Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Eyewitness to a failure in Iraq

PETER W. GALBRAITH
By Peter W. Galbraith | October 27, 2004

IN 2003 I went to tell Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz what I had seen in Baghdad in the days following Saddam Hussein's overthrow. For nearly an hour, I described the catastrophic aftermath of the invasion -- the unchecked looting of every public institution in Baghdad, the devastation of Iraq's cultural heritage, the anger of ordinary Iraqis who couldn't understand why the world's only superpower was letting this happen.

I also described two particularly disturbing incidents -- one I had witnessed and the other I had heard about. On April 16, 2003, a mob attacked and looted the Iraqi equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control, taking live HIV and black fever virus among other potentially lethal materials. US troops were stationed across the street but did not intervene because they didn't know the building was important.

When he found out, the young American lieutenant was devastated. He shook his head and said, "I hope I am not responsible for Armageddon." About the same time, looters entered the warehouses at Iraq's sprawling nuclear facilities at Tuwaitha on Baghdad's outskirts. They took barrels of yellowcake (raw uranium), apparently dumping the uranium and using the barrels to hold water. US troops were at Tuwaitha but did not interfere.

There was nothing secret about the Disease Center or the Tuwaitha warehouses. Inspectors had repeatedly visited the center looking for evidence of a biological weapons program. The Tuwaitha warehouses included materials from Iraq's nuclear program, which had been dismantled after the 1991 Gulf War. The United Nations had sealed the materials, and they remained untouched until the US troops arrived.

The looting that I observed was spontaneous. Quite likely the looters had no idea they were stealing deadly biological agents or radioactive materials or that they were putting themselves in danger. As I pointed out to Wolfowitz, as long as these sites remained unprotected, their deadly materials could end up not with ill-educated slum dwellers but with those who knew exactly what they were doing.

This is apparently what happened. According to an International Atomic Energy Agency report issued earlier this month, there was "widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement that has taken place at sites previously relevant to Iraq's nuclear program." This includes nearly 380 tons of high explosives suitable for detonating nuclear weapons or killing American troops. Some of the looting continued for many months -- possibly into 2004. Using heavy machinery, organized gangs took apart, according to the IAEA, "entire buildings that housed high-precision equipment."

This equipment could be anywhere. But one good bet is Iran, which has had allies and agents in Iraq since shortly after the US-led forces arrived.

This was a preventable disaster. Iraq's nuclear weapons-related materials were stored in only a few locations, and these were known before the war began. As even L. Paul Bremer III, the US administrator in Iraq, now admits, the United States had far too few troops to secure the country following the fall of Saddam Hussein. But even with the troops we had, the United States could have protected the known nuclear sites. It appears that troops did not receive relevant intelligence about Iraq's WMD facilities, nor was there any plan to secure them. Even after my briefing, the Pentagon leaders did nothing to safeguard Iraq's nuclear sites.

I supported President Bush's decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. At Wolfowitz's request, I helped advance the case for war, drawing on my work in previous years in documenting Saddam's atrocities, including the use of chemical weapons on the Kurds. In spite of the chaos that followed the war, I am sure that Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein.

It is my own country that is worse off -- 1,100 dead soldiers, billions added to the deficit, and the enmity of much of the world. Someone out there has nuclear bomb-making equipment, and they may not be well disposed toward the United States. Much of this could have been avoided with a competent postwar strategy. But without having planned or provided enough troops, we would be a lot safer if we hadn't gone to war.

Peter W. Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, is a fellow at the Center For Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. In the 1980s, he documented Iraqi atrocities against the Kurds for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Whew....Is Iraq a Big Cash Cow?

Adventure Capitalism - The Hidden 2001 Plan to Carve-up Iraq
TomPaine.com
by Greg Palast
Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Why were Iraqi elections delayed? Why was Jay Garner fired? Why are our troops still there? Investigative reporter Greg Palast uncovers new documents that answer these questions and more about the Bush administration’s grand designs on Iraq. Like everything else issued during this administration, the plan to overhaul the Iraqi economy has corporate lobbyist fingerprints all over it.

---

In February 2003, a month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a 101-page document came my way from somewhere within the U.S. State Department. Titled pleasantly, "Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Growth," it was part of a larger under-wraps program called "The Iraq Strategy."

The Economy Plan goes boldly where no invasion plan has gone before: the complete rewrite, it says, of a conquered state's "policies, laws and regulations." Here's what you'll find in the Plan: A highly detailed program, begun years before the tanks rolled, for imposing a new regime of low taxes on big business, and quick sales of Iraq's banks and bridges—in fact, "ALL state enterprises"—to foreign operators. There's more in the Plan, part of which became public when the State Department hired consulting firm to track the progress of the Iraq makeover. Example: This is likely history's first military assault plan appended to a program for toughening the target nation's copyright laws.

And when it comes to oil, the Plan leaves nothing to chance—or to the Iraqis. Beginning on page 73, the secret drafters emphasized that Iraq would have to "privatize" (i.e., sell off) its "oil and supporting industries." The Plan makes it clear that—even if we didn't go in for the oil—we certainly won't leave without it.

If the Economy Plan reads like a Christmas wishlist drafted by U.S. corporate lobbyists, that's because it was.

From slashing taxes to wiping away Iraq's tariffs (taxes on imports of U.S. and other foreign goods), the package carries the unmistakable fingerprints of the small, soft hands of Grover Norquist.

Norquist is the capo di capi of the lobbyist army of the right. In Washington every Wednesday, he hosts a pow-wow of big business political operatives and right-wing muscle groups—including the Christian Coalition and National Rifle Association—where Norquist quarterbacks their media and legislative offensive for the week.

Once registered as a lobbyist for Microsoft and American Express, Norquist today directs Americans for Tax Reform, a kind of trade union for billionaires unnamed, pushing a regressive "flat tax" scheme.

Acting on a tip, I dropped by the super-lobbyist's L-Street office. Below a huge framed poster of his idol ("NIXON— NOW MORE THAN EVER"), Norquist could not wait to boast of moving freely at the Treasury, Defense and State Departments, and, in the White House, shaping the post-conquest economic plans—from taxes to tariffs to the "intellectual property rights" that I pointed to in the Plan.

Norquist wasn't the only corporate front man getting a piece of the Iraq cash cow. Norquist suggested the change in copyright laws after seeking the guidance of the Recording Industry Association of America.

And then there's the oil. Iraq-born Falah Aljibury was in on the drafting of administration blueprints for the post-Saddam Iraq. According to Aljibury, the administration began coveting its Mideast neighbor's oil within weeks of the Bush-Cheney inauguration, when the White House convened a closed committee under the direction of the State Department's Pam Wainwright. The group included banking and chemical industry men, and the range of topics over what to do with a post-conquest Iraq was wide. In short order, said Aljibury, "It became an oil group."

This was not surprising as the membership list had a strong smell of petroleum. Besides Aljibury, an oil industry consultant, the secret team included executives from Royal-Dutch Shell and ChevronTexaco. These and other oil industry bigs would, in 2003, direct the drafting of a 300-page addendum to the Economy Plan solely about Iraq's oil assets. The oil section of the Plan, obtained after a year of wrestling with the administration over the Freedom of Information Act, calls for Iraqis to sell off to "IOCs" (international oil companies) the nation's "downstream" assets—that is, the refineries, pipelines and ports that, unless under armed occupation, a Mideast nation would be loathe to give up.

---The General Versus Annex D---

One thing stood in the way of rewriting Iraq's laws and selling off Iraq's assets: the Iraqis. An insider working on the plans put it coldly: "They have [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz coming out saying it's going to be a democratic country … but we're going to do something that 99 percent of the people of Iraq wouldn't vote for."

In this looming battle between what Iraqis wanted and what the Bush administration planned for them, the Iraqis had an unexpected ally, Gen. Jay Garner, the man appointed by our president just before the invasion as a kind of temporary Pasha to run the soon-to-be conquered nation.

Garner's an old Iraq hand who performed the benevolent autocratic function in the Kurdish zone after the first Gulf War. But in March 2003, the general made his big career mistake. In Kuwait City, fresh off the plane from the United States, he promised Iraqis they would have free and fair elections as soon as Saddam was toppled, preferably within 90 days.

Garner's 90-days-to-democracy pledge ran into a hard object: The Economy Plan's 'Annex D.' Disposing of a nation's oil industry—let alone redrafting trade and tax laws—can't be done in a weekend, nor in 90 days. Annex D lays out a strict 360-day schedule for the free-market makeover of Iraq. And there's the rub: It was simply inconceivable that any popularly elected government would let America write its laws and auction off the nation's crown jewel, its petroleum industry.

Elections would have to wait. As lobbyist Norquist explained when I asked him about the Annex D timetable, "The right to trade, property rights, these things are not to be determined by some democratic election." Our troops would simply have to stay in Mesopotamia a bit longer.

---New World Orders 12, 37, 81 and 83---

Gen. Garner resisted—which was one of the reasons for his swift sacking by Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld on the very night he arrived in Baghdad last April. Rummy had a perfect replacement ready to wing it in Iraq to replace the recalcitrant general. Paul Bremer may not have had Garner's experience on the ground in Iraq, but no one would question the qualifications of a man who served as managing director of Kissinger Associates.

Pausing only to install himself in Saddam's old palace—and adding an extra ring of barbed wire—"Jerry" Bremer cancelled Garner's scheduled meeting of Iraq's tribal leaders called to plan national elections. Instead, Bremer appointed the entire government himself. National elections, Bremer pronounced, would have to wait until 2005. The extended occupation would require our forces to linger.

The delay would, incidentally, provide time needed to lock in the laws, regulations and irreversible sales of assets in accordance with the Economy Plan.

On that, Bremer wasted no time. Altogether, the leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority issued exactly 100 orders that remade Iraq in the image of the Economy Plan. In May, for example, Bremer—only a month from escaping out Baghdad's back door—took time from fighting the burgeoning insurrection to sign orders 81—"Patents,"and 83, "Copyrights." Here, Grover Norquist's hard work paid off. Fifty years of royalties would now be conferred on music recording. And 20 years on Windows code.

Order number 37, "Tax Strategy for 2003," was Norquist's dream come true: taxes capped at 15 percent on corporate and individual income (as suggested in the Economy Plan, page 8). The U.S. Congress had rejected a similar flat-tax plan for America, but in Iraq, with an electorate of one—Jerry Bremer—the public's will was not an issue.

Not everyone felt the pain of this reckless rush to a free market. Order 12, "Trade Liberalization," permitted the tax- and tariff-free import of foreign products. One big winner was Cargill, the world's largest grain merchant, which flooded Iraq with hundreds of thousands of tons of wheat. For Iraqi farmers, already wounded by sanctions and war, this was devastating. They could not compete with the U.S. and Australian surplusses dumped on them. But the import plan carried out the letter of the Economy Plan.

This trade windfall for the West was enforced by the occupation's agriculture chief, Dan Amstutz, himself an import from the United States. Prior to George Bush taking office, Amstutz chaired a company funded by Cargill.

There's no sense cutting taxes on big business, ordering 20 years of copyright payments for Bill Gates' operating system or killing off protections for Iraqi farmers if some out-of-control Iraqi government is going to take it away after an election. The shadow governors of Iraq back in Washington thought of that, too. Bremer fled, but he's left behind him nearly 200 American "experts," assigned to baby-sit each new Iraqi minister—functionaries also approved by the U.S. State Department.

---The Price---

The free market paradise in Iraq is not free.

After General Garner was deposed, I met with him in Washington. He had little regard for the Economy Plan handed to him three months before the tanks rolled. He especially feared its designs on Iraq's oil assets and the delay in handing Iraq back to Iraqis. "That's one fight you don't want to take on," he told me.

But we have. After a month in Saddam's palace, Bremer cancelled municipal elections, including the crucial vote about to take place in Najaf. Denied the ballot, Najaf's Shi'ites voted with bullets. This April, insurgent leader Moqtada Al Sadr's militia killed 21 U.S. soldiers and, for a month, seized the holy city.

"They shouldn't have to follow our plan," the general said. "It's their country, their oil." Maybe, but not according to the Plan. And until it does become their country, the 82nd Airborne will have to remain to keep it from them.


For the interview with Jay Garner and more details of The Plan, see "Bush Family Fortunes: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," out this month on DVD. Watch a segment: http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm

Does Bush REALLY love the Troops???

Army Will Not Cut Iraq Combat Tours
By Mark Mazzetti
The Los Angeles Times

Wednesday 27 October 2004

Citing the insurgency, a lack of manpower and a plan to reorganize, the service's chief of staff says deployments cannot be shortened.
Washington - The Army has abandoned the possibility of shortening 12-month combat tours in Iraq to six or nine months, its top officer said Tuesday.

The intensity of the insurgency 18 months after the fall of Baghdad, combined with manpower problems from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, has forced the Army to at least temporarily rule out reducing soldiers' deployments to nine or even six months, said Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff. The yearlong tours will continue at least through next year, he said.

"We're at a level of engagement right now worldwide where it's very, very difficult to reduce the tour length," Schoomaker said. "We are planning 12 months boots on the ground until the level of effort goes down."

Another complicating factor is the Army's plan to create more combat brigades from 10 active divisions. Keeping troops in combat zones for longer periods allows the Army to reorganize more of its stateside units, Schoomaker told reporters.

In June, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asked the Army to consider shortening combat tours to bring its units closer in line with the Marine Corps, which deploys its units for six or seven months at a time. Army officials responded that while they preferred shorter tours, global deployments and their service's transformation plans prohibited such a move in the near future.

Accompanied by his deputy, Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard A. Cody, Schoomaker told reporters that commanders in Iraq also were concerned that shorter tours would keep U.S. forces from building contacts with Iraqis and gathering intelligence about the insurgency.

"It means that you're going to have constant handover of contacts with the local populace over there, which is exactly what you don't want to do in an insurgency," he said.

The generals said that Army Gen. John P. Abizaid of U.S. Central Command had not asked them to accelerate the deployment of troops scheduled to rotate into Iraq next year, which would bulk up the U.S.-led security force before elections scheduled for January.

The Pentagon's goal is to have a greater U.S.-led presence to protect international and Iraqi election workers and to provide security at polling stations. Last month, Abizaid announced plans to increase the security force closer to the election, yet said that he hoped Iraqi troops being trained by U.S. forces would provide the boost.

With the training of Iraqi forces going more slowly than planned, officials at the Pentagon believe it is increasingly likely that it will have to retool its rotation plan for next year to accommodate the elections. One possibility would be to send the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, which led the original charge on Baghdad, sooner than its scheduled deployment next year.

Another option to inflate troop levels would be to delay the departure from Iraq of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division and 1st Infantry Division, deployed in Baghdad and the so-called Sunni Triangle. In April, during uprisings in Shiite Muslim-dominated southern Iraq and in the Sunni city of Fallouja, the Pentagon delayed the departure of the Army's 1st Armored Division, sending it south to take on fighters loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr.

While both Schoomaker and Cody said that they were prepared to adjust the rotation schedule to accommodate conditions on the ground, officials at the Pentagon said privately that any decision must be made soon to allow for proper preparations.




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Go to Original

Bush's War Against the Military
By Ian Williams
In These Times

Monday 24 October 2004

George W. Bush so often invokes his nominal title of "commander in chief" at veterans' rallies, on military bases and during presidential debates that he now appears like some latter-day caudillo. But his claims to be a commander of any kind in any serious way are a figment of his imagination.

Discounting that he sent American troops into Iraq on false pretenses, a real commander would fight for the welfare of his troops. But Bush has demonstrated a consistent unwillingness to do so, and as a result many high-ranking officers have endorsed Kerry, including retired Navy Adm. William Crowe and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. John Shalikashvili.

Bush has failed the military on almost every level. While Halliburton and Boeing went to the bank this year with about $10 billion each, undermanned U.S. forces went into Iraq without armored vests and driving unarmored vehicles. The fatal results were hidden from public view as the dead were secreted home and the Department of Defense (DOD) obscured and juggled the numbers of maimed and wounded.

Once back in the United States, veterans found no federal welcome mat laid out for them. By April this year, one in six veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan had filed benefits claims with the Veterans Administration for service-related disabilities. These figures do not include those troops still serving and are twice the number the DOD Web site says suffered "Non-Mortal Wounds" in those conflicts. Today, one-third of those claims, almost 10,000, have yet to be processed. Further, Bush's 2005 budget will cut 540 staff members of the Veterans Benefit Administration, which is the office that handles the claims. The outreach department that lets vets know of available services also was instructed in a 2002 memo by a deputy undersecretary in the Veterans Health Administration to run in silent mode to flush out people who had not made claims out of ignorance.

Even if the war wounded succeed in getting disability pay, in 2003 Bush threatened to veto a bill that allowed veterans to collect disability pay and pensions simultaneously.

In 2003, his administration also tried to cut combat pay from $225 to $150 a month and the family separation allowance from $250 to $100. And most callously of all, the frat brat who ducked a war that killed 48,000 American troops threatened to veto a proposal to double the $6,000 payment to relatives of soldiers killed in action.

That is typical of the way in which President Bush, who loves to dress up in uniform, treats those who actually wear one. As a June 30, 2003, Army Times editorial concluded: "President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap and getting cheaper by the day, judging by the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately."

In his ghostwritten 1999 biography A Charge to Keep, an indignant Bush wrote: "Nearly twelve thousand members of the armed forces are on food stamps. I support increased pay and better benefits and training for our citizen solders. A volunteer military has only two paths. It can lower its standards to fill its ranks. Or it can inspire the best and brightest to join and stay." Despite four years to do something about it, more than 250,000 military families did not get Bush's much-vaunted child tax credit because their breadwinner earned less than $26,000 a year. And in his 2005 budget, Bush proposes only that combat pay not count toward eligibility for food stamps-for which no less than 25,000 military families are eligible.

The U.S. Army pay scale is about half that of the British, which is why there is a major crisis in military recruitment. Senior officers talk about a "serious crisis" in recruitment for the regular forces. In addition, the Iraq war has put heavy demands on reservists and guard units. For the first time in 10 years, the guard failed to meet its recruitment target. In one Indiana unit, for instance, the reenlistment rate has dropped from 85 percent to 32 percent.

You would think that the Bush administration would be solicitous of the foot soldiers who carry out its imperial ambitions. But this administration is militaristic, not pro-military. Most of its members sedulously avoided combat and uniformed service of any kind in previous wars and most current enlisted personnel come from small town, blue-collar America, precisely the people whose voices are among the least heard. It is no surprise that Labor Secretary Elaine Chao's proposals for cutting back legal entitlement to overtime pay this year included all those who had learned their skill in the military.

All of this penny-pinching may seem strange in light of Bush's desperate attempts to associate himself with the military. But when he dons a flak jacket, the president is not looking to win over those GIs who have just had their term extended on stop-loss orders, but those TV-viewing voters who put the military on a pedestal as the guarantor of American virtues.



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Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, now available from Nation Books.


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SUPREME COURT FOLLIES....HERE THEY COME!!!

Beware Scalia-Thomas Clones
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 28 October 2004

After months of intense campaigning about Iraq, terror, taxes and jobs, the future of the Supreme Court has finally entered the public discourse. Chief Justice William Rehnquist is in the intensive care unit, after undergoing a tracheotomy for thyroid cancer. The Court issued a terse statement, saying the Chief would take the bench when the justices reconvene on Nov. 1. Unlike the detailed updates released during Ruth Bader Ginsburg's struggle with colon cancer in 1999-2000, however, we have been given no details about Rehnquist's prognosis.

Just as Bush has downplayed the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq that U.S. forces should have secured, he has mentioned little, if anything, about Rehnquist's illness. Karl Rove, Bush's evil genius, is undoubtedly aware of the explosive nature of a dialogue about how the next commander-in-chief could shape the face of the Supreme Court for decades.

Rove likely knows a recent Time magazine poll showed 86 percent felt appointments to the Court during the next four years were very important (59 percent) or somewhat important (27 percent) to their choice for president. In that poll, 43 percent said it would make them more likely to vote for Kerry, whereas 38 percent thought it would lead them to choose Bush.

When the issue arose in the second and third presidential debates, Bush said he would have "no litmus test" for his judges. But during the 2000 campaign, Bush let slip that the justices he admired most were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. During the second debate recently, Bush echoed that sentiment, saying he would pick "strict constructionists," a buzz-phrase for Scalia-Thomas clones.

Fortunately, no vacancies have arisen on the high Court during Bush's term. But his choices for lifetime appointments to the lower federal court bench reveal a definite litmus test - anti-choice, anti-civil rights, anti- worker, anti-gay, anti-environment and pro-corporate. (See my editorial, Bush's Judges: Right-Wing Ideologues.) Bush's 201 nominees - 24 percent of all active judges - were ideologically screened by the conservative Federalist Society. Many Bush appointees are "embarrassingly unqualified for judicial office," wrote Professor Ronald Dworkin in The New York Review of Books recently.

Bush could have as many as four appointments to the high Court during a second term. All justices but Clarence Thomas are over 65 years old. Rehnquist is 80. John Paul Stevens, the most liberal on the Court, is 84. Sandra Day O'Connor, 74, and Ginsburg, 71, are both cancer survivors. Ginsburg, another liberal, is in frail health.

The Supreme Court is currently divided by a razor-thin 5-4 margin. Regardless of the outcome of Rehnquist's illness, he has said he would not remain on the Court for another four years. Bush, if given a second term, would replace Rehnquist with a much younger, right-winger, who would remain on the Court for years to come. Bush would also have the opportunity to choose the next chief justice, who could significantly shape the Court. If Bush had his druthers, he would elevate Scalia or Thomas to Chief. But either choice would invite a nasty partisan battle in the Senate, which must approve the president's nomination by a two-thirds vote. Bush would probably find another right-wing zealot to assume the role of chief justice.

What would the Court look like if Bush were to appoint justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas? Roe v. Wade could be overturned. Abortion could become a crime in most states - back to back-alley abortions for poor, young women. Workers could lose family and medical leave. Gays could be imprisoned for having consensual sex in the privacy of their own homes. Equal voting rights for African Americans and other racial minorities could be at risk (not just de facto, the way they are today, but de jure, as well.) Affirmative action could be eviscerated. Preservation of the environment could give way to corporate profits. Inmates in this country (not just in Iraq and Guantánamo) could be beaten with impunity.

In the second debate, Bush's seemingly righteous criticism of the racist Dred Scott decision was really a veiled message to his right-wing followers that he would appoint anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court, according to former Supreme Court law clerks Charles Rothfeld and Thomas Colby, writing for americaprogress.org.

The May 2004 report, Courting Disaster 2004: How a Scalia-Thomas Court Would Endanger Our Rights and Freedoms, published by People For the American Way, concluded: "Supporters of Justices Scalia and Thomas praise them as 'strict constructionists,' 'originalists,' 'traditionalists,' and advocates of the 'rule of law.' These labels are misleading because they obscure the two Justices' ultra-conservative activism. The terms suggest that Thomas and Scalia are committed only to an interpretation of the law that is true to its actual wording, or in the case of the Constitution, true to the intent of the Framers. This legal approach, its adherents say, ensures that they are not activists who use their position to shape the law in their own political image. Actually, the opposite is true. A Supreme Court modeled after Scalia's and Thomas' judicial philosophy would be an activist Court that would produce dramatic changes in the law as we know it. And virtually every change would move our laws in the direction advocated by right-wing conservatives."

The future of the law of the land is at stake in this election. The differences between Bush and Kerry are stark on judicial appointments. During the third debate, Kerry said: "I'm not going to appoint a judge to the court who's going to undo a constitutional right, whether it's the First Amendment or the Fifth Amendment or some other right that's given under our courts today, or under the Constitution." Kerry added: "And I believe that the right of choice is a constitutional right."

Voters will have a choice between an administration that fights to protect the rights of everyone, not just those of straight white rich religious men, and one that promises to remake the Court in the image of those who would deny basic liberties to many.



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Marjorie Cohn, a contributing editor to t r u t h o u t, is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists.
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Why some Conspiracy Theorists Are Interesting....


Write More About Skull & Bones
Secret societies? UFOs? The truth about what *really* happened on 9/11? The media cowers
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, October 27, 2004




Mark Morford



I get this a lot:
Hey Mark, you're a rather weird, unconventional columnist, why don't you quit toeing the typical blasé journalism line and renounce the corporate-controlled news feeds and standard pop-culture drivel and instead write about the real truths, the real and sinister power structures at work in America and the world?

Like for example how both Kerry and Bush are members of mega-yuppie Yale secret society/boys' club Skull & Bones, and therefore suckle at the same tit of nefarious primeval Illuminati power and draw their ideas from same trough of covert draconian ideology, the one that is right now running the world via an insanely intricate network of corporate fronts and Swiss bank accounts and invisible spaceships and ancient cabals featuring really elaborate handshakes that would make "The Da Vinci Code" seem like a day at the sandbox? Hmm?

And why, furthermore, don't you talk about the real truths of 9/11? Like how BushCo not only allowed the tragedy to occur to further his administration's snarling agenda but also how he actually made it happen, signed the order himself, with the full and complicit cooperation of the FBI and the CIA and the Saudis and maybe even Enron and the Wal-Mart heirs and probably the Olsen twins.

And by the way did you know the planes that crashed into the WTC were fully radio controlled? And Dick Cheney was commanding the entire thing from the ground and they had been rehearsing the attack for months and it was all part of a master plan decades in the making and by the way what about the Pentagon?

Haven't you seen that amazing video on that Web site? Those incredible and damning photos? Noticed the weird cover-up? That wasn't no 747 that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, buddy. Look a little closer. See? And what about Building 7? Why did that 47-story tower adjacent to the WTC collapse when it had no fire and no plane crash and no reason to fall? Why isn't the media reporting any of this? Where is the outrage? Goddamn frightening, is what it is.

This is what they say. Mark, don't be a typical media lackey, avoiding the real truth in favor of safe, predigested corporate news tripe. What are you, scared? Repressed? I mean, who cares about the price of raw sweet crude or rampant overfishing when there's astounding crop-circle phenomena and suspicious Air Force inactivity and grainy aerial photos from Area 51 to stare at with a magnifying glass and huge doses of mistrust?

Does this make you laugh? Scoff? It is, after all, incredibly easy to dismiss conspiracy theories as ranty silly unproven wishful thinking wrought by desperately lonely fatalists and nutballs and geeks, fringe kooks ever reaching for some eternally just-out-of-reach meta-explanation, some sort of proof of massive cover-up and of the existence of a very real Matrix, and it's all best explained by the mad brilliance of the books of David Icke.

But you know what? It's not that easy. And it ain't so silly. These people, they have a point. They are indeed onto something quite large and ominous and it very much has to do with the media toeing the line of "safe" information and not really asking truly difficult or radically off-track questions of our leaders or of the strangeness happening in the world. Reptilian super-races from the fifth dimension walking among us and secretly mind controlling your child via MSG and fluoridated water? OK, maybe not. But look just a little deeper.

After all, there is indeed ample evidence that the U.S. government, long before 9/11, had already discussed the quite plausible possibilities and strategic benefits of unleashing a "Pearl Harbor"-type event on America for the purposes of creating havoc and fear and furthering certain agendas. This much is a given. And it's just the tip of the iceberg.

Look. There are plenty of strangely unanswered questions about 9/11, about the stunning inaction of NORAD and Bush's stupefying nonreaction upon hearing of the attack, not to mention his administration's incredible attempts to halt any independent 9/11 investigations, and have you ever read a fully satisfying account of how this whole atrocity could have happened, one that answered all your questions and quelled your lingering doubts and squashed, once and for all, any hints of dread you had about our government's potential role in the tragedy? Neither have I. Neither has anyone.

Of course, no one in any major media will touch this stuff. It is professional suicide to dare suggest an alternate truth to the one supplied by the Pentagon and regurgitated by the media, despite the fact that most every journalist, trained as they are to be suspicious and wary and fully cognizant of the fact that there is always more to a given apocalypse than meets the eye, every journalist knows that buried just beneath the slippery surface of any good conspiracy theory is a gem or three of real truth, a question that begs to be solved or at least researched and, yet, most likely never will, because it has been cast into the madhouse of "outrageous" impossibility and is therefore rendered impotent and hopeless.

Look at it this way. Much of the world believes in UFOs. Or ghosts. Or telekinesis. Or past lives. Or alternate realities. Or the paranormal. Or all of the above. Most of us fully intuit that we are not the center of the universe and that it's rather narcissistic and outrageously arrogant of us to think we are. Whether or not this means shiny blinking flying saucers and androgynous Gumby-like aliens with almond-shaped eyes is beside the point; most sentient bipedal creatures know there is more to all of this than just puny and egotistical little us.

And yet, go ahead and try to get any serious public figure or mainstream pundit to openly admit this belief, this fact, in public. Try to find more than a glossy and supercilious feature in, say, Time magazine (i.e., "UFOs: Gosh, are they really here?") Won't happen, so surrounded are such topics in hokum and wide-eyed ranting and fringe intellectual cheese.

The world of conspiracy theories, it is like a zoo. It is like a black hole. It is the place we as a culture toss ideas that don't fit quite right, that unsettle and disturb and cause us to shudder and shake off the queasy feeling.

And it is the place the Powers That Be will toss any sinister and dark questions about their behavior, safe in the knowledge that anyone who goes to look for the answer will have to dive into that gnarled world and will look foolish and silly and will be probably be laughed off the stage.

Sometimes it's all you -- or I -- can do to hint at the existence of these radical notions and illuminate the frightening possibilities and scream into the Void, hoping to agitate and inform and inspire while still covering your professional butt. A copout? Maybe. But then again, if there's an alternative, I have yet to find it.

And the truth is, we don't really want such unstable questions answered. We simply cannot tolerate to have our world, our leaders, our foundations so questioned. We prefer stasis to growth, security to true knowledge, blind faith to chaotic sticky self-defined wonder.

After all, once you allow the real possibility of UFOs or psychic healing or crop-circle phenomena or the notion that we could very well have a hugely malicious, criminal U.S. government capable of pulling a 9/11 on its own citizens, well, the happy capitalistic all-American Christian world begins to implode. Foundations crumble. Trust in our institutions vanishes. Gods fall and doctrines crumble and televangelists spontaneously combust and everyone starts reimagining the social order in ways that absolutely terrify those who now hold the reins.

Real truth, after all, often means anarchy, disorder, revolution. And God knows we can't have that.

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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.

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