Monday, September 29, 2003
More writing, less filling!
I’ve started writing more lately, so I’ll be posting more original content and quoting articles in their entirety a little less in the future. I’ll probably just put some links with a synopsis for some of the better things I read.
That said, I’ll provide a link today to the archives of one of my favorite columnists, Mark Morford of SFGate.com. Want to become a monkey-wrench in the cogs of the going-down-the-tubes Bush economy by slacking off for the afternoon on company time? Want a deeply subversive read - not in the sense of some crusty old pseudo-Marxist proletarian-rousing drivel, but that of a life-affirming good-for-your-soul positive human cussedness that would give John Ashcroft hives?
For a good time, go to Mark’s column archive. Here you’ll find articles that are funny, engaging, maddening, truthful, and inspiring. I have to admit that Mark’s style of run-on scream-of-consciousness unashamed mouth-frothing hedonistic prose has been influencing my writing more and more in the last couple years. Which you’ll be seeing more of, like I said…
- Bob Woods
Sunday, September 28, 2003
Patriot Act targets non-terrorists
The government is using the Patriot Act to deprive all people of their constitutional rights.
Patriot Act targets non-terrorists
The government is using the Patriot Act to deprive all people of their constitutional rights.
http://www.news-observer.com/front/story/2902681p-2671892c.html
Agents abridge rights
By SAM STANTON AND EMILY BAZAR, Mcclatchy Newspapers
Secret lists govern whether you can get on an airplane. E-mail messages and the Internet are under secret surveillance. New warrants allow the government to search your home, bank records and medical files without your knowing it.
When FBI agents learned last year that terrorist training included scuba techniques, the bureau obtained the names and addresses of more than 10 million Americans certified as divers.
Immigrants nationwide have been jailed indefinitely over visa violations that in the past would have been ignored, and about 13,000 face deportation.
Others have languished in cells while officials lied to their families about where they were. And thousands have fled the United States, seeking refuge in Canada.
For American citizens and immigrant residents, the echoes of Sept. 11, 2001, continue to resound in what a growing number of critics contend is a loss of basic civil liberties stemming from the federal government’s anti-terrorism campaign.
“The government is treating us like we are all terrorists,” said Kourosh Gholamshahi, 36, of Sacramento, Calif., an Iranian immigrant who spent nearly a year in jail over a deportation order he ignored. “What kind of Constitution is this? What kind of democracy is this?”
Critics, liberal and conservative, say it’s a democracy that has gone too far in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks by giving the federal government enormous new powers.
Supporters of the new laws insist that this same democracy is protecting its citizens’ rights, as well as their lives, by defending the nation from new attacks.
Early this month , President Bush said Congress still has not gone far enough and called for even greater federal powers in terrorism probes.
And Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on a national tour to shore up support for tough new laws passed in the wake of the attacks.
“These tools ... prevent terrorists from unleashing more death and destruction on our soil,” Ashcroft said Sept. 6 on a visit to Durham . “They enable us to save innocent lives.”
The dispute has sparked a national debate, with more than 160 communities voting to oppose some of the powers authorized under the Patriot Act, the toughest new law being used in the war on terrorism.
After initially brushing aside such actions as the protests of uninformed liberals, the Justice Department is now taking on the critics directly, issuing talking points to officials and urging them to address community concerns by appearing at public forums.
Liberty curtailed
The very definition of liberty is being challenged in the way some cases are being handled.
Consider these instances:
* Two peace activists are singled out by authorities at San Francisco International Airport as they try to board a flight to Boston for a family visit. Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon are held and questioned for hours because their names apparently popped up on a secret “no fly” list. Both are suing the federal government in a bid to gain more information about such lists.
* A public defender surfing the Web at a library in Santa Fe, N.M., finds himself surrounded by four local police officers, then handcuffed and detained by Secret Service agents after someone apparently overhears a political debate in which he declares that “Bush is out of control.” Andrew O’Connor’s experience in February led to legislative hearings in New Mexico over the Patriot Act and government secrecy.
* Barry Reingold, a retired phone company worker, gets into an intense debate at his San Francisco gym over the bombing of Afghanistan and his criticism of President Bush, and is awakened at his apartment a week later by two FBI agents who want to talk to him about his political beliefs.
The impact on the immigrant community has been more severe, as Gholamshahi’s experience illustrates. From the time he came to the United States 18 years ago, fleeing persecution in Iran, Gholamshahi had forged a new life in Sacramento, living quietly and marrying an American. He found odd jobs, including work as a busboy and as a security guard.
Gholamshahi sought political asylum in 1989 but was denied, and he was ordered deported.
He chose to stay in the United States illegally. Before Sept. 11, that was a common practice, and the government rarely pursued such cases unless an immigrant came to the attention of law enforcement.
But Gholamshahi’s old deportation order caught up with him last year. With the government newly focused on Middle Eastern men and Ashcroft’s post-9/11 declaration that any violation would be used to expel possible terrorists, he found himself shuttled from jail to jail.
Gholamshahi’s supporters acknowledge that the government had a right to detain him, but they argue that, like many Middle Eastern men, he was singled out because of his ethnicity.
“Kourosh is a person who has no criminal background,” said Gae Geram, a Sacramento immigration bond specialist who fought to win his release. “Wanting to stay here is his only crime.”
Gholamshahi was released from the Sacramento County jail in May, after a federal court agreed to hear his appeal for asylum.
His detention echoes that of thousands of others who still face the possibility of deportation. Among them are hundreds of immigrants rounded up after Sept. 11 in a sweep aimed at detaining those suspected of terrorist ties—something Gholamshahi was never accused of.
The Justice Department’s inspector general issued a scathing report in April on the handling of the 762 detainees, saying there were “significant problems” with the way some were treated, and uncovering evidence that family members and lawyers were kept in the dark about where the detainees had been taken.
The Justice Department rejected much of the criticism, contending that its “actions are fully within the law and necessary to protect the American people.”
Courts give green light
Federal courts have given the government wide leeway in its pursuit of suspected terrorists, ruling that it may keep secret the names of the detainees. They have likewise ruled that immigration hearings involving these suspects may be held in secret.
The Bush administration has also created a new category that allows U.S. citizens to be classified as “enemy combatants” who can be held without charges and denied access to lawyers.
Kevin Johnson, associate dean for academic affairs at the University of California, Davis, law school, said the concept “relies in part on some World War II case precedent,” but he added, “It’s really a new term created by the Bush administration.”
Jose Padilla, the Chicago man alleged to have plotted a “dirty bomb” attack in the United States, was detained in May 2002 and declared an enemy combatant but was never charged with a crime. He was denied access to an attorney and turned over to military authorities. Yaser Hamdi, a Louisiana-born man captured as a Taliban fighter in 2001, is being held under similar conditions.
Some legal experts say the tactics recall those used in anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s.
“If you arrest a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, he has rights,"Johnson said. “He has a right to counsel that’s guaranteed by the Constitution. He generally has a right to some kind of hearing about his detention. ... He has due process rights.”
The Justice Department and the courts disagree, and since Sept. 11 authorities have used a variety of methods to hold people suspected of terrorist ties.
Since the passage of the Patriot Act, the Justice Department said, it has ordered reviews of 4,500 intelligence files to determine whether the new standards would allow prosecutors to file terrorism charges, and courts have issued 18,000 subpoenas and search warrants in connection with anti-terrorism investigations.
Elsewhere , authorities have detained nearly 50 individuals since the Sept. 11 attacks and held them—in secret—as “material witnesses” for federal grand juries investigating terrorism, the Justice Department said.
Almost all those witnesses were released within 90 days, according to the department.
Growing backlash
The backlash has been building steadily since the passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001. That December, the City Council in Ann Arbor, Mich., responded to federal sweeps aimed at Arab immigrants with a resolution calling on the federal government to ensure “that all individuals are afforded their appropriate rights to due process.”
Since then, more than 160 communities have voted to condemn the law as too broad an attack on civil liberties. In the Triangle, Carrboro has passed an anti-Patriot Act resolution and was joined by Durham County last week. The Chapel Hill Town Council is considering following suit.
Among the provisions opponents find most troubling:
The FBI has broader authority to seek information on citizens’ reading habits at libraries and bookstores, as well as financial information and medical records.
Critics complain that the threshold for obtaining the information is not “probable cause”; instead, agents need only convince the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, a secret body that oversees investigations against terrorism suspects, that the information being sought may prove relevant in a criminal probe. The law bars anyone, librarians, for instance, from disclosing that he or she has been asked for such records.
The secrecy extends beyond the provisions of the Patriot Act, particularly with air travel. Some individuals trying to board airliners have been detained without explanation.
Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon sued after being detained at the San Francisco airport in 2002. They say they believe their names were similar to names on government no-fly lists, although they also wonder whether their work as editors of an anti-war newspaper led to their being singled out.
The idea that anyone would be singled out for searches because of his or her political beliefs is “preposterous,” said Brian Turmail, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration. “That is not and never will be criteria for any no-fly list.”
Yet details of how someone ends up on such a list—or how many people are on it—remain secret. The government cites security concerns.
When the American Civil Liberties Union sought information on why Adams and Gordon were stopped, the FBI responded to Freedom of Information Act requests by saying it had no such records.
Eventually, however, officials at San Francisco airport turned over documents indicating that 339 passengers had been stopped or questioned at the facility in connection with no-fly lists between September 2001 and last March.
Many were apparently stopped because they looked Middle Eastern, according to descriptions in the nearly 400 pages of reports, including this stop made on Sept. 19, 2002:
“Female, brown hair ... Middle Eastern ... Subj is not on a ‘no-fly’ list but her name is a close match.”
NRA and ACLU
Such tactics have some Americans from across the political spectrum asking whether they’re being forced to give up too many personal freedoms.
“This whole thing scares me,” said Robert K. Corbin, a former president of the National Rifle Association. “I believe very strongly in the Bill of Rights, and I don’t want anybody to screw around with it.”
Corbin noted that his group, widely viewed as conservative, has found common ground with the ACLU in voicing concerns about the Patriot Act. The stakes are so high, he said, that opposing groups must work together.
“I’m just afraid that the Patriot Act is like the war on drugs, where people are willing to give up their freedoms for security,” he said. “I’m not.”
Ashcroft’s defenders say he has been unfairly portrayed—from the halls of Congress to “Saturday Night Live” skits—as a paranoid crusader.
“If he utilizes the tools that have been given to the Department of Justice by Congress, he’s attacked and vilified by the ACLU and others as taking away civil liberties,” said McGregor Scott, a federal prosecutor in Sacramento.
“On the other hand, if he’s not strong enough and we get attacked again, he goes down in history as the attorney general who let us get attacked.”
Ashcroft has said he intends to use his department’s powers to protect the nation, and that doing so requires quick and innovative information-gathering.
So last year, on the eve of the Memorial Day weekend, FBI agents began showing up in dive shops around the country asking for lists of certified divers.
Acting on a tip from a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, agents had learned that some terrorists might have been trained in underwater attacks.
Eventually, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors provided the names. The association agreed to do so on the condition that the government use it “for the single purpose of investigating possible terrorist acts using scuba,” said Jeff Nadler, the group’s vice president.
With that agreement in hand, the association turned over CD-ROMs listing 10 million Americans and their addresses.
Few alarms raised
There was little partisan acrimony when the federal government began enhancing its ability to monitor would-be terrorists.
One month after the attacks of Sept. 11, Ashcroft asked Congress for sweeping new powers. The request came in the form of a bill titled “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”
It was dubbed “the USA Patriot Act,” and with the rubble of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still smoking, it was a hard pitch to resist.
In fact, it was almost impossible, because many in Congress knew almost nothing about what was actually in the bill.
“The final version of the Patriot Act that was passed into law was rewritten between midnight and 8 o’clock in the morning behind closed doors by a few unknown people, and it was presented to Congress for a one-hour debate and an up or down vote,” U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said in an interview. “It was hundreds of pages long, and no member of Congress can tell you they knew what they were voting for in its entirety.”
Few politicians were willing to explain a vote against patriotism. Only one senator—Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin—and 66 House members, including North Carolina Democrats Mel Watt and Eva Clayton, voted against the bill.
Some who voted for it said they had misgivings, but reasoned that it was palatable because many of the act’s provisions automatically expire at the end of 2005.
In recent months, however, a tougher follow-up version has been drafted.
For now, the focus of much of the new anti-terrorism efforts has been on immigrants, although one provision of the unofficial “Patriot Act II” would give the government the right to strip some Americans of their citizenship.
That, critics say, puts the country on a dangerous new course.
“When the government says, ‘We’re sacrificing their rights, you American citizens need not worry,’ the promise is illusory,” said David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and author of the new book, “Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism.”
“When you look at history,” Cole said, “in virtually every crisis, the first targets are foreigners. The government argues that the threat emanates from abroad. ... But eventually, government officials grow accustomed to exercising these authorities and seek out ways to extend them to U.S. citizens.”
http://www.news-observer.com/front/story/2902681p-2671892c.html
Thursday, September 25, 2003
Big lie on Iraq comes full circle
September 19, 2003
by Andrew Greeley
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief (director of communications, in the current parlance), once said that if you are going to lie, you should tell a big lie. That may be good advice, but the question remains: What happens when people begin to doubt the big lie? Herr Goebbels never lived to find out. Some members of the Bush administration may be in the process of discovering that, given time, the big lie turns on itself.
The president has insisted that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism, a continuation of the administration’s effort to link Iraq to the attack on the World Trade Center. While almost three-quarters of the public believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attack, the polls after the president’s recent speech show that less than half believe that Iraq is the ‘’central front’’ of the war on terrorism. Moreover, the majority believe that the war has increased the risk of terrorism. A shift is occurring in the middle, which is neither clearly pro-Bush nor clearly anti-Bush. The big lie is coming apart.
There is not and never has been any evidence that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attack. None. The implication of such involvement was an attempt to deceive, a successful attempt at the big lie.
I’m not sure that the president knows it is a lie, however.
Also, the weapons of mass destruction story was never true. It now appears that Saddam panicked in 1995 when his sons-in-law defected to Jordan and revealed the truth about his weapons development. He immediately ordered the destruction of all the evidence. The U.N. team before the war would have no more found any weapons than the Americans after the war.
Again, I’m not sure that the president knew the weapons argument was false. Perhaps some of his advisers believed it, or, as the Irish say, half-believed it. However, the American people now seem to suspect that they haven’t been told the truth.
Why, then, did the United States invade Iraq if the reasons given for the war were so problematic? It would seem that the answer was the same as the reason as for climbing Mt. Everest: Iraq was there. The administration recited the ‘’war on terror’’ mantra as a pretext for doing something that its intellectuals had wanted to do for years. No one in the administration expected that such a war would lead to more dangers of terrorism rather than less. The mantra has been used as an excuse for many things, from the Patriot Act to drilling for oil in Alaska. It won the 2002 election for the Republicans. It is supposed to win the presidential election next year. Will the big lie work? Perhaps, though it would seem that some are growing skeptical about its constant repetition.
Moreover, the corollary mantra, which says that Americans must make sacrifices to win the war on terror, is also in trouble. Who makes the sacrifices? The rich Americans celebrating their tax ‘’refunds’’? The Republican leadership who have few if any sons and daughters in harm’s way? Giant corporations like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton or Bechtel? No, the sacrifices will be made mostly by the sons and daughters of the poor and the working class who must fight the war. Jessica Lynch joined the army so she could get money for a college education. Her roommate Lori Piestewa, who was killed in action, joined because she was a Native American single mother who needed the money to raise her two children.
There will be sacrifices made by schoolchildren who depend on state and local money, which has disappeared into the ‘’war effort,’’ the elderly who will not benefit from prescription drug reform; the working men whose overtime pay the president wishes to cut; the chronically unemployed whose jobs have disappeared, and the future generations who will have to work to pay off the president’s huge debt.
‘’War on terror’’ is a metaphor. It is not an actual war, like the World War or the Vietnamese or Korean wars. It is rather a struggle against fanatical Islamic terrorists, exacerbated if not caused by the conflict in Palestine. When one turns a metaphor into a national policy, one not only misunderstands what is going on, one begins to slide toward the big lie. One invades Iraq because one needed a war.
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
What more evidence do you need?
Remember when Bush and his cohorts trotted out all that bullshit “evidence” about Iraq? That it was so important that we had to invade immediately, without waiting for the “ground truth” via UN weapons inspections? Where is that resolve, when it comes to much more important matters like global warming?
Much recent evidence, viewed in isolation, suggests regional warming and rainfall patterns changing. But when viewed together, they fit the pattern suggested by computer models of global warming to an alarming degree (pun intended ;-). The ice shelves off the northern tip of Canada have just broken up for the first time in at least 3000 years. The jet streams are rapidly moving towards the poles, it’s begun raining regularly for the first time in 6000 years across the southern Sahara, and the dry Saharan heat moves into Europe, killing thousands. It hardly snows at low altitudes here in Oregon anymore. These are not just regional variations. This is what global warming looks like.
Where is that famous resolve, the ability to do what must be done, to sacrifice for the good of all, that stands at the heart of what America once was? When will the U.S. be dragged, kicking and screaming, to sign the Kyoto Protocol? Where are Bush and his cronies now? Like a bunch of ostriches, mooning the world while their heads are stuck in the sands of the Middle East, rooting for more oil to add to the problem…
- Bob Woods
Monday, September 22, 2003
Bush covers up climate research
White House officials play down its own scientists’ evidence of global warming
Paul Harris New York
Sunday September 21, 2003
The Observer
White House officials have undermined their own government scientists’ research into climate change to play down the impact of global warming, an investigation by The Observer can reveal.
The disclosure will anger environment campaigners who claim that efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions are being sabotaged because of President George W. Bush’s links to the oil industry.
Emails and internal government documents obtained by The Observer show that officials have sought to edit or remove research warning that the problem is serious. They have enlisted the help of conservative lobby groups funded by the oil industry to attack US government scientists if they produce work seen as accepting too readily that pollution is an issue.
Central to the revelations of double dealing is the discovery of an email sent to Phil Cooney, chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, by Myron Ebell, a director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI is an ultra-conservative lobby group that has received more than $1 million in donations since 1998 from the oil giant Exxon, which sells Esso petrol in Britain.
The email, dated 3 June 2002, reveals how White House officials wanted the CEI’s help to play down the impact of a report last summer by the government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in which the US admitted for the first time that humans are contributing to global warming. ‘Thanks for calling and asking for our help,’ Ebell tells Cooney.
The email discusses possible tactics for playing down the report and getting rid of EPA officials, including its then head, Christine Whitman. ‘It seems to me that the folks at the EPA are the obvious fall guys and we would only hope that the fall guy (or gal) should be as high up as possible,’ Ebell wrote in the email. ‘Perhaps tomorrow we will call for Whitman to be fired,’ he added.
The CEI is suing another government climate research body that produced evidence for global warming. The revelation of the email’s contents has prompted demands for an investigation to see if the White House and CEI are co-ordinating the legal attack.
‘This email indicates a secret initiative by the administration to invite and orchestrate a lawsuit against itself seeking to discredit an official US government report on global warming dangers,’ said Richard Blumenthal, attorney general of Connecticut, who has written to the White House asking for an inquiry.
The allegation was denied by White House officials and the CEI. ‘It is absurd. We do not have a sweetheart relationship with the White House,’ said Chris Horner, a lawyer and senior fellow of CEI.
However, environmentalists say the email fits a pattern of collusion between the Bush administration and conservative groups funded by the oil industry, who lobby against efforts to control carbon dioxide emissions, the main cause of global warming.
When Bush first came to power he withdrew the US - the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gases - from the Kyoto treaty, which requires nations to limit their emissions.
Both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are former oil executives; National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was a director of the oil firm Chevron, and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans once headed an oil and gas exploration company.
‘It all fits together,’ said Kert Davies of Greenpeace. ‘It shows that there is an effort to undermine good science. It all just smells like the oil industry. They are doing everything to allow the US to remain the world’s biggest polluter.’
Other confidential documents obtained by The Observer detail White House efforts to suppress research that shows the world’s climate is warming. A four-page internal EPA memo reveals that Bush’s staff insisted on major amendments to the climate change section of an environmental survey of the US, published last June. One alteration indicated ‘that no further changes may be made’.
The memo discusses ways of dealing with the White House editing, and warns that the section ‘no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change’.
Some of the changes include deleting a summary that stated: ‘Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment.’ Sections on the ecological effects of global warming and its impact on human health were removed. So were several sentences calling for further research on climate change.
A temperature record covering 1,000 years was also deleted, prompting the EPA memo to note: ‘Emphasis is given to a recent, limited analysis [which] supports the administration’s favoured message.’
White House officials added numerous qualifying words such as ‘potentially’ and ‘may’, leading the EPA to complain: ‘Uncertainty is inserted where there is essentially none.’
The paper then analyses what the EPA should do about the amendments and whether they should be published at all. The options range from accepting the alterations to trying to discuss them with the White House.
When the report was finally published, however, the EPA had removed the entire global warming section to avoid including information that was not scientifically credible.
Former EPA climate policy adviser Jeremy Symons said morale at the agency had been devastated by the administration’s tactics. He painted a picture of scientists afraid to conduct research for fear of angering their White House paymasters. ‘They do good research,’ he said. ‘But they feel that they have a boss who does not want them to do it. And if they do it right, then they will get hit or their work will be buried.’
Symons left the EPA in April 2001 and now works for the National Wildlife Federation as head of its climate change programme. The Bush administration’s attitude was clear from the beginning, he said, and a lot of people were working to ensure that the President did nothing to address global warming.
Additional reporting by Jason Rodrigues
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1046388,00.html
