Patriot Act abuse - more evidence of Bush League duplicity

A recent NY Times article by Eric Lichtblau says a recent Justice Department report documents many cases of the USA Patriot Act, supposedly the nation's bulwark against terrorism, being used for purposes that have nothing to do with terrorists or terrorism.

Publicly, Attorney General John Ashcroft and senior Justice Department officials have portrayed their expanded power almost exclusively as a means of fighting terrorists, with little or no mention of other criminal uses.

"We have used these tools to prevent terrorists from unleashing more death and destruction on our soil," Mr. Ashcroft said last month in a speech in Washington, one of more than two dozen he has given in defense of the law, which has come under growing attack. "We have used these tools to save innocent American lives."

Internally, however, Justice Department officials have emphasized a much broader mandate.

A guide to a Justice Department employee seminar last year on financial crimes, for instance, said: "We all know that the USA Patriot Act provided weapons for the war on terrorism. But do you know how it affects the war on crime as well?"

Beware migrating stories on the Patriot Act. Remember the invasion of Iraq? It was sold to the country on the basis of The imminent Iraqi threat to the US. When it became obvious that Iraq posed no imminent threat, it was suddenly about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Now that it's obvious they had no WMDs, it was about liberating the Iraqi people (which, by the way, would make it an illegal war, as if anyone in the Bush administration cared about such technicalities).

The same thing will happen with the Patriot Act. The new police powers it grants were sold to us as necessary to fight terrorism. Expect a gradual shift in emphasis over the coming year. By the time the 2004 election rolls around, we'll be so inured to the use of Patriot Act provisions against non-terrorists, they'll not only be openly calling it a tool in the "War on Crime," they'll be stumping for Patriot Act II on the same basis. Criminals, they will tell us, are not patriots, and it's only patriotic to give the police the tools to pursue them.

Never mind that the nation's courts and legislatures have held for years that these particular tools go beyond what the police ought to have at their disposal. Never mind that the civil liberties taken away under the Patriot Act have never been deemed dispensable before. And never mind that the Patriot Act is unconstitutional. If the members of the Bush League have their way, by the time George W. leaves office the Supreme Court will be packed with right-wingers ready to redefine the constitution and legitimize the theft of human liberty for the sake of security.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin

It's not really about our security anyway, not yours and mine. It's about repositioning government as the defender of the corporations that own most of America (and America's politicians)--and are moving closer and closer to their goal of owning the whole world. We're headed towards a high-tech feudalism, in which the people depend on their corporate masters for their homes, their livelihood, and their very lives.

That's exactly the kind of society the Founding Fathers revolted against. Don't look now, but your children and grandchildren may have to fight the same revolution.

Pretzel logic: Iraq as flytrap

Condoleezza Rice has put the ultimate spin on the subject of Iraq as terrorist haven.

Writing in the New York Times, Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger relate Rice's blinding flash of revelation:

"There is almost a sense that they were sitting someplace minding their own business — drinking tea, having meetings" and then decided to come to Iraq only after the American military rolled into Baghdad.

"These are fighters, they are jihadists," she said. "They would be fighting someplace. Maybe they would be fighting in the Gulf. Maybe they would be fighting in Southeast Asia. Maybe they would be fighting, or trying to fight, in the United States."

So there you have it. Attracting the world's terrorists to Iraq is a good thing because it keeps them out of the United States.

Of course this ignores the very real possibility that a number of these fighters would not be "jihadists" had it not been for what they perceive as a Judeo-Christian invasion (dare we say Crusade?) into Muslim lands--to say nothing of the growing sense that the greater threat to US forces in country comes not from hard-core Islamist militants, but from everyday Iraqis who are tired of living under military occupation.

And even if you suspend disbelief long enough to assume Condi is right, how many Americans believe that US forces should be in the Middle East to serve as bait?

The Muzzled Media and the Bush League apologists

Last week on CNBC's "Topic A with Tina Brown," Christiane Amanpour said "I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled" in coverage of the Iraq invasion, "intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News."

Antonio Zerbisias writes in the Toronto Star:

According to USA Today's Peter Johnson, who first reported this astonishing admission, Brown then asked Amanpour "if there was any story during the war that she couldn't report."

"It's not a question of couldn't do it, it's a question of tone," the veteran correspondent said. "It's a question of being rigorous. It's really a question of really asking the questions. All of the entire body politic in my view, whether it's the administration, the intelligence, the journalists, whoever, did not ask enough questions, for instance, about weapons of mass destruction. I mean, it looks like this was disinformation at the highest levels."

Well, excuse my French but that was apparent to anybody who watched with even a half-closed eye. Most mainstream media south of the border, and even some up here were unabashedly pro-war, accepting everything and questioning nothing put out by the Bushies.

And there was no greater offender than Fox News, the channel that essentially elected that administration in the first place.

Recall that, on election night 2000, when the votes were neck-and-neck for Bush and Democratic contender Al Gore, Fox declared at 2:16 a.m. that Bush had taken Florida and therefore the presidency. The other networks and some East Coast newspapers jumped in, setting the tone for the dispute that followed for weeks afterwards, a dispute that made Gore look like a sore loser.

But, as it turned it, the director of the Fox electoral desk that made that faux call was John Ellis, a staunch Republican and Bush cousin who would later boast to The New Yorker that, on election night, he spoke frequently with both Dubya and his brother Jeb, governor of Florida.

Predictably, Fox is unrepentant. Spokeswoman Irena Briganti said, "Given the choice, it's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda."

Maybe Ms. Briganti should be less concerned with what she's viewed as, and more concerned with what she is. It's better, in my opinion, to be a concerned patriot who's seen as a traitor than a toadying sycophant who's seen as a patriot.

"This is the fence the West built"

A September 14 Washington Post cartoon by Tom Toles seems appropriate to the day the WTO talks broke down. The cartoon is a triptych. The first panel, captioned "This is the fence the West built," shows a big fence on which is scrawled "AGRICULTURAL BARRIERS." The second panel is captioned "This is the whitewash that covered the fence the West built."

If you haven't guessed what the third panel says, you can find it here.

If you liked the Patriot Act, you'll love this....

Even while Bush League spokesmen try to downplay or deny the havoc wrought on our civil liberties by the original Patriot Act, Dubya himself is asking for increased police power and reduced privacy protections.

As reported by Eric Lichtbrau in the September 14 New York Times:

For months, President Bush's advisers have assured a skittish public that law-abiding Americans have no reason to fear the long reach of the antiterrorism law known as the Patriot Act because its most intrusive measures would require a judge's sign-off.

But in a plan announced this week to expand counterterrorism powers, President Bush adopted a very different tack. In a three-point presidential plan that critics are already dubbing Patriot Act II, Mr. Bush is seeking broad new authority to allow federal agents — without the approval of a judge or even a federal prosecutor — to demand private records and compel testimony.

Mr. Bush also wants to expand the use of the death penalty in crimes like terrorist financing, and he wants to make it tougher for defendants in such cases to be freed on bail before trial. These proposals are also sure to prompt sharp debate, even among Republicans.

Someone should remind the President that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution he swore to uphold and defend says: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. "

Michael Parenti: Bush League as Empire

Brian Lamb interviewed Michael Parenti on C-SPAN about Parenti's new book, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome. Parenti says that contrary to popular belief, Julius Caesar was not an emperor (his title was Imperator, or Commander); nor was he the power-grabber and usurper portrayed by conventional history. Rather he was the last leader of a 500-year republic, and the last of a long line of reformers who were murdered one after another by the aristocratic members of the Senate who felt they had a lot to lose in social reform. His nephew Octavius took over the government after caesar's assassination, took the name Augustus Caesar, and became the first true Emperor of Rome.

So why is that relevant here? What does it have to do with the Bush League, or 21st-century America?

Joseph Schumpeter was a conservative economist who was read widely in the first half of the last century. I used to read him when I was an undergraduate in 1950. And in 1919, one of his earliest writings, this is what he wrote. He was describing Roman imperialism, the Roman empire, which the republic had an empire at the time. I won't read every word of it, but I'll just say -- and he said, "Rome was governed by that policy which pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generates war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism. There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies. And if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs."

Now, does any of that sound familiar to you at all? So he's writing in 1919 about Rome, and that could be about the American empire. We are constantly -- and I think that's one of the tricks of ruling groups, which is to distract the people from their immediate problems and interests by -- Alexander Hamilton made this point in Federalist paper No. 6. He said, "Many a sovereign has" -- how did he phrase it? -- "has conjured up a crisis abroad to distract the people from their domestic grievances." And I think that's what we have going today.

There are other parallels between the Roman Empire and George W. Bush's America. Read the PNAC's manifesto to learn of their blueprint for world dominion and a Pax Americana. Ignore it at your peril--for those who do not learn from history, as Santayana said, are doomed to repeat it.

The entire Vietnam War cost about $57 billion but that was back when a quagmire dollar was really worth something.
--Barry Crimmins

Book Review: the War on the Bill of Rights - and the Gathering Resistance

Robyn E. Blumner writes in the St. Petersburg Times:

I recall that morning the way you might remember a fitful nightmare - staccato images more than streaming video. I was at my newsroom desk, reading what turned out to be yesterday's news, when a colleague yelled out that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. It was inconceivable. Within minutes, the confusing jumble of "what's happening?" became clear: terrorism. Americans were being indiscriminately targeted for murder and mayhem.

I knew life would change after that day. Despite the estimated $30-billion we poured annually into the intelligence services budgets, something big had been missed. There would be the inevitable chest-beating calls for more security and monitoring. But what concerned me most was that the likes of George Bush and John Ashcroft were at the helm. Would they respect the values that define this nation and uphold the rule of law, separation of powers and individual rights? Or would they use this time of heightened anxiety as an opportunity to bulldoze any limits on their power?

Not surprising, they chose the latter route. We wake up two years later in a far diminished republic. The Bush administration has gone about this "war on terrorism" as though it were a war on the Bill of Rights.

If you want proof, I commend a new book by that title from columnist Nat Hentoff, which vividly describes the chilling compendium of abuses commited by our government since 9/11. The War on the Bill of Rights - and the Gathering Resistance (www.sevenstories.com) should be required reading in every high school government class. Drawing parallels to McCarthyism and COINTELPRO, the FBI's attempt to undermine the civil rights movement, Hentoff chronicles a great wrong inflicted by government - one we are still living, and one we will, like the others, come to regret.

There's more to the review, which can also be found at The Smirking Chimp. I think this book is going on my reading list.

British MP, foreign Environment Minister on PNAC and 9/11

MP Michael Meacher, writing in The Guardian, says the Project for the New American Century's manifesto "Rebuilding America's Defenses" provides a better explanation for the events before, during, and after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center than does the story being promulgated by the Bush and Blair regimes.

Using published stories from a variety of news media, Meacher shows that the Bush administration ignored or actively quashed specific, credible warnings of the attack to come; failed to mobilize legally required responses to the hijackings in progress; and in the ensuing months, repeatedly passed up opportunities to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.

The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews Air Force base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence."

Meacher points out how all of this dovetails with the PNAC's plans for world domination, from the plans (dating back to the '90s) to invade and occupy Iraq even if Saddam Hussein were no longer in power, to their lament that their plans would be a hard sell lacking a latter-day Pearl Harbor attack.

The Bush administration, of course, denies everything (well, duh), saying the allegations "would be monstrous, and monstrously offensive, if they came from someone serious or credible." Apparently, a Member of Parliament and six-year Minister in the government that has been Bush's closest ally in the global war on terrorism is not considered serious or credible, nor is the whole "of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain."

Of course the administration could presumably put an end to such talk by encouraging and cooperating with a bipartisan investigation into what really happened two years ago. Such an inquiry is essential, if only to clear the

A big liberal "Thank you" to Fox

I just want to go on record as saying I'm grateful to Fox for suing Al Franken over the title of his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

Due in no small measure to the publicity generated by Fox's ridiculous claim--dismissed by US District Judge Denny Chin as "wholly without merit, both factually and legally"--Franken's hilarious book is now a smash hit, as reported by Ciro Scotti in Business Week Online:

Now Fox, and especially its blustery everyman host Bill O'Reilly, are the laughingstock of Media City. Laughing hardest is Franken, a hilarious and sometimes abrasive ex-writer and performer on Saturday Night Live whose previous books include Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. With a little help from his enemies at Fox, Lies and the Lying Liars is now the #2 best-selling book on Amazon.com, as of Sept. 3, and has also just grabbed the top spot on The New York Times Best-Seller List.

The book (which has since gone to #1 at Amazon as well) really is funny. More importantly, it drives home again and again the fact that the corporate media cannot be taken at face value. Time after time, Franken exposes the pronouncements of the right-wing talking heads as outrageous distortions or outright lies.

Buy this book and loan it to anyone you know who has a brain. My standard practice, in recommending it to Republican friends, is to sell the sizzle, not the steak. "Whether you agree with him or not," I tell them, "it's a good laugh." Once they read it, I'm betting that it will at least pull a little of the wool off their eyes; hopefully they'll start taking the Bush League lies with a grain of salt. Who knows? Maybe they'll even think about checking some of the facts for themselves.

That can only help. There are far too many good, honest people who have been taken in by the propaganda of the vast right-wing conspiracy. To take back our country and reclaim our freedom, all we have to do is get those people to open their eyes and look. Once you see the man behind the curtain, it becomes impossible to believe in the wizard.

Bush Leaguer cashes in after Clean Air Act gutted

From an NRDC press release:

A week after the Environmental Protection Agency issued a final rule gutting a key Clean Air Act provision, NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) has learned that a high-level EPA air official will take a job at Southern Co., a major polluter that lobbied heavily for the rule. John Pemberton, chief of staff to EPA's assistant administrator for air and radiation, Jeff Holmstead, will join the company as a senior executive.

"Industry bought and paid for the Bush administration's assault on our clean air protections, so it's fitting that one of the nation's biggest polluters should reward this EPA official by putting him on its payroll," said John Walke, director of NRDC's Clean Air Project. "Unfortunately, it's the American people who will pay with more asthma, respiratory disease, poisoned lakes and smoggy cities."

Last week EPA announced a final rule that will effectively repeal the Clean Air Act's "new source review" provision, which requires companies to install modern pollution control technologies in new plants and in old plants when they make modifications that significantly increase pollution. The new final rule will allow facilities to avoid installing pollution controls when they replace equipment - even if the upgrade increases pollution - as long as the cost of the replacement does not exceed 20 percent of the cost of major polluting equipment at their plants.

Southern Co. is a defendant in eight of 51 federal clean air enforcement cases prosecuting new source review violations. If the new "20 percent rule" had been in place previously, Southern Co.'s violations would have been legal.

Southern Co., which owns coal-fired power plants in the Southeast, lobbied intensively to cripple these clean air protections, enlisting the help of top Republican lobbyist Haley Barbour. Last year, NRDC uncovered a March 2001 email from an in-house Southern Co. lobbyist requesting that Vice President Cheney's energy plan recommend significantly weakening the new source review provision. The lobbyist also urged the Bush administration to reverse its position in ongoing enforcement cases against Southern and other utility company defendants. (Click here to see the email, which NRDC obtained though a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.) The final Cheney energy plan directed EPA to overhaul the new source review provision and directed the Justice Department to revisit the enforcement cases. EPA followed through last week by gutting the provision.

"This is par for the course in the shameless world of Bush administration environmental policy," said Greg Wetstone, advocacy director at NRDC. "A timber lobbyist runs the Forest Service, a mining company lobbyist is deputy secretary of interior, and EPA officials take dictation from major polluters and then brazenly cash-in."

The Natural Resources Defense Council is a national, non-profit organization of scientists, lawyers and environmental specialists dedicated to protecting public health and the environment. Founded in 1970, NRDC has more than 550,000 members nationwide, served from offices in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco.