengthy 2003 human-rights report on Indonesia focuses mainly on Aceh. Here are some excerpts:

• Human rights abuses were most apparent in Aceh province, the scene of a long-running separatist revolt.

• Physical torture cases included random beatings and acts involving the hair, nails, teeth, and genitals. Heat, suffocation, electricity, and suspension were also used. Psychological torture cases reportedly included food and sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, being forced to witness torture, and being forced to participate in torture.

• The [Government's] security forces committed numerous extrajudicial killings that were not politically motivated. The government largely failed to hold soldiers and police accountable for such killings and other serious human rights abuses, particularly in Aceh.

• The Government made no progress in establishing accountability in a number of extrajudicial killings in Aceh in 2002, including the June killings of two farmers on Kayee Ciret Mountain and the August killings of three women in the north Aceh village of Kandang. . . . The Government reported no progress in prosecuting those responsible for acts of torture committed in Aceh in 2002, including the beating and burning of civilian Rizki Muhammad.

• During the year, hundreds of disappearances occurred, most frequently in Aceh province, and large numbers of persons who disappeared over the past 20 years, mainly in conflict areas, remained unaccounted for at year's end.

• According to [human-rights group] Kontras, at least 17 verified cases of torture or beatings involving women or children were recorded in Aceh during the [Government's] military operation, which began on May 19 and continued through year's end. According to a November press report, a TNI [Indonesian Army] military commander in Aceh, Brigadier General Bambang Darmono, declared that beating suspected rebels was acceptable: "For example, my soldier slugs a suspect across the face. That's no problem, as long as he is able to function after the questioning. [But] if it's gross torture, which causes someone to be incapacitated . . . that's a no-no."

It goes on like this for page after bloody page—from our own State Department, no less.

Of course, the New York-based Human Rights Watch has been trying to wake up the world to Aceh's nightmare, doing real digging by interviewing victims and so on. HRW notes in its September 2004 report:

These are systemic failures, not just the acts of rogue soldiers and police or untrained, poorly resourced judges and prosecutors. The stories of torture are chilling and sadly similar to accounts of abuses committed by Indonesian security forces in Aceh in the past and in other parts of the country.

But here's what it gets really sticky for the U.S., thanks to the Bush regime. When the Abu Ghraib scandal blew up last April, so did officials of the countries we've long scolded for human-rights abuses. Indonesia condemned the Abu Ghraib abuses—and brutally. HRW tells it like this:

Major Farid Ma'ruf, a spokesman for Kopassus, the Indonesian military’s notorious special forces unit, said, "It is ironic that torture and sexual abuse were committed by the military of a country that always claims to be the world's human rights guardian. The treatment of Iraqi prisoners was clearly inhumane because the military should have strict standards on how to properly interrogate detainees."

He should know. HRW interviewed numerous people who say they were tortured at the hands of Kopassus forces. But after Abu Ghraib, our moral authority is shot. (As if we had the right to claim it in the first place.) Last May, when the State Department released its human-rights report, Indonesian officials went ballistic. HRW tells it this way:

In response to the . . . report on human rights, which highlighted a variety of abuses in Indonesia, Marty Natalegawa, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, shot back: "The U.S. government does not have the moral authority to assess or act as a judge of other countries, including Indonesia, on human rights, especially after the abuse scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib Prison."

Yes, that's what the Bush regime has wrought. So yesterday, when Dubya finally put on a fittingly somber suit to pose as a businesslike world figure, what did he do to repair our image? He treated the English language the way Chuck Graner treated prisoners.

Bush often transforms from prop to malaprop, but he really slashed syntaxes yesterday when, defensive as usual, he inarticulated the U.S.'s position on disaster aid:

"No, we're a very generous, kindhearted nation.

You know, the—what you're beginning to see is a typical response from America. First of all, we provide immediate cash relief, to the tune of about $35 billion."

Well, it was a typical response from Bush, anyway. We spend $35 billion every five months on the Iraq Debacle. Put another way, $35 billion equals two years of Wall Street bonuses.

He meant to say $35 million. Put another way, $35 million equals what two Wall Street execs got in bonuses last year.

Whoever types up the official White House transcripts probably has a macro for "[sic]"

The smirking Bush crowed about the U.S.'s generosity, blasting his critics as "very misguided and ill-informed." He's misinformed, as my colleague Jarrett Murphy pointed out Monday: Per capita, the U.S. is not the most generous.

At least the tsunami halted the murder, rape, and torture in Aceh. Latest reports say at least 500 Indonesian military officers on Aceh are reported missing. Guess it's their turn.

Morning Report 12/29/04
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Posted by Harkavy at 11:56 AM, December 29, 2004

Even a disaster of Biblical proportions failed to rouse the bored-again George W. Bush from his Christmas vacation in Crawford, Texas.

The monumental Indian Ocean tsunami was the closest thing to the Genesis flood that we'll probably ever see. Any other U.S. president, including Daddy Bush, would have immediately gone public with comforting words and a bucketful of money. This earth-shaking event, the most deadly tsunami in the planet's recorded history, has left hundreds of millions of Asians—those who weren't swept away—with mountains of debris to clean up and victims to mourn.

Our president spent yesterday clearing brush at his ranch, while making sure the U.S. was pitching in to help the unprecedented disaster's victims.

So yesterday, we pledged $15 million. My colleague Jarrett Murphy immediately put that rather small largesse into perspective. Here's some more context: Lloyd S. Blankfein, president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs, received a nearly $20 million bonus in 2003, the New York Times breathlessly reported in a totally unrelated story that I made fun of because it was totally unrelated to the real world.

But now I finally understand how our compassionate conservatism is only conservatively compassionate. The Bush regime's Scrooge-like behavior prompted an outcry, and the U.S. chipped in $20 million more. And the Washington Post reported this morning that, even though there were "complaints that the vacationing President Bush has been insensitive to a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions," the president wasn't ignoring the issue of debris:

Earlier yesterday [December 28], White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the president was confident he could monitor events effectively without returning to Washington or making public statements in Crawford, where he spent part of the day clearing brush and bicycling.

Now that's what I call homeland security—protecting your own territory from menacing tree limbs and branches. But the good news he brought to Asians was that the U.S. more than doubled its initial contribution of $15 million.

Here's another frame of reference: In 2003, E. Stanley O'Neal, the CEO of Merrill Lynch, (and a record-setting fundraiser for Bush's campaign), got a bonus of $13.5 million plus stock worth $11.2 million, as the Times calculated it.

If you're keeping track, this is the running total:

• U.S. aid after tsunami: $35 million

• Bonuses paid in 2003 to corporate execs Blankfein and O'Neal: $44.7 million

Maybe Bush just blanks out when he's down in Crawford. Rick Perlstein captured the president's "divine calm" in a Voice story last May that began this memorable way:

For George W. Bush, August 6, 2001, had to have been a pretty harrowing day, reading as he did in his Daily Brief that operatives of Osama bin Laden were "in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives," and surveilling federal buildings in New York, and mulling over plans to attack Washington, D.C. But a reporter who saw him cavorting on his Crawford ranch not long after said, "The president was probably at the most relaxed I've ever seen him."

Adding insult to injury, Bush later refused to make public that warning he had received more than a month before 9/11 and hadn't taken seriously.

When Bush is in Crawford, nothing seems serious.

Dear Bush Beat:
Gonzales as a chef . . .

Posted by Harkavy at 4:37 PM, December 28, 2004

Gregory Gallina writes:

Gonzales grilled Kerik a pork chop and some veggies.

Thank you for reading. And your line is food for thought, Gregory.

But now we're faced with the prospect of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general. The Senate will really be out to lunch if Gonzales doesn't get a grilling next month—unless common sense prevails and the Bush regime withdraws his name.

I'm sure George W. Bush's handlers aren't considering that, but they had better hope that somebody better than Gonzales at vetting is vetting Gonzales. They need him to be attorney general so he can squelch a number of investigations.

Unless the Senate forces Gonzales to throw in the trowel, these are just a few of the questions around which he will be erecting a stone wall:

• Did high-level Pentagon officials know that underling Larry Franklin supposedly fed information on Iran under the table to Israel through AIPAC? Was one of those officials the alleged spy's boss, fanatical pro-Israel hawk Doug Feith? And was there anyone else involved? To refresh your memory, here are a couple of paragraphs from a September 4 Washington Post story by Robin Wright and Dan Eggen:

[FBI] investigators have asked questions about personnel in the office of Pentagon Undersecretary for Policy Douglas J. Feith as well as members of the influential Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to former U.S. officials who have been questioned and others familiar with the case.

Investigators have specifically asked about a group of neoconservatives involved in defense issues, including Feith, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Iraq and Iran specialist Harold Rhode, and others at the Pentagon. FBI agents also have asked current and former officials about Richard Perle of the defense board and David Wurmser, an Iran specialist and principal deputy assistant for national security affairs in Cheney's office, according to sources familiar with or involved in the case.

• Did oil consultant James Giffen bribe his pal Kazakhstan dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev in the late '90s on behalf of U.S. oil companies and with the full knowledge of the CIA and other top government officials? Giffen's lawyers contend that whatever he did in the Kazakhgate scandal, he was acting as an "agent" of the U.S. government. Giffen's trial is scheduled to start next month in federal court in Manhattan. Will Dick Cheney be deposed? Will he be called to testify? Cheney was on Nazarbayev's exclusive oil advisory board at the time this scheming took place. I'd like to meet the federal prosecutor who has the ovaries or balls to call Cheney to the stand, or even depose him.

Gonzales is needed to cap this potentially blazing oil conflagration, although now that Bush has won a second term, and oil companies are coughing up huge dough for the inauguration and other necessities, maybe the feds will cut a deal with Giffen anyway, thus keeping the tales of scandalously crooked behavior out of press.

• Who at the White House leaked Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak? Who better to have as attorney general, the person in charge of federal prosecutors and the FBI, than the White House's lawyer, Alberto Gonzales?

• What did Bush himself know about the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib? When did he know it? There would be nobody better to squelch those questions than Gonzales, who advised Bush that such blatant disregard for international law (and non-Christian human beings) was okey-dokey. Will the White House ever be held accountable for its tortured torture logic? Not if Gonzales becomes AG, that's for sure.

Judge Al, as he is known in some circles, has done more damage to human rights during the Bush regime than even John Ashcroft did. My colleague Nat Hentoff has pointed out many of Gonzales's most egregious actions—like the idea that the "war on terror," according to a January 2002 memo Gonzales wrote to Bush, "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

Gonzales has been slapped down by the Supreme Court—hell, even the JAG lawyers think he's too harsh on prisoners.

At Gonzales's best, he simply shares the "compassion" of his boss. Before becoming president, Bush was the hangingest governor in American history. Christopher Hitchens wrote in Salon in August 1999 that Bush "presided over an execution in Texas almost every two weeks since his election [as governor]."

Bush's typically careless and inattentive behavior, in this instance toward pleas of clemency, was enabled back in his goobernatorial years by his factotum Gonzales. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Alan Berlow pointed out in "The Hanging Governor," also in Salon:

Even Bush's former counsel, Judge Alberto R. Gonzales, says that a typical execution would receive no more than 30 minutes of the governor's time.

Bush did little but bumble along as president until 9/11 gave the neocons, war profiteers, and others in the gang around Bush the excuse they needed. As Derrick Z. Jackson wrote earlier this month in the Boston Globe:

Gonzales and Bush used the war on terror to justify the United States being a law unto itself. Lynndie England may get nearly four decades in jail. Alberto Gonzales is about to get four years to rewrite our laws. If England is the face of abuse, Gonzales is the hidden hand. If he becomes attorney general, you should not be shocked if new abuses of civil liberties occur in your school, your library, perhaps even in your home.

A good blistering by the Senate, followed by withdrawal or rejection, wouldn't be cruel and unusual punishment for Gonzales. He has given the OK for Americans caught in bad situations to engage in the basest human behavior. Because he flouts the Constitution, international law, and commonly recognized human rights, he puts people like the Abu Ghraib prison guards in position to fail as human beings.

Gonzales just brings out the worst in others.

Morning Report 12/28/04
You can't spell 'investors' without 'vests'

Posted by Harkavy at 11:19 AM, December 28, 2004

Great news today from the real battleground of the War on Terror: Wall Street's big bonuses are back.

This morning's New York Times reports this year's gains, after noting that "the totals in 2003 were already impressive." The breathless story by Jenny Anderson is devoid of any mention of the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us.

And of course there's no mention of the fact that many American families are having to buy armor for their children fighting in Iraq because George W. Bush's regime refuses to do it.

But even though our huge "defense" industry generates millions of dollars for investment bankers, and Mr. and Mrs. Average Struggling American's mortgage is churned by other bankers into billions of dollars in derivative-securities markets, and funds for education—even of soldiers' children—are being slashed, why bring that stuff up? This story is about long lines at Ferrari dealerships and purchases of $10 million apartments. Anderson notes:

The year-end bonus is a Wall Street tradition, and for a second consecutive year, the amounts are significant. Three major Wall Street firms—Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns—have reported record profits for the year and all are said to have given out handsome bonuses.

Anderson writes that "an investment banking analyst right out of college would have made a $65,000 salary and a $35,000 bonus last year. An associate just out of business school might have made $85,000 in salary and a $115,000 bonus."

And that was last year. She adds:

This year, investment bankers are expected to see gains in bonuses of 10 to 15 percent, amid a year-end flurry of mergers. Fixed-income traders, who have been the best compensated Wall Street professionals in recent years, will also be amply rewarded, but their percentage gains may be smaller than those of bankers. Bonuses, of course, vary by bank, by division and by individual. They reflect the firm's profitability and the group's performance, as well as the individual's contribution.

This year's bonuses do not quite reach the heights touched by star bankers and traders in the heyday of the late '90s technology bubble. But they are rich enough to persuade many of Wall Street's elite to rediscover conspicuous consumption.

Oh, this is such great news that I can't resist one more cheery paragraph from Anderson:

Wall Street bonuses are expected to total $15.9 billion in 2004—second only to $19.5 billion in 2000—according to Alan G. Hevesi, the state comptroller of New York. In 2003, bonuses totaled $15.8 billion. Mr. Hevesi said bonuses of that magnitude were "good news for New York."

OK, that's enough good news. Now let's go back to November 2003, when journalist Dave Lindorff catalogued the Bush regime's treatment of the people it has sent to die in Iraq for that very profitable war. Lindorff sets the stage by saying:

Even more than his father, and Ronald Reagan before him, Bush is cutting budgets for myriad programs intended to protect or improve the lives of veterans and active-duty soldiers. Bush’s handlers have worked hard, through the use of snappy salutes and fly-boy stunts, to present the service-ducking former National Guardsman as the soldiers’ friend. But though Republicans enjoy widespread military support, Bill Clinton was the only president of the last four to cut weapons programs instead of veteran benefits.

Then Lindorff notes that the Bush regime:

• Sought to cut $75 a month from the "imminent danger" pay added to soldiers' paychecks when in battle zones.

• Sought to cut by $150 a month the family separation allowance for overseas service as "wasteful and unnecessary."

• Charged injured GIs from Iraq $8 a day for food when they arrived for medical treatment.

The most directly dangerous act by the corporately responsible White House, as Lindorff notes, was "refusing to provide more than 40,000 active-duty troops in Iraq with Kevlar body armor, leaving it up to them and their families to buy this life-saving equipment." Colonel David Hackworth wrote about this disgrace—he called it "Pentagon criminal negligence"—back for the right-wing World Net Daily back in October 2003, long before Don Rumsfeld had his publicized question from a soldier about equipment:

Worried moms and pops are sending vests to their kids in care packages that in other conflicts contained cookies and Kool-Aid.

This one can't be laid at the feet of the doormats in Congress. Hackworth writes:

Congress is about to approve about $65 billion for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Bush & Company haven't included one penny for body armor, even though the cost of the extraordinary security precautions on the president's recent Asian tour would cover a vest for every soldier seconded to the Iraqi sand traps.

For sure, enough cash would be skimmed off that giant pile of taxpayer dough to fix this critical problem if Rummy, General Richard Myers and a few of the Pentagon supply generals were outfitted with obsolete vests and sent off with our serving heroes to patrol the mean streets of Iraq.

The vests would suddenly be exchanged as quickly as Abrams tanks' and Bradley Fighting Vehicles' tracks get replaced—with U.S. plants working three shifts and the heavy tracks then rushed by air to the battlefield.

Does Ferrari make a vest?

Morning Report 12/27/04
Disasters Natural and Unnatural

Posted by Harkavy at 10:25 AM, December 27, 2004

Indonesia finally makes the front page in the U.S. Unfortunately, it's not because of Paul Wolfowitz's activities there.

It usually takes either an unnatural disaster like the Iraq Debacle or a natural disaster like a tsunami to get foreign news into most American newspapers. As for TV, forget it, unless you get the satellite feed from CNN International.

As bidness has globalized, U.S. media outlets have actually reduced their overseas bureaus. That trend was noticed by fired CNN reporter Peter Arnett back in 1998 and reiterated in Project Censored's list of the top squelched stories for the year 2000—No. 7: U.S. Media Reduces Foreign Coverage.

Former CNN International stalwart Ralph Begleiter, who used to host the cable channel's World Report, is now a journalism prof in Delaware, fighting the good fight to release photos of U.S. military coffins arriving from the Middle East. My journalism prof, the late John B. Bremner, was somewhat of a right-winger, but not a hidebound one.

Bremner taught me to root out the mumpsimus among us—and inside us.

Now my best journalism guide is the Dacron Republican-Democrat, whose pages will never litter my litter box. The paper's top story back in 1978 (recalled by reader Bill McGraw in a Poynter Institute "Dr. Ink" column) carried this headline: "Two Dacron Women Feared Missing in Volcanic Disaster." The subhead: "Japan Destroyed." Here was the first paragraph of the Dacron paper's story:

Possible tragedy has marred the vacation plans of Miss Frances Bundle and her mother Olive as volcanoes destroyed Japan early today.

This is where Wolfowitz comes in. We can't control natural disasters, like volcanoes that erupt under Indonesia. But we can try to keep an eye on manmade problems overseas, and, by jingo, put them in context. We can also try to keep an eye on who we send to places like Indonesia to talk with their officials, and we can't do that if we don't have reporters on the ground.

Wolfowitz is a former U.S. ambassador to Jakarta under Reagan and a pal of the military there. Naturally, big oil is involved in how we react to the harsh repression by the Indonesian government in its resources-rich Aceh region and elsewhere in the huge archipelago. Miren Gutierrez of Inter Press Service pointed this out in his August 2003 piece "Is Oil Intrinsically Dirty?":

The ties between big oil and political power get too close for comfort. Nowhere are they closer than in the U.S. During the period in which the bribery and the illegal oils swaps took place in Kazakhstan, Vice President Dick Cheney was president of Halliburton. Halliburton, the world's biggest provider of oil services, is involved with ExxonMobil and BP in Kazakhstan.

ExxonMobil was sued for complicity in abuses committed by the Indonesian military forces in war-torn Aceh province, where a major natural gas operation is located. But in July 2002, the U.S. State Department urged Judge Louis Oberdorfer to dismiss the case as it could compromise U.S. interests, and discourage the Indonesian government from cooperating with it in the war against terrorism.

I wonder: Is this the same ExxonMobil that just gave $250,000 to help pay for George W. Bush's inaugural next month?

Jim Lobe, also of Inter Press, pointed to Wolfowitz's continued support in 2003 for training Indonesian military officers, even though at the time the military was being being investigated for its role in the killing of two U.S. teachers in West Papua.

Wolfowitz "exerts a profound influence on U.S. policy toward Indonesia," Ben Terrall points out in Indonesia Alert, adding:

This is an extremely unfortunate reality for dissidents, the underprivileged, and other targets of the Indonesian military.

Terrall puts this mumpsimus under a microscope:

According to his official biography, from 1989 to 1993 Wolfowitz was the "principal civilian responsible for strategy, plans, and policy under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney." Cheney was Bush Senior’s Secretary of Defense at the time of the November 1991 Dili massacre and traveled to Indonesia just a few months later, meeting with Suharto and top military officials. Rather than airing concerns over the slaughter of more than 270 unarmed East Timorese, Cheney reinforced the value of strong relations with the military, saying, "We have in the past worked with the Indonesian armed forces and are eager to continue to do that in the future."

Wolfowitz later addressed queries about General Wiranto’s role in supervising 1999 death squad activity in East Timor by arguing that while Wiranto "may have done bad things in East Timor . . . [he] was the general who commanded the army during the first elections in Indonesian history . . . where the army genuinely played a neutral role." Hence Wiranto should be commended for allowing elections to proceed without opening fire on dissidents.

Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer calls Wolfowitz "the intellectual force behind the Iraq invasion." She adds:

Wolfowitz, in an April 2000 essay in the National Interest, described a new era of American dominance—a Pax Americana. He wrote that U.S. leadership would entail "demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of . . . and that those who refuse to support you will live to regret having done so."

More unnatural disasters are on the horizon.

'An Explosion of Joy'

Posted by Harkavy at 11:17 AM, December 25, 2004

Eager to boost their own morale and get some positive p.r. during a usually slow news period, SecDef Don Rumsfeld and POTUS George W. Bush turned to the very people their disastrous policies have put in the most danger: their soldiers.

Rumsfeld scrambled to Iraq on Xmas Eve to talk with beleaguered Americans still shaken by the messy mess-tent bombing. Meanwhile, Bush's handlers at Camp David let their fingers do the walking and their puppet do the talking: Borrowing a fashion tip from SCTV's Fireside Chats, they dressed the president in one of Mayor Tommy Shanks's sweaters, sat him down for a picture, and had him chat to selected GIs by phone (see photo).

Meanwhile, the words of the Bush regime's third wise man, Paul Wolfowitz, resonate. Set the Wayback Machine to March 24, 2003: Wolfowitz is being interviewed by the BBC during the invasion of Iraq. Asked about the U.S. "preparation for what comes after," Wolfowitz replies:

"The focus has got to be on removing this criminal regime. Until the regime is gone it's going to be very hard to do anything. Even in cities that are liberated. I think when the people of Basra no longer feel the threat of that regime, you are going to see an explosion of joy and relief."

Fast forward to April 21, 2004, when five car bombs exploded simultaneously in Basra during rush-hour traffic, killing dozens of people, including 20 children. Exactly how many Iraq civilians died isn't known because, as General Tommy Franks noted, "We don't do body counts."

Now to the present day, when Tom Ricks reveals in this morning's Washington Post a prominent Army historian's conclusion that the Bush regime had no formal plan for handling Iraq after invading it. Here's how Ricks put it:

The U.S. military invaded Iraq without a formal plan for occupying and stabilizing the country, and this high-level failure continues to undercut what has been a "mediocre" Army effort there, an Army historian and strategist has concluded.

"There was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Major Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended.

Too bad, because we love to look at the Bush regime's actual documents. Odds are good that they'll show Wolfowitz was correct—he just had the wrong country—when he said: "The focus has got to be on removing this criminal regime."

Morning Report 12/24/04
Ghosts of White House Present

Posted by Harkavy at 11:21 AM, December 24, 2004

Santa probably won't bring me National Lampoon alum Anne Beatts for Xmas. It's been 30 years since I first heard of her, and I know her only from afar (that damn order of protection), but I can't say she never writes. In fact, just this fall, she discovered some Children's Letters to Osama, which you can read at Modern Mirth magazine.

Yes, yes, I know. You tsk-tsk that Beatts is being so, so cynical.

This is what's cynical: On December 21, 2001, barely two months after 9/11, George W. Bush welcomed reporters to the Oval Office (see photo). The official White House transcript (a particularly rich document I also used for a Bush Beat item in November) is titled:

President Highlights Administration's First-Year Accomplishments:
Remarks by the President and Mrs. Bush on Showing New Carpet in the Oval Office

Bush is the gift to journalists that just keeps on giving. Until it hurts. Like the following passage from the December 21, 2001, session with reporters:

THE PRESIDENT: But all in all, it's been a fabulous year for Laura and me. We're so grateful to be living in this compound, and I'm grateful to be working in this office. It's a joy to walk in here every morning, realizing that I'm the President of the greatest country on the face of the Earth.
Anything you want to say?

MRS. BUSH: Happy holidays to everybody. Very happy New Year.

THE PRESIDENT: Why don't you say something about the rug?

MRS. BUSH: Do you want to hear more about the rug?

REPORTER: Where was it made?

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Terry. (Laughter.)

MRS. BUSH: It was made, actually, in New York. Edward Fields is the company. I went and watched as it was being made. They have—it was very interesting. They have huge racks the rug is up on, and then they developed this electric needle that sort of looks like a drill, and the yarn is actually sort of painted on with this electric drill.
We took a long time working on the design of it, and the colors. We went back and forth several times with strike-offs on the colors until we got what we liked. I think it's really pretty. They've done a beautiful job.
In late January, we're going to ask everyone who had to do with the Oval Office—Scalamandre, who made the couches and—the fabric on the couches; Brunschwig, the fabric on the drapes; the Drapery House, which is also out of New York, that made them. The museums that loaned these paintings from Texas. Tom Lea's widow, Sarah Lea. W.H.D. Koerner's son, who we found through Joey O'Neill, who loaned that painting to us. So we'll ask you back at that time to meet all the people who had something to do with the decorating of the Oval Office.

REPORTER: Mr. President, can we ask you—

THE PRESIDENT: Sure.

REPORTER: Do you think that perhaps the ceasefires and the talks about possible surrender negotiations gave bin Laden a chance to sneak out of Afghanistan or—

THE PRESIDENT: Ron, I don't know where he is. I haven't heard much from him recently. And—which means he could be in a cave that doesn't have an opening to it anymore, or could be in a cave where he can get out, or may have tried to slither out into neighboring Pakistan. We don't know. But I will tell you this: We're going to find him.

This is the Bush regime. This is the Bush regime on rugs.

Starving for Guantánamo Info

Posted by Harkavy at 6:08 PM, December 23, 2004

As word of mouth about horrendous tortures and a secret CIA interrogation center leaks out of Guantánamo Bay, we're left hungry for more information on the War of Terror. Subway spokesman Jared Fogle may be the only recent visitor to the Pentagon's sunny torture chamber in Cuba who was allowed to circulate freely. Typically, though, he kept everything he learned under wraps.

Last June, probably about the same time that the Israeli flag was being used to torture at least one Muslim captive, people of the chewish persuasion stopped in at the local Subway at Gitmo to see Jared present the Most Inspiring Health Improvement essay contest award to supply manager Rebecca Jeffries (see photo).

Two months later, when the unconstitutionally delayed (and unconstitutional) tribunals of mostly foreign prisoners were launching, the Navy conducted "media training" seminars to remind all Gitmo personnel to keep a lid on things (see photo).

The local rag, the Guantánamo Bay Gazette, carried the warning from Assistant Public Affairs Officer Gabe Puello of an invasion by reporters:

This media presence on board GTMO will be sustained between 10 to 25 days each month until January 2005. Schedules beyond January 2005 have not yet been projected, but with the number of detainees about to be charged with crimes increasing, Puello anticipates media interest in the commissions to be ongoing for some time.

It must be tough to resist chewing the fat about what's going on down there. I mean, what if someone saw some tinpot Torquemada draping an Israeli flag over a Muslim prisoner? And can you imagine how difficult it would be to put a crimp in the Gitmo grapevine after some soldier tells you he stuck a lit cigarette in some Muslim's ear or slapped him upside the head? Puello apparently didn't talk about any of that, but he did tell the Gazette:

"Planning and executing a media-relations strategy that tells the story accurately is critical. The media can be your biggest ally, or your worst nightmare. Media training can prepare you to project a comfortable, competent on-camera image, while providing meaningful messages with confidence and sincerity."

Not too meaningful, of course. But that job has been easier—and the American public has been kept in the dark—by the Pentagon's strict squelching at Gitmo. The Gazette story noted:

All media are required to have a military escort at all times. If media personnel badger or harass you, politely terminate the conversation/interview and contact the NAVBASE Public Affairs Office at 4502/4520.

Once again, those numbers are 4502 and 4520. Call now if you're afraid of reporters.

But you probably won't have to, because reporters who dare go to Gitmo have it rough. Until October 2003, reporters had to sign a goddamn form promising not to ask questions. After protests from news organizations and other groups, the Pentagon relented. Here's how Reporters Without Borders put it in 2003:

U.S. authorities have lifted a ban on journalists asking questions about ongoing investigations when visiting the U.S. military base at Guantánamo. Five journalists flying there from Florida on October 14 were required to sign a form saying only that officials would not answer such questions. In an earlier version last week, three visiting journalists had been obliged to agree not even to ask them.

Guantánamo spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Pamela Hart confirmed the ban had been lifted and said the U.S. military had been "momentarily a bit too conservative" in its intention to "protect the integrity of the investigation and ongoing assessment" at the base. Among the latest group of five journalists were a reporter from the daily Miami Herald and one from Vanity Fair magazine.

The new version of the form still forbids journalists from communicating with or identifying prisoners on pain of losing their accreditation, banning them from taking pictures on which detainees can be identified, recording remarks by them, or covering the transfer of prisoners from one part of the base to another.

Props to the ACLU for its dogged pursuit of the explosive files it released at the beginning of this week. Other watchdogs are also doing great work at trying to shine light on what's happening at Gitmo. A good place for the curious to start with is Global Security.org's Guantánamo Bay page. For grins, check out the Pentagon's official Gitmo site.

Or, the next time Jared comes to your town, promise to buy him a sandwich, but first grill him.

Spinning Out of Control

Posted by Harkavy at 9:50 PM, December 22, 2004

Denying reality even as critically wounded U.S. soldiers were fighting for their lives in a German hospital after the Mosul bombing, General Dick "Quag" Myers acted this afternoon as if he were still on tour with his fellow USO celebrities.

There's no other explanation for the blatant lie the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told an assemblage of reporters at the Pentagon about yesterday's dining-hall bombing in Iraq:

This attack, of course, is the responsibility of insurgents, the same insurgents who attacked on 9/11, the same type of insurgents who attacked in Beirut, the same insurgents who—type of insurgents who attacked the, Khobar Towers, and the list goes on.

Don't bullshit us, General. Don't lump together the Sunni resistance in Iraq—or the Shiite resistance to our occupying troops—with the Saudi hijackers who bombed New York City and the Pentagon.

It was clear from the performance of both Myers and SecDef Don Rumsfeld at the press briefing that they have no friggin' idea how to stanch the flow of U.S. blood. (They don't care about Iraqi blood; if you do, go to Iraq Body Count for the latest scores.)

Myers seems much more comfortable as a celebrity general on tour with the USO (see photos). It's astonishing that he and Rumsfeld still have their jobs.

You'd think that Myers would have already been canned for his attempted coverup of the Abu Ghraib tortures. As was previously reported—and as Nick Turse noted in "The Doctrine of Atrocity," his Voice story last May about institutionalized brutality carried out by U.S. soldiers—Myers tried like hell to keep the public from learning about our abuse of Iraqi citizens. Turse put it this way:

In Iraq, only when the stunning photographs, including one of a prisoner who was apparently threatened with electrical torture, surfaced late last month on network TV did the press take notice in a major way, but even then, CBS News, at the behest of General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held the pictures back for two weeks and only decided to release them when prodded by [Seymour] Hersh's New Yorker article.

The Pentagon is so bankrupt that neocon nabob Doug Feith even banned talk of Abu Ghraib inside the Pentagon itself.

This afternoon, Myers not only disgraced himself with the "same insurgents" canard, but also gave us plenty of reason to worry about what the hell's going to happen next. He talks as if he's making it up as he goes along. Here's what he said about how to prevent such dining-hall massacres in the future:

So the way you prevent this is you win the war against the extremists, and I've talked about that at length myself. And I'm not saying that's a war in a sense that the military can do this, but that's how we do this. We make this kind of extremism, this kind of action, which shows no moral boundaries—because while this was an attack against coalition forces, U.S. forces, and contractors in Mosul, we've seen attacks on children in Baghdad and Iraqi citizens. So the way we prevent this is we win, and that's what we're going to do.

"Moral boundaries"? Please. Like the boundaries we crossed in our sanctioned and unsanctioned torture of ordinary Iraqis? Or John Ashcroft's illegal and immoral roundup of Muslims right here in the U.S.?

Considering that on the home front, the Bush regime is trying to mortgage our future with its Social Security privatization plans, among other schemes, Myers's non-solution "solution" amounts to nothing more than a nebulous "win one for the gyppers" pep talk.

That act qualifies him to lead USO tours full-time.

Morning Report 12/22/04
No Defense

Posted by Harkavy at 7:41 AM, December 22, 2004

Just a few days before yesterday's deadly attack on a U.S. mess tent in Mosul, Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard "Quag" Myers, the nation's top uniformed military leader, was in the general area, doing his job by hauling around and publicly hosting a USO tour starring the likes of John Elway and Robin Williams.

Nanu-friggin'-nanu. What planet is the Bush regime from?

Myers wasn't only ushering celebrities around Asia on the "chairman's aircraft." He was signing footballs (see photo) for Iraq-bound U.S. troops in Kuwait.

Myers showed he's a take-charge guy—he don't need no machine to sign his name.

At this point in our imperial history, Myers and the other Pentagon dreamers of this nightmare actually expected to be jabbing corncob pipes into their mouths and accepting the surrender signatures of humbled and grateful natives. Instead, the Iraq Debacle, as you can see from the heavy smoke on your TV screens, is turning chronic.

Tom Ricks of the Washington Post says as much this morning in his analysis titled "Precision of Base Attack Worries Military Experts." Increasingly, the establishment U.S. press is getting right to the point about the deadly nonsense of our foreign policy. Here's how Ricks starts his piece:

In April 2003, as the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was ending, the Pentagon projected in a formal planning effort that the U.S. military occupation of the country would end this month.

Instead, December 2004 brought one of the deadliest single incidents of the war for U.S. forces. More than 80 casualties were suffered yesterday by U.S. troops, civilian contractors, and Iraqi soldiers when a U.S. base near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was blasted at lunchtime.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon propaganda machine's Jim Garamone, one of the government's permanently embedded reporters, wrote Saturday (December 18) that "reactions were fantastic" to the USO trip by Myers, Elway, Mork, and the other celebrities, who included the unrememberable Blake Clark ("the unintelligible coach in Waterboy") and boss-lookin' Leeann Tweeden:

On the way over to the Middle East, the chairman's aircraft stopped at Shannon, Ireland, to refuel. A planeload of American servicemembers were coming back to the States for rest-and-recuperation leave. As John Elway came out of the ramp from the plane, a lifelong Denver Bronco fan recognized the former quarterback.

"Oh my God, it's John Elway," the sergeant yelled at a volume that could be heard back across the Atlantic Ocean. And he added an expletive when he noticed Williams.

I can think of one, too. Anyway, not even Williams could stop the merriment:

Another soldier spotted Myers. "Are those four stars on his collar?" he asked. Immediately, Myers, Williams, Clark, Elway, and Tweeden were surrounded by a group in desert camouflage. Digital cameras appeared, pads of paper came out, and the soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen talked and laughed with the celebrities.

In Kuwait, units preparing to go into Iraq took time from their training to take in the show. At Camp Virginia—named for the site of one of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001—about 3,000 servicemembers packed in around a stage to see the show.

Each show followed the same lineup. Myers was introduced by local commanders. He would take the stage and thank the servicemembers for their contributions. He would turn the proceeding over to Tweeden.

Tweeden—dressed in modified desert camouflage—served as emcee. She spoke about the USO and previous experiences on tours to entertain the troops. Then she would introduce Elway.

The two-time Super Bowl winner spoke about the teams he had been on. Then he told the servicemembers that they were part of an unbeatable team and that he was proud to be affiliated with them. Then Elway proved he could still sling a football, tossing out souvenirs all the way to the edges of the crowds.

After which, the celebrity general would sign the footballs. Mission accomplished.

Morning Report 12/21/04
Bush and Torture

Posted by Harkavy at 11:49 AM, December 21, 2004

Terrible explosive news from Mosul this morning: A dining hall full of U.S. troops was blown up by rockets and mortars, killing at least 22.

A tragedy that's laid at the feet of the Bush regime's tragic foreign policy. Now, turn to the other explosive news: the FBI documents pried out of the government by the ACLU. They include memos by FBI agents with new information on U.S. torture techniques at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib:

• Agents saw ". . . strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings, and unauthorized interrogations."

• An FBI agent saw a prisoner draped with an Israeli flag, accompanied by loud music and flashing strobe lights. (This morning's New York Times story on the FBI documents neglects to mention this torture-by-Israeli-flag, but you can bet your ass the Arab world will come unglued by this disgraceful and inflammatory behavior toward a Muslim by Americans.)

• The "scorpion." A prisoner alleges: "They tortured me and cuffed me in an act called the scorpion, and pouring cold water on me. They tortured me from morning until the morning of the next day, and when I fell down from the severe torture I fell on the barbed wires, and then they dragged me from my feet and I was wounded and, they punched me on my stomach."

Feeling queasy? So were the FBI agents, who wrote to their superiors:

We emphatically do not equate any of these things our personnel witnessed with the clearly unlawful and sickening abuse at Abu G that has come to light. The things our personnel witnessed (but did not participate in) were authorized by the President under his Executive Order.

It's a given that George W. Bush doesn't know shit. But we still want to ask: What did Bush know of the interrogation "techniques" we've used on prisoners? And when did he know it?

Look at the documents yourself. As the questions mount, how will Bush' handlers handle them—and him?

For a savvy description of how Bush is now dealing with the press, read "The President's Grand Elusion" in this morning's Washington Post. Dana Milbank wrote that Bush "showed at yesterday's news conference that he has not forgotten his evasive maneuvers." Milbank added:

As he fielded questions on everything from Iranian nukes to presidential personnel, the often blunt and plainspoken president employed the full range of artful dodges.

How will the press and public make Bush talk about torture? Draping an Israeli flag over him won't work. He already does that himself.

Morning Report 12/20/04
Sunday Bloody Sunday

Posted by Harkavy at 9:43 AM, December 20, 2004

As the Iraqi campaign season got into full swing Sunday, Najaf piled up a 50-14 body-count lead over Karbala. Bombs ripped into the two cities, both of them sites of holy Shiite shrines. Karbala's crowded bus station was blown up, and in Najaf, a car bomb blasted a crowd that had gathered downtown for a funeral. In Baghdad, 30 gunmen ambushed a car, dragged three election workers into the street, and executed them. The execution video was chilling, but you had to be there for the bombings. As this morning's Washington Post put it:

The bombings in Najaf and Karbala appeared designed to inflict the greatest number of civilian casualties possible, the explosives detonating within walking distance of the tombs of Shiite Islam's most revered saints. With macabre effect, the blasts demonstrated yet again that insurgents, usually operating in Baghdad and Sunni regions in central Iraq, could extend their deadly reach into the heartland of Iraq's Shiite majority.

The scenes that ensued have become all too familiar in Iraq: Streets were strewn with the twisted and charred wreckage of cars, as crowds wandered along the destruction with dazed, uncomprehending looks. Chunks of concrete were ripped from buildings and hurled onto ground soaked in rain, blood and cinders, framed in gray, stormy skies.

The Post noted that many Iraqis fear that Sunday's bomb blasts "may be a harbinger of the carnage promised by insurgents ahead of the country's Jan. 30 elections." Iraqi newspapers agreed, warning not only in words but in pictures (see cartoon) that a deadly anarchy is sweeping through the country.

The true cynics are in the Pentagon, but their public face is still cheery and optimistic. Last Friday, Don Rumsfeld's propaganda machine talked of mere "residual violence" and noted:

Though Operation Al Fajr was a success in ridding Fallujah of insurgents, the situation is not quite resolved.

Adnan Pachachi, a well-known Sunni pol who's running for a seat in the thing that's going to set up another thing that might eventually replace our puppet regime in Iraq, called for a "short postponement" of the election, saying:

I think this would help to ameliorate the whole security situation.

Because George W. Bush doesn't read, his handlers are probably consulting a thesaurus to try to find another word to explain "the whole security situation" to the doofus POTUS.

Word to Bush: "Ameliorate" is the opposite from what you've done to the planet since 9/11.

Morning Report 12/17/04
The Lord Finally Smites the Bush Regime

Posted by Harkavy at 11:04 AM, December 17, 2004

Just as this year's Human Rights Week ended, a British lord unsheathed his sword and skewered George W. Bush.

Great Britain's highest court, voting 8-1 on Thursday, struck down Britain's anti-terrorism law under which the government detains foreigners indefinitely without charging them or trying them. Here's what Lord Hoffman (see photo) had to say:

"The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these."

For a change, the New York Times outstripped the Washington Post by not only plastering it atop A1 but also calling it a "powerfully worded, groundbreaking decision."

Even the Times story, however, didn't mention American Judge Gerald Tjoflat's similarly eloquent defense of human rights, just this past October, in a case involving protesters at the School of the Americas:

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.

Is the Bush regime even aware of what judges like Hoffman and Tjoflat are saying? Bush freely admits that he doesn't read, and his stooge Alberto Gonzales doesn't read international law—as my colleague Nat Hentoff continues to point out.

But don't badmouth British cuisine: Bush and Gonzales can't help but feel the pain from the British court's skewering and roasting. Tjoflat is merely an appellate judge; these Brits are Lords, and we know how Bush is always talking about Lord this and Lord that. As for Bush's new attorney general (he hopes), we've already seen that Gonzales isn't much of an expert at the grill anyway.

Lord Hoffman wasn't the only stand-up guy. Lord Nicholls added:

Indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial is anathema in any country which observes the rule of law.

The lords' ruling was of course blasted by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw as "simply wrong." But Straw and Tony Blair are simply tagging along like puppies behind Bush and Gonzales. Like their American counterparts, they're flouting international law. As the BBC notes:

The [British] government opted out of part of the European Convention on Human Rights concerning the right to a fair trial in order to bring in anti-terrorism legislation in response to the 11 September attacks in the U.S.

Anyone familiar with convention protests knows how Bush and Gonzales feel about, say, Geneva. But even in the U.S., there are occasional flashes of judicial recognition of human rights, like Tjoflat's ruling.

Maybe more judges will put these shrimps on the barbie.

High and Inside

Posted by Harkavy at 6:36 PM, December 16, 2004

The sweetest sweetheart deal in the annals of cities sucking up to baseball owners is unraveling. Darn those poor people in Washington for raining on the big cigars' skyboxes.

The D.C. Council, the public body that tries to run Washington, just couldn't bring itself to OK the financing deal for building a stadium that will house the Washington Nationals (the ex-Expos of Montreal).

The lead owner of the new Nationals? Fred Malek, longtime pal of the Bush family and a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group. (Suzan Mazur recounts a hilarious story about how Malek got Dubya on the Carlyle board—and how the board later dumped him.)

Back to bidness: The council's move blindsided everyone, including D.C.'s mayor. To prove this is no game, the enraged Major League Baseball hierarchy (the only sports org in which one of the owners, Bud Selig, is the commissioner) pulled a Milton Bradley. The owners are now threatening that the entire deal may be off.

The original deal called for the public to bend over for the owners. The council merely insisted that the fat cats pour in more of their own money and use less of the public's.

Makes sense, considering that D.C. is basically the poorest of America's large cities. As I've pointed out a few times, America's national pastime—milking the poor to help the rich—is in great shape, and sometimes America's other national pastime squeezes our udders, too.

That's particularly painful in D.C., because the income gap between rich and poor is wider there than in any other big burg.

Since the deal was unveiled this past summer, the Washington Post has been doggedly following the disgusting financial details. One of the latest pieces of news goes like this: Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf was the chief negotiator of the deal to bring baseball back to D.C. Now it turns out that his son Michael is in line to profit from a huge contract to plan the stadium.

Here's how the Post's Thomas Heath and David Nakamura laid it down:

[Michael] Reinsdorf is the managing director and co-founder of International Facilities Group, a consulting firm started in 1995 to "provide development and management services to municipalities and professional sports owners," according to the company's Web site.

The agreement Mayor Anthony A. Williams signed in September with Major League Baseball calls for the city to build a stadium near the Navy Yard and South Capitol Street in Southeast Washington. As part of the $440 million cost, the pact calls for the city to pay an estimated $3.7 million for baseball's consultant on the stadium, also known as the team representative.

Mark Tuohey, chairman of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, acknowledged in an interview that IFG has been discussed as a front-runner for the team representative job. IFG has been working for several months on the renovation of Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, where the Washington Nationals are to play their first three seasons. And the company has advised the District on financial estimates for the proposed stadium. Major League Baseball has paid the roughly $100,000 fee for IFG's services so far, city officials said.

Hope this all works out, and Washington gets the team, even if it requires this disgraceful bit of corporate welfare. Better for Dubya to be distracted by baseball (which you know he will be) than to have him available to front the neocons' foreign and domestic policies. Go to the games, Bush, and leave us alone.

Morning Report 12/16/04
Rock the Vote!

Posted by Harkavy at 11:24 AM, December 16, 2004

Iraq's Shiite majority, expected to win control of the country in the January 30 election, are already getting bombed.

Eight of them were killed earlier today near the holy shrine of Imam Hussein in Kerbala, according to Swiss Info.

The country's youngsters, caught up in the merriment, hit the streets to swap photos with Americans through the Department of Defense's Operation Picture Peace (see photo).

Although his mission has already been accomplished, George W. Bush's job of protecting Iraqis is not done. He declared yesterday:

"We will continue to make it clear to both Syria and Iran that . . . meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq is not in their interests."

Bush didn't elaborate, according to the story by David Morgan of Reuters, and no one apparently asked him why his regime decided years ago to meddle in the internal affairs of Iraq by invading it.

Gonzales 'Grilled' Kerik?

Posted by Harkavy at 5:28 PM, December 15, 2004

What a remarkable series of conversations it must have been: Alberto Gonzales grilling Bernie Kerik.

If you believe this morning's New York Times, Bush's nominee as attorney general conducted "hours of confrontational interviews" with Kerik, to make sure none of the little Napoleon's cream filling had spilled into places it shouldn't have. (See photo of tough guy Gonzales below.)

The Times' Elisabeth Bumiller pins her tale to an unnamed "government official." I hesitate to believe it only because Bumiller also describes the White House as "normally careful." I think she means "normally careful" only in vetting potential nominees, which means that the White House is careful about whom it trusts and picks? Uh-huh. In her same story, she points out that the White House was careless in dispensing top-security information after 9/11: Kerik, while still the NYPD commissioner, was put on the list even though he neglected to fill out the basic form to start the security-check process. I wouldn't call that "normally careful." If Bumiller means "normally careful" in general—no, she can't mean that.

Anyway, this is how Bumiller sketched Gonzales's personal vetting of Kerik:

Mr. Gonzales, who is himself in the middle of a background review as Mr. Bush's nominee for attorney general, spent hours grilling Mr. Kerik, the official said. As with other nominees, the sessions were aggressive and designed to make Mr. Kerik uncomfortable enough to reveal possible embarrassing events in his record. Even so, he apparently withheld some pertinent facts. Mr. Gonzales declined to comment.

Well, let's see. Gonzales was a key figure in OK'ing the torture that we've used on prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. As my colleague Nat Hentoff writes today:

If there ever is an honest investigation of who is ultimately responsible for what happened [at Guantánamo] and at Abu Ghraib, Mr. Gonzales might well be in the dock, along with Donald Rumsfeld and a number of the defense secretary's closest aides.

When Gonzales was faced with vetting Kerik, we could reasonably assume that Al took his own advice on interrogation techniques, like the ones listed in today's Washington Post story by Thomas E. Ricks, "Detainee Abuse by Marines Is Detailed."

Which means that Gonzales probably burned Kerik's hands by dipping them in an alcohol-based cleaner and then igniting them, tied him up and held a pistol to his head, made him kneel next to an open grave and then fired a shot as a "mock execution," and hooked him up to an electric transformer to make him "dance."

Apparently, none of that worked on Kerik. Some people just won't talk about some things.

But then there's Paul Wolfowitz, who before the U.S. invasion of Iraq just wouldn't shut up about how easy the occupation was likely to be. As I wrote a while back, to get Wolfowitz to spill his guts back then, you didn't even have to drag the deputy secretary of defense by his hair from a Humvee to a prison cell or strip him and wedge him into a pyramid of naked people or punish him while he prays or have him simulate masturbation or threaten him with rape or throw him into a wall or smear shit on his back or scare him with a growling dog or put a dog collar on him or ride him around like a donkey or hook up wires to his nuts while making him stand on a box or make fun of his schmeckel while you grinned for the camera.

Maybe Wolfowitz and Kerik like wearing dog collars.

Morning Report 12/15/04
Full Medal Jackoffs

Posted by Harkavy at 7:45 AM, December 15, 2004

Proving that it's easier to reconstruct history than it is to reconstruct the world, George W. Bush hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the necks of George Tenet, Jerry Bremer, and General Tommy Franks. The rest of us had a difficult time holding our heads up high during the Tuesday ceremony because of the Iraq Debacle albatross around our necks.

The ceremony, in the East Room of the White House, was so moving that Bremer had tears in his eyes, the Washington Post's Ann Gerhart noted. But it was from delight, not remorse (see photo)

Tenet and Bremer join a long list of Medal of Freedom winners, including Doris Day and Henry Kissinger.

The facts demand that someone actually wring the necks of both Tenet and Bremer. As the Post's Gerhart noted:

Paul Rieckhoff, a former Army lieutenant who served in Iraq and now runs an organization of veterans against the war, said the awards are "a slap in the face to the troops" from "an administration that loves the big PR move. . . . It validates how out of touch Washington is with the reality of what is on the ground in Iraq."

And Brookings Institution fellow Michael O'Hanlon, who monitors Iraq, suggested that if the president wanted to honor service in Iraq, he could have selected other people to honor. "I wouldn't expect him to show any wavering" over the decision to go to war, O'Hanlon said of the president, "but I'm troubled by the use of this award in a different way. He could have called attention to the bravery in Iraq, without having to make it about the most controversial figures in the whole operation."

When it comes to Iraq, Bremer's reign as pasha was simply disastrous, as I noted on September 29 in quoting this passage from Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Mistakes Loom Large as Handover Nears," a June 20 story in the Post:

"We blatantly failed to get it right," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who served as an adviser to the occupation authority. "When you look at the record, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that we squandered an unprecedented opportunity."

Need more reminders? I noted on September 24 that Bremer's reign of error was truly absurd:

He shut down Muqtada al-Sadr's newspaper in April, an act that did nothing but inflame a bad situation. As for Bremer's last stupid act regarding Muqtada—banning him from holding office even if he disbanded his huge militia—see this Guardian story.

As for the ex-CIA chief, Tenet already donned "the full armor of God" for Bush, as I wrote on October 28. So it's only fitting that he get a nice ribbon and medal to go with it.

Morning Report 12/14/04
Happy Holiday, Halliburton!

Posted by Harkavy at 10:30 AM, December 14, 2004

While you're trying to decide whether to spend your Christmas bonus on a Snickers bar or a loosey, take a look at California congressman Henry Waxman's latest report on Halliburton's bonus from the Iraq Debacle.

A little mood music, too? Check out "Cynics in Love," a track from Nat Berg's band, the Halliburtons. Ready? Read:

Dick Cheney's company has passed the $10 billion mark in Iraq contracts, some of them for helping the U.S. reduce the country to rubble and others for pushing the rubble around. Halliburton's got two major contracts. Waxman's report elaborates:

The combined value of these two contracts is $10.77 billion. This is significantly more than any other contractor has been awarded in Iraq.

For example, the maximum value of Bechtel’s Iraq infrastructure contracts is $2.8 billion. Halliburton will reap profits of between $133 million and $424 million on its two contracts.

The actual value of Halliburton’s Iraq contracts is likely higher than $10.77 billion. In January 2004, Halliburton received a follow-on oil contract for southern Iraq worth up to $1.2 billion. The Administration has not disclosed the value of the work given to Halliburton under this contract.

At the same time that the value of Halliburton’s contracts is increasing, auditors are finding extensive problems with Halliburton’s billings, and criminal investigations of Halliburton and its employees continue.

The amount of rubble is increasing, too. Another suicide bomber just hit the sweet spot near Baghdad's designated "safe spot," the Green Zone, blasting people to paradise and parapets to powder. More work for Cheney's crew.

The Grateful Dead

Posted by Harkavy at 11:50 PM, December 13, 2004

With Operation Enduring-The-Next-Four-Years wheezing along, it's so cute that midway during the planet's annual Human Rights Week (it began last Friday), General Augusto Pinochet was arrested on human rights charges.

The 89-year-old ex-dictator of Chile was made famous by Operation Condor, a conspiracy by South American dictators to kill leftists. He was a real-life Dr. Evil of the '70s—and he could almost always count on strong support (especially behind the scenes) by our own Dr. Henry Kissinger.

After years during which Pinochet's lawyers have staved off attempts to try him on murder charges, the enfeebled fascist has been found "mentally fit" to stand trial and he has been formally charged with murder and kidnapping. Elizabeth Davies of The Independent (U.K) quotes Judge Juan Guzman as saying on Monday:

I find that he is very physically deteriorated, but he has coherence in his psychological capacity, and he understands questions, gives appropriate answers.

This is one instance in which George W. Bush can be contrasted with Pinochet. I can't help but think of the physically fit Bush's August 5 speech, in which he said:

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

But maybe Bush really meant it the way it sounds. Last Wednesday, when Colin Powell announced the kickoff of Human Rights Week from Brussels, the exiting Secretary of State started out by saying all the right things in his statement:

This year the government of the United States joins the global community in commemorating the 56th Anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Wrought from the horrors of the Second World War, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly to enshrine the principles of equality and justice in law.

Then, after noting Bush's official proclamation, Powell's statement added:

In commemorating this week, we reaffirm our commitment to the principles which have come to characterize our nation.

"The principles which have come to characterize our nation"? You mean the shit that we're doing in the world now? Why do I keep sounding surprised about this? When am I going to stop asking such questions? (How about right now?)

Kissinger is the guy whom Bush originally wanted to head the 9/11 Commission. What a feast that would have been for ol' Dr. Covert himself. But Kissinger loses his appetite when reporters want to sit down with him over a bowl of Chile con junta.

Kissinger's been regularly ducking questions from Diana Jean Schemo of the New York Times on the topic. Why? Slate's Jack Shafer takes a wild guess:

Schemo's [October 1 story], "Kissinger Cool to Criticizing Juntas in '76," documents two occasions when the former secretary of state hauled U.S. diplomats across the coals after one of them went off the Kissinger script to criticize human rights violations in Argentina and Chile.

Morning Report 12/12/04
U.S. Finally Listens to an International Agency

Posted by Harkavy at 11:06 AM, December 12, 2004

In typically reckless fashion, the Bush regime is skulking around Planet Earth's chief regulator of nuclear arms to try to find a weapon it can use against him. For now, though, the administration hasn't found the right ammo and is content to just listen.

The Washington Post's Dafna Linzer reported this morning that the administration "has dozens of intercepts of Mohamed ElBaradei's phone calls with Iranian diplomats and is scrutinizing them in search of ammunition to oust him as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency."

The whole thing smacks of the usual payback against anyone who crossed the Bush regime over its invasion of Iraq. This is hardly the first time the regime has gone Segretti on the rest of the world's asses. Last February, it was revealed that the U.S. and Britain bugged U.N. WMD inspector Hans Blix and others right here in Manhattan (see photo).

Plamegate has proven to be a handy tool to subpoena reporters' notes and otherwise threaten them and their sources. The regime's more covert offensive against yet another Arab (ElBaradei is Egyptian) is also intimidating, of course, but it hasn't produced jack shit. Here's how Linzer puts it:

Although eavesdropping, even on allies, is considered a well-worn tool of national security and diplomacy, the efforts against ElBaradei demonstrate the lengths some within the administration are willing to go to replace a top international diplomat who questioned U.S. intelligence on Iraq and is now taking a cautious approach on Iran.

The intercepted calls have not produced any evidence of nefarious conduct by ElBaradei, according to three officials who have read them. But some within the administration believe they show ElBaradei lacks impartiality because he tried to help Iran navigate a diplomatic crisis over its nuclear programs. Others argue the transcripts demonstrate nothing more than standard telephone diplomacy.

ElBaradei, a former NYU law professor, "is well-respected inside the United Nations," Linzer writes, and she adds:

Even some of the administration's closest friends, including Britain, appear to be reluctant to join a fight they believe is motivated by a desire to pay back ElBaradei over Iraq.

Last February, Blix told The Independent (U.K.) that he expected to be bugged by Iraqis, but, as the paper wrote:

[Blix said] the possibility that he was spied on by someone "on the same side" was "disgusting." Dr. Blix said his suspicions were aroused by repeated trouble with his telephone at his New York home.

His fears worsened when a member of the U.S. administration showed him photographs that could only have come from the U.N. weapons office.

Where ElBaradei is concerned, the fact is that this Mohamed has gone to the mountain: Much of the rest of the world likes the way he's doing his impossible job. But that's not enough for the impatient Bush regime, which apparently brought a mountain of eavesdropping equipment to him.

Meanwhile, the Bush regime is unhappy with this country's nukes and that country's nukes, but its officials breathe not one word about Israel's unknown quantity of nukes, which are in the hands of the aggressively right-wing Sharon administration.

As Dan Ephron explained in his Voice story last April about whistle-blower/spy (take your pick) Mordechai Vanunu:

[Israel has] a don't-admit-don't-deny policy of nuclear ambiguity, which has allowed the Jewish state to develop nuclear weapons while avoiding international sanctions.

Of course, who's more secretive than the current D.C. regime itself? Waxman lifted Bush's veil a while back and discovered "an unprecedented assault on the principle of open government." My earlier take: The Bush regime "has expanded and refined the memory hole."

Speaking of disappeared knowledge, didn't anyone bug the rooms where Dick Cheney's energy task force met back in 2001? We still don't know what the hell was talked about during those skull sessions.

Kerik: Yet Another Bad Trip

Posted by Harkavy at 8:59 PM, December 11, 2004

You can call Bernie Kerik's sudden withdrawal Friday night from the Homeland Security job another instance of Nannygate. But the reason Kerik and the White House are bawling their eyes out may have more to do with intrepid reporters like Newsday's Leonard Levitt, whose One Police Plaza column in the paper's New York City edition has kept a close eye on Kerik and other such schnooks.

The initial word from the White House late Friday and early today was that Kerik was no longer suitable as the nation's chief security guard because of his domestic situation. Kerik said he hadn't paid employment taxes on his nanny's behalf and—oops!—she wasn't even in the U.S. legally.

Hmmm.

Then it was revealed that she left the U.S. about two weeks ago, just before his nomination was announced; a "former New York City official" told the New York Times that her departure had been planned "for at least two months," the paper's Elisabeth Bumiller and Eric Lipton wrote.

Hmmm. Hmmm.

The Times story noted up high:

White House officials were clearly annoyed at Mr. Kerik for not determining the nanny's immigration status prior to this week, but said they had no evidence he had sought to mislead them. "It was Kerik's screw-up, it was that simple," the official said. "But it's a mistake you can't tolerate with someone who has oversight for immigration."

Bullshit that it was that simple.

Way down low in the Times story is something that's probably closer to the truth:

Mr. Kerik's housekeeper situation was only the latest question to be revealed about the nominee. A series of critical news reports about questionable actions had begun to surface about Mr. Kerik, threatening to turn his Senate confirmation into a lengthy embarrassment for the administration. The reports looked at Mr. Kerik's use of city personnel while in office, potential conflicts between his business life and the role of the Homeland Security department, and events growing out of his personal financial difficulties several years ago.

One Democratic Senate staff member, who had been following the nomination process closely and asked not to be identified because of the political sensitivity of the matter, said he was convinced that the nanny question was not the sole reason that Mr. Kerik had dropped out. "Multiple media organizations were pursuing multiple stories," that would be potentially damaging to Mr. Kerik, he said. Because many of these questions had not yet been answered by the administration, the staff member said, "fundamentally, he was a bad pick."

The staff member added: "The process worked here."

No, it's veteran scribe Leonard Levitt who works. Many of those "critical news reports about questionable actions" were written long ago by Levitt, and you can bet your ass that Google-eyed reporters all over the world (plus the high rollers who travel by Lexis) have been downloading him at a machine-gun rate. He's one of the best cop-shop columnists, because instead of swallowing the propaganda from pols and police officials, he's rough on top dogs and sympathetic to underdogs such as most street-level cops and the public. The dogged columnist's Friday piece, "Why Back So Soon, Kerik?," zeroed in on Bernie's mysteriously brief 2003 stint in Iraq, where he ostensibly trained Iraqi police and security troops.

Levitt points out that Kerik, in his own words, vowed to be in Iraq "at least six months—until the job is done." Yet he left barely halfway through that short stint. Why? Read Levitt's column for the details, but here's a passage that may help you understand:

[Kerik] has never explained his premature departure from Iraq. Had he junked his training of the Iraqi police, said to be among the least prepared of that nation's law enforcement agencies? Did he fear for his safety, as many in law enforcement believe?

Sources told Newsday Kerik was concerned enough that whenever he traveled he cleared a two-block radius.

On Wednesday [December 8], Kerik's attorney, Joe Tacopina, said he would ask Kerik for an explanation. Yesterday [December 9], Tacopina did not return calls.

In the same column, Levitt revisits some highlights of Kerik's tenure as NYPD commissioner:

During his two years as commissioner, [Ray] Kelly has not hesitated to belittle Kerik, his predecessor. One of Kelly's first actions was to move a statue commemorating September 11 with a quote from Kerik against a wall in the lobby of One Police Plaza so Kerik's words could not be seen.

Last summer, Kelly spokesman Paul Browne questioned Kerik's having ordered four high-tech $50,000 security doors for police headquarters while commissioner, and announced the department's Internal Affairs Bureau was investigating. That announcement followed the Department of Investigation's arrest of Alan Risi, whose company supplied the doors, for allegedly overcharging the city $50,000 to service similar doors on other city buildings.

DOI shared its findings with the Police Department, which found no impropriety but noted that a proper engineering study was not conducted. Internal Affairs Chief Charles Campisi said he would not discuss department business.

Lots of administrators and flaks have reason not to want to talk to Levitt. All the more reason to read Levitt's column, because lots and lots of insiders do talk to him, even if they have to do it on the q.t.

I'll bet the White House started reading Levitt's million or so columns on Kerik and envisioned a winter scene of the little Napoleon tumbling down a snowy hill, gathering slush and dirt and picking up speed, going faster and faster and getting bigger and bigger—until he smacked right into George W. Bush's legacy and knocked it on its ass.

Don't let those big, expensive doors hit you on the ass on your way out, Bernie.

Morning Report 12/11/04
The Kerik Ouster

Posted by Harkavy at 11:45 AM, December 11, 2004

Late last night, Bernie Kerik exited stage left from the Bush Tragedy. Mr. Law N. Order was paying his nanny under the table, and George W. Bush's handlers were afraid this particular story about the ersatz Napoleon's simoleons would be regurgitated by the press.

Nannygate also happened to Bill Clinton's attempted appointment of Zoe Baird. For a look deep inside the hidden workforce of women who almost never get health insurance and other employment benefits for raising the children of families that have health insurance and other employment benefits, read Chisun Lee's 2002 Voice probe. Time and again, politicians have been embarrassed by Nannygates. But of course we've yet to see the Run-D.C. crackas tryna put rhyme to reason to solve the problem itself.

Too bad about Kerik, in a way. I've met many cops in my life whom I greatly respect, but I really wanted to kick around this particular ex-NYPD martinet, and not just for selfish reasons: Exposing the Bush Error is very tough in the current climate, and Kerik's appointment as Homeland Security chief would have provided a soft underbelly for show-and-tell-and-poke.

That he was even nominated for such a job was nuts, but then, Bush's first choice to head the 9/11 Commission was beyond chilly: Henry Kissinger.

Those of us who read—unlike Bush—have another reason to lament Kerik's being yanked off stage by the regime's puppeteers: The guy's last name is practically palindromic, which brings to mind a different sort of play from the long-running tragicomedy at which we're squirming:

Able was I ere I saw Elba

You can see that legendary beaut on this Texas site, along with many others. If Kerik had survived to serve as the nation's security guard, maybe someone would have dreamed up something as clever as this one, which can also be seen in the Texas collection:

Wonder if Sununu's fired now?

Morning Report 12/10/04
The Baton Is Passed

Posted by Harkavy at 7:57 AM, December 10, 2004

The Iraqi National Guard has been accused of abusing prisoners and their families, doctors, and even cops—at last, a sign of a seamless transition of power in Iraq from the U.S. to its puppet regime.

See, it's not only our National Guard that terrorizes ordinary Iraqis. Iraqi Guardsmen stand accused of "beating and abusing" the public they're supposed to protect, and some of them have already been fired for doing so, according to the Institute for War & Peace Reporting.

Now that at least some authority has been smoothly transferred, Uncle Sam may finally have some time for, say, a little golf. But that game's not going too well, according to Asharq al-Awsat, a London-based pro-Saudi newspaper widely circulated in the Arab world (see cartoon).

Meanwhile, the Iraqi public aren't playing around. They're fuming about these allegations of abuse by their own Guardsmen, who are "U.S.-backed and trained," according to the story by reporters Hussein Ali al-Yasiri and Imad al-Shara, on the ground in dangerous Baghdad. See their piece, which includes this passage:

In recent weeks, there have been a number of complaints about Guardsmen beating and abusing members of the public.

Farook Shamran, an investigator at a police station in the al-Beyaa suburb of Baghdad, says he was not only beaten up and accused of being a terrorist by Guardsmen, but also alleges that they stole a large sum of money from his vehicle.

"My brother-in-law and I were arrested by Guardsmen who broke into our house one night. I showed them my police ID, but they beat us both and then arrested us. We were in custody for two days, during which time they beat us again and accused us of being insurgents," he said.

Shamran said he was released "eventually," but added:

When I got back to my car, which the guards had kept the key to, I discovered they had taken the money I had left there. Almost $2,000 and 2 million Iraqi dinar [$1,300] had gone missing.

It was stolen money we had recovered from a gang we arrested, and technically it belongs to the government.

I tried to follow up on the incident and get an explanation but no one would talk to me. This isn't a police force—it's a bunch of thugs in uniform. Unless the government sorts this out quickly, the National Guard will become useless and corrupt.

Guardsmen are even hassling doctors. Bashar Ali, an orthopedist at al-Kindi hospital in Baghdad tells of his being ordered to treat one of their colleagues ahead of more urgent cases:

They told me to ignore everyone else and treat their colleague first. When I refused, they started to slap and punch me. Other staff had to intervene to prevent them arresting me.

It's good to see them handling things on their own. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz predicted even before the invasion that we'd be able to hand over the reins so the Iraqis could whip their own country into shape. He promised Congress: "The Iraqis themselves can provide a good deal of whatever manpower is necessary." (See this Bush Beat item for a punishing look at Wolfowitz.)

A fascinating sidelight to this is the way Iraqi Guardsmen are starting to dress and act. Spreading our version of democracy, we've set a good example for them, and they're following it. As the IWPR story notes:

"It's as if some of them want to be like the Americans, but you can tell the Americans are professional and well-trained," said Jamal Jasim, a traffic policeman.

"Their uniform looks quite like the U.S. military's, and they've started wearing black sunglasses and cutting their hair really short too. They also try to act like them, holding their rifles with their fingers on the trigger and using sign language rather than talking."

Sounds like they're emulating martinet Bernie Kerik, the ex-NYPD cop who got the training of Iraq's cops off and running away. These Iraqi Guardsmen are going Sipowicz on the public—but Sipowicz at least saves most of his beatings for people who deserve it.

Just as in the scandal involving the U.S. National Guard at Abu Ghraib, Iraqi National Guard officials blame a few troublemakers for the problem. Meanwhile, they're running roughshod over the populace:

Members of the municipal council in the Baghdad neighborhood of Al-Rashid, who recently had a run-in with Guardsmen carrying out over-zealous searches of council members entering a meeting, said they weren't confident the situation would improve.

"We asked for Guardsmen to come and provide security for a meeting we were having. But the lieutenant on duty was incredibly rude to the people they were searching," said Jacob al-Mosawi, a council member. "Even Saddam's henchmen didn't talk like that to normal people."

While Kerik, America's new security guard, futzes around with the "threat level" here, we may want to raise the threat level in Iraq even higher than it already is, thanks to the training standards he established during his stint there in 2003. Consult The Onion's color-coded Iraqi "Terror Alert System" for details.

Lynne Cheney's Proximity to Bush Is Threatened

Posted by Harkavy at 3:51 PM, December 9, 2004

You have to feel sorry for Gerald Allen, the Alabama state legislator who wants to ban—actually pull from the shelves of every library in his state—all novels, plays, and poetry that recognize or promote homosexuality.

Asked what he would do with the material, he told reporters earlier this week: "I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them."

What's Allen going to do when he has to choose between George W. Bush and Lynne Cheney, who is devoted not only to Bush but also to everything his name stands for?

Gary Taylor of The Guardian (U.K.) recently tracked down Allen, who also runs CASHCO Marketing in Tuscaloosa, and discovered that the lowly state solon not only has been summoned to D.C. to meet with Bush but that the two of them have chewed the fat four previous times. As Taylor writes:

Allen does not want taxpayers' money to support "positive depictions of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle." That's why Tennessee Williams and Alice Walker have got to go.

But so does Lynne Cheney. The vice president's wife is a huge Web star as an author because of Sisters, her 1981 lesbian novel set in the Old West.

For that matter, what's Bush going to do? Who's he going to choose? He's chewed the fat with both Allen and Lynne Cheney. It's not known whether Allen has chewed anything with Lynne Cheney, but he's unlikely to, say, share an apple with her if sees her at the White House during his next visit with Bush. Here's an excerpt from Sisters:

The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage—no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were. She felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. She had never to this moment thought Eden a particularly attractive paradise, based as it was on naiveté, but she saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave.

Taylor doesn't mention the Cheney angle, but see The Swift Report, in which Cole Walters writes:

Allen told the Birmingham News that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof would most likely have to be pulled from the repertoire of university theater programs. He remained silent, however, on the question of what would happen to Sisters, a racy historical romance published in 1981 by Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, that includes scenes of forcible rape and a lesbian love affair.

If you're all steamed up, go to this Censoround page, or read this op-ed piece in the University of Alabama's Crimson White that dares to disagree with the obviously rigid Allen. Writer Sean Aden Lovelace, a teacher at 'Bama, notes:

I don't suppose Mr. Allen would, or even could, under his legislative plan, read the words of Jesus. See, under Mr. Allen's definition—works that "recognize" homosexuality—one other book, a text full of violence and sex and multiple wives and animal sacrifice and, yes, references to homosexuality, would certainly have to be banned in Alabama. That book would be the Holy Bible.

That begets this question: Where's Mary Cheney?

Morning Report 12/9/04
Stunning News

Posted by Harkavy at 11:44 AM, December 9, 2004

Still stunned by the news that a lightweight administrator like Bernie Kerik was picked to hand out billions of dollars to defense contractors in his new role as the nation's chief security guard, now we learn that his company's Tasers were used to abuse Iraqi detainees. (See this BBC story.)

Couple that with George W. Bush's latest doctrine that anyone who doesn't want his or her country to be occupied by another country's soldiers is a "terrorist," and I feel as if I've fallen, and I can't get up. (See photo.)

Today's BBC story says four members of a U.S. Special Operations unit used the electric stun guns on prisoners and were disciplined for "excessive use of force."

An AP story from late November notes that "orders are pouring in for the stun guns, which are made by Taser International," the Arizona company on whose board Kerik sits. Reporter Anabelle Garay adds:

The Scottsdale company even recently launched a metro Phoenix ad campaign urging private citizens to arm themselves with the weapons, which temporarily paralyze people with a 50,000-volt jolt.

Yet while Taser's stock has soared with the booming business, concerns are growing about whether the shock-inducing guns are truly as non-lethal as advertised.

The story elaborates:

Taser officials bill the guns, which shoot two barbed darts whose current can penetrate up to two inches of clothing, as among the safest ways of subduing violent people in high-risk situations. Tasers have a range of up to 21 feet and can also shock on contact, like a cattle prod.

Well, maybe not exactly safe, as the story points out:

While not opposed to stun guns in principle, Amnesty International wants law enforcement to stop using Tasers until scientific evidence can show they don't kill. . . . Amnesty says at least 74 people have died in the United States and Canada in the past four years after being shocked with Tasers. The group also says officers have turned stun guns on the mentally disturbed, children, and the elderly.

"Not only do we not know the impact of these weapons on human beings under various conditions, we are also concerned about the gratuitous use of these weapons," said Gerald Le Melle, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA.

The latest from Amnesty on Tasers is this report, which includes such details as this explanation of the weapon's name:

It is an acronym of Thomas A. Swift's Electrical Rifle, based on the child's novel Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle by Victor Appleton, published in 1911.

Speaking of juice, our little Napoleon just raked in the simoleons: Kerik has made millions off the stun guns by recently cashing in his stock options.

No one should be shocked by that.

Amnesty International is typically trying to interfere with the bidness affairs of one of America's corporate citizens by proclaiming:

[Amnesty] is reiterating its call on federal, state and local authorities and law enforcement agencies to suspend all transfers and use of electro-shock weapons, pending an urgent rigorous, independent and impartial inquiry into their use and effects.

It's probably safe to do that, now that the newly powerful Kerik has already sold his stock in the company.

Go ahead and suspend the use of Tasers. Ve haff other vays of stunning Iraqis. Thousands of Fallujah refugees are still living in makeshift shelters across Baghdad, according to the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, whose story, by reporters Zaineb Naji and Hussein Ali, notes that "with only limited amounts of aid reaching them, they are increasingly angry with Coalition forces and the Iraqi government," and adds:

Twelve families are living in a temporary camp near the Baghdad International Fair, set up by the Humanitarian Aid Society (HAS), an Iraqi NGO. Conditions are primitive, with no running water available, and an average of nine people sleeping in tents designed to hold just three.

"We've done our best, but we only have ten small tents, which aren't enough for 100 refugees. Some people have even had to sleep in the open," explains HAS director Saleem Abd al-Ghani.

The charity, which has also been distributing foodstuffs to the refugees, says the majority of donations have come from ordinary Iraqis.

"We deliver basic food like rice, bread, tea and sugar," explained Ghani. "Additionally, we've received donations of clothes, and monetary contributions of around four million dinars, from rich Iraqis. On top of that, many ordinary people have just turned up at the camp with food they've cooked for the refugees."

You mean there's no electricity for these Iraqis? Send in a Special Operations unit to hook them up.