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Populists! Who'd a-thunk it?
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
AUSTIN - Having watched election coverage nonstop for days, I sometimes would wake screaming, "Bipartisanship!" and scare myself.
Of all the viral members of the media who have been suggesting that the Dems cooperate with their political opponents, the one who rendered me almost unconscious with surprise was Newt Gingrich.
Newt Gingrich, the Boy Scout. Newt Gingrich, the man who sat there and watched Congress impeach and try Bill Clinton for lying about having an extramarital affair while he, Newt Gingrich, was lying about having an extramarital affair. (This all took place during his second marriage. The first one ended when he told his wife he was divorcing her while she was in the hospital undergoing cancer treatment.)
This is the level of Republican hypocrisy that reminds us all how far the Dems have to go. I tell you what -- let's all hold hands and sing, "Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends!"
Just not, please, Newt Gingrich, the man whose contribution to civility was to recommend that all Democrats be referred to with such words as cowards, traitors, commies, godless, liars and other such bipartisanship-promoting terms.
Please, anyone but Newt.
Now, from my hours spent battered and half brain-dead listening to the fatuous, self-important commentators of our nation, I learn that the people did not elect liberals to Congress last week. Nope, they elected populists! Well, gosh all hemlock. Populist! I am one.
Who knew? I thought all said I was chopped liver. Populist. Like Tom Frank of What's the Matter With Kansas? fame. Jim Hightower. We can even draw our lines of political genealogy -- via Ralph Yarborough and Bob Elkhart.
A populist is pretty much for the people and generally in this case exactly the same as a liberal -- we just put the em-pha-sis on a different syl-la-ble. We also tend to be more fun. We do not vote to hurt average Americans, even if the corporate payoff is really big. Even if it's just a little bit -- like the bankruptcy bill.
We tend to focus less on social issues and more on who's gettin' taken and who's doin' the taking. In my opinion, Americans are not getting taken by the Republican Party. They are getting taken by Large Corporations that bought and own the Republican Party.
The word populist was misused, abused and co-opted by right-wingers for years, ever since we were all forced to read Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Bad history can do a powerful amount of damage. Most of us stopped at the painful news that Tom Watson, leader of the late-19th-century populism, went on to become a raging racist bigot. Populism itself took on the connotation of bile and nastiness.
If you read back to the beginning of the populist movement, however, you will find Andy Jackson and the West set against all those dreary Eastern snobs. When Andy opened up the White House and let in the people, the snobs had the fantods.
OK, it's not the 19th century anymore, but it is always the right time to point out that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. Honest. There stands George W. Bush, buck nekkid. We want to help him out of this fix because he's dragging the whole Army, the country and the world down with him. But don't ask us to call those clothes.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/16026120.htm?template=contentModules...
As Iraq war drags on, so does a temporary memorial
By Steve Chawkins
Times Staff Writer
(My Dime: Good job to your perseverance and congrats to throwing these bums out. I've been following many of your posts (yes, even yours, Rooster; sad to know you can't change your feathers) though too busy to do much posting myself. I have seen Arlington West a couple times...so touching and sad. Click on the site for a couple of pics. I wish you all the best!!)
November 10, 2006
SANTA BARBARA — It looks like an engineer's dream: Forty-nine rows and 52 columns of white, wooden crosses a foot-and-a-half high, each exactly 36 inches from its neighbor, each row exactly 60 inches from the next, a precise reckoning of combat death gleaming on the beach beside Stearns Wharf.
Each cross in the display mounted every Sunday represents an American fatality in Iraq.
At its start three years ago, the project had 340 of them. Last Sunday, there were 2,831.
In a telling comment on the war's unexpected duration, organizers of the memorial called Arlington West now are talking about picking a number — perhaps 3,000 — and building no more crosses after it's reached.
"It's strictly a matter of logistics — there's just a limit to how much room we can take up and how many crosses we can handle," said Dan Seidenberg, president of the local chapter of a group called Veterans for Peace. "I mean: How long will this war drag on?"
About a dozen volunteers have shown up week after week since the start. They're joined by up to 30 others who appear now and again. Some started coming only in recent months, prompted by rumors that the project would cease for lack of help.
On a recent Sunday, Rod Edwards, an engineer for the Goleta Water District, walked briskly down the rows, hunching over to secure laminated, handwritten nameplates, using two rubber bands per cross.
"You almost feel you know them after a while," said Edwards, who volunteers for the task each week. "It just tears your heart out."
Here he draped a string of rosary beads that a soldier's parents had left for their son's marker; there he propped up a plastic-encased obituary for Sgt. Mark A. Maida, who "deployed to Iraq and adopted a puppy there named Maxine." He was 22.
On this day, Edwards made quick work of installing more than 1,200 nametags.
Marine Cpl. Jorge A. Gonzalez, 20, of Los Angeles: "Graduate of El Monte High School and father of a newborn."
Marine Lance Cpl. Jesus Suarez del Solar, 20, of Escondido: "RIP: Our Hero and Aztec warrior."
When there were fewer crosses, each name was displayed. Now, the names of all fatalities are dutifully recorded on nameplates, but volunteers put up only those whose friends or families have visited.
Not long ago, Edwards said, he comforted a sailor who had dropped by to seek out the name of his buddy.
"He seemed fine at first," Edwards said. "But when he saw the name, he just lost it. He threw himself on the sand and cried."
When the crosses are taken down about eight hours later, the nameplates are filed away just so, allowing Edwards and other volunteers to honor requests that troops who died together be grouped side by side. One such grouping has 17 crosses. One family asked for a Star of David instead of a cross, and that request also was honored.
Arlington West has inspired about a dozen similar installations around the United States, including one on the beach at Santa Monica. Except for a few rainouts, the Santa Barbara display has been erected every Sunday since Nov. 2, 2003.
"We sent up an SOS this summer, and that brought a spate of new volunteers," said Bob Potter, a retired drama professor and an officer of Veterans for Peace. "But people get exhausted."
The ideal, Potter said, would be to continue to place a marker for each battlefield death — but the sheer size of the task might make that impossible.
A committee is grappling with the question of limiting the crosses, which now span nearly an acre of prime beachfront. Although the city has given its blessing to the project, some volunteers grimly anticipate that it might one day crowd sunbathers and spill over into areas reserved for beach volleyball.
That was never the plan. The group never envisioned a permanent or even a full-time memorial because that would have taken more money, more manpower and sturdier crosses.
Last Sunday, volunteers started arriving about 7:30 a.m. Most were of a certain age, but members of the Santa Barbara High School Peace Club, just a bit younger than the troops they were memorializing, also pitched in. Joggers ran nearby, and a few kayakers paddled just offshore as people started hauling crosses lashed together in bundles of 16 from a donated truck.
Using methods developed by Ron Dexter, a retired TV commercial producer known in the group as a logistical whiz, the volunteers conducted the operation with military precision. Hundred-foot measuring tapes were stretched taut across the sand. People hurried down the rows, dropping each cross at a spot marked in red on the tapes.
Behind them came others to plant the crosses firmly, still others to straighten them and yet others to stick miniature U.S. flags beside each marker.
A man in a straw hat raked the sand between the crosses with a gizmo consisting of three yoked-together mop handles and dozens of dowels. He likened it to grooming a Zen garden.
As the day wore on, mourners came by, kneeling amid the crosses. Volunteers offered kind words and flowers, sometimes sitting beside them on the sand.
A Vietnam-era veteran, Dinah Mason comes weekly to help. With a daughter who just returned from Iraq, she said she has a particular feeling for mothers who weren't so fortunate.
"One lady from Simi Valley started talking about the favorite thing she used to bake for her son, and then she started crying," Mason said. "We were crying with her."
On the wharf, tourists leaned on a railing and peered down at the scene. A recorded bugle played taps over and over.
Joel and Yazmin Leal, who had come from Fullerton to Santa Barbara for their anniversary, found the name of their friend Douglas J. Marenco Reyes, a Marine who was among the first 200 troops to die in Iraq. For a while, they gazed in silence around the beach.
"This is amazing," said Yazmin, who last saw her friend at her husband's birthday party two months before Reyes' death. "There's a person to each one of these crosses."
At day's end, volunteers fanned out among the crosses, pulling them up as meticulously as they had put them down that morning. At precise intervals, they tied them together using identical lengths of rope, looped in identical spots — another of Dexter's innovations for making the work go more quickly.
The display has angered some.
A debate over its propriety recently flared in the letters columns of the Santa Barbara News-Press, with some writers saying it exploits fallen heroes for political gain. Last year, a Lompoc mother, Debbie Argel Bastian, demanded that the name of her son, Air Force Capt. Derek Argel, be removed because he wouldn't want to be associated with an antiwar protest.
The organizers complied.
Although articles critical of the war are displayed at Arlington West each week, volunteers said the tone used to be far more strident.
"One old World War II veteran would come down with 'Impeach Bush' signs, and we took to asking him not to have those around," said Potter of Veterans for Peace. "We moved to a position where we were trying to open the memorial to as wide a public as possible rather than trying to provoke people."
Even the crosses themselves have become softer.
Stephen Sherrill, a Santa Barbara carpenter, started Arlington West with half a dozen friends as a protest.
He still checks a website each week for fatalities, still buys the lumber with donated funds, still glues and screws the appropriate number of crosses.
"I plane the wood and curve the edges now," he said. "People were getting too many cuts and splinters.
"And whatever I can do to make the crosses a little lighter helps," Sherrill said. "We're looking at a ton-and-a-half of wood out there."
Sherrill will be making more crosses for this weekend's display. As a tribute to Veterans Day, Arlington West will be up Saturday as well as Sunday. Candles will be lighted and volunteers will stand vigil through the night.
From a patch of shade under a tarp, Sherrill recalled similar candlelight observances over the last three years.
"But who'd have thought we'd still be here?" he asked.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-crosses10nov10,0,7697870,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Bush Unleashes the Nuclear Beast
If the administration won't abide by time-tested nuclear treaties, why should anyone else?
By Joseph Cirincione
Joseph Cirincione is a senior vice president at the Center for American Progress. His new book, "Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons," will be published next spring.
October 15, 2006
IN THEIR THIRD PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE, in October 1960, John F. Kennedy went after Vice President Richard Nixon, blasting him as weak on national security for not stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. France had just tested its first nuclear device, joining the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain as the world's first nuclear powers. Kennedy warned "that 10, 15 or 20 nations will have a nuclear capacity — including Red China — by the end of the presidential office in 1964."
As president, Kennedy sought to fight that dark vision, telling the United Nations: "The weapons of war must be abolished, before they abolish us." He restarted talks on a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, began pursuit of a global nonproliferation pact and signed a treaty with the Soviet Union to ban atmospheric nuclear tests. Although Kennedy did not live to finish the job, in 1968, Lyndon Johnson signed what became the diplomatic crown jewel of his presidency: the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or NPT. President Nixon secured its ratification.
The NPT is now considered one of the most successful security pacts in history. Every nation in the world is a member except Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Most of the 183 member states that do not have nuclear weapons believe what the treaty says: We should eliminate nuclear weapons.
The treaty became the hub around which liberals and conservatives built an interlocking network of agreements that deterred, though didn't altogether stop, the spread of nuclear weapons. As a result, by 2000, only three other countries — Israel, India and Pakistan — had joined the original five nuclear nations. With the success of these agreements, and the end of the Soviet-American nuclear standoff at the close of the Cold War, it seemed that the nuclear threat that had haunted the world for so many years might finally be receding.
But now, suddenly, the threat is back. In the last six years, we seem awash in nuclear threats: First it was Saddam Hussein, then North Korea and Iran. How did it happen? Is nuclear restraint dead?
At the heart of the problem is the strategy George W. Bush chose, which rejects international treaties as the solution to proliferation. He and his advisors saw these agreements as limiting U.S. flexibility and viewed the United Nations and other global gatherings as arenas where the world's Lilliputians could tie down the American Gulliver.
Bush scuttled the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, walked away from the nuclear test ban treaty secured by President Clinton, opposed efforts to enforce the treaty banning biological weapons, mocked the U.N. inspectors before the Iraq war and sent low-level officials to critical negotiations, including last year's NPT conference. The world now believes that the chief architect of the global nonproliferation system has abandoned its creation.
Instead, the administration preferred to rely on U.S. military might and technology, such as anti-missile systems, to protect the United States. Rather than negotiate treaties to eliminate weapons, it forged a strategy to eliminate the regimes that might use them against us. The Bush team felt they knew who the bad guys were, and they aimed to get them — one by one.
But the strategy has backfired. Both Iran and North Korea accelerated their programs, making more progress in the last five years than they had made in the previous 10. Now North Korea's test threatens to trigger an Asian nuclear-reaction chain that could prompt South Korea, Taiwan and even Japan to reconsider their nuclear options.
And it is not just the threats from small nations such as North Korea that could fuel a new atomic arms race. It is the continued existence of huge nuclear arsenals in the United States, Russia and other states. The importance of nuclear weapons as a cornerstone of U.S. defense had been declining since the Cold War ended. Though the U.S. never ruled out their use, Clinton and George H.W. Bush made it clear that they believed they were unusable, except perhaps in retaliation.
But the current president's policies have elevated the role of these weapons. The 2002 Nuclear Posture Review detailed plans to build new, more usable "low-yield" nuclear weapons and created missions for them. Bush decided to retain about 6,000 weapons and to research a new generation of nuclear missiles, bombers and submarines.
What's the relevance of this to proliferation? Simple. U.S. intelligence officials concluded as early as 1958 that other nations' nuclear appetites could not be curbed without limiting the superpowers' stockpiles. That judgment was confirmed by subsequent administrations.
As the superpowers cut their weapons from a Cold War high of 65,000 in 1986 to about 27,000 today, other countries took note. In the 1960s, 23 countries had nuclear programs, including Australia, Canada, Egypt, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and West Germany. Most ended any weapons programs. Brazil and Argentina stopped research in the 1980s, and South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their bombs in the 1990s.
We now know that U.N. inspectors ended Iraq's nuclear program in 1991. In 2003, Libya abandoned its secret program. Until last week, no nation had tested a nuclear weapon for eight years — the longest period in the Atomic Age. The outrage that greeted the North Korean test shows how strong anti-nuclear sentiment has become.
Many political and military leaders recognize the limited military utility of weapons whose use would kill thousands of innocent civilians. Rep. David L. Hobson (R-Ohio), a solid Midwest conservative, led the effort last year to kill the administration's proposed "nuclear bunker buster," a new weapon designed to go after conventional targets. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara advocates greatly reducing the U.S. and Russian arsenals and then working to eliminate them completely, just as countries have done with chemical and biological weapons. Even former Bush advisor Richard Perle has said the U.S. could cut to well below 1,000 warheads. "The truth is we are never going to use them," Perle said. "The Russians aren't going to use theirs either."
By clinging to our own nuclear arsenal, and touting the importance of these weapons to our own security, the Bush administration has sent the world a schizoid message: Nuclear weapons are very, very important and useful — but you cannot have them. This double standard is impossible to maintain.
Last year, International Atomic Energy Agency Director Mohamed ElBaradei said that until the world was committed to eradicating nuclear weapons, "we will continue to have this cynical environment that all the guys in the minor leagues will try to join the major leagues…. They will say, 'If the big boys continue to rely on nuclear weapons, why shouldn't I?' "
Bush administration officials have proved expert at smashing the agreements their predecessors so painstakingly built, but in doing so they broke the bars that had caged the nuclear beast. Those who will have to repair the damage would do well to look back at the handiwork of the past. They might learn a thing or two.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-cirincione15oct15,1,6507987,print.story
No, Rooster, it is pedophile bashing.....have a problem with that??? Rush, your hero, is a moron, but then he is the one running down to the Dominican Republic on his weekend sex jaunts...
There's no journalism here. This is gay bashing. The Democrats and their buddies in the media are gay bashing. They are trying to disgust values voters with the Republican Party because guys like Foley are in it." More Rush Quotes
F6, in rooster's world, perception is reality...
rooster -- if they had anything, at least anything that isn't made-up bullshit, i.e. a lie (. . .), it'd be out already
you know, you'd at least have a shot at being more effective in advocating your views if you would, at least every once in a great while, acknowledge reality in some slight way or other -- . . .
By Jim Popkin
Senior Investigative Producer
NBC News
Updated: 5:25 p.m. PT Oct 4, 2006
WASHINGTON - Tyson Vivyan was a congressional page from 1996 to 1997. Now 26, he tells NBC News that he knew Fla. Rep. Mark Foley somewhat during his brief Washington stay, but not well. It wasn't until after he finished the congressional program and returned home to Tennessee, he says, that Foley began reaching out to him. Vivyan says that he began receiving instant messages in 1997 from someone with the moniker "maf54," and that the messages were almost immediately sexual in nature.
Vivyan says he soon deduced that the mystery writer was Foley, and got the congressman to concede this online. says he was 17 at the time, and not at all interested in a sexual relationship with the much older Foley. He says that every time he tried to turn the conversation away from sex that Foley would go back to the topic, asking him to discuss what he was wearing, and which sexual acts he enjoyed.
"I was completely shocked that someone of his position would conduct himself that way with someone my age," Vivyan says.
He never reported Foley to the authorities or told anyone, Vivyan says, because he didn't think anyone would believe him. Vivyan says he did not save any of those early instant messages.
Vivyan continued communicating with Foley by instant message for the next eight years. He says he didn't want to ruin his connection to a powerful Washington personality, and thus never cut off the correspondence. Vivyan says he never had any sexual contact with the Republican congressman, and is speaking out now to make the public aware that this scandal is about a lawmaker's inappropriate behavior, and shouldn't reflect poorly on the page program.
NBC News has confirmed that FBI special agents in Atlanta interviewed Vivyan Tuesday morning at his home. He provided the FBI with the following instant message exchange, in which Foley allegedly says he's looking for a boyfriend. The messages, sexual in nature, are from 2004 and 2005, when Vivyan was 24 years old. Foley's lawyer did not return a call to NBC seeking comment on the messages and Vivyan's claims.
While NBC News has verified much of Vivyan's story, NBC cannot independently confirm that the online messages were sent by Foley.
Session Start (AIM - Tyson:maf54): Thu Aug 19 22:56:23 2004
Tyson: hey, Mark.
maf54: hey tyson
Tyson: i've got a quick question, if you don't mind.
maf54: ok
Tyson: what do you think about Zach Wamp (TN-3)?
maf54: why
Tyson: i ran into him at the Atlanta airport about 2 weeks ago. i introduced myself and recalled that we sat next to one another during the President of Chile's address to a joint session of Congress when i was a page. he asked what i was doing now and i told him about being in training with AirTran, but that i desire to return to the Hill one day, despite my lack of a degree. he seemed interested and asked if i could send "Pauline" in his Chattanooga office some info... saying that he could try to get me into an entry level position in his DC office. given that i'm quite liberal, i'm just curious just how conservative an environment i could expect... and if trying is even worth it.
maf54: of course it would be worth it
Tyson: well, i'm not ignorant to the fact that getting back to DC would be a dream come true, but i just don't know how well i could function in his office if he's a bible-thumping, gay-hating, bomb-dropping republican. while i'm confident i can remain focused on serving the people of the third district, i don't know if betraying my own political and social beliefs are worth achieving my dream of getting back on the Hill.
Tyson: plus, who's to say that he was even being genuine in his offer. he could have just said that to get me off his back so he could drink his Starbucks.
maf54: well thats a consideration
Tyson: i don't know much about him.
Tyson: hence why i'm asking you.
maf54: hes a trip
Tyson: a good trip or a bad trip?
maf54: a trip
Tyson: lol
Tyson: :-p
Tyson: well, that doesn't help me much
maf54: so are you single now
maf54: no ties that bind
Tyson: the divorce should be final in the next two weeks.
Tyson: why do you ask?
maf54: cool
maf54: cause
Tyson: you lookin' for a boyfriend?
maf54: yup
Tyson: are you ever gonna come out or are you happy in the closet?
maf54: with a nice d***
maf54: i love the closet like you do
Tyson: WHATEVER! :-p
maf54: oh ok
Tyson: i've been so flaming at training the past four weeks. (i graduate tomorrow by the way)
maf54: cool congrats
Tyson: thanks. i don't have to do my operating experience until Thursday, so that gives me 5 days with no work and free flight bennies... i'm trying to decide what to do...
maf54: cool
*** maf54 signed off at Thu Aug 19 23:13:21 2004.
Session Start (Tyson:maf54): Tue Jan 18 15:47:06 2005
Tyson: well, i no longer work for AirTran, so i don't think i'll be seducing in Palm Beach anytime soon.
Session Close (maf54): Tue Jan 18 15:50:10 2005
Session Start (Tyson:maf54): Tue Jan 18 16:19:20 2005
maf54: what happened
Tyson: passenger turned in a complaint. i wasn't given any details, so i couldn't defend myself. since i was still on probation, they just let me go.
maf54: reslly
maf54: when do you thimk this happened
Tyson: i don't have a clue. i wasn't given any information. i was just told that someone complained. that's it.
Session Close (maf54): Tue Jan 18 16:42:24 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15132294/page/2/
© 2006 MSNBC Interactive
F6, I gotta hand it to you; you must have quite a stomach and wear nose plugs to read any crap of that pill-popping, quick flyin' to sexcapades island, RUSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Question Rooster: Do you think he was the only one???
It isn't just sex (consenting, at that), my fine feathered friend, unless of course, you and your ilk think hitting on a minor is cool, which I think Republicans with blinders will look the other way when it is one of their own....values, you know!!!
Though not certain, I'm sure the sniveling hypocrite, like all family values Republicans, voted to impeach Clinton
F6, it is called a 'state of denial' but it is hard to keep your lies straight.
Sorry, F6, got distracted and didn't cite the source...hope you are doing well. Gotta kick outta My3sons exchange:)
Professor's Prophecy of Doom Fulfilled
Steve Lopez
Points West
October 1, 2006
Professor Richard Dekmejian, a pint-sized and bespectacled scholar barely able to see over the top of the research materials piled on his desk at USC, is delivering a good scolding from behind his bunker.
He's got nothing but backhands for President Bush, the neo-cons, the Democratic pushovers and the average Joe and Jane. All of them were such fools, he said, to have expected the war in Iraq to produce anything but chaos, death and resentment.
The subject that had Dekmejian in a lather was last week's report by 16 United States intelligence agencies, which concluded that the war in Iraq has helped fuel the spread of terrorism around the world and shaped "a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."
The Bush administration, testing the outer limits of its own creativity, countered by accusing the war's critics of mouthing "the enemy's propaganda."
The last time I checked in with Dekmejian, in 2004, he told me that the war was sure to be a terrorist recruitment tool for years to come. I dropped by last week to see if he was ready to take a bow for predicting the current disaster.
"One should not derive pleasure from predicting doom," he said.
Dekmejian, who teaches a class on terrorism and genocide, was neither insulted nor surprised by the president's spin. Given the cost of the war in both money and blood, not to mention the loss of respect around the world, what else would Bush do but stubbornly defend the mission and compare critics to traitors?
He also wasn't surprised by the report's findings. "It's elementary stuff," Dekmejian says of the conclusion that we've only multiplied our enemies and made ourselves less safe. "It's primitive stuff. No surprises. No secrets."
He's looking at me as if I were one of the fools who bought into the war, and he gives me no chance to remind him that he and I have been on the same page from the beginning.
"Our security agencies," he continues without coming up for air, "which we spend billions on, are telling us what was obvious three years ago. Anyone who reads a newspaper could have seen what kind of response this would have around the world."
The professor has one eye on the clock, because he's scheduled to lead a seminar on Middle East politics for PhD candidates. But the class is going to have to wait, because he's not done laying into his targets.
The U.S. is acting childishly, he says. "Not just the president, but the American people. They're children. They do not read. I don't even want to talk about their reading materials. They're corrupted by television and they cannot think causally."
Now he's onto a pet subject — the physics of conflict, and the inevitability of blowback for decades of crawling into bed with despots in pursuit of resources like oil.
"When somebody smashes somebody else in the face, there are several possibilities. You can be wiped out, but if you're not, there's a very, very high likelihood that you're not going to turn the other cheek."
I don't disagree, but I'm ready to throw my hands up, because I didn't drop in on Dekmejian to talk about how we got into this mess. I want to know how we get out of it.
"Steve, you're such a good American," he says. "You want solutions."
Who doesn't?
To be honest, Dekmejian doesn't have solutions that are politically workable any time soon.
Would he pull back our troops? Probably. And he'd have us focus more on problems at home rather than incurring the world's wrath through imperialist overreach. To cool off the terrorists, he adds, there'd have to be a two-state settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Of course, it's a little too easy to save the world from the comfort of a college campus on a sunny day, and much harder to put such wisdom to practical use. But Dekmejian's larger message is that American foreign policymakers need a greater understanding of cultural differences, the nature of conflict and the ways to stop escalating the blood feud between Islam and the West.
"Talk to Iran. Negotiate. If you've got enemies, speak to them. You don't have to love them."
Take Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for instance. Dekmejian thinks it's dangerous to fling insults rather than talk to him. He may be a Holocaust denier, but anyone who's that unhinged shouldn't be alienated — especially when he seems to have such a keen interest in plutonium.
"Calling him a nasty such and such — that's kids' stuff."
Pope Benedict XVI's criticism of Islam is the kind of thing that can rally anti-Christian forces for generations, Dekmejian says. But he applauds the pope for bringing up reciprocity.
"If you can build mosques in Europe and in Rome, Christians should be allowed to do it in Islamist centers. We should appeal to Islamic moderates or at least put them on the defensive. We have no business insulting the prophet Muhammad, and they need to stop insulting us as well."
Dekmejian looks at the clock. He's 15 minutes late and quickly gathers up his teaching materials and scampers across the quad toward the School of International Relations. Eight students are waiting for him, potential policymakers in training.
The professor grabs some chalk and begins outlining what he calls "the spectrum of terror," the subject of a book he's just finished writing. In it, he explores game theory as a way of understanding the escalation of political and cultural differences from minor skirmish to state-sponsored assault.
If only there were a way to get people as interested in this stuff as they are in pictures of Tom Cruise's baby.
"Every war, every genocide, can be traced to small conflicts that became magnified and radicalized, often through religion," he says, chalk flying, his students taking notes on the history of the world.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/post_reply.asp?message_id=13706068
Curfew locks down Baghdad until Sunday
No reason announced, source cites 'intelligence' about security situation
Sept. 29: Baghdad is under a curfew tonight as violence continues to escalate. NBC's Richard Engel reports.
Nightly News
NBC NEWS EXCLUSIVE
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 1 hour, 5 minutes ago
BAGHDAD - Iraq’s government shut down the capital with a curfew from Friday night until Sunday morning, ordering all cars and pedestrians off the streets, but giving no reason for the measure.
The curfew would remain in place until 6:00 a.m. on Sunday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office said in a one-line statement. The U.S. military did not comment.
A source at the Interior Ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk with the press, said "intelligence information on the security situation made a curfew necessary." He refused further details.
The announcement came after a week of clashes and bombings heralded the start of the holy month of Ramadan. U.S. commanders say the past week saw a record number of suicide bombings and the last two weeks have seen a surge in violence.
Although no explanation was given for the curfew, residents of the Adamiya neighborhood in the north of the capital said they heard gunfire and explosions near dusk on Friday.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have launched a 7-week-old security crackdown in the capital, targeting scattered neighborhoods for sweeps. But Sunni and Shiite sectarian militia have clashed in several parts of the city over recent days.
The Ramadan holy month began a week ago with a massive bomb in a Shiite neighborhood that killed at least 34 people. A Sunni militant group claimed responsibility for that attack and said it was revenge for killings by Shiite death squads.
The curfew comes a day after gunmen killed the brother-in-law of the chief judge in former leader Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial and badly wounded his sister and nephew.
It was at least the fourth killing closely connected to the U.S.-sponsored court, following those of three defense lawyers, and will raise new questions about its ability to conduct fair trials in a nation on the verge of sectarian civil war.
Police said two officers were killed on Friday in clashes in Baghdad’s violent southern Dora district. A Sunni tribal leader was killed by gunmen in the same area.
Some tribal sheiks have become targets for militants, especially following a deal this week by tribes in western Anbar province to take on al-Qaida alongside government forces.
The tribes captured five militants in the Anbar province capital Ramadi on Friday, including three foreign fighters from Yemen, police and tribal leaders said.
The U.S. commander in Ramadi, Colonel Sean MacFarland, hailed the tribes’ action. He said his troops’ mission was not to defeat the insurgency but to reduce violence to a manageable level, allowing Iraqi security forces to take over.
Attacks on U.S. and Iraqi government forces in Ramadi had fallen to 15 a day from 20 a few months ago, he told reporters in the Pentagon by video link, adding much more had to be done.
It really is a trip, easy, how these hypocritical republicans can even look themselves in the mirror. Roskam has no military service record; none, zero, nada, and he slams his female opponent on that lame 'cut and run' crap who lost both legs in Iraq. What friggin' bullshit!! There is no bottom for them, they are the lowest of the low...they wouldn't know values if it hit them between the eyes. Sickening!!
http://republicansforduckworth.typepad.com/blog/2006/08/roskams_war_rec.html
Republican Values 'hard' at work...you gotta love them. I would love to see his voting record...probably deeply insulted by President Clinton's affair and voted accordingly...
Note: My bold comments....and it's only appropriate Foley was chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus....
Foley Resigns From Congress Over E-Mails
By DAVID ESPO and JIM KUHNHENN , 09.29.2006, 05:47 PM
Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., resigned from Congress on Friday, effective immediately, in the wake of questions about e-mails he wrote a former teenage male page.
"I am deeply sorry and I apologize for letting down my family and the people of Florida I have had the privilege to represent," he said in a statement issued by his office.
The two-sentence statement did not refer to the e-mails and gave no reason for Foley's abrupt decision to abandon a flourishing career in Congress.
Foley, 52, had been a shoo-in for a new term until the e-mail correspondence surfaced in recent days.
His resignation comes less than six weeks before the elections and further complicates the political landscape for Republicans, who are fighting to retain control of Congress. Democrats need to win a net of 15 Republican seats to regain the power they lost in 1994.
Florida Republicans planned to meet as soon as Monday to name a replacement in Foley's district, which President Bush won with 55 percent in 2004 and is now in play for November. Though Florida ballots have already been printed with Foley's name and cannot be changed, any votes for Foley will count toward the party's choice.
Campaign aides had previously acknowledged that the Republican congressman e-mailed the former Capitol page five times, but had said there was nothing inappropriate about the exchange. The page was 16 at the time of the e-mail correspondence.
The page worked for Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., who said Friday that when he learned of the e-mail exchanges 10 to 11 months ago, he called the teen's parents. Alexander added, "We also notified the House leadership that there might be a potential problem."
House Speaker Dennis Hastert said he had asked the chairman of the House's page board, Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., to investigate the page system. "We want to make sure that all our pages are safe and the page system is safe," Hastert said.
He said Foley submitted the letter of resignation to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and submitted a copy to him. A House clerk read Foley's resignation on the House floor.
"He's done the right thing," Hastert said. Asked if the chain of events was disturbing, he said, "None of us are very happy about it."
ABC News reported Friday that Foley also engaged in a series of sexually explicit instant messages with current and former teenage male pages. In one message, ABC said, Foley wrote to one page: "Do I make you a little horny?"
Foley, as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, had introduced legislation in July to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. He also sponsored other legislation designed to protect minors from abuse and neglect.
"We track library books better than we do sexual predators," Foley has said.
Foley, who represents an area around Palm Beach County, e-mailed the page in August 2005. The page had worked for Alexander and Foley asked him how he was doing after Hurricane Katrina and what he wanted for his birthday. The congressman also asked the boy to send a photo of himself, according to excerpts of the e-mails that were originally released by ABC News.
Foley's aides initially blamed Democratic rival Tim Mahoney and Democrats with attempting to smear the congressman before the election.
The e-mails were posted Friday on Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington's Web site after ABC News reported their existence. The group asked the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to investigate the exchange Foley had with the boy.
"The House of Representatives has an obligation to protect the teenagers who come to Congress to learn about the legislative process," the group wrote, adding that the committee, "must investigate any allegation that a page has been subjected to sexual advances by members of the House."
In 2003, Foley faced questions about his sexual orientation as he prepared to run for Sen. Bob Graham's seat. At a news conference in May of that year, he said he would not comment on rumors he was gay. He later decided not to seek the Senate seat to care for his parents.
According to the CREW posting, the boy e-mailed a colleague in Alexander's office about Foley's e-mails, saying, "This freaked me out." On the request for a photo, the boy repeated the word "sick" 13 times.
He said Foley asked for his e-mail when the boy gave him a thank you card. The boy also said Foley wrote that he e-mailed another page.
"he's such a nice guy," Foley wrote about the other boy. "acts much older than his age...and hes in really great shape...i am just finished riding my bike on a 25 mile journey now heading to the gym...whats school like for you this year?"
In other e-mails, Foley wrote, "I am back in Florida now...its nice here...been raining today...it sounds like you will have some fun over the next few weeks...how old are you now?" and "how are you weathering the hurricane...are you safe...send me an email pic of you as well."
What the boy wrote to Foley, who is single, wasn't available. The e-mails were sent from Foley's personal account, which Foley spokesman Jason Kello says he uses to communicate with many people, including Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
Efforts to reach the boy were unsuccessful, but he told the St. Petersburg Times last November, "I thought it was very inappropriate. After the one about the picture, I decided to stop e-mailing him back." The Times didn't publish the comments until Friday.
Alexander said the boy notified a staffer in his office about the e-mails and promptly called the boy's parents.
"My concern then was the young man's interests and the parents' interests," Alexander said. "We weren't trying to protect anybody except the parents. ... They told me they were comfortable with it and didn't want to pursue anything, didn't want to talk about it anymore."
Foley was a member of the Republican leadership, serving as a deputy whip. He also was a member of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Florida Republican Party lawyers were reviewing the process to pick a replacement. Party Chairwoman Carole Jean Jordan said she hopes a replacement will be chosen by Monday. Among the possibilities was state Rep. Joe Negron, who was a candidate for attorney general before dropping out of the race to avoid a primary with former Rep. Bill McCollum.
"It would be very time sensitive so the nominee would have the opportunity to get around the district and campaign in a very short amount of time," Jordan said.
David Johnson, a former state Republican chairman who worked as a strategist for Foley, said it will be difficult for the party's pick to win with Foley's name on the ballot.
On Foley, Jordan said, "Congressman Foley served as my congressman. He's given a great deal of time and effort and extreme good hard work to the state of Florida. I just so appreciate all the things he's done over the years."
Mahoney, a Republican who became a Democrat last year, is chairman and chief operating officer of a $1 billion-a-year financial services company. In his House bid, he has focused on Washington corruption and oversized deficits.
In 1983, the House censured two lawmakers - Daniel Crane of Illinois and Gerry Studds of Massachusetts - for having improper relationships with pages.
The page program is for high school students who study at a congressional school while also carrying out tasks for lawmakers.
He is just itching for another fight...but don't ask chicken little to partake. Iran, China, Venuzuela...I'm sure I missed one or two...It's all a big joke to Rooster. Just as long as his boy is in the Oval Office strutting around like a banty rooster and Pumpkin Head is babbling his dribble over the airwaves, Rooster is one happy chicken.
why go to china?
That says it all...
Dick Morris wrote that. I'm trying to find it now.
Rooster, if you are gonna post some crap, at least give the author credit....or is that the point??
And you can thank your president for that!!!! So foolish and unnecessary...worst president ever!!!
Iraq Is 'Cause Celebre' for Extremists
Hey Rooster, you have had many memorable posts, but 42540 is by far your best!!
Army Warns Rumsfeld It's Billions Short
An extraordinary action by the chief of staff sends a message: The Pentagon must increase the budget or reduce commitments in Iraq and elsewhere.
By Peter Spiegel
Times Staff Writer
September 25, 2006
WASHINGTON — The Army's top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.
The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.
"This is unusual, but hell, we're in unusual times," said a senior Pentagon official involved in the budget discussions.
Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service's funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.
According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army's budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker's request a 41% increase over current levels.
"It's incredibly huge," said the Army official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity when commenting on internal deliberations. "These are just incredible numbers."
Most funding for the fighting in Iraq has come from annual emergency spending bills, with the regular defense budget going to normal personnel, procurement and operational expenses, such as salaries and new weapons systems.
About $400 billion has been appropriated for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through emergency funding measures since Sept. 11, 2001, with the money divided among military branches and government agencies.
But in recent budget negotiations, Army officials argued that the service's expanding global role in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism — outlined in strategic plans issued this year — as well as fast-growing personnel and equipment costs tied to the Iraq war, have put intense pressure on its normal budget.
"It's kind of like the old rancher saying: 'I'm going to size the herd to the amount of hay that I have,' " said Lt. Gen. Jerry L. Sinn, the Army's top budget official. "[Schoomaker] can't size the herd to the size of the amount of hay that he has because he's got to maintain the herd to meet the current operating environment."
The Army, with an active-duty force of 504,000, has been stretched by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. About 400,000 have done at least one tour of combat duty, and more than a third of those have been deployed twice. Commanders have increasingly complained of the strain, saying last week that sustaining current levels will require more help from the National Guard and Reserve or an increase in the active-duty force.
Schoomaker first raised alarms with Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in June after he received new Army budget outlines from Rumsfeld's office. Those outlines called for an Army budget of about $114 billion, a $2-billion cut from previous guidelines. The cuts would grow to $7 billion a year after six years, the senior Army official said.
After Schoomaker confronted Rumsfeld with the Army's own estimates for maintaining the current size and commitments — and the steps that would have to be taken to meet the lower figure, which included cutting four combat brigades and an entire division headquarters unit — Rumsfeld agreed to set up a task force to investigate Army funding.
Although no formal notification is required, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey, who has backed Schoomaker in his push for additional funding, wrote to Rumsfeld early last month to inform him that the Army would miss the Aug. 15 deadline for its budget plan. Harvey said the delay in submitting the plan, formally called a Program Objective Memorandum, was the result of the extended review by the task force.
The study group — which included three-star officers from the Army and Rumsfeld's office — has since agreed with the Army's initial assessment. Officials say negotiations have moved to higher levels of the Bush administration, involving top aides to Rumsfeld and White House Budget Director Rob Portman.
"Now the discussion is: Where are we going to go? Do we lower our strategy or do we raise our resources?" said the senior Pentagon official. "That's where we're at."
Pressure on the Army budget has been growing since late May, when the House and Senate appropriations committees proposed defense spending for 2007 of $4 billion to $9 billion below the White House's original request.
Funding was further complicated this summer, when rising sectarian violence in Baghdad forced the Pentagon to shelve plans to gradually reduce troops in Iraq.
Because of those pressures, the Army in July announced it was freezing civilian hiring and new weapons contract awards and was scaling back on personnel travel restrictions, among other cost cuts.
Schoomaker has been vocal in recent months about a need to expand war funding legislation to pay for repair of hundreds of tanks and armored fighting vehicles after heavy use in Iraq.
He has told congressional appropriators that he will need $17.1 billion next year for repairs, nearly double this year's appropriation — and more than quadruple the cost two years ago. According to an Army budget document obtained by The Times, Army officials are planning repair requests of $13 billion in 2008 and $13.5 billion in 2009.
In recent weeks, however, Schoomaker has become more publicly emphatic about budget shortfalls, saying funding is not enough to pay for Army commitments to the Iraq war and the global strategy outlined by the Pentagon.
"There's no sense in us submitting a budget that we can't execute, a broken budget," Schoomaker said in a recent Washington address.
Military budget expert Steven M. Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent Washington think tank, said that despite widespread recognition that the Army should be getting more resources because of war-related costs, its share of the Defense Department budget has been largely unchanged since the 2003 invasion.
However, a good portion of the new money the Army seeks is not directly tied to the war, Kosiak cautioned, but rather to new weapons it wants — particularly the $200-billion Future Combat System, a family of armored vehicles that is eventually to replace nearly every tank and transporter the Army has.
"This isn't a problem one can totally pass off on current military operations," Kosiak said. "The FCS program is very ambitious — some would say overly ambitious."
Even with Rumsfeld's backing, any request for an increase could force a conflict with the White House Office of Management and Budget, which has repeatedly pushed the Pentagon to restrain its annual budget submission.
"Year after year there were attempts to raise the ceiling, but year after year OMB has refused," said a former Pentagon official familiar with the debate. "The difference this year is the Army has said that if a raise in the ceiling isn't going to be considered, they won't even play the game."
Added the senior Army official: "If you're Rob Portman advising the president of the United States and duking it out with the [secretary of Defense], it's a pretty sporting little event."
Army officials said that Schoomaker's failure to file his 2008 Program Objective Memorandum was not intended as a rebuke to Rumsfeld, and that the Defense secretary had backed Schoomaker since the chief of staff raised the issue with him directly.
Still, some Army officials said Schoomaker expressed concern about recent White House budget moves, such as the decision in May to use $1.9 billion out of the most recent emergency spending bill for border security, including deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops at the Mexican border.
Army officials said $1.2 billion of that money came out of funds originally intended for Army war expenses.
"The president has got to take care of his border mission; he needs to find a source of funds so he can play a zero-sum game — he takes it out of defense," the senior Army official said. "But when he takes it out of defense, the lion's share is coming out of the outfit that's really in extremis in the current operating environment in the war."
Rumsfeld has not set a new deadline for the Army to submit its budget plan. The Army official said staffers thought they could submit a revised plan by November, in time for President Bush to unveil his 2008 budget early next year.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-military25sep25,0,279863,print.story?coll=la-ho...
Yes, rooster, we would still have 3,000 dead but last time I checked Iraq had nothing to do with it. Admit it; bin laden is fighting a smarter war than Bush. Damn friggin' shame!!
Release the NIE
From my "Capital Games" column at www.thenation.com....
Reality intrudes again. President Bush and his allies keep insisting that the invasion of Iraq was essential to winning the fight against anti-American Islamic jihadists. The government's top experts on terrorism and Islamic extremism disagree. As The New York Times reported on Sunday, a National Intelligence Estimate produced earlier this year noted that the Iraq war has fueled Islamic radicalism around the globe and has caused the terrorist threat to grow. In other words, Bush's invasion of Iraq has been counterproductive. Or put this way: the ugly war in Iraq that has claimed the lives of thousands of American troops and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians has placed the United States more at risk.
Times reporter Mark Mazzetti noted in his front-page article that he had spoken to "more than a dozen" U.S. government officials and outside experts who had either seen the NIE or who had participated in its creation. That's a lot of footwork. But he did not quote from the document itself, except to note that the NIE describes a radical Islamic movement of "self-generating" cells. (An NIE is the intelligence community's most definitive assessment of a major strategic issue and is supposed to represent the consensus view of the government's various intelligence agencies. This particular NIE is the first evaluation of global terrorism since the invasion of Iraq.)
The White House has claimed that the Times's account of the NIE did not represent the complete document. And Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte has declared--in response to the news of this NIE--that the Bush administration has scored significant success against the "global jihadist threat."
Well, is the threat now worse because of Bush's war in Iraq? Does the NIE say the war has made the jihadist threat more dangerous? The White House could resolve this very quickly by declassifying the NIE. If the report contains nuances or success stories not conveyed by the Times report (and those of other newspapers), releasing the report will clear things up.
The report is classified. But an NIE of this sort is probably more of an analytical document than a run-down of secret intelligence. And, certainly, the real secrets in the report--particularly references to sources and methods--can be redacted.
There is precedent for a partial release of an NIE. Months into the war in Iraq, when no WMDs had been found and the Bush administration was being accused of having misrepresented the prewar intelligence to hype the Iraq threat, the White House did declassify portions of the NIE on Iraq's WMDs. The point was to show that the intelligence community had informed the White House that Saddam Hussein was sitting on stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. But that flawed NIE also contained dissents and conflicting information indicating there were serious questions about the WMD case. And before the White House released these slices of the NIE, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney authorized Scooter Libby to disclose potions of the NIE to friendly reporters--most notably, Judith Miller of The New York Times. Libby, though, made sure not to share the dissents and contradicting material. Libby's highly selective leak to Miller did not end up helping the White House, and Bush's press operation subsequently made public whole chunks of the NIE. That, too, didn't get Bush out of the where-are-the-WMDs jam, for these excerpts showed there had been questions about key parts of the WMD case. (For more on all this, see the book I co-wrote with Michael Isikoff: Hubris: the Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.)
If the White House was able to release parts of that NIE on WMDs, it can do the same with the NIE on Iraq and terrorism. It may, though, not be motivated to do so.
http://www.davidcorn.com/
F6...but the reality is Bush won; they make it retroactive to wash their dirty hands and still turn a blind eye to the Geneva Convention. McCain has sold his soul...
This week’s tentative agreement between Bush and Congress may somewhat limit torture, but exempts U.S. officials from having to observe the Geneva Convention.
F6, and of course, McCain obliged his new friend, Mr. Bush. What a pathetic group
STEVE LOPEZ POINTS WEST
The IRS Works in Mysterious Ways
Steve Lopez
Points West
September 24, 2006
Pastor William Turner Jr. is a robust man with an unshakable set of beliefs, and he's never been shy about sharing them with the congregation of his New Revelation Missionary Baptist Church in Pasadena.
He has preached against same-sex marriage, stem cell research and abortion. And he has proudly boasted to President Bush about converting 80% of his congregation from Democrat to Republican.
"I salute and support you President Bush and will work untiringly for your reelection," Turner wrote to the president in February 2004, telling him he had done the same for former California Gov. Pete Wilson. Turner also wrote to fellow African American clergymen in support of Bush in 2004, saying that "any gay, homosexual, lesbian and/or immoral act is an abomination against God."
Roughly two miles away from Turner's church is All Saints Episcopal Church, which has a radically different political bent. The same year Turner took up Bush's cause, the Rev. George Regas delivered a guest sermon at All Saints involving a mock debate between Bush, John Kerry and Jesus. In the debate, Jesus said that Bush's preemptive strike on Iraq "has led to disaster."
So which of these two churches is under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service for taking sides in political contests?
The latter. Your precious tax dollars are paying for an inquisition of All Saints by the Internal Revenue Service, which has demanded church records and ordered rector Ed Bacon to testify at a hearing next month.
Look, All Saints' politics are pretty clear, and it's not hard to guess which presidential candidate Regas might have been more sympathetic to. But it's hard to believe that the IRS wouldn't have better things to do and bigger fish to fry. The tale of these two churches proves just how arbitrary, fickle and goofy the federal agency's actions can be.
"This is completely ridiculous, what the IRS is doing" to All Saints, says USC Law School Dean Ed McCaffery, a specialist in tax law. He said the IRS has every right to make sure nonprofits abide by the rules, but he doesn't believe the sermon in question comes anywhere near the legal definition of picking sides.
So is this investigation politically motivated?
The IRS makes it impossible to find out. Conservative and liberal churches have both been targeted, but the tax agency won't say which churches it's investigating or why.
The only reason we know All Saints is being investigated is that the church went public.
After a portion of the 2004 sermon was quoted in The Times, the IRS sent All Saints a letter describing Regas' words as a "searing indictment of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq." The letter also raised an issue with the reverend's calling tax cuts for the wealthy "inimical to the values of Jesus."
It's possible that All Saints' politics got the attention of someone up the ladder in the IRS, said McCaffery. He said he wouldn't be surprised if senior officials in the U.S. Treasury Department or the White House had given the green light to continue pressing the case against All Saints.
All Saints, which could not possibly have bought better publicity, pondered its next move last week while supporters rallied to its cause. On Thursday, Bacon announced to cheers that the church would defy the IRS.
He cited an obligation to Episcopal faith, which "calls us to speak to the issues of war and poverty, bigotry, torture and all forms of terrorism … always stopping short of supporting or opposing political parties or candidates for political office." It was imperative, he said, to "defend the freedom of pulpits in faith communities throughout the land."
Given the church's liberal politics, Bacon has an unlikely ally.
"I don't know why the IRS is singling them out," said Pastor Turner, who told me he was praying for his brothers at All Saints.
He said he thought the use of Jesus in a mock debate bordered on mockery, but he said he doesn't have a problem beyond that.
If the IRS is going after All Saints, I told Turner, shouldn't they be knocking down his door?
Turner said he's never promoted a candidate directly from the pulpit, and he thought the distinction put him in the clear. It's a notion that McCaffery later discounted outright, saying the law recognizes no such distinction between what is said from the pulpit versus the desk of the pastor.
I told Turner that I believe he ought to have a right to tell his flock whatever he wants to, and I feel the same way about Regas and Bacon. I'm just not sure I want to pay for them to have that privilege, but that's essentially what we're all doing given their tax-exempt status.
That's a fair question for debate, McCaffery said, but it presents a problem: If religious institutions didn't enjoy tax-exempt status, people would get no deduction for their charitable contributions. It could mean that some religious institutions would go under, and we'd lose all the social services they provide.
As an agnostic, I'm happy to have the debate. Especially since religious fervor cuts both ways and has done a world of harm as well as a world of good.
I'd also like to have someone explain why a church can support a ballot initiative but not a candidate, and why the federal government thinks it's OK for one minister to call homosexuality an abomination but unacceptable for another to ask if Jesus would be pro-war.
Turner argued that on social issues, he speaks not for any political cause, but for Jesus and the Bible.
Wasn't Regas doing the same?
McCaffery guessed that if the IRS dropped in on 10 churches, it would find nine that are politicking one way or another. What Congress ought to do, he said, is revisit the subject and clarify exactly what tax-exempt institutions can and can't say or do.
Until then, the IRS' finest should forget about the Prince of Peace sermon, roll up their sleeves and go after tax dodgers, deadbeats and cheats.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez24sep24,1,1651274,print.column
A Silence in the Afghan Mountains
The concealment of two detainee deaths paints a troubling picture of abuse by U.S. Special Forces units deployed to the country.
By Kevin Sack and Craig Pyes
Special to The Times
September 24, 2006
GARDEZ, Afghanistan — After completing their deployment to this remote firebase, the Green Berets of ODA 2021 left for home covered in glory.
The 10-member Special Forces team, part of the Alabama National Guard, returned to their families in the spring of 2003 with tales to tell of frenzied firefights and narrow escapes.
Its commander had nominated each of his men — as well as himself — for medals for valor. The team's performance was heralded as evidence that the Guard could play as equals with the regular Army in the war on terrorism.
But the team also had come home with secrets.
Apparently unknown to Army officials, two detainees had died in the team's custody in separate incidents during the unit's final month in eastern Afghanistan. Several other detainees allege that they were badly beaten or tortured while held at the base in Gardez.
One victim, an unarmed peasant, was shot to death while being held for questioning after a fierce firefight. The other, an 18-year-old Afghan army recruit, died after being interrogated at the firebase. Descriptions of his injuries were consistent with severe beatings and other abuse.
A member of the Special Forces team told The Times his unit held a meeting after the teen's death to coordinate their stories should an investigation arise.
"Everybody on the team had knowledge of it," the soldier said, insisting on anonymity. "You just don't talk about that stuff in the Special Forces community. What happens downrange stays downrange…. Nobody wants to get anybody in trouble. Just sit back, and hope it will go away."
What distinguishes these two fatalities from scores of other questionable deaths in U.S. custody is that they were successfully concealed — not just from the American public but from the military's chain of command and legal authorities.
The deaths came to light only after an investigation by The Times and a nonprofit educational organization, the Crimes of War Project, led the Army to open criminal inquiries on the incidents. Two years later, the cases remain under investigation and no charges have been filed.
The Times has since reviewed thousands of pages of internal military records showing that prisoner abuse by Special Forces units was more common in Afghanistan than previously acknowledged.
More than a year before the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal broke in Iraq, top officers worried that harsh treatment and excessive detentions could lead to criminal prosecutions.
In one November 2002 correspondence, a high-ranking Special Operations official said military police were detecting "an extremely high level of physical abuse" of detainees transferred from Special Forces field bases to a prison in Bagram.
An operations officer with the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, the command supervising Special Forces teams in Afghanistan, complained in a memo that prisoners were being held for so long without charges that it "may be implied as kidnapping, a federal crime."
Early in 2003, the chief Special Forces intelligence officer in Afghanistan warned in a note to the task force commander, Col. James G. "Greg" Champion, and his top aides: "As you are all aware, alleged assaults and kidnapping [have] been occurring for quite some time. Again, I want to emphasize, this is not isolated."
The same officer reported another improper detention less than two weeks later, notifying Champion's staff in a memo that reflected his exasperation. "Today is Day 5 of this hostage crisis," wrote the intelligence officer, Maj. David Davis. He said that such unauthorized detentions amounted to "criminal conduct in my book."
There also were early warnings from outside sources about prisoner mistreatment.
In a series of meetings that began in late 2002, officials with the International Committee of the Red Cross told top U.S. commanders in Afghanistan that they had fielded a rash of detainee abuse reports involving at least five Special Forces firebases, according to previously undisclosed military documents.
The Red Cross representatives protested that the bases had, in effect, become short-term detention centers, without adequately trained personnel or effective monitoring, said several U.S. officials with knowledge of the meetings.
Most of the bases singled out by the agency were under the control of National Guardsmen with the Alabama-based 20th Special Forces Group. The compound at Gardez, then occupied by ODA 2021, was portrayed as one of the worst. Detainees there alleged they were beaten, kicked, immersed in icy water and deprived of sleep for days at a time.
The Army declined to comment on the cases involving ODA 2021 or more generally on allegations of detainee abuse.
Special Forces firebases in Afghanistan — often the first stop in a detainee's journey to a holding facility and possibly on to the prison at Guantanamo Bay — operated largely beyond the reach of human rights monitors, journalists and, at times, the military chain of command.
Because of their clandestine nature, Special Forces operations have been a concern to some in Congress and the State Department who worry that human rights violations could be occurring under a cloak of secrecy.
The handling of detainees in Afghanistan became a murky area after President Bush declared early in the war, launched in October 2001, that the Geneva Convention would not be applied to Al Qaeda, and Taliban captives would not be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, detainees were to be treated "humanely," according to a February 2002 White House directive.
The internal military records show that although senior U.S. commanders in Afghanistan issued warnings and distributed rules consistent with the Army field manual and Geneva Convention, those procedures were routinely ignored.
"You have so much freedom and authority over there," one member of ODA 2021 said. "It kind of makes you feel like God when you're out there in cowboy and Indian country."
The documents also show that in 2003 the leadership of ODA 2021 was repeatedly criticized by its superiors. One 20th Group officer said the Gardez ODA (for Operational Detachment Alpha) was "the most troubled" field team among nearly a dozen in Afghanistan. Another senior officer expressed concern in a note that the team was gaining a reputation as "a rogue unit."
That a small Special Forces detachment could be tied to two detainee deaths and two apparent cover-ups in less than two weeks reflected an almost perfect confluence of circumstances. They included the personality of the team, the unaccountability of its leadership, the evolution of U.S. policy on detentions, the failure of United Nations officials to report abuses, and the complicity of Afghan officials.
The story of the team's deployment, like the five-year American campaign in Afghanistan itself, is a tale of high-stakes but often conflicting goals. For the men of ODA 2021, it would be a place and time in which questionable deaths and unquestionable daring were all part of the same mission.
Hotel Gardez
The shooting war was supposedly over when about 300 National Guardsmen of the 20th Group's 1st Battalion arrived in Afghanistan nine months after the December 2001 ouster of the Taliban regime. Nonetheless, it was a dangerous and chaotic time.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban were in flight, but not vanquished. The new government was trying to stand up, but it was still wobbly. And, much like today, the U.S. military struggled to balance the sometimes incompatible missions of combat and reconstruction.
As this latest rotation of U.S. Special Forces hit the ground, much of the countryside remained beyond the control of the newly installed government of interim President Hamid Karzai.
It would fall to Special Forces teams such as ODA 2021 to root out Al Qaeda and Taliban stragglers and unearth caches of weapons. In Paktia, the province that includes Gardez, the task was complicated by byzantine local politics.
Tribal warlords and bandits had skirmished for centuries over the inhospitable terrain along the porous border with Pakistan. They had only been emboldened by the power vacuums and shifting alliances created after the U.S.-led invasion.
As in centuries past, power and wealth in the region flowed to those who controlled the trade routes. In 2002, that meant controlling 17 longtime checkpoints along about 50 miles of dusty mountain road between the provincial capitals of Khowst and Gardez. Both of the detainee deaths linked to ODA 2021 came as a consequence of efforts to pacify that perilous route.
For the Americans, securing the checkpoints would help them detect militants' movements and ensure the free passage of troops and supplies. For the warlords, who were regularly accused of extorting cash or produce from truck drivers, the checkpoints afforded a means to pay and feed their militias.
The Green Berets were prepared to remove illegally operated checkpoints by force, but Pentagon planners regarded the problem as a local political dispute that should be handled by the Afghans. Besides, the U.S. military was under pressure to move from combat operations to a reconstruction phase aimed at winning hearts and minds.
The stakes could not have been higher for Col. Champion, commander of the 20th Special Forces Group. Not only was the Army counting on his National Guard troops to perform like active-duty professionals, but Champion also had been placed in charge of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force.
It was the first time since the Korean War that a National Guard unit held command over all U.S. Special Forces in wartime. If Champion succeeded, a general's star awaited his lapel.
The 20th, with about 1,600 members, is one of the Army's seven active Special Forces groups, and one of only two consisting of National Guard troops. ODA 2021 belonged to the 1st Battalion, based in Huntsville, Ala., and its 10 members came from five Southern states.
Some were longtime friends and neighbors, like Sgt. 1st Class Dan L. Smith, a world-class judo competitor who ran a gym outside Nashville, and Sgt. 1st Class Scott Barkalow, a locomotive engineer. Though many of the guardsmen had drilled together for years, most would be seeing their first combat.
The team leader, Capt. Michael M. May, 35, was a decorated Kentucky state trooper who had a cop's respect for procedure and the chain of command. A father of two, he was cautious and regarded the Special Forces as ambassadors who were helping the Afghans reclaim their country. Though some of his men were eager to round up bad guys, May focused on the team's broader mission of training Afghan troops.
"I'm going to be the one to write the letter to your kids if you get hurt or killed," he would tell his teammates.
Some clearly felt May was too passive, especially as conditions in the area deteriorated. They "wanted [us] to grab our guns and drive out the door and go do it," one team member recalled.
In Gardez, the dusty provincial capital nearly a mile and a half above sea level, the ODA settled into an adobe fort the size of a football field. They called it Hotel Gardez. It was surrounded by 25-foot mud walls and had an elevated latrine accessible only by ladder.
The region was endlessly brown, parched by drought. Being stationed there, one U.S. soldier said, was like "living in a gravel pit."
The fortress came under regular attack, most often by Taliban loyalists lobbing missiles from a pair of nearby hilltops. One day, a shell exploded in a cemetery behind the fort and the soldiers watched dogs fight over the bones of unearthed remains.
Army regulations at the base were relaxed. The guardsmen wore bushy beards and civilian clothing, a look intended to ease their approach to locals. They also adorned the grille of a red Toyota truck with a James Brown doll, thrilling local children when, at the press of a button, it sang out: "Whoa! I feel good!"
The Warlord
From their earliest days in Gardez, the members of ODA 2021 bristled at being kept on a short leash. They were particularly eager to mount an offensive against their primary nemesis, a renegade warlord named Pacha Khan Zadran.
In an assessment sent to headquarters shortly after its arrival, the team's leaders labeled the warlord "a thug" and asked permission "to take a much stronger stance" against him.
Pacha Khan was an imposing figure. With heavy eyebrows, a thick dyed mustache and trademark bandolier, he resembled a Pashtun Pancho Villa.
As the leader of the Zadran tribe, he commanded 300 to 600 armed men and, with American backing, had helped fight the Taliban. He also controlled various checkpoints along the Khowst road.
CIA and Special Forces operatives who dealt with Pacha Khan (or PKZ, as they called him), described him as brutish, mercurial and unstable. "I thought he was a windbag and a bully and just out for the money," said one U.S. intelligence analyst.
But Pacha Khan's stature grew when he became one of the signatories to the December 2001 Bonn agreement that formed the transitional Afghan government. Karzai rewarded his support by naming him governor of Paktia, then rescinded the decision after Afghan military commanders in Gardez refused to cede power to the warlord.
Pacha Khan responded by furiously bombarding Gardez in the spring of 2002. American forces were caught in the middle of the rocket attacks and the policy confusion over how to deal with the warlord.
CIA operatives and Special Forces tacticians hatched a number of plans to capture and imprison him, but senior officials in Washington always resisted. The havoc he wrought was exactly the kind of intra-Afghan dispute that the Defense Department insisted should be dealt with by the Karzai government.
Denied its preferred option, the CIA tried intimidation. As Pacha Khan was leaving a confrontational meeting at the Gardez firebase, intelligence officials arranged for three jets to buzz the compound in a display of American might. The low-level flyover sent the warlord diving beneath his car, toppling his turban, according to a witness.
Then U.S. officials embraced a plan by Gen. Atiqullah Lodin, an Afghan military commander, to pay Pacha Khan's checkpoint commanders to defect to the government. Lodin said in an interview that the CIA put up the cash. Military correspondence shows that the agency contributed at least $100,000.
One who defected for dollars was the commander of the strategic Sato Kandaw checkpoint, Ahmad Naseer, who told The Times the CIA gave him $3,000 and a pickup truck. He said an agent photographed him accepting the payoff.
By November, however, ODA 2021 had begun receiving reports that the checkpoint shakedowns had resumed.
The team's patience was already wearing thin when, on the morning of Nov. 27, 2002, a unit convoy was ambushed while passing through a steep draw on the Khowst road. The soldiers had just picked up the 1st Battalion commander, Lt. Col. Steven W. Duff, who was headed to Gardez for a Thanksgiving visit despite warnings about security along the road.
"We told him if he wants to come see us, take a helicopter — don't come down the Khowst road," a team member recalled. But Duff insisted. As his red Toyota sped through the kill zone, a sniper round slammed through Duff's left thigh.
Smith and Sgt. 1st Class Jason Howard ran off the snipers, and Duff was evacuated by helicopter. Indebted to the team, he recommended Smith and Howard, the team's senior medic, for the Bronze Star.
The team took it personally that its battalion commander had been wounded while in its care. After Pacha Khan quickly emerged as the prime suspect, the ODA redoubled its efforts to have him listed as a high-value target.
But the warlord was considered "a pseudo political figure" — untouchable unless they could tie him to the Taliban or Al Qaeda, according to an official of the Special Operations task force. If they could, he wrote, "the ballgame changes completely."
He concluded: "We do not want to get in the middle of Afghan politics, even if he is a shithead who deserves to spend a decade or two at Gitmo."
'Smear Campaign'
Five days after Duff was shot, a commando task force made an unexpected visit to the Gardez firebase in pursuit of a top-tier target believed to be in the area.
The complex mission called for ODA 2021 to join the operation, but no one had bothered to inform the team. The team's commander, Capt. May, refused to go along because of inadequate planning, according to several 20th Group officials and documents reviewed by The Times.
May's refusal infuriated the Delta Force officer in charge of the commando task force, the officials said. A month later, on his way out of the country, the officer delivered a four-page memo to Special Operations officials, in effect accusing May of cowardice and dereliction of duty.
At Champion's request, Duff looked into the accusations. Though he ultimately dismissed them as unfounded and "a smear campaign," he learned that many on May's team considered him a tentative leader, more focused on bringing his men home alive than on attacking the enemy. Duff reassigned May to the battalion's operations center in neighboring Uzbekistan.
Though Duff insisted that the transfer was unrelated to the criticism, May saw the reassignment as "a career-ending thing," said one 20th Group colleague. "Mike was stressed about this," the colleague said. He "was devastated."
In an interview, Duff said he had intended to transfer May anyway to season him for promotion. May, who referred requests for an interview to the 20th Group public affairs office, was in fact promoted to major and given a company command after returning to the U.S.
May's removal heartened those on the team who wanted to conduct more "posse operations" in the manner of the Army's Delta Force and the Navy's SEALs.
"This was an aggressive, door-kicking bunch," said one 20th Group official, "and Mike May was the control rod."
Bamian Mutiny
More than 100 miles to the northwest, in Bamian, another Green Beret team was having its own leadership problems. For many in ODA 2015, Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth C. Waller, their team commander, was too hungry for a fight and had a habit of planning risky missions without their input.
Waller was not a weekend warrior but a full-time National Guardsman. He worked at 20th Group headquarters in Birmingham and was perceived by many to be Col. Champion's "golden child." He declined to be interviewed for this article.
Late in November 2002, Waller's team discovered a large cache of weapons in the nearby Kahmard Valley. They linked it to a warlord suspected of supporting Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
Waller carried the news directly to Champion's command, bypassing his 1st Battalion superiors. He argued for a full assault on the area, peppering his entreaties with reminders of 9/11 and imploring commanders to "think war."
His end runs, and his flamboyant prose, incensed Waller's superiors at headquarters. They were so annoyed by his tendency to act on his own that they marked his periodic sightings on a wall map, calling the exercise "Where's Waller?"
The team leader had trouble within his own ranks as well. The Bamian unit's senior noncommissioned officer, Master Sgt. Pasquale "Jim" Russo, sent a defiant note to battalion officials in December openly challenging Waller's proposal to raid an area that was thick with enemy fighters. "I can't think of many more principles of combat that we have not violated," Russo said of the plan.
The operation was temporarily scrubbed, redesigned and its planning assigned to a different team.
Not long after Russo's complaint, a sizable contingent of the 2015 team let battalion leaders know they preferred not to serve under Waller, several members said. It was an almost unthinkable act of mutiny.
After Maj. Tony Wheeler, a top 1st Battalion official, arrived in Bamian in early January to head the provincial reconstruction team there, he reported to Duff that the trust between Waller and his men had deteriorated beyond repair. "The team seems to see Ken as a loose canon [sic] who might get them killed for no reason," he wrote.
Duff relieved Waller of his command in Bamian and ordered him to Gardez as Capt. May's replacement. Champion signed off on the transfer. However, Duff acknowledged making the decision over the warnings of his own staff. His aides cautioned that Waller would be even less controllable in Gardez and that inserting him into the conflict with Pacha Khan might make things combustible.
"It was like throwing a match into gasoline," one Special Forces official said.
Chaotic Mission
Back in Gardez, ODA 2021 was between commanders on the night of Feb. 6, 2003, when the team set out on a "snatch mission." The plan was to swoop into the nearby village of Neknam and seize two men suspected of having ties to the Taliban.
The first was taken without incident. But before team members could grab the second, they came under intense fire that left two soldiers pinned against a wall. The team responded with small arms and hand grenades.
Because the leaderless team had failed to file proper operational plans, headquarters had no idea who was in command on the ground. To those monitoring radio communications from the scene, it appeared that U.S. forces might be attacking one another in the dark. That also made it unsafe to call in airstrikes to help end the battle.
Both suspects were finally captured, but almost immediately the team was blistered with high-level criticism.
"As you can imagine, this makes everyone in this unit look like amateurs and incompetent as well," Lt. Col. Robert E. Biller, a top Special Operations task force official, wrote to 20th Group counterparts. Biller characterized the chaotic mission as a "goatscrew."
Col. Champion promptly confined the team to its base. Then he and his staff set out to control the damage. Champion personally briefed Lt. Gen. Dan McNeill, commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan. Champion's aides later reported he had succeeded in stressing the intelligence value of the captured detainees rather than the team's blunders.
"Things have died down," Maj. Jeff Pounding, a Special Operations task force official, wrote to subordinates in the 1st Battalion the following day. "We turned the emphasis of operation of a 'rogue team' to a 'time-sensitive PUC operation.' " PUC, or "person under U.S. control," was shorthand for detainee.
But the missteps continued. Two days after the raid, the team in Gardez transferred two detainees to the Bagram Collection Point, a U.S. holding facility. The detainees arrived "bagged," their mouths taped and hoods secured around their necks, according to military documents.
"As you well know," Pounding wrote to battalion officials, "this is a significant violation of the PUC handling procedures. Bagram detention facility may be doing an investigation."
Red Cross Warnings
There should have been little confusion over detainee policy among members of the 20th Special Forces Group. Champion had distributed the Army's guidelines when the 20th deployed to Afghanistan, and they had been reissued when reports of abuse first made their way to headquarters.
Only detainees found to meet Pentagon criteria for prolonged imprisonment, such as those with clear ties to Al Qaeda or the Taliban, were to be transferred to Bagram. Fearing that innocents might wind up at Guantanamo, Gen. McNeill had stressed to subordinates that he wanted terrorists, not truck drivers and farmers, said a civilian military advisor.
But it wasn't always easy for soldiers to tell the difference. Given the constant threat of ambush, their instinct often was to detain first and ask questions later. The Pentagon criteria provided plenty of latitude, allowing the detention of any suspects "who pose a threat" or "who may have intelligence value."
There was supposed to be a 96-hour limit on battlefield detentions. Sometimes prisoner transfers to Bagram were delayed because helicopters weren't available. But at other times, one 20th Group official said, Special Forces teams extended their prisoners' stays in hopes of extracting better intelligence.
State Department officials in Afghanistan said the teams seemed not to care that their door-kicking roundups and prolonged detentions might stoke local resentment even as the Army was trying to build bridges.
"They felt … there was carte blanche to carry out actions and there would be little repercussion if they made tactical mistakes," said a State Department official who asked not to be named.
By the end of 2002, the Red Cross had relayed early complaints of prisoner mistreatment to top U.S. military officials in Afghanistan. On Jan. 10, 2003, officials of the organization met with Gen. McNeill's staff, describing the 20th Group's firebases as some of the worst offenders.
Two weeks after the Red Cross meeting in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld convened a working group in Washington to recommend whether the list of approved anti-terrorism interrogation methods should be expanded. McNeill asked his various intelligence-gathering units to assess the techniques that were in use in Afghanistan.
Despite the Red Cross allegations, the 1st Battalion's chief intelligence officer reported back that there were no problems. "I have not witnessed any abuse or maltreatment of PUCs," Capt. Steven D. Perry wrote. "When they detain a person, I have faith that it is for a very good reason."
On Jan. 24, 2003, McNeill's command reported on its interrogation techniques in a memo to the Pentagon. The list conformed to the Army field manual's approved battlefield methods, but the memo also requested approval of "more aggressive, creative and flexible techniques."
The wish list included food deprivation for up to 24 hours, sensory overload through loud music and extreme temperature changes and the use of muzzled dogs to create "controlled fear." Some of the requested procedures might need to be assessed for compliance with Pentagon rules for humane treatment, the memo acknowledged.
However, according to the Red Cross, many of the more coercive techniques were already being used at some of the firebases.
Blood and Grudge
ODA 2021's new commander took charge in Gardez on Feb. 7 as recriminations were still flying from the "time-sensitive PUC operation" in Neknam. For a team chafing at the second-guessing of its missions, Waller's arrival was a welcome relief.
"He wanted to be aggressive," said one team member. "We knew he had problems with his other team, but he fit right in with us."
Another team member said Waller quickly won respect. "He seemed very competent and certainly wasn't afraid in combat," he said. In mid-February, only 12 days after he had taken command, Waller and his team were returning from patrol along a road blanketed with 5 inches of snow. The red Toyota — the same truck Duff had been shot in — rumbled along in the middle of a five-vehicle convoy.
Staff Sgt. Mark "Marco" Deliz, a team engineer from Oneonta, Ala., tried to steer precisely through the tread marks carved by the two vehicles ahead. But his front right tire strayed a few inches and hit a land mine.
The explosion blew the truck 6 feet into the air, military reports said. Watching in horror from the vehicle behind, Waller could not imagine that anyone had survived.
With blood streaming down his face, Deliz stumbled out the driver's door, brushing the remains of a foot from his lap. It belonged to his teammate and passenger, Barkalow, the 40-year old intelligence sergeant from Burns, Tenn.
Deliz determined that Barkalow was still alive and gestured for someone to radio for a helicopter. Staff Sgt. Philip S. Abdow, a junior medic who had joined the team six weeks earlier, wrapped what remained of Barkalow's right leg.
After the unnerving incident, the medic accompanied Barkalow on his helicopter evacuation. Abdow reportedly acted so frantically during the flight, barking orders and cursing, that the copter crew later complained to Special Operations officials.
He was recalled to battalion headquarters for evaluation before being cleared to return to the field, according to a 20th Group officer familiar with the incident. Abdow did not respond to requests for an interview.
By several accounts, the attack had a profoundly sobering effect on the team. Before the explosion, members had merely been frustrated by political constraints on their activities. Now they shared Barkalow's loss — and some nursed an abiding grudge.
"You get mad when you see your buddies blown up," one team member said. "You stay pissed off about it."
kevin.sack@latimes.com | craig.pyes@latimes.com
*
Next: Detained, then dead.
--
About this series
"Firebase Gardez" examines the deployment to Afghanistan of a decorated Alabama National Guard unit. It is the result of a yearlong investigation in the U.S. and Afghanistan by Times staff writer Kevin Sack and freelance investigative journalist Craig Pyes. It was written by Sack.
Pyes, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and frequent contributor to the newspaper, reported from Afghanistan jointly for The Times and the Crimes of War Project, a Washington-based nonprofit that describes itself as "a collaboration of journalists, lawyers and scholars dedicated to raising public awareness of the laws of war." In 2004, the group provided The Times with the first evidence of an unreported Afghan death in U.S. custody and joined with the newspaper to investigate further. That led to a military inquiry by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command that continues today.
The Times reviewed thousands of pages of internal military documents to reconstruct the period when a 10-member Special Forces combat team called ODA 2021 (for Operational Detachment Alpha) was assigned to the Gardez firebase.
Every member of the team was contacted. Most declined to be interviewed or referred reporters to public affairs officers. The Army and all of its subordinate commands — the U.S. Central Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, Army Special Forces Command, 20th Special Forces Group and the Alabama National Guard — declined to comment.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-torture24sep24,0,7826852,print.story?coll=la-ho...
Rooster: I think your comment was we should 'assault' Chavez for his devil comment...but, of course, being the hypocrite you are...
[Note: MyDime bolds!!]
Falwell Says Faithful Fear Clinton More Than Devil
The evangelical leader tells a conference that the New York senator will mobilize his base like no one else if she runs for president.
By Peter Wallsten
Times Staff Writer
September 24, 2006
WASHINGTON — Nothing will motivate conservative evangelical Christians to vote Republican in the 2008 presidential election more than a Democratic nominee named Hillary Rodham Clinton — not even a run by the devil himself.
That was the sentiment expressed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the longtime evangelical icon and founder of the once-powerful Moral Majority, during private remarks Friday to church pastors and activists as part of the Values Voter Summit hosted this weekend by the country's leading Christian conservatives.
A recording of Falwell's comments was obtained by The Times, and his remarks were confirmed by eyewitnesses.
"I certainly hope that Hillary is the candidate," Falwell said, according to the recording. "She has $300 million so far. But I hope she's the candidate. Because nothing will energize my [constituency] like Hillary Clinton."
Cheers and laughter filled the room as Falwell continued: "If Lucifer ran, he wouldn't."
At that moment in the recording, Falwell's voice is drowned out by hoots of approval. But two in attendance, including a Falwell staff member, confirmed that Falwell said that even Lucifer, the fallen angel synonymous with Satan in Christian theology, would not mobilize his followers as much as the New York senator and former first lady would.
One critic who has been observing the conference said Saturday that Falwell's words offered a rare glimpse into how religious conservative leaders were planning to inflame opposition to the Democrats with below-the-radar messages that are often more scorching than the ones showing up in public.
"He was calling Hillary Clinton a demonic figure and openly arguing that God is a Republican," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "It's hard to know whether people thought he was joking or serious, but once you start using religious imagery and invoking a politician in this way, it's not funny. A lot of people who listen to him do think that she's a dark force of evil in America."
Such controversy is nothing new for Falwell, who once described Islam's prophet Muhammad as a terrorist and said that abortion providers, feminists, gays and lesbians were to blame for the 9/11 attacks.
An aide to Falwell said Saturday that the Lucifer reference was an "off the cuff" comment and that Falwell "had no intentions of demonizing her."
Falwell's remarks about Clinton were part of a 40-minute address at a private breakfast that included assurances that God would preserve a Republican majority in Congress and that moderates such as former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani could not be allowed to win the GOP presidential nomination.
Falwell's estimation of Clinton's campaign war chest appeared to be hyperbole; she has raised about $47 million for her Senate account this cycle, according the Center for Responsive Politics. But she has raised millions more for other candidates, and many strategists believe that if she decides to run, Clinton will amass record-level contributions.
Falwell wasn't the only public figure to invoke Satan in reference to a political adversary last week. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez referred to President Bush as the devil before the United Nations General Assembly, speaking the day after Bush had stood at the same rostrum.
About two hours after Falwell's speech at the Values Voter Summit, James Dobson, founder of the influential group Focus on the Family, spoke publicly at the same conference. Dobson denounced what he said was a limp response by both political parties to Chavez's comment. Dobson, whose group was a sponsor of the weekend gathering, told the nearly 2,000 activists crammed into a hotel ballroom near downtown Washington that Chavez had "attacked our president viciously."
"And there has hardly been a statement of defense out of members of Congress about that," Dobson said. "There's been [only] a few pantywaist comments."
Neither Falwell nor Dobson responded to interview requests.
One conference official, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, said Saturday that he believed Falwell intended his comment to be a "humorous remark."
Asked if he was comfortable with the connotation, Perkins deferred questions to Falwell.
"I can only be responsible for what I say," Perkins said, adding that he disagreed with Falwell that a Clinton candidacy would be good for conservatives. "I think it would be a little too risky. Anything could happen, and that's just one step closer to her actually being elected."
Falwell's remarks about Clinton were not the only indication this weekend that the evangelical movement was focused on the senator from New York.
One meeting on the agenda featured three analysts from the conservative Heritage Foundation for a discussion of health policy titled "The Future of Health Care: HillaryCare or Values-Driven Health Care?" The title was referring to Clinton's 1993 efforts to draft a national health plan that conservatives continue to deride as a form of big-government socialism.
But Falwell's speech captured the spirit of much of the weekend, which was devoted to revving up the GOP base for November and beyond, and included appearances from several prospective Republican presidential candidates — Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Sens. George Allen of Virginia and Sam Brownback of Kansas.
At the breakfast, Falwell made it clear that he thought the 2008 nominee must be a true conservative.
"It can't be a Giuliani and it cannot be a [New York Gov. George E.] Pataki," he said. "It cannot be a pro-choice. It cannot be a person on the wrong side of the social issues. We've got to have somebody worth fighting for because we will be energized if Hillary is the standard-bearer."
Falwell predicted that this year's midterm elections would go in the GOP's favor, despite polls showing Democrats in position to make gains.
"I think we're going to keep the House and the Senate," he said. "I think the Lord will take care of that."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-falwell24sep24,0,3070284,print.story?coll=la-ho...
yeah, you're right rooster, Bush is the biggest douche in history!!!
If rooster is anything, it is consistently ignorant.
Excellent piece...this needs to be read.
Full Transcript:
And lastly tonight a Special Comment on why we are here. Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space.
And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.
And all the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and — as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul — two more in the Towers.
And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.
I belabor this to emphasize that, for me… this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.
And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft", or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here — is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante — and at worst, an idiot — whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.
However. Of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast — of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds… none of us could have predicted… this.
Five years later this space… is still empty.
Five years later there is no Memorial to the dead.
Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.
Five years later this country’s wound is still open.
Five years… later this country’s mass grave is still unmarked.
Five years later… this is still… just a background for a photo-op.
It is beyond shameful.
—
At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial — barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field, Mr. Lincoln said "we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."
Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.
Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We can nto dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground." So we won’t.
Instead they bicker and buck-pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they’re doing — instead of doing any job at all.
Five years later, Mr. Bush… we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir — on these 16 empty acres, the terrorists… are clearly, still winning.
And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.
—
And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation.
There is, its symbolism — of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.
The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it… was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.
Those who did not belong to his party — tabled that.
Those who doubted the mechanics of his election — ignored that.
Those who wondered of his qualifications — forgot that.
History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government, by its critics.
It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation’s wounds, but to take political advantage.
Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.
The President — and those around him — did that.
They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused; as appeasers; as those who, in the Vice President’s words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."
They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken… a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated Al-Qaeda as much as we did.
The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had ’something to do’ with 9/11, is "lying by implication."
The impolite phrase, is "impeachable offense."
Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space… and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.
Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.
Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible — for anything — in his own administration.
Yet what is happening this very night?
A mini-series, created, influenced — possibly financed by — the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.
The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.
How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death… after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections… how dare you or those around you… ever "spin" 9/11.
—
Just as the terrorists have succeeded — are still succeeding — as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero…
So too have they succeeded, and are still succeeding — as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.
This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney’s continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.
And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."
In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm.
Suddenly his car — and only his car — starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man’s lights go on.
As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced.
An "alien" is shot — but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help.
The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials areseen, manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there’s no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves."
And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight.
"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices - to be found only in the minds of men.
"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn."
—
When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…
When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:
Who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President.
You have.
May this country forgive you.
I knew I could count on you to not think for yourself!!
There's a hard, cold reality out there, ladies and gentlemen, that we must face: America is at war with Islamofascism, and American liberals are at war with America." More Rush Quotes
Hoahao...you gotta be kidding...
“We are losing our manufacturing base,” said Abercrombie. “We are losing our ability to farm, while rich, elite people in this country that support some of these environmental Taliban organizations are out there with the propaganda that is trying to say that some of us that are trying to get to energy independence are the ones that are causing the difficulty.
We are losing our manufacturing because the 'rich, elite people in this country' choose to export these jobs out of this country.
I'm sure it is Bush's leadership in Iraq and the Middle East that is providing the bounce in his 'approval' ratings.
However, the attempt by the Democrats to force a cut-and-run strategy on the mission in Iraq appears to have reminded people of the stakes involved in the war, and the alternatives to Bush and the GOP in terms of leadership.
Admit it, Bush is pathetic, the worst President this country has ever had!! 'Significant political momentum'??? You must be joking...
It looks like Bush has significant political momentum -- just in time for the midterms -- and the Democrats have handed it to him ... again.
Rooster, it is reassuring to know you still kneel at the alter of that drug-induced Rush who has a brain the size of a bb rolling around in a box car.
This article is so loaded with crap I don't know where to begin but lets start with 'The Bush Doctrine'. What a friggin' joke....what the hell is the Bush Doctrine?? Is that some sort of coherent plan?? Hell no, it was an excuse to manipulate and doctor (or is that doctrine?)intelligence to go into Iraq and somehow that would make the world right. Now look what we got and this blowhard is talking about going into Iran and Syria. Yea, right.....
Bush has no plan and never did. They had some ideas (invade Iraq with 'shock and awe')but not one of them have played out even close to what they thought and they had no backup plan whatsoever other than bullshit spin. In Bush's State of the Union in Jan. '02 he identified the Axis of Evil: Iraq, Iran and N. Korea. Good job, Bush; Iraq is a total mess, Iran has gained in strength while they pursue a nuclear device and N. Korea fired a bunch of missles to say 'Screw you, what's you gonna do?'
Rooster, I really believe (hope) you post Rush's crap cause you want to rattle this thread, but this administration and those who goose step along (Rush, Sannitized, Colter, et al) haven't gotten one thing right. So you go ahead and buy into Bush's fly-paper strategy (we'll fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here) but for every so-called terrorist killed he as created 5 more and in due time they will again set their sites on our shores....and Bush hasn't done squat to prepare our country for that day other than a bunch of orange alerts leading up to his so-called re-election, which amazingly ceased once the election was over.
You know, Rooster, I remember when you're buddy Zit was here to talk his crap about how great Bush is...but he finally got enough sense to disappear rather than continue to look the fool. Keep up the good work, Rooster!!
Bush: Worse Than Nixon
The writer was on Richard Nixon's "enemies list," but Bush's power grab has him really worried.
By Morton H. Halperin
MORTON H. HALPERIN served in the administrations of presidents Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. He is a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress and the director of U.S. Advocacy for the Open Soci
July 16, 2006
THE BUSH administration's warrantless wiretapping program may have shocked and surprised many Americans when it was revealed in December, but to me, it provoked a case of deja vu.
The Nixon administration bugged my home phone — without a warrant — beginning in 1973, when I was on the staff of the National Security Council, and kept the wiretap on for 21 months. Why? My boss, national security advisor Henry Kissinger, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed that I might have leaked some information to the New York Times. When I left the government a few months later and went to work on Edmund Muskie's presidential campaign (and began actively working to end the war in Vietnam), the FBI continued to listen in and made periodic reports on everything it heard to President Nixon and his closest associates in the White House.
Recent reports that the Bush administration is monitoring political opponents who belong to antiwar groups also sounded familiar to me. I was, after all, No. 8 on Nixon's "enemies list" — a curious compilation of 20 people about whom the White House was unhappy because they had disagreed in some way with the administration.
The list, compiled by presidential aide Charles Colson, included union leaders, journalists, Democratic fundraisers and me, among others, and was part of a plan to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies," as presidential counsel John Dean explained it in a 1971 memo. I always suspected that I made the list because of my active opposition to the war, though no one ever said for sure (and I never understood what led Colson to write next to my name the provocative words, "a scandal would be helpful here").
As I watch the Bush administration these days, it's hard not to notice the clear similarities between then and now. Both the Nixon and Bush presidencies rely heavily on the use of national security as a pretext for the usurpation of unprecedented executive power. Now, just as in Nixon's day, a president mired in an increasingly unpopular war is taking extreme steps, including warrantless surveillance, that many people believe threaten American civil liberties and violate the Constitution. Both administrations shroud their actions in secrecy and attack the media for publishing what they learn about those activities.
But there also are important differences, and at first blush, it is hard to say which administration's policies are worse. Much of what the Nixon administration did was clearly illegal and in violation of the Constitution. Nixon and his colleagues seemed to understand that and worked hard to keep their activities secret. On the occasions when their actions became public, administration officials tried to blame others for them.
These actions were not limited to its warrantless wiretap program and the investigation of political opponents by the IRS and other agencies. They also included, among other things, the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist (to find evidence discrediting Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times) and the effort to have the CIA persuade the FBI to call off the investigation of the Watergate burglary (by asserting that it threatened national security).
Although the Nixon administration did argue (like the Bush administration) that virtually anything the president did to promote national security was lawful, it never presented an argument to justify these particular transgressions.
By contrast, as far as we know, the Bush administration has not engaged in any such inherently illegal activities. Nor has it, to our knowledge, specifically targeted its political opponents (aside from the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame).
But even though Nixon's specific actions might have been more obviously illegal and more "corrupt" (in the sense that they were designed to advance his own career over his rivals), President Bush's claim of nearly limitless power — including the ability to engage in a range of activities that pose a fundamental threat to the constitutional order and to our civil liberties — overshadows all comparisons.
Among the many such activities are the seizure of U.S. citizens and their indefinite detention without charge or access to lawyers; warrantless wiretaps of citizens in violation of procedures mandated by Congress; and the seizing of individuals in foreign countries and their movement to third countries, where they have been subjected to torture in violation of U.S. laws and treaty obligations.
When these activities have leaked out, the president has not sought to deny them but has publicly defended them (and attacked the press for printing the information). The administration has vigorously opposed all efforts to have the courts review its actions, and when the Supreme Court has overruled the president, as it has several times now, the administration has given the court holdings the narrowest possible interpretation.
Congress has been treated with equal disdain. When the Senate voted overwhelmingly to prohibit torture and cruel and degrading treatment by all agencies, including the CIA, Vice President Dick Cheney warned lawmakers that they were overstepping their bounds and threatening national security. When Congress persisted and attached the language to a defense appropriations bill, the president signed the law with an accompanying statement declaring his right to disobey the anti-torture provisions.
The administration has repeatedly failed to inform Congress or its committees of what it was doing, or has told only a few selected members in a truncated way, preventing real oversight. Even leading Republicans, such as Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have voiced strong concerns.
During the Nixon years, the laws governing what the president could do and under what circumstances he needed to inform Congress were murky. There were no intelligence committees in Congress, and there was no Intelligence Oversight Act. There was no legislated prohibition on national security surveillance.
In response to Watergate and the related scandals of the Nixon years, however, Congress constructed a careful set of prohibitions, guidelines and requirements for congressional reporting.
Bush's systematic and defiant violation of these rules, as well as of the mandates of the Constitution and international law, pose a challenge to our constitutional order and civil liberties that, in the end, constitutes a far greater threat than the lawlessness of Richard Nixon.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-halperin16jul16,1,709864,print.story
Jimlur, I get a heckuva lot more answers from teecee than ed ferrari.
Spree, TeeCee has never had any answers other than insults to investors so why would you go there?
Thanks, Sluggo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
F6, very cool. Thanks for the sites!!!!!
The Little Tramp's Classic Labor Lesson
Venezuela's socialist government is using a 1936 Chaplin film to educate workers about their rights. Employers are not applauding.
By Chris Kraul
Times Staff Writer
July 9, 2006
LOS TEQUES, Venezuela — In his classic 1936 film, "Modern Times," Charlie Chaplin has to work so fast tightening bolts in a steel factory that he finally goes crazy. In a memorable scene that has become a metaphor for labor exploitation, the Little Tramp is run through the factory's enormous gears.
For President Hugo Chavez's socialist government, the film is more than just entertainment: It's become a teaching tool. Since January, in a bid to expose the evils of "savage capitalism," the Labor Ministry has shown the Chaplin film to thousands of workers in places such as this rundown industrial suburb of Caracas.
When the screenings at factories or meeting halls end, Labor Ministry officials then take their cue, and use Chaplin's plight to spell out worker rights under occupational safety laws passed last year and now being applied. They are part of Chavez's sweeping reform agenda that he calls Socialism for the 21st Century.
Chaplin wanted his Depression-era movie to make a point, that "once inside the factory, workers had no meaningful rights," said Los Angeles-based film historian and Chaplin authority Richard Schickel. "It was very relevant in the moment it was released, a time of social unrest and the emerging U.S. labor movement."
Seventy years later, Chaplin's fable is all too relevant in Venezuela, said several factory workers who saw the film recently.
"The owners still value their machines more than their workers," said Roberto Maldonado, a 29-year-old minimum-wage worker at the Pollo Premium poultry plant, which processes 75,000 chickens a day. "Charlie Chaplin ends up crazy, and I feel that way too sometimes. When I go home, I'm too tired to pay attention to my wife or family."
Freddy Colmenari, a 35-year-old worker at a pasta factory here, said that just as Chaplin's bosses do in the film, his supervisors frequently speed up the assembly line to nerve-racking levels and zealously monitor workers' trips to the bathroom. "There is always pressure and stress," he said.
But the business community here is hardly applauding the film. In a formal complaint to Chavez last month, the four main employer associations in Venezuela said that showing a movie depicting the boss as a "vulgar exploiter of workers" was designed to "generate hate and resentment in the labor sector" and "demonize the employer."
An official at the Venezuelan Confederation of Industries, one of the four signatories, said that the new workplace laws were another example of Chavez punishing private industry, a process the groups say has been unrelenting since a failed 2002 coup led by businessman Pedro Carmona.
While insisting they don't oppose workplace safety improvements, business groups here say that they weren't consulted before the new laws were drafted and that now workers and their delegates have too much power to intervene in factory operations.
Jhonny Picone, a top Labor Ministry official, said employees needed all the power they could get. He noted that Venezuelan workers were more likely to describe their job as "a curse from God than as something positive."
The grim and dehumanizing factory conditions depicted in the Chaplin film are still the "norm," he said — more than 1,500 workers die and thousands are injured annually in industrial accidents.
Largely at Picone's insistence, the film has been shown 1,000 times in 14 states and has been effective in educating workers who usually have no clue about their health and safety rights. Labor Ministry officials say it's because the most recent workplace regulations, passed in 1986, were unobserved, a "dead letter."
Workers are told they have a right to demand safety and hygiene precautions, and, through an employee-elected delegate that represents each factory, even to shut down production if owners don't comply. Egregious and repeated safety violations can result in the government taking over a plant.
"With Charlie Chaplin, it's easier to catch the attention of workers who are often too tired or don't trust the government in the first place," said Picone, a doctor named by Chavez to head a new Labor Ministry agency that he compared to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The workplace laws are a facet of Chavez's often-mentioned goal of installing a new socialist economic model to replace the globalized free-market version that the president says has failed.
The "popular economy" model includes a return to state-controlled central planning that reminds many of the Soviet era. Bankrolled by the country's oil wealth, Chavez has financed a number of worker-owned cooperatives that run factories and farms that the government has built or taken over.
"It's by no means dominant yet. It's gradually being built up by a process of trial and error," said a Chavez administration official who asked not to be named. "But in the longer term, the popular economy model will be dominant."
But one industrial leader who asked not to be identified said that the business climate was abysmal, and that factory production, industrial jobs and private investment had plummeted since Chavez took power in 1999.
"How much of this policy is revolution and how much is castigation, I don't know," he said.
Critics say Chavez is merely recycling the failed protectionist economic policies that many South American nations tried to impose after World War II to keep out foreign capital and competition. The policies were largely jettisoned in the 1980s as countries began embracing free markets and foreign investment.
Business interests also cite Chavez's decision to pull Venezuela out of the Andean Community as another example of his bias against the private sector. The regional trade group, known as CAN, was too U.S.-dominated, the president said. But one member, Colombia, is Venezuela's second-largest trading partner, and businesspeople here are worried that they will lose tens of millions of dollars in trade as a result.
On Tuesday, Venezuela formally joined the Mercosur trade bloc, whose members include Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Chavez told delegates in Caracas, Venezuela's capital, that he made the switch to avoid being "devoured by imperialist strategies, as happened with CAN."
But Venezuelan producers will have a tougher time competing in the Mercosur arena, said Jose Luis Betancourt, president of Fedecamaras, Venezuela's largest business chamber.
He criticized the new workplace measures. "The law will only generate less efficiency, less [industrial] capacity and make the Venezuelan economy more dependent on high oil prices, which won't last all our lives."
Chavez's adversaries in the business sector scoff at the Chaplin film screenings as an example of the president's simplistic, outdated and decidedly business-unfriendly economic policies.
But for poultry plant worker Maldonado, Charlie Chaplin has made a difference at work.
Inspired by the film and the talk from Labor Ministry officials, he demanded gloves and soap from his employer — and got them. But the assembly line still goes too fast, he said.
Metalworker Miguel Moreno also has seen some improvement. "We have more power because we know more," he said. "They've given me earplugs for the noise, at least."
Film historian Schickel said, "Chaplin would just love that his film is still relevant to modern social conditions, that a modern-day leftist politician in Latin America would find this film to be a useful tool."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-chaplin9jul09,0,6808160,print.story?coll=la-home...