Progressive Quotes

Americans on America

2006-12-19T12:51:00.000+09:00

"Freedom , not safety , is the highest good."

"[O]vergrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."

- George Washington Washington's Farewell Address, 1796

"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like fire: a dangerous servant and a terrible master."
- George Washington

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it."

"I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind."

"It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape."

"Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us."

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."

"Question even the existence of a God; if there be one, he must approve of the homage of reason over that of blind-folded fear."
- Thomas Jefferson

"All men having power ought to be mistrusted."

"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."

"It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."

"Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other."

"The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war."

"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."

"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."
- James Madison

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin

"They may introduce the practice of France, Spain, and Germany--of torturing, to extort a confession of the crime. They will say that they might as well draw examples from those countries as from Great Britain, and they will tell you that there is such a necessity of strengthening the arm of government, that they must have a criminal equity, and extort confession by torture, in order to punish with still more relentless severity. We are then lost and undone ..."
- Thomas Paine, Debate in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 16, 1788

Human Nature

2006-08-21T06:05:00.000+09:00

Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?

An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You’d have to be an idiot to agree with my plan—at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.

And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite.3 The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven’t even considered the battering ram aspect of cars—why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?

It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism.
- John Taylor Gatto, The Underground Histroy of American Education

Environment

2006-01-30T00:57:00.000+09:00

Every significant indicator of global environmental health is heading in the wrong direction.
- Adam Werbach, former Sierra Club President

Peace and Dissent

2005-07-05T08:33:00.000+09:00

It's the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
- Albert Camus

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
- Teddy Roosevelt

Loyalty in character means absolute obedience that does not question the results of the order nor its reasons, but rather obeys for the sake of obedience itself. Such obedience is an expression of heroic character when following the order leads to personal disadvantage or seems even to contradict one's personal convictions.
- Rudolf Hess, 25 February 1934, "The Oath to Adolf Hitler"

Downing Street Memo and Other Lies for War

2005-07-04T09:12:00.000+09:00

Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States

If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense
against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any
agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of
such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy,
each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than
five years, or both.
- U.S. Code, Chapter 19, Section 371

a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully --

falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

- False Statements Accountability Act of 1996

Guantanamo, etc.

2005-06-27T11:42:00.000+09:00

Lease of Coaling or Naval Stations Agreement Between the United States and Cuba (1903)

ARTICLE I
The Republic of Cuba hereby leases to the United States, for the time required for the purposes of coaling and naval stations, the following described areas of land and water situated in the Island of Cuba:

1st. In Guantanamo...

Platt Amendment (1903)

VII. That to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations at certain specified points to be agreed upon with the President of the United States.

Article 5
The present Convention shall apply to the persons referred to in Article 4 from the time they fall into the power of the enemy and until their final release and repatriation.
Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.

Article 130
Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the Convention: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, compelling a prisoner of war to serve in the forces of the hostile Power, or wilfully depriving a prisoner of war of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in this Convention.

Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumanor Degrading Treatment or Punishment
Adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession byGeneral Assembly resolution 39/46 of 10 December 1984
entry into force 26 June 1987, in accordance with article 27 (1)

Article 1
1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider application.

Article 2
1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political in stability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Article 3

1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

Article 4
1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.

2. Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.

Article 5
1. Each State Party shall take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over the offences referred to in article 4 in the following cases:

(a) When the offences are committed in any territory under its jurisdiction or on board a ship or aircraft registered in that State;
(b) When the alleged offender is a national of that State;
(c) When the victim is a national of that State if that State considers it appropriate.

2. Each State Party shall likewise take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over such offences in cases where the alleged offender is present in any territory under its jurisdiction and it does not extradite him pursuant to article 8 to any of the States mentioned in paragraph I of this article.

3. This Convention does not exclude any criminal jurisdiction exercised in accordance with internal law.

Article 6

...

4. When a State, pursuant to this article, has taken a person into custody, it shall immediately notify the States referred to in article 5, paragraph 1, of the fact that such person is in custody and of the circumstances which warrant his detention. The State which makes the preliminary inquiry contemplated in paragraph 2 of this article shall promptly report its findings to the said States and shall indicate whether it intends to exercise jurisdiction.

Article 10

1. Each State Party shall ensure that education and information regarding the prohibition against torture are fully included in the training of law enforcement personnel, civil or military, medical personnel, public officials and other persons who may be involved in the custody, interrogation or treatment of any individual subjected to any form of arrest, detention or imprisonment.

2. Each State Party shall include this prohibition in the rules or instructions issued in regard to the duties and functions of any such person.

Article 11

Each State Party shall keep under systematic review interrogation rules, instructions, methods and practices as well as arrangements for the custody and treatment of persons subjected to any form of arrest, detention or imprisonment in any territory under its jurisdiction, with a view to preventing any cases of torture.

Article 12

Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.

Article 13

Each State Party shall ensure that any individual who alleges he has been subjected to torture in any territory under its jurisdiction has the right to complain to, and to have his case promptly and impartially examined by, its competent authorities. Steps shall be taken to ensure that the complainant and witnesses are protected against all ill-treatment or intimidation as a consequence of his complaint or any evidence given.

Article 14

1. Each State Party shall ensure in its legal system that the victim of an act of torture obtains redress and has an enforceable right to fair and adequate compensation, including the means for as full rehabilitation as possible. In the event of the death of the victim as a result of an act of torture, his dependants shall be entitled to compensation.

2. Nothing in this article shall affect any right of the victim or other persons to compensation which may exist under national law.

Article 15

Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.

Article 16

1. Each State Party shall undertake to prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture as defined in article I, when such acts are committed by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. In particular, the obligations contained in articles 10, 11, 12 and 13 shall apply with the substitution for references to torture of references to other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

2. The provisions of this Convention are without prejudice to the provisions of any other international instrument or national law which prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment or which relates to extradition or expulsion.

Nuclear Weapons

2005-06-07T00:15:00.000+09:00

If I were to characterize US and NATO nuclear policies in one sentence, I would say they are immoral, illegal and militarily unnecessary.
- Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara

Freedom

2005-06-03T00:43:00.000+09:00

"If one accepts this assumption, freedom will never be achieved, for one can not arrive at the maturity for freedom without having already acquired it; one must be free to learn how to make use of one's powers freely and usefully. The first attempts will surley be brutal and will lead to a state of affairs more painful and dangerous than the former condition under the dominance but also the protection of an external authority. However, one can achieve reason only through one's own experiences and one must be free to be able to undertake them..."
- Immanuel Kant

The War on Terror

2005-05-30T12:18:00.000+09:00

"This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine... We're going to lie about things."
- an unnamed Pentagon war planner quoted by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, 9/24/01

Islam

2005-05-30T10:58:00.000+09:00

[I]t is often said that Islam was 'spread by the sword'.

This is not the whole story, however. From the time of Muhammad onwards, Muslim agents worked to promote the 'Message of the Prophet'; likewise, recorded instances of conquered peoples being forced to accept Islam are the exception, not the rule...

While conversion to Islam was not discouraged in the first century of conquest, it wasan't greatly encouraged either - largely because Muslims were exempt from the jizya tax. If the newly conquered countries had been converted en masse, the Arab empire would have rapidly drained of revenue. Tolerance was the norm instead, and Christians, Jews and some Zoroastrians became ahl-adh-dhimma - protected peoples.
- Justin Wintle, The Rough Ruide History of Islam, p. 52-53

Government

2005-05-16T11:31:00.000+09:00

Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid. Did you hear that? - stupid.
- Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, 1965

[American leaders] are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't care ... the same that could be said about a sociopath. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them ... then they just don't care about it happening to other people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home - the ones who make it back alive - with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things.
- William Blum

This [the U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.
- Benjamin Franklin

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
- Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

Immigration

2005-05-15T21:50:00.000+09:00

Submerged cultures

A culture can be submerged without an immigrant presence. But an immigrant presence will have only a faint, and usually beneficial, effect unless the number of imigrants is very large, or their culture powerfully dominant...

A culture can be submerged without an immigrant presence...

[H]ardly a household in Britain is not now pestered by trick-or-treat extortions on 31 October...

There nevertheless is such a thing as a country's being submerged by immigration. Britain would indeed be in no position to complain of being swamped, even if any real danger of its being so existed. In two former British colonies the colonial authorities positively encouraged immigration that bade fair to submerge - or swamp - the native population: in Malaya and in Fiji...

Why does a nation have a right not to be submerged? Each person's sense of who he is derives from many circumstances: his occupation, his ideals and his beliefs, but also from the customs and language he shares with those about him...

[I]t is an injustice that immigration should ever be allowed to swell to a size that threatens the indigenous population with being submerged. It is very seldom that there is a genuine danger of this. It can happen, as we already noted, under colonial regime indifferent to the wishes of the inhabitants of a territory it governs. It can also happen when a government is determined to obliterate a minority, and sets about it, not by massacre, or not just by massacre, but by systematically settling large numbers in its territory who do not share the culture of the original inhabitants. Examples from recent times are East Timor and Tibet.
- Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees, p.14-15, 17, 20

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

CONVENTION RELATING TO THE STATUS OF STATELESS PERSONS

Adopted on 20 September 1954 by a Conference of Plenipotentiaries convened by Economic and Social Council resolution 526 A (XVII) of 26 April 1954
ENTRY INTO FORCE: 6 June 1960, in accordance with article 39

Article 7. - Exemption from reciprocity

1. Except where this Convention contains more favorable provisions, a Contracting State shall accord to stateless persons the same treatment as is accorded to aliens generally.

2. After a period of three years' residence, all stateless persons shall enjoy exemption from legislative reciprocity in the territory of the Contracting States.

3. Each Contracting State shall continue to accord to stateless persons the rights and benefits to which they were already entitled, in the absence of reciprocity, at the date of entry into force of this Convention for that State.

Article 16. - Access to courts

1. A stateless person shall have free access to the courts of law on the territory of all Contracting States.

2. A stateless person shall enjoy in the Contracting State in which he has his habitual residence the same treatment as a national in matters pertaining to access to the courts, including legal assistance and exemption from cautio judicatum solvi.

Article 26. - Freedom of movement

Each Contracting State shall accord to stateless persons lawfully in its territory the right to choose their place of residence and to move freely within its territory, subject to any regulations applicable to aliens generally in the same circumstances.

Article 27. - Identity papers

The Contracting States shall issue identity papers to any stateless person in their territory who does not possess a valid travel document.

Article 28. - Travel documents

The Contracting States shall issue to stateless persons lawfully staying in their territory travel documents for the purpose of travel outside their territory, unless compelling reasons of national security or public order otherwise require, and the provisions of the schedule to this Convention shall apply with respect to such documents. The Contracting States may issue such a travel document to any other stateless person in their territory; they shall in particular give sympathetic consideration to the issue of such a travel document to stateless persons in their territory who are unable to obtain a travel document from the country of their lawful residence.

Article 31. - Expulsion

1. The Contracting States shall not expel a stateless person lawfully in their territory save on grounds of national security or public order.

2. The expulsion of such a stateless person shall be only in pursuance of a decision reached in accordance with due process of law. Except where compelling reasons of national security otherwise require, the stateless person shall be allowed to submit evidence to clear himself, and to appeal to and be represented for the purpose before competent authority or a person or persons specially designated by the competent authority.

3. The Contracting States shall allow such a stateless person a reasonable period within which to seek legal admission into another country. The Contracting States reserve the right to apply during that period such internal measures as they may deem necessary.

Article 32. - Naturalization

The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of stateless persons. They shall in particular make every effort to expedite naturalization proceedings and to reduce as far as possible the charges and costs of such proceedings.

Refugees

The principal is frequently proclaimed by politicians that every state has an unrestricted right to determine whom it shall admit within its frontiers. In proclaiming it, they usually fail to make explicit mention of the exception to which they are bound by international law to which they have subscribed, the duty of a state to admit refugees, or, rather, not to send them back to the countries from which they have fled. This needs to be understood as obliging a state to which a refugee has applied for asylum not to send him or her anywhere from which he or she may be returned to that country, but only to a land where refuge will be offered.

- Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees, p.31

1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees
(28 July 1951)

Article 1
Definition of the term "Refugee"

A. For the purposes of the present Convention, the term "refugee" shall apply to any person who:

(2) ...[has] a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

Democracy

2005-05-15T19:18:00.000+09:00

Whether what the majority wants should prevail depends on how oppressive it is to those who do not want it, and how oppressive what they want would be to the majority.
- Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees, p. 13

The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.
- Norman Mailer

Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. It is about responsible government. We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is going on.
- Michael Parenti

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

The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.
- Arundhati Roy

To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them."
- Michael Parenti

If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, - not democracy... But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.
- Michael Parenti

Imperialism

2005-05-15T16:47:00.000+09:00

The U.S. planned "an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States".
- Memorandum of the War and Peace Studies Project of the Council on Foreign Relations, with State Department participation, 19 October 1940

The measure of our victory will be the measure of our domination after victory...(The US must secure areas) strategically necessary for world control.
- Isaiah Bowman, Council on Foreign Relations, 1942

[W]e have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

...We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and--for the Far East--unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
- George Kennan, Former Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff, February 1948

The U.S. "must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a Pax Americana." - General George V. Strong, "Petroleum Policy of the United States,"
-Memorandum of U.S. Department of State, April 11, 1944, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1944, Vol. V

The right to first-class citizenship entails the right to what is called 'self-government': it rules out imperialism. An unfashionable view which is nevertheless sometimes expressed is that people have a right to be governed well, but that, granted that they are governed well, they can have no legitimate objection to whoever it is that governs them.... The mere fact that authority resides in aclass of foreigners suffices to humiliate all those subject to that authority by making them feel themselves to be second-class citizens in their own lands.
- Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees, p. 11

[Ronald] Reagan ... was most definitely a global empire builder, a servant of the corporatocracy... He would cater to the men who shuttled back and forth from corporate CEO offices to bank boards and into the halls of government. He would serve the men who appeared to serve him but who in fact ran the government - men like Vice President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Richard Cheney, Richard Helms, and Robert McNamara. He would advocate what those men wanted: an America that controlled the world and all its resources, a world that answered to the commands of that America, a U.S. military that would enforce the rules as they were written by America, and an international trade and banking system that supported America as CEO of the global empire."
- John Perkins

But we didn't come this far because we are made of sugar candy. Once upon a time we uh, elbowed our way onto and into this continent by giving smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans. Yes, that was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever and we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.
- Paul Harvey, "radio legend"

U.S. Elections

2005-04-05T21:50:00.000+09:00

2000

Key officials anticipated before Election Day, that there would be an increase in levels of voter turnout based upon new voter registration figures, but did not ensure that the precincts in all communities received adequate resources to meet their needs; At least one unauthorized law enforcement checkpoint was set up on Election Day resulting in complaints that were investigated by the Florida Highway Patrol and the Florida Attorney General; Non-felons were removed from voter registration rolls based upon unreliable information collected in connection with sweeping, state sponsored felony purge policies; Many African Americans did not cast ballots because they were assigned to polling sites that did not have adequate resources to confirm voting eligibility status; College students and others submitted voter registration applications on a timely basis to persons and agencies responsible for transmitting the applications to the proper officials, but in many instances these applications were not processed in a timely or proper manner under the National Voter Registration Act (“motor-voter law”); Many Jewish and elderly voters received defective and complicated ballots that may have produced “overvotes” and “undervotes;” Some polling places were closed early and some polling places were moved without notice; Old and defective election equipment was found in poor precincts; Many Haitian Americans and Puerto Rican voters were not provided language assistance when required and requested; Persons with disabilities faced accessibility difficulties at certain polling sites; Too few poll workers were adequately trained and too few funds were committed to voter education activities; STATUS REPORT ON PROBE OF ELECTION PRACTICES IN FLORIDA DURING THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION - http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/florida.htmWe are deeply troubled by our preliminary review which points to differences in resource allocations, including voting technology, and in voting procedures that may have operated so that protected groups may have had less of an opportunity to have their votes counted. We will conduct complete disparate impact and treatment analyses before the report is completed, and our final conclusions will take into account the results of these analyses. However, it appears at this phase of the investigation that the evidence may ultimately support findings of prohibited discrimination. Two particular sources of fruitful inquiry are the questionable uses of Choicepoint data and resource allocation issues. We are attempting to document whether and, if so, how long state, county and local officials knew that certain differences in resources and procedures might impact more harshly African Americans and members of other protected groups. STATUS REPORT ON PROBE OF ELECTION PRACTICES IN FLORIDA DURING THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION - http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/florida.htmU.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS CONCLUDES THAT “NO COUNT” IS REAL ISSUE IN FLORIDA VOTE Voter Disenfranchisement is at the Heart of the Issue WASHINGTON, DC, MARCH 9 - Supported by approximately 30 hours of sworn testimony from some 100 witnesses, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights determined that the Florida presidential elections appear to have been marred by voter disenfranchisement. "It is not a question of a recount or even an accurate count, but more pointedly those whose exclusion from the right to vote amounted to a 'No Count,'" concluded a statement issued today by the Commission. [...] "In the final analysis," the statement said, "new recounts of old ballots are an academic exercise. Voting is the language of our democracy and, regrettably - when it mattered most - real people lost real opportunities to speak truth to power in the ballot box. This must never occur again. "Voting technology reforms and the conclusion of recounting procedures alone are insufficient to address the significant and distressing issues and barriers that prevented qualified electors to cast ballots and have their ballots counted. It is our hope that Florida, as well as other jurisdictions, would promptly address these major problems instead of hoping that with the passage of time, the public will forget," the statement continued. [...] The Commission also flagged the removal of non-felons from the voter registration rolls on the basis of unreliable information collected during a sweeping, state-sponsored felony purge. The Commission cited other problems in Florida which prevented voters from exercising their franchise, including the assignment of many African Americans to polling sites that lacked sufficient resources to confirm voter eligibility; failure to process voter registration applications under the "motor voter" law in a timely manner; use of defective and complicated ballots that caused many "overvotes" and "undervotes"; early closing of polling places; relocation of polling places without notice; use of old and defective election equipment in poor precincts; failure to provide requested language assistance to Haitian American and Latino American voters; and failure to ensure access for voters with disabilities. - http://www.usccr.gov/nwsrel/archives/2001/030901.htm It is impossible to determine the total number of voters turned away from the polls or deprived of their right to vote. It is clear that the 2000 presidential election generated a large number of complaints about voting irregularities in Florida. The Florida attorney general’s office alone received more than 3,600 allegations—2,600 complaints and 1,000 letters.[2] In addition, both the Democratic and Republican parties received many complaints from Floridians who either could not vote or experienced difficulty when attempting to vote. - http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/ch1.htm TABLE 1-1: Top 10 Counties with Various Population Characteristics and Ballot Rejection Rates at http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/ch1.htm

Estimates indicate that approximately 14.4 percent of Florida’s black voters cast ballots that were rejected. This compares with approximately 1.6 percent of nonblack Florida voters who did not have their presidential votes counted. [...] Approximately 11 percent of Florida voters were African American; however, African Americans cast about 54 percent of the 180,000 spoiled ballots in Florida during the November 2000 election based on estimates derived from county-level data. - http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/exesum.htmAfrican American voters were placed on purge lists more often and more erroneously than Hispanic or white voters. For instance, in the state’s largest county, Miami-Dade, more than 65 percent of the names on the purge list were African Americans, who represented only 20.4 percent of the population. Hispanics were 57.4 percent of the population, but only 16.6 percent of the purge list; whites were 77.6 percent of the population but 17.6 percent of those purged. - http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/exesum.htm Under a 19th-century Florida law, convicted felons are barred from voting for life. DBT [Database Technologies] was hired, in part, to comb through computerised records around the country to identify former felons registered to vote in Florida. After wrongly identifying 8,000 Florida voters with Texas misdemeanour records as felons, it supplied a revised list of 57,770 "possible felons" to Florida's secretary of state, Katherine Harris. The list was full of mistakes mainly because of the criteria DBT used. It compared its list of felons with the Florida voting rolls by looking for a rough match between the names and dates of birth. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,439222,00.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs/newsnight/palast.ram

2004

Florida Abandons Felons-To-Be-Purged Voting List
The state of Florida has thrown out its list of potential felons who shouldn't vote in the November election, after the list was found to be deeply flawed. If the list had been used it could have helped George Bush win Florida in November. Of the 47,000 voters on the list, Latinos made up one tenth of one percent -- even though roughly 20 percent of the state is Latino. Governor Jeb Bush claimed a mistake in the databases caused Latino names not to appear on the purge list. In Florida the Latino population, especially the Cuban immigrants, historically vote Republican. In addition the Miami Herald found nearly 2,500 felons, mostly African American, appeared on the list even though their voting rights had been restored. The makeup of the list was not publicly known until last week when a judge forced the state to make the secret list public. During the 2000 election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the purging of tens of thousands of alleged felons from the rolls five months before the election. According to BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast the list included at least 8,000 voters, mostly African-American, who had only committed only misdemeanors and should not have been purged.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/12/1345237　

FL Election Official Knew About Database Problems Early On
In other election news from Florida, the Miami Herald has revealed that Secretary of State Glenda Hood held out two months before scrapping a database of 48,000 felons barred from voting despite knowing about major problems with the list. The list included 2,500 ex-felons who had their voting rights restored. In addition the list contained almost no Latinos voters, a group that often votes Republican in Florida.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/02/1428205

Tom DeLay Aides Indicted For Illegally Raising Funds
Three top political aides to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay were indicted yesterday on charges that they illegally raised political funds from corporations to use in the Republican takeover of the Texas legislature. About 20 Republican candidates in Texas were helped from the illegal activity. Travis County District Attorney accused Delay's aides of using corporate contributions to "control representative democracy in Texas." After Republicans gained control of the Texas legislature for the first time since Reconstruction, GOP lawmakers redrew the state's Congressional map in a way that would give the Republicans as many as five new seats in Congress. According to the Washington Post DeLay has often cited the redistricting effort as a key reason he expects the Nov. 2 election to expand the Republican's House majority The Post reports that DeLay was not named as a target of the grand jury's investigation, but documents disclosed in the inquiry indicate that DeLay was central to creating and overseeing the political fundraising in Texas. Eight corporations were also indicted for illegal political contributions. They include Sears Roebuck, Bacardi and Cracker Barrel Old Country Store.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/22/1422200&mode=thread&tid=25

Late last month, students in the Women's Studies honorary society, in conjunction with the Feminist Majority Foundation, gathered on the lawn of the University of Arizona registering voters. They called the drive "Suffrage 2004." They were engaging in an activity that is common on many campuses nationwide. In recent weeks on the Arizona campus, the college Democrats, Republicans and student government had run similar drives. But this one was different. As the students gathered on the lawn doing voter registration, the local Fox News affiliate pulled up to the site and with cameras rolling accused the students of engaging in felony voter fraud. The Fox reporters charged that Arizona law prohibits students from out of state from registering to vote in Arizona. For their part, the students say they had consulted with the local registrar on voter law before they picked up the registration forms and insisted that state law requires only that someone live in the state for 29 days before the election.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/27/1433241&mode=thread&tid=25

Ohio Secretary of State Called On To Resign
In elections news, two state senators from the battleground state of Ohio have called for the resignation of Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. State Senator Teresa Fedor accused the Republican official of attempting to cook the vote. Up until Wednesday Blackwell had threatened not to accept voter registration forms that were not printed on paper with 80-pound card stock. The senators also accused Blackwell of misinforming ex-felons of their voting rights and of refusing to clarify how many voters have been purged from Ohio's voter registration rolls. Blackwell served as an electoral expert for Bush and Cheney during the 2000 recount in Florida.

Florida Attempts To Prevent 17,000 New Voters From Voting
In other election news, the state of Florida is threatening to keep more than 17,000 newly registered voters from the voters rolls because their registration forms were incomplete. The nonpartisan America's Families United is attempting to contact the 17,000 people before Monday's registration deadlines. The group has sued Duval County to hand over a list of the disqualified voters.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/01/1420257&mode=thread&tid=25

Report: Hundreds of Democrats Voter Forms Thrown Out In Nevada
The Nevada tv station KLAS is reporting workers at a Republican-funded voter registration company charge that hundreds, and perhaps thousands of voter registration forms signed by Democrats were thrown into the trash. The company, Voters Outreach of America, has employed up to 300 part time workers in Nevada collecting new voter registrations across the country. What the company didn't tell the new voters is that it is funded by the Republican National Committee. The workers allege the company sorted through the new registration forms, appropriately submitted the Republican forms and tossed the Democratic forms. This could possibly leave thousands of Democratic voters who thought they were registered unable to vote in the presidential election. Meanwhile in Florida, the Washington Post reports that African American leaders are complaining that voting officials in Duval County are unfairly rejecting new voter registrations from Democrats. An analysis by the Post found county officials were flagging Democratic registrations at three times the rate as Republicans. And no group has more flagged registrations than African Americans.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/13/144212&mode=thread&tid=25

Fmr. GOP Operative Move to Block Some Nevada Dem Voters Fails
In election news, a former Republican operative in Nevada has failed in an attempt to purge 17,000 Democrats from the state's voting rolls. Nevada's former Republican Party chair Don Burdish claimed the Democrats were inactive voters. But county officials rejected the request.

Meanwhile in Oregon, the secretary of state and attorney general have announced plans to investigate allegations that a Republican-funded company called Voters Outreach of America threw out voter registration forms filed by Democrats. Similar complaints have surfaced about the same company in Nevada. Former employees of the company have said they personally saw supervisors toss out voter registration forms filed by Democrats. The move could leave hundreds and possibly thousands of Democrats in Oregon and Nevada unable to vote even though they had registered.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/14/1455250&mode=thread&tid=25

GAO Study: Justice Dept. Unprepared to Handle Voting Rights Complaints
A new study by Congress's Government Accountability Office has determined the Justice Department is not prepared to handle a large influx of complaints about voting rights violations in the Nov. 2 presidential election. According to the Washington Post, the GAO found the Justice Department lacks a clear plan to reliably document and track allegations in a manner to identify patterns of abuse and take corrective steps.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/15/157200&mode=thread&tid=25

GOP Threatens Group Not To Discuss The Possibility of A Draft
The head of the Republican National Committee has threatened to take legal action against the pro-voting group Rock the Vote and to challenge its non-profit status if the group continues to discuss the possibility that the government may reinstate the draft. In an extraordinary letter sent last week that has received almost no media attention, Republican chief Ed Gillespie wrote to the group and accused it of "promoting a false and misleading campaign designed to scare America's youth into believing that they may be drafted to serve in the military." Last month the group sent a mock draft notice by email to over 600,000 email addresses. Gillespie described the possibility of the reinstatement of the draft as an urban myth and as proof cited a statement by President Bush that there would be no draft. Gillespie went on to write "As a non-partisan organization that enjoys the benefits of being formed under 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code, you have an obligation to immediately cease and desist from promoting or conducting your 'Draft' campaign In response, the head of Rock the Vote, Jehmu Greene described the threat as a "textbook case of attempted censorship." Greene wrote to Gillespie "By your logic, there should be no debate about anything that you disagree with. There's a place for that kind of sentiment (and your threats), but its not here in our country. "
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/1438227&mode=thread&tid=25

Early voting for the presidential election began in Florida on Monday as activists urged people to opt for early ballots to avoid a repeat of the 2000 election. Black and elderly voters in particular lined up to cast ballots two weeks before Nov. 2nd.

Computer problems and long lines soon emerged in Florida - one of 32 states where voters are allowed to make their choice before Election Day.

...

This summer, Michigan state Rep. John Pappageorge (R) was quoted in the Detroit Free Press as saying, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election." African Americans comprise 83 percent of Detroit's population.
In South Dakota's June 2004 primary, Native American voters were prevented from voting after they were challenged to provide photo IDs, which they were not required to present under state or federal law.
In Kentucky in July 2004, black Republican officials joined to ask their State GOP party chairman to renounce plans to place "vote challengers" in African-American precincts during the coming elections.
Earlier this year in Texas, a local district attorney claimed that students at a majority black college were not eligible to vote in the county where the school is located. It happened in Waller County - the same county where 26 years earlier, a federal court order was required to prevent discrimination against the students.

- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/19/1423215&mode=thread&tid=25

ACLU: Millions May Be Blocked From Voting
On the election front, the American Civil Liberties Union yesterday issued a report predicting millions of eligible voters will be prevented from casting votes due to non-existent or flawed procedures used by state election officials to purge felons from voter rolls.

Nevada Judge Blocks New Voting RegistrationsIn Nevada, a state judge has rejected a request by the Democratic Party to reopen voter registration for voters who had their registration forms destroyed by a Republican-funded organization. Last week it was revealed that the GOP-funded company Voters Outreach of America had thrown out many registration forms signed by Democrats. The judge claimed agreeing to the Democrats request would open the floodgates to allow people not affected by the illegal action to register to vote.

GOP Attempts Last Minute Move of 63 Polling Places
And in Pennsylvania, Republican operatives attempted to confuse voters in Democratic-leaning areas of Philadelphia by submitting last-minute requests to the city to relocate 63 polling places. 53 of the cited polling places are located in areas predominently populated by African-Americans and Latinos. The city denied the requests.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/20/1422246&mode=thread&tid=25

GOP To Send 3,600 'Monitors' To Challenge Right to Vote in Ohio
In election news, Republican officials in Ohio have formalized plans to send thousands of paid recruits to go to polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters in heavily Democratic urban areas. This according to a report in the New York Times. Republicans have registered 3,600 election monitors in Ohio each of whom will be paid $100 to work on election day. The Democrats have registered about 2,000 monitors. Already the Republicans have challenged the voting eligibility of 35,000 registered voters in Ohio.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/25/1416239&mode=thread&tid=25

Right now, we're seeing a number of problems in the process, a lot of them related to the registration, and I'll give you one example from Arkansas, where a number of people took forms from the public library, registration forms, filled them out, sent them in and have been told by the registrars that because they used old forms, that they're not entitled to register to vote on those forms. Another example is early voting in Broward County, Florida, where there have been several problems using the voting machines early on, including voting machines not working, voting machines that had not been set back to zero at the appropriate time.

...

[V]ery early this year, we brought a case on behalf of students at Prairie View University, a historic Black college outside of -- about 40 minutes outside of Houston, Texas, Waller County, Texas, in which the district attorney actually threatened students with felony prosecution if they voted, claiming that because they were students they weren't residents of the county. We filed a lawsuit basically to get him to retract that position, which he quickly did.

...

If you are going to challenge groups of voters, you better have a good reason for doing so. We're very suspicious when anybody says that they're going to challenge a large group of voters. I'll give you another example, smaller example of something like that, which is going on in Atkinson County, Georgia, where basically the -- there in Georgia you have racial identification registration, and a few people in the county went down to the registrar's office, got the names of all of the Hispanic voters who had registered, and they have challenged most of the Hispanic voters in Atkinson County, Georgia, based on citizenship grounds. Once again, that sort of thing makes us suspicious when you're challenging large groups of voters without having personal knowledge, necessarily, as opposed to more narrow challenges where do you have personal knowledge of why somebody might be ineligible to vote. So hearing that they're contemplating, any group is contemplating challenging 35,000 voters makes us very suspicious.

...

[I]n terms of early voting and problems, Florida they started early voting the beginning of last week. There were breakdowns in the internet links apparently between laptop computers linked to the voter registration databases so people couldn't find out if they were eligible to vote. That caused hours of delay. In Duval County in Florida, the head of elections there, who is the one who is responsible for disenfranchising thousands of predominantly core, predominantly black, predominantly Democrat-voting voters in 2000, suddenly decided to resign on the very first day of voting, throwing them into complete pandemonium. He cited it where health reasons. There had been accusations that he wasn't providing sufficient early voting facilities in black areas of Jacksonville, which is the main town in Duval County.

...

[I]n Chicago earlier this year, in the primary election in Illinois where there were over 1,000 voters in Chicago, who lost their vote this way. They saw it when they went down to the polls, and they were -- they were given this provisional ballot. They thought that ballot was going to count. It turned out it didn't. You are giving people the expectation that their vote is going to count, then you take that -- you're taking that away.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/25/1416245&mode=thread&tid=25

In most states, the Secretary of State is the highest elections official. Now, the problem is that they're also generally partisan, elected on a party platform and very often involved in political campaigns. We thought after the scandals of 2000 when Katherine Harris was both making all the rules in Florida and co-chairing the Bush-Cheney election campaign, that there would be a stop put to this, but in fact, the National Association of Secretaries of State considered briefly whether they should have a rule that Secretaries of State have to be non-partisan during the election and they decided not to adopt that rule. In fact, we are seeing in places like Michigan and Missouri, and other places, we have Secretaries of State who are making rules about the election, who are deciding where registration drives funded by taxpayer money will be held. Will they be held in the inner city or at the suburban shopping mall? They're doing all of that with taxpayer money and they're also working in presidential campaigns.

...

The Ohio Secretary of State is a partisan republican, Ken Blackwell, who hopes to run for governor himself next year, which puts him in a position, obviously, of wanting to make friends with lots of people. He has made a number of rulings this year that have been fairly outrageous, but probably the worst was he just decided that voter registrations that were streaming into the county offices around the state, largely democratic registrations brought in by groups like America Coming Together, would be rejected, would have to be rejected if they came in on paper stock that was less than 80 pound weight. Now, it's a ridiculous rule.

...

Glenda Hood, who is Katherine Harris's successor, did the same thing all over again. She did a felon purge, which was very much flawed. The wrinkle she added is she decided that she had the right to keep it secret. She wasn't going to tell the media who was being purged. CNN and other media organizations had to go to court to get a court order. When she was ordered to make it public, within a day, the newspapers found thousands of names on the rolls who were in fact not felons at all. So, completely outrageous situation. And again, Glenda Hood, although nominally non-partisan -- she's not involved in the Bush-Cheney campaign -- she was an elector for George Bush in 2000 in Florida. It's troubling.

...

These purges go on everywhere, but the problem is there's really no mechanism for us to know how they're being done. There's a very great possibility that thousands of people are being thrown off in every state, but there's no accountability, no transparency. One example I can give you is, when I was reporting on this, it occurred to me that the same kind of felon purges or other purges may being done wrongly in New York state. When I called the New York State Board of Elections and said, “Can you tell us how this is working and how do we know that people are not being wrongly purged,” the one person I was told could talk to me about this, the spokesman, hung up the phone. He was offended by the question. In New York, we apparently don't have the right to know how they're doing the purge.

...

[T]he faxed ballots from soldiers and the e-mailed ballots from soldiers don't come to the Pentagon, they go to a defense contractor called Omega Technologies. Well, I had never heard of Omega Technologies. It seems that it had been never described anywhere. It was not in any written materials that I could find. I talked to Omega Technologies. It turns out it is a Pentagon contractor. The CEO of it is a contributor to the Republican Congressional Re-election Committee. In this cycle, she's given $6,600. She's on a committee of this Republican Congressional Re-election Committee. She's handling the non-secret ballots, and there's no oversight of any kind. There's no ability for the parties or the candidates to go in and make sure that the ballots are being handled correctly, and that they're all being transferred to the states. I mean, we don't know that they're not, say, throwing out the John Kerry ballots. It's just shocking. The other thing we don't know is how many ballots get handled in this way. There seem to be no reporting requirements. We have no idea how many ballots go in, how many come out. One little disturbing thing that I learned is that this is the process that was used in 2000. Remember when the military ballots came in at the last minute in Florida and may have changed the outcome of the election? We don't know how many went through this office. Now, I should say, many of them went directly to county elections offices, and it may be that this office only handled a few ballots, but we really don't know.

...

Students in this country often have a hard time voting. There are actually places in the country where they have been threatened with prosecution for simply trying to register from their dorms, which they have a Constitutional right to do. The Supreme Court has spoken to the issue. But in Prairie View Texas this year, we had a District Attorney who threatened to prosecute the 8,000 African-American -- largely African-American -- students at Prairie View A&M, if they tried to register from their dorms. We had someone in upstate New York who was threatened with prosecution. All voting is local. In a lot of the local communities, they see students as a threat. They're not thinking necessarily about the Presidential election, they may be thinking, “Hey, if all of these students register, they could throw out the local city council member. They could change the mayoral race,” and things like that. So they really tell a lot of students they can’t vote.

...

New citizens are also a group that have had some obstacles. Probably the most egregious thing in this regard that happened this year is, there was a group in Florida called Mi Familia Vota that does register Latino, often new citizens to vote. They put up a little registration table in Miami Beach on the public sidewalk outside of a building where there had just been a naturalization ceremony. They wanted to register the 3,000 new registered citizens and their family members who showed up for the ceremony. The Department of Homeland Defense -- Homeland Security -- told them they could not be on this public sidewalk registering people.... The reasons they gave were so specious. One was that in another part of the state, Republicans had tried to register some new citizens with forms that already had the Republican Party checked on it, so therefore, this non-partisan group would not be allowed to register other citizens. They also said they were creating an obstruction on the sidewalk. Completely ridiculous. A federal court rejected all of these reasons, but again, it shows that's an arm of the federal government trying to stop newly registered citizens from registering to vote.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/26/144227&mode=thread&tid=25

BBC: GOP Preparing To Challenge Florida Voters
Meanwhile the BBC and investigative reporter Greg Palast reported last night that it had obtained a secret document within the Republican party in Florida that contained nearly 1,900 names and addresses of voters in Jacksonville from areas that are predominantly black and Democratic. An elections supervisor in Tallahassee told the BBC, "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day."
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/27/1428218&mode=thread&tid=25

Up to 58,000 Absentee Ballots Missing in Florida
In election news, as many as 58,000 absentee ballots have gone missing in the heavily Democratic Broward County in Florida. The ballots were said to have been mailed two weeks ago but many have disappeared. The county is blaming the postal service but the post office denied it is at fault. Now county officials are attempting to get ballots sent out in time to voters. In the 2000 presidential elections Al Gore won 67 percent of the vote in Broward County.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/28/141203&mode=thread&tid=25

In one county in Ohio, more than 900 registered voters have been told they must appear in court on Saturday to defend their voter eligibility or risk losing their right to vote. In Wisconsin, scores of students report that their local elections board says it has no record of their voter registration. In Nevada, fallout continues after the it emerged that a group registering voters had destroyed possible hundreds of ballots of voters who identified themselves as Democrats. But nowhere is concern greater than in the state of Florida, the epicenter of the theft of the election in 2000.

Yesterday, the deputy election supervisor in one of Florida's most populous counties admitted that some 60,000 absentee ballots had gone missing. Broward county election official Gisela Salas said the matter is under investigation by law enforcement agencies. In 2000, it was Broward county that gave Al Gore his strongest support in the state of Florida. The US Postal Service says it has investigators trying to find the missing ballots, which constitute 5 percent of Broward County's electorate.

...

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list". It lists more than 1,800 names and addresses of voters in predominantly Black and traditionally Democratic areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

...

ION SANCHO: This, for example, is a copy of my step-daughter's voter registration from Orlando; and it is clear that her own handwriting filled in blocks two through fifteen. Apparently, a petition form was placed over the top of a voter registration form. It purported to tell the citizen they were signing a petition to legalize medical marijuana. The citizen filled it in, thinking that's what they were doing, and then after the voter had left, the individual fraudulently filled out lines one, the party change, making them a Republican now, and then fraudulently signed it, and then turned the application over to the election administrator. This form changed the voter's registration from Tallahassee to Orlando. And if this voter had not known me, and turned this information over to me, she may have been -- she may have been disenfranchised when she attempted to vote.

...

New Mexico -- there's non-count of vote in the Hispanic areas and Native American areas. Colorado they're starting a felon purge, days before the election which is against federal law, by the Republican Secretary of State. In Harper's, in this month's issue, I have gone through how the change in machinery to computers is going to cost hundreds of thousands of African American votes, Democratic Party votes. We figure our analysis is that in southern Florida alone, the change to computer also cost 27,000 votes -- will cost John Kerry a net of 27,000 votes. So, it's even the machinery. We have Hispanic precincts in New Mexico which in the last race showed no vote at all for president, and the response they get from elections officials, some people cannot make up their mind. What's happening is in poor areas, they're being given crap machines, just like they get crap hospitals and crap schools. They know this means that a lot of votes are lost in the machinery, whether its computers or punch cards. You name it. You have a loss of -- by the US Civil Rights Commission statisticians that I have been working with, we calculated a loss of 1 million black and minority votes lost in the machines. This is a tremendous electoral thumb on the scale, when we are going into this Tuesday. It's nationwide. I concentrated on Florida, because Florida will be Florida again. Look to, if you are going to see it election shoplifted, New Mexico, Colorado, Ohio. Those are going to be states where you cannot trust the vote.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/28/141211&mode=thread&tid=25

Bush Seeks to Limit Voting Rights LawsuitsIn election news, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that Bush administration lawyers are now attempting to overturn decades of legal precedence by claiming that only Attorney General John Ashcroft and not individual voters have a right to ask federal courts to enforce voting rights. In legal briefs filed in Ohio, Michigan and Florida, the Bush administration is arguing that the new Help America Vote Act stipulates that only the Justice Department, and not voters themselves, may sue to enforce the voting rights. Veteran voting rights lawyers say this would overturn decades of legal precedent and could greatly affect any legal challenge to Tuesday's election. According to the LA Times, since the civil rights era of the 1960s, individuals have gone to federal court to enforce their right to vote, often with the support of the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, the League of Women Voters. J. Gerald Hebert, a former chief of the Justice Department's voting-rights section, said he was dismayed that the government was seeking to weaken a measure designed to protect voters. Hebert, who worked in the voting-rights section from 1973 to 1994 told the Times, "This is the first time in history the Justice Department has gone to court to side against voters who are trying to enforce their right to vote. I think this law will mean very little if the rights of American voters have to depend on this Justice Department." Even the Supreme Court has backed the idea of private suits. In 1969, the justices issued a ruling in a case related to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that "the achievement of the act's laudable goal would be severely hampered ... if each citizen were required to depend solely on litigation instituted at the discretion of the attorney general."
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/29/1414213&mode=thread&tid=25

Dirty Tricks Reported Ahead Of Tuesday's Election
With one day until the presidential elections, reports are coming in across the country of efforts to confuse, intimidate and discourage voters from going to the polls. Ion Sancho, the supervisor of elections in Leon County in Florida, told the Washington Post, "In my 16 years as an election administrator, I've never seen anything like this." In Florida thousands of students have learned that not only was their party registration switched to Republican but their home address was changed without their knowledge. This means that when they show up to vote at their local precinct, their names won't appear on the voting rolls. In Pittsburgh, fliers were handed out on what looked like county letterhead that claimed voting had been extended an extra day "due to immense voter turnout expected on Tuesday." The fliers said Republicans should vote on Tuesday and Democrats should vote on Wednesday. In Wisconsin fliers purportedly from the a group calling itself the "Milwaukee Black Voters League" told voters, "If you've already voted in any election this year, you can't vote in the presidential election, If you violate any of these laws, you can get ten years in prison and your children will get taken away from you." In South Carolina, a letter purportedly from the NAACP warned voters they can not vote if they have outstanding parking tickets or have failed to pay child support.

Civil Rights Activists Sue Ohio To Block GOP Challenges
Meanwhile in Ohio, a pair of civil rights activists have filed a lawsuit to block the Republicans from challenging the eligibility of any voters at the polls tomorrow. The couple, Marian and Donald Spencer, said the Republicans are basing the challenges on a law dating back to the Jim Crow era that was originally aimed at disenfranchising black voters.

GA. Officials Throw Out GOP Challengers
In Georgia's Atkinson County, the Republicans attempted to challenge the voting eligibility of 78 percent of the county's registered Latino voters. But on Thursday the Board of Registrars dismissed the Republican complaint. The county attorney said, "The challenges ... are legally insufficient because they are based solely on race."
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/01/1513250&mode=thread&tid=25

U.S. Short 500,000 Poll Workers
The newly formed Election Assistance Commission officially announced yesterday that the country will likely have 500,000 fewer poll workers than needed for tomorrow's elections. The Commission called on businesses to allow employees take the day off from work so they could work at the polls.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/01/1513250&mode=thread&tid=25

Federal Appeals Courts Oks GOP Challenges at Polls
Late last night a federal appeals court in Ohio reversed two lower court rulings and ruled that Republicans will be allowed to send thousands of operatives into the polls today to challenge the eligibility of voters. A pair of Ohio civil rights activists had sued the state to block the challenges saying they were unconstitutional and that the law allowing the challengers dated back to the Jim Crow Era. Both Kerry and Bush view Ohio as a must-win state.

Penn. GOP Plan To Challenge 10,000 Voters in Philadelphia
In Pennsylvania Republicans have also announced plans to challenge as many as 10,000 voters from west Philadelphia, an area populated by many African-Americans. And the Republicans plan similar challenges in Florida.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/02/1522229&mode=thread&tid=25

Daschle Sues Opponent Over Native American Vote Intimidation
Meanwhile in South Dakota, Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle took his Republican opponent, John Thune, and 200 Republican attorneys to court yesterday over allegations of intimidation of Native American voters.

Election Protection Hotline Receives 50,000 Calls
Numerous groups have set up 1-800 hotlines for voters who experience problems at the poll. The hotline run by the Election Protection Coalition, 1-866-OUR VOTE, has already received 50,000 calls since mid-October. More reports of pre-election day dirty tricks have also emerged. In Michigan, an unknown group has been placing automated phone calls to heavily populated African-American areas around Detroit. The recording on the call says, "When you vote this Tuesday, remember to legalize gay marriage by supporting John Kerry. It's what we all want. It's a basic Democratic principle." Kerry, in fact, opposes gay marriage. The Republican party denied being behind the calls.

Police Tackle, Punch & Arrest Journalist at Fla. Polls
Meanwhile in Palm Beach County Florida, a widely published investigative journalist was arrested Sunday for taking photos of voters waiting in line to vote. According to news reports, the county's sheriff's deputy tackled, punched and arrested the journalist, James Henry. Police accused Henry of breaking a new county rule barring reporters from interviewing or photographing voters lined up outside the polls. The 54-year-old Henry is a Harvard-educated lawyer and economist who has written for the New York Times, Washington Post and other publications.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/02/1522229&mode=thread&tid=25

International Election Monitors Report Problems
The International Herald Tribune reported observers from the European-based Organization for Security and Cooperation said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan and that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela. Election observer Konrad Olszewski said, "To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler. They have one national election law and use the paper ballots I really prefer over any other system. Another observer, Ron Gould, criticized the electronic voting machines that gave voters no receipt. Gould said, "Each electronic vote in Venezuela also produces a ticket that voters then drop into a ballot box. Unlike fully electronic systems, this gives a backup that can be used to counter claims of massive fraud."

Election Protection Groups Receive Thousands Of Complaints
Election protection groups reported receiving tens of thousands of complaints from voters who experienced problems but widespread problems of voter intimidation or suppression did not appear to materialize. In Ohio some voters were forced to wait in line over six hours due to a shortage of working voting machines.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/03/1520204&mode=thread&tid=25

Report: N.C. County Loses 4,500 Votes
This comes at a time when officials in North Carolina are admitting that 4,500 votes were lost in one county due to electronic voting machine problems. According to the Associated Press country officials were misinformed as to how many votes could be stored on each machine. Meanwhile the website Voteprotect.org is reporting that more than 1,100 voters called their 1-800 number on election day to report problems with electronic voting machines or other voting technologies.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/05/1521207&mode=thread&tid=25

Congressmen Call For E-Voting Investigation
In election news, more questions are being raised about the accuracy of electronic voting machines used last week. Three Democratic members of Congress have written to the General Accounting Office of Congress to request an investigation into problems with voting machines on Election Day. This according to Wired.com. The Congressmen are John Conyers of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida. In their letter they note how in one Ohio county, the electronic voting machines mistakenly gave President Bush an extra 3,900 votes due to a machine mishap. Also they noted that in North Carolina, electronic voting machines accidentally lost 4,500 votes.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/08/1513234&mode=thread&tid=25

Even though Kerry has stopped fighting for the presidency, serious questions abound about the use of electronic voting machines. Take this story: In a voting precinct in Ohio's Franklin County, records show that 638 people cast ballots. Yet, George W Bush got 4,258 votes to John Kerry's 260. In reality, Bush only received 365 votes. That means Bush got nearly 3,900 extra votes. And that's just in one small precinct. This in a state that Bush officially won by only 136,000 votes. Elections officials blamed electronic voting for the extra Bush votes.
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/08/1513252&mode=thread&tid=25

According to a letter from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) to Kevin Brock, Special FBI Agent in Charge of the Democratic Staff's investigation into irregularities in the 2004 election, and attorney Larry E. Beal, Hocking County Prosecutor, three federal laws and five Ohio State laws could have been violated by Triad's behavior.

Additionally, according to the Votecobb.org website (a cached google copy), the events in Hocking County represent the compromise of the required randomness of the recount precincts:

(Section 3515 of the Ohio Revised Code) "The board must randomly select whole precincts whose total equals at least 3% of the total vote, and must conduct a manual count."
"If the tabulator count does not match the hand count, and after rechecking the manual count the results are still not equal, all ballots must be hand counted. If the results of the tabulator count and the hand counted ballots are equal, the remainder of the ballots may be processed through the tabulator (for optical scan and punch cards)."

Conyers brings this up in his first letter to Triad's President and Michael Barbian:

I am concerned that your company has operated - either intentionally or negligently - in a manner which will thwart the recount law in Ohio by preventing validly cast ballots in the presidential election from being counted.
You have done this by preparing "cheat sheets" providing county election officials with information such that they would more easily be able to ignore valid ballots that were thrown out by the machines during the initial count. The purpose of the Ohio recount law is to randomly check vote counts to see if they match machine counts. By attempting to ascertain the precinct to be recounted in advance, and than informing the election officials of the number of votes they need to count by hand to make sure it matches the machine count is an invitation to completely ignore the purpose of the recount law.
You as much as admitted that this was your purpose at the December 20 hearing:
Rapp: "Remember: the purpose was to train people on how to conduct their jobs... and to help them identify problems when they conducted their recount... If they could not hand recount the ballots correctly, they would know what they needed to look for in that hand count."
[break]
Observer: "Why do you feel it was necessary to point out to a team counting ballots the number of over-votes and under-votes when the purpose of the team is to in fact locate those votes and judge them?"
Barbian: "It's an easy mistake as you're hand counting... It's just human error. The machine counts it right. We're trying to give them as much information as possible to help them out.
[break]
Interviewer: "You were just trying to help them so that they wouldn't have to do a full recount of the county, to try to avoid that?"
Barbian: "Right."(1)

In a separate interview, Barbian admits that none of the six counties he serviced during the recount actually conducted a full recount:

Interviewer 1: Did any of your counties have to do the full recount?

Michael Barbian: Not that I am aware of.

As of the time of this writing, Triad had not responded to either of Conyers' letters.

Everything below is quoted from Representative John Conyers' Letter to Kevin Brock, Special FBI Agent in Charge of the Democratic Staff's investigation into irregularities in the 2004 election, and attorney Larry E. Beal, Hocking County Prosecutor.

Alleged Violations Of Federal Law
Alleged Violations of Ohio State Law

Alleged Violations Of Federal Law

Tampering with ballots and/or election machinery would violate the constitutional rights of all citizens to vote and have their votes properly counted, as guaranteed by the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
42 U.S.C. 5 1973provides for criminal penalties against any person who, in any election for federal office, "knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by . . .the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held."
42 U.S.C. 3 1974also requires the retention and preservation, for a period of twenty-two months from the date of a federal election, of all voting records and papers and makes it a felony for any person to "willfully steal, destroy, conceal, mutilate, or alter" any such record. Further, any tampering with ballots and/or election machinery would violate the constitutional rights of all citizens to vote and have their votes properly counted, as guaranteed by the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Alleged Violations of Ohio State Law

OHIO REV. CODE ANN. 3599.27provides "[n]o person shall tamper or attempt to tamper with, deface impair the use of, destroy or otherwise injure in any manner any voting machine...No person shall tamper or attempt to tamper with, deface, impair the use of, destroy or otherwise change or injure in any manner any marking device, automatic tabulating equipment or any appurtenances or accessories thereof."
OHIO REV. CODE ANN. 3599.24provides "[n]o person shall...destroy any property used in the conduct of elections."
OHIO REV. CODE ANN. 3599.34provides "[n]o person, from the time ballots are cast or voted until the time has expired for using them in a recount or as evidence in a contest of election, shall unlawfully destroy or attempt to destroy the ballots, or permit such ballots or a ballot box or pollbook used at an election to be destroyed; or destroy, falsify, mark, or write in a name on any such ballot that has been voted."
OHIO REV. CODE ANN. 53599.33provides "[n]o person, from the time ballots are cast or counted until the time has expired for using them as evidence in a recount or contest of election, shall willfully and with fraudulent intent make any mark or alteration on any ballot; or inscribe, write, or cause to be inscribed or written in or upon a registration form or list, pollbook, tally sheet, or list, Iawfully made or kept at an election, or in or upon a book or paper purporting to be such, or upon an election return, or upon a book or paper containing such return the name of a person not entitled to vote at such election or not voting thereat, or a fictitious name, or, within such time, wrongfully change, alter, erase, or tamper with a name, word, or figure contained in such pollbook, tally sheet, list, book, or paper; or falsify, mark, or write thereon with intent to defeat, hinder, or prevent a fair expression of the will of the people at such election.".
Ohio Revised Code 3505.32which provides that during a period of official canvassing, all interaction with ballots must be "in the presence of all of the members of the board and any other persons who are entitled to witness the official canvass," given that last Friday, the Ohio Secretary of State has issued orders to the effect that election officials are to treat all election materials as if they were in a period of canvassing,(2) and that "Teams of one Democrat and one Republican must be present with ballots at all times of processing."(3)

- http://video.lisarein.com/election2004/ohioreport/recount.html

Terrorism

2005-04-04T11:36:00.000+09:00

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [From the Shadows] that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahidin in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period, you were the national security advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that corect?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahidin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec. 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was 3 July 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

[Asked if he regreted this action] Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
- Zbigniew Brzezinski in1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur

Probably the most subversive effect of the privatized jihad was on the madrassahs, many of which were turned into politico-military training schools. The point was to integrate guerrilla training with the teachings of Islam and thus create "Islamic guerrillas." The London-based Indian journalist Dilip Hiro commented in the curriculum of the madrassahs: "Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete sociopolitical ideology, that holy Islam was being violated by atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow." The madrassahs not only opened their doors to Islamic radicals from around the world but also taught that the Islamic revolution in Afghanistan would be but a precursor to revolution in other Muslim-majority countries, particularly those in Soviet Central Asia.
...
'The skills passed on by trainers to fighters included "the use of sophisticated fuses, timers and explosives; automatic weapons with armor-piercing ammunition, remote-control devices for triggering mines and bombs (used later in the volunteers' home countries, and against the Israelis in occupied Arab territory such as southern Lebanon). [Mamdani quoting John Cooley in Unholy Wars]"

...

[A] team of Los Angeles Times reporters who carried out an investigation [in 1996] into the aftermath of the Afghan War "over four continents" found that the key leaders of every major terrorist attack, from New York to France to Saudi Arabia, inevitably turned out to have been veterans of the Afghan War.
- Mamood Mamdani in Good Muslim Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, And The Roots of Terror, p.136 - 139

If the U.S. really believes that supporting terrorists makes you as guilty as the terrorists themselves, then it would have to put on trial most of its military and political leadership over the last handful of administrations, and more.
- Peter McClaren

A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force.
- William Blum

Fascism

2005-04-04T10:03:00.000+09:00

Fascism is a set of ideologies and practices that seeks to place the nation, defined in exclusive biological terms, above all other sources of loyalty, and to create a mobilized national community. Fascist nationalism is reactionary in that it entails implacable hostility to socialism and feminism, for they are seen as prioritizing class or gender rather than nation. This is why fascism is a movement of the extreme right. Fascism is also a movement of the radical right because the defeat of socialism and feminism and the creation of the mobilized nation are held to depend upon the advent to power of a new elite acting in the name of the people, headed by a charismatic leader, and embodied in a mass, militarized party. Fascists are always pushed towards conservativism by common hatred of socialism and feminism, but are prepared to override conservative interests - family, property, religion, the universities, the civil service - where the interests of the nation are considered to require it. Fascist radicalism also derives from a desire to assuage discontent by accepting specific demands of the labour and women's movements, so long as these demands accord with the national priority. Fascists seek to ensure the harmonization of workers' and women's interests with those of the nation by mobilizing them within special sections of the party and/or within a corporate system. Access to these organizations and to the benefits they confer upon members depends on the individual's national, political, and/or racial characteristics. All aspects of fascist policy are suffused with ultranationalism.
- Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 31

Fascism is on the march today in America. Millionaires are marching to the tune. It will come in this country unless a strong defense is set up by all liberal and progressive forces... A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government, and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. Aboard ship a prominent executive of one of America's largest financial corporations told me point blank that if the progressive trend of the Roosevelt administration continued, he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism to America.
- Former ambassador to Germany William Dodd, 1938

Once the war against Saddam begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if they can't do that, to shut Up.
- Bill O'Reilly, Fox News

Education

2005-04-03T11:26:00.000+09:00

It is not coincidental that the concerted effort by government authorities to gain monopoly control over the curriculum arrives at the time that social movements have appeared and are challenging male, white Anglo-European political and cultural supremacy. The formerly enslaved, colonized, and oppressed do not accept their ascribed cultural, racial, and gender inferiority. Many are asserting their rights to reclaim cultural power, and to create and forge their own cultural and social identities.

For those who see these movements as cultural balkanization and a threat to social order, standardization and centralization of curriculum and testing serve both as an antidote to the demand for greater cultural diversity and as a way to manufacture consent and maintain the dominant culture. They serve to reduce what they perceive as a threat: multiculturalists, anti-racists, feminists, and others whom they fear are sowing seeds of disunity, threatening the fabric of the nation.
- Harold Berlak

Iran

2005-04-03T10:23:00.000+09:00

As early as 1957, the U.S. agreed to help the Shah obtain enriched uranium for civilian nuclear power plants.... After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini halted the construction [of 2 reactors at Bushehr] on the grounds that nuclear power was "un-Islamic," but the ferocious Iran-Iraq war and the damage it did to Iranian oil production facilities made the ayatollah reconsider. Iran resumed acquisition of the equipment necessary to produce nuclear fuel, and in January 1995, the government of President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani signed a contract with Russia to finish construction of the two reactors at the Bushehr facility (which had been bombed by Iraq in the 1980s), as well as a centrifuge plant to enrich uranium and an additional research reactor. In a nod to its NPT obligations, Russia agreed to take back the plutonium-laden spend fuel from the reactors.
- Kaveh Ehsani amd Chris Toensing, Neo-Conservatives, Hardline Clerics and the Bomb, Middle East Report, Winter 2004, p. 12

Torture

2005-03-13T20:39:00.000+09:00

6. (S) I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by
military police personnel included the following acts:

a. (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees;
jumping on their naked feet;
b. (S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and
female detainees;
c. (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various
sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d. (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and
keeping them naked for several days at a time;
e. (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's
underwear;
f. (S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate
themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
g. (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and
then jumping on them;
h. (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box,
with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his
fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
i. (S) Writing "I am a Rapest" (sic) on the leg of a
detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old
fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
j. (S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked
detainee's neck and having a female Soldier pose for a
picture;
k. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female
detainee;
l. (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles)
to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least
one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.
(ANNEXES 25 and 26)

8. (U) In addition, several detainees also described the
following acts of abuse, which under the circumstances, I
find credible based on the clarity of their statements
and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses
(ANNEX 26):

a. (U) Breaking chemical lights and pouring the
phosphoric liquid on detainees;
b. (U) Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol;
c. (U) Pouring cold water on naked detainees;
d. (U) Beating detainees with a broom handle and a
chair;
e. (U) Threatening male detainees with rape;
f. (U) Allowing a military police guard to stitch the
wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed
against the wall in his cell;
g. (U) Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and
perhaps a broom stick.
h. (U) Using military working dogs to frighten and
intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one
instance actually biting a detainee.
- Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, HEARING ARTICLE 15-6 INVESTIGATION OF THE 800th MILITARY POLICE BRIGADE

SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. . . . I do not think it was right to put them in a pile. I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage. The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. . . . I left after that.

I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.” I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”
- Specialist Matthew Wisdom, hearing in the case against Sergeant Frederick at Camp Victory near Baghdad

Racism

2005-03-13T11:55:00.000+09:00

Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president.
- Ann Coulter defending Jeff Gannon

We shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth.
- Winston Churchill quoted by Richard Burton

But we [the U.S.A.] didn't come this far because we are made of sugar candy. Once upon a time we uh, elbowed our way onto and into this continent by giving smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans. Yes, that was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever and we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.
- Paul Harvey, "radio legend"

Israel

2005-03-08T00:57:00.000+09:00

One ton bomb to assassinate terrorist?

Feldman and Sfarad [in their 50-page report to the clerk of the Israeli Supreme Court] describe the killing of Hamas activist Salah Shehada, who was assassinated last July with a one-ton aerial bomb that killed another 14 people, injured 150 people and destroyed numerous homes in the vicinity of Shehada's home: "It greatly pains us to say the following, but we do not have any choice, because the legal and moral truth obligates us to present these facts, in their full severity, before the honorable court: liquidation is a war crime, the consistent, widespread policy of targeted liquidations bounds on a crime against humanity and the State of Israel has turned its pilots into war criminals that hunt wanted men as if they were on a duck hunt (and duck hunting is also against the law)."
- Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz, May 21, 2003

We are killing civilians in the streets of Gaza and Ramallah, in the alleys of Jenin and Hebron, we are chasing cars with helicopters and blowing them up with missiles intended for use against tanks on the battlefield, we are sniping at civilians walking out of the front door of their home, we are booby-trapping phone booths and planting bombs, we are sowing destruction and ruin in numerous families, and all this without any legal procedure, without any evidentiary infrastructure of anything being presented to anyone. This is the biggest victory of all of the architects of death in the cafes and shopping centers.
- Attorneys Avigdor Feldman and Michael Sfarad in their report to the Israeli Supreme Court

Between the first and last chapters, the document [by attorneys Avigdor Feldman and Michael Sfarad presented to the Israeli Supreme Court] presents a detailed list of all of the liquidations and all of the attempted assassinations that Israel's security forces carried out between November 9, 2000, the day that a helicopter fired a missile in Beit Sahour that assassinated Fatah activist Hussein Salim Abiyat and the two women driving with him in his car, and April 29, 2003, the day that a missile fired from a helicopter liquidated Popular Front activist Nidal Salameh in Khan Yunis, along with the man driving with him in his car.

In the 29 months that have passed between these two killings, Israel carried out no less than 175 liquidation attempts. In other words, the document says, one attempt every five days.

...[T]he 175 events did result in the death or injury of hundreds of bystanders that had nothing to do with anyone who Israel wished to assassinate.

In these 175 cases, says the authors, 235 people were killed and 310 injured. Only 156 of the dead were described as targets. The other 79 were their relatives, neighbors or just bystanders. The age of 31 of the incidental dead varied from two months (the baby Dunia Matar, a neighbor of Shehada's in Gaza) and 18 years; 11 of these victims were women. The statistics of the injured is even more problematic: five of the wounded were people whom Israel intended to liquidate but failed in the mission; the remaining 305 wounded were relatives, neighbors or bystanders.

... [T]hey cite... the "mistaken liquidation of the two Israeli security guards near the settlement Pnei Hever," which took place on March 13, 2003. Feldman and Sfarad allege that the latter incident would not have happened if not for the liquidation policy pursued by the army and political echelons. "The army's investigation of the incident proves that the victims of the liquidation were given no opportunity to surrender or to lay down their weapons," they write.
- Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz, May 21, 2003

The high number of bystanders harmed by the liquidation policy, the immense number of wounded, the number of destroyed families, the innocent citizens who were killed, the children that we have handicapped for life, all of these victims of the Israeli assassination policy stand at the gates of the honorable court in a long line, and prove more than any cold legal argument that the means chosen by the IDF to realize the policy of liquidations is blatantly unlawful and immoral.
- Attorneys Avigdor Feldman and Michael Sfarad in their report to the Israeli Supreme Court

Treaties

2005-03-07T13:46:00.000+09:00

Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War
Adopted on 12 August 1949 by the Diplomatic Conference for the Establishment of International Conventions for the Protection of Victims of War, held in Geneva from 21 April to 12 August, 1949

Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects. Geneva, 10 October 1980.

Women

2005-03-01T10:55:00.000+09:00

Feminism is the radical ideal that women are huban beings.
- Unknown

"It would be a much better country if women did not vote."
- Ann Coulter, 2003

Rape

Rape reporting appears to be dependant on how stereotypical the circumstances surrounding the rape are. In a sample of women who had contacted rape crisis centers, Williams (1984) found that women were more likely to report rape to the police if the circumstances of the rape corresponded to the "classic" rape situation, which is characterized by the use of a high degree of force, the use of a weapon, and physical injury. Previous research findings indicate that the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator is the most important factor that influences a victim's decision to report a rape to the police (Williams, 1984; Feldman-Summers & Norris, 1984; Feldman-Summers & Palmer, 1980). Perhaps women who are raped by an acquaintance are less likely to report the assault because they do not perceive the unwanted sexual intercourse as rape (Koss, Dinero, Siebel & Cox, 1988). Rape, therefore, may be more easily recognized, given the aforementioned "classic" set of circumstances.
- Heather Flowe http://psy.ucsd.edu/~hflowe/acrape.htm

Crime

2005-02-28T01:12:00.000+09:00

Lord Chief Justice Hales, who wrote in the time of Charles II., computes the necessary expence of a labourer's family, consisting of six persons, the father and mother, two children able to do something, and two not able, at ten shillings a week, or twenty-six pounds a year. If they cannot earn this by their labour, they must make it up, he supposes, either by begging or stealing. He appears to have enquired very carefully into this subject.
- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book One, Chapter VIII

The results of these analyses support the proposition that the degree to which resources are unequally distributed is a stronger determinant of levels of lethal violence in modern nation states than is the average level of material welfare.
- Martin Daly, Margo Wilson and Shawn Vasdev, Income Inequality and Homicide Rates in Canada and the United States (Canadian Journal of Criminology April 2001, p.219-236)

Other socio-economic factors which are associated with higher levels of victimisation in the general population are low levels of economic activity (economically active means those who are employed or those who are unemployed but seeking and available for work) and living in socially rented accommodation.
- Heather Salisbury and Anna Upson, Ethnicity, victimisation and worry about crime: findings from the 2001/02 and 2002/03 British Crime Surveys

Agricola... understood the feelings of the province and had learned from the experience of others that arms can effect little if injustice follows in their train. He resolved to root out the causes of rebellion.
- Tacitus, The Agricola, c. 98AD

Capital: The ruling class

2005-02-28T01:06:00.000+09:00

[W]e have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

...We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and--for the Far East--unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
- George Kennan, Former Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff, February 1948

If it's class warfare, my class is winning.
- Warren Buffett

This is a gathering of the haves and the have-mores. Some call you the elite, but I call you my base.
- President George Walker Bush

The people who own the country ought to govern it.
- John Jay, coauthor of the Federalist Papers and the first Chief Justice

The evils of experience flow from the excess of democracy.
- Elbridge Gerry, fifth Vice President it the U.S.A., and the first "gerrymanderer"

The people should have as little to do as may be about the Government.
- Roger Sherman, co-signer of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and a representative of Connecticut

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and well born; the other, the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second; and as they cannot receive any advantage by change, they will therefore maintain good government.
- Alexander Hamilton, 1787

Landholders ought to have a share in the government to support these invaluable interests and check the other many. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.
- James Madison

Al Smith once remarked that "the only cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy." Our analysis suggests that applying that cure at the present time could well be adding fuel to the flames. Instead, some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy - an "excess of democracy" in much the same sense in which David Donald used the term to refer to the consequences of the Jacksonian revolution which helped to precipitate the Civil War. Needed, instead, is a greater degree Of moderation in democracy.
- Samuel P. Huntington, The Crisis Of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission

[T]he effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups. In the past, every democratic society has had a marginal population, of greater or lesser size, which has not actively participated in politics. In itself, this marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic, but it has also been one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively. Marginal social groups, as in the case of the blacks, are now becoming full participants in the political system. Yet the danger of overloading the political system with demands which extend its functions and undermine its authority still remains. Less marginality on the part of some groups thus needs to be replaced by more self-restraint on the part of all groups.
- Samuel P. Huntington, The Crisis Of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission

To my father the world's fair was an opportunity to keep the status quo, that is capitalism in a democracy. Democracy and capitalism, that marriage. That linking, just like that. He did that by manipulating people, and getting them to think that you couldn't have real democracy in anything but a capitalist soicety, which was capable of doing anything - of creating these wonderful highways, of making moving pictures inside everybody's house, of telephones that didn'y need cords, of sleek roadsters. I mean, it was consumerist, but at the same time you inferred that in a funny way democracy and capitalism went together.
- Ann Bernays, daughter of American propagandist Edward Bernays on his exhibit "Democracity" at the 1939 World's Fair

The individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under [the best of] conditions...Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed...years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event without a ready-made opinion.
- Jacques Ellul, cited by John Taylor Gatto in The Underground History of American Education

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
-Woodrow Wilson

In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply.
- Occasional Letter Number One (1906)of Rockefeller’s General Education Board cited in John Taylor Gatto's The Undderground History of American Education

In the U.S., we avoid discussing the implications of overeducation because we fear that we may reach conclusions that clash with our ideal of equal opportunity for all. But until everyone owns a humanoid robot, as well as a car and a color television, some person will have to do the 'dirty jobs.' Until then, however loath we are to admit it, we must continue to produce an uneducated social class...
- Gerald Bracey, proponent of government schooling, 1991

Iraq: The reason for war

2005-02-13T16:53:00.000+09:00

The "Smoking Gun Memo"

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY
DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02
cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

Legality?

The president has adopted a policy of "anticipatory self-defense" that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy.
- Arthur Schlesinger Jr., March 23, 2003

The Court can only regard the alleged right of intervention as the manifestation of a policy of force, such as has, in the past, given rise to most serious abuses and such as cannot, whatever be the defects in international organization, find a place in international law. Intervention is still less admissible in the particular form it would take here; for, from the nature of things, it would be reserved for the most powerful states and might easily lead to perverting the administration of international justice itself.
- International Court of Justice, the Corfu Channel case, 1949

"The charges in the Indictment that the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent States alone, but affect the whole world.

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
- The Nuremburg Judgement

Deeply sensible of their solemn duty to promote the welfare of mankind;

Persuaded that the time has, come when a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy should be made to the end that the peaceful and friendly relations now existing between their peoples may be perpetuated;

Convinced that all changes in their relations with one another should be sought only by pacific means and be the result of a peaceful and orderly process, and that any signatory Power which shall hereafter seek to promote its national interests by resort to war a should be denied the benefits furnished by this Treaty...

ARTICLE I
The High Contracting Parties solemly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.

ARTICLE II
The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.
- The General Treaty for the Renunciation of War, AKA the Kellogg-Briand Pact, 1928

War between nations was renounced by the signatories of the Kellog-Briand Treaty. This means that it has become throughout practically the entire world... an illegal thing. Hereafter, when engaged in armed conflict, either one or both of them must be termed violators of this general treaty law... We denounce them as law breakers.
- Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, 1932

[W]hen the plans for an attack on Norway were being made, they were not made for the
purpose of forestalling an imminent Allied landing, but, at the most, that they might prevent an Allied occupation at some future date...

It was further argued that Germany alone could decide, in accordance with the reservations made by many of the Signatory Powers at the time of the conclusion of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, whether preventive action was a necessity, and that in making her decision her judgment was
conclusive. But whether action taken under the claim of self-defense was in fact aggressive or defensive must ultimately be subject to investigation and adjudication if international law is ever to be enforced.
- Judgment of the International Military Tribunal For The Trial of German Major War Criminals London His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1951

Liberation?

[Iraq's possession of WMDs] is what this war was about and is about.
- Ari Fleischer, Financial Times (London), 12 April 2003, War in Iraq section, p. 5

We have made it clear – British Prime Minister Tony Blair has made clear repeatedly – that if Iraq complies with (Security Council resolution) 1441 and disarms its weapons of mass destruction, we accept that the government of Iraq stays in place.
- Jack Straw, British Prime Minister, March 6, 2003

Let me put the question to you directly and clearly in the simplest terms that I can. The question simply is: Has Saddam Hussein made a strategic political decision to comply with the United Nations Security Council resolutions? Has he made a strategic political decision to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction? That's it, in a nutshell.... That's the question. There is no other question. Everything else is secondary or tertiary. That's the issue.
- Colin L. Powell, U.S. Secretary of State, March 5, 2003

QUESTION: Hello, Secretary Powell. My name is Alexandra Kennedy (ph) from St. John's College High School. My question is: Are we invading Iraq for possession of their oil?

SECRETARY POWELL: No, not at all. We hope not to have to invade Iraq. President Bush and the international coalition has been doing everything possible to avoid a conflict with Iraq. The issue simply is getting Iraq to disarm, to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction. And the United Nations Security Council, through a resolution, a resolution called Number 1441, demanded that Iraq come into compliance with its international obligations and get rid of these weapons.
- Colin L. Powell, U.S. Secretary of State, 02/19/2003

To illustrate the weird logic of dreams, Sigmund Freud used to evoke a story about a borrowed kettle: When a friend accuses you of returning a borrowed kettle broken, your reply is, first, that you never borrowed the kettle; second, that you returned it unbroken; and third, that the kettle was already broken when you borrowed it. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms precisely what it endeavors to deny: that you, in fact, did borrow and break the kettle.

A similar string of inconsistencies characterized the Bush administration's public justifications for the U.S. attack on Iraq in early 2003. First, the administration claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which posed a “real and present danger” to his neighbors, to Israel, and to all democratic Western states. So far, no such weapons have been found (after more than 1,000 U.S. specialists have spent months looking for them). Then, the administration argued that even if Saddam does not have any WMD, he was involved with al Qaeda in the September 11 attacks and therefore should be punished and prevented from launching future assaults. But even U.S. President George W. Bush had to concede in September 2003 that the United States “had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.” Finally, there was the third level of justification, that even if there was no proof of a link with al Qaeda, Saddam's ruthless dictatorship was a threat to its neighbors and a catastrophe to its own people, and these facts were reason enough to topple it. True, but why topple Iraq and not other evil regimes, starting with Iran and North Korea, the two other members of Bush's infamous “axis of evil”?
- Slavoj Zizek, Foreign Policy, January/February 2004

Weapons

It's Official: There Were No WMDs In Iraq
In... news on Iraq - it's official - no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. On Monday the Iraq Survey Group published its final report on the hunt for WMDs. The group concluded that a two-year search had uncovered no nuclear, biological or chemical weapons stockpiles in Iraq. In addition the US investigators reported they had found no evidence that any weapons of mass destruction were moved to Syria before the war.
- Democracy Now!, April 26, 2005

Osirak Reactor:
Iraq had a long history of peaceful use of nuclear power. Iraq, which began construction on the Soviet supplied reactor in 1963, had operated it peacefully since 1969. Iraq became a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1969. It had permitted IAEA inspections of Osiraq in 1976 when the Osiraq program began. The last IAEA inspection before the Israeli attack was January 1981. The IAEA reported no evidence of Iraq's intention to develop nuclear weapons and had accounted for all Iraq's nuclear material. In contrast, Israel had refused to sign the NPT and had kept its nuclear facilities secret. The United Nations Security Council condemned the Israeli attack as an act of aggression. The United States, Israel's strongest ally, was sympathetic to Iraq...

... Having failed to secure a replacement reactor, Iraq turned to uranium enrichment programs in order to acquire weapons grade nuclear material. The natural uranium Iraq had already acquired (250 tons in 1981) and all further uranium it could acquire on the open market could be enriched on Iraqi soil and developed into nuclear weapons. There was no longer a need for a reactor. So in the long term, the Israeli attack did not delay the nuclear weapons program - it accelerated it by stimulating a sense of domestic political urgency. As a country living in an anarchic international system and facing an intense security dilemma, Iraq was compelled to expand its program and to identify Israel as a direct threat. Although United Nations weapons inspections following the Gulf War of 1991 did find evidence of a nuclear weapons program, they found no evidence that this program pre-dated 1981.
- Professor David L. Rousseau, University of Pennsylvania

In 1981, when Israel attacked Iraq's Osirak reactor, Tel Aviv's move caused Baghdad to accelerate its quest for nuclear arms. By demonstrating Iraq's military weakness in its failure to prevent an Israeli air strike, Tel Aviv's decision merely caused the leadership in Baghdad to believe even more strongly that they needed nuclear weapons to shield against future aggression from hostile states. By acquiring nuclear arms, states are able to increase their defense capabilities since other states are hesitant to take military action against a nuclear-armed rival. As Khadduri writes in his recent book describing Iraq's nuclear research program, after Israel attacked the Osirak reactor, "Saddam took the political decision to initiate a full-fledged weapons program immediately afterwards."
- Erich Marquardt, Asia Times, Oct 21, 2003

At first, the program focused mainly on the use of nuclear energy for power generation. Khadduri said that changed in 1981 after Israeli jets destroyed the country's Osirak nuclear reactor.

At that point, he said the program shifted to focus on producing nuclear weapons. At one point Saddam Hussein put his son-in-law Hussein Kamel in charge in order to improve results.
- Jeffrey Hodgson, Reuters, February 03, 2003

A more far-reaching example of establishing norms was Israel's bombing of the Osirak reactor in Iraq in June 1981. At first the attack was criticized as a violation of international law. Later, after Saddam Hussein was transformed from favored friend to unspeakable fiend in August 1990, the reaction to the Osirak bombing also shifted. Once a (minor) crime, it was now considered an honored norm, and was greatly praised for having impeded Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program.

The norm, however, required the evasion of a few inconvenient facts. Shortly after the 1981 bombing, the Osirak site was inspected by a prominent nuclear physicist, Richard Wilson, then chair of the physics department at Harvard University. He concluded that the installation bombed was not suited for plutonium production, as Israel had charged, unlike Israel's own Dimona reactor, which had reportedly produced several hundred nuclear weapons. His conclusions were supported by the Iraqi nuclear physicist Imad Khadduri, who was in charge of experimental work at the reactor before the bombing and later fled the country. He too reported that the Osirak reactor was unsuitable for the production of plutonium, though after the Israeli bombing in 1981, Iraq took the "solid decision to go full speed ahead with weaponization." Khadduri estimated that it would have taken Iraq decades to obtain the required amount of weapons-grade material, had the program not been sharply accelerated as a result of the bombing. "Israel's action increased the determination of Arabs to produce nuclear weapons," Kenneth Waltz concluded. "Israel's strike, far from foreclosing Iraq's nuclear career, gained Iraq support from some other Arab states to pursue it."
- Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, p.25

Terrorism?

When it came to pinning the terrorist label on the Saddam government, all the Bush administration had to do was point a finger at the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organistaion (MKO, People's Mujahedin). An anticlerical Iranian group opposed to the regime in Tehran, the MKO, placed on the State Department's list of terrorist organisations in 1997, had located its headquarters in Baghdad since 1986. Its National Liberation Army was trained and armed by the Iraqi military, and it engaged in self-confessed terrorist activities against the Iranian government. Moreover, while MKO representatives around the world publicly condemned 9/11, inside Iraq the MKO rejoiced. "There were celebrations at all the Mujahedin camps [in Iraq] on September11," Ardeshir Parkizkari, thirty-nine, a former member of MKO's central council and now a political refugee in Europe, told the New York Times. "I was in one of their prisons then. And we were never treated so well as we were that day - given juices and sweets. They called the events of September 11 God's revenge on America." Yet the MKO's political wing, the National Resistance Council of Iran, even though listed as a terrorist organisation after 9/11, continued to function openly in the United States, with its head office in Washinton.

- Dilip Hiro, Secrets And Lies: Operatoin "Iraqi Freedom" And After, p.381-382

Media

2005-02-13T15:14:00.000+09:00

American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare to differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people.
— Rep. Luther Johnson (D.-Texas), in the debate that preceded the Radio Act of 1927 (KPFA, 1/16/03)

A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a...frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others.... It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.
— U.S. Supreme Court, upholding the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 1969.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
- Edward Bernays, director of the U.S. Committee on Public Information during World War I

The U.S. record of war crimes has been, from the nineteenth century to the present, a largely invisible one, with no government, no political leaders, no military officials, no lower-level operatives held accountable for criminal actions... Anyone challenging this mythology is quickly marginalized, branded a traitor or Communist or terrorist or simply a lunatic beyond the pale of reasonable discussion.
- Carl Boggs

The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
- Alex Carey

Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.
- Neil Postman

The news and truth are not the same thing.
- Walter Lippmann

The biggest political joke in America is that we have a liberal press. It's a joke taken seriously by a surprisingly large number of people... The myth of the liberal press has served as a political weapon for conservative and right-wing forces eager to discourage critical coverage of government and corporate power ... Americans now have the worst of both worlds: a press that, at best, parrots the pronouncements of the powerful and, at worst, encourages people to be stupid with pseudo-news that illuminates nothing but the bottom line."
- Mark Hertzgaard

In a media universe where you're likely to find right-wing conservatives on ABC, Fox, or NPR, the facts don't matter; only the framing. And in the hands of biased pundits posing as objective journalists, the framing is always going to be the same: promilitary, pro-government, and pro-war.
- David Potorti, in book 'September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows'

Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth."
- Mark Crispin Miller