tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88086182024-03-23T11:16:15.260-07:00ForwardAmerica"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Orwell--
The US is probably moving toward becoming a heavily controlled Rightist state. This blog is an effort to document how that happened.Sherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.comBlogger190125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-21507167179511484812008-05-28T07:11:00.000-07:002008-05-28T07:20:03.363-07:00Abusing DetaineesThe American public learned in April 2004 that some detainees were being abused in Iraq by U.S. military police who were encouraged to do so by Military Intelligence and by civilian employees of private intelligence contractors, of which there were sixty in Iraq. Little more would come to light about the private contractors, but eventually a substantial body of evidence developed suggesting the use of torture in the war on terror was by no means confined to isolated occurrences. As late as May 2006, the director of human rights for Amnesty International reported that “this increasing outsourcing of war has created a virtual rules-free zone for private military companies” and that the “awarding, overseeing, and enforcing of contracts is shrouded in secrecy....” She noted, “Contractors have been linked to shootings of civilians and to sexual abuse and torture of detainees.” One CIA contractor has been sent to prison for eight years for torture resulting in the death of a detainee. Two other cases have been thrown out of court, and seventeen others are languishing in the office of the US attorney for Eastern Virginia. That office is packed with loyal Bush appointees, who are not expected to investigate or act. The Justice Department has told Congress that there are jurisdictional problems in pursuing cases involving mercenaries. Experts, including those from Amnesty International , believe that the abuse cases involving military contractors easily run into the hundreds. In 2005, videotape footage surfaced showing contract employees machine-gunning occupied civilian cars on an Iraqi highway. This did not involve detainees, but it suggests that some contract employees are lawless cowboys. It is known that the number of contract employees in Iraq is about 2/3s of the number of Armed Forces personnel. <br /><br /> In 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed a memorandum authorizing severe physical interrogation techniques that were to be combined with harsh psychological methods. Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey objected and warned that those involved in producing the memo would be ashamed of themselves when the world eventually learned of this policy. The policy memorandum was signed at a time when the administration was vigorously denying that the U.S. was involved in torturing prisoners. When the memo came to light in 2007, the administration refused to provide Congress with any of the paperwork that had been developed as background and underpinning for the memo. <br /><br /> By August 2006, there were 450 prisoners at Guantanimo, as the US had released some prisoners due to international pressure. Those being released were told not to talk to a lawyer and often were asked to sign confessions as a condition for release. Five hundred people were detained in Afghanistan, where the US had used at one time or another 35 different detention centers. Another 13,000 were held in Iraq, and 98 died while in various detention centers. There was no data on how many were held in secret CIA prisons around the world. <br /> <br /> In May 2004, photographs surfaced that showed two soldiers posing with the dead body of a detainee who had apparently been beaten to death by CIA or private intelligence contractor operatives. The body was there because the CIA and military interrogators could not agree on who should dispose of it. The Red Cross had been complaining about the abuses since October 2003 and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had also expressed deep concern about the abuses. The FBI had been complaining since 2002 that interrogation techniques at Guantanimo had crossed the line of propriety and that detainees were being abused. The administration claimed abuses were isolated to a handful of wayward National Guard personnel. Yet some of the photographs revealed torture techniques known only to skilled professionals. The interrogations were ultimately under the control of military task forces that answered to the Joint Special Operations command. A seasoned retired CIA officer claimed that these teams “had full authority to wack—to go in and conduct ‘executive action’….” <br /><br /> It is likely that the techniques were based on decades of the study of “no-touch” torture techniques. In the 1960s, the CIA spent enormous amounts on these investigations that included sleep deprivation, strange eating schedules, stressful positions, loud noises, self-inflicted pain, sexual humiliation, intense never ending light, and scrambled sleep. Some of the work was farmed out to experimenters at Cornell and McGill Universities. It was found that the interrogators easily slipped from no-touch techniques to traditional brutality. <br /><br /> It soon became apparent that a pattern of abuse had existed in Afghanistan and at the Guantanimo detention facility. In Bagram, Afghanistan two men died due to repeated beatings in December 2002. At first, the military tried to sweep the matter under the rug, but eventually seven soldiers were charged with abuses. The investigation continued for two years, but documents were somehow lost, key people not interviewed, and evidence was mishandled. Finally, in October 2004, it appeared that twenty others might be charged for offenses ranging from lying to unintentional manslaughter. A year later, a regiment of the 173 Airborne burned the bodies of two Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan, a clear violation of Islamic custom. Across the globe at Guantanimo, authorities were looking into charges that soldiers had degraded the corpse of a prisoner. <br /><br /> It became known that commandos, probably acting under operation “Copper Green,” seized people in Afghanistan and placed them in “the Pit” and other detention centers, where they were subjected to various forms of abuse, including sexual. They had learned that sex, especially homosexual sex, was especially taboo among Muslims. It was thought that sexual degradation and photographing people in compromising sexual situations would produce information and even recruit prisoners to become informers. The prisoners would do whatever was necessary to prevent the photographs from being shown to their families. These techniques would also be employed in Iraq, and interrogation methods designed to play upon Islamic sensibilities were to be widely reported in Afghanistan, Guantanimo, and Iraq. <br /><br /> One of the Military Intelligence units involved in Bagram abuses was transferred to Iraq, where they continued to ply their skills. Months after the first revelation,, reports began to surface that some prisoners who were released from Guantanimo were claiming that they had been tortured by “prostitutes.” At Guantanimo, under the command of General Geoffrey Miller, interrogators played upon the detainees sexual sensitivities. A whole range of unspeakable techniques was used on Mohammed al Kahtani. This was the first indication that the pattern of abuse existed in Afghanistan and Guantanimo before we had military prisons in Iraq. Evidence surfaced that women questioned these men at Guantanimo in late night sessions that included the use of fake menstrual blood. Female interrogators wore Tight T-shirts, engaged in sexual touching, and paraded in miniskirts, and left bras and thong underwear hanging in the room. This often reduced the detainees to uncontrollable crying. One woman in a tight shirt rubbed her breasts against the back of a praying internee and then mocked him because he had an erection. A class action suite brought the Center for Rights has brought some complaints by detainees. One named Ahmed, was held for five months and tortured in various ways including being frequently bound, stripped, exposed to extreme cold, and kicked and beaten. He was also kicked in his genitals. Ahmed also had to watch his father being tortured. His savings were confiscated and his house destroyed. <br /><br /> Four months of extreme abuses at Abu Ghraib seemed to begin after the Guantanimo Camp X-Ray commander, Major General Geoffrey Miller was ordered to visit the site. Rumsfeld sent him there with oral orders to “Gitmoize” the camp. He was sent to “Gitmoize” the facility, and he told its commander Reserve Brigadier General Janice Karpinski to turn over effective control of the prison to military intelligence. General Miller told the staff to “treat these prisoners like dogs” and said that the guards should soften up the detainees for the intelligence people. Even before his visit, the prison was a hellhole due to overcrowding and the failure of higher command to provide adequate supplies and staff. Karpinski was refused permission to release people who had been cleared. After Miller’s visit, the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade had control of the facility. When news of the torture came out, Karpinski was relieved of command, and the Bush administration later reduced her to colonel on charges that had nothing to do with Abu Gharib. She had no opportunity to defend herself <br /><br /> Lt. General Keith Alexander, as Army Chief of Staff, was sent to Iraq to persuade Colonel T. Pappas, the intelligence officer who had been given control of the camp, to comply with General Jeffrey Miller’s plan to “Gitmoize” interrogation facilities in Iraq by intensifying interrogation techniques. In 2006, Pappas faced the possibility that he could be charged with permitting prisoners to be abused. . <br /> On September 14, 2003, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez also ordered more intense questioning methods, but they did not include the most troubling techniques revealed in photographs, except the use of dogs. Most of the abuses occurred in Cellblock 1A, which was off-limits to Karpinski and her Reserve troops. General Miller had ordered some unusual interrogation techniques for Mohammed el Quahtani, the so-called “Twentieth Hijacker.” This person was dressed in women’s underwear and required to perform sex acts in the presence of a female. A leash was placed around his neck and he was required to perform dog tricks. A leaked December 2005 inspector general’s report stated that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld monitored these sado-sexual practices via telephone.<br /><br /> It is unclear what measures Major General Miller recommended. At some time after the visit, he was briefed –“read in”- about “Copper Green” which Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice had approved after 9/11, and was most probably pursuant to the program Bush, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft signed off to, which was designed to extract information from “high value” prisoners. It was a “black”, special-access program (SAP) that authorized elite personnel from the CIA, Seals, and other agencies to “Grab whom you must. Do what you want.”<br /><br /> Dr. Rice signed off on Copper Green, but there is evidence that she did not know about the 2002 “torture memo” which made Copper Green and its outgrowths so horrible. However, it is known that Dr. Rice played a major role in shaping torture policy. She and other NSC officers carefully reviewed what the CIA could do to detainees. They all but orchestrated interrogation sessions, detailing whether slapping. Simulated drowning, etc. could occur. President Bush acknowledged that he knew that these discussions took place and approved of them. <br /><br /> On January 11, 2002, CIA briefers met with White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and David S. Addington, Cheney’s lawyer. The briefers said they would have problems obtaining actionable intelligence if they had to work within the rules of the Geneva Convention. Vice President Cheney took it upon himself to lead the effort to promote “robust interrogation” by finding a way around international law by redefining torture. The famous memo justifying torture was the work of Gonzales, Timothy E. Flanigan of the White House, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, John Yoo, also of Justice, and Addington. Yoo, who is usually given most of the credit for the memo, later said it would be dangerous to let the military implement the memo. Built into it was a defense for the torturer. If he or she acted with the intent of obtaining information rather than inflicting harm, no crime was committed. Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney’s old mentor, claimed Cheney was the driving force in forging the new policy. Rice and Colin Powell learned of the August, 2002 memo on June 8, 2004. International Law professor Jordan Paust wrote, “Not since the Nazi era have so many lawyers been so clearly involved in international crimes concerning the treatment and interrogation of persons detained during war.”<br /><br /> <br /> It was the creation of the Copper Green program and its subsequent extension to Iraq that set the scene for horrible transgressions of human rights and international law.. Among them were guards urinating on detainees, riding them, and having snakes bite them. There were reports of homosexual rape and of guards jumping on the injured leg of a prisoner. It was later learned that some of the Arabic-speaking interrogators/torturers were the same people the Israelis used in South Lebanon in 1991. Under- Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone authorized “Copper Green” tactics at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq. Apparently “Copper Green” originally dealt with the abuse of high value detainees. Cambone’s order made possible the use of these techniques against many more detainees. More Military Intelligence and civilian intelligence people appeared, using aliases, and instructed military police to abuse the detainees. Some detainees were singled out for such extensive abuse that their names were not recorded. They were “ghost detainees” who existed in no records. Cambone resigned in late 2006. <br /> Specialist Charles A. Garner, Jr. confided to whistle-blower Joseph M. Darby, “The Christian in me says its wrong. But the corrections officers says, ‘ I love to make a grown man piss on himself.’” In one instance, the sickly son of a former Iraqi official was stripped naked, driven around in a truck with mud spattered over him in order to induce the “high value” detainee to talk. He did so when more threats were made against the boy and rest of the family. The boy was later placed in cellblock where a sergeant warned he was likely to be raped. Smothering and chest compression techniques were often used to bring on near asphyxiation as a means of getting other high value captives to talk. At least two high-ranking Iraqi officers died this way, and there are believed to be at least six other homicides; although twenty-seven people died under interrogation in Iraq. One of the dead was the former head of the Iraqi Air Force, Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush. <br /> <br /> There have been complaints of Islamic women being raped. A British paper first broke this story. Then Newsweek said that unreleased photographs showed a soldier having sex with a female detainee and soldiers having sex with juveniles. Nadia, a reporter for a London-based paper, was held there for six months and was first raped bt five soldiers to the refrains of heavy metal music. She reported :<br />One month later, a soldier showed up and told me in broken Arabic to take a shower. And before finishing my bath, he kicked the door open. I slapped him but he raped me like animals and called two of his colleagues, who forced me to have sex with them for up to 10 times," added Nadia. <br /><br /> Four months later, the female soldier came along with four male soldiers with a digital camera. She stripped me naked and started fondling me as if she was a man while her male colleagues broke into laughter and started taking photos. <br />Reluctant as I was, she fired four shots close to my head and threatened to kill me if I resist. Then, four soldiers raped me sadistically and I lost conscience. Later, she forced me to watch a clip of my raping, saying bluntly: ‘You were born to give us pleasure’. <br /><br /> When it was clear that the operations at Abu Ghraib prison had gotten out of hand, the CIA withdrew from the project. Several military Judge Advocate general officers tried unsuccessfully to get the New York State Bar Association to intervene. There was also great concern about the number of civilian contractors used in the operation because they were subjected to no restrains. For months, the International Red Cross and various human rights organizations had alerted the administration to the growing abuses. <br /><br /> It is unclear if the deaths of high value detainees at Al Asad, a remote air base, were connected to this program. There is unmistakable evidence based on photographic evidence that Sunni tribal leader Abdul Kareem Abdul Jaleel was tortured to death there. American medical personnel said he died of natural causes. About five bodies a week are delivered to Forensic Institute in Baghdad from American detention facilities. The Iraqi coroners and scientists are forbidden to examine bodies for which there is a US- issued death certificate, but they do look at them. Off the record, they say the bodies show obvious signs of torture. <br /><br /> High value suspected terrorists could be moved across borders and kept in various locations in a vast US interrogation network. This secret gulag or network of prisons was linked largely by CIA operated Gulf Stream and other executive jets. There is evidence that a number of shell corporations were used in these rendition operations. Rendition involved seizing a person in a foreign land and flying him to a secret CIA prison , also abroad, or to a foreign prison where he would be questioned by foreign jailers who were not bound by any rules of conduct. One was Aero Contractors, which operated out of the Johnston County Airport in Smithfield, NC. Prisoners were also turned over to other regimes in Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan for torture and interrogation. One Canadian citizen was held in Syria for three months, a matter that caused great consternation in Canada. Some were sent to other countries known for the use of brutal torture techniques Australian citizen Mamdouh Habid was held for forty-eight months in Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Guantanimo. The experiences he claimed were consistent with reports from other former detainees. He may have been considered a fairly high value prisoner because U.S. authorities knew he had trained in two Al Qaeda camps and had reason to suspect he might have trained people for the attack on 9/11. <br /><br />At several of these sites, electric shock techniques were employed. Sometimes a wired helmet was used, which interrogators said was truth detector. American female interrogators touched his private parts, and one reached under her skirt and threw what she claimed were blood at him. `Egyptians snubbed out cigarettes on his skin and a Pakistani interrogator dropkicked him in the skull. Americans also beat him, and his head was hit against the floor at Guantanimo. By 2007, it was known that at least 300 people had been subjected to rendition by the George W. Bush administration. <br /><br /> These abuses have their origins in the Clinton administration, but they were vastly magnified in the subsequent administration. In the mid- 1990s, the Clinton administration laid the foundations for this program when it began to sanction the transportation of terrorist detainees to foreign countries for questioning. This policy of “rendition” was limited to people who had already been found guilty in our courts. The Bush administration broadened this policy to include mere suspects, and about one hundred and fifty have been subjected to rendition since 2001. The new policy was part of what Alberto Gonzales called the New Paradigm, the administration’s new approach to detention and interrogation. Rendition also changed in that it often meant more than just sending detainees to foreign countries, they were often held and questioned by Americans in safe houses in those countries. <br /> Some theorize that much of the torture would have occurred even without the involvement of civilian and military authorities because soldiers were led to believe that the people they were fighting were terrorists, closely connected to those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.Eventually, Pentagon officials admitted that 90% of its detainees were innocent. The Geneva Conventions states: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed," and "collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.” So far, the preferred opinion of the government and most Americans is that these abuses were very limited and entirely the actions of a few low-ranking individuals. <br /><br /> . In 2005, Dana Priest of the Washington Post revealed that the US maintained a network of secret prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The paper was persuaded not to mention two of the locations. A Swiss paper published intelligence information that showed that there were black holes in Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and the Ukraine. The highest-ranking Al Qaeda operatives are sent to “Bright Light,” a prison, it is said, from which there is no return. ABC News soon discovered secret prisons were in Poland and Romania. It also reported some of the black sites were being evacuated with prisoners being removed to somewhere in North Africa. The White House persuaded the network not to mention sites in Poland and Romania for four days, probably allowing time to complete the removals. The ABC television network agreed to this, not realizing the whole story had been broadcast on ABC Radio and placed on the website. All this fancy footwork was necessary so that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice could deny the existence of the black holes and torture during a hastily arranged trip to Europe. Of course, all of this had been widely reported in Europe, but these “secrets” were withheld from American news consumers. The Republican Congress promptly launched an investigation of how this information was leaked. <br /><br /> Ms. Priest and her paper did their jobs, but most of the American media avoided using the word “torture” and followed the administration line of blaming a few, low-ranking bad apples. Moreover, the Democrats did not raise the question in the 2004 presidential campaign. When Bush was reelected, Yoo said the election had been a referendum on torture and that the public had decisively upheld the administration’s position. Although Secretary Rice denied the existence of secret prisons and seemed to deny rendition, Europeans did not drop the matter. On June 6, 2006, the Council of Europe released a 67-page report on CIA renditions across Europe. It even provided flight logs. At about that time, Italian investigative judge Armando Spataro in Milan activated a case against 22 agents who kidnapped Hussan Nsar. In November 2006, investigators finally found a memorandum in which President George W. Bush authorized policies for the handling of foreign detainees. <br /> <br /> To appease public opinion, the Pentagon ordered Major General Antonio M. Taguba to undertake an investigation of the situation at Abu Ghraib. His orders were very narrow. He was to investigate the military police there but no one above them, including the military intelligence teams. One can assume that a report was expected that would result in the punishment of untrained prison guards and few else. It would develop later that it would be almost impossible to investigate many of the military intelligence people who were involved because they used fake names. Taguba’s report was thorough and it took little reading between the lines to understand the extent of the abuse and that this was just the work of young kids in the military police. <br /><br /> The report was leaked, and this, along with its contents, would destroy Taguba’s career. Old friends in uniform now avoided him, and Secretary Rumsfeld did not conceal his displeasure. The Secretary was mainly concerned with finding the leak and creating the false impression that he knew very little about all this and had only seen the pictures of abuse briefly before testifying before Congress. In fact, he had access to all that for months. General John Abizaid told him, “You and your report will be investigated.” Taguba thought, “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time T thought I was in the Mafia.” He eventually concluded that it was impossible that the President had not been aware of the torture program all along. A member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee offered the prevailing view of the scandal: “Abu Ghraib was the price of defending democracy.” In January 2006, Taguba was ordered to resign. <br /><br /> Subsequently, the Pentagon decided that water-boarding should be discontinued, and the revised manual on interrogation specifically forbids it. However, the CIA is permitted to water-board prisoners, and both the Pentagon and Justice Department have ruled that testimony from detainees gathered through torture was admissible in court. Detainees do not have the right of habeas corpus to determine if their detainment is appropriate. <br /><br />A FBI report released in 2008 revealed that agents knew of the torture almost at its inception. They were instructed not to participate. Agents watched prisoners being tortured hundreds of times but nothing was done to expose or stop these deplorable practices. This internal report praised the agents for their integrity and professionalism. <br /><br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com84tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-59838660360527422502008-05-27T14:52:00.000-07:002008-05-27T14:56:26.457-07:00More on Bush SecrecyIn dealing with Congress, the Bush administration has been worse than its predecessors in sharing information. To avoid confirmation hearings, it has resorted to a number of recess appointments. When it was clear there would be trouble confirming someone, as in the case of the nomination of John Bolton as UN ambassador, it abandoned the hearings route and made a recess appointment. Letters from Congressmen requesting information are treated in a cavalier manner, and those from Democrats are sometimes ignored. After a spate of mine disasters, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the problem. The top mine safety official, David G. Dye, testified and left, announcing that he had “pressing matters” to attend to. Those who testify are expected to remain in case matters come up that they can address. When Bush instructed the NSA to spy on private telephone conversations without warrants, the administration briefed only Congressional leaders, and the briefings were only fig-leaves. Yet Bush bragged about his openness in this matter. The Congressional Research Service noted that the law requires that whole committees be briefed and concluded that the administration may have broken the law. <br /><br /> Taking its cue from the administration, the Republican Congress has usually refused to investigate controversial matters; perhaps thinking party loyalty demanded this. Of course, observers with good memories know that Democratic Congresses did investigate Democratic presidents. Norman Ornstein has suggested that the subservience of Congress is part of a “battered Congress syndrome,” something akin to a battered spouse syndrome. <br /> Despite the Freedom of Information Act, the Justice Department promulgated regulations that enabled agencies to keep secret any information they thought should not be available to the public. A very small case in point was the abuse of secrecy rules to make Bill Clinton look bad in his negotiations with Israeli Prime minister Ehud Barach. The transcripts of their telephone discussions were labeled top secret, and the Bush administration edited them to the disadvantage of its predecessor. There was also a massive increase in the number of classified documents, from 8 million in 1999 to 23 million in 2002. The administration appointed a new federal archivist who had been accused of violations of the code of the International Council of Archivists. It did not seem to be an administration committed to the public’s right to know what was transpiring. <br /> White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in March 2001 ordered all agencies to develop guidelines to prevent disclosure of information they considered “sensitive but unclassified.” Bush’s EPA began making scholars register before they could use its Envirofacts database After September 11, the movement toward secrecy in government was intensified under the pretext that security made this necessary. In contrast, the Clinton administration had declassified millions of records and had supported passage of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act. In 2002, Mitch Daniels, head of the Office of Management and Budget proposed that departments and agencies print their own materials, perhaps using private printers. This would end the practice of sending materials to the Government Printing Office, which was then required to send copies of what it printed to library depositories throughout the country. Daniels insisted that his plan was designed only to save money, but its effect would be to greatly limit the flow of information to the public. <br /> The Bush administration refused to release Reagan administration documents that federal law mandated be made public in January 2001. The Bush administration delayed the release of 60,000 pages for more than a year, despite the requirements of law. On March 15, 2002, all but 155 pages were released. Most of that material seems to relate to the process of nominating judges. Bruce Craig, director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, believes the administration does not want scholars to know how the Reagan administration stacked the judiciary with conservative judges. “What they did was brilliant, no question about it.” Some of the papers still withheld were those of then Vice President George H. W. Bush. <br /><br /> There are still millions of Reagan era papers to be processed before release can even be considered. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 required that the National Archives have ultimate control of presidential papers. In obedience to the law, the National Archives screened the Reagan papers for materials that related to national security and prepared about 68,000 that could be safely released in 2001 as the first installment of the Reagan papers. Alberto Gonzalez, White House Counsel, persuaded the Archives to accept three delays to give the White House time to deal with legal questions. After September 11, President Bush issued Executive Order 13233, asserting the right to decide what was released and when. The fact that the country was on a war footing was used to justify the order as well as executive privilege. The order, for the first time, extended executive privilege to cover vice-presidential papers. <br /> <br /> Presumably, the reason for the concealment of these documents was that many former Reagan administration officials were serving in the second Bush administration. Concealment of these records and the refusal to obey the law was scarcely mentioned in most of the press. Bush attempted to resolve the matter with the executive order giving presidents, beginning with Reagan, the same power as sitting presidents to keep their papers private. The executive order reversed the Presidential Records Act. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said the action was justified because of the September 11 attack on America. Molly Ivins, one of the few to comment upon this usurpation of power thought it was because the papers could “contain information damaging to the reputation of Poppy Bush, who was then vice president, and/or the reputations of old Reaganites like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.” The Executive Order is being challenged in the courts by Public Interest, but the political outlooks of the judges who hear the case could determine the outcome. <br /> <br /> Bush had also moved to keep control of his gubernatorial papers by placing them in his father’s presidential library. Using the terrorist threat as an excuse, Attorney General John Ashcroft advised government agencies that he would support their efforts to withhold records requested under the Freedom of Information Act. A few newspapers noted that the Bush administration made haste to release the correspondence of Enron chairman Ken Lay with Clinton’s two Secretaries of the Treasury, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Lay offered Rubin a seat on the Enron board, which was declined. Summers was asked to resist a call to regulate derivatives. There was no evidence that the letters produced the desired results. On the other hand, Kenneth Lay had spent more than $600,000 to advance the political career of George W. Bush. During the campaign of 2000, Enron also loaned Bush a corporate jet for whistle-stopping. Lay had been appointed to the senior Bush’s Energy Council, and the Energy Policy Act, passed under the first Bush, forced utilities to permit energy traders like Enron to use their pipelines. By long delaying the seizure of Enron’s papers after it was clear that there had been widespread corporate wrong-doing, the Bush administration made it possible for extensive shredding of documents to occur.<br /><br /> In 2006, the Bush administration refused to release papers on its badly bungled handling of the hurricane Katrina, which did massive damage to the Gulf coast. After Katrina struck, Bush said he had no idea that New Orleans would be flooded or its levees would break, yet evidence turned up in February 2006 that he had been warned about those possibilities hours before the disaster occurred. The decision to stonewall on the FEMA papers issue and the refusal to permit top White House officials to testify before Congressional committees was clearly an attempt at damage control. In 2007, a federal judge commented on the “Kafkaesque” hurdles people had to jump in order to obtain FEMA assistance. FEMA legal service people were kept under a gag order so that the complete picture of the agency’s ineptitude or disinterest could not be revealed. It was also revealed that much FEMA food has simply gone to rot and that the agency had put out false figures about how many people it put into hotel rooms. While dealing with disastrous fires that year, the agency resorted to a faked press conference to burnish its image. <br /><br /> The Bush administration in 2002 stopped reporting information about factory closings, and acknowledged that it was doing so only in a footnote to a document released on Christmas Eve, 2002. In the environmental arena, there was an effort to tone down and/or delete scientific data from reports written by government environmental professionals that contradicted administration policy. Pollster Frank Luntz warned that the scientific debate about global warming “is closing against us but is not yet closed. There is still an opportunity to challenge the science.” This was essentially done by censorship and editing. By early 2004, the administration found the ultimate policy for dealing with scientific findings. It created a scientific review process under the Office of Management and Budget that could delay the implementation of environmental and health regulations until the scientific information underpinning them was approved by this new review process. Joan Claybrook remarked, “this is an attempt at paralysis by analysis.” <br /><br /> There seemed to be a distrust of government experts as though they were somehow uninformed obstructionists determined to get in the way of progress. This characterization was applied to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, economists, environmentalists, and the CIA. The latter was particularly distrusted because it often criticized estimates and claims made by the Neo Conservatives and their Iraqi exile clients. This deep distrust of experts is partly an outgrowth of the Republicans’ critique of the so-called New Class. Even the Bush administration’s assault on the findings of hard sciences, particularly in regard to global warming, is more than pandering to industrial donors. It is a manifestation of the ideologues hostility to experts and is rooted in their critique of the so-called New Class. <br /> In 2006, Dr. James E. Hansen, head of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, complained that NASA has attempted to stop his frequent warnings about global warming. It ordered the public relations people to monitor future lectures, papers, and postings as well as requests from journalists for interviews. A public relations official relayed to him that NASA warned there would be “dire consequences” if he continued to speak in the same manner about global warming. A NASA official went on record as being unhappy that Hansen spoke on liberal NPR and stated that his job was “to make the president look good” and that Hansen was disloyal civil servant. For a time, his superiors assigned a “minder” to Hansen, but they it was learned that the young man who was to monitor Hansen’s behavior did not possess the degree he claimed to have. In 2006, Hansen compared Bush’s censorship of science with the way Stalin’s minions distorted it. It was reported that political appointees at NASA exerted heavy pressure during the 2004 election to prevent publication of information about glaciers melting, climate change, or global warming. <br /><br /> When government scientists produce facts that offend the Bush administration's corporate allies, the administration has moved to suppress the information. Dr. James Zahn was ordered by the Department of Agriculture not to publicize information about superbugs in huge hog farms due to pressure from the National Pork Producers Council. At the Department of Interior, the deletion and alteration of scientific information became a standard procedure. Scientists who were likely to find information that contradicted Bush policies or threatened corporate interests have been removed from federal panels. Tony Oppegard, a federal engineer heading a geodesic study of mountain top strip mining was fired as soon as Bush took office. The White House had little reason to share information with Congress or seek its imput. Republicans in the House and Senate are held in line by Teutonic discipline, and dutifully follow the White House line. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska complained that “You have an administration that does not reach out or see much value in consulting with Congress. They treat Congress as an appendage, a constitutional nuisance . <br /><br /> The George W. Bush administration has found another means to avoid vigorous enforcement of regulatory law by packing the top levels of the civil service with political appointees. Other administrations have done some of this, but Paul Light of the Brookings Institution considered the 12% increase of employees at this level “stunning. ” Appointments on Schedule C do not require Congressional approval. But the extent of these appointments suggests an intention to politicize the federal service and challenge the long-standing merit principle in civil service hiring. The plan for undoing much of the federal civil service system was laid out in January 2001 in the Heritage Foundation’s “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel.” The document called for appointments based on loyalty as the first criterion rather than expertise. It maintained that the professional civil service should be considered the enemy and called for the outsourcing of as much work as possible. In early, 2007 the Bush administration capped its battle against the professional civil service with an executive order that required any changes in federal regulations had to be approved by political appointees in the departments and agencies of government. <br /> The penchant for secrecy also involves an effort to control the flow of information about foreign policy. Just as William Casey, CIA director under Ronald Reagan, purged dissidents in the agency, Porter Goss, George W. Bush’s appointee, has made it clear that information coming out of the agency must fit the administration’s policy line. He has refused to release to Congress an assessment of how much damage was done by the outing of covert agent Valerie Plame. Goss and his aides have expressed displeasure with the results of a study by former deputy director Richard Kerr that detailed intelligence failures prior to the invasion of Iraq. He has delayed publication of the issue of Studies in Intelligence that referenced the report, erected new barriers to what can be printed there, and provoked the resignation of the editor and chairman of the editorial board. Career officers have vacated 20 top positions and 90 senior officials have resigned. A purge also occurred in Condi Rice’s Department of State, but it was more gentle. Officials who disagreed verbally or in their reports with the Bush Cheney NeoCons have had their security clearances pulled and they have been reassigned to less important tasks. Some had dealt with the Middle East, Iran, international law, the environment, non-proliferation, Latin America, and Africa. <br /><br /> Perhaps the administration’s penchant for secrecy is simply a reflection of the mindset of corporate CEO, who are impatient with public discussion and the squabbling of politicians. Bush and Cheney were both corporate CEOs and promised to use their executive skills to solve national problems. After the disclosure of many CEO-induced scandals, they said no more about the advantages of putting CEOs in office but their governing style did not change. It was marked by impatience with discussion, contempt for compromise, ruthlessness with opponents, chumminess with business cronies, secretiveness, and hierarchal outlook. Whether several of these traits represented a disdain for some aspects of democracy remains to be seen. <br /> The Bush energy plan was developed in secret by Vice President Cheney and passed in 2005 in proceedings often clouded in secrecy. There were efforts to open the task force records, but they were successfully blocked in the courts. The Bush administration acknowledged that Vice President met with Enron executives six times about the proceedings of his energy task force. More complete information about its proceedings has not yet become available. It is known, however, that representatives of the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and as well as Carl Pope, director of the Sierra Club, were given an audience with the vice president only after the details of the energy plan had been made public. The deliberations of the energy task force resulted in quick approval for controversial of the pebble-bed nuclear reactor of Exelon Corporation. The firm, which has made large contributions to the Republican Party, insists that the design will provide safer cheap power in abundance, but environmentalists dispute these claims. <br /><br /> A successful effort to cloak critical information in secrecy was accompanied by a very skillful effort to manipulate the press and manage the news. By the end of George W. Bush’s third year in the White House, Harpers’ Magazine publisher Rick MacArthur told a radio interviewer that the “White House press corps...has now turned into ...[a] full time press agency for the President of the United States.” Later in the interview he added that the public should “assume that the press is now part of the government.” On reflection, Mac Arthur would certainly back off from full meaning of these assessments, but he was correct in noting that the national press had lost its ability to critically cover this GOP administration. British journalist Greg Palast has referred to the mainstream American press as the dependent press because information is so tightly controlled that it must cater to the Bush administration in order to be rewarded with even small pieces of information. Richard L. Ehrlich, Jr., Maryland’s Republican governor, formalized this way of dealing with the press in November 2004 when he signed a written order forbidding employees to talk to two reporters for the Baltimore Sun. Two federal courts subsequently upheld the legality of that order.<br /><br /> It insists upon enforcing the Pentagon’s 1991 ban on taking photographs of coffins carrying the bodies of American soldiers at Dover Air Force Base. When the President held a huge rally for troops at Fort Carson, the press was ordered not to talk to any soldiers before, during, or after the rally. They obeyed, and only the Rocky Mountain News reported on the orders given to the press. The skill of the Bush administration in manipulating the press was demonstrated in 2004, when the Social Security Administration ran many advertisements clearly touting the advantages of Bush’s prescription care plan. Few noticed that the advertisements could have a political effect. Later that year, the Department of Education, paid $700,000 to an agency to advertise Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, a major Bush bragging point. The department also paid TV talk show host Armstrong Williams $240,000 to talk up the program in the black community. When the payment came to light, there was little discussion about blurring the lines between a journalist and an paid advocate. <br /><br /> The federal government paid Maggie Gallagher $21,500 to promote the Bush approach to marriage, and another conservative columnist was paid $10,000 to do the same. The use of taxpayer money for political purposes was nearly a non-issue in the public and political forums. In a related matter, private corporations began to provide local television stations with video news releases, which the stations presented as ordinary news. Sometimes the releases had political content and other times they were more commercial in nature.<br /> <br /><br /> By early, 2006, it was becoming clear to some that unilateral actions of the Bush administration were establishing a “creeping presidential autocracy.” These actions were partly inspired by Richard Cheney’s view that the presidency had lost too much power as a result of the Vietnam War and Watergate crisis, but it was the 9/11 attacks on the US that provided the justification for these steps. The administration claimed the power to hold foreign detainees indefinitely, and even American citizens could be held if they were classified as” enemy combatants.” The newly enacted Patriot Acts were interpreted in the most expansive ways. The administration lifted many restrictions on torture, on the theory that the commander-in-chief’s authority trumped international law. Eventually, it was revealed that U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at the Guantanimo detention facility practiced torture. It even took to spying on telephone conversations without warrants. <br /><br /> The Republican Congress refused to investigate some of the administration’s questionable conduct and it tended to legalize actions many considered illegal. When the Supreme Court ruled twice that the administration’s treatment of detainees violated the law, Congress legislated to legalize this conduct and then passed a law stripping the courts of the power to rule on how detainees were treated. Similarly, the Congress, without even investigating the matter, legalized the warrantless spying. By striking an empty compromise with the administration on the spying, the Republican Congress posed as heroic in standing up to the president, claiming it had “rebelled.” In fact, it had again aided and abetted the unwarranted expansion of the executive’s power. <br /><br /> Attorney General John Ashcroft, the darling of the GOP right, demonstrated no uneasiness with the diminution of civil liberties that battling terrorism seemed to require. Ashcroft demonstrated his hostility to organized labor when he used 9/11 as an excuse to forbid secretaries in federal prosecutors offices to join unions. Ashcroft also used his power to advance the agenda of the Christian Right. He expended valuable resources attempting to break up a ring of bordellos in 2001 and 2002 and battled a state’s legislation permitting assisted suicide in carefully defined cases. The Attorney General vigorously moved against people who grew marijuana for medicinal purposes in states that bucked federal drug policy to the extent of legalizing medicinal marijuana. An enthusiastic supporter of the death penalty, he overruled the recommendations of federal prosecutors in 28 cases where the death penalty could be applied. Ashcroft also moved to intimidate federal judges whose sentences were more generous than federal sentencing guidelines suggested. His effort to create a blacklist of liberal judges was even criticized by Chief Justice William Rehnquist. <br /><br /> His enforcement of the USA Patriots Act, which was enacted in late October 2001 to strengthen federal investigators and prosecutors after the September 11, 2001 attack by Islamic terrorists seemed authoritarian to some. Many talked of the Ashcroft Doctrine, which held that in security cases the accused’s rights must be subordinated to the demands of national security. However, Ashcroft labeled “un-American” any criticism of his uses of the Patriot Act, including efforts to monitor what people read. Section 215 was one of the most controversial sections because it stripped non-citizens of search and seizure rights and also made it possible to deprive citizens of these rights. Under this section a person or organization could be ordered to provide information to the FBI and would be subjected to a gag order forbidding it to reveal to anyone that it had been ordered to surrender information. Working hurriedly, the House Judiciary Committee, remodeled this section, but at 3:30 AM, the original version reappeared in the printed version, and it was subsequently passed in that form. It is doubtful if many members of Congress had a chance to read the final version. <br /><br /> John Turley, a George Washington University law professor, told Nightline on August 20, 2002 that Attorney General John Ashcroft had moved from constituting “a political embarrassment” to “being a constitutional menace.” The conservative Turley had become familiar face on television in the Clinton years when he appeared many times making a case for the president’s impeachment and removal. The measure even made it possible to admit hearsay evidence and permitted prosecutors to refuse to identify witnesses. <br /><br /> In combating terrorism, it is probably true that individual rights must sometimes be sacrificed to necessity, but the abridgments of rights should be as limited as possible. However, the administration has sought to cover its use of the Patriot Act in secrecy and misrepresentations of fact. It is also seeking the repeal of sunset provisions that apply to some extraordinary and worrisome powers. In June 2004, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s contention that in time of war it should wield unfettered power. The court ruled that the foreign nationals held as “enemy combatants” had the right to file habeas corpus petitions and that an American citizen being held as a suspected terrorist had the right to be informed of the charges against them and to exercise the right to defend himself. The decisions freed no one, and left much room for executive power to be exercised, but it cancelled the blank check the administration thought it possessed. <br /> <br /> After 9-11, the Justice Department rounded up between 1500 and 2000 people. A purpose of the dragnet was to find people who could provide information about terrorists or who may have helped them. The great majority of them were not citizens, and many could be held on technical immigration violations. The detainees were often held under no charges. A year later, almost all had been released or deported. Ashcroft permitted the FBI to continue to misrepresent requests for wiretaps and searches. The abuses reached the point where a secret federal tribunal felt it necessary to issue a public protest. In May 2002, the secret federal court that reviews Justice Department requests for investigative powers in terror cases took the unprecedented step of making public a decision in which it refused to grant the Department additional powers. The court complained that the FBI and the Department had provided false information in over 75 requests for wiretaps and search warrants in the two previous years. Moreover, the agencies were accused of improperly sharing intelligence information with New York law enforcement agencies.<br /><br /> The Department claimed that the decision wrongfully limited its authority under the Patriot Act and said it would appeal. Later, a higher secret security court reversed this ruling. A major effect of this ruling was to breach the wall that was separate investigations of terrorists and foreign agents and ordinary criminal probes. The barrier to the sharing of any information between criminal justice agencies and intelligence agencies should have been modified and the secret security court did this. Yet the administration insisted it remained in place. In persuading Congress to pass this sweeping measure, Ashcroft insisted that critics of the bill were providing “ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends.” <br /><br /> With respect to the enforcement of the act, House Majority Leader Dick Armey told reporters, “I told the president I thought his Justice Department was out of control... Are we going to save ourselves from international terrorism in order to deny the fundamental liberties we protect to ourselves? It doesn't make sense to me." In a little more than two years, five thousand people were detained under its provisions, and only a handful of them were convicted. There were numerous reports that some of them were mistreated, even beaten. The measure also empowered FBI agents to quiz librarians about the books read by their patrons. The measure was so sweeping in nature that it opened the door to possible abuses. Defending the Act, John Miller, an FBI spokesman, said that the freedoms the press enjoy under the First Amendment does not constitute a basis for academic freedom in the universities. <br /><br /> In December 2002, one Mike Maginnis was arrested at his home for photographing the hotel where Vice President Cheney was staying in while in Denver as well as the neighborhood around it. A Special Agent demanded that he admit to being a terrorist collaborator and called him a “dirty pinko fagot” and a “ragtag collaborator.” He was subsequently released, and the Denver police denied he had ever been held. In another Keystone Cops episode, a local sheriff and three Secret Service agents, empowered by the Patriot Act, invaded the privacy of a retired chief petty officer named Michael Moore in North Carolina. The officers must have confused him with the populist by the same name who was critical of Bush and the proposed war on Iraq. The agents intercepted his e-mail and searched his home without a warrant. The agents told Moore they were working with the National Security Agency and FBI on national security issues. Moore had made the mistake of calling Bush names in his e-mail and expressed displeasure with the 2002 election. Moore was required to sign forms permitting the agents to access his medical history at two hospitals. Moore had threatened no one in his e-mail, but the agents told him not to go to Washington in the future and asked him what he thought about assassinations. <br /> <br /> The FBI began resorting to the tactics of the Hoover era when it started gathering information on peace demonstrators and the ways they raised funds, recruited, trained and organized rallies. In Des Moines, the FBI, acting with a local sheriff, used the Patriot Act to get a federal grand jury to subpoena records from local organizations involved in the peace movement. They included Drake University, the state chapter of the Lawyers’ Guild, a Catholic Worker House, and the Catholic Peace Ministry. The FBI later withdrew the subpoenas, saying it was only looking into simple trespass charges. Moreover, the agency, in Intelligence Bulletin no. 89, urged local law enforcement to emulate its tactics. Police were warned that demonstrators tried to intimidate law enforcement by videotaping their demonstrations and even “documenting potential cases of police brutality.” Homeland Security also warned local law enforcement to watch people with nervous mannerisms or who arrogantly expressed “dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government." <br /><br /> By 2007, a Justice Department web site noted that the FBI terrorist watch included 509,000 names. In Pittsburgh, the ACLU obtained FBI files that showed that the bureau had been spying on the Thomas Merton Center from November 29, 2002 to at least March 2005. The documents referred to a source that must have been an infiltrator. Perhaps some of this work was carried out by the new National Security Service, a branch of the FBI placed directly under the White House by Executive Order. There is also a new National Clandestine Service, a wing of the CIA that can carry out some operations within the United States. <br /><br /> Efforts were also made to track down dissenters in other ways and to limit the information they accessed through alternative news outlets. The owner of the company that serves Capitol Hill.com and some other alternative news outlets received a “national security letter” that demanded information about the publisher, his disbursements, and traffic information about his web operations. This would give the FBI the names of people who read the site, and, of course, they were tracking his sources. Capitol Hill Blue claims to have inside sources, but its exposes do not go beyond rumors about possible indictments and the president’s mental state and possible drinking habits. <br /><br /> The Patriot Act and its extensions made it possible for the administration to create a two-track justice system. Cases involving “enemy combatants” or material witnesses in terrorism cases could be handled completely outside the ordinary justice system. In the extraordinary track, citizens and non-citizens alike can be investigated and jailed without the normal guarantees of rights and procedures. People can be held for long periods without the right to consult attorneys. Non-citizens can be tried by military tribunals and be deported after closed hearings. Solicitor General Theodore Olsen, who had played a key role in the effort to tie Bill Clinton to illegal activities, is the Bush administration’s lead lawyer in anti-terrorism matters. In a 5-3 ruling in June 2006, the Supreme Court blocked the use of these military tribunals in hearing the cases of foreign detainees. It held that the Bush Administration had overstepped its authority. The door was left open for Congress to craft a way of trying these people within the US court system in a manner satisfactory to the administration. <br /> <br /> The amended Patriot Act also included a little-known provision that enabled the administration to appoint interim U.S. Attorneys who could serve indefinitely. In this way, controversial appointments could be made without the scrutiny and approval of the Senate. An aid of Senator Arlen Specter admitted that he inserted the provision at the last minute and only discussed the change with fellow Republicans. Armed with this provision, the administration began quietly pushing out U.S. Attorneys and replacing them with people who were extreme partisans. In Arkansas, Timothy Griffin, a man with “a thin legal record” became an interim U.S. Attorney. He had headed opposition research for the Republican National Committee and had worked closely with Karl Rove. One of the purged US Attorneys was Carol Lam of San Diego, who had put Randy Duke Cunningham in prison and was investigating Representative Jerry Lewis.<br /> <br /> The preference for secrecy became a hallmark of the administration’s approach to terrorism. In November 2001, a presidential order stated that non-citizens found harboring terrorists or with terrorism could be tried by military tribunal. This order seemed to set the tone for the hard-line Justice Department policies that were to follow. After the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan all cases in the United States were to be tried in civil courts so long as they were open. It would seem that this meant that these military tribunals had no standing in 2001. Later, several American citizens would be held as “enemy combatants” and would be deprived of their constitutional rights to legal representation. Later, Bush authorized the CIA to kill Americans if they were working with Al Qaeda in some way. <br /> The doctrine that suspected terrorists need not be given even the rights of prisoners of war seems to suggest a denial of the generally held notion that all people share a common humanity, which brings with it some basic rights. There were so many questions about Ash croft’s enforcement of the Patriot Act that on June 13, 2002, the ranking Democrat and the Republican chairman on the House Judiciary Committee sent fifty questions to the Attorney General. The chairman was James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, one of the most conservative people in the House. The Justice Department responded that it would respond to some <br />of the questions only if the two Congressional intelligence committees asked them. <br /> While many of Ashcroft’s policies should have concerned civil libertarians, it might also be conceded that occasionally he had to do battle with judicial rules that were probably too restrictive in counter- terrorist matters. The secret federal “spy court” ruled that FBI criminal and intelligence squads cannot freely communicate and share information. If the sharing would result in action against someone in matters not remotely involving terrorism, the ruling would make sense. However, Ashcroft probably was on the right track in challenging it insofar as it prevented full cooperation in terrorism matters. The ruling was later overturned. Progressives kept up a steady discussion of the dangers to civil liberties the act posed, and a few conservatives joined in efforts to expose the legislation’s worst features, but, as ACLU president Anthony Romero said , the political dialogue on this issue was essentially “anemic.” <br /><br /> Attorney General Ashcroft’s treatment of two American citizens apprehended while fighting for the Taliban or Al Qaeda raised troubling questions for civil libertarians. John Walker Lindh was permitted to enter a plea in a US court. Y. Esam Hamdi was long held incommunicado in a Navy brig in Norfolk. He did not have access to an attorney while a French citizen, Zacarias Moussaoui, had access to attorneys and is being tried in open federal court. The Justice Department said it was permissible to hold Hamdi indefinitely and without access to a lawyer because he is being charged with nothing and was clearly an enemy combatant. Another US citizen, Jose Padilla was being held in a South Carolina brig without charges or an attorney. He was apprehended as a possible dirty bomb builder, but no charges were lodged for some time. The Attorney General has talked about building camps where such US citizens could be held.<br /> <br /> In summer, 2004, the case against Padilla was dropped and he was sent back to Saudi Arabia without his US citizenship. In addition, the military has seized 1500 detainees as a result of the Afghan War and other operations and has maintained that these prisoners have no rights under the Geneva Convention. The government’s original intention was to hold them until a worldwide terrorist network no longer existed. In 2002, the Bush administration issued a formal waiver on the Geneva Convention, stating that they did not apply to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In June 2004, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s contention that in time of war it should wield unfettered power. The court ruled that the foreign nationals held at “enemy combatants” had the right to file habeas corpus petitions and that an American citizen being held as a suspected terrorist had the right to be informed of the charges against him and to exercise the right to defend himself. <br /><br /> The decisions freed no one, left much room for executive power to be exercised, but it cancelled the blank check the administration thought it possessed. Congress subsequently defined the way these people would be tried by military courts. The detainees would not see the evidence against them and information gained through torture was admissible. There was to be very little room for appeals. Though the legislation flew in the face of basic American principles, Democrat Karl Levin was a co-sponsor. With the surrender of Levin and other Democrats, it seemed there was little further interest in exploring the matter of torture. In May 2006, Mary McCarthy, deputy inspector general of the CIA, was fired one day before she was to retire. It seems she had learned that some high CIA official had lied to congress about torturing prisoners. Unnamed sources said she had been fired because she had leaked something to the press or, even worse, Congress. There was no effort on the part of the two intelligence committees to interview her. <br /><br /> In 2003, the Justice Department prepared Patriot Act II, which passed the House in September , 2003. Named the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, it was designed to expand government’s domestic surveillance powers. It also made possible stripping people of citizenship if they assisted groups the Attorney General designated as terrorist organization. It greatly expanded the FBI’s powers in the use of national security letters or administrative subpoenas. The bureau was authorized to obtain telephone, internet, and financial date from financial institutions whenever it thought national security was involved without the scrutiny of a judge. Financial institutions included casinos, travel agencies, the Postal Service, pawnbrokers, insurance companies, and dealers in precious metals. Those ordered to turn over records were forbidden to disclose that this had occurred In March 2007 the Department of Justice Inspector General revealed that in many instances the FBI used national security letters illegally and improperly to gather information. It was also found that the Bureau had often understated to Congress how many of these letters it was employing.<br /><br /> Arrests of people who were “threats” to the economy were to be facilitated. Since September 11, 2001, hundreds had been quietly taken into custody and the government refused to give their names on grounds it was protecting their privacy. The new measure facilitated secret arrests. It was signed into law on the day Saddam Hussein was captured, December 13, 2003. The third extension of the Patriot Act came before Congress in 2005, but final passage was delayed until early 2006. The press reported that the delay was mainly due to disagreement over whether law enforcement agents should be able to get access to anyone’s medical records and library usage. Defenders of the measure argued that only the guilty had reason to worry about abuse resulting from having their records checked. The bill provided a more controversial section ( 605) which created a permanent and secret Homeland Security force known as the “United States Secret Uniformed Division.” When it thought it had good reason, it could arrest people without warrant. It would also function at special events of national significance (SENS), which it was free to designate itself. <br /><br /> This new provision is the more worrisome when it is recalled that on January 6, 2003, President Bush signed an executive order permitting himself to set aside habeas corpus and the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using troops in domestic situations. He did not invoke this power when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, but it remains on the books. This provision was lifted from a 1982 plan by Lt. Colonel Oliver North to give FEMA a new mission.” The act was overwhelming extended in March 2006 after some “legislative hocus-pocus” which changed little but provided a “fig leaf” of a compromise which enabled moderates and most liberals enough cover to join the stampede. <br /><br /> The Bush Justice Department has also taken to intimidating defense attorneys. In 2005, Lynne Stewart was sent to prison because she represented an accused terrorist in a manner prosecutors disliked. She was charged with providing material support for terrorism. In 2006, prosecutors threatened to jail the attorney for Kenneth Ford, an NSA analyst whose views on WMDs probably resulted in his incarceration on trumped-up charges of stealing classified documents. The judge noted that there was no information on how the documents ended up in Ford’s kitchen and that the government’s confidential informant was a “curious figure,” but he still sentenced Ford to 6 years in prison. Tom Flocco, an internet muckraker, has claimed that his computer firewall system showed through internet identification numbers that the Department of Defense was surveiling him when he talked to intelligence sources or agents or when he wrote stories about intelligence or the Bush White House. In early April not long after Flocco reported his troubles, someone hacked into the E-Mail of “Good Morning America” John Green and found two unacceptable notes. In one Green called former Secretary of State Madeline Albright “NeoCon lite without NutraSweet.” In another, he criticized Bush. Each was leaked to a different conservative outlet: the Drudge Report and The New York Post. ABC suspended him and forced him to apologize to the White House Communications director. At the same time, Chris Graff, Vermont AP Bureau Chief, was fired for putting a Patrick Leahey op-ed on the wire. <br /><br /> John Ashcroft cooperated with the Bush administration in hacking away at many Bill of Rights protections, but he appeared to draw the line at supporting without reservation the creation of a massive database with information on potentially all American citizens. When he was desperately ill in a Washington hospital, the president’s chief of staff Andrew Card and chief legal counsel Alberto Gonzales came to demand that he authorize the FEMA database named Main Core. At issue was FEMA’s desire to greatly expand it by means of various forms of surveillance and incorporation of rad data from NSA telecommunications intercepts. Ashcroft refused, as did Acting Attorney General James Comey. More than two years later, the mainstream press claimed the argument was about reauthorizing wireless wiretaps, which Ashcroft and repeatedly supported. Finally, in late July 2007, Attorney General Gonzales admitted to a Senate panel "The disagreement that occurred was about other intelligence activities, and the reason for the visit to the hospital was about other intelligence activities . . . It was not about the terrorist surveillance program that the president announced to the American people." <br /><br /> In foreign affairs, the Bush administration also moved toward unilateralism denial of international law, a posture that delighted foreign policy fundamentalists. John Bolton, who eventually became ambassador to the UN, claimed that it is “a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law” even when doing so yields some short-term advantages. Alberto Gonzales, who was to become Attorney General, believed that international conventions on the treatment of prisoners were “obsolete” and “quaint.” <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-69233747298968520992008-05-11T17:01:00.000-07:002008-05-11T17:07:42.751-07:00The G.W. Bush Administration and SecrecyEven more dangerous for the republic than using the FBI for political purposes or the Interior Department manipulating situations to enrich a key Republican lobbyist is the persistent use of secrecy as a governing tactic. Combine secrecy with a politicized Justice Department, and one has the potential for all manner of abuses that may never come to light. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jack Nelson said “This administration [ that of George W. Bush] is by far the most secretive administration I have had any experience with at all. They have no shame… in doing things in the dark….” <br /><br /> Few who read the papers carefully could state with some certainty why the United States invaded Iraq or the full reasoning process behind the energy policies adopted in 2005. Secrecy has extended from such large matters to any number of other matters. Judge Damon Keith wrote in 2002 that “democracies die behind closed doors,” and John Adams said, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” An essential requirement for democracy is assuring that the people have an opportunity to gain a full understanding of public matters. By avoiding presidential press conferences and indulging a mania for secrecy, the Bush administration reduced the degree of Democracy enjoyed by the American people. George W. Bush held fewer press conference than any president since FDR. At the fourteen he did hold up to June 2004, the president regularly refused to answer difficult questions. <br /> To some extent, the belief in keeping the public in the dark and even lying to them can be seen as a carefully thought out approach to governance which has some support among philosophers and academicians. More than a few in the Bush administration had been influenced by the writings of Leo Strauss, who taught that “lies, far from being a regrettable necessity of political life, are instead virtuous and noble instruments of wise policy.” Whether Bush subscribed to the philosophy of the noble lie cannot be documented, but his conduct in leading the nation into invading Iraq could be the result of this outlook. <br /> <br /> Even before entering the White House, George W. Bush demonstrated a devotion to secrecy in government. As soon as he learned that the Supreme Court had awarded him the presidency, he set out to circumvent a Texas law that required that gubernatorial papers be immediately indexed and made available to the public. He arranged to have his papers placed in his father’s library, which placed them under federal jurisdiction and met the Texas requirement that placement of papers be made in consultation with the head of the state library and archives commission by simply notifying the commission of his action. Some have suggested that his papers would reveal that he handled death row commutation matters too quickly and perfunctorily. <br /> . The Bush administration’s policymaking process often seemed a closely-held secret, perhaps suggesting “a blithe sense of class entitlement” or the Neo Conservatives’ belief that the masses should be kept in the dark Policy making procedures developed over decades by previous administrations simply fell into disuse on many occasions. <br /><br /> The Bush White House adopted a policy of using e-mail accounts provided by the Republican National Committee rather than those provided by the federal government. The National Journal reported that Karl Rove did 95% of his electronic communicating using the RNC account. There is something troubling about conducting government business on e-mail accounts provided by a partisan entity. The point of doing this was to circumvent the requirements of the Presidential Records act which requires that all such communications be preserved. By using partisan e-mail accounts to get around Congressional investigations, it is possible that White House aids are exposing sensitive data to hackers, assuming the commercial accounts are less secure than those provided by the US government. <br /><br /> From the outset, the Bush administration moved quickly to limit the flow of information about what went on in the executive branch. This administration became known for its culture of secrecy, and made itself far less accessible to Congress and the media than any previous government. For example it punished a DEA agent who helped the Times of London write about money laundering, and it tried to suppress information about mad cow disease in the United States. Democratic members of Congressional investigative committees were denied access to some administration briefings and papers from the executive branch. Congress was denied access to information on telephone calls advisor Cark Rove made to firms in which he held stock. <br /><br /> Consumers found new roadblocks to obtaining information about automobile safety. Even Republicans such as Representative Dan Burton and activist Phyllis Schlafley have complained about the administration’s penchant for operating in secrecy. Burton was angry when the Bush administration refused to release information on Clinton’s midnight pardons. Eventually it released only t hose papers that would put Clinton in a bad light. In many ways it demonstrated clear opposition to open government. The quest for secrecy even including the scrubbing of routinely produced scientific data of information that could be used to challenge administration policy. Scientific results that offended administration ideology were simply deleted or reversed. <br /><br /> In 2003, the administrations even withheld information on many consumer issues as well as tire and auto safety reports. In the same year, the minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee found that the administration had scrubbed and manipulated data in 21 scientific areas that included stem-cell research and global warming. <br /><br /> In 1999, 8 million documents were classified as confidential; that number jumped to 23 million by the end of 2002. The desire to cloak government actions in secrecy animates Bush administration efforts to shut down the Government Printing Office, though the proposal is claimed to be an economy move. Perhaps there were no sinister intentions for so much secrecy and the deletion of some scientific data. The administration was filled with conservative ideologues who placed theory and ideology above rational empiricism. It may not be a matter of spinning facts to their advantage; it is quite possible that these people simply find contradictory data irrelevant because they have such an unalterable faith in their policies and ideology. Sometimes, what others saw as secrecy many have just been adroit news management to the Bush administration. For example, it adhered strictly to the 1991 Pentagon rule against the photographing of body bags (“transfer tubes”), the arrival of soldiers’ bodies at Dover Air Force Base , or burials at Arlington on the grounds that the appearance of these pictures would upset the soldiers’ relatives and friends. <br /> Before the horrific events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was busy expanding governmental secrecy. Vice President Cheney’s refusal to make public information about the composition of his energy task force was only a small part of this effort. In August 2002, Assistant Attorney General Robert McCallum filed pleadings with a district court requesting that executive privilege be permanently extended to all matters involving pardons. It might be recalled that President George H.W. Bush pardoned the key figures involved in the Iran-Contra controversy as well as a Cuban exile who bombed an airliner carrying over 170 people. Mc Callum was a Skull and Bone’s classmate of the president’s. Under Bush, the government was much more reluctant to grant requests made by the media and others under the Freedom of Information Act. The administration charged very high fees to people and organizations seeking information under the act. When a small nonprofit agency asked the Department of Education for information on students barred from federal grants and loans due to drug convictions, it faced “much foot-dragging and finally ruinous” fees. <br /> The president’s desire to operate in secrecy was also reflected in his signing of a measure that provided for fines and jail time for journalists who publish information related to security matters. It was essentially the official secrets measure that Bill Clinton had vetoed. Secrecy is employed to hide some activities and also to discipline reporters. Only those who are friendly to the administration are given access to some information. Knight-Ridder CEO and president of the Newspaper Association of America Tony Ridder told the National Press Club that there is “a blend of fear, frustration and anger on the part of many Washington journalists” and he reminded listeners that “access to information is essential to democracy” and that secrecy diminishes the freedoms of most citizens. <br /><br /><br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> In dealing with Congress, the Bush administration has been worse than its predecessors in sharing information. To avoid confirmation hearings, it has resorted to a number of recess appointments. When it was clear there would be trouble confirming someone, as in the case of the nomination of John Bolton as UN ambassador, it abandoned the hearings route and made a recess appointment. Letters from Congressmen requesting information are treated in a cavalier manner, and those from Democrats are sometimes ignored. After a spate of mine disasters, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the problem. The top mine safety official, David G. Dye, testified and left, announcing that he had “pressing matters” to attend to. Those who testify are expected to remain in case matters come up that they can address. When Bush instructed the NSA to spy on private telephone conversations without warrants, the administration briefed only Congressional leaders, and the briefings were only fig-leaves. Yet Bush bragged about his openness in this matter. The Congressional Research Service noted that the law requires that whole committees be briefed and concluded that the administration may have broken the law. <br /><br /> Taking its cue from the administration, the Republican Congress has usually refused to investigate controversial matters; perhaps thinking party loyalty demanded this. Of course, observers with good memories know that Democratic Congresses did investigate Democratic presidents. Norman Ornstein has suggested that the subservience of Congress is part of a “battered Congress syndrome,” something akin to a battered spouse syndrome. <br />rmation Act, the Justice Department promulgated regulations that enabled agencies to keep secret any information they thought should not be available to the public. A very small case in point was the abuse of secrecy rules to make Bill Clinton look bad in his negotiations with Israeli Prime minister Ehud Barach. The transcripts of their telephone discussions were labeled top secret, and the Bush administration edited them to the disadvantage of its predecessor. There was also a massive increase in the number of classified documents, from 8 million in 1999 to 23 million in 2002. The administration appointed a new federal archivist who had been accused of violations of the code of the International Council of Archivists. It did not seem to be an administration committed to the public’s right to know what was transpiring. <br /><br /> White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in March 2001 ordered all agencies to develop guidelines to prevent disclosure of information they considered “sensitive but unclassified.” Bush’s EPA began making scholars register before they could use its Envirofacts database After September 11, the movement toward secrecy in government was intensified under the pretext that security made this necessary. In contrast, the Clinton administration had declassified millions of records and had supported passage of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act. In 2002, Mitch Daniels, head of the Office of Management and Budget proposed that departments and agencies print their own materials, perhaps using private printers. This would end the practice of sending materials to the Government Printing Office, which was then required to send copies of what it printed to library depositories throughout the country. Daniels insisted that his plan was designed only to save money, but its effect would be to greatly limit the flow of information to the public. <br /><br /> The Bush administration refused to release Reagan administration documents that federal law mandated be made public in January 2001. The Bush administration delayed the release of 60,000 pages for more than a year, despite the requirements of law. On March 15, 2002, all but 155 pages were released. Most of that material seems to relate to the process of nominating judges. Bruce Craig, director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, believes the administration does not want scholars to know how the Reagan administration stacked the judiciary with conservative judges. “What they did was brilliant, no question about it.” Some of the papers still withheld were those of then Vice President George H. W. Bush. <br /><br /> There are still millions of Reagan era papers to be processed before release can even be considered. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 required that the National Archives have ultimate control of presidential papers. In obedience to the law, the National Archives screened the Reagan papers for materials that related to national security and prepared about 68,000 that could be safely released in 2001 as the first installment of the Reagan papers. Alberto Gonzalez, White House Counsel, persuaded the Archives to accept three delays to give the White House time to deal with legal questions. After September 11, President Bush issued Executive Order 13233, asserting the right to decide what was released and when. The fact that the country was on a war footing was used to justify the order as well as executive privilege. The order, for the first time, extended executive privilege to cover vice-presidential papers. <br /> <br /> Presumably, the reason for the concealment of these documents was that many former Reagan administration officials were serving in the second Bush administration. Concealment of these records and the refusal to obey the law was scarcely mentioned in most of the press. Bush attempted to resolve the matter with the executive order giving presidents, beginning with Reagan, the same power as sitting presidents to keep their papers private. The executive order reversed the Presidential Records Act. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said the action was justified because of the September 11 attack on America. Molly Ivins, one of the few to comment upon this usurpation of power thought it was because the papers could “contain information damaging to the reputation of Poppy Bush, who was then vice president, and/or the reputations of old Reaganites like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.” The Executive Order is being challenged in the courts by Public Interest, but the political outlooks of the judges who hear the case could determine the outcome. <br /><br /> Bush had also moved to keep control of his gubernatorial papers by placing them in his father’s presidential library. Using the terrorist threat as an excuse, Attorney General John Ashcroft advised government agencies that he would support their efforts to withhold records requested under the Freedom of Information Act. A few newspapers noted that the Bush administration made haste to release the correspondence of Enron chairman Ken Lay with Clinton’s two Secretaries of the Treasury, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Lay offered Rubin a seat on the Enron board, which was declined. Summers was asked to resist a call to regulate derivatives. There was no evidence that the letters produced the desired results. On the other hand, Kenneth Lay had spent more than $600,000 to advance the political career of George W. Bush. During the campaign of 2000, Enron also loaned Bush a corporate jet for whistle-stopping. Lay had been appointed to the senior Bush’s Energy Council, and the Energy Policy Act, passed under the first Bush, forced utilities to permit energy traders like Enron to use their pipelines. By long delaying the seizure of Enron’s papers after it was clear that there had been widespread corporate wrong-doing, the Bush administration made it possible for extensive shredding of documents to occur.<br /><br /> In 2006, the Bush administration refused to release papers on its badly bungled handling of the hurricane Katrina, which did massive damage to the Gulf coast. After Katrina struck, Bush said he had no idea that New Orleans would be flooded or its levees would break, yet evidence turned up in February 2006 that he had been warned about those possibilities hours before the disaster occurred. The decision to stonewall on the FEMA papers issue and the refusal to permit top White House officials to testify before Congressional committees was clearly an attempt at damage control. In 2007, a federal judge commented on the “Kafkaesque” hurdles people had to jump in order to obtain FEMA assistance. FEMA legal service people were kept under a gag order so that the complete picture of the agency’s ineptitude or disinterest could not be revealed. It was also revealed that much FEMA food has simply gone to rot and that the agency had put out false figures about how many people it put into hotel rooms. While dealing with disastrous fires that year, the agency resorted to a faked press conference to burnish its image. <br /><br /> The Bush administration in 2002 stopped reporting information about factory closings, and acknowledged that it was doing so only in a footnote to a document released on Christmas Eve, 2002. In the environmental arena, there was an effort to tone down and/or delete scientific data from reports written by government environmental professionals that contradicted administration policy. Pollster Frank Luntz warned that the scientific debate about global warming “is closing against us but is not yet closed. There is still an opportunity to challenge the science.” This was essentially done by censorship and editing. By early 2004, the administration found the ultimate policy for dealing with scientific findings. It created a scientific review process under the Office of Management and Budget that could delay the implementation of environmental and health regulations until the scientific information underpinning them was approved by this new review process. Joan Claybrook remarked, “this is an attempt at paralysis by analysis.” <br /><br /> There seemed to be a distrust of government experts as though they were somehow uninformed obstructionists determined to get in the way of progress. This characterization was applied to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, economists, environmentalists, and the CIA. The latter was particularly distrusted because it often criticized estimates and claims made by the Neo Conservatives and their Iraqi exile clients. This deep distrust of experts is partly an outgrowth of the Republicans’ critique of the so-called New Class. Even the Bush administration’s assault on the findings of hard sciences, particularly in regard to global warming, is more than pandering to industrial donors. It is a manifestation of the ideologues hostility to experts and is rooted in their critique of the so-called New Class. <br /> <br /> In 2006, Dr. James E. Hansen, head of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, complained that NASA has attempted to stop his frequent warnings about global warming. It ordered the public relations people to monitor future lectures, papers, and postings as well as requests from journalists for interviews. A public relations official relayed to him that NASA warned there would be “dire consequences” if he continued to speak in the same manner about global warming. A NASA official went on record as being unhappy that Hansen spoke on liberal NPR and stated that his job was “to make the president look good” and that Hansen was disloyal civil servant. For a time, his superiors assigned a “minder” to Hansen, but they it was learned that the young man who was to monitor Hansen’s behavior did not possess the degree he claimed to have. In 2006, Hansen compared Bush’s censorship of science with the way Stalin’s minions distorted it. It was reported that political appointees at NASA exerted heavy pressure during the 2004 election to prevent publication of information about glaciers melting, climate change, or global warming. <br /><br /> When government scientists produce facts that offend the Bush administration's corporate allies, the administration has moved to suppress the information. Dr. James Zahn was ordered by the Department of Agriculture not to publicize information about superbugs in huge hog farms due to pressure from the National Pork Producers Council. At the Department of Interior, the deletion and alteration of scientific information became a standard procedure. Scientists who were likely to find information that contradicted Bush policies or threatened corporate interests have been removed from federal panels. Tony Oppegard, a federal engineer heading a geodesic study of mountain top strip mining was fired as soon as Bush took office. The White House had little reason to share information with Congress or seek its imput. Republicans in the House and Senate are held in line by Teutonic discipline, and dutifully follow the White House line. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska complained that “You have an administration that does not reach out or see much value in consulting with Congress. They treat Congress as an appendage, a constitutional nuisance . <br /><br /> The George W. Bush administration has found another means to avoid vigorous enforcement of regulatory law by packing the top levels of the civil service with political appointees. Other administrations have done some of this, but Paul Light of the Brookings Institution considered the 12% increase of employees at this level “stunning. ” Appointments on Schedule C do not require Congressional approval. But the extent of these appointments suggests an intention to politicize the federal service and challenge the long-standing merit principle in civil service hiring. The plan for undoing much of the federal civil service system was laid out in January 2001 in the Heritage Foundation’s “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel.” The document called for appointments based on loyalty as the first criterion rather than expertise. It maintained that the professional civil service should be considered the enemy and called for the outsourcing of as much work as possible. In early, 2007 the Bush administration capped its battle against the professional civil service with an executive order that required any changes in federal regulations had to be approved by political appointees in the departments and agencies of government. <br /><br /> The penchant for secrecy also involves an effort to control the flow of information about foreign policy. Just as William Casey, CIA director under Ronald Reagan, purged dissidents in the agency, Porter Goss, George W. Bush’s appointee, has made it clear that information coming out of the agency must fit the administration’s policy line. He has refused to release to Congress an assessment of how much damage was done by the outing of covert agent Valerie Plame. Goss and his aides have expressed displeasure with the results of a study by former deputy director Richard Kerr that detailed intelligence failures prior to the invasion of Iraq. He has delayed publication of the issue of Studies in Intelligence that referenced the report, erected new barriers to what can be printed there, and provoked the resignation of the editor and chairman of the editorial board. Career officers have vacated 20 top positions and 90 senior officials have resigned. A purge also occurred in Condi Rice’s Department of State, but it was more gentle. Officials who disagreed verbally or in their reports with the Bush Cheney NeoCons have had their security clearances pulled and they have been reassigned to less important tasks. Some had dealt with the Middle East, Iran, international law, the environment, non-proliferation, Latin America, and Africa. <br /><br /> Perhaps the administration’s penchant for secrecy is simply a reflection of the mindset of corporate CEO, who are impatient with public discussion and the squabbling of politicians. Bush and Cheney were both corporate CEOs and promised to use their executive skills to solve national problems. After the disclosure of many CEO-induced scandals, they said no more about the advantages of putting CEOs in office but their governing style did not change. It was marked by impatience with discussion, contempt for compromise, ruthlessness with opponents, chumminess with business cronies, secretiveness, and hierarchal outlook. Whether several of these traits represented a disdain for some aspects of democracy remains to be seen. <br /><br /> The Bush energy plan was developed in secret by Vice President Cheney and passed in 2005 in proceedings often clouded in secrecy. There were efforts to open the task force records, but they were successfully blocked in the courts. The Bush administration acknowledged that Vice President met with Enron executives six times about the proceedings of his energy task force. More complete information about its proceedings has not yet become available. It is known, however, that representatives of the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and as well as Carl Pope, director of the Sierra Club, were given an audience with the vice president only after the details of the energy plan had been made public. The deliberations of the energy task force resulted in quick approval for controversial of the pebble-bed nuclear reactor of Exelon Corporation. The firm, which has made large contributions to the Republican Party, insists that the design will provide safer cheap power in abundance, but environmentalists dispute these claims. <br /><br /> A successful effort to cloak critical information in secrecy was accompanied by a very skillful effort to manipulate the press and manage the news. By the end of George W. Bush’s third year in the White House, Harpers’ Magazine publisher Rick MacArthur told a radio interviewer that the “White House press corps...has now turned into ...[a] full time press agency for the President of the United States.” Later in the interview he added that the public should “assume that the press is now part of the government.” On reflection, Mac Arthur would certainly back off from full meaning of these assessments, but he was correct in noting that the national press had lost its ability to critically cover this GOP administration. British journalist Greg Palast has referred to the mainstream American press as the dependent press because information is so tightly controlled that it must cater to the Bush administration in order to be rewarded with even small pieces of information. Richard L. Ehrlich, Jr., Maryland’s Republican governor, formalized this way of dealing with the press in November 2004 when he signed a written order forbidding employees to talk to two reporters for the Baltimore Sun. Two federal courts subsequently upheld the legality of that order.<br /><br /> It insists upon enforcing the Pentagon’s 1991 ban on taking photographs of coffins carrying the bodies of American soldiers at Dover Air Force Base. When the President held a huge rally for troops at Fort Carson, the press was ordered not to talk to any soldiers before, during, or after the rally. They obeyed, and only the Rocky Mountain News reported on the orders given to the press. The skill of the Bush administration in manipulating the press was demonstrated in 2004, when the Social Security Administration ran many advertisements clearly touting the advantages of Bush’s prescription care plan. Few noticed that the advertisements could have a political effect. Later that year, the Department of Education, paid $700,000 to an agency to advertise Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, a major Bush bragging point. The department also paid TV talk show host Armstrong Williams $240,000 to talk up the program in the black community. When the payment came to light, there was little discussion about blurring the lines between a journalist and an paid advocate. <br /><br /> The federal government paid Maggie Gallagher $21,500 to promote the Bush approach to marriage, and another conservative columnist was paid $10,000 to do the same. The use of taxpayer money for political purposes was nearly a non-issue in the public and political forums. In a related matter, private corporations began to provide local television stations with video news releases, which the stations presented as ordinary news. Sometimes the releases had political content and other times they were more commercial in nature.<br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-34938818523681607522008-05-11T16:55:00.000-07:002008-05-11T17:01:43.319-07:00Bush Fires Eight US AttorneysIn George W. Bush's second term, the unwarranted firings of eight U.S. Attorneys did become major news. The Department of Justice ousted Carol Lam of San Diego in a purge of U.S. Attorneys. She put Congressman Cunningham in prison, was in charge of following up on connections to his case, and was close to obtaining House documents on Representative Jerry Lewis, a Californian who had been appropriations chairman. She was one of eight US Attorneys who appeared to have been removed for political reasons. To prevent Senate questioning of the replacements, a new provision of the amended Patriot Act was used in appointing the replacements as interim US Attorneys, who could serve indefinitely and whose appointments did not require Senate confirmation.<br /><br /> The removal of Thomas Di Biagio in Maryland was attributed to his looking into people connected with the Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich funneling money from gaming interest to promote legalized slot machines. Di Biagio also examined their links with a Washington/DC prostitution ring run by Deboraj Jeane Palfrey, later known as the “DC Madame.” She was subsequently prosecuted and she claimed that she was a scapegoat for her customers, whose names were seqled by a federal judge. She speculated that some of her employees were involved in the sex ring associated with former Congressman Randy Cunningham and Mitchell Wade of MZM, Inc. <br /><br /> In Nevada, David Bogden was removed, and it was wondered if the cause was his looking into Governor Jim Gibson’s receiving payments or gifts from a firm that received secret military contracts when Gibson was in Congress. Senator Peter Domenici pressed for the removal of David C. Iglesias because he had not sped up an investigation in time to damage New Mexico Democrats in the 2006 elections. In Washington State, John McKay had angered superiors because he could not prove that the Democrats had stolen the gubernatorial election of 2004. He said he found no evidence and was unwilling to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury. Representative Doc Hastings, former chair of the ethics committee, had called him about the Washington Gubernatorial recount. A Justice official said McKay could have been removed because he was to aggressive in seeking a thorough investigation of the murder of an assistant US attorney, who had been a prominent anti-gun advocate. <br /><br /> Paul Charlton of Arizona was removed while he was investigating very questionable land deals on the part of Republican Congressman Rick Renzi. In Arkansas, Karl Rove associate Timothy Griffin was appointed to replace a man with a good record. Griffin had been research director of the Republican National Committee and in 2004 masterminded the “caging” of 70,000 would be voters. “Caging “ is a method of setting up voters to have their registration challenged by a variety of very effective procedures. Challenging potential voters based on caging lists can occur at the polls. The Republican National Committee was forced to forego caging some years ago in a consent decree because it had targeted black for caging, but the consent decree did not apply to state parties. In most cases they would not know they had been removed until it was too late. They were mostly minority people—some students, some soldiers, and some in homeless shelters. Caging is an extremely effective technique today the HAVA Act of 2002 appears to partially legitimize and facilitate it. <br /><br /> It developed that Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales had discussed this purge of federal attorneys even before Gonzales became Attorney General. However, Gonzales had said that he was not involved in the discussion of the removals. Kyle, Sampson, his former chief of staff, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Attorney General was very much involved in the process. However, Sampson added that he himself had no idea that any of those prosecutors were involved in very sensitive political investigations. That seemed very implausible. But he admitted that he had suggested firing Patrick Fitzgerald, who was the special prosecutor in the Plame Case. No wonder Republicans on the committee wanted to shut down that hearing. <br /><br /> Evidence was produced that Monica Goodling, once a senior aide to Gonzales, had created a political test for becoming an Assistant U.S. Attorney. This violated long-standing Department of Justice policies. Gonzales also gave her and Kyle Sampson, his former chief of staff, the power to fire the department’s top officials. All this made it much more difficult to deny that the Justice Department had been politicized.<br /><br /> A study by professors Donald Shields and John Cragan showed that of 375 corruption cases under US attorneys under Bush to early 2007, 298 involved Democrats and 67 involved Republicans, and still another 10 involved independents. John Nichols of The Capitol Times, placed the Gonzales question in a larger context: “The Controversy that matters is not about the attorney general’s hiring practices. It is about a lawless administration, and the president who has led this country further and further from its constitutional moorings.” The Gonzales controversy has distracted attention from the sad fate of the Civil Rights Division, which has been gutted, with career lawyers forced out to make way for appointees with very conservative credentials. <br /><br /> It was recalled that U.S. Attorney Chris Christie in New Jersey opened an investigation of Senator Bob Menendez when he was in a close election contest, suggesting that the criminals he testified against at the risk of his life years ago were actually in league with him. It was also recalled that a career U.S. attorney in Guam was removed in 2002. He had been investigating Jack Abramoff’s activities there. Abramoff wrote in March 2002, “I don’t care if they appoint bozo the clown, we need to get rid of Fred Black,” That aspect of the Abramoff investigation ended. <br /> <br /> The investigation of the firings was hampered through claims of executive privilege, claims of lost e-mails, and the refusal to turn over other documents. Nevertheless, it produced the admission and incontrovertible evidence that the Bush administration had violated prohibitions regarding the hiring of civil service attorneys on the basis of political affiliation. This was one more piece of evidence that Republicans in the Justice Department put the interests of their party above that of the people of the United States. Traditional barriers designed to separate the work of the DOJ from politics simply dissolved. Under Bush, 471 White House aides were authorized to talk directly to the top 30 people at Justice. In the past, only the President, Vice President, White House counsel, and chief of staff could contact people at the top of the Department of Justice. <br /><br /> In the end, it proved impossible measure the extent to which the Department of Justice had been politicized because the Executive branch simply refused to provide the documents Congressional investigators subpoenaed. The balance between the branches had been badly eroded, and there was little public outcry. The interesting investigation of Puerto Rico’s Democratic Governor, Anibal Acevedo-Vila, probably was related to all this. The island’s career US Attorney, who had been promised Republican backing for a permanent slot, carried on a long and apparently fruitless investigation of the governor. It began with claims of campaign finance irregularities and spread into every aspect of the man’s life including his relations with a delegate to Congress, clothing purchases, whether he had plastic surgery, and whether his hair was a replacement or original. The investigation was marked by many seemingly purposeful leaks. <br /><br />The Congressional investigation of the political firings began to sputter to a close as the Executive Branch refused to provide needed information and witnesses. It also claimed that it somehow lost millions of e-mails. The final blow came when the Bush Justice Department announced that it was prohibiting US Attorneys from enforcing Congressional subpoenas. <br /><br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com29tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-35495102303209492162008-05-11T16:54:00.000-07:002008-05-11T16:55:48.007-07:00Some Possible Abuses of Power under George W. BushThere is strong reason to believe that the FBI was used in an effort to influence a Philadelphia election. The Philadelphia mayoral election of 2004provided a blatant example of how the abuse of federal power was used in an effort to influence voters. The FBI installed listening devices in the ceiling of Philadelphia Mayor John Street’s office before a regularly scheduled security sweep. The FBI also seized one of the Democratic mayor’s handheld computers. The agency quickly leaked that he was a subject of investigation, possibly in connection with fixing parking tickets or the fact that his brother got a part of a construction contract. The timing of these moves left the popular mayor in limbo, unable to defend himself against undisclosed charges and likely to lose votes as a result of the situation. Skeptics thought these actions part of an “October surprise,” aimed at placing City Hall in Republican hands in time for the presidential election of 2004. Believing Ashcroft was abusing his powers for political ends, black voters turned out in droves to give Street another term. <br /><br /> There are strong indications that the Department of Interior also used its power to help key Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff do business with Indian Tribes. Secretary Gail Norton also proved adept as using her supervision of the Bureau of Indian Affairs for the advantage of her party. In the fall of 2001, she met with leaders of the Mississippi Choctaw, the Chitimacha, and the Coushatta. Bush fundraiser Jack Abramoff represented these tribes. Each tribe was reported to pledge amounts approaching a million dollars to the 2002 campaign. Wayne Smith, second in command at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, reportedly used former business partner Phil Bersinger to raise funds. Bersinger’s approach to Linda Amelia of the Chinooks was so blatant that Ms. Smith thought an FBI sting operation was underway. Another group of Indian tribe leaders met with President Bush at a meeting arranged by Americans for Tax Reform, a group they helped to finance. <br /><br /> Norton’s accounting methods, designed to help wealthy ranchers, also reveal an inclination to abuse power. In September 2002, a federal district judge found Norton guilty on four counts of “fraud on the court” for lying about efforts to improve accounting methods with respect to collecting money from leased Native American lands. Apparently, millions had not been collected for decades. Other administrations had been remiss in correcting problems in the system, but the judge claimed Norton had reached new heights in disregard for court orders. Norton’s Department of the Interior also opened Wyoming’s Powder River Basin to as many as 51, 444 gas wells which will threaten water sources ranchers depend upon and interfere with agriculture in numerous ways. <br /><br /> There was evidence of monumental waste and fraud in the conduct of the Iraq War, but it was difficult to get a complete picture of what was going on. Even the staid Department of State joined in the cover-ups. Its inspector General suppressed reports that showed waste and fraud in the construction of the embassy complex in Baghdad, the largest in the world. The Department’s Inspector General derailed investigations of the Blackwater security firm and warned the former head of Public Broadcasting that both Congress and the Justice Department were investigating him for collecting twice for the same work and for billing two public agencies. Many thought the man shielded Blackwater because his brother was on a Blackwater board, but it is doubtful that he had this information. Although there have been some real horror stories about waste and fraud in the Iraq War, it has proven difficult to access detailed information. Contractor fraud cases are often dealt with under the Civil War’s False Claims Act. Someone with information files a “qui tam” suite in hopes that the Department of Justice will take up the case and that the filer will obtain about 18% of the judgment. The law provides that the information be sealed for 60 days while the Department decides what to do. In the past, it was not unusual for the DOJ to seek extensions of this time, but the Bush Department of Justice has developed a pattern of repeatedly seeking extensions and, thus, effectively gagging indefinitely those with information about fraud. The decision not to insist that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root adhere to established DOD accounting standards has effectively thrown a veil of secrecy over KBR’s activities there. Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction has complained that KBR did not “have certified billing or cost and schedule reporting systems” in place. There was no good way of knowing if the taxpayer was getting adequate value for payments. These payments were on a cost plus basis. Two years after made that comment, the Army Material Command made the same complaint in reference to learning what subcontractors were doing. <br /><br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-22385385606103471982008-05-11T16:51:00.000-07:002008-05-11T16:54:02.244-07:00Impatience with DissentUnder George W. Bush, Republicans have evinced a great impatience with legitimate dissent. Republican campaigning techniques demonstrated an impatience with dissent and a disregard for the rights of dissenters to express themselves. During the campaigns of 2000 and 2004, the Bush campaigns carefully screened non- Republicans from their rallies. This is perfectly legal and has a precedent in Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, but it is hardly democratic. After winning reelection in 2004, Bush barnstormed the nation speaking for his so-called Social Security reforms but it was reported in at least one location that his advance people provided a non-admit list for Fargo, North Dakota, rallies so that known Democratic activists would be excluded from the rally at a local high school. At other rallies, people were required to sign pledges to support the Bush privatization plan before being admitted to rallies. In Denver, a Republican operative posing as a Secret Service agent ejected three people from a rally. <br /> <br /> In the same year one Steve Howards approached Cheney in a Denver mall and told him that his policies were reprehensible. Ten minutes later, the Secret Service handcuffed him and charged him with harassment. In 2006, anti-war protestor Cindy Sheehan had a ticket to view the state of the union address from the fifth gallery of the House, but she was cuffed and arrested in an elevator because she wore an anti-war shirt. A policeman said she was being held “ because you were protesting." Later a Republican Congressman’s wife was removed from a gallery because she wore a pro-war shirt. She was not arrested. In late 2005, Veterans Administration officials investigated nurse Laura Berg because she wrote a letter to the editor critical of the Bush administration. First, they seized her computer, hoping they could prove she wrote the letter while at work. When that failed, they informed her they were continuing an investigation of sedition. <br /> <br /> That the Bush campaigns used police and secret service to keep protesters away from the traveling chief executive is also troubling because it impinged upon free expression. Outrage over the outcome of the disputed 2000 election in Florida led placard-carrying protesters to show up at Bush appearances in his first year as president. Claiming these citizens threatened the president’s security; they were kept out of sight. The real reason may have been a desire to keep them out of the range of television cameras. When Bush flew into Green Bay, Wisconsin, to address friendly unionists in Kaukauna on Labor Day, protesters were kept off the tarmac and away from the parade route. When President Bush visited Greensboro, NC, on July 25, placard carrying peace demonstrators were kept more than a mile away from him. They had tried unsuccessfully to get permission to stand along his parade route with their signs. <br /><br />In time, the Secret Service developing a policy of creating Free Speech or Demonstration Zone’s far away from parade routes and places where Bush would speak. By late 2003, the Free Speech Zone’s were sometimes half a mile away from where Bush would appear. When George W. Bush appeared at a carpenters’ rally on Labor Day, 2002 in western Pennsylvania, Bill Neel, 65, of Butler, Pa. showed up with a sign that read “The Bushes must truly love the poor--they’ve made so many of us.” Neel refused to stay in the protest pen and was arrested for disorderly conduct. Neel argued, “the whole country is a free speech zone.” By 2007, the name had been changed to First Amendment Zones, which seems like some sort of sick joke or at least an oxymoron. <br /><br /> In Oregon, Peter Buckley, 45, complained in the Oregonian that he and other protesters were rounded up and placed in a dirt compound that was surrounded by a six-foot high cyclone fence. Buckley ran for Congress in 2002. People in Tampa, Florida, including two grandmothers, were arrested in 2001 at a Bush rally because they held up signs outside a remote protest zone. Bush spokesmen claimed these people must be kept far away for security reasons, but people carrying pro-Bush signs were permitted along parade routes and very close to him at rallies. In the past, courts have invalidated protest pens, but the practice has become routine for the president. The point is to make protesters invisible to television cameras and journalists. <br /> <br /> Eventually, investigators used the Freedom of Information Act to turn up a government manual on how to deal with protesters and demonstrators called “Presidential Advice Manual.” Published in October 2002, it outlined the procedures described above and emphasized that protesters and demonstrators should be kept out of the view of television cameras. They were also to be kept “preferably not in view of the event site or motorcade route.” There should be “rally squads” comprised of young people and “local athletic teams” to shout down protesters should they somehow get inside an event. When Vice President Cheney appeared at a fundraiser at an Estero, Florida resort in late 2003, security people forced protesters to move some distance from the resort entrance so they would not disturb Cheney. Efforts to curb protesters can also be seen as an effort to curb public discourse.<br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-7815826475877278732008-05-11T16:46:00.000-07:002008-05-11T16:51:13.292-07:00Republican Conservatism Falls Back on Authoritarian RootsLionel Trilling wrote in 1950 about conservatives becoming nearly extinct. In 2006, the ran the country but still complain “that liberals run things even when they manifestly don’t....” They still complain that liberals are “snooty, snobby know-it-alls” who allegedly disparage the people in middle America as “those hicks in flyover country.” Of course, it was the creation of populist resentment now that made possible the Republican triumph.<br /><br /> In the late 19th Century, a similar situation sparked a great populist protest. One hundred years later, a potential populist uprising of that kind was unthinkable. The New Right had channeled populist energies into battling those who would limit gun ownership, advance reproductive rights, or defend people’s choice of lifestyle. The process of harnessing the energies of right-wing populists transformed most conservatives into the very antithesis of the conservatives of the 1950s. The new conservatives ballooned government’s size, the power of the executive, and the national debt, seemed contemptuous of reasonable debate, and erected new and very dangerous threats to civil liberties<br /><br /> John Wesley Dean of Watergate fame, believes that 1994 marked the beginning of what he calls the “postmodern period” of American conservatism, a time in which “it has regressed to its earliest authoritarian roots.” Traditional conservative Paul Craig Roberts became the object of their wrath when he opposed the invasion of Iraq. He likened his new enemies to the Nazi Brownshirts and claimed that obsession with power and force prevented the original Brownshirts from recognizing the implications for their country of their reckless doctrines. “Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy. I went overnight from being an object of conservative adulation to one of derision when I wrote that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a "strategic blunder’” <br /><br /> Old style conservatives like Roberts are uncomfortable with the hyperventilated rhetoric of the new conservatives and are increasingly unwelcome in their company. Daniel Borchers, another old style conservative, edits a newsletter and web page that is critical of the tactics and rhetoric of Ann Coulter. When he attended a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference his newsletters were confiscated and organizers tried to strip him of his press credentials. Asked why he bucks the tide, he said “Honor requires outing. Silence is complicity.” By 2006, there was little indication that these traditional conservatives comprised more than a tiny fraction of the electorate. <br /><br /> From the outset, the administration of George W. Bush has sought to maximize its power by testing the customary and legal limits of executive power. Moreover it has incorporated into its modus operandi the same ugly, bare-knuckle tactics that marked its campaigns. Aside from arrogance, a number of factors might contribute to this inclination to employ ugly tactics and stretch legal limits. Richard Nixon believed in executive supremacy, and after his administration steps were taken to curb these tendencies. Vice President Richard Cheney was dedicated to the Nixonian vision and was bent on moving backward toward it .A preoccupation with national security matters might have led some to assume that the will of the commander essentially had the force of law.. In foreign affairs, Republican Neo Conservative thinking was marked by a “romance of the ruthless” that entertained the notion that a few bright, dedicated people could bring about great change, especially if they are unhampered by traditional or even legal restraints. Their willing allies were old-school nationalists--sometimes called foreign policy fundamentalists-- who long had chafed at the restraints placed on the use of military force. In domestic matters, some of the Neo Conservatives brought with them the old Leninist contempt for compromise and conviction that the end justifies the means and that it is perfectly justifiable to accuse your enemies of anything. David Horowitz, probably the brightest and most effective of them, has demonstrated this tendency. Some Christian Evangelicals--particularly the Restorationists-- share a similar approach. <br /><br /> A rather small example of a disregard for democratic protocols was President Bush’s inclination in his second term to denounce Democrats before military audiences. It is true that the military has become more and more Republican over time, but this breach of tradition as well as military protocol is, according to a retired Marine general “the sort of thing you find in other countries where the military and certain political parties are aligned.” It suggests the military is a red states militia. In 2000, the Bush campaign stepped over the line separating the military and politics by advertising in Army Times and other service publications. <br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-77911726857737109272008-05-11T16:42:00.000-07:002008-05-11T16:46:12.518-07:00Republican Scandals in G.W. Bush's SEcond T4ermWhen George W. Bush’s second term began, pundit Kevin Drum said it would be marked by scandal. He thought they would be particularly susceptible to scandal because “Both Bush and the current Republican Party leadership have already demonstrated a ruthlessness and disregard for rational political norms. A “ second reason for foreseeing scandal was that the Republican Congress had largely given up its role of oversight of the executive branch.” When Clinton was in the White House, committees in both chambers limited oversight largely to scandal hunting. When George W. Bush entered the White House, oversight ended and Congress became supine, while its leadership assumed the roles of his loyal lieutenants. Republican leaders gave no sign they understood the institutional prerogatives of Congress or that they could be characterized by institutional patriotism. <br /> <br /> Beginning in 2005, the Republican Party was rocked by a number of scandals. Its key lobbyist Jack Abramoff and two of his partners were indicted, as was Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney’s Chief of staff. Libby was indicted for lying in connection with the outing of CIA covert agent, Valerie Plame. Her identity was first revealed by conservative columnist Robert Novak who said he got the information from two administration officials CNN talk show host Chris Matthews subsequently called Ambassador Wilson to warn him that Karl Rove had called him to say “Wilson’s wife is fair game.” It appears that she was outed to embarrass her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson and UN weapons inspector David Albright had appeared on CNN together and criticized the claim that Iraq had negotiated with Niger to acquire nuclear materials. Vice President Cheney directed the CIA to dig up information to discredit Albright. He also held a meeting with NSA and CIA people in which he ordered a “work-up” on Wilson, whom he called “an ‘asshole’ [and] a son of a bitch.” They started spreading the word that Wilson was a “womanizer” and looked for more stories to circulate. In February 2005, Federal Judge Tatel ruled that the federal law protecting covert agents had been violated. Yet, the prosecutor apparently hit a stonewall in trying to learn who originally gave up her identity and was forced to only look at obstruction of justice matters. This apparently took both Vice President Cheney and Karl Rove out of the line of fire. The White House has refused to give the prosecutor e-mails that mentioned Plame and has maintained that malfunctions in the White House e-mail system erased many relevant communications. Reporters later found that all White House e-mails were backed up and stored elsewhere, but nothing was done to retrieve them. The story about the millions of missing e-mails changes several more times, as they became more important. For example, a Congressional committee wanted them to see if it was true that Karl Rove was behind the prosecution of Democratic governor, Don Siegelman of Alabama. The last story was that millions of e-mails were destroyed for 2—3-2005 when hard drives were destroyed because the White House was in the process of replacing a third of its computers.<br /><br /> Libby told prosecutors that he had been given the power to declassify information, and Vice President Cheney subsequently said there was an executive order that gave the president and vice president the power to declassify information. It later developed that this process was used to leak the intelligence estimate on Iraq’s military capacities to The New York Times. The most likely justification for doing so was to use such information to sell the war in Iraq. A court put the whole matter on the back burner, deferring a trial until two months after the 2006 elections. Republicans have been busily raising defense funds for Libby as though being involved in the treasonable outing of a covert agent was an act of high patriotism. In the end, President Bush commuted Libby’s sentence, and the true facts of the case never came out.<br /><br /> The second Bush term was marked by scandal. Most of it involved Republicans, but a black Democrat, Representative William Jefferson, was found with $100,000, with which he was supposed to bribe an African government. Of course, the matter was portrayed as though he was to get the full $100,000. The amount of money going to Republicans made the $100,000 look like chickenfeed. To be fair, it should be noted that the end of five Democratic dominance in the House were also marked by scandal. Speaker Jim Wright had to step down because he pressured some people to buy and distribute a book he had written. About $40,000 in sales was involved. Newt Gingrich, who played the central role in forcing Wright’s resignation, later quietly paid $300,000 to settle an ethics complaint. Representative Dan Rostenkowski was sent to prison for misappropriating government property. He gave away some furniture and ash trays, but he claimed he bought them for his offices with his campaign funds. Of course, once he placed them in a government office, they were government property. In 2006, there was concern that the scandal in Congress would metastasize “from a cancer on Congress to a cancer on the Republican Party in general and this presidency in particular.” Whether this would occur depended upon the level of public interest, and in this matter there was no Monica Lewinsky. It was said, “The Abramoff scandal, so far anyway, boasts plenty of cigars but no sex.” However, this proved to be partially wrong as Abramoff money was found to fund at least one sex for Congressional votes ring, but there was not a great deal of public interest directed at “Hookergate.” <br /><br /> Tom De Lay and two associates thought they had found a way around the Texas law forbidding corporate contributions to Texas political races. Instead a local grand jury indicted DeLay. He, at first, temporarily stepped down from his majority leader’s position, and it soon became clear the party would not let him reclaim it. He resigned the post and was replaced by John A. Boehner of Ohio, who unconvincingly presented himself as a reformer. However, he had voted against almost all ethics reform measures, and he soon displayed a “shockingly blasé,” wanting to consign the whole matter of reform to “the ultimate dead letter office, the House ethics committee.” Randy Cunningham of California was sent to prison for taking much in excess of $2 million in bribes. Mitch Wade of MZM, Inc, who gave Cunningham most of the money was also indicted. May James, wife of MZM’s second in command, worked in the Pentagon office that supervised the firm’s contract. MZM had been given a contract to handle and analyze some intelligence and was involved in cooking information to justify the invasion of Iraq. Wade, admitted to making illegal contributions to Virginia Republican Virgil Goode, Jr., and Katherine Harris of Florida. The Justice Department claimed neither representative realized the contributions were illegal. Republican Representative Bob Ney of Ohio accepted a 27-month plea deal for accepting a bribe. Ney was a former CIA operative who occasionally did back channel missions in the Middle East and had tripped onto a WMD network that allegedly involved Richard Cheney. <br /><br /> Cunningham did not use “earmarks,” special appropriations of a local nature, to achieve his objectives. His method was to increase a defense or intelligence appropriation and then make sure it was spent with designated firms, who then did favors for Cunningham or his friends. Congress reacted to the Cunningham scandal by trying to limit earmarks by making them more transparent and by clearly identifying what Senator or Representative was behind each earmark. <br /><br /> The Cunningham probe later showed that fifteen Republican congressmen were involved in “Hookergate,” receiving sexual favors at the Westin Grand and Watergate Hotels from male and female prostitutes proved by another San Diegan, Brent Wilkes, who had ties to the CIA and the Iran-Contra scandal. The man whose limousine service was used for these gatherings had a 62 page rap sheet, but the firm was a Department of Homeland Security contractor. Most of the fifteen Republican Congressmen were on the subcommittee that handled defense contract appropriations. . Wilkes was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Cunningham case. Wilkes and Wade were both San Diego businessmen who had government contracts and routed some of the money back to the GOP through a firm run by two of Tom DeLay’s former aids and is suspected of being tied to Jack Abramoff. Wilkes’s ties to Congressmen went back to the 1980 when he was visiting CIA agent and close friend, Kyle “ Dusty” Foggo. Congressmen traveled there to view the progress of the secret war against progressives, and Wilkes said he got to know them during sexual encounters with women in Honduran villages. There was some talk that Mitch Wade tried to bribe Representative Katherine Harris, but one Capitol Hill figure said, “I think Mitch made a mistake trying to bribe Harris. She’s so incompetent, she can’t be bribed.” <br /><br /> “Hookergate” received little coverage in the mainstream press but it was covered far more than a similar one in the mid-eighties. Ed Rollins revealed that there had been a small sex for votes operation run by one lobbyist using one prostitute. Two dozen Republicans were involved, about half of whom were prominent. The scandal received no coverage, except as it involved Rep. Tom Evans of Delaware, who confessed to his wife and lost his seat. <br /><br /> Porter Goss, director of the CIA, resigned his position in May 2006 for unknown reasons, perhaps due to reports that he and “Dusty” Foggo had been seen at these parties where prostitutes were present. Foggo resigned soon thereafter, but this could have been due to his connection to a questionable CIA contract awarded to Wilkes. Foggo claimed that he was connected with the contract with Archer Logistics but had no idea his best friend owned it. A third figure who attended the parties was Brant “Nine Fingers” Bassett, who had been a CIA agent until 2000, when he joined Goss’s Congressional staff. In the brief time before leaving the CIA and joining Goss, he collected an “honorarium” from Wilkes for undisclosed services. It was difficult to determine if there were two sets of sex parties, hosted separately by Wilkes with contractor Mitchell Wade and Abramoff or whether they were the same operation. On “The Charlie Rose Show,” Republican strategist Ed Rollins confirmed that about fifteen sitting Republican congressmen were involved, a number of whom were on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. The CIA even went to the trouble of bring a dominatrix from Germany to take care of the needs of Republican Congressmen. <br /><br /> Titan Corporation, another San Diego defense contractor, was also a major contributor to Cunningham and Republicans. Its employees were accused of torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and it was fined $28,000,000 for fixing an election in Benin. It also hired Makram Chams as a contractor in Saudi Arabia. This man was known to have befriended Mohamed Atta when he was in Venice, Florida. Titan has an economic relationship with Skyway Aircraft of Saint Petersburg, a firm whose plane was seized by the Mexican government. It had 5.5 tons of cocaine aboard. The firm’s chairman is Brent Kovar, who is linked to Tom DeLay. The DC9's co owner was Royal Sons Motor Yacht Sales, an outfit muckraker Daniel Hopsicker thinks is part of a interlocking group of CIA “dummy front” companies. Although the Mexican army surrounded the plane, its pilot escaped. The Sky Way plane operates out of the same Venice airport where Mohamed Atta trained and could have been involved in the drug trade. The DEA began to investigate this possibility, but Attorney General Ashcroft shut down this probe. <br /><br /> Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was under investigation for improper handling of a blind trust, and it was revealed that he used $456,000 from an AIDS charity to keep political operatives on the payroll in anticipation of a presidential bid in 2008 The Abramoff investigation involved an inquiry into the bribery of Congressman and staff members and was headed by Alice Fisher, who became head of the Criminal Investigations division through an interim appointment. She had been with the Office of Homeland Security and deputy counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee. <br /><br /> Strange things happened in respect to the Abramoff investigation since 2002. In November of that year, Frederick Black, acting federal attorney on Guam, was removed a day after he subpoenaed a contract between Abramoff and the government of Guam. One of Black’s colleagues said, “Fred was removed because he asked to indict Abramoff.” Prosecutor Noll L. Hillman, who had been working on the case for two years, was suddenly nominated for a federal judgeship, leaving open a key job that could be filled with a loyalist. Representative George Miller said the timing was “startling” and added, “You have one of the chief prosecutors removed from a case that has tentacles throughout the Republican leadership of Congress, throughout the various agencies and into the White House. Andrew Lourie, a man with an interesting history, replaced Hilman. He headed the Justice Department’s Division of Public Integrity in 2001 and 2002 after Republican Congressmen persuaded Attorney General Ashcroft to demote the career lawyer, Lee Radek, who headed it. The White House promised to make public all of Abramoff’s contacts with its staff, but press secretary Scott McClellan later announced that this information would not be given to anyone. This exercise in stonewalling was largely ignored by the press, but Paul Krugman did take fellow journalists to task for ignoring the matter. <br /><br /> A poll showed that 68% of the public thought Congress should force White House officials to testify about the firing of the attorneys, and even more thought Congress should investigate. Oddly, a CNBC correspondent complained about the invstigation saying the Democrats looked “Too political in exploiting this.” Time’s managing editor share4d this view , saying the Democrats should back off “because it is so bad for them.” He added that “That’s not what voters want to see.” <br /><br /> Most of the press tried to give the affair a “balanced” approach by claiming that the Abramoff affair was bipartisan. It was reported across the board that he gave money to both Democrats and Republicans. When a few people noted that he did not give one personal contribution to a Democrat, the response was that he “directed” his Indian tribe clients to send contributions to the Democrats. If fact, the tribes had donated to Democrats before, and their giving to this party declined by 9% after they retained Abramoff. The White House refused to release pictures of Bush and Abramoff together and also refused to provide information on the people Abramoff contacted there. The Associated Press reported that he and his employees had almost 200 contacts with White House people in the first ten months of the Bush administration. Few in the press looked at the full implications of the Cunningham scandal, ignoring the votes for sex part.<br /><br /> Instead the press showered great attention on two Democratic members of Congress and the minute details provided by the now highly politicized Capitol police. Cynthia Mc Kinney had foolishly hit a policeman with a cell phone when he acted in a way she considered disrespectful, and foolishly let the story dominate the front page for days before offering an abject apology. Congressman Patrick Kennedy had a car accident at 2:30 AM, in which he was either under the influence of medications or drugs, but he handled the manner in a way guaranteeing that it would be drug out endlessly. An August 2002 an August 2002 Salon article showed that the Capitol Hill police have a history of not recognizing Mc Kinney <br /><br /> .Charges of driving under the influence of prescription drugs were brought by the Capitol Police with lightning speed, and Kennedy entered a guilty plea. Another case that discredited Democrats was that of Louisiana Democrat William Jefferson, who was caught in a sting accepting $100,000, $90,000 of which he stashed in his refrigerator. That was allegedly to be used to brine Nigerian officials. The FBI subsequently raided his Capitol Hill office, which touched off a dispute about the separation of powers. The fact that both McKinney and Jefferson were African Americans made their offenses look so much worse to more than a few voters. A misleading story about Senator Harry Reid also helped the GOP deflect criticism. The Associated Press made much over the fact that Democratic Senate Minority leader Harry Ried had accepted two fight tickets from the Nevada Gaming Commission. Its story was misleading and suggested Reid voted on a matter relating to the commission when he had not. AP stuck by its report as written and boasted in an internal memo that the story had set off a great deal of criticism of Reid. <br /> The DC federal district judge who authorized the raid was Thomas Hogan. On January 1, 2004, he permitted nuclear triggers smuggler Asher Karni a $100,000 bail with the condition that he resides in a Hebrew Shelter Home operated by a friend and defender of Jack Abramoff. Karni, had worked for both Israeli and Turkish intelligence. He smuggled 60 USA nuclear triggers through South Africa to Pakistan. His operation had been a target of the CIA nonproliferation unit run by Valerie Plame. Karni received a very light sentence--three years. <br /> By spring, 2006, the Republican scandals were enough under control that Representative Jerry Lewis, chairman of the appropriations committee, hired Jeffrey Shockey as the committee’s deputy staff director. Both men had been discussed in relationship to the various Abramoff scandals. Shockey said the Ethics Committee sanctioned the hire, but there is no paper record of this and Democrats have not been given the green light for similar hires. Shockey had somehow managed to collect $2 million from a lobbying firm in 2004 while working for Uncle Sam. Lewis was being investigated for his ties to Brent Wilkes, who contributed $60,000 to his last campaign. Lewis’s ties to the Copeland Lowery lobbying firm are also being scrutinized. That firm had failed to report $2,000,000 in income from 1998 to 2005 and found it necessary to submit a revised earnings statement. Most of these investigations were being carried out before grand juries in very conservative southern California. <br /><br /> Some speculated that there could be a reaction among the voters as great as that which deprived the Democrats of 50 House seats in 1994. However, political scientist Norman J. Ornstein calculated that there are so many safe Republican seats 2006 that at most their loss of House seats would be 20. That would turn out to be ten short of the actual number of lost seats, probably because experts on both sides had underestimated how many true independents there were in 2006. That would barely return control to the Democrats, but enough Democrats habitually vote with the Republicans in both houses that they could still advance their agenda In February 2006, the House and Senate Republican leadership moved to dampen the scandal by proposing modest reform legislation. It would prevent lobbyists under some conditions from making gifts to Congressmen or paying for trips. However, these practices were legal if they occurred as part of campaign functions. The Democrats offered a plan that was slightly tougher. It would prevent Congressmen from directing that lobbying firms hire people based on party membership. <br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-90693524809820926982008-05-11T16:36:00.000-07:002008-05-11T16:41:57.568-07:00The K Street ProjectThe so-called K Street Project was a potent tool for increasing Republican power. It was designed to force lobbying firms to purge Democrats, hire Republicans, and direct their contributions to Republican members and their political action committees. The House Republicans redoubled their earlier efforts to prevent their members from dealing with any lobbyists with Democratic connections. In the past, Democrats had sought contributions from lobbyists and the firms they represented. The Republicans broke new ground by demanding that these people and their firms sharply reduce what they contribute to Democrats. Republican members were also expected to shun environmental lobbyists and those for other causes favored by the Democrats. <br /><br /> Majority Leader Tom DeLay ruled that members should investigate lobbyists to be certain they have no connections to Democrats and do not work for corporations that have donated money to the Democratic Party. Democrats tried to bring Representative Oxley before the ethics committee when he insisted that the Investment Company Institute either fire Democrat Julie Domenick or get a Republican to work with her. Oxley, a member of the Financial Services Committee, was pressing for an investigation of how mutual funds disclose their fees to investors, and the Democrats use this connection to claim a breach of ethics. When DeLay was too obvious about refusing to deal with one firm’s representatives because its board chairman was a Democrat, the House Ethnics Committee found it necessary to issue a mild reprimand. In the Senate, former leader Trent Lott led a similar effort. Rush Limbaugh joined the effort by urging Republican House members to avoid lobbyist Linda Daschle, wife of the Senate minority leader. <br /><br /> The result of this so-called K Street Project is that Republican activists have been hired as lobbyists. Their chief loyalty is to their party, not the firms the represent and they channel almost all their firms contributions to the GOP In the past. The Republican Congressional leadership has learned how to exploit lobbyists to the fullest extent. Without making political contributions, firms learned they could not do business in Washington. The private e-mail of Westar Energy Inc. of Kansas said it was necessary to give to Republican POACs “to get a seat at the table.” The House Republicans redoubled their earlier efforts to prevent their members from dealing with any lobbyists with Democratic connections. Republicans rewarded contributing firms by allowing their lobbyists to sit with House committees in drafting legislation. These people often have desks in staff areas and draft legislation on government computers. In an effort to create a poll of lobbyists who were friendly to the Republican Party, De Lay called in lobbyists and lectured them about their hiring practices and political donations. He was equipped with data provided by Grover Norquist on each lobbying operation. His message was simple, “If you want to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules.” In 1996, GOP Chairman Haley Barbour and house leaders delivered the same blunt message to a meeting of CEOs. In theory, the strategy created an endless loop in which former Republican Congressmen and staffers occupied high-paying lobbying position, pumping huge amounts into the party, and electing more and more Republican senators and representatives. <br /><br /> Under Senator Rick Santorum, some Senate Republicans have joined the K Street Project, but lobbyists have not greatly increased their legislative roles in that chamber, Democrats had sought contributions from lobbyists and the firms they represented. The Republicans broke new ground by demanding that these people and their firms sharply reduce what they contribute to Democrats The mandatory hiring of Republican lobbyists was the key element in a carefully crafted play to lock Republicans into control of both Houses of Congress. It was expected that these highly partisan lobbyists would maximize contributions to Republican campaigns at the federal and state level. In return, they received more access to those in power; and, in the House, actually sat in on the drafting of legislation. Their funds at the state level helped elect Republican legislature that redrew Congressional and local district lines, creating many more invulnerable Republican seats. Of course, the two seats given by the Constitution to small, rural states enabled the party to slowly expanded on that great advantage facilitated the GOP hold on the Senate. <br /><br /> The result was that the GOP receives twice as much money as the Democrats from firms maintaining lobbyists in Washington. Tom De Lay had close ties with Republican lobbyists, particularly Jack Abramoff, and rose in the leadership by obtaining funds from lobbyists for other Republicans. Abramoff was the most successful Washington lobbyist and was a long-time intelligence asset for the apartheid regime in South Africa. His friend Bob Ney, chairman of the House Administration Committee, was the informal “Mayor of Capitol Hill” and used his power to reward Congressmen who cooperated with De Lay. He was also close to the lobbyists and openly pulled strings to help them. <br /><br /> When the Electronic Industries Alliance hired a former Democratic congressman rather than a Republican, the EIA found that its legislation was stalled. Lobbyists also learned that they could not access Karl Rove unless Norquist first cleared them. Rove’s appointments secretary had worked for key Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whom DeLay had described as his best friend. Norquist, who stands at the center of the GOP policy apparatus, proclaimed, “What the Republicans need is 50 Jack Abramoffs.” Lobbying firms learned to clear hires with Senator Rick Santorum and either DeLay or House Republican whip Roy Blunt. The K Street Strategy has produced a corps of lobbyists who are Republican Party operatives, whose first loyalty was to the Republican Party. A Senate Committee chaired by John McCain looked into some of Abramoff’s questionable relations with Indian tribes and found that some of their payments were channeled to political consultant Ralph Reed through Norquist’s Americans for Tax Justice and that Norquist took a processing fee. This finding should result in the powerful group losing its tax exemption. <br /><br /> One of the most interesting DeLay-Abramoff operations began in 1997, when DeLay visited Moscow ostensibly to meet religious people there. When he returned, he was working with a little-known Bohemian company and a London lawyer and--of course Abramoff-- to obtain legislation providing for the International Monetary Fund to assist certain Russian companies held by holdovers from the old Soviet regime. In return for this work, DeLay’s U.S. Family Network received $1,000,000 from the former Communists. According to the former chairman of its board, the network also received money from textile sweatshops in the Marianas that forced women to have abortions and backed prostitution. It was forced to pay a substantial fine for using its money for political advertisements. The real power behind the US Family Network was Ed Buckham, once De Lay’s chief of staff. The former chairman of the board said the organization operated to benefit Abramoff. <br /><br /> In May ABC reported that Speaker Dennis Hastert was a Justice Department target in the Abramoff scandal, but the Speaker denied it. Earlier, a major magazine hadrevealed that translator Sybil Edmonds had reported that Hastert had received $100,000 from the Turkish lobby, but a federal court subsequently gagged her. Hastert was also connected with a $207 million appropriation earmark to build a freeway west of Chicago, about five miles from some land he owned. He had a 67 acre farm in the name of his wife and a similar farm owned by him and two political associates. The highway made it possible for him to turn a $1.8 milli0on profit selling the land to a developer. This is what historians call “honest graft,” but he was infuriated when the Chicago press reported the story. <br /><br /> The Speaker had angered the Department of Justice when he criticized the FBI for raiding the office of Louisiana Democrat Bill Jefferson and carting off papers. The FBI refused to permit the Counsel of the House of Representatives or his attorney to witness the search. Jefferson had been stung in a sting operation accepting $100,000, (90,000 of which he deposited in his freezer). Jefferson had been deeply involved in assisting Americans do business in Nigeria and neighboring states. It has been speculated that he had files a huge bribe Halliburton paid in bribes to get a gas liquefaction contract. That was said to have occurred when Dick Cheney was chairman of the conglomerate. The FBI also searched the Pontiac, Maryland,home of the likely 2007 Nigerian presidential candidate Atiku Abubaker in an effort to scoop up and contain documents on the Halliburton bribe. The raid of a ranking foreign national was unprecedented. <br /><br />Jack Abramoff received a light prison sentence, and several others have gone to jail. <br />The deeper meanings of the scandal have not been found and the Bush administration's firing of US attorneys derailed much of the investigation. The conviction and subsequent suicide of the DC Madam made it more difficult to probe the sex for Congressional votes part of the scandal.<br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-53107606867091287172008-05-01T09:14:00.000-07:002008-05-01T09:18:04.772-07:00Procedural Abuses and the Decline of Minority Party Rights Under Republican Rule in CongressProcedural Abuses and the Decline of Minority Party Rights <br /> Two respected observers--moderate Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution and conservative Norman Ornstein, have observed that Democrats in their half-century period of dominance engaged in some abuses, “But they were neither as widespread nor as audacious as those we have seen in the past few years.” Mann charged that the Republican majorities have damaged the legislative process by sacrificing Congressional prerogatives and independence by deferring to the White House. In the 1980s, Democrats occasionally bent the rules for partisan purposes, reducing the role of Republicans in the legislative process.<br /><br /> A few times they used closed rules to shut off all amendments to bills, and there were some instances of limiting the number of amendments that could be introduced in the last Democratic Congress before Newt Gingrich and his followers took over, 35% of the important bills came with closed rules, if one includes those that somehow or other limited the number of amendments. In 1985, the Democrats seated an Indiana representative, whom Republicans insisted had not won his election. From that time on, influential Democrats worked hard to see that the rights of the minority were preserved. According to Mann and Ornstein, the advent of Republican power in the House led to “practices that were more unsettling than those of the Democrats [and they became] the norm.”<br /><br /> The abuses of legislative procedures were sometimes motivated by determination to accomplish some ideological goal, but much more often they were for the intention of including “ earmarks” –special set-aside appropriations buried in legislation-- that would benefit contributors. Republicans have greatly expanded on exclusionary practices Democrats had sometimes employed in the past and effectively shut the Democrats out of deliberations on key measures. In the entire 109th Congress, only two significant bills were allowed on the floor with open rules. The three-hour open voting process in the House to pass the Medicare Reform Act demonstrated that the legislative process had been greatly restructured and perhaps damaged. Intense pressure, including serious threats, was brought to bear on the most conservative Republicans, who thought the bill authorized too much spending. Nick Smith, a retiring member from Michigan, was told that the part would prevent his son from succeeding him. Smith was also told that someone would invest $100,000 in his son’s business if Smith voted with the leadership. Another version of the story was that $100,000 would be invested in the son’s campaign if Smith submitted. He did not budge. Now roll calls frequently stretch to two and three hours as leaders prowled the chamber to twist arms and offer enticements for changing votes. <br /><br /> In 1987, Republicans chastised Speaker Jim Wright for keeping the voting open ten minutes more than the normal fifteen minutes. The Republican whip then was Dick Cheney, who branded this “the most arrogant, heavy-handed abuse of power in the ten years I have been here.” Such an extraordinary procedure was even labeled an abuse of power by the Republican commentators on the “Beltway Boys.“ Both Speakers Gingrich and Hastert had pledged to uphold the fifteen minute rule. As noted, Republicans held the vote open three hours to pass the Medicare Act, and they had many other votes that were open for an hour or more. <br /><br /> The move toward one party government was abetted by the inability of the Democratic leadership to deal with the situation. Too many Democratic leaders, on the other hand, were temperamentally and intellectually unable to cope and still believed give and take and compromise should be the order of the day in Congress. As these highhanded procedures became more frequent, some doubted that bipartisanship and compromise were essential to sound public policy and the preservation of democratic traditions. <br /> <br /> Democrats often were not permitted to see key legislation until just before it was to be voted on, and more than 70% of legislation reached the floor with rules that prohibited amendments. Democrats also encountered great difficulty getting legislation they introduced to the floor. The operation of the House under the Republicans became far more centralized than it ever had been under the Democrats. Legislation was produced in leadership offices and simply put up for up or down votes. In November 2004, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert announced a new policy that prevented any legislation reaching the floor that did not have the support of the GOP caucus. The legislative role of the Democrats was reduced to” next to no role at all.” A Brookings Institution expert noted that the House restrictions on the minority had been taken to a new extreme.<br /><br /> Perhaps fearing even more restraints, the Democratic leadership refused to demand an investigation of Representative Mike Oakley’s demand that a Democratic lobbyist be fired in return for his Financial Services Committee’s dropping of an investigation of the mutual funds industry. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also declined to press for an investigation into Tom De Lay’s role in having the Department of Homeland Security track Texas legislature Democrats when they fled the state to avoid a vote. De Lay succeeded in getting the state redistricted, and Bush appointees trumped the objections of Justice Department lawyers that it violated the Voting Rights Act. Bush people at the top of the Department of Justice also scuttled the objection of those lawyers to what amounted to the reintroduction of the poll tax in Georgia. <br /><br /> Trent Lott, the Republican majority leader in 2001, fired the Senate parliamentarian when he ruled that the Bush tax cut package could not have the procedural protections afforded budgets. Moreover, the bipartisan Joint Taxation Committee was not given an opportunity to estimate the cost of the tax, perhaps because some suggest that the ultimate cost will be around $4 trillion. Such behavior reveals a troubling inclination to resort to authoritarian behavior. Some commentators believed the GOP numbers were simply manufactured from whole cloth. The numbers were not all that important to Republican ideologues because they adhered to a “market theology” that by definition was correct. Moreover, leaders of the Republican Congress and in the Bush White House had discovered “there are simply no limits to how much you can lie in American politics and get away with it.”<br /><br /> The Democrats were in no position to challenge Republican claims because they lacked common vision and were fearful that too many voters subscribed to market theology as it applied to tax cuts. They were simply too craven to advance effective criticism or even complain loudly and repeatedly about the tactics employed to pass the tax cuts. Since taking control of the Congress, the GOP in the House repeatedly ignored informal rules of conduct and had simply rolled over their opposition. They did not appear to value informed public discourse or consider the long-term consequences of their actions. Perhaps they had come to believe that their opponents were so weak and demoralized that they would never be in a position to retaliate. Alan Wolfe observed that the GOP, both in Congress and the Executive Branch, acted as if “[it] had no interest in the long-term effects of its slash and burn political methods.” <br /><br /> In 2002, the Republicans increased their majority in the House and seized control of the Senate. Apparently accepting Grover Norquist’s dictum that “Bipartisanship is another name for date rape,” they were able to successfully pursue a bi-partisan agenda. When Newt Gingrich was speaker, he very rarely met with minority leader Dick Gephart, and the same pattern prevailed after he stepped down. Communications between Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were strained and irregular, whereas Democratic Speakers like Tip O Neill and Tom Foley had routine meetings with Minority Leader Bob Michel to discuss scheduling of legislation and the operations of the House. In 2003 and 2004, the Republican Senate leadership threatened to stop Democratic filibusters against court nominees by having Vice President Cheney exercise the “nuclear option, ” a parliamentary maneuver that would permit the Vice President, as presiding officer, to rule that filibusters to block judicial nominations ere contrary to Senate rules. It was a scheme to allow a Senate rules change with fifty votes upon authorization of Vice President Dick Cheney. They were also able to continue eroding the traditional independence of Congress. <br /><br /> Once the most independent branch of government, it was transformed into a reliable instrument of party rule. In October 2003, the Republican leadership in the very closely divided Senate decided to exclude Democrats from conference committee that developed the Energy Act of 2003 and the Medicare Reform Act 2003. Democrats were locked out of conference committees that dealt with other matters. The Medicare Reform Act of 2003 was formulated in secret by Republicans from both houses, with some help from two Democratic senators. A number of House Democrats politely appeared at the office where the act was being developed to protest their exclusion from the law-making process. Capitol police were called to evict the Democrats from the meeting room, but the police did not use force, fearing litigation. <br /><br /> Perhaps the most remarkable abuse of a conference committee occurred in January 2006. No Democrats from either chamber were permitted to sit on a conference committee considering a bill to cut the budget. One would expect this was to prevent them from protesting many cuts in social services. More was involved. A month later, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that the committee changed a funding formula so that HMOs would receive an additional $22 billion in federal funds. <br /><br /> A more frequent tactic to assure passage of conservative legislation was to have the Republican Senate accept as many compromise provisions as possible just to get a piece of legislation to a conference committee, where the will of the lockstep House Republicans will prevail. If Democrats were permitted to be members of the conference committees, they were of the most pliable sort, and they “become enablers of a game being played with a stacked deck.” Increasingly the House Republicans have relied upon “closed rules” which prevent Democrats from making any amendments to legislation. The Rules Committee frequently schedules legislation for votes with very little warning, making it very difficult for the opposition to organize and develop arguments.<br /><br /> In the Senate, the Democrats still had the right to offer amendments in most cases. However, the Republican majority has developed a pattern of accepting moderate amendments, which they know will be removed in conference committees. Frequently, the work of the conference committees is done in secret meetings of inner committees, comprised only of GOP members and perhaps some people from the Executive Branch. The moderate clauses are often stripped away, and the legislation is sent back to the two chambers for up or down votes. Moderate Republican Senators can point to their earlier support of moderate amendments and say they reluctantly voted for the final legislation. None of these techniques are without precedent, but what is unprecedented is the e3xtent to which they are employed now. When the Republicans barely lost control of the Senate in 2007, their leader Mitch <br />McConnell of Kentucky vowed that they would filibuster every “controversial measure” before the Senate, and the party kept that promise. In this way it blocked efforts to give accused terrorist detainees at least a few rights before the law as well as measures intended to give soldiers longer down time before being called back to Iraq. Voters seldom realize it requires 60 votes to end a filibuster and are prone t5o blame the majority party for accomplishing little. The GOP merrily used this tactic while complaining about a “Do Nothing Congress.” It is not illegal to abuse the Senate rules in this way, but it does not demonstrate a respect for majority rule or customary usages. <br /><br /> According to Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution, Republicans had also damaged the legislative process by sacrificing Congressional prerogatives and independence by deferring to the White House. Too many Democratic leaders, on the other hand, were temperamentally and intellectually unable to cope with the new situation. They still believed give and take and compromise should be the order of the day in Congress. As these draconian procedures became more frequent, some wondered if they doubted that bipartisanship and compromise were essential to sound public policy and the preservation of democratic traditions. David Broder has noted that Democrats had sometimes abused power when they ran the House of Representatives for 40 years, “But the abuses were rarer before Republicans gained control in 1994....” <br /><br /> The high-handed procedures employed in fashioning the Energy Bill were justified by reference to the days when Wilbur Mills, supported by huge Democratic majorities, worked out tax policy by himself and then had his Ways and Means Committee dutifully pass it with little debate. But the fact was that this committee had a history of holding down partisanship and placing a premium on institutional integrity and good legislative workmanship. All that changed when Bill Thomas assumed control of the committee. He had said that when the GOP took control of the House, it would abandon “civilized” behavior, and he was as good as his word. The committee became the cockpit of partisan warfare where he frequently resorted to brute political force. The committee’s tradition of discussion and patient negotiation was abandoned and bridges between the two parties were burned.<br /><br /> On one occasion Thomas ordered the House Police to break up a meeting of the committee’s Democratic members in the Ways and Means Committee library because he did not want them to confer on strategy. On November 12, 2003, Republican leaders ordered staffers to remove an amendment that had passed the House from the Transportation Bill that was going to a conference committee. The point was to save President Bush from vetoing the bill, which included an amendment that forbade spending money to keep people from traveling to Cuba. Similarly, in 2006, the Republican leadership sent to the White House a measure that had not gone through both houses in the same form. It cut $40 billion over five years. Bush signed it because they had “certified” it. That version of the bill cut two billion more than the one that had passed both houses. The leadership pointed to an obscure 1890 Supreme Court ruling that seemed to validate this practice. <br /> <br /> The House Rules Committee has taken to announcing at one and two o’clock in the morning that certain legislation will be on the floor at 10 AM, a tactic that prevents Democrats from preparing to deal with the measures to be brought up for a vote. For this reason, Democratic lawmakers refer to the Dracula Congress, because the decisions are made very late at night. All sorts of rules prohibiting amendments and debate have appeared in the House. The seventy-two hour rule is now violated with great frequency, and even omnibus bills running a thousand pages now appear on the floor with no notice at all. Until now, the Rules Committee was supposed to only slightly change the language of legislation committees submit to it. The committee now completely rewrites legislation and then forces votes on the measures before the bills can be read or opposition can organize. It has also become very difficult to debate or amend bills that are taken to the floor. Now the vast majority of such bills cannot be amended. <br /><br /> When the Democrats last controlled the House, the number of bills open to revision had gone down to 57%. By 2004, under the Republicans this number had fallen to 15%. Pork barrel provisions added to appropriations bills jumped from 47 in the last year of Democratic control to 3,407 this year. Even respected Republican leaders such as Jim Leach of Iowa have been shut out. He tried unsuccessfully to subject the banking operations of financial services firms to normal banking regulations. Passage of legislation in the House is so automatic that it now only meets two days a week. A significant but not mandatory part of the legislative process is meeting with lobbyists who represent groups that might have interests that diverge from yours. Lois Gibbs, a longtime consumer lobbyist complained “Anybody who’s an advocate for the environment or public health the other side of corporate interests is immediately dismissed.” Referring to both houses, respected nonpartisan reformer Fred Wertheimer said, “There is no legislative process anymore.” <br /> <br /> Before the 2004 omnibus appropriations bill was passed, House Democrats were forbidden to speak in the debate on the rules under which the spending legislation would be handled. By 2003, there was also a great disparity between how much the federal government spent in Republican and Democratic districts. The majority party districts were receiving $612 million than the average Democratic district. In 1994, the average Democratic district received $35 million more than the average Republican one. In 2003, Conservative Democratic Representative Ralph Hall was told projects for his district could not be funded and “the only reason I was given was I was a Democrat.” Also facing the prospect of losing his seat through redistricting, Hall saw no choice but to become a Republican. <br /> <br />House Republicans regularly rode roughshod over the rights of the Democratic minority. Moreover, they used conference committees to ignore the wishes of their colleagues in the Senate. A pattern has developed where in the Republican Senate takes a more moderate line on social and tax legislation only to surrender entirely to the wishes of House Republicans in conference committee. At the end of the 2005 session, the Senate caved in to the wishes of the House in accepting drastic cuts in Medicaid, and it gave up its demand that required greater savings at the expense of Preferred Provider organizations. Of course, the appearance of a measure of moderation and compassion may be a necessary posture to disarm Senate Democrats who still have some legislative rights and could deploy them to delay legislation. <br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-42851291247658182772008-05-01T09:09:00.000-07:002008-05-01T09:13:57.699-07:00One Party Government and the Absence of Congressional OversightHistorian Lewis L. Gould has noted that Republicans have become so arrogant and high-handed in the exercise of power that they have raised doubts about whether the G.O.P. “really believe[s] in the two-party system as a core principle of politics.” <br />Since 1996, the GOP has transformed itself into a European-style parliamentary party in which members were epected to walk in lockstep. They came to show great disdain for the old American legislative process which entailed give and take between the two parties. <br /><br /><br /> The Republicans lost a number of House seats in the election of 2000, but they still had a majority and compensated for their loss by reducing Democratic representation on House committees. This high-handed behavior was only briefly noted in a few of the nation’s better newspapers. The Democrats’ previous abuses of power pale by comparison with those of the New Right’s abuses of power pale by comparison those of Democrats, who sometimes ran roughshod over Republicans in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they were clearly losing their grip on the House of Representatives. The right-wing tendency to abuse power became even more apparent in 2001, when Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. The House Republicans slashed Democratic representation on some committees even though they had narrowed the margin between parties in the election of 2000.<br /><br /> Even though Republicans had increased their margin in the House in the election of 2002, they enacted new restrictions, which would make it even more difficult for the Democratic minority to get their legislative proposals to the floor for consideration. From 1995 to 2006, very few important Democratic proposals were to reach the house floor. By 2002, House Democrats had been driven out of the caucus room they had used for seven years and sent to a basement room. They were sometimes not even permitted there or anywhere else in the Capitol, which made planning difficult. Democrats on committees were frequently not permitted to caucus in committee rooms and not infrequently were not invited to Committee meetings. When they did attend committee meetings, they often were not permitted to attempt to amend legislation that was being marked up. <br /><br /> Before Congress renewed and extended the Patriot Act, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings in the summer of 2005. Hearings cannot be ended except by unanimous consent, but chairman James Sensenbrenner, Jr. became so exasperated with criticisms of the measure that he graveled the meeting at an end, saying the proceedings were “irrelevant.” His staff quickly shut down the microphones and left the room. When John Conyers requested space to hold hearings on the Downing Street Memos, he was given space-- hardly a foregone conclusion these days. But the area was no larger than a “large closet,” and Speaker Hastert scheduled eleven major votes during the hearing to dissuade representatives from attending. <br /><br /> The first step toward one party government was to enforce tight discipline within the Republican Party. Beginning in the 1980s, the GOP began tightening party discipline, and, once in power, sought ways to limit Democratic participation in the legislative process. Senator Philip Gramm said in the mid-1990s that the objective of these steps was to show voters that Republicans could get results Another tool, that Graham did not mention, was the use of “earmarks” to reward compliant Republican Congressmen. They in turn used them to persuade lobbyists to maximize contributions to the GOP. In the ten years since Republicans took control of the House, earmarked pork barrel legislation increased by 873%. By the turn of the century, House Re publicans were very well disciplined and certain to vote as Tom DeLay, the new majority leader, directed. In 2003, Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay took more steps to end the seniority system. The Speaker ruled that a panel dominated by the leadership would select committee chairmen, and he ignored seniority in selecting chairmen who were report directly to DeLay. It was made clear that they were expected to be good team players.<br /> <br /> This put an end to the idea that chairmen under the Republicans were to enjoy autonomy. Richard W. Pombo, an opponent of environmental legislation was elevated over several senior members to head the Resources Committee, and moderate Christopher Shays, despite his seniority, was denied chairmanship of the Government Reform Committee in part because he backed campaign finance legislation. Hastert called in Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey to chastise him for not supporting the leadership on bankruptcy legislation and other legislation. Marge Roukema of New Jersey was one of the first moderates whom the leadership blocked from becoming a committee chairman. She decided to leave Congress in 2002. <br /> <br /> These steps were also driven by intense ideological fervor and probably the belief that their opponents, who represented error, deserved no legislative rights. By 2003, the GOP had become the most disciplined legislative party in the Western world. It had also greatly reduced Democratic involvement in the process in both Houses. Bending and ignoring the formal rules and long-standing procedural usages in both chambers called “the regular order” accomplished this. By far the worst abuses occurred in the House of Representatives, but there were many infractions in the Senate as well, and it can be expected that the Senate will continue on this path as zealots from the House move into the other chamber.<br /><br /> Senate Republicans exhibited considerably more discipline than they had before the party’s transformation. . Even though there are several moderate Republican senators, they had a history of voting as they were told once pressure was exerted. Maine’s Senator Olimpia Snowe, a respected moderate, played an important role in preventing an investigation of the Bush administration’s domestic spying. Another respected moderate, Arlen Specter, also had a “ sad habit of bowing to the right wing when the chips are down.” The fact was that the moderates were really not very moderate in their votes. Senate Democrats had the ability to employ a filibuster, but there are so many New Democratic senators that this was not likely to occur very often. There were filibusters that prevented votes on four extremely conservative Republican judicial nominees, but almost all other Bush nominees were confirmed. <br /><br /> In 2003, at least one Republican staffer on the Judiciary committee was able to access Democratic computers because of a technician’s carelessness. From the spring of 2002 until April 2003, they accessed information on meetings, correspondence, and Democratic strategy in the Judiciary committee. Sometimes they provided it to the right wing press, including Robert Novak. One staffer was taken off the job temporarily on a paternity leave. He was punished with a brief administrative leave. The others were not identified, and the matter attracted very little attention. <br /> <br /> On the PBS television program Now, Bill Moyers said, “For the first time in the memory of anyone alive, the entire federal government--the Congress, the executive, and the judiciary--is united behind a right-wing agenda for what George W. Bush believes he now has a mandate.” One party government has also meant “Americans have not been exposed to serious Congressional debate on any major issue....” Moreover, legislative scrutiny of the executive branch has been almost non-existent or consisted of crude-cover-ups. Congressman Henry Waxman noted that the GOP House invested 120 hours of hearings looking into whether Bill Clinton abused the White House Christmas list for political gain, but it spent only 12 hours looking into the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The two exceptions were oversight of handling of the Katrina disaster and Senator Arlen Specter’s brief investigation of warrantless spying on the international communications of American citizens. But in that case, the hearings only involved legal theories about whether warrantless eavesdropping was legal. The two intelligence committees refused to look into the nature of the spying, confining themselves to crafting legislation to legalize what the administration was doing.<br /><br /> Pat Roberts, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee at first refused to permit the committee to vote on whether to have any kind of hearings whatsoever. Later the Republican majority on the committee agreed to block hearings. Instead, they agreed to back legislation legalizing warrantless taps of conversations with suspicious foreigners for forty-five days. After that time,. The Bush administration would have to report to subcommittees of Congress if it still did not want to seek warrants. The committee majority essentially upheld the legality of a program they knew little about and agreed to help codify presidential claims of extraordinary authority. The New York Times’ “The Death of the Intelligence Panel” described this craven surrender to the executive. Of course the panel continued to meet, but its majority were merely willing pawns of the White House. Its majority has consistently stonewalled on carrying out a fair investigation of whether the administration had misrepresented intelligence in order to lead the nation to war in Iraq.<br /><br /> The most shocking case of failed oversight involved the refusal of the majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee to look into claims that three telephone companies were feeding various communications they processed to the NSA. Senator Specter said he wanted to subpoena the telephone executives, but Vice President Richard Cheney went behind Specter’s back to persuade the other Republicans to undercut the chairman. This matter also demonstrated the administration’s contempt for Congress and the separation of powers. The most bizarre case of Right wing Republicans refusing to exercise oversight involved the House Intelligence Committee. Chairman Pete Hoekstra refused to interview former NSA employee Russell Trice because some committee members lacked sufficiently high security clearances. <br /><br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-84389180198406681152008-05-01T09:02:00.000-07:002008-05-01T09:09:07.186-07:00Newt’s Followers and the CourtsThe Right was to demonstrate demonstrated impatience with the courts when they took positions contrary to what conservatives expected. When the judiciary failed to support indefinitely prolonging the life of brain-damaged Terry Schiavo Texans Representative Tom De Lay and Senator John Cornyn made statements that seemed to justify violence against judges. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor both received death threats because they cited foreign law in footnotes. They were not advocating adoption of those laws, but simply noting how others defined and approached common problems. The Right has made this a significant issue and has proposed legislation forbidding judges from citing foreign law and courts. In these contexts, O’Connor as a retired justice felt compelled to speak out against interference with the judiciary noting that such steps could the beginning of degeneration into dictatorship. Reverend Dr. James Dobson, a psychologist, noted that Congress had the power to abolish the liberal Ninth Circuit Court, and DeLay added, “We set up the courts. We can unset the courts.” The New York Times editors suggested she also had in mind legislation sharply limiting review of military commission actions regarding detainees. When this legislation passed, the Bush administration immediately announced it would apply it to 160 pending cases, even though the law did not refer to pending cases. <br /><br />Hostile to judicial restraints, Congressional Republicans stood by while George W. Bush set up an unauthorized wiretap program. The cooperated in Dick Cheney's effort to eviscerate the FISA Court, which had been set up to police electronic surveillance of foreign intelligence operatives within the United States. They have come close to achieving this goal when Congress was under Democratic control in 2007-2008, as fefw Democrats are willing to stand up and be counted. The Dems fear being called weak on defense. At the same time, the Republicans, with Democratic help, nullified a court decision on the rights of detainees and established passed the Military Commissions ACt, which even makes testimony acquired from torture admissible. <br /><br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-9392660154780924302008-05-01T08:56:00.000-07:002008-05-01T09:02:19.466-07:00The Transformation of Congressional RepublicansThe Republican who engineered the Republican triumph of 1994 was neither a NeoCon nor a Christian Restorationist. He had contempt for the gentlemanly Republican leadership he encountered. Newt Gingrich more than anyone else taught his party that ruthlessness had to be their long-term strategy. His tactics yielded great success for the party, but it is becoming clear that they have done grave damage to the legislative process. <br /><br /> Next to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, Congressman Newt Gingrich made the greatest contribution to making the GOP the nation’s dominant party. After two unsuccessful attempts to win a seat in Congress, the young history professor was elected in 1978 to represent a suburban Atlanta district. He predicted that he would become Speaker, and with Robert Walker of Pennsylvania and Vin Weber of Minnesota, organized the Conservative Opportunity Society. They set out to organize the Young Turks in the Republican caucus and work to replace what they thought was the tired and too gentlemanly leadership of their party in the House. As Dick Armey, a Young Turk explained, the more traditional members of the caucus were “Establishment Republicans” who were too committed to civility, moderation, bipartisanship, and above all avoiding gridlock. Gingrich complained, “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” In 1988, Gingrich told a Heritage Foundation audience that “This war [between liberals and conservatives] has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars.” Gingrich and his associates realized that the televised House proceedings on C-SPAN presented them with a great opportunity and they came to monopolize television time when no one else was in the House, particularly after the end of regular business. Because the rule was that the TV cameras focus tightly on the person speaking, most viewers would not realized the chamber was almost empty. Gingrich and his collaborators also set up situations that forced the Democratic leadership to strong arm the “Confederates” or “ boll weevils,” which eventually led some of them to become Republicans.<br /><br /> The Democrats, then laboring with a smaller majority, were tightening procedural rules to make it easier for them to rule. All this played into the hands of Gingrich, who claimed that the Democrats were tyrants who needed to be replaced. Of course, Newt claimed that the House Democrats had long used high-handed tactics to rule. While Gingrich’s greatly exaggerated claims did not win him many supporters in the House, he did acquire a large following among C-SPAN viewers.<br /><br /> When COS speakers began claiming that many Democrats had been apologists for Communist regimes, Speaker O’Neill became enraged and ordered the cameras to show that they were speaking to a nearly empty chamber. A trailer on the screen indicated that the regular business of the House had been concluded. It was within the Speaker’s power to make these changes, but he should have at least notified the Republican leadership about what he was doing. Gingrich dubbed the affair “Camscam” and insisted it showed how dictatorial the Democratic leadership had become. The Republican House leaders were forced to come to his support, and Gingrich became an instant celebrity and leading Republican spokesman in May 1984. With Gingrich setting the tone for Republican rhetoric, civility deteriorated badly. O’Neill was demonized by the Far Right and the Speaker was physically attacked in a Chicago airport by an angry citizen. O’Neill also began to receive death threats. <br /><br /> The angry and frustrated Democratic leadership sought revenge by declaring Representative Frank McCloskey the winner in an Indiana race he had probably lost by four votes. Nineteen Democrats, including ultra-liberal Barney Frank, refused to agree to this abuse of power. Both parties had done this sort of thing in the past, but the Democrats occasionally used procedural tricks to accomplish it and gave Gingrich more ammunition. These Democratic missteps would cost their successors dearly as they would justify far worse abuses of majority power when the Democrats became a minority in 1995. Until Gingrich was within sight of taking over Congress, a substantial number of Republicans actively opposed his tactics, while sharing his desire to win control. <br /><br /> The Georgian had his own political action group called GOPAC and operated the American Campaign Academy to train Republican activists. Two other tax-exempt foundations funded it. Gingrich’s key allies were Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, and Dick Armey. Senate Republican leader Robert Dole called them the “young hypocrites.” Similarly, Barry Goldwater disowned the new conservatives, telling them, “Do not associate my name with anything you do. You are extremists, and you hurt the Republican Party much more than the Democrats have.” Newt convinced his House Republican colleagues that they would never regain the majority unless they were constantly on the attack. His first great success was the scalp of Speaker Jim Wright, who was forced to resign in 1989 because he pressured lobbyists to purchase about $40,000 worth of Wright’s book, Reflections of a Public Man. In retrospect, it was a relatively minor matter, particularly in comparison to Gingrich’s own acknowledged ethics violations. Wright was eventually fined $300,000 and found guilty of abusing tax-exempt foundations and misleading the house Ethics Committee in sworn testimony. <br /><br /> In 1986, Gingrich took over a conservative activist organization called GOPAC, which he thought was insufficiently nasty. He proved to be a first-rate fundraiser and used some of the money to recruit right wing candidates for Congress. Richard Mellon Scaife was a significant contributor. He told young Republicans it was acceptable to do things considered wrong if it was for the conservative cause. GOPAC materials for GOP candidates urged them to demonize Democrats and urged them to speak like Newt, calling Democrats advocates of criminal rights, traitors, “bizarre,” “sick,” “pathetic,” and “corrupt.” As late as 1995, Gingrich was supporting the proposition that Vincent Foster was murdered. <br /> <br /> The Georgia Congressman characterizing liberals and Democrats as “the enemy of normal Americans.” He claimed, “left wing Democrats will represent the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness.” He was certain that Susan Smith’s 1994 drowning of her two children in South Carolina could be traced back to the hedonism of the 1960s and the “counterculture and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.” It turned out that Smith’s stepfather was an official in the Christian Coalition and a backer of Pat Robertson for president. <br /><br /> Many had noted that the process had become much more partisan. Some Democrats, like the former Speaker Jim Wright, bear more than a little responsibility for this, but young Republicans under the guidance of Newt Gingrich bear most of the responsibility for the breakdown of the traditional system of governance. “The System,” valued reasonable debate, comity, and willingness to compromise. Within the Republican Party, especially in the Senate, there were still some moderates who were deeply committed to The System. The most important of them was John Chaffee of Rhode Island, who observed, “There’s a new breed of pit terrier around here. What they want to do is get a hold of the calf of somebody’s leg and hang on. There is a spirit of meanness out there.” Some of the change in attitude may be attributed to the rising dominance of the West and South in the Republican Party. Senator David Durenberger noted, “Those of us from the Midwest and Northeast are not familiar with that particular style.” <br /><br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-69659778093784617262008-04-21T12:30:00.000-07:002008-04-21T12:35:23.637-07:00Constraints Effecting JournalismExplaining why President George W. Bush was getting an easy ride, Harris wrote,” There is no well-coordinated corps of aggrieved and methodical people who start each day looking for ways to expose and undermine a new president.” This explanation leaves aside some serious questions. To what extent have liberal journalists been intimidated by the constant refrain that the media has a liberal bias? Has the fact that the three major networks are now in conservative hands anything to do with their increasingly cautious approach to the way they report on conservative politicians and conservative administrations?. Neal Gabler of the Annenberg School of Communications has suggested that the secret of understanding the media is not that it has a liberal bias. Rather, ”it is that they are trying to attract the widest possible viewership, or readership, and that doing so necessitates that they be as inoffensive as possible.” <br /><br /> Don Hewitt, producer of “Sixty Minutes”-- a television program that has set a reasonably high standard for integrity, lamented “The 1990s were a terrible time for journalism in this country but a wonderful time for journalists.” Jim Squires, former editor of the Chicago Tribune has even referred to the “death of journalism.” Speaking to trade and corporate seminars can be very lucrative, and there is no way of knowing whether people might modify their reporting patter somewhat to make themselves attractive to these employers. Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson, who were on the most influential Sunday commentary program, were talking to insurance and hospital lobbying groups at about $30,000 a speech during the health care debate. Roberts also earned money speaking to Phillip Morris executives. Both of these allegedly liberal commentators had little good to say about Bill Clinton in his second term. Roberts appeared to uncritically accept every charge made about Clinton’s sexual adventures and has been called a “font of Beltway conventional wisdom.” Later, she was inclined to treat President George W. Bush gently, claiming the SEC had exonerated him in a potential inside-trading case when the agency’s letter specifically said it was not exonerating him.’ <br /><br /> The decline of journalistic standards that became obvious in the 1990s has often been blamed on the need to compete with around the clock cable television news. Dusko Doder confessed, “Reporters like myself, who have been in the business for a while, talk frequently these days about avoiding certain topics that would clash with the financial interests of their organizations.” <br /><br /> In 2002-2003, the US newspaper industry was netting an average profit margin of 21%, a yield far in excess of what the European press was realizing. Analyst Curtis Gans worried that the media was sacrificing accuracy and balance n order to wreap these gains and noted that the press should provide information and opinions that ignite the fires of a citizens’ democracy. Media outlets are businesses, and they cannot afford to alienate advertisers or people who are likely sources of news. In the mid-1970s, the New York Times moved too far left in its reporting and promptly suffered declining revenues. Articles on problems in health care alone cost it $500,000 in advertising from one former client. A Wall Street analyst then commented that the paper’s support of a tax increase “could put the Times right out of business." The paper had no choice but to reverse course and made Max Frankell managing editor in January 1977. In addition, the increasing concentration of media outlets in fewer hands has increasingly tended to make the press more cautious and conservative. Although large corporate interests tend to hold large numbers of newspapers and electronic media outlets, this is not always the case. By 2002, the Retirement System of Alabama held 36 television stations and 118 daily newspapers. Among its holdings were the NBC station in Memphis and the CBS station in Cleveland. RSA also holds 118 newspapers.<br /> <br /> The manner in which the media treats political matters is closely tied to the ownership of the press and media and to the necessity of not alienating advertisers. . Newspapers, magazines, and television stations exist to make money. Wealthy advertisers can influence what a radio station chooses to broadcast. Television was deregulated in the 1980s, and this increased the profit potential of the networks. Public service was no longer mandated, and the industry no longer considered it a goal. Great corporations acquired the Networks. GE bought and continues to hold NBC. Capital Cities acquired ABC, and it later passed to Disney. Lowes purchased CBS, and that was later bought by Viacom. News department staffs were cut to increase profits, and their broadcasts were oriented more toward entertainment than hard news. <br /><br /> The vast majority of newspapers are owned by conservative interests, as are the three major television networks and FOX. The interests of the corporations that own media outlets are affected by how the news is handled. Westinghouse, owner of CBS, and General Electric, owner of NBC, are involved in both the nuclear power industry and the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Few negative stories appear about the World Trade Organization which has a record of being anti-labor, anti-human rights, and pro-business. Between January 1, 1998 and February 1, 1999, the three major television networks interviewed 132 people about the desirability of “privatizing” Social Security. That is, permitting people to invest a third of their contribution in mutual funds. Only three of those interviewed were critical of the plan. Investment houses and mutual fund providers are major advertisers. This may have something to do with the skewed coverage of a very important issue. <br /><br /> PBS, which is denounced by conservatives as being too liberal, frequently covers Latin American stories by interviewing current or past US officials or those of governments allied with the United States. Viewers are not likely to learn much about why dissidents there are unhappy with US corporations and US policy. As federal subsidies to public television have decreased, PBS has become more dependent upon corporate underwriting and has found it necessary to become careful about not offending corporate benefactors. In 2002, PBS abruptly cancelled showing a British documentary entitled “Counting On Democracy,” which argued that Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris had illegally deprived 57,000 people of the right to vote in the presidential election of 2000. A handful of local affiliates obtained the program and showed it, but the PBS decision deprived most viewers of an opportunity to consider an alternative explanation of what happened in the Florida election. <br /> <br /> There is a very natural tendency for the press to go easy on those who wield great economic power. In the 1980s and 1990s, the American media was concentrated more in more in the hands of a few vast corporations. It was unable or unwilling to provide sufficient information to the electorate on economic polarization or the growing power of a small economic elite. Republican theorist Kevin Phillips wrote: “For want of insights and data often unobtainable from the corporate media, the public opinion vital to US democracy has trouble remaining vigorous and informed.”<br /> <br /> Structural factors help explain the media’s tilt to the right. In 1987, Ronald Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission repealed the time-honored fairness doctrine. This removed any barrier to the partisan use of the media, and talk radio soon became almost completely right-wing. Cable television soon took a decidedly conservative bent, although there are some moderate commentators on the cable and even one outspoken liberal. Under Bill Clinton, Congress opened the door somewhat to media consolidation, which made it easier for most mainstream media to be owned by 6 corporations. George W. Bush’s FCC removed so many more limitations, that the Republican Congress in 2004 actually put aside one sweeping grant of powers to private interests. <br /><br /> Some feared that the internet was the last venue where progressive views could be presented, and it was clear that the time would come when internet access would be almost entirely via broadband access offered by a few providers. For that reason, there was much concern in 2006, when A.T.&.T. offered to purchase Bell South for $67 billion dollars. Progressives sought to block the deal until Net Neutrality or “Equal Access” was guaranteed. The Justice Department approved the merger with no conditions in October but a hitch turned up when one member of the FCC recused himself, leaving a 2-2 tie. To obtain approval AT&T guaranteed Net Neutrality and reasonable rates for the next thirty months. <br /> <br /> The media’s tilt to the right was partly due to the influence of advertisers, the fact that most outlets are in conservative hands, and to the “vast success of the long rightist propaganda drive against ‘the liberal media.’” The ceaseless complaints about a liberal media had enabled conservative writers and electronic journalists to stray far beyond any acceptable standard of fairness. Their cover is that they are just redressing long-standing grievances. When Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham died, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ran an editorial insinuating that she murdered her husband in order to gain control of the company. Conservatives had long painted Mrs. Graham as an unprincipled liberal because her paper exposed the Watergate story and sometimes disclosed information injurious to the conservative cause. In point of fact he had committed suicide, and there was not a shred of evidence to support the paper’s outrageous hypothesis. The paper’s owner is Richard Mellon Scaife, who had financed the Arkansas Project, which was a massive investigation of the Clintons, and the American Spectator, when it printed reams of unsupported material on the Clintons’ business dealings and sexual activities. That most of the press neither took notice of nor rebuked Scaife’s Tribune-Review indicates, at best, that many simply expected wild and irresponsible attacks from the conservative press. <br /><br /> As late as the 1970s, reporters sometimes did courageous things. Today, however, Russell Baker wrote, “They have discovered that their prime duty is no longer to maintain the republic in well-informed condition--or to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable--but to serve the stock market with a good earnings report to comfort the comfortable.” Kate Graham risked loss of her paper and broadcast empire when she continually supported the investigative work of Watergate reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward Arthur Ochs Sulzberger risked federal prosecution when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers for days in an ad-free section, which must also have been a costly proposition. Seymour Hersh has made a career of straight, honest, non-partisan reporting. His penchant for raising questions that challenged those in power have cost him prestigious jobs and a great deal of income. Hirsh’s careful, analytical, investigative journalism has prompted George W. Bush to say, “Seymour Hersh is a liar.” A seasoned journalist has noted that his stories “sting, but there’s no real lasting effect.” This may be because most of the press is marching along safer paths. <br /><br /> There are very few investigative reporters like Seymour Hersh today, in part because investigative reporting is expensive both in terms of paying personnel and in terms of the retribution it can bring. Reporters with deadlines to meet find it easier to draw readily available information from conservative think tanks, or even from Matt Drudge. He carried an untrue and unsourced story that Ken Lay slept in the Lincoln bedroom when Clinton was president, and moderate journalists picked it up and printed it. On an earlier occasion Drudge false accusation that a Clinton aide was beating his wife was quickly picked up and circulated by the mainstream press. These were examples of the mainstream press becoming a vast echo chamber for stories mounted in the aggressive conservative press. <br /><br /> Appearing on BBC’s “Hardtalk” Carl Bernstein noted that there had been a “massive pullback” on tough and investigative reporting. Some of this was due to financial considerations, but much was due to a “horrible political atmosphere” in which a very large part of the population does not want anything approaching full or honest reporting.” Courageous reporting that challenges powerful interests is very infrequent today as demands for higher profits make it impossible for publishers and media managers to show such courage or take such chances. Newspaper CEOs are far less frequently journalists; rather they are business school graduates who eyes are fixed on the bottom line as well as the possibility for acquisition or merger. Local television news programs in big markets enjoy profit margins of 60-70%, and those in smaller markets are not willing to settle for the 10% that would please many small businesses. <br /><br /> CBS’s Dan Rather, the contemporary anchor who seems most committed to honest journalism, admits that “delivering the profit” has become the news media’s “driving force” and admits that this has led to “the decline in quality.” This means that there are fewer people to cover stories but also that there is greater pressure to do less with stories that could antagonize advertisers or viewers. The pursuit of profits has led the press to do more with brain-softening entertainment items and inconsequential material. There is evidence that many patrons like things this way. Even the Sunday talk shows slowly have drifted to the Right. In Bill Clinton’s second term, the guests were reasonably balanced with a slight edge going to the Republicans. During the George W. Bush presidency, conservative guests significantly outnumbered liberals, and the panels were strongly tilted to the right. Outspoken liberals like Paul Krugman rarely appeared. The one exception was Katrina vanden Heuvel. <br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-49241135566128539172008-04-21T12:28:00.000-07:002008-04-21T12:30:27.819-07:00Press Treatment of DemocratsMSNBC offered a steady diet of “bash Clinton all the time” during the nation’s long obsession with his sex life and Whitewater. Was this due to the entertainment value of the stories or because Microsoft was unhappy with Clinton’s Justice Department? Much of the print and electronic media has become partly an entertainment medium, and reporters are becoming celebrities. Moreover, a star system has developed, in which performers do what is necessary to enhance their fame, star status, and income. To enhance their star status, many abandoned normal journalistic standards while feeding off the Clinton sex scandal and hyping the Whitewater hoax, which turned out to be a very minor matter. Many viewers and readers can recite the list of Princess Dianna’s male friends but would be at a loss to offer any information on government tax or environmental policy. The public found George W. Bush a likable fellow, and after 9/11 he was elevated to hero status, with an approval rating around 90%.<br /><br /> The greatest no-no in journalism “is to offend a substantial chunk of the audience by reporting things in a way that goes against their attitudes.” Even in the Reagan era, such a large portion of the public considered Lt. Colonel Oliver North a national hero that nothing was reported about his efforts to protect Latin American drug-dealing generals or that he had been banned from Costa Rica on charges of drug running. Journalists found they could enhance their public appeal by portraying the new president in the best possible light. After 9/11,Washington press’s fawning over Bush reached astronomical levels as he was compared to Winston Churchill and the great men of history. Giving the news a conservative spin not only placed a journalist in sync with the nation’s rightward shift; it opened the doors to fat consulting fees and employment by well-financed think tanks and foundations. The liberal journalist might be able to garner paltry fees from a few “little magazines” or, with great luck, land a slot at the Brookings Institution, which employs experts of all persuasions. As media pundits came to earn vast amounts of money, their class interests certainly did not dictate liberal politics. <br /><br /> While much of the press fawned over George W. Bush, there was a tendency for the press to pile-on in making charges against Clinton, and doing so certainly did not injure anyone’s career. Indeed, this kind of journalism seemed to satisfy those who had regularly wailed about an alleged liberal media. In June 1993 Clinton foolishly delayed his flight out of Los Angeles in order to get a $200 haircut from a famous stylist. Dr. John McLaughlin of “The McLaughlin Group” expanded upon the story by saying the decision tied up “ground and air traffic, putting as many as 37 planes in a holding pattern.” His right-oriented telecast was sponsored by General Electric, whose CEO Jack Welch had been persuaded by Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan to do so. The story commanded front pages across the nation. Six weeks later, the Los Angeles Times published a story proving that no other planes were inconvenienced by the presidential haircut. This story attracted very little attention, and when it was printed it appeared on back pages. <br /><br /> Until the Mark Foley scandal in 2006, the press corps had shown great interest in Democratic sex scandals but had largely overlooked those of Republicans. When George Bush was vice president, a report about an affair briefly surfaced. One outraged denial on his part was enough to put the matter to rest. Similarly, a report of Governor Jeb Bush’s affair with a former Playboy bunny on his cabinet received little coverage from the national media despite the fact that more information kept surfacing. In the summer of 2001, the affair of conservative Democrat Gary Condit with a missing intern occupied the press for months. The press rarely mentioned that he was “the pet congressional Democrat of the new Bush administration” or that he had been considered by Bush for a cabinet post. Condit matter deserved coverage the Congressman had initially denied the affair, thus impeding efforts to find her. The press was soon investigating every sordid detail of the man’s promiscuous private live. <br /><br /> While some electronic media figures like Larry King were covering Condit almost every day for weeks, a woman turned up dead in the Florida office of Republican Congressman Joe Scarboro. She was apparently his mistress and had a major head injury. Scarlboro found it necessary to resign his seat, but then appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball as a guest commentator. He later acquired his own cable commentary show. The case received very little attention. In the latter case, the local authorities dodged telling whether the death was natural. While the press busily covered every detail of Gary Condit, there was scarcely a mention of President George W. Bush’s encounter with an unhappy African American constituent at a Philadelphia block party. Though usually charming, the president replied, “Who Cares what you think?” to a man who said “I hope you only serve four years. I’m very disappointed in your work so far.” <br /><br />During the 2004, campaign William Greidler commented on the hostility of the press to Howard Dean and its nearly reverential treatment of George W. Bush. He claimed that the mainstream reporters were "surrogate agents for Washington insider sensibilities. Clearly, the journalists believed that conservatives preferred something other than an honest, balanced approach. As the election approached, there was another striking example of the tendency of the press to censor itself when criticism of conservatives was concerned. Kitty Kelley produced The Family a critical study of the Bush dynasty. Though she had written a number of best-selling books, most of the shows that generally interview authors of new books refused to give her time on the air. Matt Lauer of the “Today” show gave her a very hostile interview, in which he repeatedly demanded to know how she was going to vote in November. <br /> <br /> The Walt Disney Company is an entertainment enterprise rather than a journalistic operation. Yet, its reluctance to distribute a film criticizing Bush reflects the atmosphere of the times. In May Disney forbad its subsidiary Miramax to distribute “Fahrenheit 911,” a Michael Moore film that criticizes George W. Bush. Ari Emanuel, Moore’s agent, said that Michael Eisner told him that concern about retaining certain tax incentives from the State of Florida motivated the decision. The film explored the Bush family’s ties to Saudi Arabia and the decision to permit bin Ladens to leave the US immediately following 9/11. Moore subsequently found another firm to distribute the documentary, and conservatives promptly started pressuring cinema house chains to refuse to show it. After the election, the media’s sensitivity to the complaints of the Neo Conservative-Religious Right coalition about unfair press coverage be came so great that several networks refused an advertisement from the United Church of Christ which proclaimed itself a “welcoming church,” and showed a same sex couple coming to church for worship. <br /><br /> In the final Bush-Kerry debate, Schieffer of CBS did not ask one question about the environment, which would have played to Kerry’s strengths. Instead, his questions on personal religious faith, gay marriage, and abortion underscored Bush’s attractiveness to large elements in the electorate. In framing a question, he also informed the candidates that Social Security was running out of money. <br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-66796572135590402032008-04-21T12:24:00.000-07:002008-04-21T12:27:44.349-07:00The Media and US Foreign PolicySustained criticism of fundamental U.S. foreign policy has not been a mark of the mainstream U.S. media for decades. Positions that appear too critical of entrenched economic power or offer sustained criticism of basic social and economic policies can create problems for journalists. After Islamic terrorists attacked buildings in Washington and New York on September 11, 2001, the mainstream media did very little to help people understand why the Al Qaeda terrorists were so anxious to murder Americans. Critics of US policies such as Edward Said, Edward Herman, and Noam Chomsky were not interviewed. Henry Kissinger appeared many times even though it had recently been revealed that he had approved the assassination of Rene Schneider, head of Chile’s military, because he would not have backed a proposed coup against Salvadore Allende. <br /><br /> With more than a little justification, Eric Alterman has claimed “the mainstream media almost always allow the Bush Administration to lie without consequence.” Press treatment of George W. Bush’s May 6, 2003 press conference illustrates how the press has come to backstop this president. The chief executive came with a prearranged list of reporters who would be called upon and he even mentioned that the conference had been scripted. Nevertheless, the reporters went through the motions of jumping from their chairs, acting as though they were struggling to be recognized so they could offer softball questions. In that press conference on Iraq, he mentioned September 11 or Al Qaeda fourteen times, but no reporter challenged him on whether he was saying that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attack It is no wonder a vast majority of Americans came to believe this.<br /><br /> At the beginning of the conference Helen Thomas was deprived of her customary front row seat, and Bush refused to call on her, though it was customary that she offer the first question and close the conference with a “Thank You, Mr. President.” She was being punished for saying Bush was the worst president in US history. The GOP national committee also sent out instructions to pundits in its stable to attack her. Many had the decency to ignore these instructions. Jim Rosen of Fox noted that the conference went much smoother without her asking questions, and Brit Hume called her to: a nutty aunt in the attic.” John Podhorentz said Thomas was an “ancient White House pseudo-reporter,’ and Michelle Malkin intoned “Shame, shame, shame, on Helen Thomas.” The Bush administration had also blacklisted Mike Allen of the Washington Post. Walter Cronkite, another journalist in his eighties, was the only major commentator to join Thomas in seriously questioning Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Bill O’Reilly denounced Cronkite as an “internationalist,” a Bushian term of derision. Andrew Sullivan also denounced the BBC for offering some unfavorable news about the war by calling it the ally of Saddam Hussein. For a variety of reasons, the press almost gave Bush a free pass since the campaign. His elevation of warrior/president after 9/11 made it more difficult to criticize him. Moreover, the administration was extremely effective in controlling news and not giving information to journalists who seemed hostile. Even a respected journalist Howard Fineman has taken to offering undiluted praise of Bush on his television appearances and praising the president’s gunslinger approach to diplomacy. <br /><br />When President George W. Bush was beating the drum for war against Iraq in 2002, the desire to control oil resources as a motivation for war was much more a subject of interest in the foreign press than in the US media. The French and Germans took a leading role in opposing the war, but much of the media, particularly CNN and Fox, portrayed them as “isolated.” As Le Monde editor Alain Frachon noted, “European criticism of Bush’s position on Iraq ‘doesn’t cross the ocean well ‘“ People knew Europeans questioned Bush’s views but had no access to their arguments. <br /><br /> In time, it became clear France and Germany spoke for almost all of Europe. The British press, particularly the BBC, provided much information to debunk the Blair and Bush administrations claims about Saddam’s weapons programs and holdings, but the US press showed great deference to the administration and failed to go beyond reporting the claims of the Defense Department and White house. During the war, the press minimized data on US casualties even though Defense Department data demonstrated that they were far greater than reported. Paul Krugman suggested that CNN and Fox cable networks “have taken it as their assignment to sell the war, not to present a mix of information that might call the justification for war into question.” He thought Americans seemed mystified and stunned by foreign opposition to the war because they were mainly exposed to a one-sided approach and noted that the two main cable operations were dismissive in their coverage of the worldwide anti-war demonstrations on February 15, 2003. Hans Blix, in his February 14 report to the Security Council, refuted some of Secretary of State Powell’s charges. However, CNN deleted those 750 words from its transcript of the weapons’ inspector’s report on its web site. <br /><br /> On January 26, 2003 White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card appeared on “Meet the Press” to warn that there would be a holocaust against the US or its friends if there were not a war with Iraq. Tim Russert asked Card if the White House still stood behind Bush’s claims that some aluminum rods imported by Iraq were intended for plutonium processing. When Card responded with a lengthy affirmative answer, the usually tough Russert did not follow up with information from a very recent International Atomic Energy Administration report that dismissed this charge with considerable scientific evidence. To question Bush’s claims came too close to appear to be an apologist for Saddam Hussein. During the war itself, the media often performed more as cheerleaders than as objective reporters of events. John Pilger of the New Statesman reported that British troops “put on protective suits to recover dead and wounded in vehicles American [hit with]‘friendly fire’” because “the Americans are using solid uranium coated missiles and tank shells.” This was also reported in al-Jazerra, but not elsewhere. <br /> <br /> There are many examples of the reluctance of The New York Times and The Washington Post to print information that could undermine fundamental foreign policy or dominant social and economic institutions and power structures are not meant to suggest that these are poor newspapers. They are two of the nation’s best papers and provide far more information critical of U.S. foreign policy and economic structures than other mainstream outlets. They usually push the envelope as far as possible consistent with their own profitability and continued access to important news sources. Enough solid information appears in their pages to make it possible to piece together a revealing but inadequate view. They present much that is not even mentioned in most other media outlets. Because these papers do print much invaluable information that others will not provide, conservatives angrily insist that the Times and Post provide biased, liberal coverage. If they printed only the news that appeared in conservative newspapers, they would pass the right’s fairness and balance tests with flying colors.<br /><br /> The staffs of less powerful and prestigious papers would be likely to encounter insuperable problems if they decided that good journalism required them to go very far against the grain in selecting topics or providing information that would be genuinely damaging to powerful interests. By the 1990s, the news departments of the major networks were facing enormous pressures for good ratings in a declining market. In 1981, the evening news broadcasts together had 84% of the viewers in their time slots; by 2002 they could claim only 43%, and those viewers had a median range in the upper fifties. To improve their positions, they reported less hard news and offered more material that was essentially justified by its entertainment value. These news departments began to reduce their payrolls to meet the new circumstances. Under these circumstances, reporters found it difficult to offer up highly controversial material.<br /><br />Some of Bush’s foreign policy appointments should have raised more than a few eyebrows in the press. The younger Bush became the first president to appoint a pardoned criminal to a high White House post. President Bush the Elder had pardoned Elliott Abrams, who had been convicted of two counts of lying to Congress. Abrams had been involved in the Iran Contra scandal, channeling illegal funds to the right-wing death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. This misguided policy produced 70,000 dead in El Salvador and 100,000 in Guatemala. Abrams denied the validity of reports about the El Mozote massacre, which claimed the lives of 700 unarmed people, including children, and was highly critical of reports of the UN truth commissions and Catholic human rights committees about the bloody results of U.S. policy in El Salvador and Guatemala. Bush the Younger appointed Abrams senior director of the office for democracy, human rights, and international operations at the National Security Council. A halfway vigilant press would have publicized this case, and editors would have insisted that the price of rehabilitation should be providing a full and truthful account of all of his dealings with Lt. Colonel Oliver North in sending Iranian arms money to the Contra rebels in El Salvador.<br /><br /> Two other Bush nominations should have raised questions about the administration’s intentions toward Latin America and concern for human rights. Otto Reich, who was head of the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1980s, returned to that department to deal with Latin American affairs. Reich, teacher at the School of the Americans and another Cuban-American, took his orders from Lt. Colonel Oliver North in the National Security Council. Reich’s task was to plant materials in the press that would discredit the opponents of Ronald Reagan’s policies in El Salvador. The General Accounting Office reported in 1987 that Reich’s office had “engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities.” He was never prosecuted. John Negroponte was nominated to be ambassador to the United Nations. He was U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 when Battalion 3-16, a U.S. trained death squad, was on the loose. Negroponte, had at his disposal a briefing book by his predecessor on Honduran military’s human rights violations. There were hundreds of stories about their bloody activities in the Honduran papers. Nevertheless, he quashed reports about their abuses and denied he had any information about these matters. Negroponte also helped arm Nicaraguan Contras who were working out of Honduras. The Los Angeles Times investigated his activities when Bush the Younger nominated him, but few other newspapers pursued the matter <br /><br /> The Bush administration did not discuss its previous dealings with the Taliban, even though the foreign press covered them these matters in detail. Moreover, these matters were not explored in the American mainline press. The information available through the foreign press would have prompted some Americans to wonder if Bush’s dealings with the Taliban could have triggered the attacks. Some of this information also raised serious questions about how the administration handled investigative efforts to detect terrorist plots. The Village Voice reported on the visits of Taliban leaders to Bush’s Washington. These have been verified, but there is no way of knowing if the Village Voice report that the Taliban offered to hold Bin Laden until we could track his movements is true. It is clear that the administration was divided into three factions on what to do in Afghanistan, with many NeoCons wanting to deal with the Taliban. Apparently the State Department was opposed to dealing with the Northern Alliance, which is what the US ended up doing. Most of the press was content simply relying on administration handouts.<br /><br /> The disastrous events of September 11 clearly indicated there had been an intelligence failure of massive proportions. There was surprisingly little discussion of why the intelligence community had failed to detect such a large plot. When Congress began to look into this intelligence failure, delaying and obfuscating tactics by the Justice Department and CIA frustrated its efforts. Even Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, expressed frustration about the difficulties encountered in obtaining information. <br /><br /> Some might consider it a serious failure that the mainstream press did not look at reports that the Bush administration had shut down investigations of suspicious Saudi activities, In late 2001, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, a French intelligence expert and a journalist, published a book that revealed the United States’ secret negotiations with the Taliban and suggested that US concerns for the sensibilities of the Saudis seriously thwarted efforts of the FBI to investigate Afghanistan-based terrorism. It was given the provocative title The Forbidden Truth because it included material on how one of Bin Laden’s brothers managed to have it banned in Sweden. The assertion about frustrating the FBI’s investigation of terrorism was controversial and not fully proven. The book was widely discussed in Europe, but by late January 2001 received little attention in the United States.<br /> The New York Daily News and Paula Zahn on CNN gave it considerable coverage. The two French writers have charged it had been standing U.S. policy to require the security agencies to tread carefully when investigating terrorists and terrorist organizations that had Saudi connections. They talked to John O’ Neill who had been a key FBI anti-terrorist investigator and had complained that Barbara Bodine, Clinton's ‘ambassador to Yemen, had tied the FBI's ‘ hands in its investigation of the bombing of the Cole. He complained that “ the FBI was even more politically engaged” after the election of George W. Bush.<br /><br /> O’Neill resigned in August and became head of security at the Twin Trade Towers and died there September 11. An intelligence source told a British journalist the same thing: the FBI was long required to handle people and organizations with Saudi ties with kid gloves. He too heard that the situation became worse when young Bush took power. O’ Neill told the Frenchmen, “All of the answers, all of the clues allowing us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia.” O’Neill was extremely frustrated by the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism, but his resignation was prompted by internal FBI politics. He had been denied a promotion, was on poor terms with the director and deputy director, and he faced an internal investigation. He had violated rules by letting a mistress use a bathroom in safe house and had apparently lost a laptop computer and briefcase with sensitive information while attending a meeting in Atlanta with 175 other agents. He left the conference room to take a telephone call and the briefcase and laptop somehow disappeared. O’ Neill had too high a profile for the agency, and his abrasiveness and great intelligence earned many enemies. When Louis Freeh told him he was sure the Saudis would help in the investigation of the Khobar Towers bombing, O’Neill responded, “They were just shining sunlight up your ass.” The director consistently defended O’Neill against his critics up to that point, but was wary of him thereafter. <br /><br /> After the bombing of the USS Cole, he temporarily led the investigation in Yemen, where he sought to break up key Al Qaeda operations. He and his team were ultimately barred from operating there by an ambassador who thought he endangered US relations with that country. He resigned because his career advancement was blocked, but his criticisms of Bush’s negligence on the anti-terrorism effort could be accurate. The truth of O ‘Neill’s claims about the Bush administration’s quashing of anti-terrorist activities may have gone to the grave with him.<br /><br /> However, a US intelligence source told two London Guardian journalists that “There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis,” but that these were considerably tightened after Bush became president. One reason, the Guardian was told, was that the “hands off” order was necessary to prevent it from becoming public that some Saudis were paying protection money to bin Laden. According to Greg Palast, an American journalist working in London, “A group of well-placed sources -- not-all-too-savory spooks and arms dealers--told my BBC team that before September 11 the U.S. government had turned away evidence of Saudi billionaires funding Osama bin Laden’s network --.we got our hands on documents that backed up the story that FBI and CIA investigations had been slowed by the Clinton administration, then killed by Bush Jr.’s when those inquiries might upset Saudi interests.” Another reason was allegedly “Arbusto” and “Carlyle”, terms that refer to the Bush business ties with Saudis. Palast and The Guardian later learned that the George W. Bush administration ordered the intelligence agencies to “back-off” Clinton’s investigation of Khan’s nuclear operations in Pakistan. Perhaps this was because Saudi money trails might turn up. <br /><br /> John Loftus claimed that Vice President Cheney ordered the FBI and intelligence Al Qaeda activities because such activities might interfere with efforts to negotiate a twin pipeline deal with Iraq. Apparently Enron was then taking the lead in the proposed deal. The gas pipeline was to terminate in a Pakistani port city and a line was to connect it to the Enron power plant in northern India. <br /><br /> The Guardian team that reported on the Bush administration’s negotiations with the Taliban concluded that the attacks of September 11 were a preemptive strike on the part of Al-Qaeda. In view of the fact that these strikes were long planned actions, a better conclusion would be that the threats made by American negotiators might have had some influence on the timing of these tragic events. They probably would have occurred anyhow. One wonders what might have occurred if the FBI investigators had not been ordered not to pursue some aspects of potential terrorist activity. <br /><br /> The Guardian obtained FBI documents that indicated there were restrictions on investigating possible terrorist plots. Shown on the BBC television program Newsnight, the file was coded A199,” which was a designation for national security cases. The material indicated the FBI could not investigate two of bin Laden’s relatives who lived in Falls Church, Virginia. Abdullah and Omar bin Laden were associated with a suspected terrorist organization, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) that had an office there. Abdullah was the director of the US branch of WAMY. Two of the September 11 hijackers used a false address several blocks away from the office. Apparently under Saudi pressure, the Clinton administration had limited the investigation of this organization. FBI sources disclosed that the restrictions became much worse under the Bush administration and that several investigations were effectively shut down. The restrictions were lifted after September 11. The French investigators Brisard and Dasquie claimed that powerful elements in the Saudi royal family support bin Laden and were able to pressure the US into shutting down the FBI investigation. <br /><br /> The San Francisco Chronicle forced Warren Hinckle to take a three-month “vacation”, and Dr. Orlando Garcia lost his talk show on WADO in New York City. Both had criticized the war against the Taliban. The editor of the Kutztown, Pa. Patriot was fired for writing an anti-war editorial. In September and October 2002, there here huge demonstrations abroad against George W. Bush’s proposed war against Iraq. About 1.5 million demonstrated in Rome, and several hundred thousands turned out in London. There were much smaller demonstrations in the United States, but none of these received much coverage. <br /> <br /> The administration’s view of how the war should be reported can be seen in its view of al-Jazeera, the Islamic network that sometimes let itself be used by Al Qaeda for propaganda purposes. This network provided the best coverage of the loss of civilian lives and massive physical damage done during the second Battle of Falluja. The network claimed to have been targeted at least twice targeted there by US jets, and the US did not accept a cease-fire until al-Jazeera pulled its people out of the ruined city. Later an April 2004, a memo surfaced in which Bush suggested to Blair that its headquarters be bombed. The British Official Secrets Act was invoked against the two journalists who printed the story. Frank Gaffney, a Neo Conservative intellectual, quickly defended Bush’s suggestion. <br /> <br />The Canadian and European press explored the Second Bush administration’s meetings with Taliban officials before the attack of September 11, but these questions were not discussed in the mainstream American press. In the first seven months after 9-11, the American press did not investigate what the administration might have known about potential terrorism before 9-11. Dan Rather of CBS News explained on a BBC broadcast, “In some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore in on the tough questions so often.” In this extraordinarily frank televised interview, Rather added “One finds one’self saying ‘ know the right question, but you know what, this is not exactly the right time to ask it’.” Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney suggested an investigation of Bush policies toward the Taliban and restrictions on watching suspicious Saudi nationals in the United States, and the press accused her of saying that Bush knew about 9/11 before it occurred—a claim she did not make. She had earlier looked into Choice Point, the Atlanta Company that had scrubbed black voters from the Florida voter rolls. Rather had urged her not to ask for a thorough investigation of 9/11 in order to avoid a necklacing. Conservative Democratic Senator Zell Miller led in her political lynching. <br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-29002117126657729892008-04-21T12:15:00.000-07:002008-04-21T12:18:51.662-07:00Is the Mainstream Media Snoozy?What Palast called “snoozy” probably meant lazy, which included a disinclination to report things many people did not want to read. Moreover, the U.S. press developed a “heard instinct” which demonstrated in the Clinton years by an inclination to print charges without first thoroughly researching them. It has been said that the American media is a vast echo chamber. Part of the press is comprised of a determined and closely-knit group of right-wing writers who frequently place political objectives well above honest reporting. In the Clinton years, they learned that if a few of them raised a charge against Bill Clinton, the mainstream press would quickly follow. If the mainstream press did not deal with the questions they raised, it was accused of demonstrating its liberal bias. The same dynamics worked in dealing with George W. Bush.<br /><br /> James Wolcott found that “the press has given Bush and his Cabinet a horsy-back ride--. Because they’re push-overs.” Some are attracted by his apparent openness and disarming Marlboro man style. Bush was personally likeable, and it did not hurt to be good to a man favored by the conservative corporate interests that essentially controlled the media. For some time, “media consumers [were] sending the wrong message to media owners. They were not complaining about junk food news, and many of them raised strong objections whenever information unfavorable to the Republican Party was aired. In the last analysis, journalists are in the business of selling airtime and advertising pages; the news is often seen as “a commodity to stick in between the ads. The media is increasingly profit-driven and is concentrated in fewer and fewer corporate hands. The traditional barrier between editorial and advertising operations is also eroding.<br /><br /> By the 1990s, television journalists were drawing huge salaries, and print journalists were also enjoying greater prosperity than before. Philip Weiss, who has written for several newspapers, suggested that “reporters are making too much money” and that this was connected to their “loss of professional freedom.” Their job was to avoid printing what could anger the papers’ owners, advertisers, or readers. The blatant under reporting of FCC rule changes in 2003 that benefited the networks and big corporate interests is an example of how this works. Many of the highly exposed pundits are millionaires who benefit from the Bush tax cuts; “Self-interest most always begets a little prudence.” <br /><br /> During the 2004 campaign, the Bush organization repeatedly employed deception and half-truths in attacking Kerry, who proved singularly inept in answering the charges. For example he was repeatedly charged with voting against funding to supply American troops in Iraq, when the truth was that he had voted for one version of the bill but against another, which was certain to pass in any event. In September CBS Evening News took it upon itself to objectively deal with and sort out the many half-truths, but they were alone in this effort. For almost three weeks, the cable and broadcast media publicized charges that Kerry had lied about his conduct in Vietnam. During the Democratic National Convention, one of the big stories was that Teresa Heinz Kerry had told a right-wing journalist to shove it, even though it was clear he was harassing her and twisting her words. On the eve of the Republican convention, George W. Bush told Matt Lauer the war on terrorism was not winnable, but this did not receive “a fraction of the Teresa coverage.” <br /><br /> What appears to be a “snoozy” inclination may in part be that liberal and conservative journalists have different mindsets in approaching their task. Liberal journalists are inclined to be journalists first and liberals second. Since the socialist left has all but disappeared, they have been marked by “fetishize [d] fairness, openness, and diversity.” They tend to be pragmatic and do not have a clear vision of what the world should be like. Conservative journalists, on the other hand, are conservatives first and journalists second. They are much more inclined than liberals to zealously pursue their party’s talking points. They incline toward bunkerism, believing they are under siege. They have a clear normative vision of what the world should be like, and the absence of that blue print in reality leads them to see sinister forces working against them. The willingness of liberals to tolerate and air other views is seen by conservatives as an endorsement of what they do not like. Hence, the presence of gay people on a broadcast is seen as an endorsement of homosexuality. The difference between these two orientations energizes the conservatives and places the liberals at a great disadvantage. Given this situation, there is little possibility that what is reported in the media can serve liberalism. As Eric Alterman has noted, “[T]he bias of the American media is more conservative than liberal.” <br /> <br /> In August 2002, the Los Angeles Times fired a sportswriter because he used his company e-mail account to criticize Congressman Bill Thomas for claiming that Bill Clinton was responsible for the corporate frauds that came to light in 2002. The Bakersfield Republican was chairman of the powerful house Ways and Means Committee. The reporter had violated company policy, but it is doubtful if the infraction merited dismissal. The Los Angeles Times is clearly not a conservative newspaper. Its overreaction to this infraction may have been a result of sensitivity to conservative claims that the press has a liberal bias. Had a conservative sports writer written a critical letter to Governor Gray Davis using company e-mail, one wonders if she would have been summarily fired. Representative Thomas is a powerful man by any account, and there is evidence that the media does not go out of its way to antagonize the rich and powerful. <br /><br /> In early September 2002, Connie Chung was scheduled to air a special broadcast on the Yale chapter of the secret society Skull and Bone’s. The network ran a number of promotional advertisements and then abruptly scrubbed it. Neither Chung nor her superiors were willing to discuss the matter. The “Tomb,” headquarters of the organization located beneath the Yale campus, is said to house an impressive computer system. Its membership includes President George W. Bush, his father, and many other wealthy and powerful men. Ms. Chung is not known to be a tough investigative reporter, so the piece would probably have done little more than give the names of its members, which can be found in a book by the late Anthony Sutton. The society prizes privacy and secrecy, and its members had the power to preserve it. Bonesmen helped young Bush start his early businesses, and at least one of them was a co-owner of the Rangers. Early in his term, the society held its annual reunion at the White House. When asked about the secret society, the President said “The thing is so secret that I’m not even sure it still exists.” <br /><br /> Only USA Today, of the nation’s major newspapers covered in any detail Jack Welch’s arrogant behavior on election night 2002. This was also the only paper to note on May 4, 2001 that of 27 Bush ambassadorial nominations, 22 went politician in nature, mostly rewards to contributors. In contrast, it noted that at the same time Clinton had nominated 23 envoys, of which 21 were career diplomats. USA Today is by no means a liberal paper, but it has “goo-goo” ( good government) leanings and will print such stories even though they reflect poorly on a Republican administration. <br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-92018225038016035212008-04-19T16:15:00.000-07:002008-04-19T16:18:39.848-07:00Kid-Gloves Coverage for G.W. Bush and ConservativesThe media’s kind treatment of George W. Bush and his administration has been remarkable and is grounded in structural conditions that shape the conduct of the contemporary press. During the campaign of 2000, journalists displayed strong aversion to Al Gore, whom they considered stiff, nerdish, and too ambitious. John Scarborough, a right-wing TV commentator and former Florida Congressman, remarked, “I think in the 2000 election, [the media] were fairly brutal to Al Gore.” They found Bush to be a very likeable fellow and did little to report his verbal gaffs and lack of knowledge. During the contest over the Florida electoral vote, it “accepted the debatable premise that Bush had won the election and Gore was grasping at straws to save his flawed position.” <br /> <br /> As president, Bush pursued a partisan and conservative agenda without a clear electoral mandate, but the press gave him much more than the traditional presidential honeymoon, perhaps “to do its part to heal the deep divisions revealed during the Clinton impeachment and against the disputed election in Florida.” The Bush administration was the most secretive in the nation’s history, and journalists deemed unfriendly to it were simply deprived on information. The administration was so adept at not honoring requests for material under the Freedom of Information Act that there was a virtual shut-down on the acts enforcement. Reporters began to worry that they would be questioned by the FBI if they followed leads in regard to the war in Iraq, and Washington insiders began to clam-up, fearing repercussions for talking to journalists not tied to the administration. The administration viewed information as a weapon and tool and refused to share much of it with anyone, even its supporters. Some areas of government activity became very difficult to cover unless the journalist simply relied on the official story. <br /><br /> Writing in November 2003, Russell Baker referred to “the curiously polite treatment President Bush was receiving from most of the mainstream media.” James Warren, Washington bureau chief of the Republican Chicago Tribune claimed the press was so busy “sucking up to Bush” that “we have been effectively emasculated....” Columnist Anna Quindlen noted that Bush enjoyed ” a Teflon coating slicker and thicker that that of Ronald Reagan.” Even after turning a budget surplus into a huge deficit, failing to find Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and admitting that there was no evidence to connect Iraq with the 9/11 attack on America, Bush enjoyed gentle treatment from the press. Quindlen asked, “Imagine what the response from Republicans--and reporters--would have been if Bill Clinton had been responsible for one of those things.” <br /> <br /> The gentle treatment or “ free pass” George W. Bush received at the hands of the media during the campaign of 2000 could be attributed in part to superb strategy. His campaign duplicated the Reagan strategy of painting large pictures with few details. Bush was often confused on details and his economic notions were simplistic and laden with huge and obvious arithmetical errors. Reporters found Bush personally likeable . They were even known to boo him, like a gaggle of teenagers, when his image appeared on television monitors. They mocked Gore’s nearly encyclopedic knowledge and indulgently passed over in silence Bush’s problems with specific information. The press hounded Albert Gore on every perceived distortion of fact but generally passed over Bush’s mistakes in near silence. <br /><br /> James Pfiffer of James Madison University suggests that Bush’s reliance on a thematic approach made it very difficult to demand some details or bring up factual and mathematical errors without appearing to be carping. Moreover, the thematic approach meant that Bush later would not be held responsible for broken promises. The thematic strategy allowed him to connect to all the narratives the New Right had assiduously and successfully established over more than two decades. It also permitted him to appear as though he had an overall vision of how to proceed. Since the implosion of the liberal paradigm, Democrats have been unable to develop attractive, coherent themes. Gore’s many specific proposals, and his stiff demeanor, invited the constant press criticism he received. It is also likely that the press early on decided that Gore was guilty of strategic dishonesty, reinventing himself as conditions changed. They settled on this as his fatal flaw and built their reporting about him around this theme throughout the campaign. They were aware that Bush came into the campaign prepared with little knowledge but were inclined to give him a pass on his mistakes, thinking he could always hire aides to provide the knowledge he lacked. The result was that there were different standards for truth-telling and slips of the tongue. The press probably did not identify ideologically with Bush; they simply dislike Gore. <br /><br /> Electronic and print journalists “overwhelmingly bought into Bush’s compassionate-conservative facade and downplayed his radical economic conservatism” during the election of 2000. During the campaign of 2002, Bush claimed to be a “compassionate conservative” and cited his alleged support for the Children’s Health Insurance Program [ CHIP] to bolster his claim. The fact was that he fought hard to prevent its passage and later took credit for its passage. The national media seldom picked up this side of the story. Economist Paul Krugman did not join those who believed the media was bullied into giving George W. Bush a free ride. He believed that intellectual sloth and institutional listlessness accounted for its missing the big story, that the Bush administration has been very successful in enacting a radical right wing agenda that included changes in revenue policy which could make inevitable the sharp reduction of the nation’s safety net. <br /><br /> The mainstream press never called him to task” for the radical disconnect between how he got into office and what he has done since arriving.” New Republic editor Peter Beinart defended the press, claiming political writers worked under short deadlines and were generalists who lacked the time or expertise to understand or assess the consequences of Bush’s economic legislation. Moreover, he noted, “the conventions of newspaper evenhandedness dilute their analysis.” This could explain why the press did little to explain the bankruptcy legislation that passed in 2003, showering banks and credit card companies with benefits. Two years before it passed, David Broder was writing about the failure of the press to cover the issue or to note why Bill Clinton had vetoed it. <br /><br /> The press covered the Bush administration’s close ties to Enron, but the role of Ken Lay in screening candidates for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration [ FERA] was only discussed in a few papers and periodicals. Preoccupation with Enron and the effect of the bankruptcy on its employees who lost their retirement savings probably prevented coverage of a $665,000,000 contract to the Carlyle Group for development of the Crusader Advanced Field Artillery System. George H.W. Bush owns stock in the firm and is on its payroll. Spokesmen for the investment firm said that none of its officers lobbied for the contract. <br /> <br /> Little was done to bring attention to the September 2001 resignation of John Di Iulio, head of the president’s faith-based initiative. Di Iulio, one of the very few Democrats in the Bush administration, had angered conservatives by saying that groups that mixed religion with public service should not be funded. He also told a gathering of Evangelicals that their record of concern for the urban poor needed improvement. There were calls for his resignation, but President Bush never spoke publicly on the matter. Di Iulio covered his resignation by claiming he needed more time with his family, and only The New Republic considered his resignation in the light of conservative opposition to his views. <br /><br /> The national media scarcely mentioned the trillion-dollar rainy-day fund Bush had promised and proceded as though the promise not to raid the trust fund was just normal politics, and something not to be believed in the first place. In August 2001, the younger Bush attended a conference of the Western Republican Governors at a hotel in Denver that was being boycotted by the NAACP due to its hiring practices. The White House issued no apology about its tacit support of the hotel, and the national media gave it little play. <br /><br /> Karl Rove, the president’s friend and assistant, met with officers of several corporations in which he held stock. The meeting was a possible violation of federal law. It was reported briefly in the press and dropped. Had that been a Clinton assistant, it would have received much greater play in the press and Congressional Republicans would have demanded at least a Justice Department investigation. At little later, it came to light that Rove had lied about ownership of a political consulting firm. This was only reported in a few papers. Alberto R. Gonzales, White House counsel, found it necessary to admit that Rove had also participated in formulating Bush administration energy policy while he still held Enron shares and stock in other energy firms. <br /><br /> Many have complained of declining journalistic standards, noting a tendency toward “more slipshod and reckless, at times promiscuous work.” Part of the slippage is due to the competition with round-the clock cable news. It is necessary to work faster and cut corners.” It has also gone soft on itself, rarely apologizing or even noting injustices it has done such as the hounding of Richard Jewell in connection with the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta. Greg Palast, an American writing for the Guardian and Observer of London, wrote that the American press seems to be conservative because of its particular “journalistic culture.” He portrays it as a bit “snoozy” and inclined to “reprinting a diet of press releases and canned stories provided by officials and corporation public relations operations.” For example, he notes that there was almost no interest in looking into reports that a Florida effort to scrub the voter rolls of illegal voters actually took at least another 40,000 legitimate voters off the rolls. When CBS News, allegedly the most liberal of the network departments, heard the report, it only checked the matter with Governor Jeb Bush’s office. Hearing a denial there, it dropped the matter. <br /><br /> Palast did a report for his BBC Newsnight program and offered the tape to ABC News, which had a cooperation agreement with BBC. The American network refused to consider the matter and simply aired reports emphasizing how dumb voters in some Florida counties were unable to master simple voting procedures. Only Salon.com and The Nation pursued the matter. The Washington Post briefly covered the story seven months later; only after the U.S. Civil Rights Commission had investigated it and proven that more than 40,000 people were unjustly deprived of the vote. A frustrated Palast asked major newspaper editors why they refused to look into the story and was told that editorial committees feared that they would appear partisan if they reported it. Though he hints that US journalists may often have an aversion to hard work, he seems to settle for an explanation that a lack of funds and shortage of staff makes it difficult for the American press to look into stories that would verify the claims of liberals. By the end of George W. Bush’s third year as president, he had added two trillion dollars to the national debt, but as Charles R. Morris and Paul Krugman noted, the whopping amount of this new debt is scarcely ever mentioned in the mainstream press. Krugman attributes this failure to laziness and a hyper-concern to be evenhanded.<br /> <br /> By 2006, George W. Bush’s approval rating had declined considerably, and the press was reporting more negative information about his policies. Nevertheless, it continued kid gloves treatment on most matters other than the Iraq war, which was shown to be the disaster it had become. <br /><br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-56723336028634280352008-04-19T16:13:00.000-07:002008-04-19T16:15:38.800-07:00Bushies Pressure Public BroadcastingPublic Broadcasting, which has long been denounced by conservatives for its liberal bias, has moved to the right since 1993. Even earlier, PBS sought to eliminate Republican complaints. When the Nixon Administration objected to a program that seemed to suggest that the banks were unfair to the poor, PBS rewrote its program guidelines. Later it modified John Kenneth Galbraith’s Age of Uncertainty, which dealt with different economic theories. Without informing him, it cut parts and brought on many conservative economists to criticize it. By the mid-1970s, it accepted the view that the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Both the “MacNeil/Lehrer Report” and “Washington Week in Review” were dedicated to this preposition. Still the conservative complaints persisted. While conservatives complained that reporters sometimes reached conclusions and “editorialized,” it is likely that they simply did not want information presented that would damage their positions. By the 1990s, when PBS had mastered the art of self-censorship, Bob Dole claimed that PBS conspirators hid behind Big Bird and Mister Rogers while funding gay and lesbian shows. FAIR studies found its reporting has a slight Republican edge in 1993 and was conservative in 2003. By then the Republican goal was not to destroy PBS, which would alienate moderates, but they sought to neuter and use it. <br /> <br /> The Bush administration hastened public broadcasting’s march to the right by installing Kenneth Tomlinson CEO the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tomlinson had many complaints about the liberal bias of public broadcasting and quickly hired conservative consultant to monitor the political content of Bill Moyer’s “Now”, which soon went off the air. A study of his e-mail traffic strongly suggested that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove was behind the move to oust Moyers and move PBS to the right. He also spent millions to bring The Wall Street Journal Report to PBS. The show featured the far right commentaries of the editorial board. The program eventually failed. Tomlinson also established an office of ombudsman, headed by Mary Catherine Andrews, who had worked in the Bush White House. She was assisted by two other Republicans, William Schultz and Ken Bode. Bode was supposed to ad balance to the panel, but he was closely associated with the Hudson Institute and worked for the election of a Republican governor in Indiana. It is unclear what the function of the office might be, but some fear it will continue the task of monitoring broadcasts to detect alleged liberal bias. His successor, Cheryl F. Halpern, a major GOP fund-raiser, was poised to continue his policy. She complained about editorializing and wanted to punish reporters who did so. She was also concerned that the nation’s media was unfair to Israel. <br /><br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-44733194521327367492008-04-19T16:10:00.000-07:002008-04-19T16:13:10.618-07:00The Plame CaseThe administration’s handling of the Plame matter is illustrative of how it handles critics and uses the press. Before the invasion of Iraq, Columnist Robert Novak wrote that he had learned in the White House that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA agent. The agency said that she was a covert agent, which meant revealing her identity could be a crime. There were reports that television host Chris Matthews received a call from Karl Rove, saying it was open season on Wilson’s wife, but the press never nailed down this report. Eventually, journalist Matt Cooper admitted that Rove told him about Plame’s true identity, but only after denials from the White House that Rove was involved From September 2003 to April 2006, Rove denied that he told the Time correspondent about Plame, and only admitted it after Prosecutor Fitzgerald had Cooper’s testimony. Nevertheless, Rove would not be prosecuted for lying or anything else.<br /><br /> Bob Woodward, perhaps the nation’s most famous and respected print journalist, repeatedly said he did not see why the Plame matter was important as White House people are historically given to gossiping. He later had to reveal that he had early knowledge of her identity. When most of the facts were known, it was clear that three high Bush administrations officials told reporters she was a CIA agent, and still others had busily pressed the media to report that she worked for the CIA. <br /> Of course, most of the press had initially thought objections to the veracity of Bush’s claims of WMDs in Iraq were similarly inconsequential. Lou Dobbs, a moderate Republican, told his CNN audience that the investigation into what reporters knew was an “onerous, disgusting abuse of government power,” and liberal columnist Richard Cohen said “The best thing Patrick Fitzgerald could do for his country is get out of Washington, return to Chicago, and prosecute some real criminals.” Fitzgerald was prosecutor in the Plame case. <br /><br /> No one confessed to outing her, so there is no way to know why this was done. Many supposed it was a way of punishing Wilson, who had written to the New York Times, disputing the administration’s claim that Iraq was attempting to acquire uranium from Niger. Novak never answered for what he wrote. Times journalist Judith Miller, who never wrote about Plame, spent 85 days in jail until she proved willing to talk about who told her about Plame. In her first days in jail, she was even forced to sleep on the floor. She left jail only when promised she would be questioned only about Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief-of-staff. She had been an important part of the Cheney information apparatus, and she may have accepted her incarceration as a means of protecting other people. Libby was soon indicted for lying and obstructing, not leaking the identity of a covert agent. <br /><br /> Retired CIA agents made it clear to Congress that the outing of Plame did serious damage to intelligence gathering and that the administration’s cover-up caused “irreversible damage [to] the credibility of our case officers when they try to convince an overseas contact that their safety is of primary importance to us….” The mainstream press showed little interest in the outings implications for national security. Most of the Republican press claimed that outing Plame was not a potential breach of the law. There was a major effort to cast aspersions on the honesty and motives of the Wilsons and reduced the question to one of pure politics. Critics of the Wilsons have also insisted she was not a covert agent under the meaning of the law, even though the CIA had stated she was "an employee operating under cover." From the beginning of this sorry mess, the White House and the Republican information machine have attacked the Wilsons by claiming the trip to Niger was a "boondoggle" and an example of "nepotism." In fact Joe Wilson was an old Niger hand and undertook the assignment without pay. Only, his expenses were reimbursed. His wife even lacked the authority to send him.<br /><br /> After many reports that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was about to indict Karl Rove, Fitzgerald told Rove’s lawyers that this was not going to occur. Fitzgerald, a Bush appointee, had repeatedly handled the case in a manner that allowed the Bush administration to minimize its importance. At one point in 2005, it appeared that the grand Jury would indict Rove, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had a serious discussion with Fitzgerald and the grand jury records were permanently sealed. Good sources suggest the Attorney General reminded Fitzgerald of his and that of Michael Chertoff, misconduct in the trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. The prosecutors hid the multiple government ties to the bombers. He had indicted Lewis “Scooter” Libby for lying but the Libby trial was long delayed. It has been speculated that Alberto Gonzales, who met with Fitzgerald at the time of the supposed indictment, told him that Bush planned to pardon Rove. That would have made the case against Rove hard to make. A March 2007 Justice Department evaluation of US attorneys said of Fitzgerald : “No recommendation : has not distinguished himself either positively or negatively." By then he had indicted Libby and was on the way to winning four counts of perjury and obstruction against him.<br /><br /> Weeks after Rove was in the clear, columnist Robert Novak admitted that Rove had exposed Plame as a covert agent to him. Novak also said that Rove’s testimony to the prosecutor was very different from his. The CIA assessment of damage done by unmasking Plame never became public, but knowledgeable sources said it decimate the operation she directed out of Brewster Jennings and Associates. She ran an important part of the CIA’s Counter proliferation Division (CPD.) To confuse matters more CIA director actively purged members of CPD because they had not supported claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. <br /><br /> CBS News rarely reported on the case, just as it usually ignored the charges against John Bolton who had been nominated to be ambassador to the UN. Burned by its mishandling of charges regarding George W. Bush’s Texas Air Guard service, it simply steered clear of the Rove investigation, as though it involved mere politics. Under Republican control, the two Houses of Congress showed no interest in the matter, but Democrats did conduct an informal, unofficial hearing on the Rove matter. On the PBS program "Reliable Sources," which is supposed to render a balanced account of how the press handles major stories, the host complained that the Rove story had driven the Senator Dick Durbin story off the front page. Durbin, echoing the International Red Cross, had said that some of the abuse of detainees reminded him of Nazi practices. To press fairness watchdog Howard Kurtz, the Durbin remark and the Rove matter were both simply political flaps. On the right-wing FOX News, Juan Williams tried to suggest that the affair was serious because it endangered CIA operations, but Brit Hume silenced him with, “somebody needs to hose you down.”<br /><br /> Prosecutor Joseph Fitzgerald seems to have persuaded a panel of judges that the Intelligence Identity Protection Act could have been violated. However, the law is very tightly drawn, defines covert very narrowly, and specifies that the leaker must have done so with the full intention of exposing a covert agent. Some observers believed it would be almost impossible to prove this. John Wesley Dean has suggested that indictments could be more readily obtained under two other sections of the U.S. code. However, to a layman’s reading, it would seem hard to apply these statutes. White House personnel sign nondisclosure agreements, promising they will not reveal classified information. Fitzgerald could also have been looking at a violation of this agreement. The whole thing might simply have gone away as it has been reported that Fitzgerald's power to investigate will expire in October and the Justice Department official he reports to has been replaced with someone close to Bush. The press could not be counted upon to keep the matter alive or to help in getting to the bottom of the scandal.<br /><br /> The Republican controlled Congress has refused to investigate this possible violation of laws governing national security. Rather, it chose to investigation only the role of journalists in the matter. Normally, the CIA automatically does a damage assessment after a breach of security like this. The assessment is then sent to the committees in Congress that deal with security matters. Eventually an assessment was made, but the CIA refused to let Congress see it. The Republican Congress took a similar approach when The Washington Post’s Dana Priest reported on November 2, 2005 that the CIA maintained a number of secret prisons in Europe and elsewhere. Rather than look into the “black-sites program” both Houses of Congress began probing the leak. In 2007, the Council of Europe issued a scathing report revealing that the CIA had secret prisons in Romania and Poland where detainees were subjected to “degrading treatment and so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’” Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, revealed that disgruntled CIA operatives provided information for the report.. <br /> In September 2006, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a former CIA covert agent, admitted that he had inadvertently revealed Plame’s identity. He said Fitzgerald had not authorized him to disclose his role until that late date. That revelation seemed to end the matter and even justify Republican claims that it was a tempest in a teapot. It was also revealed that Robert Novak confirmed what Armitage told him with Karl Rove and that Rove had also passed this classified information to Matt Cooper. Fitzgerald seemed to have concluded that there was no way to enforce the law against outing covert CIA agents. Interest in others who revealed her identity in order to damage her husband ended, and few remembered that the CIA had never revealed what damage her outing had done to the unit she worked with. <br /> <br /> When Libby was tried for perjury, several Bush administration witnesses said he had lied about hearing about Plame first from a journalist. Judith Miller, a friend of Libby, repeatedly said she could not remember who told her Plame was a CIA agent. Matthew Cooper, another New York Times reporter, testified that Rove first told him Plame worked for the agency. All the testimony made it clear the Vice President’s Office had been involved in a major effort to destroy the good names of Wilson and his wife It was reported that at least one agent with non-official cover was killed as a result of the leak. In early July 2007, President Bush commuted Libby’s sentence to two and a half years probation. In this way, the investigation was effectively ended as Libby no longer had any incentive to tell Fitzgerald what he knew. <br /> <br /> The mainstream media has frequently compared the commutation of the sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to the pardon of Marc Rich by Bill Clinton. One similarity is that neither served any prison time, which is an usual conditions in commutations and pardons. Not mentioned is that Libby had obtained Rich’s pardon and that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barach requested the pardon as did Shimon Peres and Ehud Omert. Rich was involved in many US/Israeli covert operations. It gets more interesting, when we consider that British Lord Chancellor Jack Straw said, “It’s a toss-up whether [Libby] is working for the Israelis or the Americans at any given time.” Recently a former Mossad agent told Wayne Madsen that Libby was an Israeli agent. <br /><br /> A much better comparison would to compare the pardon to George H.W. Bush’s pardon of Caspar Weinberger and Eliot Abrams. Lawrence Walsh made it clear these pardons were intended to end his investigation of Iran/Contra. There were strong reasons to believe that the elder Bush was coordinating the supplying of Contra rebels in Nicaragua, even after law forbade it. A continued investigation would have followed up on leads that Bush, Sr. was not “out of the loop” in the Iran/Contra affair.<br /><br /> To continue the comparison--- The convictions of Admiral John Poindexter and Colonel Oliver North were reversed after partisan Republican Chief Justice William Rehnquist removed Walsh from the supervision of a friendly judge and steered the North and Poindexter to situations where Judge David Sentelle could be of great help. The judge was a protégé of Jesse Helms and a great admirer of Reagan, for whom he named a child. The younger Bush replaced prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s friendly supervisor with a Bush loyalist, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales all but openly leaned on Fitzgerald. <br /><br /> In the case of the younger Bush, the cover-up clearly involved an orchestrated effort to attack former Ambassador Joseph Wilson by revealing that his wife was a covert CIA agent. When Wilson returned from Niger, he started telling journalists that the story that Iraq seeking uranium there was false. He was doing this well before his now famous New York Times Op Ed was published on July 6, 2003. <br /><br /> It is also clear that, beginning around June 23, 2003, the White House began contacting journalists to out Valerie Plame Wilson. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage’s staff offered Robert Novak an interview, even though the columnist has said that Armitage had continually shunned him. In the interview, which occurred after the New York Times piece appeared, Armitage revealed that Plame was an agent. It did not appear to be the accidental admission he claimed. Then Novak got a confirmation from Karl Rove, who had been Armitage’s friend since 2000.<br /><br /> White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan had vigorously denied that anyone in the White House was involved in the leak. After he left that post, he wrote that “I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administrtion were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.”<br /><br /> What else could the White House been hiding? Good alternative news sources suggest that Plame had discovered that there was a secret U.S. effort to smuggle uranium into Iraq in order to develop proof for the Weapons of Mass Destruction argument. <br /><br /> It is not clear why Fitzgerald limited his prosecution to Libby. Clearly, he was under pressure to let Rove off the hook and prevent Vice President Cheney from being implicated. He may have worried that the very conservative DC federal courts would buy the new claim that the president can declassify anything and even, in this case, override the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, which made outing covert agents illegal. Under this doctrine, Cheney could be seen as out of reach because an executive order of March 25, 2003 delegated to the Vice President the power to classify and declassify information. Hence, Cheney could have legalized the outing of Plame by excluding her from the protection of the act. Many would have seen all this as legal but still unseemly and an abuse of power. <br /><br /> Fitzgerald may have felt the need for restraint because of his well-meaning mistakes in the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. The indictment of one key figure was kept under seal; and the involvement of triple agent Ali Mohammed was concealed, as was the likely use of an informer as an agent provocateur. <br /><br /> T </span>Sherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-11237030902557492572008-04-08T12:00:00.000-07:002008-04-08T12:02:25.909-07:00George W. Bush’s News ManagementThe Bush administration had shown enormous skill in information management. It built upon two decades of Republican success in information management and in framing the issues. Journalists have learned to avoid hard questions or presenting information that damages the administration will result in exclusion and persecution, while going along is rewarded with special access and exclusives. The George W. Bush administration insisted upon enforcing the Pentagon’s 1991 ban on taking photographs of coffins carrying the bodies of American soldiers at Dover Air Force Base. When the President held a huge rally for troops at Fort Carson, the press was ordered not to talk to any soldiers before, during, or after the rally. They obeyed, and only the Rocky Mountain News reported on the orders given to t he press. The skill of the Bush administration in manipulating the press was demonstrated in 2004, when the Social Security Administration ran many advertisements clearly touting the advantages of Bush’s prescription care plan. Few noticed that the advertisements could have a political effect. Social Security Administration employees protested that their Administration had been forced to twist the facts about the system’s solvency in order to generate support for the personal retirement accounts. <br /><br /> Later that year, the Department of Education, paid $700,000 to an agency to advertise Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, a major Bush bragging point. The department also paid TV talk show host Armstrong Williams $240,000 to talk up the program in the black community. When the payment came to light, what little discussion there was about blurring the lines between a journalist and a paid advocate. The federal government paid Maggie Gallagher $21,500 to promote the Bush approach to marriage, and another conservative columnist was paid $10,000 to do the same. The use of taxpayer money for political purposes was nearly a non-issue.<br /><br /> Even abuses of the White House press secretary’s briefings did not cause a great uproar. Minor conservative journalist and male escort Jeff Gannon--his real name was Guckert--was issued temporary passes to attend press conferences. Gannon once broke the story that John Kerry could become the first gay president. Scott Mc Clellan seemed to call on Gannon when he was in a spot and Gannon would get him off the hook, sometimes by manufacturing quotations from leading Democrats. Gannon was one of the reporters who broke the story that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent, and he was the only one to see a confidential CIA document revealing her identity. Gannon was a male prostitute with close ties to political operatives in Texas connected to Karl Rove. The male prostitute even kept a web site. In 2004, he was very active circulating information designed to damage Senator Tom Daschle in South Dakota. <br /> <br /> There were many very effective publicists in the administration of the second Bush. One who was sometimes forgotten was Todd Leventhal, who was very skilled at generating propaganda and misinformation. Under Reagan, he was in charge of monitoring Soviet misinformation. Prior to that, he worked with lobbyist Jack Abramoff polishing the image of South Africa. For a time under the second Bush, Leventhal worked with the Pentagon’s Information Operations Task Force to produce positive, if not always truthful, news about the war on terror. His activities were later centered in the Sate Department’s International Public Diplomacy bureau, which answers to Deputy Secretary and master PR generator Karen Hughes. <br /><br /> Newsweek White House correspondent Martha Brant noted “We’re more dependent than ever on [Bush’s] top aides because everything is so closely held.” In 2003 and 2004, the press did not treat kindly the Democrat who ignited the most opposition to George W. Bush and his invasion of Iraq. The remarkable illustrator Art Spiegelman left The New Yorker in 2003 after it supported the invasion of Iraq. He was to observe, “The absolute cowardice of the mainstream American press at that time was overwhelming.” William Greider has argued that the mainstream reporters were “surrogate agents for Washington insider sensibilities.” Not only have they given Bush a relatively free ride, but they “ blew off” Democratic critic Howard Dean and were “hostile to his provocative kind of politics.” After Dean’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination was destroyed, they admitted “with giggly pleasure” that their coverage of him had greatly contributed to that result. Widespread suspicion that the press had a liberal bias must account for why most of the press was so careful to avoid being critical of the Bush administration. By 2004, only 24% of the public strongly agreed that the press attempted to report the news without bias. Given that 58% disagreed, the continuous complaints about liberal bias were bound to lead to self-censorship and an inclination not to provide information that would anger conservatives<br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-16992030766429564612008-04-08T11:58:00.000-07:002008-04-08T12:00:20.020-07:00The Media Accommodates the RightThe mainstream American press is certainly not an adjunct to the Republican Party, but its inclination, since the nineties, to handle Republicans with kid gloves has contributed to the GOP’s progress toward becoming the nation’s normal governing party. For three decades, conservatives have complained about an alleged liberal bias in the media, and these complaints have induced some degree of self-censorship. Over time, most outlets have fallen back to limiting and toning down reports that could reflect poorly on conservatives. The conservative call for “balanced” coverage meant backing away from seeking the unvarnished truth and settling for “he said-she said” journalism. No matter how absurd the factual claims of one side might be, they must be given equal time. In dealing with complex scientific and medical issues, it meant presenting the consensus of experts on one side and giving equal time to often unfounded claims by conservative special interests.” In this context, it meant the media became subservient to some industries such as the fossil fuel industry in environmental matters. Slanted, partisan stories that appeared in conservative press were often picked up by the mainstream media without vetting and aired in its vast echo chamber. Even the Drudge Report became a source of mainstream stories. The inclination of the press to lean over backwards to avoid conservative criticism was also attributable to the expert news management of the George W. Bush White House. <br /> The call for “balanced” journalism has led to what has been called “junk journalism” simply offering the public equal amounts of the claims of both parties. In 2004, Ken Silverstein of the Los Angeles Times journeyed to Missouri to see if efforts were underway to prevent large numbers of blacks from voting. The Justice Department had found that this had occurred in 2000. He found this to be the case again. Republicans denied this and mounted very flimsy countercharges. Reflecting on what balanced journalism meant in this case, he wrote to an editor, wondering if the new standard for journalism required that he simply present the spin from both sides with no effort to establish the facts. He thought the new journalistic atmosphere was very “stifling.” <br /> By the end of George W. Bush’s third year in the White House, Harpers’ Magazine publisher Rick MacArthur told a radio interviewer that the “White House press corps...has now turned into ...[a] full time press agency for the President of the United States.” Later in the interview he added that the public should “assume that the press is now part of the government.” On reflection, MacArthur would certainly back off from full meaning of these assessments, but he was correct in noting that the national press had lost its ability to cover this GOP administration critically. Gore Vidal offered the opinion that “The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.” “The Note,” an electronic publication of ABC News, claimed that the American press in the George W. Bush years was “arguably the most beaten down press corps in the modern era….”<br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-75879292422571123442008-04-08T11:54:00.000-07:002008-04-08T11:57:39.507-07:00Electronic Fraud in 2004 Elections?The New York Times has noted that the forms of electronic voting introduced in the United States “could end up undermining democracy by producing unreliable election results that cannot be truly audited or corrected.” If some were intent on using the machines and computation programs to change results and took great care to cover their tracks, it could be done without anyone being the wiser. The most reliable way of finding fraud in these instances is to compare exit polls with actual results. But many people do not trust exit polls and the comparison’s validity depends on the statistics of probability, which most people do not understand. Touch- screen voting machines linked to centralized computer systems have the potential for massive vote fraud if someone takes the time to learn how to rig the centralized counting program. Prior to 2004, it seems likely that vote fraud via electronic means probably occurred by changing program cards in individual machines. In 2004, there was not a great deal of evidence of this. Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen has also turned up evidence that bribes paid by Nigerian politicians were used to pay election supervisors and computer technicians. More worrisome was the vote counting programs themselves. University scientists and mathematicians have pointed out that the touch-screen machines’ software can easily be manipulated for partisan purposes and have insisted that they be improved and only be employed with paper verification <br /> <br /> Tallahassee computer programmer Clinton Curtis has testified that in the October 2000 election Tom Feeney, A Congressman and former Speaker of the Florida House, asked him to develop software to “flip an election” without being detected. Three other employees were present. Feeney, Jeb Bush’s running mate in 1994, had been a lobbyist for the company where Curtis was employed. The software-tabulating program was to be undetectable and capable of being triggered without the use of additional programs or equipment. At least since 1988, some of the computers used to tabulate results have had black boxes containing codes only the manufacturers could decode. To an ordinary laymen, of course, it is difficult to understand why special computers and software are necessary to count voters. It is also difficult to grasp why the manufacturers, claiming proprietary rights, refuse to share much information about how their products work. <br /><br /> Curtis was then working for Yang Enterprises. Yang was also doing work for NASA at the time. A life-long Republican, Curtis first thought the prototype was needed so Republicans could detect Democratic dirty tricks. He soon learned that the software was needed to change the vote in southern Florida. After the election Feeney bragged about voter exclusion lists and placing state police in locations to prevent blacks from getting to the polls. Curtis wrote the program and then quit his job. There is no solid evidence this particular program was ever used. <br /><br /> Curtis found a job at the Florida Department of Transportation. However, his determination to bring the story to public attention resulted in his being fired. The St. Petersburg Times reported that Curtis passed a lie detector test administered by the former chief polygraph operator for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Curtis had found corruption within the department, and Ray Lemme, a department investigator, looked into his claims and was found dead in Valdosta, Florida, an apparent suicide. In 2006, journalist John Caylor, while seeking photographs of Lemme’s body, was arrested in Panama City, Florida for nonviolently resisting arrest. The reporter was looking into drug money laundering through Florida highway tolls and beating deaths in Jeb Bush’s boot camps. He was made to stand in a cell for seven hours and was not permitted to take nitroglycerin for his heart. Though Florida law permits one telephone call in the first seventy-two hours, he was denied the right to make a call. He was subsequently tried. <br /> <br />The many statistical anomalies of 2004 -- almost all benefited the GOP-- were of a sort that could not be readily investigated. Indeed, Republican computer security expert Chuck Herrin noted that they “benefited us 100% of the time.” In the election of 2004, the electoral count was settled in favor of George W. Bush in Ohio and Florida, both states where electronic voting and tabulation was predominant. A Quantitative Methods Research Team at the University of California at Berkeley examined the Florida election and found that “a county’s use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush and that the random chances of this happening were “less than once in a thousand....” They conservatively estimated that Bush received between 130,000 and 260,000 more votes than could be statistically expected.” <br /><br /> Some voting machines there were actually counted votes backward against Kerry. Bush carried the state by 5%, but lost it by 2% according to the exit polls. Among the 57 counties that used vote-scanning technology to count votes, 29 had been overwhelmingly Democratic. This time they became Bush bastions. The GOP gained 128.45% in those counties, and the Democrats lost 21%. In Liberty County, which is 88% Democratic, Bush gained 700%. Where optional scan technology was not used, voting followed predictable patterns. In Broward County, voting workers said there were boxes of uncounted absentee votes that were later removed from the courthouse. Before the election there, 50,000 applications for absentee ballots somehow got lost in the postal system. <br /><br /> <br /> The election was unusual because there was such a great disparity between the exit polls and the actual results. The exit polls called for a Kerry victory, but the actual results gave Bush another term in the White House. In 42 of 51 states (and District of Columbia), the states moved more toward Bush than the exit polls indicated. When it was clear that the exit polls appeared to be very wrong, the Edison and Mitofsky exit poll results were “rebalanced” early in the morning of November 3 so they came closer to actual results. An important assumption in the “reweighing” was that Bush got every vote he garnered in 2000; no one died and no one changed his mind. This data published by CNN and a CALTECH/MIT study based on the modified figures found that the disparity between the exit polls and actual results was not great enough to warrant further inquiry. The actual exit poll data became available two weeks later and revealed great disparities or “red shifts” in favor of Bush. In Delaware it was 10% in New Hampshire 9.8%, in North Carolina 8%; in Ohio 6.2%, Florida 6%, There is no solid evidence that anyone was seen tampering with county-wide vote counting programs. One respected reporter claimed that the GOP paid $29,000,000 for technicians, posing as FBI and Homeland Security agents to work with these programs in various locations. He claimed that some of this information came from disgruntled agents who claimed to have been shorted on their pay.<br /> <br /> In ten of the eleven battleground states, the differences between tallied and exit poll margin favored Bush. For two generations, the media’s exit polls have never been more than a tenth of a percent off. Even Republican consultant Dick Morris told FOX News that “Exit polls are almost never wrong.” The discrepancies were far outside the allowances for random error and chance. Statisticians have concluded that the chances of the wide variances of 2004 occurring were less that one in a thousand. In The chances that Kerry received only 47.1% of the vote in Florida are only three in a thousand. The best explanation Gallup pollsters could come up with was that Kerry people were much more willing to participate in exit polls than Bush backers. <br /><br /> In states where a variety of means were used to count votes, there was no meaningful disparity between exit poll results and actual tabulations. However, there was a great difference between the exit polls and reported results in states where electronic programs were used to register and count votes. <br /><br /> Analyzing the races in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania ( where a Senate seat was involved), Professor Ron Baiman thought the discrepancy between exit polls and tabulated votes could occur only once in 155,000,000 times. In Florida, Republicans came up with a particularly ugly means of scrubbing black voters from the rolls. Letters were sent to the home addresses of black men and women in the service with instructions that they were not to be forwarded but returned to sender. With that evidence of non-residency, the Florida GOP was able to remove 10 % from the rolls. The story was uncovered by BBC but not reported much in the United States. The race was especially close in Ohio, where Bush eventually was declared the winner by less than 130,000 votes. There was not one elected statewide official who was a Democrat, and the secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who counted the votes, was the Bush campaign chairman. Every possible legal and marginally legal device was used against Kerry. In addition 105,000 voters --mostly Democrats-- were purged in Cincinnati and another 28,000 were removed from the rolls in Toledo. There is no information of how many were purged in Dayton and other Democratic strongholds.<br /><br /> In Franklin County there was a pattern of taking voting machines out of strongly Democratic precincts so that the lines would be longer. There were 580 absentee votes in Trumbull County, which could not be matched with voters in the registration list. If this were extrapolated statewide, it would come to 62, 513 fraudulent absentee votes. A former ES&S employee was allowed to tamper with the vote counting computer in Auglaize County on October 16. In Warren County (about 20 miles northeast of Cincinnati (Kings Island area), the court house was locked down so that reporters could not observe counting. In the past, there was room for the media in the courthouse during elections. It is important to know this is one of the last counties in Ohio to close its polling places. That county had a 33% increase in votes cast over 2000, and Bush won 72% of the vote. . In Perry County, more votes were cast than people who signed the register as on site voters or absentees/ In Butler County, the Kerry-Edward ticket ran far behind other Democrats. In the Columbus area, there were 4,258 votes in a Gahanna precinct and 260 for Kerry. However, there were only 800 voters there.<br /><br /> Miami County was very slow counting its votes and released its complete total only when almost the entire state had been heard from. Bush picked up an amazing 19,000 more votes than in 2000 in this rural county, Kerry carried 31.38% of the voter, compared to 36.38 for Gore. The county boasted an almost impossible increase in turnout, with the new votes shared between the candidates in these proportions. Some precincts had nearly 98% turnouts. In usually heavily Democratic Mahoning County, many voters reported that they attempted to vote for Kerry on the video machines, but the vote kept turning up for Bush. Some might recall that this is Youngstown and naturally wonder whether some kind of corruption were involved. In Lucas County where Toledo is located, , numerous machines consistently malfunctioned. Outside of Xenia, polling officials applied special standards to prevent black students from Wilberforce University from voting. <br /> <br /> Except in the case of the 2002 Georgia elections, it has been difficult to find a great body of evidence proving that electronic machines have been used to rig elections. With the passage of time and growing sophistication of election software, it will become nearly impossible. Senator Chuck Hagel has been questioned because he was a part owner of the E .S &S firm that counted more than 80% of the votes in Nebraska. Only in 2003 did Senator Hagel divulge his involvement in the voting machine company. His election in 1996 was an upset, and he won in a landslide in 2002. In the same year, machines in Comal County, Texas awarded victories to three Republicans, each polling exactly 18181 votes. Recently, Emery County, Utah Elections Director Bruce Funk brought in an outside technical firm to test Diebold machines. It was learned that the machines could easily be manipulated. The Governor of Utah hurriedly used his private plane to bring in Diebold officials to squelch the story. Funk was fired. In Leon County, Florida, Ion Sanchez , elections commissioner, found a security flaw in the Diebold machines. Diebold refused to do anything about it and removed its machines. The other two large providers of machines refused to sell machines there. Sanchez could be sued by the State of Florida for not having touch screen machines. <br /><br /> Touch screen voting machines linked to centralized computer systems have the potential to massive vote fraud if someone takes the time to learn how to rig the centralized counting program. University scientists and mathematicians have pointed out that the touch-screen machines’ software can easily be manipulated for partisan purposes and have insisted that they be improved and only be employed with paper verification. The most important of these programs is GEMS, manufactured by Diebold. The manuals and source codes for it can be downloaded from an open Diebold FTP site or from at least three other known sites. With this information, it would be easy to hack into a county’s main computer and change the results. For some reason, GEMs can even record negative votes, and a Diebold spokesman defended that feature saying that an election administrator may have a good reason to record negative votes. It is also possible that these programs have many undetected bugs. They have roughly 100,000 lines of code, and their providers insist they are error-free. Lacking paper trails from the individual voting machines, it would be very hard to reconstruct what had happened. <br /> <br /><br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-40428806437279512982008-04-08T11:51:00.000-07:002008-04-08T11:54:42.049-07:00The Election of 2004In addition to working to put Nader on the ballot, the Republicans in 2004 attempted to hold down the number of registered voters who were most likely to vote for Democrat Kerry. In Arizona, challenging Hispanic Voters was a tradition, and five organizations ramped up to intensify this activity in 2004. The Missouri legislature passed new voter identification legislation that made it easier to prevent Blacks from voting. In 2000, this was accomplished there by opening black voting places several hours late. In the past, “ballot security” teams went into minority neighborhoods photographing minority voters and demanding identification cards. This process was repeated in 2004. In 2004, South Dakota authorities demanded that Native American voters in the primaries produce identification cards, which are not required by law. <br /><br /> In Texas, local authorities threatened to prosecute students at African American Prairie View A and M if they attempted to vote.. The Republican Secretary of State in Ohio attempted to invalidate voter registration forms in Cleveland because they were not printed the right weight paper. A quarter of a million African Americans in Ohio received letters warning them that they could not vote; among the reasons given were being registered by the NAACP. Misleading pamphlets were also sent to Milwaukee blacks in an effort to discourage their voting. John Pretzel, Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of representatives, openly stated it was necessary to suppress the black vote in Philadelphia. <br /><br /> In Las Vegas, Nevada, the Republicans hired Voters Outreach of America to register voters. The firm’s managers were caught destroying Democratic registration forms. Employees said they were being paid only for Republican signature. In Oregon, the same firm was discovered to be repeating this performance. However, there it sometimes used public libraries, claiming to be official registrars. Its employees were reported to have told University of Oregon students that by registering as Republicans they were somehow fighting the sexual abuse of children. Similar problems appeared in West Virginia.. In Florida, election officials tried to remove another 22,000 Blacks from the voter roles, even though they were not felons. Republican Secretary of State Glenda Hood disqualified an additional 10,000 registration forms of likely Democrats because they had checked off in only one place rather than two that they were citizens of the United States. <br /> <br /> Former President Jimmy Carter, whose center has monitored elections around the world, noted that the process in Florida did not meet international standards in part because people holding “strong political biases operate it,” and he predicted that the 204 Florida election would again be characterized by irregularities. The usual efforts of those in power to prevent some groups from voting were much in evidence. In Minnesota, the Secretary of State refused to give Democratic workers street lists. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, voting officials dumped 5,000 votes, but Kerry still managed to carry the state. In many places in the North and South, Democratic precincts seemed to have far more voting machine problems than in Republican areas. Southern state officials routinely denied black college students the right to vote in college towns or made the process so tedious that few were able to cast ballots. Voting officials permitted blatant intimidation of black voters by private individuals and party operatives across the South. <br /> <br /> The Republican Party and its allies also used traditional means to hold down the Democratic vote. In Michigan, state Representative John Pappageorge spoke openly about the necessity to “suppress the Detroit vote.” A Republican official in Philadelphia said the same about his city’s black vote. In South Carolina, African Americans received bogus NAACP letters saying that people with parking tickets would go to jail for ten years if they voted in 2004. This was a variant of the old tactic of telling blacks that if they had any outstanding debt they could not vote. In South Dakota, volunteers followed members of the Yankton Sioux tribe to the polls and copied down their license plate numbers. This intimidation tactic helped Christian conservative John Thune defeat Senator Tom Daschle. The newest and most effective technique in holding down the Democratic vote was the use of private firms to register voters and help people apply for absentee ballots. The papers of those identifying themselves as Democrats were lost. This was widespread in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Michigan, and Ohio. The firm accused of doing much of this was Sproul and Associates. After the election, George W. Bush entertained the firm’s founder, Nathan Sproul.<br /> <br /> Civilian American voters living abroad tend to vote Democratic. These three million found it difficult to vote because the Pentagon shut down the web site that was supposed to be used by these people to register to vote. Almost a million military personnel live abroad, and the military distributed absentee ballots at all its foreign bases. These people are immersed in a conservative military culture, given access to Rush Limbaugh daily on armed services radio, and are exposed on a daily basis to the pro-Republican views of NCOs and officers. <br /><br />Swift-Boating John Kerry<br /> Democratic efforts to feature Kerry’s distinguished war record were quickly countered by claims that he had lied about his service and did not deserve his medals. Early in the campaign, and again in August and thereafter, a GOP-backed “independent” group of veterans called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, ran advertisements that claimed that John Kerry did not deserve his three purple hearts, the Bronze Star, and the Silver Star. They claimed that he had lied to get them. They were also angered by the fact that he later denounced the war and spoke of atrocities that had occurred. Reminding veterans that Kerry had criticized the war involved a very potent gut issue. It reminded many Vietnam veterans of the shabby treatment they had received upon returning to the United States, and it invited them to blame Kerry for their abuse then. The Bush administration claimed no connection to the group but refused to disavow their advertisements .The “527” advocacy group had ties to the Bush campaign and two Bush campaign officials, including general counsel Benjamin Ginsberg, had to resign their posts. Much of their money came from Bush’s top fund-raiser in Texas, a man who was also a close friend of strategist Karl Rove. Take-over specialist T. Boone Pickens donated $500 million and Texas oil men gave massive amounts to the $6.7 million the group collected by September 11. “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” a conservative 527 group operating out of Texas, aired a series of advertisements claiming John Kerry had lied to obtain his medals. The Bush administration claimed no connection to the group but refused to disavow their advertisements. The advertisement apparently sharply reduced Kerry’s support among veterans and forced the Kerry campaign to spend precious resources answering it.<br /><br /> The Annenberg Election Survey found that 46% of undecided voters found the Swift-Boaters charges believable, even though very few of them saw either of the commercials in their entirety. The group held joint rallies with the Bush Republicans in Texas and was financed by leading Bush fund-raisers, one of whom was a friend of Karl Rove. Their claims contradicted Navy documents and had numerous inconsistencies. Several of these veterans had previously praised Kerry. One veteran was interviewed by them under the impression he was helping Kerry, and they deleted from his comments proof that Kerry was under fire in the incident that led to his receiving the Bronze Star. They alleged that the shrapnel that Kerry still carries was the result of a self-inflicted wound. Their claims were widely covered, especially on cable television, and the wall-to-wall coverage could have helped spread their stories and could have been instrumental in reducing Kerry’s support. Jerome Corsi who co-authored the group’s book attacking Kerry was forced to admit that he had sent anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim posts to a conservative web site. <br /><br /> Rear Admiral William L. Schachte, Jr., one of those involved with the Swift Boaters, had been involved in the 2000 effort to smear Mc Cain in South Carolina and was a lobbyist for a firm that recently won a large defense contract. His partner was chairman of the 2004 Republican convention in New York., Soon after the controversy gathered steam, former GOP nominee Bob Dole went on the stump to attack Kerry’s war record, and Rush Limbaugh devoted a large part of his daily program to interviewing the leader of the Swift Boat Veterans. John McCain criticized the advertisements but vigorously campaigned with Bush for some time. He also asked Kerry to drop an advertisement that showed him criticizing Bush for using similar tactics against him in 2000, and Kerry immediately complied. When asked why people could believe that Kerry had lied about his Vietnam service, McCain responded, “With enough ads, you can convince people that pigs fly.” The claims of this group dominated the broadcast and cable news for almost three weeks. The pattern for covering them was to give equal time to the accusers and to those trying to make rebuttals, but there were not many efforts to get at the facts themselves. <br /><br /> At the Republican National Convention, many delegates were wearing Band-Aids with purple hearts attached to them, a way of saying Kerry had not bled enough and did not deserve his three Purple Hearts or other medals. At an early morning prayer breakfast, the presider assured others that “the people who hate George Bush hate God.” The Republican National Convention endorsed a very conservative platform but featured a host of moderate sneakers, in an effort to attract undecided moderate voters. The Republican administration of New York City scooped up 1,821 peaceful demonstrators, and depositing them in an abandoning bus depot before depositing them in cells. A few of the people were not demonstrators but people unfortunate enough to be leaving their apartments at the time. <br /><br /> The Los Angeles Times released polling data on August 26 showing that the attacks on Kerry’s military record had weakened him. This poll showed Bush ahead 49-46; a CNN poll showed Kerry maintaining a one point lead. In this case too, Kerry had lost support with half as many voters as a month before believing his service record was a positive indicator with respect to his ability to function as commander in chief. Most of those who had abandoned Kerry were conservative Democrats, who had long been unhappy with the party’s position on racial and cultural matters. Fully 15% of declared Democrats planned to vote for Bush, while very few Republicans planned to abandon their standard-bearer. In late October the Sinclair Broadcasting Corporation preempted 90 minutes on all 62 of its stations to broadcast the Swift Boat Veterans film attacking John Kerry. It was entitled “Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal.” The firm regularly sends tapes of right-wing political commentary to its affiliates to be presented in news broadcasts. <br /><br /> Carlton Sherwood produced the film, which came very close to saying Kerry’s anti-war activities were treasonous. Sherwood has worked for The Washington Times, and in the 1980s wrote Inquisition: The Persecution of Reverend Sun Myuung Moon. The four Smith brothers, who own Sinclair, gave 97% of their political contributions in 2004 to Republicans. They ordered their ABC stations not to air the Ted Koppel April 30 telecast in which he honored those who had died in Iraq. <br /> <br /> Bush’s War Record Dispute Helps GOP<br /> In September someone fed a CBS producer false documents that showed that George W. Bush had attempted to evade his responsibilities to the Texas Air Guard. A little examination would have shown that the documents were forgeries, but CBS accepted them after a cursory effort to review their authenticity, perhaps because the documents only verified what was already known from other sources. <br /><br /> CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” aired documents allegedly written by George Bush’s National Guard commander that related to his refusal to take the required physical examination in 1972. The refusal to take the physical examination was well known, but the documents also indicated that Bush received favored treatment and had been given a direct order to take the examination. Long-time anchor Dan Rather had been a devil figure of conservatives since the Nixon era, and they did not stint on their efforts to discredit him and this story. In time, Rather had to admit that he could not verify the authenticity of the documents. Almost from the beginning, media attention focused on CBS rather than on Bush’s Guard service. This incident chilled interest in Bush’s Guard Service. CBS subsequently cancelled a one-hour special on the claims used to bring the US into the war in Iraq because airing the program before the election would be inappropriate. <br /> There was much speculation that the documents on which the program was based came from the Democratic National Committee, but few considered the possibility that the forgery of these documents was a supremely successful Rovian trick.<br /> <br /> Ohio <br /> There were long lines in Ohio Democratic precincts, while there were none or short ones in Republican ones, which typically had more and better voting machines. By placing outmoded equipment in black precincts, Ohio election officials greatly increased the chance of having many “spoiled votes.” In the 47 Dayton, Ohio precincts that went heavily for Kerry, the spoilage rate was 5.16%, compared to 1.31% for the rest of Montgomery County. This is partly why blacks have a 800 % greater chance of not having their votes counted than whites. Similarly, placing too few machines in black precincts created great lines and discouraged people from voting. The situation was so blatant in Ohio that the very Republican Columbus Dispatch felt obliged to report on it. It found that the number of machines in Democratic parts of Franklin County was reduced by 17 while the Republican precincts received eight more machines. Gambier, Ohio mayor Kirk Emmert asked the state election commission for more machines because Kenyon College students were expected to vote in large numbers. The request was denied and only two machines were available in the ward where students could vote, and one of them broke down before noon. In Democratic Cuyahoga and Summit Counties, old machines were used and the average number of votes per machine was less than half those per machine in the Columbus area. In Akron, Democratic volunteers learned on Election Day that almost 10% of their voters had been removed from the rolls.<br /><br /> The provisional ballot, a new technique made possible by HAVA, allowed people to provisionally vote if they showed up at the wrong place or broke some other regulation. These votes were usually not counted. There were 1,090,729 provisional ballots thrown out in 2004 and another 3,600,390 that were classified as spoiled. In addition, there were 526, 420 uncounted absentee ballots that were discarded, especially in swing states. These techniques were widely used, especially in Ohio, and boosted the number of uncounted votes to the 3,000,000 mark. In addition there were 95,000 lost votes in Franklin County, 12,000 in Mahoning, and 6,400 in Warren County. Often, the HAVA provision on provisional ballots is used in conjunction with sophisticated caging techniques to disqualify voters. Hispanics and African Americans who move frequently are targeted by highly developed caging operations. Perhaps mail is sent to an old address and the returned letter is used to strike someone from the voting rolls. Should the targeted person remain in the rolls, he or she can be challenged at the polls and then given a provisional ballot, which voting officials have the power to simply ignore.<br /><br /> In some southwest white Republican, Bible-belt counties, C. Ellen Connally, an underfunded African American running for Ohio Supreme court, somehow ran far ahead of John Kerry. It has been argued that maybe these conservative Christian voters did not know that she was black or a supporter of gay marriage. Even two large black precincts in Cleveland voted in this very unusual way. The normal pattern is that vote totals are highest at the top of the ticket and drop off significantly thereafter. <br /> <br /> The Ohio recount was marred by allegations of fraud. Triads Corporation, which services the punch card voting system in 41 counties, was found to be sending people to court houses to prepare computers for recounts. The clearest case of abuse was in Hocking County, where “Michael” from Triad appeared to brief workers on “tricky” questions attorneys might ask and to work with tabulators and computers. He asked which precincts had been designated for recount and then worked on the computer, telling the employees not to turn it off as the correct results were then on display. He also helped employees post a “cheat sheet” to help them with the recount. In Lucas County, a Diebold technician reprogrammed machines prior to the recount, and in suburban Sylvania Precinct 3 the programming card was reprogrammed.. Voting officials in Shelby County admitted they had destroyed critical materials, making a recount there impossible to the recount, Secretary of State Blackwell ordered voting officials in the counties to prohibit others from examining poll registers, a violation of Ohio law which made it impossible for Democratic observers to analyze the election or make sense of the recount. <br /><br /> Blackwell did not bother to impound any machines or computers before the recount and refused to appear before a House Committee investigating the matter even though its chair was a Republican Blackwell, himself a black, saw to it that minority precincts received too few machines. Often these precinct voting sites were relocated without sufficient notice to residents. Before the election, he had written to other Republican officials that retaining the old punch card machines would guarantee many errors, and he followed his own advice by placing defective ones in black precincts in Cleveland. There were similar complaints about serious misconduct on the part of the secretaries of state in Florida and Minnesota. <br /><br /> Progressive journalist Mark Hertsgaard has examined many of the issues raised above and has bent over backward to weigh Republican explanations for many strange circumstances. He concluded that the evidence of conventional vote fraud techniques is not enough to warrant the conclusion that the GOP stole the election. However, he “came away [from Ohio] persuaded there was indeed something rotten in the state of Ohio in 2004.” He gave only a cursory glance at claims that there was electronic vote fraud. It is in this area where the largest number of votes could have been flipped. <br /><br /> Alaska Democratic officials suspected that results in the state’s very close election had been manipulated. They sued to get access to tabulations and found that 293 manual changes had been made after the election. Such entries are made when a ballot cannot be scanned. By contrast, only seventeen manual entries were made after the primary. The Board of Elections refused to let them see the tally and the Democrats had to resort to very time-consuming litigation before they were permitted to see the records in 2006. In 16 state house districts, the turn out was 200%. An honest total for Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski was 149,446 but the official total was 226,992. Bush received 190,889 votes, but the official tally showed 292, 267 votes. <br /><br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8808618.post-3234765894817903872008-04-08T11:46:00.000-07:002008-04-08T11:50:26.931-07:00The Election of 2002Even with the advantage of Bush’s popularity and the national security issues, Republicans did resort to some chicanery in the 2002 by-elections. New Hampshire Republicans successfully jammed Democratic telephone lines, preventing them from making get-out-the-vote calls. The Republican Party spent $2,500,000 in the unsuccessful defense of James Tobin, who orchestrated this, and four years later it developed that on November 5-6, 2002, he made 22 calls to the White House. Tobin was sentenced to ten months in prison, but the ties to the White House were not pursued. In Georgia, the defeat of Senator Max Cleland in 2002, up to then considered untouchable, has been questioned. Cleland is a triple amputee who lost those limbs in the service of his country. His opponent, Saxby Chambliss, trailed Cleland by 5 points and was claiming that Cleland was a coward and traitor for not giving Bush 100% support on Iraq. Cleland lost by 7 points. Democratic Governor Roy Barnes was leading his opponent by eleven points but ended up losing to Sonny Perdue by five points. In October 2003, a former Diebold subcontractor in Georgia reported that Diebold technicians reprogrammed 20,000 touch screen machines in 2002 after the state had certified that the machines were in working order. Technicians were ordered not to inform the Board of Elections of what had occurred. Diebold has denied the charge. Diebold is the nation’s largest election services contractor. Reprogramming was ostensibly undertaken because some of the machines were crashing. A number of employees admit to secretly placing a software “patch” on voting machines. <br /><br /> It is possible that memory cards from the touch screen machines could be removed and manipulated in such a way as to show how the machines were working and whether errors were made. In addition, 67 machines in Fulton County, Georgia lost their memory cards so no votes were recorded. The cards were never found, and Georgia authorities showed no interest in examining why the 2200 new machines were showing results that differed so markedly from recent polling. Recent tests of touch screen machines in Florida revealed that sometimes people would vote for one name while another appeared as the person for whom they had voted. Alert voters in Miami Dade and Broward Counties were able to identify this problem in 2002 before much damage had been done. As of 2004, five of its top managers, including Vice President Jeff Dean, had been convicted of felonies. <br /><br /><br />Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forumSherman De Brossehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607886884624597357noreply@blogger.com0