"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
- Winston Churchill, Nov. 21, 1943
Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and noncitizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of "an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs."
Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.
According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists."
Fraud-busters such as Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, have complained about these contracts, saying that more taxpayer dollars should not go to taxpayer-gouging Halliburton. But the real question is: What kind of "new programs" require the construction and refurbishment of detention facilities in nearly every state of the union with the capacity to house perhaps millions of people?
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"I apologize; "60 Minutes" didn't even begin to cover the scandal that is the Don Siegelman story. That segment last night didn't even scratch the surface.
Barbara sent this wonderful link to a Huffington Post entry which offers a very good bibliography of source material on this. Scott Horton, at Harper's, has done yeoman work bringing this to light.
And evidently the broadcast, insipid as it was, was blacked out in Alabama. What a strange and frightening country we've become."
(Do click onto the Huffington Post above, a fascinating group of articles by Larisa Alexandrovna, a journalist, essayist and poet. She is currently managing new editor managing news editor for Raw Story, and contributes regularly to other publications in the alternative press. She also hangs out at her blog, AT-LARGELY. Her work is cited by mass media outlets such as Rolling Stone, New York Times, Mother Jones, and other notable publications. She is best known for her reporting on domestic intelligence issues and foreign military affairs. For the past few years she has been focused on the build up for war with Iran, pre-Iraq war intelligence, and other national security and intelligence stories some key pieces:
There is a series of articles by her that are fascinating and should keep you busy for quite a while. To much for me to send by email, but you can click into them as your time permits. Click on the huffingtonpost.com above.
TEN STEPS TO FACISM. - AN ARTICLE BY NAOMI WOLF IN THE GUARDIAN, AMERICAN EDITION. i CAN NOT COPY IT BECAUSE OF TECHNICAL PROBLEMS BUT IT IS A MUST READ. CLICK TO IT AT :
The battle lines between father and son were drawn. In the balance hung policies that would kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people and change the global balance of power for years to come.
Editor's note: This is Part 1 of an excerpt from "The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future." Parts 2 and 3 will follow on Nov. 8 and 9. For more information on the book, visit craigunger.com
By Craig Unger
Nov. 7, 2007 | It was a cool, crisp day in the spring of 2004 -- a rarity for Houston -- and George H.W. Bush chatted with a friend in his office suite on Memorial Drive. Tall and trim, his hair graying but by no means white, the former president was a few weeks shy of his eightieth birthday -- it would take place on June 12, to be exact -- and he was racing toward that milestone with the vigor of a man thirty years younger. In addition to golf, tennis, horseshoes, and his beloved Houston Astros, Bush's near-term calendar was filled with dates for fishing for Coho salmon in Newfoundland, crossing the Rockies by train, and trout fishing in the River Test in Hampshire, England. He still prowled the corridors of power from London to Beijing. He still lectured all over the world. And, as if that weren't enough, he was planning to commemorate his eightieth with a star-studded two-day extravaganza, culminating with him skydiving from thirteen thousand feet over his presidential library in College Station, Texas. All the celebratory fervor, however, could not mask one dark cloud on the horizon. The presidency of his son, George W. Bush, was imperiled.
One way of examining the growing crisis could be found in the prism of the elder Bush's relationship with his son, a relationship fraught with ancient conflicts, ideological differences, and their profound failure to communicate with each other. On many levels, the two men were polar opposites with completely different belief systems. An old-line Episcopalian, Bush 41 had forged an alliance with Christian evangelicals during the 1988 presidential campaign because it was vital to winning the White House. But the truth was that real evangelicals had always regarded him with suspicion -- and he had returned the sentiment.
But Bush 43 was different. A genuine born-again Christian himself, he had given hundreds of evangelicals key positions in the White House, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and various federal agencies. How had it come to pass that after four generations of Bushes at Yale, the family name now meant that progress, science, and evolution were out and stopping embryonic stem cell research was in? Why was his son turning back the hands of time to the days when Creationism held sway?
But this was nothing compared to the Iraq War and the men behind it. George H.W. Bush was a genial man with few bitter enemies, but his son had managed to appoint, as secretary of defense no less, one of the very few who fit the bill -- Donald Rumsfeld. Once Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney took office, the latter supposedly a loyal friend, they had brought in one neoconservative policy maker after another to the Pentagon, the vice president's office, and the National Security Council. In some cases, these were the same men who had battled the elder Bush when he was head of the CIA in 1976. These were the same men who fought him when he decided not to take down Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War. Their goal in life seemed to be to dismantle his legacy.
Which was exactly what was happening -- with his son playing the starring role. A year earlier, President George W. Bush, clad in fighter-pilot regalia, strode triumphantly across the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, a "Mission Accomplished" banner at his back -- the Iraq War presumably won. But the giddy triumphalism of Operation Shock and Awe had quickly faded. America had failed to form a stable Iraqi government. With Baghdad out of control, sectarian violence was on the rise. U.S. soldiers were becoming occupiers rather than liberators. Coalition forces were torturing prisoners. As for Saddam's vast stash of weapons of mass destruction -- the stated reason for the invasion -- none had been found.
Bush 41 had always told his son that it was fine to take different political positions than he had held. If you have to run away from me, he said, I'll understand. Few things upset him. But there were limits. He was especially proud of his accomplishments during the 1991 Gulf War, none more so than his decision, after defeating Saddam in Kuwait, to refrain from marching on Baghdad to overthrow the brutal Iraqi dictator. Afterward, he wrote about it with coauthor Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, in "A World Transformed," asserting that taking Baghdad would have incurred "incalculable human and political costs," alienated allies, and transformed Americans from liberators into a hostile occupying power, forced to rule Iraq with no exit strategy. His own son's folly had confirmed his wisdom, he felt.
But now his son had not only reversed his policies, he had taken things a step further. "The stakes are high ..." the younger Bush told reporters on April 21. "And the Iraqi people are looking -- they're looking at America and saying, are we going to cut and run again?"
The unspoken etiquette of the Oval Office was that sitting and former presidents did not attack one another. "Cut and run" was precisely the phrase Bush 43 used to taunt his Democratic foes, but this time he had used it to take a swipe at his old man. Having returned recently from the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, the elder Bush was eagerly looking forward to his celebrity-studded birthday bash in June. But, to his dismay, the media didn't miss his son's slight of him. On CNN, White House correspondent John King characterized the president's speech as an apparent "criticism of his father's choice at the end of the first Gulf War." Thanks to a raft of election season books, the press was asking questions about whether there was a rift between father and son.
So on that brisk spring day, a friend of Bush 41's dropped by the Memorial Drive offices and asked the former president how he felt about his son's controversial remarks. The elder Bush was stoic and taciturn as usual. But it was clear that he was not merely insulted or offended -- his son's remark had struck at the very heart of his pride. "I don't know what the hell that's about," George H.W. Bush said, "but I'm going to find out. Scowcroft is calling him right now."
The battle lines between father and son had been drawn even before the Iraq War started -- a discreet, sub-rosa conflict that was both deeply personal and profoundly political. In the balance hung policies that would kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people, create millions of refugees, destabilize a volatile region that contained the largest energy deposits on the planet, and change the geostrategic balance of power for years to come.
Ultimately, it was the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history -- one that could result in the end of American global supremacy.
The two men shared overlapping résumés -- schooling at Andover and Yale, membership in Skull and Bones, and an affinity for Texas and the oil business. But that's about where the similarities end. From the privileged confines of Greenwich, Connecticut, where he was raised, to Walker's Point, the Bush family summer compound in Kennebunkport where his family golfed and ate lobster on the rugged Maine coast, to the posh River Oaks section of Houston after they settled in Texas, George H.W. Bush epitomized a blue-blooded, old money, Eastern establishment ethos that was abhorrent to the Bible Belt. By contrast, his son had been a fish out of water among the Andover and Yale elite, and scurried back to the West Texas town of Midland after graduating from the Harvard Business School. Nothing made him happier than clearing brush off the Texas plains.
People who knew both men tended to favor the father. "Bush senior finds it impossible to strut, and Bush junior finds it impossible not to," said Bob Strauss, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee who served as ambassador to Moscow under Bush 41 and remained a loyal friend. "That's the big difference between the two of them."
More profoundly, they epitomized two diametrically opposed forces. On one side was the father, George H.W. Bush, a realist and a pragmatist whose domestic and foreign policies fit comfortably within the age-old American traditions of Jeffersonian democracy. On the other was his son George W. Bush, a radical evangelical poised to enact a vision of American exceptionalism shared by the Christian Right, who saw American destiny as ordained by God, and by neoconservative ideologues, who believed that America's "greatness" was founded on "universal principles" that applied to all men and all nations -- and gave America the right to change the world.
And so an extraordinary constrained nonconversation of sorts between father and son had ensued. Real content was expressed only via surrogates. In August 2002, more than seven months before the start of the Iraq War, Brent Scowcroft, a man of modest demeanor but of great intellectual resolve, was the first to speak out. At seventy-seven, Scowcroft conducted himself with a self-effacing manner that belied his considerable achievements. Ever the loyal retainer, he was the public voice of Bush 41, which meant he had the tacit approval of the former president. "They are two old friends who talk every day," says Bob Strauss. "Scowcroft knew it wouldn't terribly displease his friend."
Well aware that war was afoot, Scowcroft had tried to head it off with an August 15, 2002, Wall Street Journal op-ed piece titled "Don't Attack Saddam" and TV interviews. As a purveyor of the realist school of foreign policy, and as a protégé of Henry Kissinger, Scowcroft believed that idealism should take a backseat to America's strategic self-interest, and his case was simple. "There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations," he wrote, "and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks." To attack Iraq, while ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, "could turn the whole region into a cauldron and, thus, destroy the war on terrorism." A few days later, former secretary of state James Baker, who had carefully assembled the massive coalition for the Gulf War in 1991, joined in, warning the Bush administration that if it were to attack Saddam, it should not go it alone.
On one side, aligned with Bush 41, were pragmatic moderates who had served at the highest levels of the national security apparatus -- Scowcroft, Baker, former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger, and Colin Powell, with only Powell, as the sitting secretary of state, having a seat at the table in the new administration. On the other side, under the younger George Bush, were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Advisory Board Committee -- all far more hawkish and ideological than their rivals.
Of course, both Scowcroft and Baker would have preferred to give their advice to the young president directly rather than through the media, and as close friends to Bush senior for more than thirty years, that should not have been difficult. After all, Scowcroft's best friend was the president's father, his close friend Dick Cheney was vice president, and Scowcroft counted National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley among his protégés. And James Baker had an even more storied history with the Bushes.
"Am I happy at not being closer to the White House?" Scowcroft asked. "No. I would prefer to be closer. I like George Bush personally, and he is the son of a man I'm just crazy about."
But in the wake of Scowcroft's piece in the Journal, both men were denied access to the White House. When the elder Bush tried to intercede on Scowcroft's behalf, he met with no success. "There have been occasions when Forty-one has engineered meetings in which Forty-three and Scowcroft are in the same place at the same time, but they were social settings that weren't conducive to talking about substantive issues," a Scowcroft confidant told The New Yorker. (Sorry, I could not find a way to eliminate that ad. June W.)
Meanwhile, Bush senior did not dare tell his son that he shared Scowcroft's views. According to the Bushes' conservative biographers, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, family members could see his torment. When his sister, Nancy Ellis, asked him what he thought about his son's plan for the war, Bush 41 replied, "But do they have an exit strategy?"
In direct talks between father and son, however, such vital policy issues were verboten. "[Bush senior is] so careful about his son's prerogatives that I don't think he would tell him his own views," a former aide to the elder Bush told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. When the Washington Post's Bob Woodward told Bush 43 that it was hard to believe he had not asked his father for advice about Iraq, the president insisted the war was never discussed. "If it wouldn't be credible," Bush added, "I guess I better make something up."
Likewise, friends who saw them together found that they had absolutely nothing to say to each other on matters of vital national importance. "I was curious to see how they related to one another, and I'll be damned," said Bob Strauss, who shared an intimate dinner with them in the White House. "They never discussed the war, never discussed politics. We talked about social things, friendships, what was going on back in Texas. It was like a couple of old friends just gossiping about the past."
About the writer
Craig Unger is the New York Times bestselling author of "House of Bush, House of Saud" and a frequent analyst on CNN, ABC Radio, Air America, "The Charlie Rose Show," NBC's "Today" show and other broadcast outlets. He has written for the New Yorker, Esquire and many other publications and is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He lives in New York, where he is a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at NYU's School of Law.
In all, 63% of the campaign stories focused on political and tactical aspects of the campaign. That is nearly four times the number of stories about the personal backgrounds of the candidates (17%) or the candidates’ ideas and policy proposals (15%). And just 1% of stories examined the candidates’ records or past public performance, the study found.
And:
The press’ focus on fundraising, tactics and polling is even more evident if one looks at how stories were framed rather than the topic of the story. Just 12% of stories examined were presented in a way that explained how citizens might be affected by the election, while nearly nine-out-of-ten stories (86%) focused on matters that largely impacted only the parties and the candidates.
An editorial — 10/26/2007 10:40 am http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/editorial/253367 THE CAPITAL TIMES
Those echoes that Americans are hearing in the noisy-and-getting-noisier debate about Iran are from 2002 and 2003, when members of the current administration were busy spinning the fantasy that the United States needed to attack Iraq.
George "Uranium From Africa" Bush sure sounds like he wants to attack Iran. Just last week, the president said, "I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from (obtaining) the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."
Dick "Greeted as Liberators" Cheney sure sounds like he wants to attack Iran. This week, the vice president declared: "Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions."
Secretary of State Condoleezza "Mushroom Clouds" Rice sure sounds like she wants to attack Iran. "Unfortunately the Iranian government continues to spurn our offer of open negotiations, instead threatening peace and security by pursuing nuclear technologies that can lead to a nuclear weapon," Rice said on Thursday as she announced drastic new sanctions against the country that serious analysts say poses little threat to its neighbors and no real threat to the United States.
As in 2002 and early 2003, the most rational response is coming from Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio Democrat who says, "After the lies and deception used to lead us to war in Iraq, the belligerent Bush administration cannot be given leeway with statements that suggest a pre-emptive attack on Iran is necessary," says Kucinich, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nod who deserves a much better hearing than he has been afforded so far by the media and Democratic power brokers. "We are systematically destroying every available route to restoring peace and security in the Middle East," he adds.
Kucinich may be running for the White House, but his message is most relevant to Capitol Hill. "Congress," he says, "must take back its exclusive authority to declare war from the Bush administration."
He's right. But being right is not always enough in tenuous times. Being heard is what matters.
It could well be that the American experiment's best hope lies in the remote prospect that, having been proved right in 2002 and 2003, it will be Kucinich's counsel -- as opposed to that of Bush, Cheney and Rice -- that is heeded in this new moment of peril.
The point here is not a political one. This is not about whether Kucinich becomes president or the Democratic nominee, or even a strong contender in his race with cautious Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This is about the most fundamental question in a democracy: At a time when talk of war is growing louder, will we hear a real debate or merely the exaggerated echoes of those who have never gotten anything right?
The answer could well be measured by the extent to which we listen to Dennis Kucinich and those who stood with him in 2002 and 2003. Their record of cutting through the spin of the past should afford them forums in the present.
An editorial — 10/27/2007 9:40 am THE CAPITAL TIMES http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/editorial/253588
The anti-war movement, which is now supported by close to 70 percent of Americans, has yet to have much success in Congress. Neither the delusional Bush administration nor the dysfunctional Democratic opposition has the courage to take responsibility for cleaning up the quagmire -- by rapidly withdrawing U.S. troops, providing adequate aid, and then allowing the Iraqis to take genuine control of their own affairs -- so the death and destruction continue at a rate that is as unimaginable as it is unconscionable.
Close to 4,000 U.S. troops have been killed as part of an invasion and occupation of a sovereign country that should never have occurred. More than 25,000 U.S. troops have suffered devastating injuries. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have died. Millions have been displaced. And yet, Washington dithers.
So American patriots are doing what they have always done: going to the streets to employ what remains of their rights to freedom of speech, assembly and petition for the redress of grievances in the hope that if enough noise is made, the politicians will listen. Eleven regional demonstrations and marches are taking place across the country today as part of a new effort by the national United for Peace and Justice coalition to highlight opposition to the occupation.
The largest regional demonstration will be in Chicago, and more than 25 busloads of Wisconsinites from every corner of the state will be present, along with thousands of Wisconsinites who will arrive by car and train. The Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice and the Wisconsin AFL-CIO are big backers of this initiative, and state AFL-CIO President David Newby, a prime mover in successful efforts to align organized labor with the peace movement, will be a featured speaker in Chicago, along with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin.
In addition, Madison's "Raging Grannies" -- a project of the Madison Women's International League for Peace and Freedom -- will be singing their satirical songs from the main stage in Chicago. So Wisconsin's voice will be heard today. But it can't be a one-day affair. One message should be as unrelenting as it is blunt: "Bring the troops home NOW!"
A new executive order, signed in January 2004, gave State authority over all but military operations. Rumsfeld’s revenge, at least in the view of many State officials, was to withdraw all but minimal assistance for diplomatic security.
But they sat down to work it out, right?
Meetings to negotiate an official memorandum of understanding between State and Defense during the spring of 2004 broke up in shouting matches over issues such as their respective levels of patriotism and whether the military would provide mortuary services for slain diplomats.
Remember, however, the important point: if you noticed back then that these were crazy, dangerous people, you were shrill. To be respectable, you have to have waited until 2006 or so to turn on the Bushies.
The State Department Turned to Contractors Such as Blackwater Amid a Fight With the Pentagon Over Personal Security in Iraq
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 21, 2007; A01
Last Christmas Day in Baghdad, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad received a furious phone call from Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi. An American -- drunk, armed, wandering through the Green Zone after a party -- had shot and killed one of his personal bodyguards the night before, Mahdi said. He wanted to see Khalilzad right away.
At the vice president's home, Khalilzad found the slain guard's family assembled. Mahdi demanded the names of the American and his employer. And he wanted the man turned over to the Iraqi government.
After consulting with the embassy's legal officer, Khalilzad identified the shooter as Andrew J. Moonen, an employee of Blackwater USA, the company that provides security for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad. But he would not deliver Moonen himself. Within 36 hours of the shooting, Blackwater and the embassy had shipped him out of the country.
"As you can imagine," the embassy's Diplomatic Security office said in an e-mail to its Washington headquarters the day of Moonen's departure, "this has serious implications."
But as with previous killings by contractors, the case was handled with apologies and a payoff. Blackwater fired Moonen and fined him $14,697 -- the total of his back pay, a scheduled bonus and the cost of his plane ticket home, according to Blackwater documents. The amount nearly equaled the $15,000 the company agreed to give the Iraqi guard's family.
Ten months later, however -- after Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad traffic circle on Sept. 16 -- the State DepartmentIraq. The FBI is investigating the incident, Baghdad has vowed to overturn a law shielding contractors from prosecution, and congressional critics have charged State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security with failing to supervise Blackwater and other security companies under its authority. can no longer quietly manage the consequences of having its own private army in
The shootings have also reopened long-standing, bitter arguments between the State Department and the Pentagon, which over the years have feuded over policies including the decision to invade Iraq and the treatment of detainees. Such broad disagreements have frequently played out over a narrow question: Who is responsible for the safety of U.S. civilians serving in Iraq?
With State Department and FBI investigations underway, the military leaked its own report on the Sept. 16 shootings, finding no evidence that the Blackwater guards fired in self-defense, as the company has maintained. U.S. officers have publicly criticized the security contractors as out-of-control "cowboys" who alienate the same Iraqis the military is trying to cultivate.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last week that the contractors are at "cross purposes" with military goals, and he has suggested they be put under his authority. Many at State see this as a power grab by a Defense Department that has long refused to supply protection for diplomats. Since last month's shootings, one diplomat said, the Pentagon "has spared no expense to excoriate Blackwater and the State Department."
At its headquarters in a Rosslyn high-rise, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) is in crisis mode. Already, the service has more than doubled its three dozen agents in Baghdad, dispatching at least a third of the elite, 100-agent mobile SWAT force it keeps for emergencies around the world. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has ordered that at least one DS agent accompany every Blackwater-guarded convoy leaving the Green Zone -- an average of six or seven each day -- and has directed DS to monitor and archive radio and video transmissions from Blackwater vehicles to be used as evidence in any future incident.
An examination of State Department security contractor operations awaits Rice's review. Some officials speculated that Rice will have no choice but to remove Blackwater's approximately 900 personal-security personnel from Iraq; others said they think the company will be allowed to stay through the end of its current contract in May.
Replacing Blackwater -- by far the largest and most visible of three private security companies under State Department contract in Iraq -- would be difficult and expensive. DS officials fear that their bureau may be permanently tasked with guarding the hundreds of U.S. civilian officials now under Blackwater protection in Iraq. The service has only 1,400 trained agents worldwide, spread among the State Department building in Washington, 25 domestic U.S. offices and 285 U.S. diplomatic facilities overseas.
In the short term, taking over in Iraq would require pulling agents from other assignments. Training new agents "would take anywhere from 18 months to two years to identify them, do all the backgrounds, do the clearance work, seven months of basic training [and] follow-up training for high threats," said Richard Griffin, the assistant secretary of state for Diplomatic Security, in recent testimony.
A new, $112 million contract signed last month with Blackwater may also be in jeopardy, according to a senior DS official who, like other current and former administration officials and military officers interviewed for this article, discussed the contractor issue on the condition of anonymity. The new contract -- adding 241 Blackwater personnel and increasing its helicopter fleet in Iraq from eight to 24 -- will provide a quick-reaction air component for diplomatic transport, medical evacuation and rescue, the senior official said, something for which the military has declined to dedicate resources.
The need for the helicopters, the official maintained, was underscored when a convoy carrying Poland's ambassador in Baghdad was ambushed early this month. "Our technical ops center [in Baghdad] heard the radio chatter" between the ambassador's guards and the U.S. military, the official said. When the military said a rescue would take an hour, DS contacted Blackwater. Its helicopter extricated the dead and wounded -- including the badly burned ambassador -- in seven minutes.
But as criticism of State's security operations grows, the downside of having a contractor army at its disposal -- and under its responsibility -- has become more apparent, the official said. "With perfect 20/20 hindsight," he said, "maybe four years ago we should have seen this coming."
A Low-Key History
Before Iraq and Blackwater landed it in congressional hearing rooms, DS preferred to stay in the diplomatic shadows. Its duties include investigating visa and passport fraud, providing courier services, and managing technical and physical security for State's domestic and overseas facilities and personnel. Most visibly, its agents provide around-the-clock protection for the secretary of state and visiting foreign dignitaries.
Each U.S. embassy is assigned a DS agent as regional security officer. Trained, local hires have long provided protection around buildings, but it was not until 1994 that DS contracted with a U.S. firm for personal protection services, hiring Virginia-based DynCorp to accompany exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide back to Haiti after the U.S. military restored him to power.
Later, other U.S. contractors were hired temporarily to protect U.S. officials in trouble spots including Bosnia and the Palestinian territories. But for the most part, U.S. diplomats venturing outside their embassies are lightly guarded with local protection or are on their own.
Marc Grossman, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey in the mid-1990s, recalled telling his staff to take their own security precautions. After losing embassy employees to attacks, he advised staffers to keep a six-sided die in their glove compartments; to thwart ambushes, they should assign a different route to work to each number, he said, and toss the die as they left home each morning.
DS operations grew after the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but it was not until after the administration declared war on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 that security contractors became a permanent fixture on the State Department's payroll.
North Carolina-based Blackwater was hired to protect Hamid Karzai, first installed as head of a transitional government in Kabul and later elected president. Karzai was reluctant to accept the guards, said a U.S. diplomat posted to Afghanistan. "He was concerned about how it would look to have blonde or African-American guards, even women." Karzai asked why he couldn't have Italian Americans who could blend in more easily.
Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, who arrived in Kabul in December 2001 as President Bush's special envoy, later serving as ambassador there before moving to Iraq in 2005, received complaints about the contractors from Karzai. Tribal elders were insulted when they were refused access to him; some were even pushed to the ground if they approached too aggressively, the U.S. diplomat recalled.
Blackwater also guarded Khalilzad, whose gratitude was mixed with worry that the guards' speeding convoys would hit an Afghan child darting from a side street.
But Afghanistan, in security terms, was child's play compared with what would lie ahead in Iraq.
A Convenient Choice
When the U.S. military invaded and occupied Iraq in early 2003, there was no question who would be in charge of security for the official civilians pouring in to remake the country. Under an executive order signed by Bush, the Coalition Provisional Authority and its head, L. Paul Bremer, reported directly to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. But as U.S. troops became preoccupied with a growing insurgency, the Pentagon hired Blackwater to provide protection for Bremer and other civilians.
The next year, as the United States prepared to return sovereignty to the Iraqis and the State Department began planning an embassy in Baghdad, Rumsfeld lost a bid to retain control over the full U.S. effort, including billions of dollars in reconstruction funds. A new executive order, signed in January 2004, gave State authority over all but military operations. Rumsfeld's revenge, at least in the view of many State officials, was to withdraw all but minimal assistance for diplomatic security.
"It was the view of Donald Rumsfeld and [then-Deputy Defense Secretary] Paul Wolfowitz that this wasn't their problem," said a former senior State Department official. Meetings to negotiate an official memorandum of understanding between State and Defense during the spring of 2004 broke up in shouting matches over issues such as their respective levels of patriotism and whether the military would provide mortuary services for slain diplomats.
Despite the tension, many at State acknowledged the Pentagon's point that soldiers were not trained as personal protectors. Others worried that surrounding civilian officials with helmets and Humvees would undermine the message of friendly democracy they were trying to instill in Iraq.
"It was a question of, 'Do you want uniforms?' " the senior DS official said. " 'Should the military be doing that kind of work?' "
It was clear that the mission was beyond DS capabilities, and as the mid-2004 embassy opening approached, "we had to decide what we were going to do," the former State Department official said. "We had to get jobs done, and to do that we had to have some protection."
State chose the most expedient solution: Take over the Pentagon's personal security contract with Blackwater and extend it for a year. "Yes, it was a sole-source contract" justified by "urgent and compelling reasons," said William Moser, the deputy assistant secretary of state for logistics management, in recent congressional testimony. Midway through the contract, Moser said, an independent audit forced Blackwater's $140 million proposal down to $106 million.
The senior DS official rejected congressional suggestions that Blackwater's Republican political contacts and campaign contributions influenced its selection. "I'll stack our procurement office against anybody else's," he said. "Particularly DOD's." State officials "could care less whether [Blackwater head Erik] Prince gave money to anybody." Blackwater was the only contractor in Iraq with helicopters, and it already had personnel and facilities in place.
When the sole-source contract expired in the summer of 2005, State invited bids on a massive "worldwide personal protection services" contract to put its operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere under one umbrella. Blackwater formed a consortium with U.S. firms DynCorp and Triple Canopy, and the group won a multiyear, $1.2 billion agreement.
Under the individual task orders that only the three are eligible to bid on, DynCorp provides personal security in northern Iraq, and Triple Canopy in the south. Blackwater covers Baghdad and Hilla, and has by far the largest share of the $520 million that State spends annually on contract security in Iraq.
Both Blackwater and State say the firm provides good value. The cost of sending a U.S. diplomat or DS agent overseas "ranges from around $400,000 for a regular mission around the world to around $1 million for an American diplomatic position in Iraq," Moser, the State logistics official, told Congress. "So when we talk about using contract employees, I think that we have to be very careful to consider what the fully loaded costs would be of direct hires."
DS provides contractors a 1,000-page list of rules and procedures and says all security personnel meet rigid requirements -- including military or police experience -- and undergo security vetting. Contractors are highly paid for security duties: Blackwater charges State $1,221.62 a day for a "protective security specialist," according to a 2005 invoice released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
But that is an all-inclusive cost, Blackwater head Prince argued during a recent interview on the "Charlie Rose" show. "They get paid well, but they get paid only for every day they are at work in a hot zone. They pay significant taxes right off the top of that, state and federal. They have to cover their own insurance, their own housing allowance -- all those benefits that a soldier gets wrapped in."
In any case, Prince said, "I know it would be hard for the State Department to recruit other people to come over and do reconstruction work . . . if some of them are going home in coffins."
U.S. diplomats who have served in Iraq are uniform in their defense of Blackwater and the other security firms that protect them. Blackwater, they point out, has lost about 30 of its own personnel in Iraq -- and not one diplomat.
But just as diplomats receive only rudimentary training to protect themselves, DS had little preparation and established no comprehensive guidelines for running a thousands-strong private army. In particular, the senior DS official said, little thought was given to how contractors would be held legally accountable for incidents such as the Sept. 16 shootings.
Oversight, the official acknowledged, has "perhaps not been as good as it could be."
“There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.” So declared Mark Hanna, the great Gilded Age political boss.
Karl Rove has often described Hanna as his role model. And predictions that Mr. Rove and his disciples would succeed in creating a permanent Republican majority — I have a whole bookshelf of volumes with titles like “One Party Nation” and “Building Red America” — depended crucially on the assumption that the G.O.P. would have vastly more money than its opponents. It might even, some thought, match the 10-to-1 advantage Hanna gave William McKinley when he ran against William Jennings Bryan.
Oops. According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, in the current election cycle every one of the top 10 industries making political donations is giving more money to Democrats. Even industries that have in the past been overwhelmingly Republican, like insurance and pharmaceuticals, are now splitting their donations more or less evenly. Oil and gas is the only major industry that the G.O.P. can still call its own.
The sudden burst of corporate affection for Democrats is good news for the party’s campaign committees, but not necessarily good news for progressives. Before I get to the down side, however, let’s talk about why business seems to be giving up on the G.O.P.
To some extent it’s a matter of cold political calculation. Polls, plus a wave of G.O.P. retirements, suggest that next year the Democrats will expand their majority in the House, which is already bigger than anything the Republicans ever had during their 12-year reign. Of the 34 Senate seats up for election, 22 are held by Republicans, and major Democratic gains seem all but inevitable.
Add to this the weakness of the Republican presidential field, and it’s not surprising that lobbyists are casting in their lot with the likely winners. But that’s not the whole story.
There’s also disgust, even in the corporate world, with the corruption and incompetence of the Bush years. People on the left often describe the Bush administration as an agent of corporate America; that’s giving it too much credit.
The truth is that while the administration has lavished favors on some powerful, established corporations, the biggest scandals have involved companies that were small or didn’t exist at all until they started getting huge contracts thanks to their political connections. Thus, Blackwater USA was a tiny business until it somehow became the leading supplier of mercenaries for the War on Terror™.
And the lethal amateurishness of these loyal Bushies on the make horrifies the corporate elite almost as much as it horrifies ordinary Americans.
Last but not least, even corporations are relieved to see the end of what amounted to a protection racket.
In a classic 2003 article in The Washington Monthly, Nicholas Confessore (now at The New York Times) described the efforts of people like former Senator Rick Santorum to turn K Street into an appendage of the Republican Party — not the other way around. “The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer,” wrote Mr. Confessore, “are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the G.O.P.”
But corporations weren’t happy. According to The Politico, “many C.E.O.’s” used the term “extortion” to describe “the annual shakedowns by committee chairmen with jurisdiction over their industries.” And now that Mr. Santorum is out of office, heading the America’s Enemies program at a right-wing think tank, the faint sound you hear from K Street is that of lobbyists singing: “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.”
All of this greatly increases the odds that the Republicans, far from establishing a permanent majority, will be out of power for quite a while. But it also raises the question of what Democratic rule will really mean.
Right now all the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination are running on strongly progressive platforms — especially on health care. But there remain real concerns about what they would actually do in office.
Here’s an example of the sort of thing that makes you wonder: yesterday ABC News reported on its Web site that the Clinton campaign is holding a “Rural Americans for Hillary” lunch and campaign briefing — at the offices of the Troutman Sanders Public Affairs Group, which lobbies for the agribusiness and biotech giant Monsanto. You don’t have to be a Naderite to feel uncomfortable about the implied closeness.
I’d put it this way: many progressives, myself included, hope that the next president will be another F.D.R. But we worry that he or she will turn out to be another Grover Cleveland instead — better-intentioned and much more competent than the current occupant of the White House, but too dependent on lobbyists’ money to seriously confront the excesses of our new Gilded Age.
The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped.
By Bruce Fein
Posted Wednesday, June 27, 2007, at 5:06 PM ET
Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in teexecutive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.
Take the vice president's preposterous theory that his office is outside the executive branch because it also exercises a legislative function. The same can be said of the president, who also exercises a legislative function in signing or vetoing bills passed by Congress. Under Cheney's bizarre reasoning, President Bush is not part of his own administration: The executive branch becomes acephalous. Today Cheney Chief of Staff David Addington refused to renounce that reasoning, instead laughably trying to diminish the importance of the legal question at issue.
The nation's first vice president, John Adams, bemoaned: "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived; and as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet common fate." Vice President John Nance Garner, serving under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, lamented: "The vice presidency isn't worth a pitcher of warm piss." In modern times, vice presidents have generally been confined to attending state funerals or to distributing blankets after earthquakes.
Then President George W. Bush outsourced the lion's share of his presidency to Vice President Cheney, and Mr. Cheney has made the most of it. Since 9/11, he has proclaimed that all checks and balances and individual liberties are subservient to the president's commander i chef powers in confronting international terrorism. Let's review the record of his abuses and excesses:
The vice president asserted presidential power to create military commissions, which combine the functions of judge, jury, and prosecutor in the trial of war crimes. The Supreme Court rebuked Cheney in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Mr. Cheney claimed authority to detain American citizens as enemy combatants indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay on the president's say-so alone, a frightening power indistinguishable from King Louis XVI's execrated lettres de cachet that occasioned the storming of the Bastille. The Supreme Court repudiated Cheney in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.
The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists. This lawlessness has been answered in Germany and Italy with criminal charges against CIA operatives or agents. The legal precedent set by Cheney would justify a decision by RussianPresdent Vladimir Putin to kidnap American tourists in Paris and to dispatch them to dungeons in Belarus if they were suspected of Chechen sympathies.
The vice president has maintained that the entire world is a battlefield. Accordingly, he contends that military power may be unleashed to kill or capture any American citizen on American soil if suspected of association or affiliation with al-Qaida. Thus, Mr. Cheney could have ordered the military to kill Jose Padilla with rockets, artillery, or otherwise when he landed at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, because of Padilla's then-suspected ties to international terrorism.
Mr. Cheney has championed a presidential power to torture in contravention of federal statutes and treaties.
He has advocated and authored signing statements that declare the president's intent to disregard provisions of bills he has signed into law that he proclaims are unconstitutional, for example, a requirement to obtain a judicial warrant before opening mail or a prohibiton onemploying military force to fight narco-terrorists in Colombia. The signing statements are tantamount to absolute line-item vetoes that the Supreme Court invalidated in the 1998 case Clinton v. New York.
The vice president engineered the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance program targeting American citizens on American soil in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. He concocted the alarming theory that the president may flout any law that inhibits the collection of foreign intelligence, including prohibitions on breaking and entering homes, torture, or assassinations. As a reflection of his power in this arena, today the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Cheney's office, as well as the White House, for documents thatrelateto the warrantless eavesdropping.
The vice president has orchestrated the invocation of executive privilege to conceal from Congress secret spying programs to gather foreign intelligence, and their legal justifications. He has summoned the privilege to refuse to disclose his consulting of business executives in conjunction with his Energy Task Force, and to frustrate the testimonies of Karl Rove and Harriet Miers regarding the firings of U.S. attorneys.
Cheney scorns freedom of speech and of the press. He urges application of the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists who expose national security abuses, for example, secret prisons in Eastern Europe or the NSA's warrantless surveillance program. He retaliated against Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, through Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, for questioning the administration's evidence of weapons of mass destruction as justification for invading Iraq. Mr. Cheney is defending himself from a pending suit brought by Wilson nd Plam on the grounds that he is entitled to the absolute immunity of the president established in 1982 by Nixon v. Fitzgerald. (Although this defense contradicts Cheney's claim that he is not part of the executive branch.)
The Constitution does not expressly forbid the president from abandoning his chief powers to the vice president. But President Bush's tacit delegation to Cheney and Cheney's eager acceptance tortures the Constitution's provision for an acting president. The presidency and vice presidency are discrete constitutional offices. The 12th Amendment provides for their separate elections. The sole constitutionally enumerated function of the vice president is to serve as president of the Senate without a vote except to break ties.
In contrast, Article II enumerates the powers and responsibilities of the president, including the obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. A special presidential oath is prescribed. Section 3 of the 25th Amendmnt provides a method for the president to yield his office to the vice president, when "he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." There is no other constitutional provision for transferring presidential powers to the vice president.
Yet without making a written transmittal to Congress, President Bush has ceded vast domains of his powers to Vice President Cheney by mutual understanding that circumvents the 25th Amendment. This constitutional provision assures that the public and Congress know who is exercising the powers of the presidency and who should be held responsible for successes or failures. The Bush-Cheney dispensation blurs political accountability by continually hiding the real decision-maker under presidential skirts. The Washington Post has thoroughly documented the vice president's dominance in a four-part series running this week. It is quite a read.
In the end, resident ush regularly is unable to explain or defend the policies of his own administration, and that is because the heavy intellectual labor has been performed in the office of the vice president. Cheney is impeachable for his overweening power and his sneering contempt of the Constitution and the rule of law.
Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer at Bruce Fein & Associates and chairman of the American Freedom Agenda. He is author of the forthcoming book Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle Over the Constitution and Democracy.
Transgender people are not beggars at the civil rights table set by gay and lesbian activists. They are integral to the struggle for gender freedom for all.
Oct. 11, 2007 | Pity poor John Aravosis, the gay rights crusader from AmericaBlog whose "How Did the T Get in LGBT?" essay, in reference to the controversy over gender identity protections in the pending Employment Non-Discrimination Act, was published on Salon a few days ago.
To hear Aravosis tell it, he and multitudes of like-minded gay souls have been sitting at the civil rights table for more than 30 years, waiting to be served. Now, after many years of blood, sweat, toil and tears, a feast in the form of federal protection against sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace has finally been prepared. Lips are being licked, chops smacked, saliva salivated, when -- WTF!?! -- a gaunt figure lurches through the door.
It is a transgender person, cupped hands extended, begging for food. Seems somebody on the guest list -- maybe a lot of somebodies -- let this stranger in off the streets without consulting everyone else beforehand, claiming he-she-it-or-whatever was a relative of some sort. Suddenly, what was supposed to be a fabulous dinner party starts surreally morphing into one of those OxFam fundraisers dramatizing third-world hunger whose sole function is to make the "haves" feel guilty for the plight of the "have-nots."
Maitre d' Barney Frank offers an elegant pretext for throwing the bum out. The establishment's new management, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is caught off-guard by the awkward turn of events, but deftly shuffles the hubbub into the wings and starts working the room, all smiles, to reassure the assembled guests that a somber and long-sought civil rights victory will be celebrated in short order.
Aravosis and those who share his me-first perspective are not so sure. Seeing half a loaf of civil rights protection on the table before them, and sensing that the soirée might come to a premature and unexpected denouement, they make a grab, elbows akimbo, for said truncated loaf. This is, after all, their party.
In my line of work -- teaching history and theory of sexuality and gender -- we've invented a polysyllabic technical term applicable to Aravosis & Co., which is homocentric, whose definition Aravosis supplies when he asserts, as he did in his recent essay, that gay is the term around which the GLBT universe revolves. By gay he means gay men like himself, to which is added (in descending order of importance), lesbian, bisexual and transgender, beyond which lies an even more obscure region of poorly understood and infrequently observed identities.
Aravosis isn't questioning the place of the T in the GLBT batting order; he's just concerned with properly marking the distinction between "enough like me" and "too different from me" to merit inclusion in the categories with which he identifies. His position is a bit like those kerfuffled astronomers not too long ago, scratching their noggins over how to define Pluto's place in the conceptual scheme of the solar system. Sure, we've been calling it a planet for a good number of years because it's round and orbits the sun just like our Earth, but now it appears that if we keep doing so we'll have to let a bunch of the bigger asteroids into the planet category, as well as some other weird faraway stuff we only recently learned about, which stretches the definition of "planet" into a name for things we don't really think of as being much like good ol' Earth, so let's just demote Pluto instead. In Aravosis' homocentric cosmology, men may not be from Mars, nor women from Venus, but transgender people are definitely from Pluto.
Transgender people have become this political season's version of the unisex-toilet issue that helped scuttle passage of the Equal Rights Amendment back in the 1970s, of Willie Horton's role in bringing the first Bush presidency to the White House in the 1980s, and of the "Don't bend over to pick up the soap in the barracks shower room" argument against gays in the military in the 1990s -- a false issue that panders to the basest and most ignorant of fears. This is unfortunate because protecting the rights of transgender people specifically is just one welcome byproduct of the version of ENDA that forbids discrimination based on both sexual orientation and gender expression or identity. This full version of ENDA, rather than the nearly introduced one that stripped away previously agreed-upon protections against gender-based discrimination and would protect only sexual orientation, is the one that is of potential benefit to all Americans, and not just to a narrow demographic slice of straight-looking, straight-acting gays and lesbians. It doesn't really even do that much good for this group, as Lambda Legal points out, because of a loophole big enough to drive a truck through.
Aravosis, not being one to mince words when it comes to mincing meat, wants to know what he, as a gay man, has "in common with a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman." The answer is "gender." The last time I checked my dictionary, homosexuality had something to do with people of one gender tending to fall in love with people of the same gender. The meaning of homosexuality thus depends on the definition of gender. However much Aravosis might wish to cut the trannies away from the rest of his herd, thereby preserving a place free of gender trouble for just plain gay guys such as himself, that operation isn't conceptually possible. Gender and sexuality are like two lines intersecting on a graph, and trying to make them parallel undoes the very notion of homo-, hetero- or bisexuality.
Now here's the rub -- but it requires another of those fancy words my academic colleagues and I like to throw around: heteronormativity, the idea that whatever straight people do is really what's what, and that whatever anybody else does is deviant to some degree. To want to have sex with somebody of the same gender violates heteronormative expectations of gender behavior as much as it does heteronormative expectations of sexual behavior. Simply put: Real men don't suck cock. Nor do they use the word "fabulous" when describing a pair of women's shoes. Nor do they keep a picture of their husband pinned to the wall of their office cubicle. All of the above violates conventional or stereotypical expectations of proper masculine gender, and as Lambda Legal's preliminary analysis of ENDA makes clear, none would be protected under the rubric of sexual orientation alone. It's OK to be gay, in other words, just so long as you don't act like a fag.
Without solid theoretical ground to stand on, Aravosis resorts to flights of rhetorical fancy in lieu of an argument against gender protections. He characterizes the more than 300 GLBT organizations nationwide now on record as supporting a gender-inclusive ENDA, which collectively speak on behalf of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, as plotting something of a palace coup. They attempt, he claims, to force the gay movement -- along with the country that is poised to embrace them -- to crawl unwillingly into bed with a big bunch of tranny whatevers. Aravosis positions himself as a man giving voice to an oppressed silent majority, a majority too cowed by their fear of appearing "politically incorrect" to express their true feelings, in order to proclaim "that over the past decade the trans revolution was imposed on the gay community from outside, or at least above."
This coming from an ex-Republican, former congressional aide, Georgetown-educated, inside-the-Beltway lawyer who studied under Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and who has spent the past decade working his political connections in order to hold corporate America's feet to the fire on gay rights? Puh. Leeze. John Aravosis is in the nosebleed section of the social hierarchy; if he gets any higher up the food chain he should be issued an oxygen mask. Where, pray tell, is this "above" whereof he speaks, peopled with radical transgender revolutionaries? Somewhere in the vicinity of the Jewish international bankers, or the Trilateral Commission?
Aravosis wants to know how the T came to be added to GLB. Here's how: It started happening in the mid-1990s, in response to the queer movement of the early 1990s, and in response to a decade of radical AIDS activism. Fighting to end the epidemic required, from a public health point of view, getting past the squabbles of homosexual identity politics left over from the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The Reaganite right wanted to label AIDS "gay-related immune deficiency," even though viruses are no respecters of identity. AIDS was not a gay disease, but convincing others of that fact required a transformation of sexual politics. It fostered political alliances between lots of different kinds of people who all shared the common goal of ending the epidemic -- and sometimes precious little else.
What does Aravosis, as a gay man, have in common with a little girl whose mother gave her HIV in utero, or a heterosexual African man who contracted HIV from a female prostitute, or a junkie living on the streets of Bangkok, Thailand? Presumably, a common interest in ending AIDS. And what might he have in common with transgender people? Some sense that a person's suitability for employment had something to do with their ability to do the job?
Transgender people have their own history of civil rights activism in the United States, one that is in fact older, though smaller and less consequential, than the gay civil rights movement. In 1895, a group of self-described "androgynes" in New York organized a "little club" called the Cercle Hermaphroditos, based on their self-perceived need "to unite for defense against the world's bitter persecution." Half a century later, at the same time some gay and lesbian people were forming the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, transgender people were forming the Society for Equality in Dress. When gay and lesbian people were fighting for social justice in the militant heyday of the 1960s, transgender people were conducting sit-in protests at Dewey's lunch counter in Philadelphia, fighting in the streets with cops from hell outside Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco's Tenderloin, and mixing it up at Stonewall along with lots of other folks.
There was a vibrant history of transgender activism and movement building through the 1970s, when it suddenly became fashionable on the left to think of transgender people as antigay and antifeminist. Gay people were seen as freeing themselves from the straitjacket of psychopathology, while transgender people were clamoring to get into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association; feminists were seen as freeing themselves from the oppressiveness of patriarchal gender, while transgender people were perpetuating worn-out stereotypes of men and women. It's a familiar refrain, even now. Transgender arguments for access to appropriate healthcare, or observations that no one is ever free from being gendered, fell on deaf ears.
Until the early 1990s, that is, when a new generation of queer kids, the post-baby boomers whose political sensibilities had been forged in the context of the AIDS crisis, started coming into adulthood. They were receptive to transgender issues in a new way -- and that more-inclusive understanding has been steadily building for nearly two decades.
Aravosis and those who agree with him think that the "trans revolution" has come from outside, or from above, the rank-and-file gay movement. No -- it comes from below, and from within. The outrage that many people in the queer, trans, LGBT or whatever-you-want-to-call-it community feel over how a gender-inclusive ENDA has been torpedoed from within is directed at so-called leaders who are out of touch with social reality. It has to do with a generation of effort directed toward building an inclusive movement being pissed away by the clueless and the phobic. That's why every single GLBT organization of any size at the national and state levels -- with the sole exception of the spineless Human Rights Campaign -- has unequivocally come out in support of gender protections within ENDA, and has opposed the effort to pass legislation protecting only sexual orientation.
What happens in Congress in the weeks ahead on this historic issue is anybody's guess. I urge all of you who support the vision of an inclusive ENDA to contact your representatives in government and let your views be known.
On the day after Al Goreshared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.
And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.
What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?
Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.
And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.
The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.
But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.
Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.
The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.
Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the causes are global. The sulfuric acid in America’s lakes mainly comes from coal burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America’s air comes from coal and oil burned around the planet — and a ton of coal burned in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal burned here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their equivalent; it also requires international negotiations in which the United States will have to give as well as get.
Everything I’ve just said should be uncontroversial — but imagine the reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.
So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros.
Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them craz
the Conscience of a Liberal - Paul Krugman - The New York Times
October 14, 2007, 10:27 pm
Their own private S&Ls
Floyd Norris had an interesting piece on Friday on the effects of paying executives largely in stock options; it confirms suspicions I’ve had in the past. Floyd doesn’t put it this way, but the research he describes basically says that big options grants give CEOs the same incentives that deregulation plus deposit insurance gave S&Ls in the 1980s.
If you don’t know that story, here’s how it went: by the early 1980s, many savings and loan banks were in trouble: inflation was high, they had to pay high interest rates to attract deposits, but they were locked into long-term mortgage loans made when rates were much lower. Deposits in the S&Ls were guaranteed by the government — but in an effort to avoid paying up on that promise, Congress loosened the restrictions on the loans S&Ls were allowed to make, hoping that they would grow their way out of the problem.
What actually happened was that many S&L owners started deliberately taking bad risks, making dubious high-interest loans that would pay off big if they were lucky, but probably wouldn’t. And why not? It was heads they win, tails the taxpayers lose: if things went badly, they could just walk away. And there was also an explosion of outright fraud. What should have been a $15 billion problem quickly mushroomed into $150 billion.
Now imagine a CEO with a huge option package, but one that’s well out of the money — that is, it’s worthless if the stock price stays where it is or goes down, but might be worth a huge amount if the stock goes up a lot. Well, he’s in the same position as an S&L owner. It’s in his interest to make very risky plays, that might drive up the stock price but probably won’t. After all, it’s heads he wins, tails the stockholders lose. And a bit of fraud to pump up the stock price, just long enough to cash in, would make sense too.
Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.
In the early days of the explosion in CEO paychecks, Michael Jensen and Kevin Murphy famously claimed that it was all part of giving executives an incentive to be entrepreneurial:
On average, corporate America pays its most important leaders like bureaucrats. Is it any wonder then that so many CEOs act like bureaucrats rather than the value-maximizing entrepreneurs companies need to enhance their standing in world markets?
So we started paying CEOs like S&L owners instead - and they started acting like riverboat gamblers.
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Diehard GOP faithful, the dwindling number of Bush loyalists and political pundits of every stripe and medium seem obsessed these days with defining or discerning the "legacy of George W. Bush."
Lou Dobbs says President Bush has diminished a great nation and may diminish it further.
Frankly, I spend more time worrying about whether or not the United States can survive the remaining 15 months of his ebbing presidency.
There is little mystery about what future historians will consider to be the legacy of the 43rd president of the United States. Those historians are certain to describe the first presidential administration of the 21st century with terms such as dissipation and perversion.
Bush campaigned for the Republican Party's nomination eight years ago, styling himself as a compassionate conservative. He's amply demonstrated that he is neither.
Although many conservatives refuse to accept the reality, George W. Bush is a one-world neo-liberal who drove budget and trade deficits to record heights while embracing faith-based economic policies that perversely require only blind allegiance to free markets and free trade, without regard for consequence.
This president pursues a war without demanding of his generals either success or victory and accepts the sacrifice of our brave young men and women in uniform while asking nothing of our people or the nation at a time of war.
Sadly, this president has diminished a great nation and may diminish it further.
President Bush has pressed hard for the Security and Prosperity Partnership, the first step toward a North American Union that will threaten our sovereignty. This administration has permitted American businesses to hire illegal aliens, encouraged the invasion of 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens and has given Mexico and corporate America dominion over our borders and our immigration policy.
Were it not for an outraged public, the Bush administration would have been happy to cede control of our ports to a Dubai government-owned company.
The assault on our national sovereignty continues: At a time when public approval of the White House and Congress is near historic lows, the president is urging the Senate to act favorably on our accession to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
One hundred fifty-five nations have ratified the Law of the Sea Treaty, which essentially codifies into law detailed rules about freedom of the seas and the extent of territorial waters. The treaty also establishes an international bureaucracy to regulate deep-sea mining.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently heard arguments on the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, which President Ronald Reagan rejected but President Bill Clinton submitted to the Senate in 1994. A vote is likely in the weeks ahead, and this Democratic-controlled Senate is the same institution whose leadership sought passage of the disastrous comprehensive immigration overhaul legislation.
And just as this administration trotted out an Army general to support the Dubai Ports World fiasco and a Marine Corps general to support the administration's immigration proposal, it's now pressured the U.S. Navy to support this treaty.
Bush says the treaty "will secure U.S. sovereign rights over extensive marine areas, including the valuable natural resources they contain." The president could not be more wrong.
This treaty will submit the United States to international tribunals largely adverse to our interests, and the dispute resolution mechanisms are stacked against the United States. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, astutely argues that nearly all the signatories "have voted against the United States over half the time [at the United Nations]."
This administration can do nothing straightforwardly and perverts language at every turn. Take, for example, the words of Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte arguing in support of the treaty. "As a non-party," he argues, "We are not currently in a position to maximize U.S. sovereign rights over the shelf in the Arctic or elsewhere."
Negroponte's tortured reasoning is entirely consistent with this administration's intellectual performance over almost two terms in office, but it serves neither the truth nor the national interest.
The Law of the Sea Treaty would undermine our national sovereignty and act as a back door for global environmental activists to direct U.S. policy.
It would hold the United States to yet another unaccountable international bureaucracy and constrain our national prerogatives. Aside from that, the treaty is wholly unnecessary. The U.S. Navy already enjoys international navigation rights by customary practice.
Our elected officials in both political parties and the national media should worry less about the legacy of this lame-duck president and far more about the future of a great nation and people debilitated by his ruinous leadership.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.
It is a pedestrian observation that terrorists are human beings and therefore have a human psychology which we can study and understand. Strangely, that simple observation seems almost heretical, possibly even subversive in our currently political climate. It seems to imply that terrorists are not aberrant monsters, or possibly even that they are normal in some respects.
Maybe it does imply that, but it is certainly true that it also means that we can understand the enemy better if we try to get in his head rather than just demonize him as a sub-human, brain-washed automaton, living only to kill for his cause. There is no greater folly than to fail to use all the civilized tools at our disposal to defeat terrorists. If we dismiss the advantage that truly understanding our enemy can convey out of some idealogical commitment to portraying the enemy as a caricature, rather than as full human beings, we only harm ourselves.
Here is a wonderful discussion with Dr. Louise Richardson, Executive Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University on how to understand terrorism and contain the threat through a deeper understanding of the motives and goals of terrorists. She is the author of a book entitled "What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat." Both the conversation and the book may challenge your assumptions and push you out of your comfort zone.
." Both the conversation and the book may challenge your assumptions and push you out of your comfort zone.
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