Quickies 10

Considering the vacuous way that the Bush admin has been timing its *big* announcements and puffed up Ashcroft red alerts to divert attention from embarrasing events, I wouldn't be surprised if the speed-up was nothing more than a petty attempt to divert attention away from Fahrenheit 9/11.

But Hatch — good Mormon that he is — wouldn't be caught dead dropping the F-bomb on Leahy even if more than half of the rest of the country is screaming that very word at their TV sets.

No... it was left to straight-talking Cheney.

Lassige said earthquakes in that area are rare but have occurred before. He said quakes have been recorded there in 1881, 1912 and 1972.

The geological survey said the three-second quake occurred at a depth of 3.1 miles in a structure associated with the Sandwich Fault Zone. It was not connected with the New Madrid Fault further south, which has been responsible for the Midwest's most serious earthquakes.

There has been endless speculation about who this mystery man was and who actually did the forging. Was he the forger? And if so, what were his motives? If not, who put them into his hands? And what were their motives?

According to the Financial Times article, that business man is likely himself the forger of the documents and he has a long history of bad acts which, they say, discredit him as a source of information. That last tidbit plays a key part in the FT story because, in their words, the provider of the documents is "understood to be planning to reveal selected aspects of his story to a US television channel."

That's what the FT says.

I hear something different.

In fact, I know something different.

Streeter voiced his view on the movie, "I made the comment, apples and oranges -- Kerry, Bush -- one's no better than the other. You really ain't got much of a choice. This guy comes up to me and says, 'Oh yeah?' " Streeter was then spat on by the same man.

He attempted to call police to report the incident when he was told not to, "A guy standing next to him said why don't you drop it. I said, 'No, I'm calling the police. I'm exercising my right as a citizen, I've been assaulted.' "

But the horror kept on growing for Streeter as he walked to his car on the phone with police, "This guy turns, and totally by surprise takes his hand and bam! It was a big guy. Shoved me onto the ground, I hit my head." A police report has been filed.

The American criminal justice system relies too heavily on imprisoning people and needs to consider more effective alternatives, according to a study released Wednesday by the American Bar Assn., the nation's largest lawyers' organization.

"For more than 20 years, we've gotten tougher on crime," said Dennis W. Archer, a former Detroit mayor and the group's current president. But it is unclear, he said, whether the U.S. is any safer for having 2.1 million people behind bars, including 160,000 in California.

"We can no longer sit by as more and more people - particularly in minority communities - are sent away for longer and longer periods of time while we make it more and more difficult for them to return to society after they serve their time," Archer said at a Washington news conference. "The system is broken. We need to fix it."

..."The situation is as dangerous as we thought", said Muselier, Foreign Ministry secretary of state, told journalists after touring the Mornay camp where the Sudanese authorities say 100,000 people have taken shelter....

“After surviving massacres carried out by pro-government militias on their villages, displaced civilians in Darfur, Sudan continue to endure violent attacks and rapes around the areas where they have gathered”, a statement said. “The same militias that carried out the initial attacks now control the camp’s periphery, virtually imprisoning people who live in constant fear. “Men risk being killed if they leave, and women have been beaten and raped looking for food and other essential items outside the camp”, said the statement, released in Geneva.

“Already, 200 people die in Mornay every month, and there is nothing to indicate that assistance will arrive in time or in sufficient quantities to avoid a massive human disaster. “Today, one in five children in the camp is severely malnourished while irregular and insufficient food distributions do not come close to meeting the basic needs of people weakened by violence, displacement and deprivation”....

War broke out in Darfur in February 2003 when black African rebel groups, complaining of the economic neglect of their region and a lack of protection for local people, rose up against the Sudanese government. The government-backed Janjawid militias have been accused of conducting a scorched earth campaign and ethnic cleansing in the region. Clashes between the Sudanese army and the rebels have killed at least 10,000 people and forced more than a million from their homes, according to UN estimates. Khartoum, meanwhile, has been accused of hampering essential humanitarian access to the region. The United States has said it expects Khartoum to live up to President Omar Bashir’s pledge to rein in the militias.

The State Department, which has said Washington is considering sanctions against Sudanese officials unless the militias are neutralized, said it had “noted” Bashir’s promise to respect an April 8 cease-fire in Darfur. But spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States would wait to see whether Khartoum took action against the militias.

Humanitarian aid agencies, analysts and U.S. officials all agree that no matter what the international community does to try to prevent the catastrophe unfolding in Darfur, western Sudan, it's too late: Huge numbers of people will die there in coming months.

With the U.S. Agency for International Development conservatively predicting that 320,000 people will perish from disease and starvation in the Darfur region, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan will fly to the region this week to press Sudan to remove barriers to humanitarian aid and stop Arab militias from attacking civilians in Darfur....

We now really have to turn our attention to Darfur," Rice said on "Fox News Sunday."

Powell acknowledged Friday, "The situation is so dire that if we were able to do everything we wanted to do tomorrow, there would still be loss of life because of the deprivation people there are under now." Humanitarian agencies have seen the crisis coming for nearly a year. Many are asking why the world was so slow to act.

John Prendergast, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, said the catastrophe could have been avoided with early action, but powerful players such as the U.S. and Britain lacked the political will to do so....

The organization Physicians for Human Rights recently described "a genocidal process" in Darfur. There are questions about whether the Khartoum authorities deliberately orchestrated the crisis or whether it was an unintended result of supporting the janjaweed. So rather than "genocide," the term that the United Nations, humanitarian groups and others are using is "ethnic cleansing."

Annan said Friday that "we don't need a label to propel ourselves to act, and so I think we should act now and stop arguing about which label to put on it."

Just a reminder that we could all be paying more attention to the Cassini-Huygens space probe right now.

My favorite part of the movie is when Bob Roberts closes a letter to a 7-year-old girl in Vermont with the admonition "Don't do crack; it's a ghetto drug."

This is the perfect movie for an election-year party.

If there were a 101 on how fascism manipulates its way into power `Bob Roberts' would be it. Very few films excluding `All The President's Men' have we seen a dramatization placing conservatives in a bad light, and while there are assertions that the media has liberal bias, most films/news coverage featuring a politician or having some political meaning proves otherwise.

In the film, made-up U.S. Senate candidate Roberts (Tim Robbins) dodges questions about his stands on issues. When stonewalling loses grout, he moderates his stances by putting on a `folk rock' gig on the campaign trail. Despite the radical roots of folk rock, the words of Robert's songs are nothing more than lyrical preachings of the platform he's running on. Conceivably, a fictional coincidence of the horribly oxymoron `compassionate conservatism' which, like Robert's ploy, is as commercially misleading as an Atkins diet.

That was supposed to be a confrontational interview? Hahahahahaha.

The interviewer asks supplemental questions in what are quite clearly pauses and opputunities. On two occasions, Bush comes to a grinding halt, and Carole asks another question, and Bush *decides* he hadn't finished. Does he hold conversations like this, expecting the other party to doff their cap, and only speak when spoken to, like he was the fucking queen talking to a servant?

As was mentioned earlier, I'd think this is at least partially the product of two different media cultures. Those who are comparing this reporter's interviewing style to O'Really should listen to the BBC - many of their interviews lack the veneer of politeness that is par for the course over here. Interrupting and badgering are pretty common. This is a bit of a non-story for me.

Barna Research Group founder George Barna notes, "Atheists and agnostics, who reject the Bible as truth, contend that there is no moral legitimacy to defining marriage as the amendment would do. The remaining half of the population -- comprised of notional Christians and people associated with non-Christian faiths -- lean toward letting people make their own choices, without any legal limitations or parameters."

Inconsistency and Moral Relativism
People's opinions were found to be less divided on the topic of ordaining homosexuals priests and pastors, however. By a greater than two-to-one margin, the public opposes ordaining practicing homosexuals as clergy (60 percent), while less than a fourth of adults (24 percent) support the idea of ordaining actively homosexual clergy.

Still, the survey found a great deal of inconsistency between people's support for the FMA and their acceptance of the ordination of homosexual clergy. One out of every eight marriage amendment supporters also favored homosexual ordination, while almost half of the adults opposed to the FMA also opposed ordaining actively homosexual clergy.

Barna, who directed the study, believes the widespread lack of awareness and lukewarm response to crucial issues such as the definition of marriage and the ordination of homosexual clergy are rooted in the serious problem of moral relativism. He notes that even though most American adults believe that marriage should be defined as a relationship between a man and a woman, many consider the issue a moral "gray area" that is better left without strict legal definition.

The researcher finds similarity between these issues and the abortion debate. He notes that millions who oppose abortion for themselves and their families still feel that whether the act is right or wrong should be left up to individuals to decide for themselves. By the same token, many Americans -- including many born-again Christians -- who oppose homosexuality and the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples are not convinced that their moral beliefs should be codified into law.

"This is classic relativism," Barna says, "a philosophy that has taken the nation by storm in the last quarter century and is now restructuring every aspect of American society. The consequence is that many people are personally opposed to such behavior but feel compelled to allow that behavior to take place legally because they also contend that there are no moral absolutes."

"An effective proclamation of the Gospel in contemporary Western society will need to confront directly the widespread spirit of agnosticism and relativism which has cast doubt on reason's ability to know the truth which alone satisfies the human heart's restless quest for meaning," the Holy Father said....

"For this reason, the new evangelization calls for an unambiguous presentation of faith as a supernatural virtue by which we are united to God and become sharers in his own knowledge, in response to his revealed word," John Paul II said in his address delivered in English.

"The presentation of an authentically biblical understanding of the act of faith, one which emphasizes both its cognitive and its fiducial dimensions, will help to overcome purely subjective approaches and facilitate a deeper appreciation of the Church's role in authoritatively proposing the faith which is to be believed and put into practice," the Pope said.

"An essential element of the Church's dialogue with contemporary society must also be a correct presentation, in catechesis and preaching, of the relationship between faith and reason," he observed.

For a long time there have been two paramount arguments against homosexuality. The first came from the Bible. The King James Version of Leviticus 18:22 is quite clear: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: It is abomination." Then again, in that same Bible, Exodus sanctions selling one's youngest daughter into slavery. In fact, elsewhere in the Good Book, we're told that a woman caught wearing garments made from two different threads should be burned to death and that a man caught planting the wrong crops must be stoned to death. Oddly, the folks who most often use the Bible to defend their bigotry fail to mention these absurdities.

Darwin, whose theory of evolution says that all life originated from a common ancestor, made the other frequently cited argument against homosexuality. The reason the tree of life is so varied is because reproduction is an inexact process. Mutations arise that either help or hinder existence. Helpful ones create new lineages; harmful ones die off. "Survival of the fittest" is an abridged way of saying organisms with mutations that increase the species' chances of reproduction do better than ones that don't.

But mutation alone doesn't explain all the variety in nature. To address that, Darwin developed his idea of sexual selection. Sexual selection is meant to explain how things like a peacock's ornamental tail -- obviously a hindrance to survival (have you ever tried running away from a predator with a kite tied to your ass?) -- exist. Darwin figured, simply, that peahens (female peacocks) must like the tail. In fact, Darwin supposes, the male with the biggest tail attracts the most females. So, in Darwin's theory of evolution, mutations that are not in the service of survival -- as are speed, camouflage and opposable thumbs -- must be in the service of attracting mates with which to propagate the species.

Which puts homosexuality, which is clearly not a reproduction-enhancing mutation, at odds with Darwinism. Which, in turn, has made strange bedfellows out of sworn enemies: Evolutionary scientists and Christian-right literalists both agree, for different reasons, that homosexuality is unnatural.

Moore is best when he doesn't stage dumb pranks (like broadcasting the Patriot Act in D.C. out of an ice-cream truck) but provokes with his mere presence. When he interviews the author of House of Bush, House of Saud in front of the Saudi embassy and the Secret Service shows up to ask what he's doing, it's a gotcha moment: What's the Secret Service doing protecting non-U.S. government officials? He has a light touch there that's missing from the rest of the Fahrenheit 9/11. In one scene, his camera homes in on a Flint, Mich., woman weeping over a son killed in Iraq, and the effect is vampirish. After the screening, a friend railed that Moore was exploiting a mother's grief. When I suggested that the scene made moral sense in the context of the director's universe, that the exploitation is justified if it saves the lives of other mothers' sons, my friend said, "When did you become a relativist?"

I'm troubled by that charge—and by the fact that we nearly came to blows by the end of the conversation. But when it comes to politics in a time of war, I think that relativism is, well, relative. Fahrenheit 9/11 must be viewed in the context of the Iraq occupation and the torrent of misleading claims that got us there. It must be viewed in the context of Rush Limbaugh repeating the charge that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster murdered in Fort Marcy Park, or laughing off the exposure of Valerie Plame when, had this been a Democratic administration, he'd be calling every day for the traitor's head. It must be viewed in the context of Ann Coulter calling for the execution of people who disagree with her. It must be viewed in the context of another new documentary, the superb The Hunting of the President, that documents—irrefutably—the lengths to which the right went to destroy Bill Clinton. Moore might be a demagogue, but never—not even during Watergate—has a U.S. administration left itself so open to this kind of savaging.

There is one bit of the world that happy people do see in an irrationally rosy light: themselves. As the British psychologist Richard P. Bentall has observed, ''There is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others.'' Indeed, Bentall has proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder.

A Canadian man, driving a car packed with weapons and ammunition, was intent on killing as many people as possible in a Toronto neighborhood but gave up the plan at the last minute when he encountered a friendly dog, police said on Thursday.

The five great saints and many other leaders in the spirit world, including even Communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin, who committed all manner of barbarity and murders on earth, and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons

An urgent inquiry was launched in Cyprus last night after an undercover police operation exposed a group of up to 100 tourists, including Britons, taking part in what was described a mass orgy aboard a cruise ship off the island.

Nearly half of the more than 200 cases we identified involve clergy who tried to elude law enforcement. About 30 remain free in one country while facing ongoing criminal inquiries, arrest warrants or convictions in another. Most runaway priests remain in the church, the world's largest organization, so they should be easier to locate than other fugitives. Instead, Catholic leaders have used international transfers to thwart justice.

The six-year search for Chiara Marino and Fabio Tollis, two missing teenagers who were members of a heavy metal band called the Beasts of Satan, ended in a pit in the woods northwest of Milan. The authorities say other members of the loose-knit band buried the bodies after killing the teenagers in a drug-fueled Satanic sacrifice....

The discovery of the bodies has captured the Italian imagination, especially in the north, not so far away from where a series of crimes that came to be known as the Monster of Florence killings haunted people in the Tuscan woods for two decades, beginning in 1968.

This is a country in which Roman Catholic priests are still asked to carry out exorcisms.

A sociologist, Maria Macioti, a professor at La Sapienza University in Rome, has said increasing numbers of young people seem drawn to devil worship. A magistrate has warned of the lure of antichrist cults....

In Italy, Ms. Macioti said, the devil is deeply ingrained in popular faith. She said that Satanic sects had always existed but that more and more young people now seemed to be experimenting with elements of Satanism through drugs and music. But they are mostly unsophisticated, uneducated and misguided, she said.

"In the past, there were intellectual Satanists," Ms. Macioti said. "Today, you'd have difficulty finding people who can write two sentences."

Crude graffiti scrawled on the walls outside Midnight, the nightclub, suggest that she may be right.

Francesca Cramis, who is Mr. Sapone's lawyer, said the band members could barely play musical instruments and were more involved with drugs and with listening to music than in practicing Satanism. "They listened to death metal and Satanic music that pushes people toward Satan, toward killing people," she said. "These are guys that have severe problems and they convinced themselves that they were in contact with Satan and they had the power to kill others. It was born as a game, but it ended in a tragedy."

• Voted against a bill declaring the third Monday in January a federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

• Voted to cut off federal assistance to public schools that prohibit prayer in school.

• Voted to strike provisions of the Racial Justice Act that would prohibit the death sentence in state and federal cases if a defendant could prove with statistical or other evidence that the race of the victim played a role in sentencing.

• Voted against a 1996 bill to prohibit job discrimination based on sexual orientation.

• Voted against measures to increase the minimum wage, against a woman's right to choose, and with Bush 91 percent of the time last year.

In the weeks leading up to his appearance on Capitol Hill, Tutu said in speeches that it seemed that the Reagan White House saw "blacks as expendable" in South Africa. The white government forced black people from prized lands and into horrid townships. Migratory labor laws split familes for 11 months at a time. Education was gutted for black children. There was virtually no due process for black defendants. Tutu said it was "reminiscent of Hitler's Aryan madness." Tutu declared that "constructive engagement is an abomination, an unmitigated disaster."

On Capitol Hill, Tutu became a public relations disaster for Reagan. Tutu started off the hearing by saying apartheid itself "is evil, is immoral, is un-Christian, without remainder." I was there, and all breathing stopped, without remainder. Tutu continued:

"In my view, the Reagan administration's support and collaboration with it is equally immoral, evil, and totally un-Christian. . . . You are either for or against apartheid and not by rhetoric. You are either in favor of evil or you are in favor of good. You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral."

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Reagan was not moved. Over the remainder of his presidency, at least 3,000 people would die, mostly at the hands of the South African police and military. Another 20,000, including 6,000 children, according to one estimate by a human rights group, would be arrested under "state of emergency" decrees.

Yet Reagan had the gall to say in 1985 that the "reformist administration" of South Africa had "eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country." In 1986, Reagan gave a speech where he said Mandela should be released but denounced sanctions with crocodile tears, claiming that they would hurt black workers, who were already ridiculously impoverished. Reagan's go-slow speech was denounced by Tutu, who said: "I found it quite nauseating. I think the West, for my part, can go to hell. . . . Your president is the pits as far as blacks are concerned. He sits there like the great, big white chief of old."

Later in 1986, Reagan made his greatest demonstration yet that black bodies were "expendable." Congress had finally had enough of the carnage to vote for limited sanctions. Reagan vetoed them. Congress overrode the veto. Reagan proceded to put no muscle behind the sanctions. Mandela remained in jail and at least 2,000 political prisoners remained detained without trial.

SS: In earlier interviews you described how the economy has been "financialized" in ways that free companies from taxation. What role do offshore tax havens play in this?

MH: Companies set up trading companies in tax-avoidance islands and declare whatever income or capital gains they earn on real estate, stocks or other investments to be made by these shells. This has led to the quip that taxes have become purely voluntary for modern businesses.

SS: How does this affect the domestic U.S. economy?

MH: Un-taxing business income--and financial income in particular--leaves individual taxpayers to bear the fiscal burden through wage withholding for Social Security, Medicare and pension-fund contributions. Consumers also bear a rising burden through the sales tax and other local taxes.

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SS: You paint a discouraging picture. What is the point in trying to tax corporate and financial income at all, if transactions with these islands are not simply closed down?

MH: A choice is indeed being forced. If these tax-cheating havens are not closed down, the only people left to tax will be the middle class and employees.

Companies now file two sets of annual accounts. One is for their stockholders, and another is for the tax collector. The tax account shows no profit, because companies don't want to pay taxes. The report to stockholders shows a maximum profit, because companies want to boost the price of their stock. Voters have elected politicians whose electoral campaigns are paid for by lobbies who are hired to mobilize support for this policy, while academic chairs are endowed to hire well-meaning fools or "useful idiots" to teach this anti-government philosophy as representing positive "reform" rather than depicting it as outright parasitism.

The public is being misled in two ways. First of all, governments are given tax returns that show profits as shrinking, through artificial book-keeping that becomes the basis for official statistics. Meanwhile, stockholders are being given stories of fictitiously high profits, at least in the cases of Enron and Parmalat.

The clients of this floating island world use a system that has been put in place by pillars of business integrity representing the global economy's core, not merely a peripheral underworld constituency. These enclaves belong at the center of economic analysis, yet they usually are treated as an anomaly rather than as an integral organ of modern wealth accumulation.

The Bush administration routinely bypassed or overruled Pentagon experts on international law and the Geneva convention to construct a sweeping legal justification for harsh tactics in the war on terror, the Guardian has learnt.

In one instance, President George Bush's military order of November 13 2001, which denies prisoner-of-war status to captives from Afghanistan and allows their detention without charge or access to a lawyer at Guantánamo, was issued without any consultations with Pentagon lawyers, a former Pentagon official said.

The revelation follows reports in the US press this week of a Pentagon memo that argued that Mr Bush was not bound by laws against torture, and that interrogators who torture detainees at Guantánamo cannot be prosecuted.

The Democrats who voted for Reagan abandoned the sour, nitpicking Jimmy Carter for the cheerful Hollywood figure, but they also did what the political pros and historians still don't get. Led by the determined cadres of the "New Right," they supported a candidate and a plan for a new America with an ideological agenda. That agenda called for doing the unthinkable: grabbing control of Congress and smashing the New Deal, while leaving a token "safety net" in its place. It was in the early days of Reagan that the homeless began to appear in growing numbers on the streets of American cities, an early sign of the slow process of turning over the functions of the federal government to companies through such ideas as privatization. Reagan practically initiated the concept of turning social welfare over to charitable foundations. All of this was accomplished with the glue of anti-Communism, a shared bond that tied otherwise quarreling factions together—the libertarian-minded Republicans, the anti-feminist crusaders, the Christian fundamentalists. Under Reagan, the government borrowed the concept of guerrilla warfare from the winning side in Vietnam and used it to win a victory over the Sandinistas. Reagan escaped the Iran-Contra scandal without a scratch. For some, Reagan spelled the turning point in the death of the first American republic.

The Greatest President of the 20th Century The eulogies for Ronald Reagan are already abundant, but I cannot resist offering my own.

I believe that Ronald Reagan was the greatest President of the 20th century. The only competitor is Franklin Roosevelt, who gets credit for leading the country during World War II and for helping the US persevere through the Great Depression. But Roosevelt's accomplishments were marred by his enormous failures, including significantly expanding government control of the economy, undermining traditional constitutional restraints, failing to actually end the economic downturn until World War II, and not appreciating the dangers of Soviet Communism.

By contrast, Reagan's accomplishment were tremendous in both the domestic and foreign spheres, and they were not undermined by any significant failures. In the domestic sphere, Reagan inherited an economy plagued by stagflation and bequeathed one with both low inflation and strong economic growth. In foreign affairs, Reagan took a nation that was paralyzed by Iranian students and transformed it into one that persuaded the Soviet Union that it could never win the Cold War. Reagan's failures, such as trading arms for hostages, pale in comparison.

Perhaps President Reagan's greatest accomplishment was that he achieved these goals even though elites, especially liberal elites, regarded his policies as dangerous if not absurd. The elites claimed he practiced voodoo economics, and in 1982-1983 in the midst of a severe recession, lesser men would have despaired. But the President's courage and wisdom prevailed, and the Reagan boom soon emerged.

Because of the wealth associated with Europe's new found dependence on spices like pepper, cloves and nutmeg, Spain and Portugal were rivals. Both were eager to get control of commerce with the Far East -- especially with the Spice Islands of the Indies (Indonesia). In order to keep the two nations from fighting each other, on June 7, 1494, in the Treaty of Tordesillas, Pope Alexander VI divided the world in half "giving" Spain and Portugal each one half of it. Following on the heals of Columbus's "discovery" of the "West" Indies in 1492, it is not coincidental that Alexander-a Spaniard, born Rodrigo de Borja, near Valencia-bestowed the western hemisphere, in which Columbus promised the existence of immeasurable quantities of golf, on Spain, and the eastern hemisphere on Portugal. Alexander VI was a lawyer by training. He assumed the Borgia name when his maternal uncle, Alfonso Borgia, began his brief reign as Pope Callistus III and as his lineage suggests, was a rather secular pope. He was among the wealthiest and most ambitious men in Europe, fond of his many mistresses and his illegitimate offspring. He indulged his worldly tastes with great vigor and was one of the most corrupt and secular popes of the Renaissance period. Alexander is perhaps best remembered as the patron of the Banquet of Chestnuts, known more properly as the "Ballet of Chestnuts" in which fifty courtesans crawled naked on the floor collecting chestnuts that had been strewn on the floor of the papal apartments after the meal had been eaten, following which was the obligatory orgy.

In recent days, some have labeled Red Cross personnel as "humanitarian do-gooders" whose presence in coalition-run detention centers is inappropriate while American soldiers are fighting and dying. Others have warned that the ICRC is on the path toward becoming a left-wing advocacy group and portrayed the Geneva Conventions as a hindrance to our ability to extract intelligence from prisoners that might save U.S. lives. It is critical to realize that the Red Cross and the Geneva Conventions do not endanger American soldiers, they protect them. Our soldiers enter battle with the knowledge that should they be taken prisoner, there are laws intended to protect them and impartial international observers to inquire after them. America's observance of the Geneva Conventions and our support for the ICRC in part determine the willingness of other nations to do the same. While our intelligence personnel in Abu Ghraib may have believed that they were protecting U.S. lives by roughing up detainees to extract information, they have had the opposite effect. Their actions have increased the danger to American soldiers, in this conflict and in future wars.

There is no ‘good cause’ for torture. As a torturer, you are the first to be a victim because you lose all your humanity. You do harm to yourself in the act of harming another. If you had a good cause to begin with, it is lost when you torture another human being. When we imagine situations when torture could be justified, we jump to conclusions too quickly and too easily. Torturing someone will not always give us the result we wish for. If the prisoner in custody does not tell us the information we want it is because they don’t want their people, their fellow soldiers to be killed. They withhold information out of compassion, out of faithfulness to their cause. Sometimes they give out wrong information. And there are those who prefer to die rather than give in to the torture. I am absolutely against torture. It is very easy to create a pretext for why it is necessary to torture a prisoner when we have fear and anger in us. When we have compassion, we can always find another way. When you torture a living being, you die as a human being because the other person’s suffering is your own suffering. When you perform surgery on someone, you know the surgery will help him and that is why you can cut into his body. But when you cut into someone’s body and mind to get information from them, you cut into your own life, you kill yourself as a person.

They're the most unappetizing gang of hypocrites and liars ever, these spawn of the "Reagan Revolution." We're talking about Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Jerry Falwell and Henry Hyde.

I won't run through the details regarding Somalia since you can find a lot in print, right at the time and later.

Steve Shalom had a fine article about it at the time in Z; I wrote about it right away in Z too. More later, after other facts dribbled out. In brief, there had been a terrible famine after the chaos following the overthrow of the murderous US-backed dictator. By the end of 1992 it was declining, Red Cross supplies were mostly getting through, it looked as though the situation was coming under control. At that point Bush 1 decided to make a spectacular show of "humanitarian aid." Marines were sent in a manner so comical even the TV teams couldn't take it seriously. There was a night landing in front of TV cameras (of course all networks were notified: what else would be the point?). But the marines with their night vision equipment were blinded by the cameras and the crews had to be ordered to shut them off. There was no resistance of course.

Did Bush lie on the reasons for 9-11 ("they hate our freedoms," etc.)? I think one has to be a bit cautious.

Lying requires a certain competence: at least, it requires an understanding of the difference between truth and falsehood. When a 3-year old tells you an obvious falsehood, it isn't really fair to call it a lie. The same was true of the huge whoppers that Reagan came out with when he got out of the control of his handlers. The poor soul probably had no idea. With Bush, I suspect it is more or less the same. There is a literature of "exposures" (Woodward, etc.), which is taken seriously, but I don't frankly understand why. Among the people he is interviewing, some have the competence to lie, and it only makes sense to suppose that they are doing so; why should they tell him the truth? As for the others, it doesn't really matter what they tell him. The same is true of people who are deeply immersed in some religious cult, like the Washington neocon intellectuals. It is hard to know whether they have the competence to lie, just as it's hard to know for someone who has a direct line to some divinity.

...in most respects, the blogosphere is inferior to the existing media that the Internet makes available. From my home computer, I can read newspapers in Britain and Canada, I can have easy access to the current commentary of Chomsky and Roy and others without parochial blinders.

Now contrast this with most of the US-based law and political science blogosphere, which functions almost entirely as an echo chamber for stale right-wing tripe, that was already widely available in the reactionary United States. Why turn to the blogosphere when The Weekly Standard and The National Review" and The Wall Street Journal, not to mention the various pseudo-scholarly publications of AEI and Heritage, have long been around?

Afghanistan constitutes George W. Bush's clearest victory since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The Taliban regime has been overthrown, eliminating al-Qaida's most important base. But the overlooked war continues with no end in sight. Narcotics trafficking is at an all-time high. If U.S. forces were to leave, the Taliban -- or something like it -- would regain power. The United States is lost in Afghanistan, bound to this wild country and unable to leave.

The situation in Afghanistan, as laid out to me, looks nothing like a country alleged to be progressing toward representative democracy under American tutelage. Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-sponsored Afghan president, is regarded by the U.S. troops as hopelessly corrupt and kept in power by U.S. force of arms.

Paul Wolfowitz could not come up with the right number when he testified on Capitol Hill recently—he was off by about 30% in his estimate of the number of Americans killed in Iraq, which at this writing is 786. He's a busy man. You can't expect him to remember how many young Americans have died for the ambition of his adult life. Had he been asked what they died for, he would not have repeated what he told Vanity Fair last year. He would not have said, "For oil." By now, on message with the rest of the administration, he'd have said, "For democracy."

Tragically, any good the US could have obtained from bringing democracy to Iraq has been vitiated by the mayhem Wolfowitz's obsession with toppling Saddam Hussein has inflicted on the Iraqi people—the 7,000 to 10,000 civilians killed, the torture victims, the populace so brutalized and humiliated by an occupation to which Wolfowitz appears not to have given a thought that over 80% want us out now. And those are just the short-term, intra-Iraq harms. Long-term, according to the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden, US interests in the Middle East have been set back a decade by Abu Ghraib....

Paradoxically, the very scale of the debacle in Iraq may yield one long-term good: the repudiation of neo-conservative "democratic imperialism." The Americans killed in Iraq will not have died in vain if their sacrifice keeps other Americans from dying in neo-con wars to "remediate" Syria, Iran, or North Korea. After Iraq, "neo-conservative" may achieve the resonance of "isolationist" after World War II—a term of opprobrium for a discredited approach to foreign policy, shorthand for dangerous innocence about world realities. Like the isolationists, the neo-cons are history's fools. The strategy they championed was the wrongest possible strategy for the wrongest possible moment in the wrongest possible region of the world.

THE PHOTOS from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are snapshots not of simple brutality or a breakdown in discipline but of CIA torture techniques that have metastasized over the past 50 years like an undetected cancer inside the US intelligence community. From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led secret research into coercion and consciousness that reached a billion dollars at peak. After experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shocks, and sensory deprivation, this CIA research produced a new method of torture that was psychological, not physical -- best described as "no touch" torture.

The CIA's discovery of psychological torture was a counterintuitive breakthrough -- indeed, the first real revolution in this cruel science since the 17th century. The old physical approach required interrogators to inflict pain, usually by crude beatings that often produced heightened resistance or unreliable information. Under the CIA's new psychological paradigm, however, interrogators used two essential methods to achieve their goals.

In the first stage, interrogators employ the simple, nonviolent techniques of hooding or sleep deprivation to disorient the subject; sometimes sexual humiliation is used as well.

Once the subject is disoriented, interrogators move on to a second stage with simple, self-inflicted discomfort such as standing for hours with arms extended. In this phase, the idea is to make victims feel responsible for their own pain and thus induce them to alleviate it by capitulating to the interrogator's power. In his statement on reforms at Abu Ghraib last week, General Geoffrey Miller, former chief of the Guantanamo detention center and now prison commander in Iraq, offered an unwitting summary of this two-phase torture. "We will no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the detainees," the general said. "We will no longer use stress positions in any of our interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep deprivation in any of our interrogations."

Although seemingly less brutal, no-touch torture leaves deep psychological scars. The victims often need long treatment to recover from trauma far more crippling than physical pain. The perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to cruelty and lasting emotional problems....

For more than 50 years, the CIA's no-touch methods have become so widely accepted that US interrogators seem unaware that they are, in fact, engaged in systematic torture. But now, through these photographs from Abu Ghraib, we can see the reality of these techniques. We have a chance to join fully with the international community in repudiating a practice that, more than any other, represents a denial of democracy.

Vice President Dick Cheney was a guest on NBC's Meet the Press last September when host Tim Russert brought up Halliburton. Citing the company's role in rebuilding Iraq as well as Cheney's prior service as Halliburton's CEO, Russert asked, "Were you involved in any way in the awarding of those contracts?" Cheney's reply: "Of course not, Tim ... And as Vice President, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the [Army] Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the Federal Government."

Cheney's relationship with Halliburton has been nothing but trouble since he left the company in 2000. Both he and the company say they have no ongoing connections. But TIME has obtained an internal Pentagon e-mail sent by an Army Corps of Engineers official—whose name was blacked out by the Pentagon—that raises questions about Cheney's arm's-length policy toward his old employer. Dated March 5, 2003, the e-mail says "action" on a multibillion-dollar Halliburton contract was "coordinated" with Cheney's office. The e-mail says Douglas Feith, a high-ranking Pentagon hawk, got the "authority to execute RIO," or Restore Iraqi Oil, from his boss, who is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. RIO is one of several large contracts the U.S. awarded to Halliburton last year.

The e-mail says Feith approved arrangements for the contract "contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP's [Vice President's] office." Three days later, the Army Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton the contract, without seeking other bids. TIME located the e-mail among documents provided by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group.

Witty, most of these warbloggers aren't....Probably the most venomous of all is Charles Johnson. His site (http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com) is the toilet in which all sorts of misinformation and malice about Arabs and, in particular, Palestinians are dumped. Anybody who writes favourably — or even in a half-balanced manner — about them is slimed.

"People were literally walking out of the show," she said. "As soon as she came out, she began to insult us. We thought she was joking at first because it was kind of weird."

Witnesses said Jewel went on a tirade of insults from poking fun at fat people to others with no teeth. At one point, she asked the audience to yell requests and then told them to "shut the hell up."

"I saw her live in Boston and it was the greatest show I’ve ever been to," Dion said. "I don’t know if she was having a nervous breakdown or what. She told everyone to stop looking at her teeth and look at her breasts."

Jewel was on stage for about an hour and played only four to five songs. Halfway through the show, Dion said Jewel began to talk about Zoloft and Paxil for about 10 minutes.

Yeah, yeah, Bush's numbers are down. But in order for Democrats to get his approval rating to be where it should be, post-Clarke, post-Abu Ghraib-- that is, somewhere between 5 and 15 percent (somewhat higher in the South)-- we need to understand just why his remaining supporters are still hanging on. So, as a public service to all the smart, well-informed, snarky progressives and liberals and lefties reading this blog on a regular basis, I've devised a handy pop quiz that we can distribute to Bush supporters, in order to discover (in the best traditions of Gramscian cultural studies) the continuing appeal of the Bush presidency.

For Iraq, there are difficult days ahead that may appear chaotic, but do not fear: our actions are guided by a vision, and Operation "I Will Always Hate You People" is proceeding according to plan

This will be a long and circuitous journey. I’m sorry; I wish it were not so. But we must, we must find the strength we need to sustain our spirits against an onrush of negativity, pessimism, defeatism and despair that is so deadly precisely because it is so antithetical to the natural character of the American people.

Morale, my friends. Morale. Humor and confidence are our best friends now. And so, as we begin our journey through Mordor toward the heart of Mt Doom, this mission to defeat this pernicious attack on our strength, remember this:

Americans eat disasters and crap hand grenades. And I got your quagmire right here.

I and many others view Little Green Footballs as the equivalent of the Cold War’s D.E.W. Line – the Distant Early Warning radar system that searched the Polar skies, looking for incoming threats. This is why Charles is attacked personally. He is attacked personally in an attempt to discredit him and his website because the fact remains that almost everything he links to are articles by Islamists, about Radical Islam – and what they say in their own words is so totally compelling, damning, and down-right blood curdling that anyone not seeing the danger brewing does not deserve to be part of this argument.

Now, the source of this hatred towards the West is the source of endless books and analysis and articles and thesis papers. To this interminable Gordian Knot of causes and effects and counter-causes and grievances, I can only add this:

I don’t care.

He is blatantly a puppet for corporate interests, who care only about their own greed and have no sense of civic responsibility or community service. He lies, constantly and often, seemingly without control, and he lied about his invasion into a sovereign country, again for corporate interests; many people have died and been maimed, and that has been lied about too. He grandstands and mugs in a shameful manner, befitting a snake oil salesman, not a statesman. He does not think, process, or speak well, and is emotionally immature due to, among other things, his lack of recovery from substance abuse. The term is "dry drunk". He is an abject embarrassment/pariah overseas; the rest of the world hates him . . . . . He is, by far, the most irresponsible, unethical, inexcusable occupant of our formerly highest office in the land that there has ever been.

"Brat Pack" - the twentysomething Young Republicans who are running Iraq's economy. Their resumes all pulled from the conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation, they came to Iraq with no experience and found themselves with six-figure salaries managing the $13 billion budget of the Coalition Provisional Authority. An amazing article from The Washington Post that reads like the scariest season of MTV's The Real World ever.

What I think, after my short time in his company, is that Moore is a man you would not want as an opponent, but also one you'd think twice about calling a friend. Though a talented film-maker and a clever showman, a populist who knows how to play the maverick, he is too often both big-headed and small-minded. In his desire to be seen as the decent man telling truth to power, he is too ready to blame those less powerful than himself for his shortcomings. He was justly revered in the Palais, but out on the street no one had a kind word to say about him. At Cannes, Moore may have been the star but he was not, it seems, the man of the people.

One of the key political moderates in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cabinet deplored on Sunday the Israel army's offensive in the Gaza Strip, saying television images reminded him of the suffering of his family during the Holocaust. In stark and emotional language, Deputy Prime Minister Yosef Lapid, who also holds the Justice Ministry portfolio and is a Holocaust survivor, told Israeli radio that the country risked further international condemnation if the army continued its campaign of pursuing Palestinian gunmen, demolishing homes and expelling civilians from the heart of the populous Rafah refugee camp.

The suffering people of war-ravaged western Sudan need the help of their government and the international community if a humanitarian disaster is to be averted, the aid agency Oxfam said today.

Oxfam warned that thousands of people in the troubled region of Darfur face disease and starvation over the next three months as food and fresh water supplies run dangerously low.

Aid agencies were today warning of looming famine and a humanitarian crisis in Darfur, western Sudan, where up to a million people have been driven from their homes by government-backed militias.

The arid desert region is hit by a cyclical "hunger gap" from April until harvest-time in October, but attacks on towns and villages by the "Janjawid" mounted Arab militias, which human rights observers say include members of the armed forces, have exacerbated the crisis this year....

Around a million people are believed to be internally displaced in the region, while 200,000 refugees have fled over the border to neighbouring Chad....

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which is also operating in the area said the threat of famine was "looming" in Darfur. A nutrition survey conducted by the agency showed dangerously high levels of malnutrition and mortality, with a rapidly deteriorating food security situation.

With already high levels of "excess death" and malnutrition, the whole population was "teetering on the verge of mass starvation", MSF warned.

On this Patriots Day, Updike is again thinking about war and politics. He has met President Bush. "I give him high praise for graciousness," Updike says. "Laura, too."

But, he adds, "that doesn't make me a Republican."

"Upon sober reflection at age 72," he says, "the Democratic Party is the party that tries to give losers a chance. A laissez-faire government drives a culture apart."

He says toothily, "I would like to see Kerry win."

In more modern times, the Meat Inspection Act of 1917 prohibits giving "money or other thing of value, with intent to influence" to a government official.

But that was before the lawyers and the politicians got around to rewriting the meaning of bribery. And so we came to a time a few years ago when the Supreme Court actually ruled that a law prohibiting the giving of gifts to a public official "for or because of an official act" didn't mean anything unless you knew exactly what the official act was. In other words, bribery was only illegal if the bribee was dumb enough to give you a receipt.

The media has gone along with the scam, virtually dropping the word from its vocabulary in favor of phrases like "inappropriate gift," or "the appearance of a conflict of interest."

Another example is the remarkable redefinition of money to mean speech. You can test this one out by making a deal with a prostitute and if a cop comes along, simply say, "Officer, I wasn't giving her money, I was just giving her a speech." If that doesn't work you can try giving more of that speech to the cop. Or try telling the IRS next April that "I have the right to remain silent." And so forth. I wouldn't advise it....

You don't just need techniques and instruments to torture. You also need the right words to justify it. Marshall Rosenberg, who teaches non-violent communication, was struck in reading psychological interviews with Nazi war criminals not by their abnormality, but that they used a language denying choice: "should," "one must," "have to." For example, Adolph Eichmann was asked, "Was it difficult for you to send these tens of thousands of people their death?" Eichmann replied, "To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy."

Asked to explain, Eichmann said, "My fellow officers and I coined our own name for our language. We called it amtssprache -- 'office talk.'" In office talk "you deny responsibility for your actions. So if anybody says, 'Why did you do it?' you say, 'I had to.' 'Why did you have to?' 'Superiors' orders. Company policy. It's the law.'"

Just like "those techniques" at Abu Ghraib. - SAM SMITH

Here is David Brooks commenting on Dylan Klebold, one of the two high school students who shot up the Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, killing many classmates, before killing himself:

"My instinct is that Dylan Klebold was a self-initiating moral agent who made his choices and should be condemned for them. Neither his school nor his parents determined his behavior."

So Brooks is a "libertarian" incompatibilist about free will: he thinks free will is incompatible with determinism, but believes we can be self-caused in some sense....

Nietzsche, happily, had the Brooks-type pegged long ago:

"The longing for 'freedom of the will' in the superlative metaphysical sense (which, unfortunately, still rules in the heads of the half-educated), the longing to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for your actions yourself and to relieve God, world, ancestors, chance, and society of the burden--all this means nothing less than...pulling yourself by the hair from the swamp of nothingness into existence." (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 21)

But, of course, Brooks is ascribing responsibility to others, not claiming it himself, and Nietzsche also had "the psychology of all 'making responsible'"