Fair Game: the Book

And once upon a time
When treason was a crime
Before the Imperial President
Established bold precedent
Undercover operators flourished
And rarely were punished
Unless they were doubles
And thus earned their troubles


I normally enjoy biographies because they tend to illustrate how people live and solve or fail to solve their problems in life. Fair Game, by Valerie Plame Wilson is an unusual departure from that sort of biography. It is historic in outlook, but the problem solving remains unfinished.

The book is heavily redacted. In a few cases, entire pages are blacked out leaving the reader to guess what the topic was. What is not left to the reader to imagine is essentially the ordinary description of how Ms. Plame prepared herself for her career as a spy for these United States. It could just as easily been the description of hundreds of people I know preparing for a career in the military with training that spanned similar areas from map reading to jumping out of airplanes. It included descriptions of how Ms. Plame felt about all this preparation, and her descriptions are skilled and revealing of her strengths, but the description falls short of conveying an understanding of the CIA from the view of an undercover operative with increasing responsibility as her twenty years or so of service played out. A career in the Espionage is not the same as a career in Botany or Accounting, but with the critical elements redacted, it might just as well have been a career in Forest Service.

Thankfully, Ms. Plame was able to include descriptions from others within the covers. They were not redacted and they serve to fill in the blanks albeit without the direct identification of Valerie Plame Wilson. Sources including Valerie’s mom are helpful in getting some of the personal history supported and the description of other undercover agents who were not so politically handled by the agency and the US Government offers corroboration of the mechanics of espionage that, I assume, were redacted. As sometimes happens, the government was highly sensitive to criticism of how it handled the politicization of Ms. Plame and it appears to have classified activities that were embarrassing to the government and the GW Bush administration rather than because these facts would have uncovered sources and techniques or that they were threatening the security interests of the United States. If you recall the disgusting photos of Abu Ghraib were classified as SECRET, but nothing in those photos created an actual or potential threat to our security. They were especially painful for an administration that claimed to have high moral standards and authority. Similarly with Ms. Plame, the extremes to which the Vice President and his staff went to discredit her service and even cause her outing from deep cover demonstrate that embarrassment can be as powerful as the worst security situation. Politicians abhor embarrassment and, when they can control the classification process, are sorely tempted to use the process to shield themselves from embarrassment. Valerie Plame Wilson calls this self-protection by Cheney and associates a betrayal and that word is strongly personal. It may be that and more, but the effectiveness of the classification system worked well politically because it has been defended in the courts and Valerie Plame was unable to continue her career as an undercover agent.

As a relatively minor example of over-classification, Valerie Plame’s retirement annuity computations were classified because they “might have provided time-frames” of her activity. Despite the humor that offers, the initial position of the CIA was to allow publishing and yet it re-classified the information after being published by the CIA and sent to Ms. Plame. It was also included in the Congressional Record. The actual outing by powerful politicians destroyed an intelligence network dedicated to discovering weapons of mass destruction. In most circumstances, that would be regarded as treason, and for good reason. The lives of undercover agents and their contacts in several nations would be put at risk immediately with a high probability of anybody that had worked with Ms. Plame being discovered and “neutralized.” On the technical side, perhaps the classification authority of the Vice President through the President permitted the outing since he might have declared the information as unclassified despite the obvious threat to our national interests.

It is a matter of record that Vice President Cheney felt that Ambassador Wilson had undercut his position that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction prior to the invasion directed by President Bush. The claim that Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium was quickly disproved (within hours) as a forgery of a document purportedly of Italian origin, but Cheney may have felt that he needed that fiction to support the war and was upset by the loss of the fig leaf and his own vocal support of a forgery. The book provides clear support to destroy the myth that Valerie Plame recommended or sent her husband to Niger. In addition to Ms. Plame’s testimony, the CIA manager who coordinated the visit by Wilson explains how the decision was made in the absence of Plame. It is also ludicrous to believe that an undercover agent could have the power to send anybody anywhere not in her direct chain of command.

The Afterword (Laura Rozen) of Fair Game contains all the information that the reader needs to arrive at the conclusion that our nation lost a dedicated operative and her network through the actions of a proud, political and venal vice president. The Libby trial is covered, as are some of the numerous public gaffes of the CIA and the unusual personal interest of the Vice President in the entire intelligence process and his frequent trips to the CIA. There is an irony in that the CIA allowed others to write what it forbid Valerie Plame to write, but that is only part of the mystery of how we came to a position of extreme partisanship on what could have been explained as a minor misstatement by Cheney. Instead, members of Congress stood up and defended the indefensible and even generated myths like the “assignment” of Joe Wilson by his wife or that Ms. Plame was not an undercover agent. If you have doubts, then the book will satisfy your mind with documented and corroborated reports by people in the know. If you already have your mind made up, expand it with a few facts and a refreshing outlook.

Fair Game, Valerie Wilson, Simon & Schuster, 2007 with Afterword by Laura Rozen



Peace,
George Giacoppe
11 July 2010

The Defining Moment

 
Our now legacy-conscious president made what should be his final surprise visit to Iraq this weekend, and lo and behold, left us with what I predict will be the defining moment of his presidency. As he was giving a talk side by side with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, an Iraqi journalist named Muntazer al-Zaidi threw first one shoe, and then the other at the “leader of the free world.” As he did so, he shouted,
            “It is the farewell kiss, you dog.” 
Though both shoes missed the U.S. president—he ducked the first, and Maliki deflected the second—the report of the double insult rocketed around the world. For the reporter had not only called Iraq’s self-proclaimed liberator a “dog,” itself an insult, but threw his shoes in a culture where such an act is considered the ultimate insult. Or rather, the soles of shoes are the ultimate insult; after Saddam Hussein’s statue was torn down in Baghdad, some Iraqis slapped its severed head with the soles of their shoes.
            President Bush, of course, was quick to dismiss the incident as bizarre and limited, saying “I don’t think you can take one guy throwing shoes and say, this represents a broad movement in Iraq.” But the damage has been done. Bush has taken the reputation of the United States to such abysmal depths that even a common reporter, one from a country we are told should be grateful for the sacrifice of U.S. lives and U.S. treasure, dares to hurl public insults at its most exalted figure.
            In short, though one must worry about what is even now being hurled at this amazingly courageous reporter, it is clear that his act stands as THE defining moment of the Bush presidency. It is more emblematic of what this President has wrought than the Mission Accomplished fiasco, where Bush, in full flight regalia, strutted across the deck of an aircraft carrier after landing in a jet, to assure the assembled sailors and the world that the United States had prevailed in Iraq when, in truth, the most vicious part of the battle was just beginning; more memorable than the “heckuva job Brownie” moment, when Bush praised his head of  FEMA for performing so well in the New Orleans drowning, even as New Orleans residents by the thousands were gasping for help.
            Yes, this moment tops them all. It is more delicious than an assassination attempt, for a Bush attacker could be characterized as a fanatic or a madman. It is more satisfying than an impeachment, for right wing zealots could easily attribute that to “partisan politics.” This attack, by contrast, came from an Iraqi, a journalist who could be expected to know the score. An Iraqi who should have been bowing down in gratitude to his, and the world’s ‘savior,’ the world’s ‘liberator,’ the world’s ‘messenger of freedom and democracy.’ And instead, the man threw his shoe, both shoes. Called the President a “dog.” In full view of the entire world. And while the President may have been right when he said al-Zaidi doesn’t represent a movement, what he did not say, and would be determined not to recognize, is the overarching truth of this moment. For here, for all time, is the historical judgment on Bush’s doomed Iraqi venture, the burial ceremony of his entire Middle Eastern policy, indeed of his entire presidency: Iraqi shoes thrown as a farewell kiss for a “dog;” a dog who has attacked a country without cause, on false pretenses, imposing on its millions of people the kind of suffering that not even a dog should have to endure. 
            Could it be any richer? Any more ironic? Remembering that the torture (called enhanced interrogation) that the Bush Administration sanctioned for its prisoners, featured snarling dogs to exploit the Arab fear they incite. Remembering all the metaphors of America’s imperial footprint, and boots on the ground, and the famous shoes of America’s first Iraqi Proconsul, L. Paul Bremer. Remembering also that instead of being welcomed by the garlands and kisses promised to American “liberators” in the runup to the war, the leader of the world’s most powerful nation can now count on being greeted with a pelting of shoes, or rotten fruit, or god knows what else. All of which poses the humiliating question: can the United States still consider itself the world’s sole superpower, the most admired empire in history? It hardly seems so. Its economy is in a shambles. Its public figures have become clowns. Its foreign policy a disaster. Its reputation a joke.
            And it is all symbolized, perfectly, by this defining moment: Two shoes hurled at the most powerful man in the world, the “farewell kiss to a dog.” How strange is the eruption of truth. How satisfying and unpredictable the eruption of poetic justice. And how accurate was the prediction of Gore Vidal, eight years ago upon Bush’s ascension to, or rather theft of, the presidency. “He will leave in disgrace,” said Vidal. Who could have imagined how thorough, how vivid, how global that disgrace would be?
 
Lawrence DiStasi

The B Attitudes

If the meek shall inherit the earth
Just how much is it worth
With scars everywhere
And wars here and there
And for the poor in spirit
It’s heaven they inherit
But what does that mean
For us in between
A loss of all face
Or some Amazing Grace?



We live in amazing times and in an amazing society where the meek get pushed around and those who are poor in spirit are being led to their inheritance of heaven a little faster than necessary. If you are brash and bold and lay claim to the earth and exploit its wealth and resources, then you are authorized to dig mining holes anywhere or poison the water we all need for life. The current administration came into power with a promise of “compassionate conservatism” but has shown neither compassion nor conservatism. Instead, we have seen a cascade of bad news created by bad policies that have made life more difficult for the vast majority of Americans. Given our global economy, the bad news has become international. Pain without borders…what a concept!

In the past eight years, the nominal pay for the average American has declined by $1,000 while the real pay, considering inflation has declined by $5,000. Meanwhile, we have had an eight-year lecture series on the benefits that derive from a “free market.” The final examination on this Bush “free market” is a life-performance exam where the proctor is an unlicensed proctologist and we have all had the probing finger jabbed where it hurts. Multi-trillion dollar deficits have been followed by a trillion dollar bailout followed by worldwide fear and retrenchment. And it is not over. Even the use of the “free market” phrase is an amazing affront. We have witnessed record quantity and value for no-bid contracts and watched a Bush payback to drug firms through the most profligate Medicare Drug Plan that could possibly have been authored by the drug firms themselves. This was a “free market” where the government, representing all us people, chose to prevent competition in the marketplace to the detriment of the consumer and the possible destruction of Medicare. This gave a new meaning to the old saw that “Freedom isn’t free.” We are paying dearly for this “free market” through worse jobs and fewer of them.

One reason to remind ourselves of the dismal failure of the policies of the past eight years is that there are still people out there who firmly believe that we simply did not go far enough in the destruction of the state and the building of corporate power. The neocon theory seems parallel to an earlier theory and time when the state was to wither away and the proletariat would rise to power. At this juncture, these theories appear to be equal and opposite forces that need to be uncovered for the frauds that they both are. If we look briefly at our history since Richard Nixon, the contempt for government has become a growth industry. Ronald Reagan, the uncanonized patron saint of the modern GOP, spoke eloquently of government being the problem rather than being able to solve a problem. On of his early acts (August 1981) as president was in direct contradiction to this pre-election letter (Oct 20, 1980):


“Dear Mr. Poli:

I have been briefed by members of my staff as to the deplorable state of our nation's air traffic control system. They have told me that too few people working unreasonable hours with obsolete equipment has placed the nation's air travellers (sic) in unwarranted danger. In an area so clearly related to public
safety, the Carter administration has failed to act responsibly.

You can rest assured that if I am elected President, I will take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety....

I pledge to you that my administration will work very closely with you to bring about a spirit of cooperation between the President and the air traffic controllers.
Sincerely,

Ronald Reagan”

Obviously, Reagan saw the hazards of overworked and overstressed air controllers as evidenced by his letter written prior to his election as president. After his election, he made no changes in equipment or work schedules for the controllers but put the hammer down on the union. He fired the controllers. Ideology triumphed over practicality and safety, as well as the concept of keeping his word. And remember, that Reagan was a likeable man, unlike GW Bush who has artfully managed to alienate most of the world. Ideologues can act consistent with their ideologies in spite of overwhelming evidence that their theories are suspect or unworkable. What is interesting and sometimes terrifying is that an ideology can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that government is the problem and then act on that belief, then you act to destroy government rather than improve it. You place administrators like John Bolton who hates the UN as ambassador to it. You place a failed horse show administrator, Michael Brown, in charge of FEMA and continue to curry favor with Texan Joe Allbaugh, major Bush contributor, to hire his friends without regard to competence. These hirelings demonstrated personal loyalty rather than competence. More dramatically, you hire occupation administrators for Iraq, including Paul Brenner, that have correctly answered loyalty questions on such irrelevant criteria as Roe v Wade or their favorite president but have no language or functional skills to conduct the real business of an occupation in a potentially hostile space. Then you can say, “See, I told you that government couldn’t do the job!” Arrgh! Prophecy fulfilled. Now we can outsource fully half of the war. Mission Accomplished! And you never have to say you are sorry for the failed construction or logistics or intelligence or security of an outsourced function. And that is truly priceless.

Unfortunately, the process of damaging government from within has a long-term effect of bleeding confidence from the citizenry, especially when denied examples of good government for eight years. Given the example of the Bush Administration demanding loyalty as an end item, people soon learned that a contrary opinion was viewed as disloyalty and a direct challenge to authority rather than a search for good answers. The downward spiral begins. The incompetent government shifts priorities from supporting the common good to defending the decisions made to enforce loyalty. Recently and in stark contrast, President-Elect Obama chose to avoid rewarding such pandering loyalty on an early dilemma. Senator Lieberman could not have been more disloyal to Obama during the campaign, and yet Obama has asked Senator Reid to avoid punishing Lieberman. This was impossible under Bush.

Serious damage to the rule of law and to the concept of commonwealth has been done by this extension of the Reagan concept of “small government.” Small, in this context, begins to describe the smallness of the heart and smallness of the intellect instead of a true smallness in size of an effective government. The two largest expansions of government in our lifetime have been built by the two loudest proponents of small government. Each has, in his turn, presided over the largest increase in government debt in history to his point in time. Reagan had a reputation for B movies and he had a B attitude about government. Bush never reached a B level in 8 years. His attitude about government was a miserable F and his government failed miserably. We have inherited the country as it is and it is up to us to make it into something worth inheriting for our children and grandchildren. Pray for the strength to do it. The work will indeed be hard and the critics many for our attitudes have hardened against government. It will truly take Amazing Grace.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
13 November 2008

War in Georgia

When I heard about the conflict in the Caucasus between the Republic
of Georgia and Russia, and especially Michael Klare’s (author of
"Blood and Oil") comments about its relationship to United States
designs on the huge oil deposits nearby, something rang a bell.

Then I remembered. Jeremy Scahill, in his book "Blackwater: The Rise
of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army," has a short chapter on
Blackwater and Caspian Sea oil. Take a look at a map of the region
and you see that Georgia is located smack in the corridor between the
Caspian and the Black Seas. Its closest neighbor, bordering its south
and east, is Azerbaijan. Scahill tells us that in order to protect
western oil and gas interests in that region, the Pentagon “deployed
‘civilian contractors’ from Blackwater and other firms to set up an
operation that would serve a dual purpose: protecting the West’s new
profitable oil and gas exploitation in a region historically
dominated by Russia and Iran, and possibly lay the groundwork for an
important forward operating base for an attack against Iran” (p. 173).

Now, with the battle over Georgia, we see more of what’s going on.
According to Klare, the United States, beginning with the Clinton
administration, has been pouring arms into a province, Georgia, that
had never had a real army of its own (it is, after all, the Russian
province which gave the world Josef Stalin). Now it’s armed to the
teeth, and those arms (plus special forces training similar to the
kind the U.S. has long exported to its neighborhood friendly
dictators via the School of the Americas) apparently gave it the
notion that it could simply invade Ossetia without consequences. In
Azerbaijan, the tactic is a bit subtler, but possibly more dangerous:
send in private “contractors,” i.e. mercenaries, instead of our own
forces. And why? Because we love democracy, as the President would
have it; because we love freedom?

Not exactly. As Scahill and Klare make clear, it’s about oil, folks.
Russia and its Caspian Sea region has all this oil. And we have
almost none (Klare, in a recent essay, “Portrait of an Oil-Addicted
Former Superpower,” contends that, because of its insatiable need for
foreign oil, the U.S. has already faded as a superpower). Russia also
has these former provinces which seem open to western money,
influence, and clandestine activities—not to mention that western-
owned pipeline which bypasses Russia and therefore avoids Russian
control. More than that, both countries, Georgia and Azerbaijan, are
“sandwiched between Russia and Iran,” so sending uniformed American
troops could be provocative, but sending private contractors keeps
things a bit quieter (at least, that was the hope).

Now, however, the Georgian attack on Ossetia and the overwhelming
Russian response has blown things into stark relief. The United
States has been caught playing a risky game, inciting the Georgians
into a tweak of the Russian bear’s whiskers, and no doubt doing the
same in Azerbaijan. In the latter country, according to Scahill,
Blackwater mercenaries are being used to “bolster Azerbaijan’s
military capabilities, including creating units modeled after the
United States’ most elite Special Forces, the Navy SEALs—this in a
country, according to Human Rights Watch, already prone to employing
“torture, police abuse, and excessive use of force by security
forces.” In Georgia, though, the Russian bear has struck back, with
consequences no one can really predict. What we can predict is that,
once again, the United States is stirring up a witch’s brew of
conflicting loyalties, as in Iraq, which may prove impossible to
control. And it is doing so in a region that has exploded before, and
could well explode again. For all we know, that may be the intention
here: start a little backfire, set the tanks and planes rolling, and
perhaps find the excuse the Bushies have been looking for to invade
yet another muslim country, Iran. Then the United States of America,
the great “peacemaker,” will have torched not just Afghanistan, not
just Iraq, not just Georgia, but the whole damn region.

Meantime, our leaders are singing their song of outrage: big bully
Russia has attacked a defenseless “democracy,” is trying to
reincorporate Georgia into its “empire,” and must withdraw,
immediately. How noble they sound, demanding a ceasefire, pretending
to work hard for peace—all the while knowing that they themselves are
the incendiaries, the naughty boys who simply can’t stop pouring oil
on fire, or fire on oil, take your pick. Only this time, the game is
not working very well. Russia holds all the cards here. It has all
the oil, and the United States has nothing but oil debt. So weakened
has the Bush Administration made us (Klare points out that with the
average GI in Iraq using 27 gallons of petroleum-based fuels per day,
America’s gasoline bill for 160,000 troops comes to more than $14
million per day, or $5.1 billion per year) that it took France’s
President Sarkozy to put together an initial cease-fire.

At this writing, Georgia is licking its wounds and a once-invincible
superpower is left with nothing but protests about the brutality of
Russia’s “invasion.” That, and the vain hope that somehow its oil
exploitation in the Caspian region can survive the blow. If it does
not, and if the U.S. keeps adding fuel to the regional fire (such as
today's Bush administration action of using military planes to send
"humanitarian aid" to its dear ally, Georgia), the least of the
consequences may be the $200-a-barrel oil prices that many have
predicted.

Lawrence DiStasi

Candidate McCrash

What will be the fate
Of the Manchurian Candidate?
Known to party and swirl
With dozens of girls
Showing a temper that’s famous
Using words that will shame us
While courting the Right Wing
That excuses his night flings
So, just what will unfold
Will he crash and explode?


A week ago or so, a friend handed me a short crash history of the presidential candidate. It caused me to do a little research beyond McCain’s autobiography that I had read years ago. We all know about his crash as a fighter pilot in North Vietnam and that seems to be an unfortunate reality of a man doing his job and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Chalk that up to bad luck even if you believe that he should have ejected sooner than he did. His injuries were caused by the ejection process at 500 knots and not by his judgment. There are four other McCain airplane disasters that do not easily fall into the same category however. Let us start at the beginning of his government life. McCain had the reputation of being a marginal but hard drinking midshipman while at Annapolis. According to fellow midshipman Robert Timberg who wrote, The Nightingale’s Song, “being on liberty with John McCain was like being on a train wreck.” It is that character issue that causes me to pause at those who wink and nod at the indiscretions and bad judgment of potential leaders. I see them as being either too forgiving or blind to a defect that could affect us all if McCain becomes Commander-in-Chief. After all, we have just experienced nearly 8 years of a hard drinking party animal who continuously demonstrated bad judgment in nearly every aspect of leadership and took us all along for the ride to an unnecessary war while failing to prosecute the war in Afghanistan, to a market crash, to the loss of millions of jobs, to the loss of our noble international reputation, to institutionalizing torture, to the supremacy of loyalty over competence, and to an economy that depends more on oil today than when he took office in January 2001.
The parallels between Bush and McCain don’t end with the party animal escapades but extend into the world of privilege that both enjoyed by virtue of family ties. Let us begin with McCain’s first airplane demolition. Lt. McCain was a student pilot for 2 ½ years at Pensacola and Corpus Christi after graduating from the US Naval Academy. While in Pensacola, he dated the exotic dancer (stripper) “Marie, the Flame of Florida.” His fitness reports appear to indicate that his performance was below par. Indeed, he crashed his trainer into Corpus Christi Bay while trying to land. That was often enough to boot a trainee out of flight school, but not McCain who had an active 4 star admiral dad and a retired 4 star admiral grandfather. Of course, that could have been coincidence, just as it was coincidence that W got into the Texas Air Guard despite long waiting lists of less well-connected citizens. Sometimes good stuff happens to well-connected people. His second crash happened because he was flying too low over Spain while on a Mediterranean cruise, and he took down power lines along the way. The headlines did not reflect his bad judgment or faulty depth perception, but that he was the son of an admiral. Not to worry; he was nonetheless promoted to flight instructor back at Pensacola. His third crash happened as he was flying a Navy trainer (solo) to Philadelphia on the way to an Army-Navy game. He parachuted safely, but the plane was destroyed striking a group of trees. Nobody killed…no harm; no foul? Again, the Navy glossed over the event and there was no uproar over personal use of a military aircraft. After all, what could be more important than the Army-Navy game?
John McCain’s 4th airplane disaster actually occurred on the deck of the USS Forrestal. He was waiting on deck for takeoff, and (according to one nasty version) he wet-started his A4E Skyhawk which caused a jet of flame to strike the Phantom F 4 immediately behind him. That caused a Zuni rocket to ignite and launch starting a chain of events that killed at least 164 men. The more official version attributes the M 48 Zuni launching to stray current when the system was switched from external to internal. The “angry” (Navy veterans) version described McCain as a “hot dog” pilot who wet started his aircraft and that he panicked and dropped his two 1,000 lb bombs on the deck in the ensuing fire. Regardless of what version you may read, McCain was quickly and singularly removed from the Forrestal and put in safety, some say to protect him from other crew members who felt that the accident was caused by his actions. Indeed, a Navy veterans’ group has been vicious in criticizing McCain for this incident. If there is evidence that he caused the accident, I have not read it and, personally, I feel that the stray electrical current is a credible cause. Unfortunately, McCain reported several versions of the event himself and some critics are using this as proof of his guilt. We don’t need to go there. It is clear that he got special treatment by being the only one given immediate removal from the burning ship, but if you have experienced the confusion of similar smoke, fire and chaos, you will understand that details will never be known. It is unwise as well as unfair to blame McCain for that tragedy. He has enough blame to bear as we review his crashes and behavior.
John McCain’s fifth and final crash resulted from enemy action and, again, it is not fair or wise to assume that greater skill would have avoided it. In summary, it would appear that three of the five demolitions were caused or contributed to by questionable pilot judgment and the willingness of the Navy to keep McCain flying despite marginal skills and demonstrations of “hot-dogging.” I have not read of any “near misses,” but only of his 5 crashes. In a way, I equate McCain’s actions to that of a rebellious and spoiled teen who wrecks his daddy’s Corvette only to be given the keys to a newer model. The Navy and his 4 star daddy continued to give him the keys.
McCain’s lack of maturity showed up in more personal ways as shown by this excerpt from the web entry “thought Rogue” (http://gto7.wordpress.com)

Upon returning home with the aid of crutches, he discovered his wife Carol had survived her own ordeal - a devastating car accident in 1969 which left her with her own set of crutches, four inches shorter, and considerably heavier than the model she had been.
As he went through physical therapy for his injuries and recovered just enough to be appointed commanding officer of an A-7 Corsair II training squadron in Jacksonville, FL, his marriage entered troubled waters. For all they had been through, chasing his youth (and various women), the Maverick engaged in a series of extra-marital affairs. He said, “My marriage’s collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity more than it was to Vietnam, and I cannot escape blame by pointing a finger at the war. The blame was entirely mine.”
As the web entry indicates, the party animal of his midshipman days did not disappear after 5 ½ years in the Hanoi Hilton. He was selfish and immature. These are the same characteristics that fellow senators point to today when they describe his verbal and physical assaults in the senate environs. In a quote attributed to McCain by Cliff Schecter, his temper and shameful treatment of his second wife (Cindy) shine through in a harsh and disturbing way. As Cindy twirled his hair, she said “You’re getting a little thin up there.” McCain’s face reddened and he responded, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c___.” He offered his fatigue for a long day as an excuse. As president, he might just have a long day once in a while.
As you may remember, the Manchurian Candidate is the story of a brainwashed POW returning to the US and politics. McCain was indeed interrogated by North Vietnamese officials during his time in prison. While McCain vigorously denied that the Soviet Russians also interviewed him, KGB Major General Kalugin testified under oath that the KGB worked on a “high ranking naval officer.” Kalugin was repatriated to the United States. Colonel Bin Tin of the North Vietnamese Army testified that the Soviets indeed interrogated American prisoners and treated them badly. Bin Tin had access to all this information due to his high position in the Communist Party. Bin Tin wants normalization of relations with the Vietnamese and was warmly greeted by McCain when he testified to the US Senate. McCain, in 1991, influenced other Republican senators to stop POW/MIA investigations. Indeed, this interrogation period is troubling because it indicates that McCain was likely given special treatment due to his relationship to his father and, worse that he may have violated Article V of the US Military Code of Conduct that prohibits providing intelligence to the enemy although McCain claims that it was only accidental that he offered “military information” at the time he was getting special medical treatment. (Ted Sampley, U.S. Veteran Dispatch, December 1992). Not incidentally, McCain provided military information that described how tactical air attacks were executed; he estimated pilot losses and how replacements were provided to the mission. It is difficult not to link the two actions since they happened simultaneously. Communists seemed to delight in having the son of an admiral in custody.
Let me review the issues. If past behavior is the best predictor of future performance, then I would expect McCain to take a high risk approach to foreign and domestic affairs as president. Further, I would expect that his “other” affairs would easily outpace Clinton and probably Bush as well. Bush has claimed sobriety for several years and, if true, that would probably cut down his girl chasing. Clinton seems to be recently more discrete if not more pure. McCain’s privileged behavior is troubling even if precipitated by pain of torture that he now supports.
Choosing to focus on issues critical to the nation over self-adulation and indulgence would not seem to be likely for McCain. His renowned temper would probably aggravate delicate foreign relations. Note that he recently rebuked Senator Obama for having said that he, Obama, would negotiate with North Korea, only a matter of two weeks before Bush announced relaxation of sanctions and negotiations with North Korea. The rude disdain he has shown for his two wives (abandonment and crude sexual insult) might not easily support the agenda for women. Finally, his past behavior of expecting personal privilege would interfere with the decision process just as it has with Bush. (“My way or the highway, and there can be no compromise on my powers.”) Three of McCain’s crashes appear to be the result of faulty judgment ignored by a compliant Navy. Bush has enjoyed both compliant parents and the Congress that spoiled him rotten. If that does not bring up the memory of George W. Bush and his inability to stay with the Air National Guard; getting bailed out of weak business decisions in Oil and Baseball industries by Daddy’s friends, then I am missing something. If character means something important to the office of President, then we need to have some straight talk for a change. We cannot afford 8 or even 4 more years of indulging the perpetual adolescent.
The Vietnamese-American citizens of Little Saigon here in Orange County, California have been very sensitive to the attempts to normalize relations with the Communists of Vietnam and they already resent the attempts by the Bush Administration to minimize the importance of the hundreds of political prisoners still held by Vietnam. McCain voted with Bush 100% of the time in 2008 and 95% in 2007 including McCain’s reversal to support torture. (He was against torture before he was for it.) Maybe he has been brainwashed in Washington if not Hanoi. It is time for an accounting and not for privilege. It is time to ground McCain and take his keys away before he crashes again.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
30 June 2008

The Torture Conspiracy

The McClatchy newspapers—the only major media group that has even pretended to employ investigative reporters to question Bush administration policies—has done it again. This time, in a June 18 article by Tom Lasseter, it has pointed out that the “framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan,” was an organized attempt to circumvent U.S. laws and treaties “to prevent anyone…from being held accountable.” Five White House lawyers, all of them familiar to anyone who has been following this, are identified as part of the so-called “War Council:” David Addington, now chief of staff to VP Cheney; Alberto Gonzalez, one-time Attorney General; John Yoo, one-time counsel in the Justice Department;  William J. Haynes II, former Pentagon general counsel; and Timothy E. Flanigan, former deputy to Gonzalez. This “War Council” met every few weeks in the office of Gonzalez or Haynes to plot their nefarious policies—policies that resulted directly in depriving arrested suspects of all legal rights, and in torture. The members of this council were, in every sense of the word, a torture conspiracy, and worse, one that “created an environment in which it was nearly impossible to prosecute soldiers or officials for alleged crimes committed in U.S. detention facilities.”
            Lasseter’s article lists the memos, the direct result of the conspiracy, that did the dirty work.
            Jan. 9, 2002: Yoo sent a memo to Haynes, saying that the Geneva Convention’s Common Article Three prohibiting “humiliating and degrading treatment and torture of prisoners” did not cover al Quaeda or Taliban suspects.
            Jan. 25, 2002: Gonzalez sent a follow-up memo to President Bush, asserting that eliminating prisoner rights under Geneva (the Yoo memo) set up a “solid defense against prosecutors or independent counsels” who might some day want to pursue war-crimes charges.
            Feb. 7, 2002: Bush then followed up these memos with a memo of his own, asserting that al-Quaeda or Taliban suspects were not considered prisoners of war, and wouldn’t be given Common Article Three protections. (i.e., the memos resulted in almost immediate action.)
            Aug. 1, 2002: Gonzalez requests a memo from the Justice Department, which Yoo writes, defining torture so narrowly—injury such as death, or organ failure deriving from “extreme acts”—that it could excuse almost any abuse.
            March 14, 2003: Yoo writes a memo for Haynes (who was getting heat from his military lawyers about the abuses going on) asserting that even if some interrogation amounted to war crimes, the perpetrators still couldn’t be prosecuted because they were operating under Bush’s constitutional authority to wage war. “In wartime,” Yoo wrote, “it is for the president alone to decide what methods to use to best prevail against the enemy.”
            The conspiracy, in short, provided the legal bases for Americans to use torture, and the legal structure whereby they could escape prosecution for their crimes. These legal opinions resulted in direct and foreseeable and planned actions—first the President’s memo declaring captured detainees beyond the reach of U.S. and international laws, and then the license to interrogators to use techniques normally considered to be war crimes because the President, in his role as commander during a war, had given them sanction. Evidence exists confirming that U.S. interrogators did, in fact, use the once-forbidden techniques, i.e. torture.
            Of course, what we now know is that the Justice Department itself, under new head of Office of Legal Counsel Jack Goldsmith, found John Yoo’s Aug. 2002 and March 2003 opinions so legally abhorrent, that it reversed them. We also know that the Supreme Court first, in 2006, rebuked the Bush lawyers by ruling that Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions DID apply to Guantanamo prisoners; and it also recently reversed the Bush administration’s contention that so-called enemy combatants do not have habeas corpus rights (the right to challenge the reason for their detention), by ruling that, in fact, they DO. We also now know that even within the administration—especially in the Judge Advocate General’s office at the Pentagon—military lawyers and officials were horrified at what they saw being perpetrated in their names, and tried to protest. But, as Lasseter makes clear, the War Council simply shut out these protesting voices.
            Now those voices are coming back to haunt them. In a Boston Globe article on June 18, Bryan Bender writes that the group “Physicians for Human Rights” has now found medical evidence corroborating the stories of eleven former Guantanamo prisoners that they were tortured. The evidence includes scars such as cheek wounds on a prisoner who says he was stabbed with a screwdriver, and burns and other scars which tend to support allegations of electrical shock and forced sodomy.
            This evidence was convincing enough to General Antonio Taguba (who wrote the first report on Abu Ghraib) to induce him to write in the report’s preface: “This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture.” General Taguba, now retired, then added an even harsher judgment:
            “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes.”
            Does this not complete the circle? White House lawyers engaged in a conspiracy to circumvent the laws against torture, and to provide cover for those who employed torture. The President put that conspiracy into action by asserting that those captured had no rights and so could be held indefinitely without charges and treated in any way their interrogators could devise, short of murdering them (although there are up to one hundred torture deaths alleged by researchers like Alfred McCoy.) The members of the United States armed forces and other official and non-official organizations then implemented those executive orders by treating all captives as if they were guilty, subhuman, and deserving of torture. And their actions were hidden, for as long as possible, from neutral watchdog authorities like the International Red Cross.
            What more is needed, now, to begin pursuing those responsible for war crimes?
            What could possibly prevent the impeachment of this President, indeed, as Vincent Bugliosi has written in a recent book, from PROSECUTING this President and all his henchmen for nothing less than a sustained conspiracy to commit war crimes?
 
Lawrence DiStasi
           

The Torture Conspiracy

The McClatchy newspapers—the only major media group that has even pretended to employ investigative reporters to question Bush administration policies—has done it again. This time, in a June 18 article by Tom Lasseter, it has pointed out that the “framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan,” was an organized attempt to circumvent U.S. laws and treaties “to prevent anyone…from being held accountable.” Five White House lawyers, all of them familiar to anyone who has been following this, are identified as part of the so-called “War Council:” David Addington, now chief of staff to VP Cheney; Alberto Gonzalez, one-time Attorney General; John Yoo, one-time counsel in the Justice Department;  William J. Haynes II, former Pentagon general counsel; and Timothy E. Flanigan, former deputy to Gonzalez. This “War Council” met every few weeks in the office of Gonzalez or Haynes to plot their nefarious policies—policies that resulted directly in depriving arrested suspects of all legal rights, and in torture. The members of this council were, in every sense of the word, a torture conspiracy, and worse, one that “created an environment in which it was nearly impossible to prosecute soldiers or officials for alleged crimes committed in U.S. detention facilities.”
            Lasseter’s article lists the memos, the direct result of the conspiracy, that did the dirty work.
            Jan. 9, 2002: Yoo sent a memo to Haynes, saying that the Geneva Convention’s Common Article Three prohibiting “humiliating and degrading treatment and torture of prisoners” did not cover al Quaeda or Taliban suspects.
            Jan. 25, 2002: Gonzalez sent a follow-up memo to President Bush, asserting that eliminating prisoner rights under Geneva (the Yoo memo) set up a “solid defense against prosecutors or independent counsels” who might some day want to pursue war-crimes charges.
            Feb. 7, 2002: Bush then followed up these memos with a memo of his own, asserting that al-Quaeda or Taliban suspects were not considered prisoners of war, and wouldn’t be given Common Article Three protections. (i.e., the memos resulted in almost immediate action.)
            Aug. 1, 2002: Gonzalez requests a memo from the Justice Department, which Yoo writes, defining torture so narrowly—injury such as death, or organ failure deriving from “extreme acts”—that it could excuse almost any abuse.
            March 14, 2003: Yoo writes a memo for Haynes (who was getting heat from his military lawyers about the abuses going on) asserting that even if some interrogation amounted to war crimes, the perpetrators still couldn’t be prosecuted because they were operating under Bush’s constitutional authority to wage war. “In wartime,” Yoo wrote, “it is for the president alone to decide what methods to use to best prevail against the enemy.”
            The conspiracy, in short, provided the legal bases for Americans to use torture, and the legal structure whereby they could escape prosecution for their crimes. These legal opinions resulted in direct and foreseeable and planned actions—first the President’s memo declaring captured detainees beyond the reach of U.S. and international laws, and then the license to interrogators to use techniques normally considered to be war crimes because the President, in his role as commander during a war, had given them sanction. Evidence exists confirming that U.S. interrogators did, in fact, use the once-forbidden techniques, i.e. torture.
            Of course, what we now know is that the Justice Department itself, under new head of Office of Legal Counsel Jack Goldsmith, found John Yoo’s Aug. 2002 and March 2003 opinions so legally abhorrent, that it reversed them. We also know that the Supreme Court first, in 2006, rebuked the Bush lawyers by ruling that Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions DID apply to Guantanamo prisoners; and it also recently reversed the Bush administration’s contention that so-called enemy combatants do not have habeas corpus rights (the right to challenge the reason for their detention), by ruling that, in fact, they DO. We also now know that even within the administration—especially in the Judge Advocate General’s office at the Pentagon—military lawyers and officials were horrified at what they saw being perpetrated in their names, and tried to protest. But, as Lasseter makes clear, the War Council simply shut out these protesting voices.
            Now those voices are coming back to haunt them. In a Boston Globe article on June 18, Bryan Bender writes that the group “Physicians for Human Rights” has now found medical evidence corroborating the stories of eleven former Guantanamo prisoners that they were tortured. The evidence includes scars such as cheek wounds on a prisoner who says he was stabbed with a screwdriver, and burns and other scars which tend to support allegations of electrical shock and forced sodomy.
            This evidence was convincing enough to General Antonio Taguba (who wrote the first report on Abu Ghraib) to induce him to write in the report’s preface: “This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture.” General Taguba, now retired, then added an even harsher judgment:
            “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes.”
            Does this not complete the circle? White House lawyers engaged in a conspiracy to circumvent the laws against torture, and to provide cover for those who employed torture. The President put that conspiracy into action by asserting that those captured had no rights and so could be held indefinitely without charges and treated in any way their interrogators could devise, short of murdering them (although there are up to one hundred torture deaths alleged by researchers like Alfred McCoy.) The members of the United States armed forces and other official and non-official organizations then implemented those executive orders by treating all captives as if they were guilty, subhuman, and deserving of torture. And their actions were hidden, for as long as possible, from neutral watchdog authorities like the International Red Cross.
            What more is needed, now, to begin pursuing those responsible for war crimes?
            What could possibly prevent the impeachment of this President, indeed, as Vincent Bugliosi has written in a recent book, from PROSECUTING this President and all his henchmen for nothing less than a sustained conspiracy to commit war crimes?
 
Lawrence DiStasi
           

Bush's War

Last night, as part of its pledge drive, KQED public television repeated the Frontline documentary, “Bush’s War.”  What struck me, aside from the devastating impact of seeing closeup once again the behavior and machinations of the criminal cabal that ruled this administration, was the lack of any analysis of the actual rationale for war. If you remember, Bush was persuaded by Colin Powell to go to the United Nations in order to provide some legitimacy for his plan to invade Iraq. Accordingly, the United States was able to browbeat the Security Council into passing Resolution 1441 on November 8, 2002. This resolution gave Iraq “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.”

            Iraq did comply, allowing Hans Blix of UNMOVIC and his inspectors to come into the country and inspect numerous facilities, and providing 12,000 pages of documents testifying to the destruction of its weapons (These documents were later borne out by the inability of the United States inspectors to find any WMD anywhere in Iraq). The inspectors found nothing except, on January 16, 2003, 11 empty 122mm chemical warheads previously undeclared. Iraq said they were old and forgotten; be that as it may, there were no chemicals detected to prove noncompliance.

            Lack of evidence notwithstanding, the United States insisted that Iraq was lying. The US “cemented” this position when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his infamous presentation to the United Nations on February 5, with its mockup of so-called mobile chemical and biological weapons labs, its allegation that Iraq’s aluminum tubes were being used in a nuclear weapons program, and its allegation that Iraq had ties with al-Quaeda. It maintained these charges even after February 14, when Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei presented a detailed update on the situation in Iraq to the Security Council—in which Blix stated not only that “the Iraqis were now more proactive in their cooperation,” but also that the arguments presented by Colin Powell were not credible: the satellite images were not convincing, and Iraqis never received early warning of inspector visits (it was not known, at the time, that the mobile lab mockups were fabrications invented by the informant known as “Curveball”). El Baradei added that it was his conclusion that Iraqis did not have a nuclear weapons program (this, too, turned out to be correct.)

            Undeterred by these setbacks, the United States then tried to pass a new resolution in the Security Council. Supported by Great Britain and Spain, the draft resolution on February 24, 2003, declared that “Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded to it by resolution 1441.” Therefore, it could be invaded in accordance with the “serious consequences” provision. Unfortunately for the U.S. position, most of the member states (save for the aforementioned England, Spain, and Bulgaria) in the Security Council refused to back this resolution. France and Germany stated their intention to veto the resolution. It was therefore withdrawn without a vote.

            This left the United States with NO United Nations authority to invade Iraq. Resolution 1441 had not authorized an invasion, but merely urged Iraq to comply or face unstated “consequences”. The US’s proposed resolution, finding Iraq in “material breach” of its obligations and therefore subject to invasion, had been dropped for lack of support.

            At this point, the United States, unwilling to abandon invasion plans already underway, resorted to a thirteen-year-old UN resolution—# 678. Resolution 678, issued on November 29, 1990, was directed against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. It authorized the use of force against Iraq to “uphold and implement resolution 660 and all subsequent resolutions to restore international peace and security.” Resolution 660 of Aug. 2, 1990, in turn, had condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and demanded a withdrawal of Iraq’s troops. So 678 authorized force only to get Iraqi troops out of Kuwait—something that had been accomplished 13 years ago. This did not deter the Bushies. Another old resolution, # 687, was dusted off, and combined with 678 to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to give what was essentially an unprovoked invasion additional cover. Resolution 687 of April 3, 1991, had issued the formal ceasefire ending the Gulf War, adding several conditions: 1) Iraq destroys all its chemical and biological weapons and all ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 km; 2) Iraq agrees not to develop nuclear weapons; 3) Iraq submits a declaration of its weapons programs and voluntarily agrees to on-site inspections. UN inspectors, including Scott Ritter, had testified to the fact that Iraq had complied with virtually all of these conditions. Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei had added their confirmations that Iraq was in near total compliance in February/March of 2003. Furthermore, in Great Britain, as George Monbiot makes clear, senior legal counsels to Tony Blair had advised the Prime Minister that such resolutions could not be used to justify a new war with Iraq. Neither could Article 51 of the UN Charter, which gives States a right to defend themselves “if an armed attack occurs against them,” and even then only until the Security Council can intervene. Since Iraq had not attacked anyone in 2003, there was no legal justification for war. Period. 

            None of this mattered to the Bush administration. Announcing that it had authority to invade via Article 51 of the UN Charter, and via Resolution 678, for the reasons (shortly to be proven totally bogus and manufactured out of whole cloth) that Iraq was in violation of 687, it invaded anyway.  In the years since, despite not finding the alleged WMD, Bush and his henchmen have continued to insist that the United Nations authorized the invasion.

            Again, “Bush’s War” is riveting television, if for nothing else than to see the faces and hear once again the laughable justifications of those who promoted this costly, devastating war. But this leaves the viewer thinking only that this group resembled the “gang who couldn’t shoot straight.” The problem lies far deeper than that. This gang was made up of liars, propagandists, and war criminals. Their invasion of Iraq constituted an international crime—especially against Iraq and the Iraqi people who have suffered the destruction of their country, their lives, their families, their most elementary hopes. As such, it deserves not only the condemnation, but the prosecution of those responsible—beginning with the President and the Vice President, and including the Secretary of Defense, the head of the CIA, and countless other lawyers and enablers like John Yoo who did the dirty work. Until they are brought to account, this nation will continue to live in shame and infamy.

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Library of Redactions

Now who would be attracted
If the text is redacted
And if the tortuous prose
Makes one hold his nose?
Surely not the Methodists
But how ’bout the rest of us
Is this all jest for us
That George knows best for us
The Emperor without any clothes
Who knows?


            This week, there was an important demonstration of courage by the Methodist Church when it refused to approve the plan for the George W. Bush Library to be located at Southern Methodist University. Of course, most betting people will put their money on the Methodists backing down to an offer that cannot be refused. There will be another meeting of the church in July. This is not the first controversy surrounding the presidential library in Dallas. Much earlier, the SMU faculty objected to locating the library and a partisan political center on the grounds of SMU. The library and partisan political center will cost in the neighborhood of a half billion dollars and will eliminate some student housing although SMU has purchased adjoining land in anticipation of the plan being approved.
            Reading the blogs and comments associated with the news is a hoot because of the names that citizens are offering to describe the content; much of it in creative spelling such as ”LIEbrary.” Despite all the negative feelings expressed for the unique concept of a partisan political center coupled with a library, I would like you to consider the possibilities:
            This could be the world’s largest collection of redacted text and therefore likely qualify for a Guinness record. Consider that scholars for centuries will debate the content of the visible text and, more likely, the content of the stuff under the Magic Marker obliterations. There may even be an entire branch of study, perhaps under linguistics, that will ponder the meanings of the text and why some words were chosen to remain while others were chosen to be blacked out. For decades, we had expert Kremlinologists who interpreted the meaning of bureaucrat A or B being included or excluded in text and photographs in order to predict the direction of the Soviet Union. This library could spawn an entire industry. We haven’t done that much in the last 8 years unless you consider war itself to be a growth industry. Add to that the word inventions of GW and we may advance learning for what drugs do to the formative brain…unless I “misunderestimate” the scholars of the future. Most of us guess that the redacted text of the documents from this administration is simply protection from embarrassment and not from disclosure of information that would be injurious to the national security of the nation, but who knows, maybe it was classified because we had enemies that we were unaware of?
            As I understand the plan for the library, there may be an entire wing devoted to shredded documents although the potential curator is understandably guarded about how these will be displayed, but given that Bush has expressed an interest in education with his famous “Is our children learning,” I understand that it will be an interactive children’s exhibit where they can piece shredded documents together. Given the zero impact on reading of the “No Child Left Behind Act,” there is no danger of the children even accidentally piecing these puzzles together and actually reading words like “waterboarding” or “torture” or Hurricane Katrina. There is another, although smaller, wing devoted to hanging chad just as you pass under the portrait of Katherine Harris and there are preliminary plans for an indoor maze on Astroturf from the Texas Rangers sale surplus and a replica of the Karl Rove desk is the center of that exhibit.
            Oh, I nearly forgot that the combination exhibit of shredded documents and the maze contains the shredded US Constitution. I don’t usually support mixing Church and State, but let us pray that the Methodists continue to demonstrate courage in the face of overwhelming odds and oddities.


Peace,
George Giacoppe
3 May 2008

Here's to You, John Yoo

First, let’s get some facts straight. Attorney John Yoo was an
assistant to Attorney General John Ashcroft, working in the Office
of Legal Counsel under his boss, Jay Bybee, during George Bush's
first term. This office is supposed to advise all the departments of
government on the legality or illegality of their actions. The
attorneys work, in the final analysis, not for the President or any
of his subordinates, but for the American people. They are obliged to
render opinions that are, to put it mildly, legal, according to U.S.
and international law.

Second, let’s look at what John Yoo did and why he did it.

To begin with, he essentially argued, in a series of memos, that the
Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution has no bearing on
the President of the United States during wartime. Neither the 5th
Amendment’s due process clauses nor the 8th Amendment’s protections
against cruel and unusual punishment apply to aliens in foreign
countries, and even if they did, Yoo maintained, the President is not
bound by them. Essentially, this means that the President’s power
trumps both the Constitution and the federal statutes that constitute
U.S. Law—specifically, any that would constrain his power to find and/
or torture those he deems ‘enemies.’ This means that the President
can also thumb his nose at foreign laws and treaties, for if he
cannot be constrained by U.S. Law, he certainly cannot be constrained
by treaties with other nations, such as the Geneva Conventions, even
though normally and legally they have the force of the Constitution
itself. No matter; the President, wrote Yoo, is “free to override all
such laws and treaties at his discretion.” In sum: John Yoo argued
that the President has unlimited authority to order war crimes
against enemy combatants captured on foreign soil, so long as he
decides that such orders are necessary to the nation’s “defense.”

All this is breathtaking enough. What’s worse is that in defending
these memos, John Yoo has actually said that they confer on the
President the power, if he chooses to use it, to torture children. In
a January 2006 interview with Notre Dame professor and international
human rights scholar Doug Cassel, Yoo argued that there is no law
that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of even
the child of a suspect. Here is the conversation:

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody,
including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is
no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the
August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do
that.
(see article by Philip Watts, www.informationclearinghouse.info/
article11488.htm.)

Of course, we can surmise, the President would always have a
“good” reason for crushing a child’s testicles.

So let’s get specific. Let’s take a look at one of the allegedly
toothless treaties that John Yoo was referring to—the 1984 Convention
Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment—which
the United States signed. Here is what it says:

“The term ‘torture’ means any act by which severe pain or suffering,
whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person
for such purposes as obtaining information or a confession…No
exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a
threat of war, internal political stability or any other public
emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” (cited by
Anthony Piel, “A Primer on the Law of Torture,” Truthout.org, 11/5/07)

Anyone convicted of such crimes can be punished by life imprisonment
or the death penalty. Piel goes on to say that not only is the United
States bound by this law, the President cannot grant immunity from
its provisions: “The US government crafted, promoted, adopted, signed
and ratified the 1984 Convention Against Torture, which therefore
automatically becomes the “supreme law of the land,” pursuant to the
US Constitution. No enabling legislation is required to give effect
to these basic principles of law.”

For a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice
Department to argue otherwise is to essentially argue that the
President and all those under him can break the law with impunity.
But Yoo not only did this—in direct violation of his legal ethics. He
also argued for the immunity of those who followed his memos and
broke any such laws. Here is what Yoo writes in another Memo, (as
noted by Glenn Greenwald in “John Yoo’s War Crimes,” Salon, April 2,
2008):

"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an
interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal
prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks
on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case,
we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's
constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified
his actions."

So there it is. Not only 'could we argue' that the President is
above all law prohibiting torture, both domestic and international,
so are those Americans (CIA agents, military police and/or
interrogators, civilian contractors) who follow his orders and
torture or abuse their captives. So are those who command them—the
generals, the admirals, the secretaries of defense and war and so on
up the chain.

This last part is really the point. We have been given the
impression, not least by Yoo himself, that he was trying to formulate
difficult policy in the critical and dangerous new conditions created
by 9/11, and that government officials were pressing him and his
office for guidance on how they should conduct interrogations, how
they should treat the dangerous “terrorists” they were capturing.
This turns out to be a smokescreen. In fact, as Scott Horton has
recently noted in “Yoo Two,” (Harper’s Magazine, April 3, 2008),
there were two series of memos, one in August 2002, and one in March
2003. The memos are similar in that they “were issued as part of an
actual plan to induce individuals to commit criminal acts by ensuring
that their crimes would never be investigated or prosecuted.” Horton
calls this effort a “criminal enterprise,” because “Under the
standards of U.S. v Altstoetter, it was reasonably foreseeable that
the issuance of these memoranda would result in serious harm,
including assault, torture, and death, to protected persons in the
custody of the United States. Accordingly, each of the actors,
including the memoranda writers, is criminally liable.”

This was the “need” to which John Yoo was responding. As a
lawyer and professor of United States law, he knew full well that
what he was advocating would make those who followed its dictates
liable to prosecution for war crimes. So did others in government,
and that was the real “crisis” at hand. Naval officers had seen what
was happening to “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo under the authority
of Yoo’s earlier memo, and had relayed it to Alberto Mora, the
general counsel for the Navy in the Pentagon. These practices, along
with other questionable techniques authorized by Donald Rumsfeld,
including waterboarding, led decent military lawyers to vehemently
protest what was going on. These were military lawyers who knew about
torture and knew about the consequences for U.S. military personnel
if it became known worldwide that the United States was engaging in
such practices. When the legal counsel at the Pentagon, William
Haynes, began wilting under enormous pressure from such lawyers, he
recommended to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that the torture procedures
should stop. (see Horton, cited above, and Jane Mayer, “The Memo,”
New Yorker Magazine, 2/27/2006.)

Unfortunately for the military, the chicken hawks were in
charge. Rumsfeld took his case to the Office of Legal Counsel in the
Justice Department, among others. He needed legal justification for
torture, and military lawyers knew too much to give it to him. The
political hacks in the Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo and his boss
Jay Bybee chief among them, had no such qualms. Yoo knew nothing
about the military, but he had “read lots of books.” And so he
crafted his torture-justifying memos. And those memos were relayed to
zealots like Secretary Rumsfeld and his commander at Guantanamo,
General Geoffrey Miller. Miller implemented the 'more creative'
techniques at Gitmo, was subsequently sent to Abu Ghraib to
“gitmoize” that sadly tragic place, and the rest is history
(including the death of the so-called “Ice Man” and god knows how
many more).

As Scott Horton puts it, Yoo created these memos “as a
roadmap to committing crimes and getting away with it.” The roadmap
worked. The only sad sacks punished for the scandals at Abu Ghraib
have been, as always, the underlings, the so-called “bad apples” in
an otherwise pristine barrel, Pvt. Lynndie England, Sgt. Chip
Frederick, Cpl. Charles Graner. The war criminals really responsible
for those crimes—Yoo and his boss Bybee, Donald Rumseld, Richard
Cheney and his lawyer, David Addington, Alberto Gonzalez, General
Geoffrey Miller, George Tenet and President George W. Bush, among
others—have so far gotten off scott-free.

Perhaps they are all laughing privately amongst themselves.
Then again, perhaps not. Though they may, like John Yoo (now safely,
and to my mind scandalously, welcomed back to his academic post at
Boalt School of Law, UC Berkeley) continue to defend their actions as
necessary in a time of war, perhaps they should also remember that
the conventions against torture specifically state that “no
exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification for
torture.” Perhaps they should also remember what Anthony Piel, cited
above, reminds us:

“…there is no statute of limitations on war crimes and crimes against
humanity.”

So here’s to you, John Yoo. You’ve served your masters well,
and duly collected your due. Although, it may be, you’ll yet see
another turn of the screw.

Lawrence DiStasi

Fragile and Reversible

Life is certainly hectic
When it comes to the war metric
What you measure and when
Over and over again
Tells us all so much
About philosophy and such
Recall the count of bodies
Was called so very shoddy
But now there is no hope
Without a microscope

I would not want to defend the Bush Administration’s position on staying the course. For this, General Petraeus deserves credit. He is loyal and articulate. Unfortunately, the performance measurements are essentially microscopic and movement toward success is surely not available to the naked eye. Hence, with some sensitivity, he called the gains “fragile and reversible.” While that description is not a common yardstick of progress, it does provide cover in the event of a tragic collapse. Each year now since the invasion in March 2003, we have been entertained by an Administration dog and pony show citing progress. In between, we have been provided a variety pack of “significant measures” that were “turning points.” We captured Baghdad. We toppled a statue. We de-Baathified. We disbanded the Iraqi Army. We killed Saddam’s two sons, Uday and Qusay. We established a provisional government. We tried Saddam. We executed Saddam. We killed the second or third most important insurgent (several times). We had a new president. We had a charter. We had a constitution. We had purple fingers. We had a power-sharing plan. We stood up the Iraqi Army (so we could stand down). We re-Baathified (at the cost of $10 per Sunni per day). We pacified Basra and secured Umm Qasr and the Brits went home. We got an agreement for a truce with Muqtada al Sadr. We fought Muqtada al Sadr in the streets of Basra and al Amarah and secured Umm Qasr. All this seems to verify that if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there…wherever “there” is.

Having quickly reviewed the Administration practice of using selected dramatic events as proof of progress, we are struck with the contrast of looking at other areas and practices of measurement. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), has been the centerpiece of domestic policy. The policy is dependent upon the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is a survey of student achievement that uses assessments in a variety of subject areas including reading, math, science, writing, history, geography and the arts. Without getting into the quagmire of unfunded federal mandates, the entire program is dependent upon measurement, measurement and more measurement. In fact, the major criticism has been that since Bush tied test scores to school performance, that teachers are teaching to tests and not teaching for learning. More important, schools have long been the nearly exclusive territory of local government and this top down measuring frenzy has reversed a couple hundred years of tradition. If you receive Title I funds, you must submit a plan to the US Department of Education that demonstrates that you have sufficient academic content and state wide standards that support the plan. Although the system is administered by a federal contractor, the numbers are salient yardsticks, even if compromised by fear of losing funds and teachers teaching to the test. Now, many of you may argue that NCLB has been a dismal failure perhaps because it focused too much on measurement of easily manipulated testing and I won’t defend the practice, but clearly, it provides a contrast to the evaluation of the war in Iraq. Or does it?

Do the real purposes of NCLB and the war in Iraq coincide? The answer that I submit to you is that both are intended to claim that Bush is a winner. He is a “winner” who took Baghdad, unlike his more tentative father and a “winner” who has upgraded American education with little or no money and with numbers to prove it. This evaluation of winners and losers is human nature and also a matter of perception. Bush is also sensitive to propaganda and has twice approved multi million dollar contracts for the Lincoln Group to promote the best side of the Iraqi war to Iraqis in Iraq. The whole purpose of the FOX-Bush connection appears to be promotion of Bush in exchange for Administration promotion of the network. Have you been to any military base and seen any public television set NOT tuned to FOX? Think of it as putting your best foot forward, not as either truth or prevarication.

As a military retiree who devoted over 30 years to supporting the government and the supremacy of the civilian to the military in policy decisions, I am troubled by current events where Petraeus has essentially provided a policy endorsed by the President instead of the other way around. The Secretary of Defense and Admiral Fallon (the nominal boss for Petraeus) have both been circumvented to promote the illusion that we are winning in Iraq. There is no metric that I know of that will prove him wrong, but we have heard that mantra of victory before and it has become hollow. Merely pretending that we could somehow “win” a civil war as an occupying force is bizarre, but pretending that there is no civil war is just as strange. Without metrics we can agree upon, we are left with the prospect of winning Iraq for the next hundred years, but remember that is fragile and reversible.


Peace,
George Giacoppe
11 April 2008

Why Does W Hate our Freedom?

In the Good Book it’s stated
That evil’s to be hated
But for those with no conscience
This is all nonsense
For Greed is Good
In their neighborhood
And the birth of Nations
Is through the Corporations
For the uninitiated, the last six years seem to be an aberration where we are being told that we need to give up our rights of habeas corpus, and our 4th Amendment rights. In other words, we must to give up our freedoms to stay free. There are several points to be made and surely I will miss a few, but let me try.
When corporations broke the law by spying on each of us that uses electronics like telephones, but including TV, cell phones, Internet, pagers and blackberries, the President insisted on providing retroactive immunity for the telephone companies, including Big Brother Bell. Now this is from a president that in April 2004 (at Buffalo) stated:
“…Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, Constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution….”
According to Mark Klein, the whistle-blower who reported this NSA operation, the facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco (Room 641A) was built in 2003, well before Bush spoke in Buffalo. Qwest refused to participate in this illegal spying on Americans and was soon prosecuted by the Federal Government for unrelated charges. Now is that ironic or what? Big Brother Bell can spy on us illegally and without the record of a FISA court order and be paid for it, but it is an offer you had better not refuse. Qwest refused. Collaborators can use the information and will be protected retroactively from prosecution and lawsuits. Clearly, the President was disingenuous at best in suggesting that he got court orders. Direct lie?…”Not exactly” as the Hertz ad goes. What is most revealing about this set of transactions is that the telephone companies unanimously agreed to obey the law and stop spying when the government fell behind in making payments. As long as they were being paid, they were OK with breaking the law. Not incidentally, this high-speed fiber-optic arrangement went far beyond spying on foreign nationals. It was/is called the Total Information Awareness Program headed up by Vice Admiral Poindexter (of Iran Contra fame). Poindexter is an experienced, recycled and ethics challenged operative. Are you shocked? If we pay, they spy on us.
This is one example of how Bush has embraced corporatism. Others abound, including outsourcing the Hurricane Katrina disaster aftermath (we cannot call it a recovery effort. Want to buy a toxic trailer?). He outsourced intelligence gathering at Abu Ghraib and myriad additional activities in Iraq to the tune of 180,000 non-military, including Blackwater, on our government corporate payroll for the Iraq adventure alone. He has outsourced much of our military health care to corporate contract labor and eliminated military positions. Our State Department mercenaries are also above the law. As I have reminded you before, Cheney is still on the corporate payroll for Halliburton, but this does not suggest a conflict of interest. Instead, it demonstrates a primary corporate interest. Similarly when creating an energy policy, Cheney met with energy companies who proceeded to run up the energy charges in California and laugh about it. If it were not for audiotapes showing their disdain for the law as well as Californians, we might have to guess that Cheney had a hand in the process. Bush enacted a drug policy that eliminated competition in pricing for government drug programs and established blocks and penalties for prescriptions coming in from Canada. This alone costs Americans billions of tax dollars each year, but it protects corporations from competition by a government that talks constantly about free trade and open markets. Bush has surrounded himself with cronies and incompetents who are protected from scrutiny and as long as the circle of contributions to Bush and favors to corporations remains unbroken, the curtain shall not rise. Daylight and transparency tend to discourage the growth of these viruses, but they flourish in darkness.
Even in the days following Katrina, Bush sought to eliminate union wage scales for the cleanup work and cheap imported labor was quick to the scene. Unions seem to be feared by the Bush administration. Who knows, they might limit the profit potential of corporations or shrink the circle of contributions to the Administration?
Another area of concern is the merging of Church and State. Not only have we endured the scandals at the Air Force Academy pushing evangelical Christianity, but we have had Major General Boykin caught preaching to congregations while in uniform and then “punished” by promotion to Lieutenant General. Blend these signs with the “Faith Based Initiative,” and you have the makings of a cozy relationship not seen with western governments since the twenties and thirties in Italy.
In fact, that brings us to other chilling parallels with the ultimate corporatist, Benito Mussolini. Military adventurism for Il Duce culminated in the botched invasion of sovereign Ethiopia. Does that parallel the invasion of sovereign Iraq? Too often, amateurs have equated Fascism with Totalitarianism. They are independent variables. Mussolini himself defined Fascism as corporatism. He also kissed up to the Pope and called Italy, “Catholic.” Benito Mussolini also hated freedom because he saw that as a threat to Italy and he claimed to give the people only enough “elbow room” for them not to revolt against the state. Dissent is discouraged. And is it not poetic, that we have the freedom to shop, but not to get involved in state policies? Another distraction is the use of a scapegoat or a boogeyman so that all the people have a common enemy. Elitism and corporatism go together for he ultimate good of the state. The corporate leaders become the elite and therefore the ordinary citizen does not have to concern himself with civic affairs except that we must all be very afraid of the boogeyman. Be very afraid of “Islamofascists” that represent an absurdity in terms since they are, by nature, the antithesis of corporatism. That gives us a boogeyman just as effective as the Socialists and Communists of Mussolini’s Italy.
Remember that dissent was the enemy of the Fascist state and that efforts were made to root out dissent. Benito was a uniter and not a divider. There are other characteristics of the fascist state that may not yet have materialized. Rigged elections, for example, were common in Mussolini’s Italy. Thank goodness that they have not happened here. Why does W hate our freedom? Freedom simply cramps his style. That is where dissent comes from, too. So if you lose your right to habeas corpus and privacy and security of your person and property, maybe the boogeyman won’t come…but then, maybe he is already here. Look up the definition of Fascism. It is fascinating.
“Don’t ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” Think “Ma Bell” becoming Big Brother Bell. We can still vote in frequently fair elections. Work to make elections fair and Vote, damn it, Vote.
Peace,
George Giacoppe

935 Lies and Still Counting

Where was the outrage
For absorbing the lies
From the top of the page
On American lives
And where was the press
In this time of distress?
Nine-thirty five
Is more than just jive.

It is difficult to decide the greater crime between the 935 documented major lies of the Bush Administration and the absolute failure of the press to challenge or counter them with research and clear expression of outrage. Without defending the Bushies, did not every newspaper and every major media outlet have the opportunity and responsibility to speak out?
Recall that we are not merely discussing weak intelligence, but documented information that the administration had full knowledge of what was correct and deliberately chose to promulgate lies…and then repeat the lies. The recent study published by the Center for Public Integrity listed the contributions of major administration players and, not surprisingly, GW Bush was the Liar in Chief with 232 documented whoppers. “Documented” is an important distinction. For example, the false charge that the Iraqis had trucks designed and built for biological operations and proven to be false was used by the Bushies for a full six months after the truth was known. Thanks to Colin Powell and the AWOL press.
Perhaps there is a conflict of interest that we must finally recognize and deal with. A war may be far more interesting than peace. A war may sell more newspapers than peace. Newspapers and other media seemed to relish sending dramatic images across the globe. Some media such as FOX News chose to be cheerleaders for war and no major media representative energized examination of the facts or became spokesperson for caution or truth. Back on 28 September 1913, the New York Times reported on a speech “Art and Conscience in Newspaper Making” by Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican He spoke of the evil that would fall on society if the newspaper distorted or misrepresented the news. Unfortunately, even the formerly venerable NY Times was overcome by the clear conflict of interest. War sells papers. Papers sell advertising. Headlines and bylines provide great compensation for unscrupulous reporters or writers. Judith Miller of the NY Times actually went to jail after distributing false information and refusing to name her sources. This is just how misguided we have become, that the truth or falsity of a story has become less important than protection of a criminal source.
The scope of the lies and the huge apparatus used to maintain the mythology of supporting the troops while exploiting the hell out of them is mind numbing. Even if these reporters and media outlets wanted war for selfish interests, did they have no conscience to help our brave men and women sent to fight the war? Add to that the rewriting of history and we have not only lost our way and our collective conscience, but we are losing the ability to sort this out for our children and grandchildren. Incidentally, of all the Presidential candidates, including Democrats, only Ron Paul has had the courage to call the war a “horrible mistake.” Others have succumbed to the revision of history and “the best intelligence at the time.” Neither Ignorance nor Stupidity is absolution nor is blaming the Bushies. If the Bushies led the parade, then why did politicians and media march behind them? What did we do as individuals to point out the lies and join with our neighbors to challenge them and have a counter march?
I do not subscribe to the moral certainty that, for our omissions, we are all damned to hell and, more important; there is still work to be done. There is a real enemy, Osama bin Ladin, to bring to justice. There are lives to be saved. There is truth to be told. There is our progeny’s treasure to be protected. (We spend $720 million per day of their money for the war in Iraq.) There is a new generation to be led into honesty. And yes, there are impeachments to be held for future as well as current accountability. This may not be absolution, but it is recognition of the sins by politicians, our media and us. When we are done, there is a real history waiting to be written. Guilt is an ineffective motivator. Hope is a far better motivator. We need to change our future rather than our history.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
27 January 2008

The Meaning of IS

It all depends on the meaning of “is”
Clinton said with measured reason
And annoyed us with a fizz
Just short of national treason
But now we face more lies
Than truth can possibly uncover
In Dana Perrino’s blinking eyes
Or a news helicopter’s hover

There is an irony in the news recently that Barry Bonds is being charged with perjury for denying that he used performance-enhancing drugs because it is competing with the news that Bush lied about the nuclear danger posed by Iran. Sports are important and I do not mean to diminish the impact of a role model for our youth. One could argue that President Bush has long ago given up the role of being a person to emulate and perhaps nobody expects the truth from him any longer. If Barry Bonds lied, then the sport of baseball is diminished. He is going to trial. If Bush lied, then Democracy is diminished. He is not going to trial. Today, the LA Times and several news organizations are carrying the story of the CIA destruction of video demonstrating their use of methods that the world calls “torture.” Bush has repeated the mantra that the “United States does not torture.” I guess that it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is.

As a simple example, we have charged and convicted perpetrators of waterboarding as torturers at least since the Spanish American War. We convicted Japanese for that offense during war crimes trials for WW II. Not incidentally, we held leaders responsible for the actions of their followers. Does it really depend on what the meaning of “torture” is when we have longstanding precedent and we have isolated ourselves from the civilized world in defining it? Does the CIA destroying evidence constitute vindication in our neocon world? Does it matter that the evidence was requested by a Federal Court? An earlier presidential spokesman, Scott McClellan has recently written a book decrying the fact that he was lied to and made to lie, in turn, to the American people.

The specific reference by McClellan is the treasonous act of outing an undercover agent and the following perjury. McClellan repeated the lie that Bush, Cheney nor anybody else in the White House participated in the process. Recall that Bush said that he would dismiss anybody in his administration involved, including White House members? Bush hardly waited for the jury to reach a verdict before he commuted Scooter Libby's jail sentence. Does it really matter that Bush communicated that he would fire anybody involved? Maybe he crossed his fingers and we failed to notice. Does it matter that Bush’s Brain “turd blossom” Rove is writing a book to revise the history of the rush to war in Iraq? Rove now claims that it was Congress and not the President that rushed to war despite dozens of video clips that demonstrate that both he and the President urged and chided the Congress for not acting fast enough. Does it matter?

We have long criticized the Russians and Chinese who brazenly used propaganda during the Cold War. We laughed at their attempts to cover up failures and blunders in politics and science. We winced at their human rights abuses when they minimized their crimes as essential to maintaining justice. Their lies were transparent to us. It seemed to matter then. We have now outsourced some of our propaganda and are spending millions annually for the Lincoln Group to propagandize Iraq through the press. Does it matter? Don’t the ends justify the means, after all?

If the end was to attack Iran by building up the tempo and drum beat, then it did matter that the intelligence community collectively decided not to cave in to pressure from the White House. Distorted intelligence from an alcoholic “Curve Ball” was used to get us into Iraq and it appears that intelligence providers did not want a repeat that scandal. It does matter. It matters to the thousands who may have been killed or injured and it matters to each of us that at least one of our checks and balances worked for reason instead of rashness. It matters to our Army and to the Marine Corps that have been depleted by repeated deployments. It matters to our friends who may have lost faith in the United States. It matters to our enemies who have seen us as a justifiable target for retaliation. Reports indicate that the Vice President delayed the report for a year, but it matters that the report was made. That is progress from an administration that has been singular in promoting secrecy and hiding truth.

Baseball will survive the Barry Bonds trial. The sport will not be severed from our culture. We need to follow that example and see that justice is served and not severed from our culture.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
7 December 2007