Dems Will Win House and Senate in 2006
By Howard Dean
The Hill
Wednesday 30 November 2005
Note: Former Gov. Dean makes an early prediction on the 06 Election

Hersh's Latest

Up in the Air: Where Is the Iraq War Headed Next?
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
05 November 2005 Issue

Other West Wing Quotes

Toby Ziegler: Sarcasm is a disturbing thing coming from a woman of your age.
Mrs. Landingham: What age would that be, Toby?
Toby Ziegler: Late 20's...


Mandy Hampton: Are you listening to me?
Toby Ziegler: Yes.
Mandy Hampton: What was the last thing I said?
Toby Ziegler: The last thing you said was: "Are you listening to me?"


Sam Seaborn: Toby, do you really think it's a good idea to invite people to dinner and then to tell them exactly what they're doing wrong with their lives?
Toby Ziegler: Absolutely, otherwise it's just a waste of food.

Passage from The West Wing

[a Navy doctor is checking the president's pulse]

President Josiah Bartlet: So, how's my pulse?
Morris Tolliver: Have you been running up and down the stairs in the past few minutes?
President Josiah Bartlet: No.
Morris Tolliver: Then it's not that good.

Single-Payer: Good for Business

Single-Payer: Good for Business
The Nation
by MORTON MINTZ
[from the November 15, 2004 issue]

Business leaders complain endlessly that the current system of private healthcare insurance based on employment provides fewer and fewer people with less and less quality care at higher and higher cost. Yet Corporate America turns its back on a publicly financed system, which, by all indicators, the taxpayers would willingly support.

Publicly financed but privately run healthcare for all--including free choice of physicians--would cost employers far less in taxes than their costs for insurance. Universal coverage could also work magic in less obvious ways. For example, employers would no longer have to pay for medical care under workers' compensation, which in 2002 cost them more than $38 billion. Auto-insurance rates would fall for them--and everyone--if the carriers were no longer liable for medical and hospital bills. You'd think that in its own selfish interest, Corporate America would be fighting to replace the existing system with universal health coverage. Yet it doesn't lift a finger.

Meanwhile, under the Bush Administration healthcare coverage steadily shrinks. In 2000, according to the Census Bureau, 14 percent of Americans didn't have it; in 2003, 15.6 percent--45 million--did not. Actually, 85 million Americans under age 65 were uninsured over varying periods during 2003-04, up from 81.8 million in 2002-03, according to Families USA, the consumer health organization. As more and more Americans become uninsured, spending on healthcare soars. By 2001 it accounted for 13.9 percent of US gross domestic product. (It constituted a much smaller share of GDP in countries with universal healthcare, such as Sweden, 8.7 percent; France, 9.5 percent; and Canada, 9.7 percent.)

Average family premiums in 2005 are projected to be $12,485, up $1,768 from 2004. The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services expects healthcare outlays to rise from $1.8 trillion in 2004 to $2.7 trillion in 2010, nearly a trillion-dollar increase in six years. The forecast reflects annual increases of 14 percent to 18 percent. David Walker, head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the auditing arm of Congress, calls them "unsustainable."

A simple fact largely explains why spending bloats while the ranks of the insured thin: Health insurance is increasingly unaffordable. After rising 38 percent between 2000 and the last quarter of 2003, the costs of providing healthcare to employees rose 11.2 percent between January and May of 2004, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's annual survey of 3,000 companies. "Close to 75 percent of 205 senior-level executives surveyed [in May] by the Detroit Regional Chamber rank employee health insurance as 'unaffordable' and 25 percent consider it 'very unaffordable,'" the Detroit News reported. The Kaiser Family Foundation says that from 2001 to 2004 the proportion of workers receiving health coverage on the job dropped from 65 percent to 61 percent, a loss of 5 million jobs with health benefits.

"Double-digit increases in healthcare costs are a drag on economic growth," says Henry Simmons, president of the National Coalition on Health Care, an alliance of groups working for healthcare reform. They "slow the rate of job growth," "suppress wage increases for current workers," "undercut the viability of pension funds," "put American firms at a steep disadvantage in world markets" and produce "severe long-term budgetary problems" for the federal and state governments.

Two unrelated but mutually reinforcing reports coming out on a single day, August 19, validate the economic-drag theory. First was a study that found a "relationship between job growth and health-care costs" in eighteen industries between 2000 and 2003. It was done for the Kerry campaign by Sarah Reber, assistant professor of policy studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Laura Tyson, dean of the London Business School and former head of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and National Economic Council. The evidence, the authors write, "suggests that employers have reduced hiring in response to rising health insurance premiums," and that rising premiums have led to a deterioration in the quality of jobs. In industries where health-insurance benefits accounted for a comparatively large share of total employee compensation, job growth was slower than in industries where they accounted for a smaller one. Thus, in the accommodation and food services industry, "benefits constituted about 12 percent of total compensation for workers...and jobs grew...by about 2.5 percent. In manufacturing...the benefits share was 18.5 percent and job losses topped 18 percent." [Emphasis in original.]

This picture was reinforced by a New York Times article based on "government data, industry surveys and interviews with employers big and small." It said:

A relentless rise in the cost of employee health insurance has become a significant factor in the employment slump, as the labor market adds only a trickle of new jobs each month despite nearly three years of uninterrupted economic growth.... employers big and small...remain reluctant to hire full-time employees because health insurance, which now costs the nation's employers an average of about $3,000 a year for each worker, has become one of the fastest-growing costs.... Health premiums are sapping corporate balance sheets even more than the rising cost of energy.

Reacting to rising expenditures on insurance, corporate managements cut back on employee health benefits, triggering worker unrest. Consider the five-month strike against supermarket chains in Southern California--the longest in the industry's history. It left about 60,000 union workers jobless, and it seriously hurt the owners as well. The central issue--in a state where half of all personal bankruptcies are related to medical bills--was the demand by Safeway, Kroger and Albertsons that members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union pay much more for health benefits. The settlement, reached last February, sent a grim message to grocery workers everywhere.

The strike "would not have occurred if we had a system of universal healthcare coverage," Greg Denier, assistant to the international president of the UFCW, told me. "All of our strikes in the past decade have occurred because of the absence of universal healthcare." Moreover, universal health coverage would have narrowed the wide gap in operating costs between the unionized chains and nonunion competitors, particularly 800-pound gorilla Wal-Mart. Unlike the chains, the world's biggest retailer charges so much for miserly health insurance that more than 60 percent of its poorly paid employees (averaging $8 an hour) don't buy it. Denier saw the strike as a symptom of "the slow-motion collapse of the employment-based healthcare system."

Lawyer Harry Burton represented Safeway and Giant Food in subsequent negotiations with the UFCW in the Washington, DC, region. Speaking "as an individual," he essentially agreed with Denier. Universal health insurance would have "a profound effect" not just on the supermarket industry but "on nearly all collective bargaining," he told me. Nonunion companies "virtually never" provide healthcare of the same quality as that provided by unionized competitors, thus creating "a vast disparity in costs." That's why a tax-supported national system would result in "a leveling of the playing field." I asked Burton what explains the resistance or indifference of employers to universal health insurance. "Very frequently it's ideology," he replied.

Business leaders worship marketplace ideology "almost like religion," says Raymond Werntz, who for nearly thirty years ran healthcare programs for Whitman Corporation, a Chicago-based multinational holding company. "It's emotional." In 1999 Werntz became the first president of the Consumer Health Education Council in Washington, a program of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group. He saw it as his mission to try to persuade employers to face the "huge, huge" issue of the uninsured because, he told me, "business has to be involved with the solution." The problem that emerged was its "unwillingness to even think about a solution." Last year, after funding ran out, a disappointed Werntz became the council's last and only president.

Publicly financed universal health insurance comes in different forms. For Americans, however, none should hold more interest than single-payer. It's "one and the same thing" as Medicare for everybody, Werntz told me. Does the Corporate America that's happy with Medicare understand this? I asked. "It's a dialogue that hasn't happened yet," he replied. "My life for four years was trying to get business people in a room with single-payer people. I couldn't do it." CEOs of large corporations see it as something "that smacks of socialism," Werntz said, and therefore as "heresy."

Somehow, they don't see Medicare as heresy. Yet it's largely why the tax-financed share of US health spending is "the highest in the world," according to Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, associate professors at Harvard Medical School and founders of Physicians for a National Health Program. Writing in the July/August 2002 issue of Health Affairs, they put the share at 59.8 percent. No wonder: Federal tax revenues pay for Medicare, Medicaid and the medical-care systems for the military, the Veterans Administration, federal employees and Congress; income-, sales- and property-tax revenues buy coverage for state and local public employees. Taxation also hugely subsidizes health insurance while benefiting mostly "the affluent," the authors noted.

In 1991 the GAO made a stark finding regarding single-payer's benefits: "If the universal coverage and single-payer features of the Canadian system [had been] applied in the United States" in that year, "the savings in administrative costs"--$66.9 billion--"would have been more than enough to finance insurance coverage for the millions of Americans who are currently uninsured," the GAO said in a report. The $3 billion left over "would be enough...to permit a reduction, or possibly even the elimination, of copayments and deductibles."

Early this year, a comprehensive study published in the International Journal of Health Services reached this stunning conclusion: "The United States wastes more on health-care bureaucracy than it would cost to provide health care to all its uninsured." The authors, Woolhandler, Himmelstein and Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group, went on to write: "Administrative expenses will consume at least $399.4 billion of a total health expenditure of $1,660.5 billion in 2003. Streamlining administrative overhead to Canadian levels would save approximately $286 billion in 2002, $6,940 for each of the 41.2 million Americans who were uninsured as of 2001. This is substantially more than would be needed to provide full insurance coverage."

Canada has had a single-payer system for more than thirty years. (Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden and Taiwan also have one.) American executives who have run Canadian subsidiaries see it as a business boon. Take General Motors. In 2003 its costs of building a midsize car in Canada were $1,400 less than building the identical car in the United States (the comparable figures for DaimlerChrysler and Ford were $1,300 and $1,200). Such savings are no mystery. Canadian companies pay far less in taxes for health coverage for everyone than the premiums they would pay under the US system to provide their employees with comparable benefits.

Highly placed Canadian business executives affirm that single-payer nurtures free enterprise. A. Charles Baillie, while chairman and CEO of Toronto Dominion Bank, one of Canada's six largest, hailed it in 1999 as "an economic asset, not a burden." He told the Vancouver Board of Trade, "In an era of globalization, we need every competitive and comparative advantage we have. And the fundamentals of our health care system are one of those advantages." He added: "The fact is, the free market...cannot work in the context of universal health care. While health care could be purchased like any other form of insurance...the risk and resource equation will always be such that, in some cases, demand will not be matched by supply. In other words, some people will always be left out." (A recent report by the World Bank ranked welfare states like Denmark, Finland and Sweden high in international competitiveness. An author of the study said, "Social protection is good for business, it takes the burden off of businesses for health care costs.")

In 2002, top executives of the Big Three automakers' Canadian units joined Basil (Buzz) Hargrove, president of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union, in signing a "Joint Letter on Publicly Funded Health Care." At a press conference with Hargrove, Michael Grimaldi, president and general manager of GM Canada and a GM vice president, called single-payer "a strategic advantage for Canada." The joint letter, also signed by Ford's and DaimlerChrysler's presidents and CEOs, Alain Batty and Ed Brust, said that while providing "essential and affordable healthcare services for all," single-payer "significantly reduces total labour costs...compared to the cost of equivalent private insurance services purchased by US-based automakers" and "has been an important ingredient" in the success of Canada's "most important export industry." The Toronto Star explained how the CAW used "credible corporate data" to quantify "the competitive advantage that [single-payer] provides to the Canadian auto industry. The union compared the hourly labour costs of vehicle assembly in Canada and the United States. The Canadian rate, including wages, benefits and payroll taxes, was $29.90 per hour. The American rate was $45.60. (All figures are in US dollars.) Healthcare accounted for more than a quarter of the difference. It saved Canadian employers $4 per hour per worker." Monthly health-coverage costs for Canadian employers average about $50, mostly for items such as eyeglasses and orthopedic shoes; health-insurance costs for US employers average $552, the Washington Post has reported.

"The rising cost of health benefits is the biggest issue on our plate that we can't solve," Ford CEO William Clay Ford told a 2003 conference of Michigan business executives. "Healthcare is out of control--it's a system that's broken." Last year the company spent $3.2 billion on healthcare for 560,000 employees and their dependents and surviving spouses, or more than six times net profits of $495 million. William Ford urged a national solution and assigned vice chairman Allan Gilmour to craft a proposal. Early this year Gilmour told fellow industry executives that high healthcare costs have "created a competitive gap that's driving investment decisions away from the US." He told a subsequent investment conference, "We're going to have to have a national solution," only to add, "That national solution does not mean, necessarily, national healthcare." Why not? He didn't say.

After Jack Smith, president and general manager of GM Canada, became president and CEO of the parent company, an ad in the New York Times placed by single-payer advocates in 1994 quoted him as saying, "I personally favor single-payer." Now, however, GM "does not support" it, spokesperson Doris Powers told me. Because? "Much has changed in health care since Smith...made statements about universal, single-payer healthcare." What's changed? She didn't say.

A General Motors that hugs single-payer in Canada would seem to have compelling reasons to hug it here. GM covers healthcare costs for 1.1 million Americans. Last year's bill was $4.8 billion--$1 billion more than earnings. In its third-quarter report the company reduced its 2004 earnings forecast because rising US healthcare costs were hurting profits. GM's projected costs for providing healthcare benefits to current and future retirees is $63 billion, a burden immensely heavier than is carried by competitors based in universal-coverage countries, the New York Times reported in September. Yet, as the Detroit Free Press has noted, GM "has set aside less than $10 billion for that obligation."

In 2001 GM was reeling from a prescription-drug bill up to 22 percent above 2000's $1.1 billion. "Prescription drugs are the fastest-growing part of GM's health-care costs, accounting for more than 25 percent of its total medical spending last year," Newsweek reported. GM was "seeing red" because in 2000 it had spent $52 million just for Prilosec, a brand-name ulcer medicine. "That is millions more than GM executives believe they should have spent," the magazine said. "They blame much of the extra cost on savvy marketing by Prilosec's maker AstraZeneca." GM is fighting back with an "aggressive plan to curb drug spending," Newsweek continued. "Point man" James Cubbin "has been taking his case to senior executives at some of the nation's largest drug makers, including AstraZeneca."

But Newsweek--and Powers--missed an embarrassing part of the story. AstraZeneca chairman Percy Barnevik joined GM's board in 1996, while Smith was GM's chairman. Pfizer executive vice president Karen Katen followed in 1997, and the noses of both of these price-gouging drug companies are still in GM's tent. Surprise: The pharmaceutical houses "aren't backing down," Newsweek said. Rather than going hat in hand to pharmaceutical executives, Canada uses single-payer's price controls to cap drug prices. In two other universal-coverage countries, Australia and New Zealand, pharmacies charge 20 percent to 30 percent less than in Canada, the Wall Street Journal reported in July.

Unlike GM and Ford, DaimlerChrysler supports single-payer. "A lot of people think a single-payer system is better," vice president Thomas Hadrych told the Washington Post. Since 1990 Chrysler--and DaimlerChrysler after the merger--has regularly endorsed it, in a letter appended to its contracts with the United Automobile Workers.

No matter how urgently needed, no matter how common-sensical, no matter how much bottom lines would be fattened, single-payer or other fundamental healthcare reforms stall unless backed by the business organizations that govern the government. The Clinton Administration learned this to its sorrow after proposing its complex, comprehensive plan. Business organizations "effectively killed the bill," Walter Maher, former vice president for public policy of DaimlerChrysler, wrote last year in the American Journal of Public Health. The bill aroused formidable opposition from businesses such as fast-food chains like McDonald's. It mostly hired young people, worked them less than full time, paid them little and provided scant if any health coverage. Of the PepsiCo chains' hourly employees, a survey indicated, 71 percent were covered by someone else's health insurance. If that someone was a parent employed by, say, an automaker facing global competition, the manufacturer was effectively subsidizing chains that had no such competition. Free-riding defeated a primary goal of the bill, which was to spread healthcare costs throughout the economy by letting no employers escape paying their fair share.

The bill received a big boost when the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) let pragmatism trump ideology and endorsed it. And the mighty Business Roundtable (BRT), an association of 150 CEOs of the country's biggest corporations, with multitrillion-dollar revenues, was "at least prepared not to oppose" the mandate, Maher said in the article.

But insurers and other businesses that profited from preserving the healthcare status quo exerted fierce counterpressures. The Chamber "suddenly reversed course and totally rejected the Clinton Plan," Maher wrote. The NAM abruptly withdrew its endorsement six weeks after granting it. At the BRT several politically powerful members, including the CEOs of eight major and a few lesser pharmaceutical manufacturers, and of a dozen insurers and healthcare providers, opposed the bill. It got only a single vote--Chrysler's, Maher told me. "It's definitely fair to say that CEOs are very reluctant to take unpopular positions against their colleagues in the BRT," he added. "If a huge majority of them are staunch conservatives who have no interest in health reform, or in using the government to control costs, or to expand coverage, or even to moderate health costs using regulatory tools, it'll be a rare CEO who will want to take on his CEO buddies. That's absolutely true."

Today, BRT executive director Patricia Hanahan Engman contends that "public financing cannot provide the same level of quality doctors, hospitals and prescription drugs generated by the competition inherent in the private market." She should tell that to GM president and CEO G. Richard Wagoner Jr. Judged by sixteen top health indicators, he said in June, the United States ranks twelfth among thirteen industrialized countries. "It will be a cold day in hell when the BRT leads the charge for universal health coverage in the United States," Maher told me.

If the Democrats win the White House and take control of Congress, John Kerry could pass his employer-based healthcare plan, which calls for expanding coverage to nearly 95 percent of Americans, including all children, and for a federal insurance pool that would pay 75 percent of "catastrophic" illness bills. Crucial elements might survive even if the GOP continues to control the House--mainly because of forceful backing from pragmatic business leaders. For example, the Chamber of Commerce signed on early to Kerry's pool idea, calling it "a seed for bipartisan reform." In late October the New York Times reported that the Chamber was acclaiming the idea as "a worthy concept, an excellent use of federal tax dollars," while some Senate Republicans are pushing it, and "lawmakers and lobbyists say that regardless of who wins the presidential election, Congress will soon take up the idea." To be sure, Kerry's scheme may face attacks by the usual suspects and the lawmakers they buy. One influential critic, the National Business Group on Health, has more than 200 members, including at least a dozen drug and medical-device manufacturers plus three dozen healthcare providers and insurers. A Wal-Mart vice president sits on its board.

Advocating universal health coverage while the GOP controls the White House and Congress would be "tilting at windmills," DaimlerChrysler's Dennis Fitzgibbons told me. Maher said any industry subject to government regulation "has got to be concerned about irritating the regulator," meaning the Bush Administration. A single-payer reform proposal, by seeking to eliminate the insurance industry, he warned in his article, would make it and many other businesses "instant and unnecessary opponents." He recommends other forms of tax-financed universal health coverage that would use the industry. An example would be a system in which employer/employee payroll taxes would finance coverage for the working population, with employees offered several choices of health plans, as the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan does. A Medicare equivalent would provide for the elderly and nonworking population.

"I don't believe [single-payer] will be achievable in my lifetime," says Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA. Ideologues "will never support it." Industries heavily invested in the present system "will spend every last dollar to stop it." He recognizes that on "a blank slate," employer-based coverage "absolutely" makes no sense. But "in terms of political feasibility," trying to dismantle the present system would make matters "much worse," he told me. "The most important thing is the achievement of affordable, high-quality health coverage for everybody." To him, the crucial question is: "At what point are we willing to say that there's a higher principle in truly moving toward universal coverage than in knocking our heads against a stone wall, in absolute frustration about a methodology [single-payer] that is not going to be achievable in our lifetime?"

Surely in a Republican Washington the prospects for publicly financed universal health insurance are remote. But Washington isn't everywhere. Deborah Richter, a Vermont physician, believes it could still be enacted in every state. As president of Vermont Health Care for All, she's been campaigning to that end in her own state for five years, with impressive results [see sidebar, page 20]. Universal access to affordable, high-quality healthcare should be conceived "as a public good, as are roads, education, and police and fire protection," she says. Making it "a practical issue works. Trying to win support for it by making it a moral issue never works." By resisting the merger of practicality with morality that universal health care embodies, Corporate America is blowing a supreme opportunity to do well by doing good. Enlightened self-interest this is not.

New Medicare Benefit Helps Only Drug Companies

By Dr. Marc Siegel
The Nation
Wednesday 16 November 2005

Enrollment begins this week for the Bush Administration's shiny new Medicare drug plan. But very few of my patients are enrolling or even asking about it. Why?

One 82-year-old man explains it to me this way: "The purpose of the plan is to bring more customers to the drug company trough at top- dollar prices."

This man, my father, is certainly correct that there is no bargaining chip; no negotiating lower prices, no buying in bulk. Plus, with forty plans to choose from, it is difficult for the 43 million elderly to make any sense of an array of premiums, formularies, co-payments, deductibles and pharmacy networks.

A survey released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington, DC, found that only 20 percent of seniors say they will enroll in a plan and 37 percent say they won't. The remaining 43 percent are confused and don't know what to do.

For those in the government who point to the Medicare website to answer seniors' questions, there is the pathetic fact that less than one-third of seniors know how to use the Internet. And for those who do, what they find is bound to make them unhappy.

Money will be funneled to the drug companies from the fresh clients who do enroll, not to local pharmacies. An estimated $720 billion over the next ten years will subsidize prescription coverage through private insurance companies, but because of all the gaps in coverage, there will be plenty of out-of-pocket payments.

My father, with a fixed income from Social Security and a small pension, would seem to be a perfect candidate for prescription drug coverage. Yet under the new Medicare plan, according to our calculations, he is faced with high deductibles, $420 in yearly co-pays and the prospect of $3,600 coming out of his pocket at top-dollar prices just to receive $1,500 in coverage before a more complete coverage kicks in.

He, like many others, isn't interested in this option at all. I supply many of my elderly patients with drug samples from my supply closet. But for most of our country's elderly in the lower- and middle-income ranges, access to even this limited supply of free medications isn't possible. Instead, they are faced with two options: Continue to do without essential medications, or pony up most of their savings to match what the government provides. The plan really only provides comprehensive coverage for those who make less than $12,000 yearly.

Ironically, this is practically the same group that already qualifies for complete coverage under Medicaid, if they only knew about it.

If you're looking for a way to understand the new Medicare prescription drug plan, consider it as a way to help the private sector: The only elderly and disabled who will profit from it are those who are lucky enough to own shares in the companies that supply the drugs.

Dr. Marc Siegel is a practicing internist, and an associate professor of medicine and a fellow in the Master Scholars Society at New York University School of Medicine. He is a weekly columnist for the New York Daily News, a frequent contributor to The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Nation. He is a member of the board of contributors at USA Today. He appears frequently on CNN, the Fox News Channel and the NBC Today Show. His new book is False Alarm: The Truth about the Epidemic of Fear.
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Medicare Prescription Plan D

AARP's link page

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Millions Face a Deadline for Choosing a New Medicare Plan
NY Times
By MILT FREUDENHEIM
Published: November 24, 2005

Decisions, decisions. The clock is ticking for millions of elderly and disabled people, who must decide whether and when to enroll in one of the new Medicare Part D drug plans that start Jan. 1, 2006.

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The Official US Government Site for Medicate Prescription Drug Coverage Note: The first page on the Medicare website is about the PDP -D, so this is one BIG brouhaha...and according to many - clumsy, fraught with extravagant administrative issues, and wholly unnecessary.

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What is the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan?

 Medicare is adding coverage for prescription medicines. This means that people who have Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) or Medicare Part B (medical insurance) will be able to get insurance to pay for part of their prescription drugs. Medicare is working with insurance companies to offer this benefit. It is available no matter what your income, illnesses, or drug costs.

You can sign up between November 15, 2005 and May 15, 2006. If you join after May 15, you will have to pay more.

Where can I learn more?

There is a lot of information about Medicare Part D available on the Internet. familydoctor.org has organized a list of Web sites that can help answer any questions you may have about Medicare Part D.  

Information from familydoctor.org:

• Understanding the New Medicare Prescription Drug Plan: Information to help you understand what is being offered with the new Medicare Prescription Drug Plan.
  
    



• Getting Ready for Medicare Part D: Answers to 5 of the most common questions about getting ready for the new Medicare Prescription Drug Plan.

Information from other organizations:

• http://www.ncoa.org/content.cfm?sectionID=60: The NCOA has 2 Web sites with helpful information on the Part D drug program. 
  
    



•  www.medicarerxeducation.org: The Medicare Rx Education Network is a group working to educate America's seniors about the new drug benefit. The American Academy of Family Physicians is part of this group.
  
    



• www.yourpharmacybenefit.org: YourPharmacyBenefit.org was created to help people make good use of the pharmacy benefits that will become available under Medicare in 2006.

Information from Medicare:

• www.medicare.gov: The official site for people with Medicare.
  
    



• www.medicare.gov/Publications/Pubs/pdf/11146.pdf: Specific brochures and publications to help people with Medicare learn more about prescription drug plans, how to compare plans, and how to apply for the extra help, such as the "Getting Started" brochure. (PDF file: 8 pages/827 KB; More information on downloading PDF files.)
  
    



• http://www.medicare.gov/MPDPF/Home.asp: This tool was designed to help you compare the benefits of different plans.



• 
  
  
  
  
  • http://www.cms.hhs.gov/partnerships/news/mma/
    
    webcasts.asp: This short webcast demonstrates many of the capabilities of this comparison tool that will help people with Medicare choose and join a Medicare Drug Plan.
    
      
  
  
  
  



• http://formularyfinder.medicare.gov/formularyfinder/selectstate.asp: This tool will allow you to find plans in your state that match your required drug list.
  
  
    



• www.medicare.gov/medicarereform/MPDP_Cost_Estimator.asp: The Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Cost Estimator provides you with an example of potential savings you can anticipate with Medicare Prescription Drug coverage.
  
    



• www.medicare.gov/medicarereform/map.asp: A Landscape of Local Plans that shows the Medicare plans that offer drug coverage in your area, including basic information to help them consider the cost, coverage, and convenience of the plan.

Information available in other languages:

• http://www.hispanichealth.org/medicare.lasso: Visit this link for on the Part D benefit in English and Spanish, from the nation's oldest and largest network of Hispanic health and human services providers.
  
     



• http://tenthings.org/: This site contains information about the Medicare Part D benefit - - and the information is available in 10 different languages!

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New Drug Benefit Questioned
By Christopher Lee
The Washington Post
Wednesday 23 November 2005

The new Medicare drug benefit fails to deliver drug prices as low as those found at the Department of Veterans Affairs, in Canada and at high-volume US pharmacies, a congressional report said yesterday. It was challenged by a Medicare official as flawed and misleading.

The report, released yesterday by the Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee, found that the average prices of 10 popular drugs being offered to Medicare recipients through 10 well-known insurance plans were 80 percent higher than prices negotiated for the government by Veterans Affairs. The Medicare prices were 60 percent higher than average prices paid by Canadian consumers, the report found. And they were about 3 percent higher than those paid by consumers who got their drugs at Costco stores or online through Drugstore.com.

"The prices offered by the Medicare drug plans are higher than all four benchmarks, in some cases significantly so," the report concluded. "This increases costs to seniors and federal taxpayers and makes it doubtful that the complicated design of Medicare Part D provides any tangible benefit to anyone but drug manufacturers and insurers."

Gary Karr, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the report was disappointing but not surprising. "It's disappointing because it's selective and misleading, and because of the timing," Karr said.

As Medicare officials try to help seniors understand and enroll in the new benefit, Karr charged, the report shows that Democrats are more interested in rehashing a political argument that raged before Congress approved federally subsidized coverage for seniors in 2003. "Now the effort should really be about educating people and not continuing the same old rhetoric that they have been saying for two years," Karr said. "This is not a new expression of the policy views of the minority staff of the Government Reform Committee."

During the congressional debate two years ago, many Democrats argued that the way to obtain the lowest prices for seniors would be to allow Medicare to negotiate discounts directly with pharmaceutical companies. Republicans maintained that the lowest drug prices would come through competition as scores of private insurers vied to attract seniors. The law establishing the benefit forbids the government from negotiating drug prices.

The Democrats' report, requested by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (CA), the committee's ranking Democrat, contends that Republicans were wrong, and that prices are not as low as they could be even though consumers typically have at least 40 plans to choose from.

For example, the 10 drug plans examined offer the heartburn medication Prevacid for an average monthly cost of $135 - far higher than the $71 price negotiated by Veterans Affairs and more than the $63 a Canadian consumer would pay. The same medication is available at Costco for $128 and at Drugstore.com for $125, the report found. Some other well-known drugs studied included Celebrex, Lipitor, Plavix and Zocor.

Karr said the report did not consider the availability of less expensive generic drugs, which are prescribed more than half the time. Karen Lightfoot, Waxman's spokeswoman, said the 10 drugs studied do not have generic equivalents.

Karr said the report also failed to examine whether Medicare drug plans other than those studied offer lower prices on the brand-name drugs cited in the report.

"What they've done is selectively picked a few drugs, not acknowledging that there may be a less expensive alternative within those plans," Karr said. "... They didn't say in their report that they had found the plans that had negotiated the best deals.... The question really is whether this is indeed a true and accurate reflection of the plan choices that somebody would have if they pumped these drugs into the Medicare plan finder."

Weekend's Sales Rush Largely Bypasses Smaller Stores
NY Times
By MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: November 27, 2005

As the nation's retail executives began poring over - and in some cases, despairing over - sales receipts from the holiday weekend, one pattern was hard to miss: consumers mobbed discount chains, with their $487 laptops and 5 a.m. openings, but largely shopped right past smaller stores at the mall.

Historical Firsts in 1898

First Patent Issued for a Computer
First Golf Course In America Opens
First Brassiere Invented
First Motion Picture

Obama's Blog Reply

Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party
Friday, September 30, 2005
(Cross-posted on DailyKos.com)

To the Daily Kos Crew:

I read with interest your recent discussion regarding my comments on the floor(1, 2, 3) during the debate on John Roberts' nomination. I don't get a chance to follow blog traffic as regularly as I would like, and rarely get the time to participate in the discussions. I thought this might be a good opportunity to offer some thoughts about not only judicial confirmations, but how to bring about meaningful change in this country.

Maybe some of you believe I could have made my general point more artfully, but it's precisely because many of these groups are friends and supporters that I felt it necessary to speak my mind.

There is one way, over the long haul, to guarantee the appointment of judges that are sensitive to issues of social justice, and that is to win the right to appoint them by recapturing the presidency and the Senate. And I don't believe we get there by vilifying good allies, with a lifetime record of battling for progressive causes, over one vote or position. I am convinced that, our mutual frustrations and strongly-held beliefs notwithstanding, the strategy driving much of Democratic advocacy, and the tone of much of our rhetoric, is an impediment to creating a workable progressive majority in this country.

According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists - a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog - we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party. They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda. In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in "appeasing" the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda. The country, finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.

I think this perspective misreads the American people. From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon. They don't think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent. They don't think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs. They don't think America is an imperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated, are worried that we have unnecessarily alienated existing and potential allies around the world, and are ashamed by events like those at Abu Ghraib which violate our ideals as a country.

It's this non-ideological lens through which much of the country viewed Judge Roberts' confirmation hearings. A majority of folks, including a number of Democrats and Independents, don't think that John Roberts is an ideologue bent on overturning every vestige of civil rights and civil liberties protections in our possession. Instead, they have good reason to believe he is a conservative judge who is (like it or not) within the mainstream of American jurisprudence, a judge appointed by a conservative president who could have done much worse (and probably, I fear, may do worse with the next nominee). While they hope Roberts doesn't swing the court too sharply to the right, a majority of Americans think that the President should probably get the benefit of the doubt on a clearly qualified nominee.

A plausible argument can be made that too much is at stake here and now, in terms of privacy issues, civil rights, and civil liberties, to give John Roberts the benefit of the doubt. That certainly was the operating assumption of the advocacy groups involved in the nomination battle.

I shared enough of these concerns that I voted against Roberts on the floor this morning. But short of mounting an all-out filibuster -- a quixotic fight I would not have supported; a fight I believe Democrats would have lost both in the Senate and in the court of public opinion; a fight that would have been difficult for Democratic senators defending seats in states like North Dakota and Nebraska that are essential for Democrats to hold if we hope to recapture the majority; and a fight that would have effectively signaled an unwillingness on the part of Democrats to confirm any Bush nominee, an unwillingness which I believe would have set a dangerous precedent for future administrations -- blocking Roberts was not a realistic option.

In such circumstances, attacks on Pat Leahy, Russ Feingold and the other Democrats who, after careful consideration, voted for Roberts make no sense. Russ Feingold, the only Democrat to vote not only against war in Iraq but also against the Patriot Act, doesn't become complicit in the erosion of civil liberties simply because he chooses to abide by a deeply held and legitimate view that a President, having won a popular election, is entitled to some benefit of the doubt when it comes to judicial appointments. Like it or not, that view has pretty strong support in the Constitution's design.

The same principle holds with respect to issues other than judicial nominations. My colleague from Illinois, Dick Durbin, spoke out forcefully - and voted against - the Iraqi invasion. He isn't somehow transformed into a "war supporter" - as I've heard some anti-war activists suggest - just because he hasn't called for an immediate withdrawal of American troops. He may be simply trying to figure out, as I am, how to ensure that U.S. troop withdrawals occur in such a way that we avoid all-out Iraqi civil war, chaos in the Middle East, and much more costly and deadly interventions down the road. A pro-choice Democrat doesn't become anti-choice because he or she isn't absolutely convinced that a twelve-year-old girl should be able to get an operation without a parent being notified. A pro-civil rights Democrat doesn't become complicit in an anti-civil rights agenda because he or she questions the efficacy of certain affirmative action programs. And a pro-union Democrat doesn't become anti-union if he or she makes a determination that on balance, CAFTA will help American workers more than it will harm them.

Or to make the point differently: How can we ask Republican senators to resist pressure from their right wing and vote against flawed appointees like John Bolton, if we engage in similar rhetoric against Democrats who dissent from our own party line? How can we expect Republican moderates who are concerned about the nation's fiscal meltdown to ignore Grover Norquist's threats if we make similar threats to those who buck our party orthodoxy?

I am not drawing a facile equivalence here between progressive advocacy groups and right-wing advocacy groups. The consequences of their ideas are vastly different. Fighting on behalf of the poor and the vulnerable is not the same as fighting for homophobia and Halliburton. But to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, "true" progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward. When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive "checklist," then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems. We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted.

Beyond that, by applying such tests, we are hamstringing our ability to build a majority. We won't be able to transform the country with such a polarized electorate. Because the truth of the matter is this: Most of the issues this country faces are hard. They require tough choices, and they require sacrifice. The Bush Administration and the Republican Congress may have made the problems worse, but they won't go away after President Bush is gone. Unless we are open to new ideas, and not just new packaging, we won't change enough hearts and minds to initiate a serious energy or fiscal policy that calls for serious sacrifice. We won't have the popular support to craft a foreign policy that meets the challenges of globalization or terrorism while avoiding isolationism and protecting civil liberties. We certainly won't have a mandate to overhaul a health care policy that overcomes all the entrenched interests that are the legacy of a jerry-rigged health care system. And we won't have the broad political support, or the effective strategies, required to lift large numbers of our fellow citizens out of numbing poverty.

The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives' job. After all, it's easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it's harder to craft a foreign policy that's tough and smart. It's easy to dismantle government safety nets; it's harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It's easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it's harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion. But that's our job. And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.

Let me be clear: I am not arguing that the Democrats should trim their sails and be more "centrist." In fact, I think the whole "centrist" versus "liberal" labels that continue to characterize the debate within the Democratic Party misses the mark. Too often, the "centrist" label seems to mean compromise for compromise sake, whereas on issues like health care, energy, education and tackling poverty, I don't think Democrats have been bold enough. But I do think that being bold involves more than just putting more money into existing programs and will instead require us to admit that some existing programs and policies don't work very well. And further, it will require us to innovate and experiment with whatever ideas hold promise (including market- or faith-based ideas that originate from Republicans).

Our goal should be to stick to our guns on those core values that make this country great, show a spirit of flexibility and sustained attention that can achieve those goals, and try to create the sort of serious, adult, consensus around our problems that can admit Democrats, Republicans and Independents of good will. This is more than just a matter of "framing," although clarity of language, thought, and heart are required. It's a matter of actually having faith in the American people's ability to hear a real and authentic debate about the issues that matter.

Finally, I am not arguing that we "unilaterally disarm" in the face of Republican attacks, or bite our tongue when this Administration screws up. Whenever they are wrong, inept, or dishonest, we should say so clearly and repeatedly; and whenever they gear up their attack machine, we should respond quickly and forcefully. I am suggesting that the tone we take matters, and that truth, as best we know it, be the hallmark of our response.

My dear friend Paul Simon used to consistently win the votes of much more conservative voters in Southern Illinois because he had mastered the art of "disagreeing without being disagreeable," and they trusted him to tell the truth. Similarly, one of Paul Wellstone's greatest strengths was his ability to deliver a scathing rebuke of the Republicans without ever losing his sense of humor and affability. In fact, I would argue that the most powerful voices of change in the country, from Lincoln to King, have been those who can speak with the utmost conviction about the great issues of the day without ever belittling those who opposed them, and without denying the limits of their own perspectives.

In that spirit, let me end by saying I don't pretend to have all the answers to the challenges we face, and I look forward to periodic conversations with all of you in the months and years to come. I trust that you will continue to let me and other Democrats know when you believe we are screwing up. And I, in turn, will always try and show you the respect and candor one owes his friends and allies.

Setting the Record Straight by Bill Moyers

November 18, 2005

Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist and former host of the PBS program NOW With Bill Moyers. He made these remarks at a celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the independent newspaper The Texas Observer . Moyers is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and the author of Moyers on America, the recent paperback collection of his speeches and essays. Please contact TomPaine.com [editor@tompaine.com] before excerpting any portion of these remarks.

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The 50th anniversary of The Texas Observer is a double celebration for me. Your first issue appeared one week before Judith Davidson and I were married in December 1954. We had transferred here to the University of Texas as juniors and were renting a garage apartment that has now totally disappeared along with the block on which it stood. So many landmarks of our lives have disappeared that it’s a joy to come back to Austin and find one that stubbornly and gamely remains true to its mission. Although many people would wish The Texas Observer had also been buried under the rubble of time, a good idea is as hard to kill as a good marriage. And this little newspaper was a good idea.

As Ronnie Dugger reminds us in his epilogue to Fifty Years of The Texas Observer , there was silence in Texas in those days about racism, poverty and corporate power. The state ranked dead last among major states and next-to-last in the South in education, health care, and programs for the poor. “We were as racist, segregated, and anti-union as the Deep South from which most of our Anglo pioneers had emerged,” Dugger writes.
”Mexican Americans were a hopeless underclass concentrated in South Texas. Women could vote and did the dog work in the political campaigns, but they were also ladies to be protected, above all from power. Gays and lesbians were as objectionable as Communists. And the daily newspapers were as reactionary and dishonest a cynical gang as the First Amendment ever took the rap for.”

Into that atmosphere rode a band of journalists determined to poke a thumb in the eye of orthodoxy. Dugger summed up their mission in his lead editorial in that very first issue:

We will have a good time and we hope you do. We will twit the self-important and honor the truly important. We will lay the bark to the dignity of any public man any time we see fit. Telling the whole truth is not an exercise to be limited to children before they reach the age of reason. It is the indispensable requirement for an effective democracy. If the press and the politicians lie to the people, or hide those parts of the truth which trouble the conscience or offend a friend, how can the people’s falsely-based decisions be trusted? Here in the Southwest there is room for a great truth-telling newspaper, its editor free, its editorials cast in a liberal and reasonable frame of mind, its dedication Thoreau’s ‘The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth.

I wish I had written those words. I wish that I had served them all my days as Ronnie Dugger has. But at the time I wasn’t even thinking such thoughts. Back then I was still in the elementary grade school of journalism. I had transferred to the University for one simple reason: LBJ offered me a job on Lady Bird’s station paying $100 a week, and that meant Judith and I could afford to get married. KTBC was the first in Texas to buy a station wagon, paint it red, and christen it—what else?—Red Rover. Charlton Heston churning a backlot in Hollywood in pursuit of Rome’s glories never had more fun than I did in that four-wheeled chariot, careening around Austin in style, broadcasting from crime scenes and accidents and the state legislature, which of course was the biggest crime scene in town. My boss, Paul Bolton, the crusty old news editor of KTBC, would look at the goings on in the Texas House of Representatives and sigh: “If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents.”

No argument there. McCarthyism was a raging plague in the 1950s and the virus rampaged across Texas like tumbleweeds in a wind storm. The legendary Maury Maverick Jr. was in the legislature at the time, one of the “Gashouse Gang” that fought bravely against the poison of the era. He said these were “the worst years” in his life. “The lights were going out” and few voices were raised in protest. The low point, said Maverick, came when the state Senate passed a bill to remove all books from public libraries which “adversely” reflected on American and Texas history, the family and religion. Even the state teachers association endorsed the bill, in exchange for a pay raise. Maverick voted against it, but walking back to his apartment that evening he was suddenly overwhelmed by the evil of what was happening, and he “vomited until flecks of blood came up.”

That was the lay of the land in the 1950s. And Democrats were in charge, remember? That’s right: Texas was a one-party state; Republicans were as scarce in high office as Democrats are today. No matter the players, one-party government is a conspiracy in disguise.

In that rocky soil and toxic climate, Frankie Randolph and Ronnie Dugger and a fistful of fellow dissenters launched The Texas Observer . I wasn’t among them. I had yet to work myself out beyond the cozy confinements of an insular East Texas Baptist culture where you could be well loved, well churched and well taught and still be unaware of the reality of other people’s lives. I belonged in those days to that category of journalists described by George Bernard Shaw as “unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.”

So Judith and I graduated and left town. The Texas Observer stayed: stayed to live out Dugger’s dare to tell the truth about the oligarchy that governed Texas. What kept that original band of scribblers going remains a mystery to me. For sure they made up in irreverence what they lacked in financial security. At that very time, in faraway Washington, D.C., I.F. Stone was also afflicting the comfortable. In his little I.F. Stone’s Weekly, he would pore through the government’s own official documents to catch the government’s lies and contradictions. Amid the thunder of his battle with Potomac dragons he boasted, “I have so much fun I ought to be arrested.” Here in Austin, Dugger and friends were also just a laugh away from jail or bankruptcy.

It took me a long time to catch up—to realize that what matters in journalism is not how close you are to power but how close you are to the truth. I had gone on to seminary, was catapulted into the Washington maelstrom, and then wound up as publisher of Newsday in New York, where I started to get my feet on the ground again.

Back at home, The Texas Observer was doing what journalism does best: setting the record straight. This, said the late Martha Gellhorn, is the reason we exist. Gellhorn spent half a life observing war and politicians and journalists, too. By the end she had lost her faith that journalism could, by itself, change the world, but she had found a different sort of comfort. “Victory and defeat are both passing moments,” she said. “There is no end; there are only means. Journalism is a means, and I now think that the act of keeping the record straight is valuable in itself. Serious, careful, honest journalism is essential, not because it is a guiding light but because it is a form of honorable behavior, involving the reporter and the reader.”

Honorable behavior is what this newspaper was exhibiting here in Texas. The journalists who embodied it included Ronnie Dugger, Willie Morris, Robert Sherrill, Larry Goodwyn, Kaye Northcott, Jim Hightower, Geoffrey Rips, Lou Dubose, Michael King, Nate Blakeslee and Molly Ivins (whose wit should have prompted her arrest long ago. Who else makes us laugh so hard even as we read about the betrayal of democracy?)

Then there were the writers whose creativity and courage buoyed many an article and essay: J. Frank Dobie, Roy Bedichek, Walter Prescott Webb, Bud Shrake, Garry Cartwright, Larry King, Larry McMurtry, Bill Helmer, Billy Porterfield, Elroy Bode, Amado Muro and Katherine Anne Porter, to name a few.

Just sample the legacy:

In these pages 40 years ago, Dugger called on liberals to remember our commitment to personal liberty, personal love, personal joy and pain. He urged us to listen to the critique of big government—“It is big, it is impersonal, it is confused” —and to be vigilant in the name of the lone individual: “We must test our system, not by whether we get to the moon, but by whether a man [or woman] can freely and fully express himself here on earth; not by whether we are ahead in weapons, but by whether we are ahead in real room to be free and alive…to be ourselves.”

In 1960, Dugger wrote that Lyndon Johnson “might be a great liberal president—might transcend his thin education, his rural bias, his evident dislike of city-industrial liberalism, his mottled record in civil rights and civil liberties, his relative ignorance in foreign policy—might lead the nation to great new public works and world service.” This made LBJ think a little more kindly toward “that fly in Austin that keeps swimming in my soup,” as he once described Dugger & Company. But it was also the fiercely independent Dugger who, six years later, challenged the escalation of the war in Vietnam and cried out against bombing “the men, women, and children in Hanoi” in order to force our will on them. The president, he wrote, “has already scarred his place in history” by bringing to the war “a West Texan’s simplistic frontier ideas about man-to-man relationships and how to behave in a fight with the enemy.”

Some things never change.

In these pages, Lou Dubose predicted early on what would happen when the chickens of Reaganomics and (Phil) Grammonomics came home to roost, Robert Sherrill anticipated the rapacity of corporate greed in a new Gilded Age, and James Ridgeway imagined a perversion of populism that could serve multinational corporations even as they moved their operations offshore to exploit poor countries for cheap labor and raw materials, costing American workers their jobs.

In these pages, Larry Goodwyn ruminated on the difference between “a politics of the present” and “a politics of the future,” urging liberals to think hard about whether their strategy meant a winning coalition 10 years down the road. Would the election next spring, say, of a “given liberal candidate in Dallas have any real meaning in altering the caste system under which the people of Dallas live?” The headline above that essay read: “Caste and Righteousness.” It was a startling headline at the time, and it still fits today, alas. As The Texas Observer continues to remind us, Texas in 2005 is run by the rich and the righteous, producing a state of piracy and piety that even the medieval papacy couldn’t match.

Consider the scene just a few weeks ago when your Gov. Perry, surrounded by cheering God-folk, showed up at a pep rally in Fort Worth for yet another cleverly staged bashing of gay people, contrived to keep the pious signed on for the culture war so they won’t know they are losing the class war waged against them in Austin by the governor and his rich corporate patrons. The main speaker was none other than the Rev. Rod Parsley of Ohio. Keep your eyes on Rev. Parsley. He is the new incarnation of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, that devout duo who channeled Elmer Gantry into a new political religion driven by an obsession to punish people on account of sex. Parsley runs a multimillion-dollar-a-year televangelism ministry based in Columbus, Ohio, with access worldwide to 400 TV stations and cable affiliates. He describes himself as neither Republican nor Democrat but a “Christo-crat” —a gladiator for God marching against “the very hordes of hell in our society.” But he shows up with so many Republicans that he has been publicly described as the party’s “spiritual advisor.”

The “advice” he offers is the same old stuff peddled by Robertson and Falwell in their own rise to the top of the dung heap of religious bigotry and bile. Parsley demonizes other faiths (“The god of Islam and the god of Christianity are not the same being”) and rouses the partisan faithful to fever pitch by tossing them the red meat of radical disinformation: “The church in America is under oppression.” “The separation of church and state is a lie perpetrated on Americans—especially on believers in Jesus Christ.” So intense is his scapegoating of gays that one cannot help but think of the 1930s when the powerful and the pious in Germany demonized Jews and homosexuals in order to arouse and manipulate public passions. Watching the two of them together, you have to wonder if Gov. Perry and Rev. Parsley have ever read a history book detailing how Heinrich Himmler organized a special section of the Gestapo to deal with homosexuality and abortion, exhorting his country to remember that “Germany’s forebears knew what to do with homosexuals. They drowned them in bags.” You want to believe the governor and the preacher are surely ignorant of such horrors, horrors you know they would never condone, but you want to grab them by the lapels and shake them and tell them their loathing of other people is the kindling of evil.

Ohio newspapers report that Parsley has launched Reformation Ohio to bring “spiritual revival and moral reformation” to the Buckeye state by using pastors and their churches to register at least 400,000 new voters motivated by “Bible-based values.” It’s a familiar agenda: deny women freedom of conscience in the difficult personal choices affecting pregnancy, discriminate against gay people who seek the commitments of marriage, outlaw stem-cell research no matter the lives it might save, and overturn a provision in the U.S. tax code that prohibits non-profit churches from endorsing political candidates. (At one recent rally, Parsley and former U.S. Sen. Zell Miller delivered “fiery speeches” as more than 1,200 pastors were handed thousands of mail-in petitions to spread among their congregations urging the Senate quickly to confirm John Roberts to the Supreme Court.)

Rev. Parsley is a master of mass psychology. He sees the church as a sleeping giant with the ability and the anointing from God to transform America. At a rally in July he proclaimed: “Let the Revolution begin!” And the congregation answered: “Let the Revolution begin.”

So what was it that brought Rev. Parsley to Austin recently to meet with Gov. Perry? Both showed up for a “Pastors’ Policy Briefing” sponsored by the Texas Restoration Project (not to be confused with Reformation Ohio, unless you think of kissin’ cousins). Once again the aim is to sign up “Patriot Pastors” who will call on their congregations to vote the Lord’s will on Election Day. Also present in Austin was Ohio’s secretary of state, Ken Blackwell. You will remember him as the overseer of the election process in Ohio last year when a surge of conservative Christian voters narrowly carried Bush to victory there. Yes, the same Ken Blackwell who had modestly acknowledged that “God wanted him as secretary of state in 2004” because it was such a critical election. Now, apparently, he has been divinely designated for higher office. One wonders what Blackwell, Perry and Parsley were really talking about when they got down on their knees here in Austin. We will never know, because the praying and preaching and politicking were closed to the press, as befits the stealth salvation they are plotting for Texas.

Who paid to bring preachers from all over the state to town for this politically religious camp meeting? That, too, is a big secret. Two Texas oligarchs were spotted at the closed-door sessions—James Leininger and Bo Pilgrim— and they may have dropped something into the offering plate. But no one will say who put up the half million shekels it cost to bring the brethren to town and provide for them more than a few loaves and fishes.

Some years ago the classicist scholar, William Arrowsmith, writing in The Texas Observer, described the “worst of Texas attitudes—the rock-bottom conviction, expressed in stone throughout the state and in the hearts of politicians, that what counts is always and only wealth, that everything is for sale and can be bought.” Including now the Faith of Our Fathers, the Old Time Religion, the Rock of Ages. Right-wing religion provides the political and corporate forces running America a cloak of “moral values” with which to camouflage the plunder of America. It is the Texas machine duplicated many times over. For, as The Texas Observer once put it, “The men who run the Lone Star State, through a tacit but powerful interlocking directorate of politicians and corporation executives [joined now by preachers] are perpetrating and perpetuating a monstrous deception on the public” —namely, the illusion of self-government.

Everything President George W. Bush knows, he learned here, as the product of a system rigged to assure the political progeny needed to perpetuate itself with minimum interference from the nuisances of liberal democracy. You remember liberal democracy: the rule of law, the protection of individual and minority rights, checks and balances against arbitrary power, an independent press, the separation of church and state. As governor, Bush was nurtured by the peculiar Texas blend of piety and privilege that mocks those values. With the election of 2000, he and his cohorts arrived in Washington like atheists taking over the Vatican; they had come to run a government they don’t believe in.

The results have been disastrous: reckless tax cuts, a relentless assault on social services, monumental debt, pre-emptive war, an exhausted military, booming corporate welfare and corruption so deep and pervasive it has touched every facet of American government.

Much has been made of the president’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina. His early response was to joke the fun he had as a frat boy in now-grieving New Orleans. When a reporter pressed him on what had gone wrong after the hurricane struck, he sarcastically asked: “Who says something went wrong?” His attitude would surprise no one who read the 1999 profile of Bush by a conservative journalist who reported how the then-governor had made fun of Karla Fay Tucker’s appeals to be spared the death penalty. The journalist—a conservative, remember —wrote that Bush mocked and dismissed the woman, like him a born-again Christian, as he depicted her begging him, “Please don’t kill me!” But this is not what she had said. Bush made it up.

Such contempt for other people’s reality is embedded in a philosophy hostile to government except as an instrument of privilege and patronage. This is the crowd, remember, that was asleep at the switch in the months leading up to 9/11 when the intelligence traffic crackled with warnings about terrorist attacks (look it up in the official commission report). It’s the same crowd that made a mess of the occupation of Iraq—and then awarded themselves Medals of Freedom for the wreckage they had created. Their mentality was well summed up by Donald Rumsfeld, who, after Baghdad’s libraries and museums were sacked, shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Stuff happens.’

Hurricane Katrina uncovered what the progressive advocate Robert Borosage calls the “catastrophic conservatism” of the long right-wing crusade to denigrate government, ‘starve the beast,’ scorn its purposes and malign its officials. We are seeing the results of an economic policy focused on top-end tax cuts and deregulations to reward private investors, as opposed to public investments in the country’s vital infrastructure. On the day that Katrina struck the coast, the census bureau reported that last year, one million people had been added to the 36 million Americans living in poverty. A few weeks earlier, the Labor Department had reported that while incomes had grown impressively last year, the gains had gone mostly to the top—the people with stocks and bonds and income other than wages. But the 80 million people who live paycheck to paycheck barely stayed even. It took a natural disaster to expose the stunning inequality and poverty produced when people are written off and shoved to the margins. And to remind us, as Borosage writes, of the dearth of basic investment in the boring but essential public works vital to civilization—schools, public transport, water systems, public health, and yes, wetlands and trees.

We are seeing now the results of systemic and spectacular corruption and cronyism and the triumph of a social ideal—the “You get yours/I’ll get mine” mentality—that is diametrically opposed to the ethic of shared sacrifice and responsibility.

Consider the story of the president’s buddy, Joe Allbaugh. When he was appointed head of the Federal Emergency Management Administration—FEMA—he described the agency as “an oversized entitlement program” and told states and cities to rely instead on faith-based organizations. Not surprisingly, the first in line at FEMA’s front door in the aftermath of Katrina was the televangelist and tycoon, Pat Robertson. Although he had only recently called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and had prayed in public for God to open some Supreme Court vacancies “one way or the other,” Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing—sic—got one of the first faith-based grants for relief work on the Gulf Coast. As a Christian magazine has now informed us, Robertson used some of those tax dollars to help rush 80,000 Bibles to the stricken region.

Joe Allbaugh, meanwhile, was already on the scene—but not as head of FEMA. He had returned to “private life,” as the term is laughingly used among Washington lobbyists. Having failed to prepare his agency to cope with disaster, he carefully prepared himself to exploit disaster when it strikes. It had not escaped him that the invasion of Iraq opened splendid opportunities for gain among the well-connected of Washington who ha cheered it on. Setting up a lobbying firm near the White House, he was soon facilitating business for contractors in Iraq and running another company that provides security for private companies operating there. Allbaugh housed his entire complex at the Washington lobbying and law firm of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers. The ‘Barbour’ in that lineup is none other that the former chair of the Republican National Committee, Haley Barbour. The ‘Rogers’ is Ed Rogers, Barbour’s partner, who is also—hold your breath—one of Allbaugh’s vice presidents. Haley Barbour, having enriched himself as an influence peddler, went back to Mississippi and ran for governor, which means he is playing a big hand in passing out your tax dollars for reconstruction. Lo and behold, on September 1, the Pentagon announced a major contract for repair of Naval facilities on the Gulf Coast to Halliburton, whose chief lobbyist is… Joe Allbaugh. What a lucky coincidence. Or as Shakespeare might put it: ‘Merit doth much, but fortune more.”

This is what you get from people who don’t believe in government except to aggrandize their own privilege. It wasn’t the lack of resources that prevented the administration from responding effectively to the disaster. The Washington Post’s Bill Arkin, among others, reminds us that the federal government had water, medicine, food and security at hand, in addition to the transportation needed to get it down to the coast in a hurry. The problem was “leadership, decisiveness, foresight.” And this goes to the core of the radical right’s atheist-in-the-Vatican philosophy: Denounce the government you now run, defang its powers and dilute its responsibilities, and direct the spoils of victory to your cronies in the private sector.

This predatory convergence of corporate, political and religious power has taken the notion of our commonwealth —the ‘We the People’ in that magnificent preamble to the Constitution—and soaked it in the sanctimony of homegrown Ayatollahs, squeezed it through a rigged market, and then auctioned it to the highest bidder for private advantage, at the expense of working people, their families and their communities.

When the right-wing apostle of no government, Grover (“Starve the beast”) Norquist appeared on my broadcast last year, I told him that I regretted having announced my retirement. With the corporate, political and religious right now exercising a one-party monopoly over Washington, I said, we are going to see such a spectacle of corruption that muckraking journalism could yet produce a new Golden Age of investigative reporting.

Sure enough, not a day passes that I don’t wish we could clone The Texas Observer, plant it smack dab in the center of the nation’s capital, and loose the spirit of Thomas Paine. Paine was the journalist of the American Revolution whose pen shook the powerful and propertied, challenged the pretensions of the pious and privileged, and exposed the sunshine patriots who turned against the revolutionary ideals of freedom, equality and justice. That spirit permeates The Texas Observer . Thanks to your Nate Blakeslee, the wrongly accused in Tulia are finally out of jail. Thanks to your Jake Bernstein and David Mann, “The Rise of the Machine”— the stunning account of modern political corruption in Texas that is the basis of Tom DeLay’s power—has begun to topple the dominoes. Just imagine how such fearless journalism in Washington today could probe deep into the political machinations behind our nation’s shocking inequality, expose the corruption of our public life, and reveal to Americans just how the regime in power is hollowing out the middle class, punishing working people and shackling future generations to runaway debt.

I read The Texas Observer and am reminded of the Irishman who comes upon a street brawl and asks, “Is this a private fight, or can anyone get in it?” You never let us forget that democracy is a public fight. For half a century now, you have covered that fight like no other journalists in the state. From Marshall in East Texas to El Paso in the far west, from Dallas to Corpus Christi, from Bastrop County to Deaf Smith County, you have reported on the men and women who struggle against much larger forces—sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of others, knowing that whether they succeed or not, they had to make a fight of it, had to take a stand, if justice is to have a chance in Texas.

So you richly deserve tonight’s rousing celebration of the difference a free press can make. I am honored to be with you. But the evening will soon end, and just outside those doors the fight is waiting for us. Good luck—and may the dollars rain down on you from good folk far and wide, to make possible another 50 years of independent, courageous journalism.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Moyers serves as president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, which gives financial support to TomPaine.com.

Media Ownership Issue

"Increasingly, the media's failure to provide diverse viewpoints and unbiased information is undermining the strength of our democracy. Dissatisfaction with news coverage of events ranging from the 2000 presidential election to the war in Iraq has given media issues a new sense of urgency. The more corporate conglomerates buy up independent news outlets, the fewer voices and perspectives the public hears, and the less accountable broadcasters are to the public." Common Cause Fall 2005

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Public vs Private Service Providers?

"No business should have to compete with public tax dollars," Texas state Rep. Phil King, a Republican from Weatherford and sponsor of the anti-municipal broadband measure, told the Fort-Worth Star Telegram in early April.

But municipal wireless advocates counter that competition helps, not harms, local citizens and businesses by encouraging innovation, better service and lower prices. They contend that the telecom industry is simply worried about losing clients. Municipal wireless advocates also note that local governments regularly provide other public services that compete with private industries.

"Their ideological argument that government shouldn't do anything the private sector does makes about as much sense as saying there should be no public transportation because we have taxis," Levin said. "It's a community decision."

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Use the webform at The Center for Public Integrity to identify your local media ownership.

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Ted Turner's article in the July Edition of the Washinton Monthly entitled "My Beef with Big Media"

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From Bill Moyers address: "Journalism Under Fire", September 17, 2004

Inspector General Report on Corporation for Public Broadcasting Administration

For Immediate Release Contacts:
November 15, 2005 Craig Aaron, Free Press
(202) 265-1490 x 25
Jeff Chester, CDD
(202) 494-7100
Mary Boyle, Common Cause
(202) 736-5770

Groups call for new leadership at CPB after report reveals ethical violations and 'political tests' in hiring

Inspector General's report illustrates why Congress must implement sweeping reforms to ensure the health and independence of PBS, NPR and other public media


WASHINGTON -- Free Press, the Center for Digital Democracy and Common Cause called on Corporation for Public Broadcasting President Patricia Harrison to resign following the long-awaited release of an Inspector General's report, which exposes extensive wrongdoing by the leadership of the CPB. The report found that "political tests" were a "major criteria" in hiring Harrison to oversee the CPB.

The 67-page report by Inspector General Kenneth Konz, which was presented in secret to the CPB Board of Directors nearly two weeks ago, was sent to Capitol Hill today. Among its other findings:

Former CPB Chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson "violated his fiduciary responsibilities and statutory prohibitions against Board member involvement in programming decisions" in creating the "Journal Editorial Report."

The report criticizes the secretive hiring of Republican operative Frederick Mann to monitor "Now with Bill Moyers" and other programs without authorization from the CPB Board.

While the report concludes the violations were primarily the result of Tomlinson's "personal actions to accomplish his various initiatives," it also identifies "serious weaknesses" in the CPB's governance system.

A copy of the report is available at: http://www.cpb.org/oig/

The groups also demanded that the CPB make public the "separate investigative report, along with specific evidence indicating possible wrongdoing," that Konz made available to the board as well as any additional documents provided to members of Congress.

"It's time to clean house at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting," said Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press. "This report shows that officials at the very top of the CPB were conspiring to conduct an extreme makeover of our public broadcasting system. Congress needs to immediately clear out the zealous partisans remaining at the CPB and institute sensible reforms that will permanently protect public broadcasting from political interference."

Tomlinson stepped down from the CPB Board on Nov. 3 upon learning of the report's findings. The remaining leadership of the CPB have close ties the Bush administration. Chairwoman Cheryl Halpern and Vice Chairwoman Gay Hart Gaines are veteran GOP operatives and mega-fundraisers, who have praised Tomlinson for "his legitimate efforts to achieve balance and objectivity in public broadcasting." Tomlinson's hand-picked choice to run the CPB, Harrison, is a former chairwoman of the Republican Party, who recently oversaw "public diplomacy" efforts at the State Department.

"The Inspector General's report documents the unnecessary and inappropriate politicization of public broadcasting," said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "Through a series of covert and overt activities, the CPB board has helped undermine the foundation of public broadcasting. But Mr. Tomlinson shouldn't be singled out as the lone culprit here. All of the board is responsible, as are top CPB executives past and present. The CPB needs new leaders untarnished by this sordid episode."

In response to the Inspector General's report, Free Press, the Center for Digital Democracy and Common Cause endorsed a series of measures that would:

Require the CPB Board to be governed in a bipartisan or independent fashion, mandating that its chairman and vice chairman not represent the same political party. The board should include more members with experience in public broadcasting, including producers of independent programming.

Restore transparency to the CPB Board by requiring open discussion and public votes on all matters. Meetings should be televised and archived online to encourage greater public accountability.

Reformulate the board's position on objectivity and balance, seeking to allow programmers -- not political appointees -- to determine what the public sees and hears.

Reduce the organization's political involvement by explicitly prohibiting the CPB board and management from hiring outside political lobbyists or consultants.

"The CPB must acknowledge its mistakes and act to restore public confidence, even in the face of this damning report on Mr. Tomlinson's failures," said Common Cause President Chellie Pingree. "We renew our call today for the CPB to be more transparent and accountable by making structural changes to better serve the public interest. The board's initial steps to improve governance don't inspire a lot of confidence given the highly partisan backgrounds of Harrison, Halpern and Gaines.

Man of few words department...

"There is a popular belief in America that if one works hard, remains diligent, and has talent, he or she will ultimately be rewarded. Unfortunately this has become, except in rare instances, more myth than reality. In today's world, talent is often secondary to marketing, promotion, and physical appearance, and hard work is usually no match for nepotism and cronyism when it comes to opening doors.

The new American idol is excess, and its demigods are the scions of inherited wealth, who have never had to work or struggle to achieve their "success," yet are incessantly fawned over by sycophantic media, as if the happenstance of being born into the "right" family actually required some effort or ability."

by David R. Hoffman,
Legal Editor of Pravda.Ru, January 22, 2004

Remember this? Tim Robbins at the National Press Club: April 2003

'A Chill Wind Is Blowing In This Nation...'

Transcript of the speech given by actor Tim Robbins to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 15, 2003

Tim Robbins: Thank you. And thanks for the invitation. I had originally been asked here to talk about the war and our current political situation, but I have instead chosen to hijack this opportunity and talk about baseball and show business. (Laughter.) Just kidding. Sort of.

I can't tell you how moved I have been at the overwhelming support I have received from newspapers throughout the country in these past few days. I hold no illusions that all of these journalists agree with me on my views against the war. While the journalists' outrage at the cancellation of our appearance in Cooperstown is not about my views, it is about my right to express these views. I am extremely grateful that there are those of you out there still with a fierce belief in constitutionally guaranteed rights. We need you, the press, now more than ever. This is a crucial moment for all of us.

For all of the ugliness and tragedy of 9-11, there was a brief period afterward where I held a great hope, in the midst of the tears and shocked faces of New Yorkers, in the midst of the lethal air we breathed as we worked at Ground Zero, in the midst of my children's terror at being so close to this crime against humanity, in the midst of all this, I held on to a glimmer of hope in the naive assumption that something good could come out of it.

I imagined our leaders seizing upon this moment of unity in America, this moment when no one wanted to talk about Democrat versus Republican, white versus black, or any of the other ridiculous divisions that dominate our public discourse. I imagined our leaders going on television telling the citizens that although we all want to be at Ground Zero, we can't, but there is work that is needed to be done all over America. Our help is needed at community centers to tutor children, to teach them to read. Our work is needed at old-age homes to visit the lonely and infirmed; in gutted neighborhoods to rebuild housing and clean up parks, and convert abandoned lots to baseball fields. I imagined leadership that would take this incredible energy, this generosity of spirit and create a new unity in America born out of the chaos and tragedy of 9/11, a new unity that would send a message to terrorists everywhere: If you attack us, we will become stronger, cleaner, better educated, and more unified. You will strengthen our commitment to justice and democracy by your inhumane attacks on us. Like a Phoenix out of the fire, we will be reborn.

And then came the speech: You are either with us or against us. And the bombing began. And the old paradigm was restored as our leader encouraged us to show our patriotism by shopping and by volunteering to join groups that would turn in their neighbor for any suspicious behavior.

In the 19 months since 9-11, we have seen our democracy compromised by fear and hatred. Basic inalienable rights, due process, the sanctity of the home have been quickly compromised in a climate of fear. A unified American public has grown bitterly divided, and a world population that had profound sympathy and support for us has grown contemptuous and distrustful, viewing us as we once viewed the Soviet Union, as a rogue state.

This past weekend, Susan and I and the three kids went to Florida for a family reunion of sorts. Amidst the alcohol and the dancing, sugar-rushing children, there was, of course, talk of the war. And the most frightening thing about the weekend was the amount of times we were thanked for speaking out against the war because that individual speaking thought it unsafe to do so in their own community, in their own life. Keep talking, they said; I haven't been able to open my mouth.

A relative tells me that a history teacher tells his 11-year-old son, my nephew, that Susan Sarandon is endangering the troops by her opposition to the war. Another teacher in a different school asks our niece if we are coming to the school play. They're not welcome here, said the molder of young minds.

Another relative tells me of a school board decision to cancel a civics event that was proposing to have a moment of silence for those who have died in the war because the students were including dead Iraqi civilians in their silent prayer.

A teacher in another nephew's school is fired for wearing a T- shirt with a peace sign on it. And a friend of the family tells of listening to the radio down South as the talk radio host calls for the murder of a prominent anti-war activist. Death threats have appeared on other prominent anti-war activists' doorsteps for their views. Relatives of ours have received threatening e-mails and phone calls. And my 13-year-old boy, who has done nothing to anybody, has recently been embarrassed and humiliated by a sadistic creep who writes -- or, rather, scratches his column with his fingernails in dirt.

Susan and I have been listed as traitors, as supporters of Saddam, and various other epithets by the Aussie gossip rags masquerading as newspapers, and by their fair and balanced electronic media cousins, 19th Century Fox. (Laughter.) Apologies to Gore Vidal. (Applause.)

Two weeks ago, the United Way canceled Susan's appearance at a conference on women's leadership. And both of us last week were told that both we and the First Amendment were not welcome at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

A famous middle-aged rock-and-roller called me last week to thank me for speaking out against the war, only to go on to tell me that he could not speak himself because he fears repercussions from Clear Channel. "They promote our concert appearances," he said. "They own most of the stations that play our music. I can't come out against this war."

And here in Washington, Helen Thomas finds herself banished to the back of the room and uncalled on after asking Ari Fleischer whether our showing prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay on television violated the Geneva Convention.

A chill wind is blowing in this nation. A message is being sent through the White House and its allies in talk radio and Clear Channel and Cooperstown. If you oppose this administration, there can and will be ramifications.

Every day, the air waves are filled with warnings, veiled and unveiled threats, spewed invective and hatred directed at any voice of dissent. And the public, like so many relatives and friends that I saw this weekend, sit in mute opposition and fear.

I am sick of hearing about Hollywood being against this war. Hollywood's heavy hitters, the real power brokers and cover-of-the- magazine stars, have been largely silent on this issue. But Hollywood, the concept, has always been a popular target.

I remember when the Columbine High School shootings happened. President Clinton criticized Hollywood for contributing to this terrible tragedy -- this, as we were dropping bombs over Kosovo. Could the violent actions of our leaders contribute somewhat to the violent fantasies of our teenagers? Or is it all just Hollywood and rock and roll?

I remember reading at the time that one of the shooters had tried to enlist to fight the real war a week before he acted out his war in real life at Columbine. I talked about this in the press at the time. And curiously, no one accused me of being unpatriotic for criticizing Clinton. In fact, the same radio patriots that call us traitors today engaged in daily personal attacks on their president during the war in Kosovo.

Today, prominent politicians who have decried violence in movies -- the "Blame Hollywooders," if you will -- recently voted to give our current president the power to unleash real violence in our current war. They want us to stop the fictional violence but are okay with the real kind.

And these same people that tolerate the real violence of war don't want to see the result of it on the nightly news. Unlike the rest of the world, our news coverage of this war remains sanitized, without a glimpse of the blood and gore inflicted upon our soldiers or the women and children in Iraq. Violence as a concept, an abstraction -- it's very strange.

As we applaud the hard-edged realism of the opening battle scene of "Saving Private Ryan," we cringe at the thought of seeing the same on the nightly news. We are told it would be pornographic. We want no part of reality in real life. We demand that war be painstakingly realized on the screen, but that war remain imagined and conceptualized in real life.

And in the midst of all this madness, where is the political opposition? Where have all the Democrats gone? Long time passing, long time ago. (Applause.) With apologies to Robert Byrd, I have to say it is pretty embarrassing to live in a country where a five-foot- one comedian has more guts than most politicians. (Applause.) We need leaders, not pragmatists that cower before the spin zones of former entertainment journalists. We need leaders who can understand the Constitution, congressman who don't in a moment of fear abdicate their most important power, the right to declare war to the executive branch. And, please, can we please stop the congressional sing-a- longs? (Laughter.)

In this time when a citizenry applauds the liberation of a country as it lives in fear of its own freedom, when an administration official releases an attack ad questioning the patriotism of a legless Vietnam veteran running for Congress, when people all over the country fear reprisal if they use their right to free speech, it is time to get angry. It is time to get fierce. And it doesn't take much to shift the tide. My 11-year-old nephew, mentioned earlier, a shy kid who never talks in class, stood up to his history teacher who was questioning Susan's patriotism. "That's my aunt you're talking about. Stop it." And the stunned teacher backtracks and began stammering compliments in embarrassment.

Sportswriters across the country reacted with such overwhelming fury at the Hall of Fame that the president of the Hall admitted he made a mistake and Major League Baseball disavowed any connection to the actions of the Hall's president. A bully can be stopped, and so can a mob. It takes one person with the courage and a resolute voice.

The journalists in this country can battle back at those who would rewrite our Constitution in Patriot Act II, or "Patriot, The Sequel," as we would call it in Hollywood. We are counting on you to star in that movie. Journalists can insist that they not be used as publicists by this administration. (Applause.) The next White House correspondent to be called on by Ari Fleischer should defer their question to the back of the room, to the banished journalist du jour. (Applause.) And any instance of intimidation to free speech should be battled against. Any acquiescence or intimidation at this point will only lead to more intimidation. You have, whether you like it or not, an awesome responsibility and an awesome power: the fate of discourse, the health of this republic is in your hands, whether you write on the left or the right. This is your time, and the destiny you have chosen.

We lay the continuance of our democracy on your desks, and count on your pens to be mightier. Millions are watching and waiting in mute frustration and hope - hoping for someone to defend the spirit and letter of our Constitution, and to defy the intimidation that is visited upon us daily in the name of national security and warped notions of patriotism.

Our ability to disagree, and our inherent right to question our leaders and criticize their actions define who we are. To allow those rights to be taken away out of fear, to punish people for their beliefs, to limit access in the news media to differing opinions is to acknowledge our democracy's defeat. These are challenging times. There is a wave of hate that seeks to divide us -- right and left, pro-war and anti-war. In the name of my 11-year-old nephew, and all the other unreported victims of this hostile and unproductive environment of fear, let us try to find our common ground as a nation. Let us celebrate this grand and glorious experiment that has survived for 227 years. To do so we must honor and fight vigilantly for the things that unite us -- like freedom, the First Amendment and, yes, baseball. (Applause.)

When US bars its door to foreign scholars
A lawsuit wants the Bush administration to explain why it denied entry to intellectuals who've criticized US policy.

By Alexandra Marks | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

NEW YORK – Concern is mounting that the US government is using antiterror laws - namely, the Patriot Act - to revive a now-discredited practice common during the cold war: the prevention of foreign intellectuals who are critical of administration policies from entering the country and sharing their views with Americans.

The practice, called ideological exclusion, became illegal in 1990. But a recent lawsuit - brought by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the PEN American Center under the Freedom of Information Act - is asking the Bush administration to explain its decisions to revoke or deny visas to several foreign scholars, and why they don't violate free-speech protections.

"This is about free speech, the purpose of colleges and universities," says Donna Euben, counsel for the AAUP in Washington. "We're not challenging the [USA Patriot Act] itself. We're just asking for information about its application to these particular scholars where there is no evidence that they have supported terrorism in any way."

In their suit, the groups cite the cases of several foreign scholars. One, Tariq Ramadan, is a prominent Swiss Muslim scholar who has condemned terrorism and routinely come to the United States on speaking tours in the past. In 2004, as he was preparing to take up a teaching post at the University of Notre Dame, his visa was revoked. The US government gave no formal reason, but press reports suggested the denial was based on "antiterrorism law." Another scholar, Dora Maria Tellez, is a former Nicaraguan government official who more than a decade ago was involved in the overthrow of the US-backed Somoza regime. She had been lined up to teach at Harvard University, but last January her visa was denied.

Administration officials aren't commenting on either case because the matter is now in the courts. But those who support the government's actions say it has a right and a duty to protect national security at a time of war. If it's concerned that a foreign national may promote ideas or activities that are antithetical to US interests, it has every right to deny that individual entry - and without an explanation.

The controversy is the latest illustration of the potential clash between commonly accepted civil rights and governmental efforts to protect national security. At the center of the debate about ideological exclusions is a little known provision of the Patriot Act, called Section 411. It allows the government to refuse admission to foreign nationals who, in the government's view, "have used [their] position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity, or to persuade others to support terrorist activity or a terrorist organization in a way the Secretary of State has determined undermines United States efforts to reduce or eliminate terrorism."

Administration critics have no problem with the idea of excluding terrorists or people who espouse it. But they're concerned the government has now so broadly defined "terrorism" that even people who have openly condemned it but are critical of US policies are now being denied entry.

"We have a right to know about how our government is using various immigration laws to censure ideas that Americans have a right to hear," says Melissa Goodman of the ACLU's legal department in New York.

The US has a long history of denying foreigners entrance if their political views are at odds with the government's. It goes all the way back to Colonial times and the Alien Sedition Act of 1798. It was revived in 1952 at the height of the cold war.

"It was believed that we had to stop the importation of communism into the United States, and it was especially so in the early and mid 1950s when [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy was at his zenith in terms of power," says Kevin Johnson, a professor of law at the University of California at Davis.

That law was revoked in 1990 because "it became increasingly clear that it was inconsistent for a country that is one of the great democracies of the world to exclude people from coming here because of their political beliefs," he says.

But supporters of ideological exclusion see it as an important governmental tool. "We have always had a policy that allows us to keep out aliens who are at ideological odds with the US," says James Edwards of the Hudson Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. He was opposed to the 1990 revocation and believes that critics' claim of a First Amendment issue is misguided.

"That's the same argument that's apparently being revived by the usual suspects on the left to deride the use of ideological exclusions," he says.

Critics of the government's use of the Patriot Act disagree. "We're concerned about these provisions of the Patriot Act because they give such more or less unlimited and unmonitored powers in certain respects to federal agencies to act essentially without any check on their exercise of discretion here," says Michael Roberts, president of the PEN American Center in New York. "That's what's disturbing here."

Thanksgiving Day 2005
Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 21 November 2005

Peak oil and Thanksgiving Day are now linked. Eminent geologist Kenneth Deffeyes predicted two years ago that the peak moment of world oil production would occur on Thanksgiving Day 2005.

Peak oil is a term for the point in time when world oil production will stop increasing and begin to decline. Deffeyes acknowledges that his prediction is just a guess based on extrapolated figures, but given all the unknowns, it may be as good as any other prediction about the end of the oil age.

One thing that is not in doubt is that the oil age will end. Geology and physics tell us that much. But because so many governments and corporations have not shared honest information about their oil reserves, they have not presented a reliable timeframe for the depletion of the oil resource.

The official agencies, the US Energy Information Agency and the European International Energy Agency, have said that world oil production will not peak until sometime around 2030. But last year after Royal Dutch Shell got caught inflating its reserve numbers in order to keep its share prices from plunging, the world suddenly started questioning the official numbers, and new reports have emerged from every quarter showing that peak oil is much closer than 2030. Most of these reports put the peak somewhere between 2006 and 2012. Others say we have already passed it.

One thing to remember about oil supply is that its peak will not resemble the Matterhorn. Instead it will look like a long rumbling plateau, bouncing around for a period before it slopes inexorably down. This is because, as oil prices go up, it becomes economical to produce oil that was bypassed as too expensive until now. This is dirty, heavy oil, oil that comes from tar sands or oil that is difficult to reach like arctic and deep off-shore oil.

Contemplating the end of oil is frightening, even terrifying. Every bit of our economy depends on cheap oil to function properly. No viable substitute lies waiting the wings. The end of oil means a radical change in our way of life. But since it is Thanksgiving, let's take a clear-eyed look at our situation and see if there is anything that we can be thankful for.

The biggest thing to be thankful for is that there is not more oil than there is. More oil would just dig us deeper into the climate change hole. Climate change appears to be accelerating more rapidly than predicted. We can live without oil and coal. We cannot live without a habitable climate. The worst-case scenarios for climate change involve dying, acid oceans and an atmosphere full of methane. The not-so-bad scenarios could still wipe out agriculture over large regions and drown every coastal city.

We are like the addict who would have died of an overdose if he hadn't run out of smack first, so let's be thankful that our supply is being cut off.

The next thing to be thankful for is that our human population has not grown any larger than it has before we have to deal with the post-oil transition. When my parents were born, in the 1920s, world population was about 2 billion people. By the time I came of age it had more than doubled, and it is now nearing 6.5 billion.

We cannot feed these billions without diesel-powered farm machinery and fertilizer produced from oil and gas. In the future, population will contract. There will be either a higher death rate from starvation and disease or there will be a lower birth rate from conscientiously applied birth control. There may be both, and our best hope for relieving suffering will be to tilt the balance as far as possible to a lower birth rate.

If peak oil was not to be reached until 2050, say, human population would have ballooned to 9 or 10 billion. The chances of contracting to a sustainable population without massive human die-off would have been nil.

One more thing to give thanks for is our elders. As oil prices go up, we are going to do some belt-tightening and we still have grandmothers and grandfathers who remember what that is like. We still have people among us who remember how to pluck a chicken, sew a dress, build a pole barn and produce any number of things that most of us would just go buy at Wal-Mart.

When you cook your Thanksgiving meal this year, give a moment's thought to your stove. My mother recently told me a story about my grandmother. When Grandma moved off the farm back in the 1940s, she had to buy a new stove. Her choice was an all-gas cook stove or a hybrid stove with a wood firebox. "Which one did she buy?" I asked my mother.

"You remember Crystal," my mother replied, "she was such a practical woman. Of course she got the one with the wood firebox. I don't think she quite trusted that the gas would always be there."

I must have inherited my own skeptical nature from my grandmother, and I'm confident that there is still a large reservoir of independent thinking and practical common sense in the American population. It will just take a new, post-oil reality to encourage us to ask our elders for help.

In some parts of Africa, a generation is being lost to HIV infection. This is tragic, not just for the lost lives but for the lost ability to pass on knowledge from parents to children about how to live. Grandparents are filling in the gap as best they can.

In America, we have nearly lost a generation to consumerism. Too many of us work without producing anything. Our labor goes to grease the wheels of commerce and globalization that break the backs of workers overseas and float an endless train of goods to us on an ocean of oil.

We Americans have become like plants basking in our own oil sun: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin."

Plants and photosynthesizing algae are the only life forms that don't need to compete for food. Because they get their energy directly from the sun, they only compete with other plants for space to unfurl their leaves and soak up the endless radiant power of our star. This is how we have been in America, competing for space to build bigger and bigger houses to hold all of our oil-soaked bounty.

Living as plants has not been healthy for us. We are junk-food-consuming couch potatoes entertained by mass media living in exurbs with no sense of community. We are alienated, and we turn to pharmaceuticals to relieve our depression and anxiety. Our bodies are loaded with a thousand different manufactured chemicals soaked up from the goods we buy. We are dying of cancer.

But ultimately we are not plants, and our oil sun is about to burn out. We will return to our animal existence and remember how to make hay when the sun shines and abandon the idea that we could just buy a hundred thousand BTU gas heater to make the hay sometime when it's more convenient for us.

The final thing I am thankful for is just to be here, participating in this moment. It is a fantastic planet that we live on. She wastes nothing; everything is recycled and turned into new life. Oil itself is an example of the Earth's awesome power.

Colin Campbell is a petroleum geologist who has worked for governments and major oil companies. He predicts that we will start seriously sliding down the oil production curve in 2010. Here is his explanation of how oil was formed:

"Advances in geochemistry over the past twenty years have made it possible to relate the oil in a well with the source-rock from which it came.... In fact, the bulk of the world's oil comes from only a few epochs of extreme global warming, which caused the proliferation of algae, effectively poisoning seas and lakes. The resulting organic material was preserved in favourable plate-tectonic settings. Thus, most of the oil from the United States to northern South America, including the vast degraded deposits of Venezuela, comes from a few hundred meters of clay, deposited 90 million years ago. Another such event, 140 million years ago, is responsible for most of the oil in the North Sea, the Middle East, and parts of Russia."

Our oil was produced during previous episodes of global warming. Now that we have released it into the atmosphere, it is warming the planet and creating the conditions for new algal growth that could be again trapped as oil.

Meanwhile, researchers at the University of New Hampshire and elsewhere are growing oil-rich algae in shallow ponds and turning it into biodiesel. Growing algae in ponds fed by sewage or other kinds of waste could produce a signifcant amount of biodiesel.

Perhaps we will be smart enough to take a basket of technologies that include this kind of biodiesel along with photovoltaics, wind power and ocean energy and build ourselves a new energy infrastructure that we can base a new kind of civilization on. It won't be easy, and it won't replace oil. We will have to conserve and cut back as well.

Perhaps we will also be smart enough to refrain from burning up all of the coal we can dig out of the ground and to keep our hands off the methane hydrates now locked up in various places along the continental shelves. Going after every last hydrocarbon to fuel our wasteful vegetative ways would do untold damage to our future prospects on the planet.

Above all, I am thankful that there is still time to avoid the worst.

Kelpie Wilson is the t r u t h o u t environment editor. She is also a mechanical engineer and does technical writing for the solar power industry. She has been a leader in the campaign to protect ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest and was the executive director of the Siskiyou Regional Education Project. Her first novel, Primal Tears, has been published by North Atlantic Books.

House Votes to Cut $700 Million in Food Stamps
By Charles Abbott
Reuters
Friday 18 November 2005

Washington - The US House of Representatives voted on Friday to cut $700 million from the food stamp program, despite objections from anti-hunger groups complaining that estimates show some 235,000 people would lose benefits.

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Congress Helps Self to $3,100 Pay Raise
By David Espo
The Associated Press
Friday 18 November 2005

Washington - The Republican-controlled Congress helped itself to a $3,100 pay raise on Friday, then postponed work on bills to curb spending on social programs and cut taxes in favor of a two-week vacation.

In the final hours of a tumultuous week in the Capitol, Democrats erupted in fury when House GOP leaders maneuvered toward a politically-charged vote - and swift rejection - of one war critic's call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. "You guys are pathetic, pathetic," Massachusetts Rep. Martin Meehan yelled across a noisy hall at Republicans.

One War Lost, Another to Go

By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 20 November 2005

If anyone needs further proof that we are racing for the exits in Iraq, just follow the bouncing ball that is Rick Santorum. A Republican leader in the Senate and a true-blue (or red) Iraq hawk, he has long slobbered over President Bush, much as Ed McMahon did over Johnny Carson. But when Mr. Bush went to Mr. Santorum's home state of Pennsylvania to give his Veterans Day speech smearing the war's critics as unpatriotic, the senator was M.I.A.

Mr. Santorum preferred to honor a previous engagement more than 100 miles away. There he told reporters for the first time that "maybe some blame" for the war's "less than optimal" progress belonged to the White House. This change of heart had nothing to do with looming revelations of how the new Iraqi "democracy" had instituted Saddam-style torture chambers. Or with the spiraling investigations into the whereabouts of nearly $9 billion in unaccounted-for taxpayers' money from the American occupation authority. Or with the latest spike in casualties. Mr. Santorum was instead contemplating his own incipient political obituary written the day before: a poll showing him 16 points down in his re-election race. No sooner did he stiff Mr. Bush in Pennsylvania than he did so again in Washington, voting with a 79-to-19 majority on a Senate resolution begging for an Iraq exit strategy. He was joined by all but one (Jon Kyl) of the 13 other Republican senators running for re-election next year. They desperately want to be able to tell their constituents that they were against the war after they were for it.

They know the voters have decided the war is over, no matter what symbolic resolutions are passed or defeated in Congress nor how many Republicans try to Swift-boat Representative John Murtha, the marine hero who wants the troops out. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey last week found that the percentage (52) of Americans who want to get out of Iraq fast, in 12 months or less, is even larger than the percentage (48) that favored a quick withdrawal from Vietnam when that war's casualty toll neared 54,000 in the apocalyptic year of 1970. The Ohio State political scientist John Mueller, writing in Foreign Affairs , found that "if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline." He observed that Mr. Bush was trying to channel L. B. J. by making "countless speeches explaining what the effort in Iraq is about, urging patience and asserting that progress is being made. But as was also evident during Woodrow Wilson's campaign to sell the League of Nations to the American public, the efficacy of the bully pulpit is much overrated."

Mr. Bush may disdain timetables for our pullout, but, hello, there already is one, set by the Santorums of his own party: the expiration date for a sizable American presence in Iraq is Election Day 2006. As Mr. Mueller says, the decline in support for the war won't reverse itself. The public knows progress is not being made, no matter how many times it is told that Iraqis will soon stand up so we can stand down.

On the same day the Senate passed the resolution rebuking Mr. Bush on the war, Martha Raddatz of ABC News reported that "only about 700 Iraqi troops" could operate independently of the U.S. military, 27,000 more could take a lead role in combat "only with strong support" from our forces and the rest of the 200,000-odd trainees suffered from a variety of problems, from equipment shortages to an inability "to wake up when told" or follow orders.

But while the war is lost both as a political matter at home and a practical matter in Iraq, the exit strategy being haggled over in Washington will hardly mark the end of our woes. Few Americans will cry over the collapse of the administration's vainglorious mission to make Iraq a model of neocon nation-building. But, as some may dimly recall, there is another war going on as well - against Osama bin Laden and company.

One hideous consequence of the White House's Big Lie - fusing the war of choice in Iraq with the war of necessity that began on 9/11 - is that the public, having rejected one, automatically rejects the other. That's already happening. The percentage of Americans who now regard fighting terrorism as a top national priority is either in the single or low double digits in every poll. Thus the tragic bottom line of the Bush catastrophe: the administration has at once increased the ranks of jihadists by turning Iraq into a new training ground and recruitment magnet while at the same time exhausting America's will and resources to confront that expanded threat.

We have arrived at "the worst of all possible worlds," in the words of Daniel Benjamin, Richard Clarke's former counterterrorism colleague, with whom I talked last week. No one speaks more eloquently to this point than Mr. Benjamin and Steven Simon, his fellow National Security Council alum. They saw the Qaeda threat coming before most others did in the 1990's, and their riveting new book, "The Next Attack," is the best argued and most thoroughly reported account of why, in their opening words, "we are losing" the war against the bin Laden progeny now.

"The Next Attack" is prescient to a scary degree. "If bin Laden is the Robin Hood of jihad," the authors write, then Abu Musab al-Zarqawi "has been its Horatio Alger, and Iraq his field of dreams." The proof arrived spectacularly this month with the Zarqawi-engineered suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman. That attack, Mr. Benjamin wrote in Slate "could soon be remembered as the day that the spillover of violence from Iraq became a major affliction for the Middle East." But not remembered in America. Thanks to the confusion sown by the Bush administration, the implications for us in this attack, like those in London and Madrid, are quickly forgotten, if they were noticed in the first place. What happened in Amman is just another numbing bit of bad news that we mentally delete along with all the other disasters we now label "Iraq."

Only since his speech about "Islamo-fascism" in early October has Mr. Bush started trying to make distinctions between the "evildoers" of Saddam's regime and the Islamic radicals who did and do directly threaten us. But even if anyone was still listening to this president, it would be too little and too late. The only hope for getting Americans to focus on the war we can't escape is to clear the decks by telling the truth about the war of choice in Iraq: that it is making us less safe, not more, and that we have to learn from its mistakes and calculate the damage it has caused as we reboot and move on.

Mr. Bush is incapable of such candor. In the speech Mr. Santorum skipped on Veterans Day, the president lashed out at his critics for trying "to rewrite the history" of how the war began. Then he rewrote the history of the war, both then and now. He boasted of America's "broad and coordinated homeland defense" even as the members of the bipartisan 9/11 commission were preparing to chastise the administration's inadequate efforts to prevent actual nuclear W.M.D.'s, as opposed to Saddam's fictional ones, from finding their way to terrorists. Mr. Bush preened about how "we're standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes" even as we were hearing new reports of how we outsource detainees to such regimes to be tortured.

And once again he bragged about the growing readiness of Iraqi troops, citing "nearly 90 Iraqi army battalions fighting the terrorists alongside our forces." But as James Fallows confirms in his exhaustive report on "Why Iraq Has No Army" in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, America would have to commit to remaining in Iraq for many years to "bring an Iraqi army to maturity." If we're not going to do that, Mr. Fallows concludes, America's only alternative is to "face the stark fact that it has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare accordingly."

That's the alternative that has already been chosen, brought on not just by the public's irreversible rejection of the war, but also by the depleted state of our own broken military forces; they are falling short of recruitment goals across the board by as much as two-thirds, the Government Accountability Office reported last week. We must prepare accordingly for what's to come. To do so we need leaders, whatever the political party, who can look beyond our nonorderly withdrawal from Iraq next year to the mess that will remain once we're on our way out. Whether it's countering the havoc inflicted on American interests internationally by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo or overhauling and redeploying our military, intelligence and homeland security operations to confront the enemy we actually face, there's an enormous job to be done.

The arguments about how we got into Mr. Bush's war and exactly how we'll get out are also important. But the damage from this fiasco will be even greater if those debates obscure the urgency of the other war we are losing, one that will be with us long after we've left the quagmire in Iraq.

The Essential Krugman: "It's Time to Leave"

Time to Leave
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Monday 21 November 2005

Not long ago wise heads offered some advice to those of us who had argued since 2003 that the Iraq war was sold on false pretenses: give it up. The 2004 election, they said, showed that we would never convince the American people. They suggested that we stop talking about how we got into Iraq and focus instead on what to do next.

It turns out that the wise heads were wrong. A solid majority of Americans now believe that we were misled into war. And it is only now, when the public has realized the truth about the past, that serious discussions about where we are and where we're going are able to get a hearing.

Representative John Murtha's speech calling for a quick departure from Iraq was full of passion, but it was also serious and specific in a way rarely seen on the other side of the debate. President Bush and his apologists speak in vague generalities about staying the course and finishing the job. But Mr. Murtha spoke of mounting casualties and lagging recruiting, the rising frequency of insurgent attacks, stagnant oil production and lack of clean water.

Mr. Murtha - a much-decorated veteran who cares deeply about America's fighting men and women - argued that our presence in Iraq is making things worse, not better. Meanwhile, the war is destroying the military he loves. And that's why he wants us out as soon as possible.

I'd add that the war is also destroying America's moral authority. When Mr. Bush speaks of human rights, the world thinks of Abu Ghraib. (In his speech, Mr. Murtha pointed out the obvious: torture at Abu Ghraib helped fuel the insurgency.) When administration officials talk of spreading freedom, the world thinks about the reality that much of Iraq is now ruled by theocrats and their militias.

Some administration officials accused Mr. Murtha of undermining the troops and giving comfort to the enemy. But that sort of thing no longer works, now that the administration has lost the public's trust.

Instead, defenders of our current policy have had to make a substantive argument: we can't leave Iraq now, because a civil war will break out after we're gone. One is tempted to say that they should have thought about that possibility back when they were cheerleading us into this war. But the real question is this: When, exactly, would be a good time to leave Iraq?

The fact is that we're not going to stay in Iraq until we achieve victory, whatever that means in this context. At most, we'll stay until the American military can take no more.

Mr. Bush never asked the nation for the sacrifices - higher taxes, a bigger military and, possibly, a revived draft - that might have made a long-term commitment to Iraq possible. Instead, the war has been fought on borrowed money and borrowed time. And time is running out. With some military units on their third tour of duty in Iraq, the superb volunteer army that Mr. Bush inherited is in increasing danger of facing a collapse in quality and morale similar to the collapse of the officer corps in the early 1970's.

So the question isn't whether things will be ugly after American forces leave Iraq. They probably will. The question, instead, is whether it makes sense to keep the war going for another year or two, which is all the time we realistically have.

Pessimists think that Iraq will fall into chaos whenever we leave. If so, we're better off leaving sooner rather than later. As a Marine officer quoted by James Fallows in the current Atlantic Monthly puts it, "We can lose in Iraq and destroy our Army, or we can just lose."

And there's a good case to be made that our departure will actually improve matters. As Mr. Murtha pointed out in his speech, the insurgency derives much of its support from the perception that it's resisting a foreign occupier. Once we're gone, the odds are that Iraqis, who don't have a tradition of religious extremism, will turn on fanatical foreigners like Zarqawi.

The only way to justify staying in Iraq is to make the case that stretching the U.S. army to its breaking point will buy time for something good to happen. I don't think you can make that case convincingly. So Mr. Murtha is right: it's time to leave.

From a mailing about Jack Murtha received today

Dear Richard & judy,

This is our moment of truth. You and I have to make it absolutely clear that we won't stand for Republican "Swift Boat" style attacks on Jack Murtha.

Yesterday, an extraordinary congressman, former Marine Drill Sergeant and decorated Vietnam veteran, spoke out on the war in Iraq. He didn't come to that moment lightly. He spoke his mind and spoke his heart out of love for his country and support for our troops. No sooner had the words left his lips than the vicious assault on his character and patriotism began.

Today, in a statement on the Senate floor, in interviews with the national media, and in this message to you, I am seeking out every opportunity to defend a brave American hero that the Republican attack machine has set their sights on.

I urge you to do the same. Whether you agree or disagree with Jack Murtha is irrelevant. These despicable attacks on Jack Murtha's patriotism and courage must be met with an enormous public outcry. Call your local talk radio show, write a letter to the editor, phone your members of Congress - join me in acting now to reject these "Swift Boat" style attacks on Jack Murtha.

It disgusts me that a bunch of guys who have never put on the uniform of their country have aimed their venom at a marine who served America heroically in Vietnam and has been serving heroically in Congress ever since. No matter what J.D. Hayworth says, there is no sterner stuff than the backbone and courage that defines Jack Murtha's character and conscience.

Dennis Hastert -- the Speaker of the House who never served -- accused Jack Murtha of being a coward. Well let me tell you, Jack Murtha wasn't a coward when he put himself in harm's way for his country in Vietnam and earned two purple hearts -- he was a patriot then, and he is a patriot today. Jack Murtha's courage in combat earned him a Bronze Star, and his voice should be heard, not silenced by those who still today cut and run from the truth.

Instead of letting his cronies run their mouths, the President for once should stop his allies from doing to Jack Murtha what he set them loose to do to John McCain in South Carolina and Max Cleland in Georgia.

The President should finally find the courage to debate the real issue instead of destroying anyone who speaks truth to power as they see it. It's time for Americans to stand up, fight back, and make it clear it's unacceptable to do this to any leader of any party anywhere in our country.

I urge you to join today in a massive public outcry that rejects the attempt to demonize and destroy anyone who dares to disagree with George W. Bush's aimless "stay for as long as it takes" policy on Iraq.

Please act now. Call and email your elected officials. Flood talk radio with calls rejecting these vicious smear tactics. Send a letter to the editor. Express your outrage about the tired old Rovian "Swift Boat" style attacks on Jack Murtha.

Sincerely,
Sen. John Kerry
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If It's Good Enough for the Times ...
By Joe Wilson
From: TPMCafe Special Guests
Nov. 18th, 2005

"The recent revelation from the Washington Post that Bob Woodward learned of the identity of CIA operative (and my wife), Valerie Wilson, in June, 2003, is perplexing. Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein were heroes to me as they were to many of my generation for their fearless reporting on the machinations of the Nixon administration. The Watergate investigation was what spurred me to pursue a career in public service. As Bob and Carl made clear in their pursuit of the truth, we as a nation had a right to demand better from our government. I still remember seeing All the President's Men at the old MacArthur Boulevard theater, just blocks from where we now live in the Palisades.

So now we have a situation where an icon of the journalistic fraternity intentionally sat on a story for over two years, while a special prosecutor investigated whether a criminal betrayal of the national security of our country occurred.

Why did he do so?

Was it out of fear of being subpoenaed, as he says, or was it rather to save it for the book for which he was interviewing at the time he was made aware of Valerie's identity? But there were no subpoenas being issued in June, 2003 and the book, Plan of Attack, contains no reference to the case.

And why did Woodward take it upon himself to adopt an advocacy position on a story in which he was involved, and which has now resulted in the first indictment of a sitting senior White House official in over a century. For months, Woodward appeared on radio and television talk shows to criticize the special prosecutor ( "junkyard dog"), and to downplay the importance of the case (his favorite term, if I recall correctly was "de minimis").

I don't know if what he was doing was a conflict of interest or inconsistent with journalistice ethics, but I would sure like to hear a fuller explanation, and I suspect many of the Post's readers would like one as well. After all, our newspapers are for many of us the principal filter through which we receive our information and opinion. The self styled "papers of record", it seems to me, have a particular responsibility to ensure that the filtration process is not corrupted by conflicts surrounding either interests or relationships with sources. Judith Miller and the New York Times is a case in point. When it became apparent that there were questions about her role in the Plame matter, the Times forthrightly addressed the questions and reported back to its readers. The Post would be well served to follow that precedent and share with us its conclusions.

I am personally very keen on knowing the extent to which Woodward's relationship with his sources at the White House, and his personal involvement in the case affected his views, and by extension the reporting of his newspaper. It is no secret that the Post's reporting has been less than objective, dating back to the first piece by Susan Schmidt in July, 2004 in which she misrepresented the Senate Select Committee report, conflated the conclusions of that report with the views of three republican senators, and even confused Iran with Iraq as a nation that had expressed an interest in Niger's uranium. That article has formed the basis for much of the subsequent reporting on the matter.

Speaking of the Senate Select Committee Intelligence report, while we are looking at truth in reporting, perhaps the Republican committee members and their staffs could now share with the American people what the nature of their relationships were with the White House, and particularly the office of the Vice President, while they were doing their investigation and writing their report. Will they, once and for all, confirm or put to rest the persistent rumors of collusion and cooperation in the drafting of the SSCI report, including phone calls with Libby and his successor, Addington, and meetings with Cheney as they crafted the first salvo in the now 27 month old character assassination campaign waged against Valerie and me. Josh has frequently disparaged the report as mendacious, a view I share. Now is the time to ascertain the whys and wherefores of that mendacity.

The Chickens are Coming Home to Roost !!

The Man Who Sold the War
By James Bamford
Rolling Stone
Thursday 17 November 2005

Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war.

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The Big Lie Technique
By Robert Scheer
The Nation
Wednesday 16 November 2005

At a time when approximately 57 percent of Americans polled believe that President Bush deceived them on the reasons for the war in Iraq, it does seem a bit redundant to deconstruct the President's recent speeches on that subject. Yet, to fail to do so would be to passively accept the Big Lie technique-which is how we as a nation got into this horrible mess in the first place.

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Withdrawal Is Not Retreat
By William M. Arkin
The Washington Post
Friday 18 November 2005

How to get out of Iraq.

Congressman John Murtha's speech on Iraq yesterday is another turning point in the Iraq debate. The President and Vice President may argue that politicians are playing politics and their feelings may be hurt that their competence and motives are called into question, but when one of the Pentagon's best friends speaks out against continuing the Iraq enterprise, the voices at the White House seem ever more puny and defensive.

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In Challenging War's Critics, Administration Tinkers with Truth
By James Kuhnhenn and Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Wednesday 16 November 2005

Washington - President Bush called Democratic critics of how he sold the Iraq war to the world "irresponsible" five times Thursday during a brief news conference in South Korea.

Bush said he agreed with Vice President Dick Cheney, who on Wednesday had accused some unnamed senators who oppose the administration's Iraq war policy of lacking "backbone" and making "reprehensible charges" that Bush and his aides "purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence."

Cheney's rough-edged remarks, and the president's unequivocal endorsement of them, were the latest in the Bush administration's new campaign to challenge critics of how it sold the war, accusing them of twisting the historical record about how and why the war was launched. Yet in accusing Iraq-war critics of "rewriting history," Bush, Cheney and other senior administration officials are tinkering with the truth themselves.

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Reid: We Need Answers and a Way Forward in Iraq, Not Another Cheney Attack Speech
Senator Harry Reid
Wednesday 16 November 2005
Washington, DC - Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid gave the following speech on the Senate Floor tonight.

"Tonight the Vice President has come out of his bunker and is speaking at a gathering of Washington DC insiders, which is closed to the press. Unfortunately, he brought his bunker mentality with him. He is repeating the same tired attacks we've heard from administration officials over the last two weeks.

In the last 24 hours, 10 of our brave soldiers have been killed in far off Iraq. On such a night, you would think Cheney would give a speech that honors the fallen and those still fighting by laying out a strategy for success. Instead we have the Vice President of the United States playing politics like he's in the middle of a presidential campaign.

Yesterday, a bipartisan majority of the United States Senate gave the administration a vote of no confidence for its Iraq policy. We said the era of their "No Plan, No End" approach is over. Apparently, the White House didn't get the message. The Vice President's speech tonight demonstrates once again that this Administration intends to "stay the course" and continue putting their political fortunes ahead of what this country needs - a plan for success.

Our troops and the American people deserve better. The White House needs to understand that deceiving the American people is what got them into trouble. Now is the time to come clean, not to continue the pattern of deceit.

Finally, I would urge the members of the Bush administration to stop trying to resurrect their political standing by lashing out at their critics. Instead, they need to focus on the job at hand - giving our troops a strategy for success in Iraq. Just this week, we've seen Stephen Hadley... Donald Rumsfeld... President Bush... and Vice President Cheney lash out at their critics....yet they all remain silent when it comes to giving our troops and the American people a plan for success in Iraq. Tired rhetoric and political attacks do nothing to get the job done in Iraq."

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"There's Already Civil War in Iraq!"
By Jean-Pierre Perrin
Libération
Tuesday 15 November 2005

Sheikh Latif al-Oumyem is one of al-Anbar province's insurgency leaders.

What is the guerrillas' strategy?

"First of all, what we don't understand is the American army's strategy. You'd think that they have no plan. For our part, we are waiting until it finishes its operations and we wait with much patience. The American army is an elephant and we are a bee. Neither can destroy the other, but the bee can hurt the elephant. The Al-Anbar province is the only one to really rise up against the Americans; in other provinces, they also fight against them, but not with as much determination. Now, we've understood that the Americans will begin to withdraw in the spring. And we know that then we'll have to sit down at the negotiating table."

Is the rebellion divided?

"There's no sponsor to guide our movement. There are several decision centers and that's very good. If there were only one, the enemy could either weaken or control it. I must say that the division of the rebellion is the best strategy to combat a superpower like the United States."

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Democrats Have Proof Pre-War Intel Was Manipulated
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report
Thursday 17 November 2005

Senate Democrats have dug up additional explosive evidence over the past week that they say will help prove the Bush administration deliberately manipulated pre-war Iraq intelligence that was used to convince Congress and the public to support a pre-emptive strike against the Middle East country in March of 2003.

Specifically, Carl Levin, the senior Democrat who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is interested in permanently debunking the administration's assertion that it "mistakenly" included the 16-word reference in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address claiming that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium - the key component to building an atomic bomb - from Niger. Levin's aides said the administration knew months before that the veracity of the allegations was dubious because it was based on forged documents.

Many critics of the war cite those 16 words in the State of the Union address as the silver bullet that convinced Congress and the American public to back the war against Iraq. The Niger uranium allegations are also at the heart of a federal probe into the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was the envoy sent to Niger in February 2002 to investigate the uranium rumor and reported back to the CIA that there was no truth to it. The leak of Wilson's wife's identity and undercover CIA status was an attempt to muzzle Wilson, a vocal critic of the war, who had accused the Bush administration of citing the phony Niger uranium documents to dupe Congress into supporting the war.

The probe has so far resulted in a five-count criminal indictment against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, who resigned from his position last month following the indictment for lying to prosecutors about his role in the leak.

Since Libby's indictment, the Bush administration has launched a full-scale public relations campaign to shore up Bush's sagging poll numbers. In doing so, senior officials at the White House and the National Security Council have publicly attacked Democratic critics of the war, as well as the bipartisan investigation into pre-war intelligence, claiming Democrats saw the exact same intelligence as those in the White House and voted in favor of military action.

On Wednesday, Cheney called critics of the war "dishonest" and "reprehensible" and said Democrats accusing the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence were "opportunists."

But aides to Sen. Levin rebutted that, saying they have smoking-gun proof that they were lied to by Bush and Cheney about not only the existence of weapons of mass destruction but also claims that Iraq had tried to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger.

In building their case against the administration, Levin, with the help of Congressman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has obtained the December 2002 letter sent to the White House and the National Security Council by Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warning that the Niger claims were bogus and should not be cited by the administration as evidence that Iraq was actively trying to obtain WMDs.

Waxman had written ElBaradei in March 2003, inquiring about the Niger documents and the allegations that Iraq tried to purchase uranium there in order to determine if the Bush administration manipulated the intelligence it had relied upon. Waxman received a three-page response from ElBaradei on June 20, 2003, around the same time that Joseph Wilson had started to publicly question the Bush administration's rationale for war and around the same time White House officials had disclosed his wife's CIA status to a handful of reporters. Baradei's response letter lays out in full detail the play-by-play in his attempt to get to the bottom of the Niger uranium story.

ElBaradei said, when the Niger claims were included in the State Department fact sheet on the Iraqi threat in December 2002, "the IAEA asked the U.S. Government, through its Mission in Vienna, to provide any actionable information that would allow it to follow up with the countries involved, viz Niger and Iraq." ElBaradei said he was assured that his letter was forwarded to the White House and to the National Security Council. ElBaradei added that he and his staff were suspicious about the Niger documents because it had long been rumored that documents pertaining to Iraq's attempt to obtain uranium from Niger had been doctored.

The evidence that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from an African country was first revealed by the British government on September 24, 2002, when Prime Minister Tony Blair released a 50-page report on Iraqi efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. This report ultimately became a significant part of the US case against Iraq.

ElBaradei had said he repeatedly requested copies of the Niger documents prior to Bush's State of the Union address but never received anything. When he finally did receive the documents - six weeks later - on February 4, 2003, a week after Bush's State of the Union address, his suspicions turned out to be on the money. He was the person who first revealed that the Niger documents cited by the Bush administration to win support for the war were crude forgeries.

ElBaradei told Waxman that the White House had turned over the Niger material "without qualification" and provided no specific comments on whether US intelligence considered the documents to be authentic.

In conversations and correspondence with Waxman, ElBaradei said he personally had tried to contact Stephen Hadley, then Deputy National Security Adviser, and aides to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, warning them not to rely on the Niger documents as evidence of the Iraqi threat, but was continuously rebuffed. He said the White House officials pledged to cooperate with United Nations inspectors but repeatedly withheld evidence from them.

Cheney did the rounds on the cable news outlets, and tried to discredit ElBaradei's conclusion that the documents were forged.

"I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney said. "[The IAEA] has consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past."

Four months later, Hadley, as well as former CIA Director George Tenet, took responsibility for allowing the Niger uranium claims to be included in Bush's speech. Aides to Levin said that when the bipartisan investigation is complete there will be ample proof that the Bush administration, specifically, Hadley, Cheney, and other top officials, knowingly manipulated intelligence to fit their agenda in launching a war.

The Essential Krugman: A Private Obsession

The Essential Krugman: A Private Obsession

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Friday 18 November 2005

"Lots of things in life are complicated." So declared Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, in response to the mass confusion as registration for the new Medicare drug benefit began. But the complexity of the program - which has reduced some retirees to tears as they try to make what may be life-or-death decisions - is far greater than necessary.

One reason the drug benefit is so confusing is that older Americans can't simply sign up with Medicare, as they can for other benefits. They must, instead, choose from a baffling array of plans offered by private middlemen. Why?

Here's a parallel. Earlier this year Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill that would have forced the National Weather Service to limit the weather information directly available to the public. Although he didn't say so explicitly, he wanted the service to funnel that information through private forecasters instead.

Mr. Santorum's bill didn't go anywhere. But it was a classic attempt to force gratuitous privatization: involving private corporations in the delivery of public services even when those corporations have no useful role to play.

The Medicare drug benefit is an example of gratuitous privatization on a grand scale.

Here's some background: the elderly have long been offered a choice between standard Medicare, in which the government pays medical bills directly, and plans in which the government pays a middleman, like an H.M.O., to deliver health care. The theory was that the private sector would find innovative ways to lower costs while providing better care.

The theory was wrong. A number of studies have found that managed-care plans, which have much higher administrative costs than government-managed Medicare, end up costing the system money, not saving it.

But privatization, once promoted as a way to save money, has become a goal in itself. The 2003 bill that established the prescription drug benefit also locked in large subsidies for managed care.

And on drug coverage, the 2003 bill went even further: rather than merely subsidizing private plans, it made them mandatory. To receive the drug benefit, one must sign up with a plan offered by a private company. As people are discovering, the result is a deeply confusing system because the competing private plans differ in ways that are very hard to assess.

The peculiar structure of the drug benefit, with its huge gap in coverage - the famous "doughnut hole" I wrote about last week - adds to the confusion. Many better-off retirees have relied on Medigap policies to cover gaps in traditional Medicare, including prescription drugs. But that straightforward approach, which would make it relatively easy to compare drug plans, can't be used to fill the doughnut hole because Medigap policies are no longer allowed to cover drugs.

The only way to get some coverage in the gap is as part of a package in which you pay extra - a lot extra - to one of the private drug plans delivering the basic benefit. And because this coverage is bundled with other aspects of the plans, it's very difficult to figure out which plans offer the best deal.

But confusion isn't the only, or even the main, reason why the privatization of drug benefits is bad for America. The real problem is that we'll end up spending too much and getting too little.

Everything we know about health economics indicates that private drug plans will have much higher administrative costs than would have been incurred if Medicare had administered the benefit directly.

It's also clear that the private plans will spend large sums on marketing rather than on medicine. I have nothing against Don Shula, the former head coach of the Miami Dolphins, who is promoting a drug plan offered by Humana. But do we really want people choosing drug plans based on which one hires the most persuasive celebrity?

Last but not least, competing private drug plans will have less clout in negotiating lower drug prices than Medicare as a whole would have. And the law explicitly forbids Medicare from intervening to help the private plans negotiate better deals.

Last week I explained that the Medicare drug bill was devised by people who don't believe in a positive role for government. An insistence on gratuitous privatization is a byproduct of the same ideology. And the result of that ideology is a piece of legislation so bad it's almost surreal.

RFID Tags, Security, & Privacy: RSA Article

If you think RFID tags are in your, or your businesses future, here is an excellent article to review.

The Essential Krugman: Health Economics 101

Health Economics 101
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Monday 14 November 2005

Several readers have asked me a good question: we rely on free markets to deliver most goods and services, so why shouldn't we do the same thing for health care? Some correspondents were belligerent, others honestly curious. Either way, they deserve an answer.

It comes down to three things: risk, selection and social justice.

First, about risk: in any given year, a small fraction of the population accounts for the bulk of medical expenses. In 2002 a mere 5 percent of Americans incurred almost half of U.S. medical costs. If you find yourself one of the unlucky 5 percent, your medical expenses will be crushing, unless you're very wealthy - or you have good insurance.

But good insurance is hard to come by, because private markets for health insurance suffer from a severe case of the economic problem known as "adverse selection," in which bad risks drive out good.

To understand adverse selection, imagine what would happen if there were only one health insurance company, and everyone was required to buy the same insurance policy. In that case, the insurance company could charge a price reflecting the medical costs of the average American, plus a small extra charge for administrative expenses.

But in the real insurance market, a company that offered such a policy to anyone who wanted it would lose money hand over fist. Healthy people, who don't expect to face high medical bills, would go elsewhere, or go without insurance. Meanwhile, those who bought the policy would be a self-selected group of people likely to have high medical costs. And if the company responded to this selection bias by charging a higher price for insurance, it would drive away even more healthy people.

That's why insurance companies don't offer a standard health insurance policy, available to anyone willing to buy it. Instead, they devote a lot of effort and money to screening applicants, selling insurance only to those considered unlikely to have high costs, while rejecting those with pre-existing conditions or other indicators of high future expenses.

This screening process is the main reason private health insurers spend a much higher share of their revenue on administrative costs than do government insurance programs like Medicare, which doesn't try to screen anyone out. That is, private insurance companies spend large sums not on providing medical care, but on denying insurance to those who need it most.

What happens to those denied coverage? Citizens of advanced countries - the United States included - don't believe that their fellow citizens should be denied essential health care because they can't afford it. And this belief in social justice gets translated into action, however imperfectly. Some of those unable to get private health insurance are covered by Medicaid. Others receive "uncompensated" treatment, which ends up being paid for either by the government or by higher medical bills for the insured. So we have a huge private health care bureaucracy whose main purpose is, in effect, to pass the buck to taxpayers.

At this point some readers may object that I'm painting too dark a picture. After all, most Americans too young to receive Medicare do have private health insurance. So does the free market work better than I've suggested? No: to the extent that we do have a working system of private health insurance, it's the result of huge though hidden subsidies.

Private health insurance in America comes almost entirely in the form of employment-based coverage: insurance provided by corporations as part of their pay packages. The key to this coverage is the fact that compensation in the form of health benefits, as opposed to wages, isn't taxed. One recent study suggests that this tax subsidy may be as large as $190 billion per year. And even with this subsidy, employment-based coverage is in rapid decline.

I'm not an opponent of markets. On the contrary, I've spent a lot of my career defending their virtues. But the fact is that the free market doesn't work for health insurance, and never did. All we ever had was a patchwork, semiprivate system supported by large government subsidies.

That system is now failing. And a rigid belief that markets are always superior to government programs - a belief that ignores basic economics as well as experience - stands in the way of rational thinking about what should replace it.

It Can't Be Said More Plainly or Accurately

This Isn't the Real America
By Jimmy Carter
The Los Angeles Times
Monday 14 November 2005

In recent years, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.

These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.

Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.

At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements - including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.

Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.

Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top US leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.

These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of "You are either with us or against us!" has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.

Another disturbing realization is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the few heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties.

Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act.

Of even greater concern is that the US has repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition program. It is embarrassing to see the president and vice president insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment" on people in US custody.

Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of "first use" of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.

Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation's global environmental policies.

Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).

I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.

As the world's only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need.

It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have espoused during the last 230 years.

Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States. His newest book is Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, published this month by Simon & Schuster.
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"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation."
George Washington

The Essential Krugman: The Deadly Doughnut

OpEd By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Friday 11 November 2005

Registration for Medicare's new prescription drug benefit starts next week. Soon millions of Americans will learn that doughnuts are bad for your health. And if we're lucky, Americans will also learn a bigger lesson: politicians who don't believe in a positive role for government shouldn't be allowed to design new government programs.

Before we turn to the larger issue, let's look at how the Medicare drug benefit will work over the course of next year.

At first, the benefit will look like a normal insurance plan, with a deductible and co-payments.

But if your cumulative drug expenses reach $2,250, a very strange thing will happen: you'll suddenly be on your own. The Medicare benefit won't kick in again unless your costs reach $5,100. This gap in coverage has come to be known as the "doughnut hole." (Did you think I was talking about Krispy Kremes?)

One way to see the bizarre effect of this hole is to notice that if you are a retiree and spend $2,000 on drugs next year, Medicare will cover 66 percent of your expenses. But if you spend $5,000 - which means that you're much more likely to need help paying those expenses - Medicare will cover only 30 percent of your bills.

A study in the July/August issue of Health Affairs points out that this will place many retirees on a financial "roller coaster."

People with high drug costs will have relatively low out-of-pocket expenses for part of the year - say, until next summer. Then, suddenly, they'll enter the doughnut hole, and their personal expenses will soar. And because the same people tend to have high drug costs year after year, the roller-coaster ride will repeat in 2007.

How will people respond when their out-of-pocket costs surge? The Health Affairs article argues, based on experience from H.M.O. plans with caps on drug benefits, that it's likely "some beneficiaries will cut back even essential medications while in the doughnut hole." In other words, this doughnut will make some people sick, and for some people it will be deadly.

The smart thing to do, for those who could afford it, would be to buy supplemental insurance that would cover the doughnut hole. But guess what: the bill that established the drug benefit specifically prohibits you from buying insurance to cover the gap. That's why many retirees who already have prescription drug insurance are being advised not to sign up for the Medicare benefit.

If all of this makes the drug bill sound like a disaster, bear in mind that I've touched on only one of the bill's awful features. There are many others, like the clause that prohibits Medicare from using its clout to negotiate lower drug prices. Why is this bill so bad?

The probable answer is that the Republican Congressional leaders who rammed the bill through in 2003 weren't actually trying to protect retired Americans against the risk of high drug expenses. In fact, they're fundamentally hostile to the idea of social insurance, of public programs that reduce private risk.

Their purpose was purely political: to be able to say that President Bush had honored his 2000 campaign promise to provide prescription drug coverage by passing a drug bill, any drug bill.

Once you recognize that the drug benefit is a purely political exercise that wasn't supposed to serve its ostensible purpose, the absurdities in the program make sense. For example, the bill offers generous coverage to people with low drug costs, who have the least need for help, so lots of people will get small checks in the mail and think they're being treated well.

Meanwhile, the people who are actually likely to need a lot of help paying their drug expenses were deliberately offered a very poor benefit. According to a report issued along with the final version of the bill, people are prohibited from buying supplemental insurance to cover the doughnut hole to keep beneficiaries from becoming "insensitive to costs" - that is, buying too much medicine because they don't pay the price.

A more likely motive is that Congressional leaders didn't want a drug bill that really worked for middle-class retirees.

Can the drug bill be fixed? Yes, but not by current management. It's hard to believe that either the current Congressional leadership or the Mayberry Machiavellis in the White House would do any better on a second pass. We won't have a drug benefit that works until we have politicians who want it to work.

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Military Inductees circa 2005

TREND I HAD NOT BEEN AWARE OF:

" Being black and female, Gravely contradicts a national decline over the past four years in the willingness of both blacks and women to consider military service -- a shift polls attribute to the U.S. anti-terrorism effort and perceived discrimination. Blacks fell from 22.3 percent of Army recruits in fiscal 2001 to 14.5 percent this year; Hispanics rose from 10.5 percent to 13.2 percent, and whites, from 60.2 percent to 66.9 percent. Women dropped from 20 percent to 18 percent."

Smoking gun or smokescreen?

From: Al-Ahram, Cairo

A biting UN report on the manipulation of the oil-for-food programme may be a cover-up for a much bigger problem, reports Serene Assir"

Ah...let's have a Congressional investigation...now, about leaks to the press

Probe Sought in Leak About CIA-Run Secret Prisons
By Mary Curtius, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON -- With pressure mounting on the administration over its detainee policies, Republican House and Senate leaders today sought a Congressional probe into who leaked information on the existence of CIA-run secret prisons abroad to the Washington Post.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) circulated a letter asking the intelligence committees to "immediately initiate a joint investigation into the possible release of classified information to the media," about the existence of the prisons.

"As you know, if accurate, such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences," the pair said in their letter to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The request came as Democrats continued to demand an independent inquiry into allegations of detainee abuse and into the administration's handling of pre-war intelligence, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) continued his fight to issue clear instructions to U.S. military and intelligence personnel banning cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners.

The Senate has passed a McCain-sponsored amendment barring torture of detainees and setting standards for their treatment. The administration opposes the restrictions and has threatened to veto the $440 billion defense bill to which it is attached. The House has not voted on the measure.

Responding to news of the request by congressional leaders for a probe into the source of the Post's information, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said it was a serious matter.

"It ought to be taken seriously," McClellan said. "But this is a congressional prerogative and it was a decision that was made by those leaders and that's the way I would describe it."

On Nov. 2, the Post revealed the existence of a network of clandestine prisons in Eastern Europe where it said the CIA was holding suspected terrorists. The administration has neither confirmed nor denied the report, but its publication intensified the debate on Capitol Hill about the administration's detainee policies.

Late this afternoon, a senior Republican aide on the Senate Intelligence Committee said the panel had not yet received Frist's and Hastert's letter. The aide, who requested anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the issue, said he could not recall an instance in which the committee investigated an alleged leak of classified information, except when there was suspicion that someone on the panel's staff had been involved.

"We will work with the leadership," if Frist's office wants a congressional probe, the aide said. But he cautioned that leak investigations ordinarily were carried out by the Justice Department, and that the committee generally avoided encroaching on criminal probes.

"If the Justice Dept. gets engaged, it becomes very problematic to cross paths with them," the aide said.

Democratic congressional leaders welcomed the call for an investigation, but said it should be broader than the possible leak of classified information about the prison system.

In a statement, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said that "leaking is unacceptable." But, he said, "while Republicans have been quick to call for an investigation of this matter, they have repeatedly and regularly resisted any real oversight of this administration's flawed policies."

The minority leader said he hoped the majority's "newfound zeal for investigations," will mean they will also push for a probe into "how this administration used and misused intelligence as it made its case for war in Iraq."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said that "if Speaker Hastert and Majority Leader Frist are finally ready to join Democrats' demands for an investigation of possible abuses of classified information, they must direct the House and Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate all aspects of that issue."

At least one Senate Republican agreed.

Asked whether he believed there should be a probe of the possible leaking of classified information on the existence of the prisons, or of the existence of the prisons themselves, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a former military lawyer, rolled his eyes and replied: "How about both? I'd like to know why we've got secret prisons and what oversight precautions we have."

Graham said it was "imperative we regain the moral high ground and having secret prisons come out in the Washington Post is not a good way to regain it."

Another Republican, Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, said it may have been Republican senators who leaked the information to the Post. Lott told reporters that the existence of the secret prison system was discussed last week during the Republican policy luncheon, held on Capitol Hill the day before the Post story appeared.

"Information that was said in there, given out in there, did get into the newspaper," Lott said.

Asked whether he believed it was Republicans who had breached security, Lott said: "I don't know where else it came from...it looked to me that at least one of those reports came right out of that room."

In their letter, Frist and Hastert said the committees should determine whether the information given to the Post was accurate, who leaked it and "what is the actual and potential damage done to the national security of the United States and our partners in the global war on terror."

The leaders said they would "consider other changes to this mandate based on your recommendations." They said that "the leaking of classified information by employees of the United States government appears to have increased in recent years, establishing a dangerous trend that, if not addressed swiftly and firmly, likely will worsen."

Earlier this month, I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and giving false statements in connection with the leak to reporters of the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame. Libby, who has since resigned, has pleaded not guilty to those charges.

Note: These guys are becoming seriously unglued...Hey ! You clowns are the "Guys in Charge" ...it's way past time for you to provide competency in something...anything !!! If you guys ran a company like you've run the country, it would be bankrupt, with several senior staff members being guilty of legal, moral, and citizenship crimes.

Worse of all, you have been directly responsible for ruining the American brand, while gaining the hostility of the entire planet's inhabitants...and appear totally incapable of providing effective, efficient governance for the legislative or executive branches. Get Help Now !! Three more years of this BS is frightening !

Pride, Prejudice, Insurance

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Monday 07 November 2005

General Motors is reducing retirees' medical benefits. Delphi has declared bankruptcy, and will probably reduce workers' benefits as well as their wages. An internal Wal-Mart memo describes plans to cut health costs by hiring temporary workers, who aren't entitled to health insurance, and screening out employees likely to have high medical bills.

These aren't isolated anecdotes. Employment-based health insurance is the only serious source of coverage for Americans too young to receive Medicare and insufficiently destitute to receive Medicaid, but it's an institution in decline. Between 2000 and 2004 the number of Americans under 65 rose by 10 million. Yet the number of nonelderly Americans covered by employment-based insurance fell by 4.9 million.

The funny thing is that the solution - national health insurance, available to everyone - is obvious. But to see the obvious we'll have to overcome pride - the unwarranted belief that America has nothing to learn from other countries - and prejudice - the equally unwarranted belief, driven by ideology, that private insurance is more efficient than public insurance.

Let's start with the fact that America's health care system spends more, for worse results, than that of any other advanced country.

In 2002 the United States spent $5,267 per person on health care. Canada spent $2,931; Germany spent $2,817; Britain spent only $2,160. Yet the United States has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than any of these countries.

But don't people in other countries sometimes find it hard to get medical treatment? Yes, sometimes - but so do Americans. No, Virginia, many Americans can't count on ready access to high-quality medical care.

The journal Health Affairs recently published the results of a survey of the medical experience of "sicker adults" in six countries, including Canada, Britain, Germany and the United States. The responses don't support claims about superior service from the U.S. system. It's true that Americans generally have shorter waits for elective surgery than Canadians or Britons, although German waits are even shorter. But Americans do worse by some important measures: we find it harder than citizens of other advanced countries to see a doctor when we need one, and our system is more, not less, rife with medical errors.

Above all, Americans are far more likely than others to forgo treatment because they can't afford it. Forty percent of the Americans surveyed failed to fill a prescription because of cost. A third were deterred by cost from seeing a doctor when sick or from getting recommended tests or follow-up.

Why does American medicine cost so much yet achieve so little? Unlike other advanced countries, we treat access to health care as a privilege rather than a right. And this attitude turns out to be inefficient as well as cruel.

The U.S. system is much more bureaucratic, with much higher administrative costs, than those of other countries, because private insurers and other players work hard at trying not to pay for medical care. And our fragmented system is unable to bargain with drug companies and other suppliers for lower prices.

Taiwan, which moved 10 years ago from a U.S.-style system to a Canadian-style single-payer system, offers an object lesson in the economic advantages of universal coverage. In 1995 less than 60 percent of Taiwan's residents had health insurance; by 2001 the number was 97 percent. Yet according to a careful study published in Health Affairs two years ago, this huge expansion in coverage came virtually free: it led to little if any increase in overall health care spending beyond normal growth due to rising population and incomes.

Before you dismiss Taiwan as a faraway place of which we know nothing, remember Chile-mania: just a few months ago, during the Bush administration's failed attempt to privatize Social Security, commentators across the country - independent thinkers all, I'm sure - joined in a chorus of ill-informed praise for Chile's private retirement accounts. (It turns out that Chile's system has a lot of problems.) Taiwan has more people and a much bigger economy than Chile, and its experience is a lot more relevant to America's real problems.

The economic and moral case for health care reform in America, reform that would make us less different from other advanced countries, is overwhelming. One of these days we'll realize that our semiprivatized system isn't just unfair, it's far less efficient than a straightforward system of guaranteed health insurance.

Declare War

Atlantic Monthly Article: Oct. 2005
It's time to stop slipping into armed conflict
by Leslie H. Gelb and Anne-Marie Slaughter

Most wars are unpredictable messes. Their zigs and zags, we are reminded by the Pentagon epistemologist Donald Rumsfeld, are determined by an unstable alchemy of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. No nation can plan a war perfectly. Yet in Iraq even the most credulous of Washington insiders had to know before our 2003 invasion that key White House assertions—we could pay for the war out of Iraqi oil revenues; we could secure that vast and raucous country with a little over 100,000 troops—flatly contradicted what almost all civilian and military experts were saying publicly and privately. Much that has gone wrong in Iraq could have been foreseen—and was.

But Iraq is only the latest in a long line of ill-considered and ill-planned American military adventures. Time and again in recent decades the United States has made military commitments after little real debate, with hazy goals and no appetite for the inevitable setbacks. Bill Clinton, having inherited a mission in Somalia to feed the starving, ended up hunting tribal leaders and trying to nation-build. Ronald Reagan dispatched the Marines to Lebanon saying stability there was a "vital interest," only to yank them out sixteen months later, soon after a deadly terrorist attack on the Marine barracks. John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson settled us slowly into a war intended to prevent another "domino" from falling to communism, but in a manner that tore the nation apart and ultimately led to defeat. Too often our leaders have entered wars with unclear and unfixed aims, tossing away American lives, power, and credibility before figuring out what they were doing and what could be done.

(Full Article Available at Above Link)

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Pres. G.W. Bush's Approval Rate Drops to low thirties

Disapproval rate climbs to mid-fifties. Undecided/unsure/no opinions in the mid-teens.

Still glad you selected Bush over McCain in 2000?

KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT THE ALFRED E. SMITH MEMORIAL FOUNDATION DINNER
Sen. John McCain
Friday, Oct 21, 2005

Your Eminence, Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Pataki, Senators Schumer and Clinton, Al and Nan Smith, distinguished guests, thank you for your warm welcome and for the great honor of addressing you on this, the 60th anniversary dinner of the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation. Thank you, Al, for that kind introduction, and thank you to everyone associated with the Foundation for all the good work you do on behalf of the citizens of the greatest city in the world.

All of New York’s movers and shakers are here. It’s like a veritable who’s who of people soon to be indicted by Eliot Spitzer.

As you know, I’ve long been an advocate of campaign finance reforms. And it’s an honor to be with so many people who have done so much to make those reforms necessary.

This is truly a distinguished audience; the haves and the have mores. And the have more than that’s; and finally, my good friend, Mike Bloomberg.

I’m glad the Mayor, my fellow Republican, is here. But, Mike, I think we’re all relieved that the organizers decided against holding this dinner at the Apollo Theater.

Traditionally, this dinner brings people together. And tonight is no different. We all put aside our political differences out of respect for the one thing we can all agree on: the Yankees choked.

I love this city. New York has a lot in common with my hometown of Phoenix, except in Phoenix the New Yorkers are a lot older.

I’m glad to be out of Washington. As you know, we Republicans aren’t having much fun there these days. Tom DeLay has been indicted; Bill Frist has been subpoenaed; senior White House aides investigated by a special prosecutor: the President’s nominee to the Supreme Court facing a difficult confirmation. Or as our friends at Fox News call it, a slow news month.

The President has called his Supreme Court pick, Harriet Miers “a pit bull in size six shoes,” which I find a little hurtful. That’s what he used to call me.

You know people are wondering if I’m going to run for President again. But I’m more than a year away from making that decision. So, please, just stop asking, relax and try to enjoy the evening, Governor Pataki.

I must admit I had a difficult time choosing the subject of my remarks this evening. So many more important and eloquent Americans have enjoyed the honor of addressing this most prestigious dinner that I found myself at a loss for a worthy topic that might be of some interest to you. At last I turned for advice to my friend, Tim Russert, a frequent guest at these dinners. He suggested I use the occasion to discuss with you the North Korean nuclear build-up, its origins, progress and ramifications for East Asian stability, along with my twelve point plan to address it, focusing not only on North Korea’s efforts to harvest plutonium from its reactor’s spent fuel rods, but also its covert attempts to enrich uranium, as well as a critical analysis of the various diplomatic strategies employed to halt its further progress. Evidently, Big Russ, whom we know Tim always turns to for advice, thought the topic might amuse you.

Actually, Tim first recommended an address on why the Buffalo Bills are New York’s and America’s team. But I wondered if a city of Giants and Jets really loved the Bills as much as Tim insisted you did. So, I asked him for another idea, and he came up with the North Korea thing, explaining that after the Bills, New Yorkers thought of little else so why not bore the hell out of them.

So, at Big and Little? Russ’ suggestion and with your indulgence I’ll proceed. . . You had better settle in and get comfortable. This could take a while. . . . Or maybe not.

Al Smith, first generation American, loved his city, the greatest metropolis in the greatest country on earth. He loved it genuinely, passionately, completely. And he expressed his love in his concern for the working men and women of New York, whom he seemed instinctively to recognize as representing the great notion of the American experiment. In their struggle to make for themselves and their children a better life than they had inherited in a city and country where class distinctions and accidents of birth are less of an impediment to success than in any other society in the world -- we find proof that a people free to act in their own interests will perceive their interests in an enlightened way; they will live as one nation, in a kinship of ideals, and make of our power and wealth a civilization for the ages, a civilization in which all people share in the promise and obligations of freedom.

We are a nation of many races, many religious faiths, many points of origin. But our one shared faith is the belief that a nation conceived in an idea, in liberty, will prove stronger, more enduring, and better than any nation ordered to exalt the few at the expense of the many or made from a common race or culture or to preserve traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity. That is the faith that sustains our country, and it is surely the faith that sustains this city, in good times and bad. It was Al Smith’s faith, just as it was that of another famous son of New York, Theodore Roosevelt.

Al Smith and TR came from very different backgrounds, one from very modest circumstances, the other from wealth and privilege, one the son of immigrants, the other heir to an old and famous American name. But they shared one important identity that proved more important than their differences: they were both New Yorkers. And both knew that their Americanism, as Roosevelt would have described it, was not a tribal or a class identity. Nor was it limited to the very strong attachments each felt to the people, to the sites and sounds of their beloved city and the physical majesty of their country. Their Americanism exalted the political values of a nation where the people are sovereign, recognizing the inherent justice of self-determination, that freedom empowered people to decide their destiny for themselves, and also empowered them to choose a common destiny. For them our freedom and industry had to aspire to more than acquisition and luxury. In Roosevelt’s words, “we have duties to others and duties to ourselves, and we can shirk neither.”

Both knew that a free society tested character in different ways than did an aristocratic culture or a dictatorship. We are free here to pursue our own interests without regard to any cause more important than our own comfort, pleasure or self-promotion. We are a free people, and among our freedoms is the right not to sacrifice for our birthright. Yet those who claim their liberty but not the duty to the civilization that ensures it live a half-life, having indulged their self-interest at the cost of their self-respect. The richest man or woman, the most successful and celebrated Americans, possess nothing of importance if their lives have no greater object than themselves. They may be masters of their own fate, but what a poor fate it is that claims no higher cause than wealth or fame.

Americans are part of something providential: a great experiment to prove to the world that democracy is not only the most effective form of government, but the only moral government. And through the years, generation after generation of Americans have held fast to the belief that we were meant to transform history. What greater cause could we ever serve?

Should we claim our rights and leave to others the duty that protects them, whatever we gain for ourselves will be of little lasting value. It will build no monuments to virtue, claim no honored place in the memory of posterity, offer no worthy summons to other nations. Success, wealth, celebrity, gained and kept for private interest, is a small thing. It makes us comfortable, eases the hardships our children will bear, purchases a fleeting regard for our lives, yet not the self-respect that in the end matters most. But sacrifice for a cause greater than yourself, and you invest your life with the eminence of that cause, your self-respect assured.

Riayen Tejada was not a celebrated or wealthy man. He wasn’t even – technically – an American citizen. He was, however, a New Yorker. Born in the Dominican Republic, he emigrated here when he was a boy. He had two dreams, he said, to become a citizen and to serve in the United States Marine Corps. He accepted his duties to his new country before he possessed all the rights of an American citizen. Staff Sergeant Tejada, the father of two young daughters, a proud New Yorker from Washington Heights who loved the Yankees almost as much as he loved his adopted country, died in an ambush in Baghdad on May 14, 2004. His grieving father hoped that “the United States will remember that my son died for this country.” We do, Mr. Tejada. And shame on us if we ever forget.

Thirty-three New Yorkers have died in service to our country’s cause in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thirty-three good and faithful Americans, whose heroism we should revere as we do the memory of the brave New Yorkers who sacrificed their lives for their fellow citizens on September 11, 2001.

For all the terrible suffering they caused, the attacks of September 11 did have one good effect. When our ideals were threatened by people who despise them, we quickly remembered why we love those ideals and how they unite us.

The terrorists who organized the attacks mistook materialism for the only value of liberty. They believed liberty was corrupting, that the right of individuals to pursue happiness made societies weak. They held us in contempt. Spared by prosperity from the hard uses of life, they thought us no match for the violent, cruel struggle they planned for us. I think they are beginning to appreciate how badly they misjudged us.

Our enemies are weaker than us in arms and men, but weaker still in causes. They pervert an ancient religion to express an irrational hatred for all that is good in humanity, a hatred that has fallen time and again to the armies and ideals of the righteous. We fight for love of freedom and justice, a love that is invincible. We will never surrender. They will.

We all have an obligation to play our part in defending our ideals. Not all of us will be soldiers. Not all of us will find the courage to race into the burning tower as others flee. But God grants us all the privilege of having our character and patriotism tested. All of us have the duty and occasion to sacrifice something of ourselves so that the civilization we are so blessed to be a part of, that so many have sacrificed so much for, will prevail against all challenges and threats, and endure long beyond our brief time on this earth. We can all, old and young, rich and poor, of whatever religious faith and political inclination, we can all find ways to make ourselves useful to our neighborhoods, our towns and to our country. Whether in public service or private philanthropy, whether in small, unseen ways or great public endeavors, we can all defend the idea of America.

Surely, those of us privileged to represent this country in high office can in this time of war and great calamities of nature, govern our own behavior in such a way that would do honor to our country and to Riayan Tejeda, a New Yorker who wished to be a citizen of the country he loved so much and who gave his life to defend her.

Politicians will argue, and that is not a bad thing. We have differences of opinion on how best to govern this country and they are worth fighting about. But our differences should not become more important to us than our shared love of this country. We should not regard our differences as evidence of our opponent’s character flaws or let an argument on principle become a personal grievance. Let’s argue when we must, but remember we are united in the one big idea that freedom is our birthright and its defense our first responsibility.

We should not come to love the privilege of office so dearly that in moments of weakness we set that privilege above the interests of the nation. Such is the case when we place partisan advantage above principle; when we offer calumnies instead of honest debate and when we squander in a time of war our nation’s wealth on parochial concerns that have no more important effect than strengthening the prospects for our own re-election. There are greater honors than a long tenure in elected office, and greater causes, too.

In the fearsome moments when 747s struck the twin towers and the Pentagon, Americans were not simply a collection of different races, different religions, the poor and the rich, Democrat and Republican, liberal or conservative. We were all Americans, all New Yorkers. We were hurt and we were summoned to a fight a war we vaguely knew was occurring but had not really expected to experience. The sacrifices entailed in our defense will not be borne equally. They never are. But we all have a moral obligation to do what we can to ensure our country remains worthy of the greater sacrifices that will be made by others.

What will we do not just to honor the memory of Christian Engeldrum, but to help keep the city and the country he loved worthy of his loss? He was a New York City firefighter, from Ladder 61 in the Bronx. He had raced to the towers on that terrible morning, remained to dig through the rubble for his fallen comrades, and stayed through the anguishing weeks of recovery. When his National Guard unit was mobilized for duty in Iraq last year, Christian said goodbye to his wife and sons, and went to fight his country’s battles. He had been there before when he was on active duty in the Army during the first Gulf War. He was thirty-nine years old when under fire his vehicle rolled over an explosive outside Baghdad and he was killed. You and I, my friends, have a duty to help keep this country such a just and decent and safe and promising place that the loss of Christian Engeldrum or Riayan Tejada can be borne with sorrow and regret but never shame. America must always mean so much that it justifies so terrible a sacrifice.

My father’s generation fought depression and world war. Their sons and daughters fought in the Cold War and the struggle for a more just society. Some fought in uniform and some did not, but many, many Americans rendered good service to America and humanity. Service in worthy causes gives our lives meaning, they give even the most obscure names historical importance. Even when the names of the men and women who serve in them are forgotten, the world will still remember what they did.

Until the end of time, will there ever be a nation such as ours? I cannot imagine that another country’s history will ever so profoundly affect the progress of mankind. She’s worth serving, worth sacrificing for, worth dying for. This is Riayan Tejada’s and Christian Engeldrum’s country. And we must never forget it. Never, ever forget it.

When I was a young man, I thought glory was the highest ambition and that all glory was self-glory. My parents tried to teach me otherwise, as did the United States Naval Academy. But I didn’t understand the lesson until later in life, when I confronted challenges I never expected to face.

In that confrontation, I discovered that I was dependent on others to a greater extent than I had ever realized, but that neither they nor the cause we served made any claims on my identity. On the contrary, they gave me a larger sense of myself than I had before. I discovered there is nothing in life more liberating than to fight for a cause that encompasses you, but is not defined by your existence alone.

Those days were long ago. But not so long ago that I have forgotten their purpose and their reward. This is still our moment to make history, to live out the authentic meaning of freedom, and to build upon the accomplishments of our storied past. There will never be another nation such as ours. We must take good care of her. The fate of the world depends upon it.

Thank you again for the privilege of addressing you.
###
Note: You will NOT be hearing a speech like this coming from G. W. Bush, ever !!

Abu Ghraib General Lambastes Bush Administration
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Wednesday 24 August 2005

I had been hesitant to speak out before because this Administration is so vindictive. But now I will ... Anybody who confronts this Administration or Rumsfeld or the Pentagon with a true assessment, they find themselves either out of a job, out of their positions, fired, relieved or chastised. Their career comes to an end.
-- Janis Karpinski, interview with Marjorie Cohn, August 3, 2005

Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski was in charge of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq when the now famous torture photographs were taken in fall of 2003. She was reprimanded and demoted to Colonel for her failure to properly supervise the prison guards. Karpinski is the highest ranking officer to be sanctioned for the mistreatment of prisoners. On August 3, 2005, I interviewed Janis Karpinski. In the most comprehensive public statement she has made to date, Karpinski deconstructs the entire United States military operation in Iraq with some astonishing revelations.

When Karpinski got to Abu Ghraib, "there was a completely different story than what we were being told in the United States. It was out of control. There weren't enough soldiers. Nobody had the right equipment. They were driving around in unarmored vehicles, some of them without doors ... So, knowing that they were ill-equipped and ill-prepared, they pushed them out anyway, because those two three-stars wanted their fifteen minutes of fame, I suppose."

Karpinski said that General Shinseki briefed Rumsfeld that "he can't win this war, if they insist on invading Iraq, he can't win this war with less than 300,000 soldiers." Rumsfeld reportedly ordered Shinseki to go back and find a way to do this with 125,000 to 130,000, but Shinseki came back and said they couldn't do the job with that number. "What did Rumsfeld do?" Karpinski asked rhetorically. "If you can't agree with me, I'm going to find somebody who can. He made Shinseki a lame duck, for all practical purposes, and brought in Schoomaker. And Schoomaker got it. He said, 'Oh yes sir, we can do this with 125,000.'"

Karpinski says she did not know about the torture occurring in Cellblocks 1-A and 1-B at Abu Ghraib because it took place at night. She didn't live at Abu Ghraib, and nobody was permitted to travel at night due to the dangerous road conditions. The first she heard about the torture was on January 12, 2004. She was never allowed to speak to the people who had worked on the night shift. She "was told by Colonel Warren, the JAG officer for General Sanchez, that they weren't assigned to me, that they were not under my control, and I really had no right to see them."

When Karpinski inquired, "What's this about photographs?" the sergeant replied, "Ma'am, we've heard something about photographs, but I have no idea. Nobody has any details, and Ma'am, if anybody knows, nobody is talking." When Karpinski asked to see the log books, the sergeant told her that the Criminal Investigation Division had taken everything except for something on a pole outside the little office they were using.

"It was a memorandum signed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, authorizing a short list, maybe 6 or 8 techniques: use of dogs; stress positions; loud music; deprivation of food; keeping the lights on, those kinds of things," Karpinski said. "And then a handwritten message over to the side that appeared to be the same handwriting as the signature, and that signature was Secretary Rumsfeld's. And it said, 'Make sure this happens' with two exclamation points. And that was the only thing they had. Everything else had been confiscated."

Karpinski tried to get information, but "nobody knew anything, nobody - at least, that's what they were claiming. The Company Commander, Captain Reese, was tearful in my office and repeatedly told me he knew nothing about it, knew nothing about it," Karpinski said. But in a later plea bargain he entered into after the Taguba Report came out, "Captain Reese said that not only did he know about it, but he was told not to report it to his chain of command, and he was told that by Colonel Pappas. And he claimed that he saw General Sanchez out there on several occasions witnessing the torture of some of the security detainees."

The first time Karpinski got any clarification about the photographs was January 23, 2004. The criminal investigator, Colonel Marcelo, came into Karpinski's office and showed her the pictures. "When I saw the pictures I was floored," Karpinski said. "Really, the world was spinning out of control when I saw those pictures, because it was so far beyond and outside of what I imagined. I thought that maybe some soldiers had taken some pictures of prisoners behind barbed wire or in their cell or something like that. I couldn't imagine anything like what I saw in those photographs."

Marcelo told her, "Ma'am, I'm supposed to tell you after you see the photographs that General Sanchez wants to see you in his office." So Karpinski went over to see Sanchez. She said that "before I even saw the photographs, I was preparing words to say in a press conference - to be up front, to be honest about this, that an investigation is ongoing and there are some allegations of detainee abuse."

But Sanchez told Karpinski, "'No, absolutely not. You are not to discuss this with anyone.' And I should have known then," she said, "and I know that Sanchez was hopeful for a four-star promotion even then, in January of 2004. And I thought it had probably most to do with the election coming up in November 2004, and that this could really move the Administration out of the White House if it was exploited. So naively, I just thought, you know, they're going to let this investigation go and they're going to handle it the way it should be handled."

Karpinski said, however, "The truth has been uncovered, but it's been suffocated and it has not been released with the results of the investigation." She added, "McClellan and Rumsfeld can get up on their high horse and say that there've been no fewer than 15 investigations that were conducted. But every one of those investigations is under the control of the Secretary of Defense. And every one of those investigations is run and led by a person who can lose their job under Rumsfeld's fist."

"We're never going to know the truth until they do an independent commission or look into this independently," Karpinski maintains. "This is about instructions delivered with full authority and knowledge of the Secretary of Defense and probably Cheney. I don't know if the President was involved or not. I don't care. All I know is, those instructions were communicated from the Secretary of Defense's office, from the Pentagon, through Cambone, through Miller, to Abu Ghraib."

Karpinski describes what happened when General Geoffrey Miller arrived at Abu Ghraib: "The most pronounced difference was when Miller came to visit. He came right after Rumsfeld's visit ... And he said that he was going to use a template from Guantánamo Bay to 'Gitmo-ize' the operations out at Abu Ghraib."

"These torture techniques were being implemented and used down at Guantánamo Bay and, of course, now we have lots of statements that say they were used in Afghanistan as well," Karpinski said. Although Miller has sworn he was just an "advisor," Miller told Karpinski he wanted Abu Ghraib. Karpinski replied, "Abu Ghraib is not mine to give to you. It belongs to Ambassador Bremer. It is going to be turned over to the Iraqis." Miller replied, "No it is not. I want that facility and Rick Sanchez said I can have any facility I want." Karpinski said, "Miller obviously had the full authority of somebody, you know, likely Cambone or Rumsfeld in Washington, DC."

Miller's representative, General Fast, turned the prison over to the Military Intelligence brigade for complete command and control, Karpinski said. "There was no coordination with me or Colonel Pappas. There was no discussion about chain of command."

Abu Ghraib housed primarily Iraqi criminals. Although many of the "security detainees" were kept at Abu Ghraib, most of the interrogations took place at a higher-value detention facility in Baghdad, according to Karpinski.

The Army discriminates against the reservists in general, and female officers in particular, Karpinski said. "It's really a good old boys' network," she said. "Come hell or high water, they're going to maintain the status quo." While she was made the scapegoat for the torture at Abu Ghraib, Karpinski said, no one above her in the chain of command has been reprimanded.

Karpinski reveals that there was "no sustainment plan" because "there were a lot of contractors - US contractors exclusively - who realized they could make a lot of money in Iraq." At the Coalition Provisional Authority, Karpinski "saw corruption like I've never seen before - millions of dollars just being pocketed by contractors. Everything was on a cash basis at that time," she said. "You take a request down - literally, you take a request to the Finance Office. If the Pay Officer recognized your face and you were asking for $450,000 to pay a contractor for work, they would pay you in cash: $450,000. Out of control."

Speaking about the war, Karpinski said, "Iraq was a huge country, and when you have people largely saying now, 'He may have been a dictator, but we were better under Saddam,' this Administration needs to take notice. And at some point you have to say, 'Stop the train, because it's completely derailed. How do we fix it?' But in an effort to do that, you have to admit that you made a few mistakes, and this Administration is not willing to admit any mistakes whatsoever."

Janis Karpinski is no longer in the military. She is writing a book that will be published by Miramax in November. In April, she received a form letter from the Chief of the Army Reserves, "warning me - warning me - about speaking about Abu Ghraib, and that everything was still under investigation." She then got "a letter saying that he understands that I'm writing a book and I should submit the transcript for review."

"And my lawyer responded simply by telling him that I was a private citizen and I don't fall under the same requirements, which he had to acknowledge, because that's true. I'm not ignorant, and I'm not going to reveal any classified information in anything I write," Karpinski said, "but I don't need to, because the truth is the truth, and it doesn't have to be classified. It is definitely staggering, but the truth is the truth."



Janis Karpinski: Exclusive Interview
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Interview

Wednesday 03 August 2005

Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski was in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq when the infamous torture photographs were taken. She was reprimanded and demoted to Colonel for her failure to properly supervise the prison guards. Karpinski is the highest ranking officer to be sanctioned for the mistreatment of prisoners. This exclusive interview by t r u t h o u t writer Marjorie Cohn is the most comprehensive public statement Karpinski has made to date.

MC: General Karpinski, thank you for agreeing to talk to me today.

JK: I had been hesitant to speak out before because this Administration is so vindictive. But now I will.

Despite years of this pronouncement that it's an "army of one," we reservists were absolutely discriminated against. The people at the senior levels of the reserve components, the Chief of the Army Reserve, for example, a three-star, never made so much as one phone call, never exchanged one word with me in all of this. Twice, my lawyer requested a meeting with him face-to-face in Washington, DC, and he declined. He denied both of those requests.

It's really a good old boys' network. Come hell or high water, they're going to maintain the status quo. They all live by each other in Fort Myers, or near Fort Myers. I'm sure that they have these cigar-smoking sessions where they're all patting each other on the back that they got another female out of the way, before I was able to get higher up in the senior levels. But I always expected that reservists would find support from their own component, and not be tagged as bad apples. For myself, there was not any support whatsoever.

I just find it incredible that the system - the Pentagon and the Judicial System - can continue to keep those soldiers in jail when there are simply volumes of documents and information that is emerging, and continues to emerge, that says exactly what one, in particular, Graner, was saying all along: that he was ordered to do these things by the Military Intelligence people and the interrogators, the contract interrogators. And there's more and more information to support that. The recommendation was that General Miller from Gitmo be reprimanded and his four-star commander from SOUTHCOM said no, I don't agree with that.

MC: And General Geoffrey Miller was the one who was supposed to transplant those interrogation and torture techniques from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib?

JK: That's correct. There are sworn statements, not only from the interrogators and the FBI personnel down at Guantánamo Bay prior to even a thought of using Abu Ghraib for a prison location. These torture techniques were being implemented and used down at Guantánamo Bay and, of course, now we have lots of statements that say they were used in Afghanistan as well.

In late August and September of 2003, Miller comes to visit, then everything starts to change, to include transferring the responsibility for Abu Ghraib over to the Military Intelligence people altogether. And it's been substantiated through an investigation that these torture practices were developed and implemented down in Guantánamo Bay and then they were imported to Abu Ghraib.

They're holding these soldiers responsible for one time on the night shift coming up with these pranks. Give me a break! It's so unfair to continue to blame those soldiers. You know, I would be the first one to say to anybody that Graner and Fredericks, as noncommissioned officers - they crossed the line. Graner punched a prisoner in the chest so hard, to get him under control, the guy passed out. Fredericks stepped on feet and hands and everything else. And they didn't report what they knew were violations of the Geneva Conventions. They didn't report those things to the chain of command.

Now I've been held accountable for that, but never once, Marjorie, never once have I had an opportunity to speak to any of those soldiers, because before I was even aware that there was an investigation going on or that there were photographs or anything else, those soldiers were removed from their positions at Abu Ghraib and taken away to Sanchez's headquarters. And I was never allowed to speak to them. Never once.

MC: Why do you think you're the highest officer who's been punished?

JK: Well, I don't know how else to say it, but I think I check a lot of blocks. Before the war got underway, before 9/11, Rumsfeld's plan was to downsize the military - fewer, faster, more trained in Special Operations, never have to fight on two fronts again. He wanted to downsize the overall military. He wanted to return control of the military to the civilian sector. And the division commanders, at least in the Army, were opposed to that. And there were very selfish reasons for their opposition. If you were a division commander, you could pay back favors that were done for you, perhaps, to get you promoted or to put you into positions. You repay other graduates of the military academy - those kinds of things - by appointing them to command positions in your own division. So the more toys you have to play with, the bigger your division and the more likely that you're going to be at the front of the pack when your promotion comes up. So that's history.

Rumsfeld wanted to downsize the military, and the component chiefs were opposed to it. He sent them all back to their offices, and said, "Find a way to do this." The only component that came up with a solution was the Marine Corps. Then he sent the Air Force, the Navy and the Army back to the drawing board, and then 9/11 happened. So they got a reprieve. And it was up to them to prove how important it was that they still needed big divisions and lots of equipment and all that other stuff.

Here's Shinseki briefing Rumsfeld that he can't win this war, if they insist on invading Iraq, he can't win this war with less than 300,000 soldiers. I wasn't there to hear it, but allegedly Rumsfeld said to Shinseki: go back and find a way to do this with 125,000 to 150,000. Well, Shinseki came back again and said: Mr. Secretary we can't do it with that number. You need 300,000.

What did Rumsfeld do? If you can't agree with me, I'm going to find somebody who can. He made Shinseki a lame duck, for all practical purposes, and brought in Schoomaker. And Schoomaker got it. He said, "Oh yes sir, we can do this with 125,000."

Well, none of them had to go fight the war. None of them had to deploy and manage this small number. And everybody was under the impression that this war was going to be over very quickly. So there was no sustainment plan. And I'm selected for Brigadier General. I had a choice: I could either wait for my unit to come back to the United States and join the men, or I could deploy. I wanted to be with my unit in the field. I thought it would be a great opportunity to see how they would operate under field conditions in a theater of war.

When I got there, there was a completely different story than what we were being told in the United States. It was out of control. There weren't enough soldiers. Nobody had the right equipment. They were driving around in unarmored vehicles, some of them without doors. Some of the soldiers didn't even have protective vests. And I kept hearing the same excuse for reservists, for National Guard units: the active component was taking the equipment as a priority. We can't get it over here.

And then layer on top of that, there was no personnel replacement system for the Reserves and the National Guard. So if I lost a soldier to an illness, a nervous breakdown, a battle injury, whatever it might be, I operated one short, or ten short, or thirty short, or sixty short. I didn't mobilize these units. I didn't deploy these units. I joined them in theater. The responsibility for how those units were deployed and how they were ill-prepared rests with the senior level of leadership in the military.

MC: And when you say "senior level," who do you mean?

JK: I mean the Chief of the Army Reserves, the Chief of the National Guard here, who is the only general officer in all of this who has admitted that they had no idea. I think it was General Bloom, he's a three-star. I don't even know if he still is Chief of the National Guard. But he admitted that they had no idea that the units were going to be deployed for anything, the length of time that it started to appear that they were going to be deployed. So they pushed them out of the mobilization stations, because they knew that the units would somehow manage once they got into Iraq. So, knowing that they were ill-equipped and ill-prepared, they pushed them out anyway, because those two three-stars wanted their fifteen minutes of fame, I suppose.

But Bloom, at least, stepped up to the plate and took responsibility. Helmsley, who allowed these units to deploy, who came up with this harebrained scheme about cross-welling soldiers and serving with complete strangers - he has never taken responsibility for anything. And neither has the Pentagon.

More than a year ago, that brave soldier stood up and said to Rumsfeld, "Why don't we have the right equipment? Why are we still going out with unarmored vehicles?" Rumsfeld made that infamous comment that was: you go to war with the units that you have, not necessarily the ones you want. Well, how about a slap in the face? But he's never been held accountable for that.

And the man, the officer who stopped requests for armored vehicles and stopped requests for protective vests to be prioritized is now the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Cody. He's a four-star. He was a three-star. He was in charge of logistics, and he disapproved any additional requests for vehicles or protective equipment for our soldiers. He was promoted. He is a four-star, and he is the Chief of Staff of the Army today.

That's how Rumsfeld and the Pentagon reward people who are in agreement with them. I don't know how else to say it. Shinseki, who was telling Rumsfeld the truth - he was retired.

Anybody who confronts this Administration or Rumsfeld or the Pentagon with a true assessment, they find themselves either out of a job, out of their positions, fired, relieved or chastised. Their career comes to an end.

MC: What is your current status?

JK: I am retired from the military.

MC: You wrote in an e-mail: "The techniques are a clear departure from what soldiers are taught and understand, the techniques that were directed by the highest level of this Administration." By that, you mean all the way up to the Oval Office?

JK: I mean all the way up to Cheney. I don't know the workings of how it gets up there. But I would think that, very similar to any other big corporation or the military, that if you have a deputy - or a Vice President, in this case - and he is making decisions or approvals, then maybe by default you will say, "If I didn't know, I should have known," or "I did know." Because he's your Vice President. Or he is the Vice President. Or he is the Secretary of Defense. I don't know what they are telling the President. And I don't care. He's the President, and he's supposed to know what's going on in this Administration, and honestly, sometimes it doesn't seem like he does.

MC: How are the techniques a clear departure from what soldiers are taught and understand?

JK: Well, I can tell you that Military Police soldiers (I don't care what component they're from: National Guard, Reserve or active duty) - in fact, when it comes to the Geneva Conventions and fair and humane treatment of prisoners, Reserve and National Guard units are better, because it is a mission. A prisoner of war operation and internment resettlement and refugee operations - it was never a mission that the active component wanted to embrace. They wanted the National Guard and the Reserve Units to take those missions. They thought it was an insult to them to have to do those kinds of missions. So in my opinion, the reservists and the National Guard Units were better equipped, better trained, and fully aware of the Geneva Conventions and the requirements of how to treat prisoners of war fairly and humanely.

They changed the mission. They assigned a new detention mission to the 800th MP brigade and relocated most of the units from the prisoner of war camp, which was winding down from May onwards, and moved them, pushed them up into Iraq, to perform this new mission of detention operations. We were told - I was told - that it was going to be assisting Bremer's headquarters, the Coalition Provisional Authority, with restoring prisons and jails and getting the Iraqi prisoners back under lock and key because they were disrupting operations, etc. etc.

So despite the fact that Iraqi criminals - detention operations - are different from prisoner of war operations (they have a different mind set of a criminal, if you will), the MPs were assigned this mission. There was absolutely no discussion whatsoever to see if the units were properly equipped, if they had appropriate training. Twice I approached the two-star, a guy by the name of Cruser [sp?], he's a Major General Reservist. Twice I went to him and I said, "This is not our mission." And he said to me, as almost to dismiss me out of his office, he said, "Yes, I know Janis, but you're the closest we've got from detention MP, so you guys have the mission." Not, you know, we don't have the right equipment; not, we don't have the right training, we don't have the right background. He didn't care.

MC: You said that Iraqi detention is different than POWs, that there's a criminal mind set. Could you explain it a little bit more?

JK: Well, when you have prisoner of war operations or refugee resettlement operations, and there's a war going on, prisoners of war know and understand, and they see it exhibited by the military police soldiers, that they are going to be treated fairly and humanely, and that the enemy - the people detaining them - are not going to be living in high-rise hotels while they're in these prison camps. Everybody they see - the MPs and the soldiers who are guarding them - are living at the same level that they are. So if there's a ration of water of two liters a day, the prisoners get the same ration that the soldiers get. If they're living in outside tents, the soldiers are likewise living in outside tents and cow towns. There's no air conditioning. There is no laundry service. There are no rental cars. And prisoners of war understand that. They know that they are only going to be held as combatants until the war is over, so their mind set is different. They are generally under control.

Nobody likes to be held against their will. But enemy combatants understand that, in the course of war, if they're captured, then they're held in a prisoner of war camp and will be treated humanely until the war is over and then they can go home. That's how prisoner of war operations work, and that's the mind set, I would say, of an average soldier, pretty much, and 75 percent of the free world.

Iraqi criminals, on the other hand, if they're violent criminals - whether it was under Saddam or now under US forces control - they might remain in jail for the rest of their lives. So they have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to plot and to plan and to design ways to escape, ways to harass their keepers, ways to make life miserable for the MPs or the individuals who are detaining them.

The only reason we had any kind of control - I will tell you this flat out, up front - the only reason we had any kind of control in any of our prison facilities, Abu Ghraib aside, was because the MPs were taking the initiative and finding ways to accommodate the prisoners. It wasn't because of the fine security of the prison facility. It was because the prisoners knew that the MPs were doing everything they could, everything in their power, to make life more acceptable for them while they were spending their days and nights incarcerated.

We had civilian so-called experts - contractors - under the Coalition Provisional Authority, who worked under the Ministry of Justice. Now these prison experts all had experience as wardens or as directors for prisons in the United States.

MC: Were some of them former US Special Forces?

JK: No, they were not. They were all civilians. There was only one of them who was retired from the military, and he was actually retired as a Military Police officer. But it's just incredible that these three contractors that they brought over were hired by the Justice Department in Washington, and it was the same Justice Department - there aren't two separate entities - it was the same Justice Department that, between 30 and 60 days before hiring these people to come to Baghdad, the same Justice Department had fired them from their positions in the Utah Corrections Facility for prisoner abuse.

And I didn't know that when we were there. Nobody bothered to tell us that. But we were told that we were going to go up to Baghdad, we were going to relocate the headquarters up to Baghdad to assist the Prisons Department, under the Ministry of Justice, with this restoration of jails and prisons. Well, we got up there and there were three of them and one director. And they were looking at 121 different jails for us to run and operate. And I told them I don't have that many MPs! I couldn't put 3 MPs in each one of those facilities and run them. We have to find the biggest facilities, and that's what they did. They eventually identified, I think they identified, 15 or 18 and we settled on 15 or 16.

MC: Why did they bring these civilian contractors? Why do you think they brought them over?

JK: Well, at that time, everybody was under the impression that the Coalition Provisional Authority was being run under the auspices of the State Department, and that the Iraqi Detention Operation was a function that would eventually be turned over to the Iraqis.

Well, that may have been true in some back room plan, that people had an idea that was going to be in place. But there was no plan. Because normally, prison operations and jail operations come with the restoration of peace and security. And that comes with a sustainment operation that follows combat operations. So on a backward timeline, when the war was declared over on the aircraft carrier, then sustainment operations - engineers, civilian contractors, military police, military police organizations - all those organizations kind of kick into high gear to get things moving down the same road. Well there was no sustainment plan. And I can tell you, Marjorie, my opinion is that there was no sustainment plan because, by that time, there were a lot of contractors - US contractors exclusively - who realized they could make a lot of money in Iraq.

MC: How did the enlisted soldiers feel about the contractors getting these fat paychecks?

JK: My soldiers were saying, I heard this often: "Ma'am, I want to get out of the Army and come back over here. I could be making five times the money that I'm making as a soldier. And these guys never go out and do anything. We're doing all the work, and they're drawing all the pay!" I heard it a dozen times a week from every level of soldier, every rank, in every one of my units. They could see it. They knew what was going on. Here's these three contractors who are supposed to restore the prison system with the help of the military, and they never - I don't want to say never - they hardly leave the confines of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

MC: Now did they play a role in the interrogations?

JK: No, they did not. The interrogations were separate and apart from Iraqi detention operations. The only role they played was, they were restoring Abu Ghraib. They were using funds from the Coalition Provisional Authority to restore the cells out at Abu Ghraib.

MC: So who was in charge of the interrogations at Abu Ghraib?

JK: The Military Intelligence.

MC: And you were reprimanded and demoted for failing to supervise the staff at Abu Ghraib, and you've said you were a scapegoat?

JK: Right.

MC: What do you mean by that?

JK: Well, I have to refer to a timeline. Miller comes, we have Abu Ghraib, and Abu Ghraib was a pile of rubble the first time I saw it. The only advantage of Abu Ghraib, the only advantage, was this 20-foot high retaining wall around the ground, acres and acres of the grounds of Abu Ghraib. So we had that as a security, first line of defense. But everything inside the prison at that time had been looted. Electrical systems, water systems, infrastructure, doors were gone. Blocks of concrete were removed from the interior section, the interior cells.

But I had a Company Commander who was commanding an MP unit out there, and he told me in July, "Ma'am, if you get us the resources we can at least hold prisoners here until the other facilities are restored." So there was great opposition to that, because of the history of Abu Ghraib. But we proceeded with the encouragement and the support, to a limited extent, from Ambassador Bremer. Because we needed some place to put these Iraqi criminals that the divisions were policing in the course of their operations and attempted to get sustainment operations underway, throughout Iraq. So in August, the divisions were directed to undertake these - let me back up. At Abu Ghraib during July and the beginning of August 2003, we were holding several hundred prisoners.

MC: Were these prisoners of war?

JK: No, these were Iraqi criminals, because the war was over. So when the President declared the war over, there are no more prisoners of war. What we were policing then were Iraqi criminals.

MC: Had they all been arrested for crimes?

JK: Yes, they were. But some of them, most of them, the vast majority of them were minor crimes. They were missing curfew. They were subjected to a random inspection and a weapon was found in their trunks, they were looting, dealing gasoline, whatever. But they were minor crimes, nonviolent crimes, the majority of them.

In October and November, 2002, Saddam and his sons opened all of the jails and all of the prisons and released all of the prisoners to cause chaos as the Coalition advanced to Baghdad. And they did. These criminals, these criminal elements, did wreak havoc. So it was not unusual, when the divisions were out doing their operations or manning a checkpoint, that they would find a minor crime, minor criminals. And then, when they were turned over, sometimes the prisoners would even admit that they had been held under Saddam. In all the thousands of prisoners that were turned over to our control, we only had one who came in with a prison record folded neatly in his wallet. Because they're smart enough to not say, "Oh, I was a prisoner, I was a murderer, and I was being held for life under Saddam, so you got me." You know, they were all, every prisoner was innocent.

MC: So the prisoners who were being tortured or abused at Abu Ghraib - were they all convicted criminals?

JK: No, because up until the mid part of August or the third week of August, 2003, I would say 95 percent of our prisoner population were Iraqi criminals, and the majority of them were nonviolent criminals. Then, directed by the CJTF-7, the divisions undertook these aggressive raids and these operations targeting specific individuals who were either terrorists, suspected terrorists, or known associates of terrorists. And they were called "security detainees." This is a new category of prisoner. So they were bringing them into Abu Ghraib, and again, no coordination with the commander (me) or my battalion commander out at Abu Ghraib. They were just flooding Abu Ghraib every night from the end of August onward with 15 prisoners, 30 prisoners, 8 prisoners, 60 prisoners, whatever it would be. So the population exploded from what it was, about 1200 at the end of August. In September and October we took in at least equal that number. So by the end of September, we had more than 3,000 prisoners. And by the end of October, we had over 6,000 prisoners. And the CJTF-7 headquarters did not care if we had food for the prisoners, if we had accommodations for the prisoners, if we had jumpsuits for the prisoners or anything.

But the most pronounced difference was when Miller came to visit. He came right after Rumsfeld's visit. Miller was there the next day. And he stayed for about ten days to work with the Military Intelligence commander, the Military Intelligence staff officer, General Fast, and the commander of the Military Intelligence committee, Colonel Pappas.

And he said that he was going to use a template from Guantánamo Bay to "Gitmo-ize" the operations out at Abu Ghraib. He didn't spend much time with me, but he wanted to see me before he went down to brief General Sanchez when he was getting ready to leave. And that was when he was using these strong-arm techniques with me. He said, "Look, we can do this my way or we can do this the hard way." I mean, first of all, we're on the same side! And he knew, and I said to him, "Sir, I don't know who told you I was going to be difficult. What I'm doing is telling you Abu Ghraib is not mine to give to you. It belongs to Ambassador Bremer. It is going to be turned over to the Iraqis." He said, "No, it is not. I want that facility and Rick Sanchez said I can have any facility I want."

So, I mean, I was telling him the truth. Miller obviously had the full authority of somebody, you know, likely Cambone or Rumsfeld in Washington, DC. And right after, during Miller's visit, Colonel Pappas, the MI Brigade Commander, asked me if he could have full control of Cellblock 1-A because all of the people being held in there were really these security detainees.

The prisons experts down at Coalition Provisional Authority objected because it had been the CPA money that had restored those jail cells. I explained that these were higher-value guys and that they needed to be segregated. So they said okay. And we turned the Cellblock 1-A over to Colonel Pappas. And then shortly after that, within a week, they asked for Cellblock 1-B. And Miller probably coached ... I don't know. I do know that Miller had this harebrained idea that he was going to bring in these milvans - you know what milvans are?

MC: No.

JK: Milvans are all metal and they're picked up at a port. Usually, they're either put on the back of a big tractor or trailer truck. Sometimes you'll see these heavy trains at the port lifting up these metal boxes. Those are the equivalent of milvans. You can ship them and then they're picked up with a moving device, wherever they're going to.

So Miller had this idea that they could import hundreds, if not thousands, of these milvans, modify them with bars and such, and make them individual prison cells, similar to what they had done down at Guantánamo Bay, apparently.

So I said to General Miller - just on that point alone - I said, "Look sir, we can't even get building materials up here, basically or efficiently. Where do you think they're going to import all these milvans and get them down here to Abu Ghraib?" He said, "It's no problem. We'll use Turkey, we'll use Jordan. We have the answer." Okay. Well, there's not one milvan that's been shipped to Abu Ghraib even to this day.

Nonetheless, he wasn't there, and he didn't have, like so many of these people ... General Cody can sit in Washington, DC now, as the Chief of Staff of the Army and can pontificate about how it should be. But he wasn't there. He was not in the middle of this disaster and this chaos. And the efforts of the Military Police soldiers, they were just so incredible, because every one of our facilities was undermanned, ill-protected, and managed by the seat of their pants.

MC: Taguba suggested that you didn't pay sufficient attention to what was going on under your command. But you said you were waved off by Military Intelligence and the CIA. Who waved you off?

JK: General Miller did first, and then General Fast, as his representative, even though General Miller has claimed repeatedly and under sworn testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was simply an advisor in Iraq; he had no authority to direct anybody to make changes or to do anything differently.

However, when he left, Colonel Pappas, General Sanchez and the Provo Marshall for General Sanchez, I think - a guy by the name of, he was a Colonel, his name was Sanwalt [sp?] - they were copying, cc-ing, General Miller on all the reports of anything to do with interrogation or detention operations. So if he was just an advisor, why were they keeping him so much in the loop? And then when I went to General Fast, after I heard that the prison had been turned over to the Military Intelligence brigade for complete command and control ---

MC: Who turned it over to the Military Intelligence?

JK: General Fast went to the Operations Section of the headquarters, CJTF-7, and told them to cut an order transferring control of the prisons from the Military Police to the Military Intelligence. There was no coordination with me or Colonel Pappas. There was no discussion about chain of command or anything else. General Fast, who was not a commander, ordered them to do it in the Operations Section at Sanchez's headquarters, and they did it. And they cut an order and transferred the prison.

MC: And now, who waved you off? When were you waved off?

JK: When I found out, I wasn't even in Iraq at the time. And when I came back they told me that the prison was transferred under the control of the Military Intelligence. So I went to Sanchez first, and his deputy went in to tell General Sanchez that I was there and I needed to see him, and the subject was the transfer of the prison. General Sanchez would not see me, but he told his deputy or his - I think it was his SGS or his executive officer - he was a full colonel - he told me to go see General Fast, that she had the details. So I went to General Fast, and General Fast pointed to the order. Pointed to the order! Held it up, pointed to the order and said it's a done deal.

MC: So then you were not allowed to go to that cellblock?

JK: No, there was never a restriction on me going to that cellblock or anywhere else at Abu Ghraib, ever. I was not allowed to go to Abu Ghraib or anywhere else during the hours of darkness. Nobody was allowed to; the roads were too dangerous. We were just starting to see the beginnings of these roadside bombs and IEDs and everything. So the headquarters said unless it was life-threatening and they gave permission, there was no travel during the hours or darkness.

MC: And that's when the torture went on?

JK: And that's when the torture was taking place, right.

MC: So if you had wanted to go at night, you couldn't have done it?

JK: Right. That's correct.

MC: When did you find out that this torture was going on?

JK: Well, I really didn't find out - I found out that there was an investigation, and I found out about that, not from General Sanchez, not from General Fast, not from anybody at the headquarters. I found out from the Commander of the Criminal Investigation Division - a guy by the name of Marcelo. He was a full Colonel. And he sent me an e-mail. We had another mission that was close to the Iranian border and I was up there. It was about an hour and forty-five minutes outside Baghdad, two hours outside of Baghdad. So I opened my e-mail when I came back from a meeting with the leadership element of this group up there, and it was close to midnight. I opened the e-mail and I said, "What is this all about?" And the e-mail said, "Ma'am, just want to let you know I'm about to go in and brief the CG on the progress of the investigation out at Abu Ghraib. This is the one involving allegations of abuse and the pictures." That was it.

MC: That was the first you heard?

JK: That was the first I heard, and that was on the twelfth of January of 2004. That was the first I heard. I left the next morning, I didn't know anything about it. I asked my aide, I asked my Operations Officer, and nobody knew anything about it, and everybody was equally shocked, stunned. So we left at daybreak the next morning and drove back into Baghdad and went right out to Abu Ghraib. And we tried to talk to some of the people out there who would have known.

Well, all of the people who worked the night shift were already removed from their positions out there and were taken over to the headquarters, the CJTF-7 headquarters. I was never allowed to speak to them. I never exchanged a word with them, because I was told by Colonel Warren, the JAG officer for General Sanchez, that they weren't assigned to me, that they were not under my control, and I really had no right to see them.

The people who were working in Cellblock 1-A at the time that I went out to Abu Ghraib didn't know anything about it. They were completely in the dark about anything. I said, "What's this about photographs?" And the sergeant said to me, "Ma'am, we've heard something about photographs, but I have no idea. Nobody has any details, and Ma'am, if anybody knows, nobody is talking." I said, "Okay, let me see the logs. Let me see the books." He said, "They took everything. The Criminal Investigation division took everything." I said, "Well, what do you have?" and he pointed to this pole right outside the little office that they were using, and he said, "Well, they left this."

It was a memorandum signed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, authorizing a short list, maybe 6 or 8 techniques: use of dogs; stress positions; loud music; deprivation of food; keeping the lights on, those kinds of things. And then a handwritten message over to the side that appeared to be the same handwriting as the signature, and that signature was Secretary Rumsfeld's. And it said, "Make sure this happens," with two exclamation points. And that was the only thing that they had. Everything else had been confiscated.

So I tried to get information. I talked to Colonel Pappas. I talked to the Battalion Commander. I talked to the chain of command, the Military Police chain of command. Nobody knew anything, nobody - at least, that's what they were claiming. The Company Commander, Captain Reese, was tearful in my office and repeatedly told me he knew nothing about it, knew nothing about it.

But in a plea bargain, later on, after Taguba, Captain Reese said that not only did he know about it, but he was told not to report it to his chain of command, and he was told that by Colonel Pappas. And he claimed that he saw General Sanchez out there on several occasions witnessing the torture of some of the security detainees.

So, the first time I even got any kind of clarification on what these photographs were was the 23rd of January. The criminal investigator, Colonel Marcelo, came into my office. It was about eight o'clock at night, nine o'clock at night. And he called me and he was asking if I was there, would I be there, and I said yes. He said, I have some photographs I want to show you.

So when I saw the pictures I was floored. Really, the world was spinning out of control when I saw those pictures, because it was so far beyond and outside of what I imagined. I thought that maybe some soldiers had taken some pictures of prisoners behind barbed wire or in their cell or something like that. I couldn't imagine anything like what I saw in those photographs.

So then Colonel Marcelo said me, "Ma'am, I'm supposed to tell you after you see the photographs that General Sanchez wants to see you in his office." So I went over to see him, and he, I told him, you know, before I even saw the photographs, I was preparing words to say in a press conference - to be up front, to be honest about this, that an investigation is ongoing and there are some allegations of detainee abuse.

Well, he said, "No, absolutely not. You are not to discuss this with anyone." And I should have known then, and I know that Sanchez was hopeful for a four-star promotion even then, in January of 2004. And I thought that it had probably most to do with the election coming up in November of 2004, and that this could really move the Administration out of the White House if it was exploited. So naively, I just thought, you know, they're going to let this investigation go and they're going to handle it the way it should be handled.

MC: Do you think the investigations that have taken place so far have uncovered the truth about this torture and who is responsible?

JK: Absolutely not. The truth has been uncovered, but it's been suffocated and it has not been released with the results of the investigation. You know, they can say that, McClellan and Rumsfeld can get up on their high horse and say that there've been no fewer than 15 investigations that were conducted. But every one of those investigations is under the control of the Secretary of Defense. And every one of those investigations is run and led by a person who can lose their job under Rumsfeld's fist.

We're never going to know the truth until they do an independent commission or look into this independently. I don't know if this has to be a commission. I don't know what the term is. But I do know that we never would have known the truth about 9/11 if they didn't appoint an independent commission. And this thing, this thing is not about what happened in Cellblock 1-A on a night shift. And it is certainly not about seven reservists who went crazy one night. This is about instructions delivered with full authority and knowledge of the Secretary of Defense and probably Cheney. I don't know if the President was involved or not. I don't care. All I know is, those instructions were communicated from the Secretary of Defense's office, from the Pentagon, through Cambone, through Miller, to Abu Ghraib.

And those civilian contractors who were imported were not subjected to the same Uniform Code of Military Justice discipline as the soldiers. They were cleared, removed from the face of the earth, and seven soldiers are being held responsible. It was grossly unfair.

MC: Now why do you think the Administration is resisting an independent investigation if it has nothing to hide?

JK: Well, for the same reason that when they started to make noise a couple of weeks ago - McCain, I think, recommended developing a bill or was recommending a bill that would define the limits of how to interview prisoners, would require an international database so family members would know where their loved ones or relatives were being held. And Cheney said he would recommend to the President that any bill that would limit his ability to extract information from terrorists, he would recommend disapproval. And the President has said that he would disapprove any such bill. And it's consistent with this Administration's reluctance to get to the truth, because it will reveal that they knew that this was designed at their level and started from the memo under Gonzales and Haynes, I think, is it Haynes?

MC: Yes, Haynes.

JK: And Cambone and all of these people have literally taken control of the inner workings of this Administration. It's just insane that - does anybody think that Lynndie England came to Iraq with a dog collar and a dog leash, with the idea of putting one around the prisoner's neck, and having a photograph taken? They were using these photographs to get - to cut to the chase, for lack of a better expression. The plan was to use these photographs to show newly-arriving prisoners: hey, start to talk or tomorrow you're on the bottom of the pile.

This is wrong to say that this was torture and abuse going on in Cellblock 1-A. It was certainly humiliating to be photographed in such a manner; I don't disagree with that at all. I'm not trying to justify it. But there were interrogation facilities outside of Cellblock 1-A and B - separate facilities, where the actual interrogations took place. And this Administration surely does not want the details of what went on in those interrogation facilities to be known by the rest of the world.

MC: Do you think the CIA is involved? Did you have any contact with the CIA at all, in terms of their involvement with the interrogations?

JK: Marjorie, I have to tell you that from July onward, even up until December, I wouldn't say regularly, but it was often, that I encountered somebody from the Task Force, from the CIA, from Special Operations, and by and large, they were professionals. They were absolutely the consummate professionals.

Now I don't know if they ran separate facilities, and I don't know what techniques they use. I do know that when they determined that somebody they were holding in one of their facilities no longer had any value and they wanted to turn them over to us, at Abu Ghraib, most likely, they turned them over with full medical records. They turned them over with a whole file of interviews and interrogations, and they turned them over in relatively good health, particularly given the situation. So I think that - this is only my conclusion - but I think that techniques in the right and responsible hands are used appropriately. I mean, I never saw anybody under the control of the Task Force or under the control of the CIA who came in bruised, bloody, beaten, and, you know, stitched together. Occasionally we did see the aftermath of a gunshot wound, but these were higher-value detainees, if there was cross-fire or if there was a bullet, but they treated those kind of wounds. That would be my impression.

However, these same techniques or suggestions of aggressive techniques that were designed, in my opinion - again, I don't know this first-hand - but all of these reports now would indicate that these techniques were designed and tested and implemented down at Guantánamo Bay and in Afghanistan. And when you take those same techniques and put them in the hands of irresponsible and non-accountable people, like these civilian contractors were, you are combining lethal ingredients. And what happens? You get civilian contractors who have a playground, and they get out of control. And unfortunately, at Abu Ghraib they suck the military into that same playground. There's no doubt in my mind that they ordered these things to be done.

MC: Who is "they?"

JK: They being the civilian contractors - Titan, CACI. The majority of those contractors were either in Guantánamo Bay or Afghanistan prior to being sent to Abu Ghraib. There were a lot of translators who were working for Titan. Some of them were locally hired, some of them were brought in from the United States. And they were given an opportunity to upgrade their positions to be interrogators - without any kind of formal training whatsoever. So now you have a deadly mix. You have people who have been exposed and who have used these techniques first-hand in other locations. They know that there is no supervision or control. They have been directed, using whatever words, to get Saddam, get the information and get these prisoners to start talking, use more aggressive techniques. So you have allowed people who have no responsibility whatsoever to use techniques that were originally, perhaps originally designed and used by very experienced hands. And it got out of control. It clearly got out of control.

And the reason I didn't know about it at all is because Sanchez and Fast and that whole operation under Miller - whether he was there or not, he was directing it from Guantánamo Bay and Cambone was directing it from Washington, DC - they didn't want Janis Karpinski anywhere near those operations. Because they knew from people talking about me, from my record, from my past performances, that I would not have tolerated anything like what was going on in Cellblock 1-A or B. I would not have.

If I had known, if I had heard from a prisoner, if I had heard from an MP, if I had heard from a soldier, if anybody had suggested such a thing, I would have raised the issue. I would have screamed at the top of my lungs until I got somebody to pay attention that this was going on out there. Likely I would have still been held accountable, because they were looking for a scapegoat all along. And I think they found one in me because they could very easily say, "Well, this is a reservist who had Reserve soldiers, and they were just out of control."

You know, let's tell the truth here. I'm at least as capable a leader as anybody else in the Army. And I have worked harder and taken the toughest assignments and proved my capabilities in those assignments throughout my career. But Miller wanted to make it appear that I didn't have the same qualifications because I was a reservist - that these seven soldiers were, you know, out of control on the night shift - because they were reservists.

No, despite the failures of the Administration and the Pentagon to deploy these soldiers with the right equipment and the right training and assign the right mission, these soldiers were doing a great job. In 17 facilities, more than 40,000 prisoners throughout the time, the only photographs and allegations of abuse were in two cellblocks under the control of the Military Intelligence command and designed and incorporated by General Miller during and following his visit to Iraq.

Now how did he cover all that up? Well, guess where he got assigned after he left Guantánamo Bay? He went back to Iraq to be in charge of not only the detention operations but in charge of the interrogation operations as well, at Abu Ghraib and at the high-value detention facility. As far as I know, they were the only two facilities where there higher-value detainees are being held.

MC: Where was that facility, that higher-value detention facility?

JK: It was in Baghdad.

MC: And is he still there?

JK: No, Miller left. He was there from July of 2004 until December, or January of 2005, and then he went to the Pentagon. I think he went in March, actually. Maybe it was March of 2004 through March of 2005. And then when he left Iraq, he was assigned to the Pentagon. And that's where he is today. He's the only one who hasn't been promoted in all of this. But Colonel Warren was fully aware of all this, and in a sworn statement to one of the soldier's defense counsel, he said that General Karpinski was not aware of any of this because there were measures put in place to prevent her from knowing about any of this.

MC: Who said that?

JK: That was Colonel Warren, the JAG Officer CJ Task Force. He has been recommended for promotion to one-star.

MC: And Sanchez is being recommended for promotion too, right?

JK: I'm not aware of that. But that doesn't surprise me. I know Rumsfeld has said all along that he thinks that Sanchez is an exceptional officer and should be recommended.

MC: And even though this high-level military investigation recommended that Miller be reprimanded, the Army General rejected the recommendation, is that right?

JK: The Commander of SOUTHCOM rejected the recommendation. Miller has never been reprimanded, not for anything down in Guantánamo Bay.

There was a Captain who was in Afghanistan. She was a Lieutenant at the time, Carolyn Woods. And she was brought over specifically by Fast. Fast recommended her to Miller. Miller brought her over to Iraq specifically to run the interrogation operation. She was linked to those deaths in Afghanistan, where the interrogators were under her control, and she was promoted to Captain. Where is she? She is at the MI school, under General Fast.

I mean there's a ton of information, and there's extenuating, not circumstances, but these units were deployed - the Reserve and National Guard units were deployed - with the full understanding, they had orders for 179 days. They were briefed at the mobilization station and deployed with the full understanding that they would be home before the 179 days even expired.

So without any notification whatsoever, without any warning from the Chief of the Army Reserves or anybody else in the Reserve component, they were extended 365 days, just like everybody else in the theater.

However, when you extend an active-component soldier past six months - whether that was their expectation or not - when you extend them, their families are not at risk, because their ID cards are still current, their medical and dental benefits stay current, their housing remains with them, their pay continues.

Reserves and National Guard soldiers rely completely on the orders that they are carrying in their pocket. So they had orders for a 179-day deployment. And when they were extended ... it's not like it is now; the Internet was not available. They didn't have opportunities to call home. Nobody had a cell phone, of course, that worked from over there or anything. So their first concern was for their families. You know, our orders are going to expire and okay, they're telling us that we're going to get an extension eventually but our families will not have ID cards, they will not have medical benefits, they will not have dental benefits. They're going to be kicked out of their housing, for those who are living on base. They were concerned about the welfare of their families. And there was no way to get notification to them.

So it's different. There is a different standard. Somebody waved the magic wand and said, "Let's extend everybody for 365 days because this war is going to go on a lot longer than we thought."

And in my little corner of the world and my exposure down at the Coalition Provisional Authority, I saw corruption like I've never seen before - millions of dollars just being pocketed by contractors. Everything was on a cash basis at the time. You take a request down - literally, you take a request to the Finance Office. If the Pay Officer recognized your face and you were asking for $450,000 to pay a contractor for work, they would pay you in cash: $450,000. Out of control.

And then, Marjorie, in March or May of this year, when Admiral Church presented his investigation findings, he concluded that the Taguba Report was sound. And McCain - Senator Levin said, "Did you interview these individuals? Did you interview Colonel Pappas? Did you interview General Karpinski?" And of course he said no. He took the Taguba Report and relied heavily on that. And McCain said that the Taguba Report has been proven to be flawed and to be incomplete. Did you interview Ambassador Bremer? And Admiral Church said well, no, because I was directed to do this investigation by the Secretary of Defense and it was limited to the Department of Defense units. And the Coalition Provisional Authority and Ambassador Bremer all work for the State Department. And Senator McCain said, "Excuse me, Admiral, but you're wrong. The Coalition Provisional Authority and Ambassador Bremer worked for the Secretary of Defense."

MC: He didn't know that?

JK: He didn't know that. And neither did we when we were there. Everybody believed that there was a balance between the military and the State Department, and that Ambassador Bremer was working for Colin Powell. And that is untrue.

So now today, 2005, I understand why Bremer fired the whole Iraqi army - because he was working for the Secretary of Defense. There was no State Department influence. There was no balance. It was exclusively under the control of Rumsfeld. And there were contractors who were coming in there, hired. It's an excellent question, how the soldiers felt about these contractors. The security guys, the bodyguards, and the security firms that were hired to provide security for visiting dignitaries or Congressional delegations - they were all making a minimum of $300 a day. $300 a day. And never left the Green Zone. They escorted the convoys to the front gate, and then the Military Police or the military units would pick up the responsibility from the gate of the Green Zone out. And here you have soldiers who are now responsible for the lives of these delegations, and some of them are making $3,000 a month.

MC: Do you think that the media is really bringing the truth to the people?

JK: You have to search for the truth. And it shouldn't be that way. It should be reported as truth and not exploited to the advantage of whatever the direction that that outlet is going.

I know those reporters John Barry and Isikoff from Newsweek, and I was shocked when they withdrew that report about the Koran at Guantánamo Bay. I was sure it was true, and I thought, "Who got to them?" They never would have been, you know, half-assed reporting, excuse my expression. You know, I thought, "My gosh, there is no truthful outlet any more."

And why are the American people turning a deaf ear to this? We had 17 Marines killed over the course of the last three days, less than 72 hours. And there's still people in Washington that get on, especially Sunday mornings, and they get on these news or these debate programs and they say, "Well it's only 1800 lives so far" - Only! Only! You know, how dare you say that!

I don't know what the solution is. I'm not an elected official, but I was there. And it was better when we were there than it is now, because they have, whether consciously or unconsciously or just out of ineptness, they have approached this insurgency with the wrong idea.

General Casey, you know, getting on the news and saying, "Well, if everything continues on track we'll be able to start a troop draw-down next March." What exactly are these people smoking?

MC: You don't think that's a public relations ploy to get the Republicans in the midterm elections? And how are they going to maintain their 14 permanent bases in Iraq if they pull troops out? They just can't do that.

JK: Right. And how is that being proven? Well, the insurgents are now responding, as they did right after Cheney's comment that the insurgency was in its last throes of effectiveness. Okay? And then they responded by killing a whole bunch of people.

So now they come back and Casey says, "Well, if everything continues on track, we should be able to start the troop draw-down by next Spring, early next Spring and into the Summer." And how is the insurgency responding? It's like setting up an explosive device and blowing 14 Marines off the face of the earth.

It's just unbelievable, and was, unfortunately, predictable, on the very elementary level of planning sustainment operations. And I don't know if it was just absolute ignorance or wishful thinking. And there is a vast difference between them, but either one of them, something was incorporated by the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, of what they thought that, as soon as they got to Baghdad and pulled those statues down, that everybody was going to be coming out waving American flags and throwing flowers? What kind of ignorance is this?

Iraq was a huge country, and when you have people largely saying, now, "He may have been a dictator, but we were better under Saddam," this Administration needs to take notice. And at some point you have to say, "Stop the train, because it's completely derailed. How do we fix it?" But in an effort to do that, you have to admit that you made a few mistakes, and this Administration is not willing to admit any mistakes whatsoever.

MC: You're writing a book. Do you have a publisher?

JK: Yeah, Miramax. It's going to be published in November. I didn't get any kind of correspondence except to chastise me. When I was going out to San Francisco to speak to the University of San Francisco, the law school out there, that was in April, I got a form letter from the Chief of the Army Reserves warning me - warning me - about speaking about Abu Ghraib, and that everything was still under investigation. Well, shortly after I got back, I get a letter saying that he understands that I'm writing a book and I should submit the transcript for review.

And my lawyer responded simply by telling him that I was a private citizen and I don't fall under the same requirements, which he had to acknowledge, because that's true. I'm not ignorant, and I'm not going to reveal any classified information in anything I write, but I don't need to, because the truth is the truth, and it doesn't have to be classified. It is definitely staggering, but the truth is the truth.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, President-Elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. She writes a weekly column for t r u t h o u t.

Progress Report Archives

November 3rd, 2005

Defanging the 'TABOR-Toothed Tiger'

On November 1, Colorado voters suspended the state's "Taxpayers' Bill of Rights" (TABOR), a hodgepodge of "anti-tax" initiatives that became law in Colorado in 1992. The approved statewide ballot proposition, Referendum C, will allow the state to keep an extra $3.7 billion over the next five years and reinvest it in critical services like health care and transportation. TABOR has impaired Colorado's ability to set priorities and respond to crises through an overly "restrictive formula" and has contributed to a "decline in public services in Colorado." While TABOR has been a "model conservatives hold up for other states to emulate," Stephen Slivinski at the libertarian Cato Institute admitted that the defeat of TABOR in Colorado "might take some of the wind out of their [TABOR advocates'] sails." Californians head to the polls on November 8 to vote on their own version of TABOR, and Arizona, Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are considering similar legislation. Tom Wolf of the Coalition for Common Sense Priorities notes, "The only state that actually has to live under TABOR just voted to suspend it." TABOR didn't work in Colorado, and it won't work in other states.



COLORADANS COULD NOT AFFORD TO VOTE 'NO': Fifty-two percent of voters decided it was time to make some changes, rejecting the right-wing claim that "Tabor has been great for our economy" and embracing the bipartisan effort for Referendum C, led by Gov. Bill Owens (R) and groups such as The Bell Policy Center and the Colorado Progressive Coalition. Under TABOR, the percentage of Coloradans with no health insurance rose from 12.7 percent in 1992 to 15.6 percent in 2001. K-12 education spending per student fell by more than $300 compared to the national average from 1992 to 2000 and in-state tuition at colleges and universities increased 21 percent over the last four years. Owens, who supported TABOR in 1992, hailed the victory: "Where I come out is with the pride of knowing that when I finish as governor I will have done the right thing for Colorado, and that's hugely important to me."



RIGHT-WING SPIN ON LOSS ALREADY IN MOTION: The right, which is attempting to spread TABOR nationwide, immediately tried to place blame on voters and progressives and to spin their defeat into gain. Douglas Bruce, the author of the TABOR amendment, called the outcome "disappointing" and said voters will "have to accept the consequences of voting themselves back into slavery." But even Bruce had to acknowledge that "Tuesday's vote makes it harder now for other states to cap spending." Grover
Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, has held up TABOR as a "holy grail" of state fiscal policy. He was less than happy after Tuesday's vote: "Young Republican children years from now will be scared in campground campfires by stories about Bill Owens - the tax-cutting Republican who magically turned into a tax-increase bad guy...and they will not be able to sleep all night."



TABOR MEANS TROUBLE FOR OTHER STATES: On the same day that Coloradans threw out TABOR, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a similar bill -- among "the most restrictive in the nation" -- which the Coalition for Common Sense Priorities notes could be even more devastating in Pennsylvania than Colorado because spending caps are linked to the rate of population growth. Colorado's population grew about 40 percent since 1990 versus 5 percent in Pennsylvania." Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) wants California voters on Nov. 8 to "give him the power to cut funding without legislative approval." The Missouri Budget Project believes that TABOR will be just as devastating to Missouri as it was to Colorado. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that Ohio's proposal, developed by Ohio's right-wing Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, would dramatically cut social programs and "is fundamentally the same as Colorado's TABOR."

Labor Dept. Is Rebuked Over Pact With Wal-Mart

NY Times
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: November 1, 2005

The Labor Department's inspector general strongly criticized department officials yesterday for "serious breakdowns" in procedures involving an agreement promising Wal-Mart Stores 15 days' notice before labor investigators would inspect its stores for child labor violations.

The report by the inspector general faulted department officials for making "significant concessions" to Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, without obtaining anything in return. The report also criticized department officials for letting Wal-Mart lawyers write substantial parts of the settlement and for leaving the department's own legal division out of the settlement process.

The report said that in granting Wal-Mart the 15-day notice, the Wage and Hour Division violated its own handbook. It added that agreeing to let Wal-Mart jointly develop news releases about the settlement with the department violated Labor Department policies.

The inspector general, Gordon S. Heddell, said the agreement did not violate federal laws or regulations.

The Labor Department reached the settlement in January after finding 85 child labor violations at Wal-Mart stores in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Arkansas, involving workers under 18 who operated dangerous machinery, including cardboard balers and chain saws.

Wal-Mart settled the investigation by agreeing to pay $135,540, but it continued to deny any wrongdoing.

In addition to allowing the 15-day notice, the agreement lets Wal-Mart avoid civil citations and fines if it brings a store into compliance within 10 days of when the department notifies it of a violation.

In exchange for these concessions, the inspector general wrote, there was "little commitment from the employer beyond what it was already doing or required to do by law."

"In our view," the inspector general's office wrote about the Wage and Hour Division, "the Wal-Mart agreement may adversely impact W.H.D.'s authority to conduct future investigations and issue citations or penalty assessments, and potentially restrict information to the public."

Responding to its inspector general, the Labor Department said it "strongly disagrees with the report's overall characterization of the effectiveness of the Wal-Mart child labor settlement agreement."

The department said the inspector general had wrongly given the impression that Wal-Mart had been permitted to avoid all penalties for violations of wage and hour laws by bringing its stores into compliance.

Even though department officials asserted that the agreement was much like that with other companies, Mr. Heddell found that the agreement between Wal-Mart and the Wage and Hour Division "was significantly different from other agreements entered into by W.H.D." and "had the most far-reaching restriction on W.H.D.'s authority to conduct investigations and assess" fines.

Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who asked the inspector general to investigate the settlement, said the report showed that the Bush administration was seeking to do favors for a powerful friend and a major Republican contributor in Wal-Mart.

"The Bush Labor Department chose to do an unprecedented favor for Wal-Mart, despite the fact it is well known for violating labor laws, including child labor laws," Mr. Miller said. "The sweetheart deal put Wal-Mart employees at risk, undermined government effectiveness, and further undermined public confidence that the government is acting on its behalf."

Mr. Heddell said he did not find that the agreement resulted from improper pressures. "Nothing came to our attention indicating evidence of influence or pressure from internal or external sources," he wrote.

Martin Heires, a Wal-Mart spokesman, said, "We think it's important to note that the inspector general's office found that the agreement is in compliance with federal law."

"We continue to believe the agreement was the appropriate course of action," he added. "Our goal remains to make sure that our stores are in full compliance in that our associates are fully informed of all policies, regulations and laws that apply to the employment of workers who are 16 and 17 years of age."

The inspector general recommended that the Wage and Hour Division develop procedures for developing and approving agreements and require that all future settlements be developed in coordination with the department's legal division.

The department said that it had developed a new policy on reaching settlements that, it was confident, would carry out the inspector general's recommendations.

The Labor Department said that the advance notification provisions applied only to child labor matters. But the inspector general voiced concern that "the plain language of the advance notification clause applies to any potential violations, not just child labor violations." Department officials say that giving 15 days' notice helps to ensure that Wal-Mart will come into compliance.

The department denied the inspector general's suggestion that it had consulted with Wal-Mart before issuing a news release on the settlement. The department took the unusual action of announcing the agreement a month after it was signed, doing so only after some details were leaked to a newspaper.

The report said: "The inspector general has specific concerns with the Wal-Mart agreement because it contained significant provisions that were principally authored by Wal-Mart attorneys and never challenged by W.H.D., and because it did not receive adequate W.H.D. review and approval."

The Essential Krugman: Ending the Fraudulence

Ending the Fraudulence
NY Times Op-Ed
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Oct. 30, 2005

"Let me be frank: it has been a long political nightmare. For some of us, daily life has remained safe and comfortable, so the nightmare has merely been intellectual: we realized early on that this administration was cynical, dishonest and incompetent, but spent a long time unable to get others to see the obvious. For others - above all, of course, those Americans risking their lives in a war whose real rationale has never been explained - the nightmare has been all too concrete.

So is the nightmare finally coming to an end? Yes, I think so. I have no idea whether Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, will bring more indictments in the Plame affair. In any case, I don't share fantasies that Dick Cheney will be forced to resign; even Karl Rove may keep his post. One way or another, the Bush administration will stagger on for three more years. But its essential fraudulence stands exposed, and it's hard to see how that exposure can be undone.

What do I mean by essential fraudulence? Basically, I mean the way an administration with an almost unbroken record of policy failure has nonetheless achieved political dominance through a carefully cultivated set of myths.

The record of policy failure is truly remarkable. It sometimes seems as if President Bush and Mr. Cheney are Midases in reverse: everything they touch - from Iraq reconstruction to hurricane relief, from prescription drug coverage to the pursuit of Osama - turns to crud. Even the few apparent successes turn out to contain failures at their core: for example, real G.D.P. may be up, but real wages are down.

The point is that this administration's political triumphs have never been based on its real-world achievements, which are few and far between. The administration has, instead, built its power on myths: the myth of presidential leadership, the ugly myth that the administration is patriotic while its critics are not. Take away those myths, and the administration has nothing left.

Well, Katrina ended the leadership myth, which was already fading as the war dragged on. There was a time when a photo of Mr. Bush looking out the window of Air Force One on 9/11 became an iconic image of leadership. Now, a similar image of Mr. Bush looking out at a flooded New Orleans has become an iconic image of his lack of connection. Pundits may try to resurrect Mr. Bush's reputation, but his cult of personality is dead - and the inscription on the tombstone reads, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Meanwhile, the Plame inquiry, however it winds up, has ended the myth of the administration's monopoly on patriotism, which was also fading in the face of the war.

Apologists can shout all they like that no laws were broken, that hardball politics is nothing new, or whatever. The fact remains that officials close to both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush leaked the identity of an undercover operative for political reasons. Whether or not that act was illegal, it was clearly unpatriotic.

And the Plame affair has also solidified the public's growing doubts about the administration's morals. By a three-to-one margin, according to a Washington Post poll, the public now believes that the level of ethics and honesty in the government has declined rather than risen under Mr. Bush.

So the Bush administration has lost the myths that sustained its mojo, and with them much of its power to do harm. But the nightmare won't be fully over until two things happen.

First, politicians will have to admit that they were misled. Second, the news media will have to face up to their role in allowing incompetents to pose as leaders and political apparatchiks to pose as patriots.

It's a sad commentary on the timidity of most Democrats that even now, with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, telling us how policy was "hijacked" by the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal," it's hard to get leading figures to admit that they were misled into supporting the Iraq war. Kudos to John Kerry for finally saying just that last week.

And as for the media: these days, there is much harsh, justified criticism of the failure of major news organizations, this one included, to exert due diligence on rationales for the war. But the failures that made the long nightmare possible began much earlier, during the weeks after 9/11, when the media eagerly helped our political leaders build up a completely false picture of who they were.

So the long nightmare won't really be over until journalists ask themselves: what did we know, when did we know it, and why didn't we tell the public?"