Bush's 'Crusade'

But Bush’s challenge now is to implement a measured – and effective – response to the Sept. 11 attacks. To do that, Bush must recognize the shades of gray that have marked the path behind and surely will mark the struggle ahead.
© 2001 Robert Parry is an investigative reporter who broke many of the Iran-contra stories in the 1980s for The Associated Press and Newsweek

Two Symbols Of American Capitalist Hegemony
Inside Corporate America
By Greg Palast
The Observer, London

There’s two people you ought to know: Greg O’Neill and Clinton Davis. They are exceptionally important because, according to Rana Kabbani, writing in my British sister paper The Guardian, they are "two symbols of American hegemony." Technically, she was referring to the two towers of the World Trade Center. But it was not American hegemony which fell 50 floors into horrid, crushing oblivion. Nor was it just some architectural artifact which was instructed with the "painful lesson" about US foreign policy described by Kabbani with unapologetic glee.

For four years, I’ve brought you tales from Inside Corporate America - from pig swill price-fixing conspiracies ripping off Asia to Texas power pirates turning off the lights in Rio. And when the profit hunt turned from goofy to cruel, I’ve told you the names of victims from Argentina to Tanzania. Now the victims are inside America itself, from what US television hair-do Tom Brokaw, happy to play the emblem game, called, "The symbols of American capitalism."

Davis worked in the basement of the Trade Center. O’Neill on Floor 52 of the South Tower. (And until I started spending too much time in London, my office was on the 50th floor of the North Tower.)

Here’s what O’Neill did in Suite 5200. When the Exxon Valdez grounded, he fought British Petroleum and Exxon to get compensation for the natives of Alaska. When he learned a power company had faked safety reports on a nuclear plant, O’Neill, a lawyer, hit them with a civil racketeering suit and ultimately helped put these creeps out of the nuclear business.

Davis worked in the cops’ division of the state’s Port Authority. Neither Davis nor O’Neill would be my first choice for a symbol of US imperial might, to target for retaliation for "terror by Jewish groups," to use Kabbani’s bone-head words.

If anything, the Trade Center was a symbol of American socialism. These towers were built by New York state in the 1970s, when ‘government-owned’ became quite unfashionable in Britain. One tower, still owned by Davis’ employer, the Port Authority, generates the revenue which pays the bonds which keeps the city’s infrastructure – subways, tunnels, bridges, and more – out of the hands of the ever-circling privatizers. Convincing capitalists that publicly-owned operations are as good an investment bet as General Motors fell to government securities market-makers, Canter Fitzgerald (100th floor, 700 workers, no known survivors).

I have a request for Britain’s Left. Today, George W. Bush is beating the war drum against Osama Bin Laden, a killer created in our President’s very own Cold War Frankenstein factory. During the war in Vietnam, thousands filled jails (including me) to resist it - we may have to again. It would help those of us Americans ready to stop the killing machine if Europeans would stop the lecturing.

In a sickening but not unique commentary, The Guardian’s Seumus Milne wagged his finger at Americans still gathering corpses. "They can't see why they are hated." He demands, as do too many of my otherwise progressive colleagues, that Americans must ‘understand’ why O’Neill and Davis were the targets of blood-crazed killers. Hey, if you’re government backs Israel, well, just get used to it, baby.

(And what do you mean ‘they are hated,’ Seamus? When did the developing world fall in love with the Imperial conquerors of Iraq, Palestine and the Khyber Pass?)

After London’s Canary Wharf was attacked, I don’t remember America’s Left suggesting this was a just revenge for the Queen’s occupation of Ireland; a time to cuddle up to the berserkers with bombs.

Commentators like Kabbani and Milne have a great advantage over me. While Bin Laden hasn’t returned my phone calls, they seem to know exactly the killers’ cause. We have to "understand" that the terrorists don’t like America’s foreign policy. Well, neither do I. But I also understand that the bombers are not too crazy about America’s freedom of religion nor equality of women under the law. And they’re none to happy about our reluctance, despite televangelists’ pleas, that we cut off the hands of homosexuals.

On my journalistic beat investigating corporate America, I’ve heard every excuse for brutality and mayhem: "We met all the government’s safety standards," "We never asked for the military to use force on our behalf." The excuses and bodies pile up.

Maybe I just have to accept that killing is in fashion again, for profit, for revolution, to protect American interests or to take vengeance on American interests.

Baroness Thatcher thinks we should understand Pinochet; the Bush family ran their own little jihad against Communism I was supposed to understand; now some Britons - sadly, the one’s I like and respect most - want us to understand a new set of little Pinochets with beards.

Afghan-American Tamim Ansary suggests we understand victims, not victimizers. He wrote in a personal note from Texas, "The Taliban are ignorant psychotics. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler." But now we come to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, says Amsary, "that's been done. Level our houses? Done. Turn our schools into piles of rubble? Done." Bombing would just stir the ruins and kill crippled orphans the Taliban will abandon in Kabul.

To prevent an unelected US President from ordering up this new atrocity, grieving Americans don’t need nasty admonitions about the causes, just or unjust, of our killers.

What’s missing is an alliance against the murder of civilians. Serbians themselves turned over Milosevic. Why not demand that the Moslem world turn over Bin Laden and his hounds, not as part of a give-him-up-or-we-blow-you-up ultimatum, but as a statement of our humanity and expectation of theirs.

That terrible Tuesday evening, I had to call O’Neill’s home. He answered the phone. "My god, you’re safe!"

O’Neill replied, "Not really." I hope that doesn’t disappoint Ms Kabbani.

Davis was safe too, in the towers’ basement. But he chose to go up into the building to rescue others.

Today, this symbol of American capitalist hegemony is listed as missing.
© 2001 Award-winning investigative reporter Greg Palast writes, Inside Corporate America, fortnightly in the Observer (London), Sunday paper of Britain's Guardian. At http://www.GregPalast.com you can read and subscribe to Greg Palast's columns.

These Times Demand Reason, Not Blind Hate

Becoming terrorists is no way to combat terrorism.
© 2001 Jan Glidewell

Right, Left And Just Wrong

That barbarism is what needs to be understood—and resisted with force.
© 2001 Joe Conason email Joe at: jconason@observer.com.

Toward The President Patriotic Tolerance

All that seems like make-believe after Sept.11, 2001, and Bush can count on patriotic Democrats to put country above party.
© 2001 Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

Quotable Quote

"We can support the troops without supporting the President." … Trent Lott

It’s The Oil

Too late for that sort of pragmatism. The war we’re about to wage will surely be protracted and costly, with profound repercussions, and all because we decided that dealing with our enslavement to gasoline via conservation, alternative energy sources and the like was just too incon-fucking-venient. Feel that way now?
© 2001 Johnny Angel

It's time to speak and to act. It falls on us now to take to the streets, bearing a clear message for the warmongers: We don't love Big Brother.
© 2001Jacob Levich (jlevich@earthlink.net) is an writer, editor, and activist living in Queens, New York.

Bush Is Walking Into A Trap
By Robert Fisk
The Independent – UK

Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was supposed to have learnt that the rule of law comes above revenge, President Bush appears to be heading for the very disaster that Osama bin Laden has laid down for him. Let us have no doubts about what happened in New York and Washington last week. It was a crime against humanity. We cannot understand America's need to retaliate unless we accept this bleak, awesome fact. But this crime was perpetrated – it becomes ever clearer – to provoke the United States into just the blind, arrogant punch that the US military is preparing.

Mr bin Laden – every day his culpability becomes more apparent – has described to me how he wishes to overthrow the pro-American regime of the Middle East, starting with Saudi Arabia and moving on to Egypt, Jordan and the other Gulf states. In an Arab world sunk in corruption and dictatorships – most of them supported by the West – the only act that might bring Muslims to strike at their own leaders would be a brutal, indiscriminate assault by the United States. Mr bin Laden is unsophisticated in foreign affairs, but a close student of the art and horror of war. He knew how to fight the Russians who stayed on in Afghanistan, a Russian monster that revenged itself upon its ill-educated, courageous antagonists until, faced with war without end, the entire Soviet Union began to fall apart.

The Chechens learnt this lesson. And the man responsible for so much of the bloodbath in Chechnya – the career KGB man whose army is raping and murdering the insurgent Sunni Muslim population of Chechnya – is now being signed up by Mr Bush for his "war against people''. Vladimir Putin must surely have a sense of humor to appreciate the cruel ironies that have now come to pass, though I doubt if he will let Mr Bush know what happens when you start a war of retaliation; your army – like the Russian forces in Chechnya – becomes locked into battle with an enemy that appears ever more ruthless, ever more evil.

But the Americans need look no further than Ariel Sharon's futile war with the Palestinians to understand the folly of retaliation. In Lebanon, it was always the same. A Hizbollah guerrilla would kill an Israeli occupation soldier, and the Israelis would fire back in retaliation at a village in which a civilian would die. The Hizbollah would retaliate with a Katyusha missile attack over the Israeli border, and the Israelis would retaliate again with a bombardment of southern Lebanon. In the end, the Hizbollah – the "center of world terror'' according to Mr Sharon – drove the Israelis out of Lebanon.

In Israel/Palestine, it is the same story. An Israeli soldier shoots a Palestinian stone-thrower. The Palestinians retaliate by killing a settler. The Israelis then retaliate by sending a murder squad to kill a Palestinian gunman. The Palestinians retaliate by sending a suicide bomber into a pizzeria. The Israelis then retaliate by sending F-16s to bomb a Palestinian police station. Retaliation leads to retaliation and more retaliation. War without end.

And while Mr Bush – and perhaps Mr Blair – prepare their forces, they explain so meretriciously that this is a war for "democracy and liberty'', that it is about men who are "attacking civilization''. "America was targeted for attack,'' Mr Bush informed us on Friday, "because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.'' But this is not why America was attacked. If this was an Arab-Muslim apocalypse, then it is intimately associated with events in the Middle East and with America's stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be added, would rather like some of that democracy and liberty and freedom that Mr Bush has been telling them about. Instead, they get a president who wins 98 per cent in the elections (Washington's friend, Mr Mubarak) or a Palestinian police force, trained by the CIA, that tortures and sometimes kills its people in prison. The Syrians would also like a little of that democracy. So would the Saudis. But their effete princes are all friends of America – in many cases, educated at US universities.

I will always remember how President Clinton announced that Saddam Hussein – another of our grotesque inventions – must be overthrown so that the people of Iraq could choose their own leaders. But if that happened, it would be the first time in Middle Eastern history that Arabs have been permitted to do so. No, it is "our'' democracy and "our'' liberty and freedom that Mr Bush and Mr Blair are talking about, our Western sanctuary that is under attack, not the vast place of terror and injustice that the Middle East has become.

Let me illustrate what I mean. Nineteen years ago today, the greatest act of terrorism – using Israel's own definition of that much misused word – in modern Middle Eastern history began. Does anyone remember the anniversary in the West? How many readers of this article will remember it? I will take a tiny risk and say that no other British newspaper – certainly no American newspaper – will today recall the fact that on 16 September 1982, Israel's Phalangist militia allies started their three-day orgy of rape and knifing and murder in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila that cost 1,800 lives. It followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon – designed to drive the PLO out of the country and given the green light by the then US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig – which cost the lives of 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all of them civilians. That's probably three times the death toll in the World Trade Center. Yet I do not remember any vigils or memorial services or candle-lighting in America or the West for the innocent dead of Lebanon; I don't recall any stirring speeches about democracy or liberty. In fact, my memory is that the United States spent most of the bloody months of July and August 1982 calling for "restraint".

No, Israel is not to blame for what happened last week. The culprits were Arabs, not Israelis. But America's failure to act with honour in the Middle East, its promiscuous sale of missiles to those who use them against civilians, its blithe disregard for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children under sanctions of which Washington is the principal supporter – all these are intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who plunged America into an apocalypse of fire last week.

America's name is literally stamped on to the missiles fired by Israel into Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. Only four weeks ago, I identified one of them as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their factory in – of all places – Florida, the state where some of the suiciders trained to fly.

It was fired from an Apache helicopter (made in America, of course) during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when hundreds of cluster bombs were dropped in civilian areas of Beruit by the Israelis in contravention of undertakings given to the United States. Most of the bombs had US Naval markings and America then suspended a shipment of fighter bombers to Israel – for less than two months.

The same type of missile – this time an AGM 114-C made in Georgia – was fired by the Israelis into the back of an ambulance near the Lebanese village of Mansori, killing two women and four children. I collected the pieces of the missile, including its computer coding plate, flew to Georgia and presented them to the manufacturers at the Boeing factory. And what did the developer of the missile say to me when I showed him photographs of the children his missile had killed? "Whatever you do," he told me, "don't quote me as saying anything critical of the policies of Israel."

I'm sure the father of those children, who was driving the ambulance, will have been appalled by last week's events, but I don't suppose, given the fate of his own wife – one of the women killed – that he was in a mood to send condolences to anyone. All these facts, of course, must be forgotten now.

Every effort will be made in the coming days to switch off the "why'' question and concentrate on the who, what and how. CNN and most of the world's media have already obeyed this essential new war rule. I've already seen what happens when this rule is broken. When The Independent published my article on the connection between Middle Eastern injustice and the New York holocaust, the BBC's 24-hour news channel produced an American commentator who remarked that "Robert Fisk has won the prize for bad taste''. When I raised the same point on an Irish radio talk show, the other guest, a Harvard lawyer, denounced me as a bigot, a liar, a "dangerous man'' and – of course – potentially anti-Semitic. The Irish pulled the plug on him.

No wonder we have to refer to the terrorists as "mindless''. For if we did not, we would have to explain what went on in those minds. But this attempt to censor the realities of the war that has already begun must not be permitted to continue. Look at the logic. Secretary of State Colin Powell was insisting on Friday that his message to the Taliban is simple: they have to take responsibility for sheltering Mr bin Laden. "You cannot separate your activities from the activities of the perpetrators,'' he warned. But the Americans absolutely refuse to associate their own response to their predicament with their activities in the Middle East. We are supposed to hold our tongues, even when Ariel Sharon – a man whose name will always be associated with the massacre at Sabra and Shatila – announces that Israel also wishes to join the battle against "world terror''.

No wonder the Palestinians are fearful. In the past four days, 23 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza, an astonishing figure that would have been front-page news had America not been blitzed. If Israel signs up for the new conflict, then the Palestinians – by fighting the Israelis – will, by extension, become part of the "world terror'' against which Mr Bush is supposedly going to war. Not for nothing did Mr Sharon claim that Yasser Arafat had connections with Osama bin Laden.

I repeat: what happened in New York was a crime against humanity. And that means policemen, arrests, justice, a whole new international court at The Hague if necessary. Not cruise missiles and "precision'' bombs and Muslim lives lost in revenge for Western lives. But the trap has been sprung. Mr Bush – perhaps we, too – are now walking into it.
© 2001 Robert Fisk

New York Times, Washington Post Suppress Media Recount Of Florida Vote
By Barry Grey

A consortium of major American news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, has decided to withhold the results of its recount of ballots cast in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. The consortium had planned to publish its report this week, and although its decision to suppress its own findings has received virtually no media attention, the reason is made clear in a September 23 column by New York Times Washington bureau chief Richard L. Berke.

In a column that enthusiastically welcomes the dissolution of all political opposition in Washington in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, Berke writes: "Until September 11, the capital was riding a historically partisan period, with leading Democrats still portraying their president as ‘appointed’ by the Supreme Court. In a move that might have stoked the partisan tensions—but now seems utterly irrelevant—a consortium of new organizations, including The New York Times, had been scheduled this week to release the results of its ambitious undertaking to recount the Florida presidential ballots. (That has been put on hold indefinitely)."

In other words, the Times and its counterparts in the consortium have decided to conceal from the American people facts damaging to the Bush administration’s claims to political legitimacy. They are doing so for the express purpose of suppressing dissent and bolstering the president as he prepares to take the American people into war and makes sweeping attacks on their civil liberties.

This act of self-censorship is entirely in keeping with the overall response of the media to the events of the past two weeks—a response that in coming years will be widely seen as among the most shameful episodes in the history of American journalism. Neither in the broadcast nor the print media is there any attempt whatsoever to examine the claims of the Bush administration. All statements emanating from the White House and the Pentagon, even those known to be lies, are presented to the public as good coin.

What "now seems utterly irrelevant" to Berke is the fact the very government which is committing the population to a war of undefined duration and dimensions, with all of the tragic consequences this entails, was installed through the suppression of votes and judicial fiat. Berke voices his own cynicism toward the theft of the 2000 election when he writes: "The indecisiveness of last year’s election gave the nation a civics lesson, but one that lent itself to snide jokes, not grave consideration."

This attitude, so crudely expressed and brazen in its contempt for democratic principles, cannot come as a surprise to anyone who has seriously considered the trajectory of news reporting in the US over the past decade. It says a great deal about the role of the media and the outlook that pervades editorial offices and network news bureaus.

The media, however, does not exist in a void. Its degeneration reflects more profound tendencies within society and the political system.

The suppression of the Florida recount, and the Times’ justification for it, exemplify the role of the media as a de facto organ of the state. Journalists like Berke, who occupy prominent positions within the media establishment, no longer conceive of themselves, even remotely, as protectors of democratic institutions and the rights of the people, with a responsibility to inform and educate the public so that it can assert its interests in opposition to those who wield power.

One component of bourgeois democratic institutions in the US was the traditional conception of the press as the "Fourth Estate," an independent force that served as a check on the power of the state. This notion, often enough expressed more in the breach than in the observance, and always attenuated by corporate control of the media and the innumerable ties that existed between the media establishment and state agencies, including the CIA, has now been thoroughly eroded and repudiated. Today, media operatives overwhelmingly, and as a matter of course, conceive of their task as the defense of the corporate elite and the state, as against the right of the people to know.

The debasement of the US media can be traced in relation to the great political convulsions of the past 30 years. During the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis, major news organs such as the New York Times and the Washington Post played a significant role in exposing the lies of successive administrations, culminating in the exposure of the criminal and authoritarian actions of the Nixon administration. In the aftermath of Watergate, however, there was a determined campaign to bring the media more tightly to heel, to which the media succumbed with relatively little resistance.

Today it is all but inconceivable that the Times would publish anything comparable to the Pentagon Papers, or the Washington Post anything like the series of exposures that ultimately led to the resignation of Richard Nixon.

Already by the time of the Iran-Contra crisis of the mid-1980s, the element of press cover-up for the unconstitutional actions of the Reagan administration far outweighed that of serious investigation and exposure. With the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the media assumed the role of conduit for the propaganda handed down by the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon. The networks and the press submitted with barely a whimper to unprecedented restrictions on the reportage of battle preparations and the actual conduct of the war. To this day, the American media have not revealed the number of Iraqis killed and wounded in that uneven slaughter.

In the 1990s the role of the media assumed an even more pernicious form. Leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post lent their prestige to the series of scandals mounted by the Republican right to destabilize the Clinton administration. They became sounding boards for a thoroughly anti-democratic conspiracy by extreme right-wing forces to remove an elected president from office.

Berke’s newspaper, the Times, played a particularly vile role. Times reporter Jeff Gerth lent credibility to the anti-Clinton machinations of unreconstructed segregationist elements, Christian fundamentalists and sections of the Republican leadership with his series of articles in the early ’90s on the Whitewater affair—articles based on little more than speculation and rumor. The Times later embraced the Monica Lewinsky scandal and unswervingly depicted the sex-based witch-hunt led by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr as a legitimate investigation, downplaying Starr’s attacks on civil liberties. In this manner the Times legitimized the political conspiracy that culminated in the impeachment of Clinton.

Within weeks of Clinton’s acquittal by the Senate, Gerth and the Times were at it again, publishing a series of witch-hunting articles against Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. These tracts provided a platform for sections of the Republican Party that were simultaneously seeking to create a Cold War-style hysteria against "Communist" China, and brand Clinton as a traitor, who supposedly traded nuclear secrets to the Chinese government in return for campaign contributions in the 1996 election. The biased and sensationalist character of Gerth’s reporting was exposed when the federal case against Lee collapsed. In the end, the Times was compelled to issue a public apology.

The political wars of the 1990s revealed the profound erosion of American democratic institutions. The Republican Party had been largely taken over by extreme right-wing and fascistic forces, and the Democratic Party had proven itself incapable of opposing their attack on democratic rights.

In the 2000 election, the outcome of this protracted political decay was expressed in a fundamental break with democratic traditions and procedures. The Republican Party, with the tacit support of the media, set out to steal the presidential election, and with the aid of the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, succeeded. It met with no serious resistance, either during or after the theft of Florida’s electoral votes, from the Democrats.

The 2000 election demonstrated that within the American ruling elite, including both capitalist parties and the media establishment, there exists no significant constituency for the defense of democratic rights. The decision of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major news outlets to suppress the results of their Florida recount underscores this fact. It demonstrates that the break with democratic forms of rule that occurred last year was irrevocable.

Now, as the Bush administration hurtles toward war and launches an unprecedented drive to strengthen the police powers of the state and dismantle democratic safeguards, the Times and the rest of the media hail the suppression of political opposition and the de facto establishment of one-party rule as a positive good.

The American people must take heed: the ruling elite is well on the way to establishing an authoritarian, anti-democratic state.

No serious resistance to such a course will emerge from within the political establishment. That must come from a politically united and independently organized working class movement, fighting with its own party on the basis of a socialist program committed to the defense of democratic rights.
© 2001 Barry Grey

Dead Letter Office

Heil Bush,

Dear Propaganda Ansager Sullivan,

Congratulations you have just been awarded the Vidkun Quisling Award for 2001. Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Antoni (light-fingers) Scalia.

Without your help shilling for us, spinning the truth, telling out right lies and ignoring the real news, holding onto power after our Coup D' Etat would have been impossible. With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Media Whores," you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account.

Along with this award there will be an Iron Cross 2nd class presented by our glorious Fuhrer Herr Bush at a gala celebration in der Fuhrer Bunker (formally the White House) on 12-15-2001. We salute you Herr Sullivan! Sieg Heil!

Signed,
Deputy Fuhrer Cheney

Heil Bush

Bipartisanship
While Democrats are setting differences aside for patriotism, Republicans are setting patriotism aside for opportunity
By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

There’s something about the right-wing mentality that can be unbelievably tawdry and petty and vicious. Nearly everyone knows of Jerry Falwell taking advantage of the catastrophe in New York to try and pin blame on gays, liberals and the ACLU. Here in northern California, in the town of Redding, some of the local anti-abortionists thought that the spontaneous memorial to those killed in the attacks would be a dandy place to put up pictures of chopped up fetuses and propaganda. I mean, people were paying attention to the memorial, right? Why not take advantage of that to promote their cause?

If it was limited to that sort of thing, you could write it off as the sort of sickening tackiness that so often accompanies right wing sanctimony and ignorance. Unfortunately, it isn’t limited to the trashiest lower reaches of the right.

While Democrats in the House and Senate were setting differences aside – even the matter of the fact that Putsch stole the election – Republicans, with a whoop, were taking advantage of the war fever, patriotism, and confusion to push as hard as they could for their various pet projects.

The rich white trash at the Wall Street Journal kissed off all their dead comrades with unseemly haste and gloated in an editorial that "the bloody attacks have created a unique political moment when Americans of all stars and stripes are uniting behind their president."

The Wall Street Journal was pretty happy about this, and made it clear that they felt that Republicans should take advantage of all this mawkish mourning and patriotism and what not to press for items that might otherwise have not passed the Senate.

Accordingly, the $40 billion "anti terror" bill that Putsch is requesting comes loaded with all sorts of GOP wet dreams. It includes $8 billion for "Star Wars", particularly ludicrous given that this pie-in-the-sky scheme would never have stopped the terrorist attack two weeks ago.

It comes with a capital gains tax cut. Six thousand, five hundred people are dead, and the very least we can do for the grieving rich is give them a free ride on the backs of our society, permanently. After all, rich people are deeper, and grieve more. Those of us who aren’t rich should give them special breaks.

John Ashcroft, the American equivalent of the Taliban, wanted to resurrect the Alien and Sedition act. He had the interesting notion that resident aliens, no matter how long they had been in the country, should be subject to deportation and seizure of property without benefit of trial or even administrative hearing, and in deed, even without evidence of any criminal acts. While it’s likely that our Attorney General, who harbors a deep mistrust for people who don’t smear Crisco oil on themselves in the name of God, isn’t envisioning throwing out 80 year old British grannies, he pretty clearly wants to be able to shaft some people. People with prayer shawls and accents, perhaps. The good news is that some Democrats stood up and said, "Er, Mr. Attorney General, sir? Um, the courts have ruled against things like that in the past and might interfere now." At least until it gets to our criminal Supine Court, any way. Ashcroft agreed to give the Senate another week to think it over, perhaps in the hope that the national sense of crisis might be ratcheted up in some way. The anti-terrorism bill contains all sorts of little nasties like that, the rest all aimed at American citizens. If you want to have liberty, you have to sacrifice freedom. That’s the GOP message of the day. And let’s get going with that Crisco oil, people. We don’t want a bunch of weird pagans around here!

Drilling in the Alaskan National Wilderness Reserve was tacked on to the terrorist bill by James Inhofe (R-Cheney) of East Knuckledrag, apparently as a favor to Frank Murkowski (R-Exxon) of Alaska. (He had already told the press he wasn’t going to do that, you see, so having a bill with his name on it would have looked tacky). We’ve got to maintain that oil habit if we want to fight terrorists, yesiree Bob.

The loud insistence that the terrorist attack was the work of Osama bin Laden is coming under closer scrutiny in Europe. Jane’s has been reporting that the Israeli Mossad, not exactly a sympathizer to either bin Laden or the Taliban, believes that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks. This is borne out by media reports of decidedly secular behavior on the part of those believed to have been responsible for the hijacking of the four jetliners. Fundamentalist Muslims (and bin Ladin’s organization contains no other type of human being) don’t, as a rule, hang around in strip clubs, bars, and McDonalds. These guys did. That suggests the more secular Saddam.

Colin Powell promised unequivocally to provide proof that bin Laden was behind the attack in a Sunday gasbag show, and backed away from that promise today. The Administration muttered about security concerns. Although if they can’t cite the proof in the public arena, how do they propose to do it in any court of law? And will the rest of the world back an attack based on proof that we won’t share?

Then there is the matter of Dick Cheney’s secret meeting. Cheney, of course, has been stonewalling on demands from the GAO that he provide the roster and minutes of meetings held in the Vice President’s office with oil and other extraction industry executives. Sunshine laws demand that such meetings be available for public scrutiny, and the showdown between the GAO and the administration, unparalleled in American history, is going to court.

In the European (free) press, speculation is growing that in the course of the meeting, Cheney agreed that the administration should try to provoke some sort of crisis in the oil-rich middle east, something that would create a crisis and make it easier both to get oil-friendly legislation through (like the ANWR drilling) and give them an excuse to eliminate those pesky environmental regulations. It would explain Cheney’s strange and blatantly illegal refusal to disclose the nature of the meetings. It would explain why the administration, which showed no sign of any interest in middle east politics during the campaign or in the first couple of months after taking office, suddenly and heavy-handedly started supporting Israel. It explains why they went out of their way to annoy the entire world of Islam.

I don’t think Cheney had something like the World Trade Center in mind. If I did, I would be insisting that he stand next to the person who planned it, and share the same fate. But I think he was playing "Wag the Dog" on a scale never envisioned by the movie’s creators. And if that’s the case, his liability is criminal, and he belongs in jail, if nothing else then for malfeasance and gross criminal negligence.

The country as a whole is coming out of the grief and mourning, and starting to look around, and we’re just starting to realize that the Republicans, cold, imperious, and remote, have been busy little rascals, and have been taking advantage of the situation in every way they can. Greed and viciousness never rests, it seems.

Thousands are dead, and the country, Democrats in particular, strove to work together as one to try and get our great nation through this time of horrible tribulation. But the Republicans seem to have the attitude of "Hey, one way or the other, they’re all still dead, so let’s make a little hay while the sun shines and put the screws to our loyal servants, the American people!"

The terrorists, indisputably, are America’s enemies from without. But the vicious callousness of the past two weeks from those mentioned here should remind people that terrorists are not the only ones working for the injury of America, and that not all enemies come from without.
© 2001 Bryan Zepp Jamieson

If This Is Patriotism, Keep It
By Ted Rall

Bush and Company's Grab for a Blank Check

NEW YORK -- We've been treated to some astonishingly vile images over the last two weeks: office workers hurling themselves into a hundred-floor-high abyss. A gaping, smoldering hole in the financial center of our greatest city. George W. Bush passing himself off as a patriot, even as he disassembles the Constitution with the voracious glee of piranha skeletonizing a cow.

"There is no opposition party," Republican congressional leader Trent Lott chillingly announced as Democratic counterpart Tom Daschle watched in silent, cowed assent after Bush's speech to a joint session of Congress. And even if it's mainly the result of our pathetic desire to follow someone -- anyone -- in the aftermath of Sept. 11, there's little opposition out in the cities and towns across our vast continent: Bush's job-approval rating is hovering up there with puppies and sunny days.

It may have seemed meaningless at the time, but now we know why 7,000 people sacrificed their lives -- so that we'd all forget how Bush stole a presidential election. And as it turns out, national amnesia was only the beginning.

"War" was declared against America Sept. 11, Bush told us, and we're declaring "war" right back. War against whom? Afghanistan (news - web sites)? Iraq? Canada? You declare war against a nation-state, not against terrorists living inside a country. You can ask a foreign government to extradite accused terrorists for trial, but you're not likely to get very far if you don't share good diplomatic relations. According to the Constitution, the president doesn't declare war -- Congress does.

Without so much as an invocation of the Constitution-bending War Powers Act -- which would allow the president to commit troops for a limited time -- here we are at "war." Troops are being mobilized and allies are being gathered to fight ... whomever. Whatever. Wherever. Wallowing in a level of cynicism unseen since Lyndon Johnson conned Congress into the Vietnam War based on a Tonkin Gulf incident that never happened, Bush has capitalized on a nation's grief, confusion and anger to extort a political blank check payable in young American blood.

Oh, right. First we have to "get" -- read, murder -- alleged terrorist mastermind and perennial bugaboo Osama bin Laden (news - web sites). "We rule out the possibility of his handover to America without substantial evidence," Taliban spokesman Abdul Hai Mutmaen said Sept. 24. This demand is nothing more than any country, not least the United States, would insist upon before extradition; the Bushies call this adherence to basic international law "a stalling tactic." But even if you don't believe that the Afghan government deserves this courtesy after all they've done (whatever that is), how about us? After all, we live -- or lived, before the Supreme Court subverted it last December -- in a democracy. Aren't we entitled to see some definitive proof tying bin Laden and/or the Taliban to the hijack attacks before we send our sons and daughters off to die in the Hindu Kush?

JFK showed us surveillance photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba. TV cameras followed troops into battle in Vietnam. But according to an anonymous defense official quoted by Reuters, "There is a new way of doing business here, and it's not in the sunshine." And the "war" itself will be waged far away from prying journalists. "It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations -- secret even in success," smirks Bush.

We're at war with whoever Bush decides is our enemy. Not only won't he tell us how or why they're our enemies, he won't tell us how or why we're attacking them or how or why our citizens are getting killed trying to do it. Welcome to 'cause-I-said-so-ocracy. "Operations like those mounted by special forces are played out in the shadows," Edward Turzanski, a LaSalle University national security analyst, told Reuters. "It is not even clear that operations in which troops might be killed will be disclosed, at least right away."

"It's important as this war progresses that the American people understand we make decisions based upon classified information, and we will not jeopardize the sources," Bush arrogantly announced Sept. 24. "We will not make the war more difficult to win by publicly disclosing classified information."

For a man who hired goons to physically threaten Florida election officials, Bush is asking an awful lot of us in his one-man war against the world. Let's get this straight: We're supposed to believe this guy's account of "classified" information -- even while he tells us that, from now on, he'll be lying to us for our own good?

If ever there was a classic naked-emperor moment, it was the morning after Bush's address to Congress. A competently delivered, committee-written hack job was breathlessly equated by liberals and conservatives alike to FDR's and Churchill's soaring oratorical highlights. Such is our craving for leadership that we're anointing a doltish daddy's-boy who still won't come clean about his DWI record with the mandate of heaven.

Pacifism is no way to run a superpower. If concrete proof can be presented that a group or individual directly participated in the massacre of thousands of New Yorkers and Washingtonians, those people deserve to be brought to justice or killed in the attempt to apprehend them. I, for one, would shed no tears for the inhumane scum who caused so much misery to so many. But the memories of our dead will be poorly served if we let right-wing extremists bring about the imperial presidency Bush is shoving down our throats. Blank-check democracy, if you stop to think about it, is no democracy at all.
© 2001 Ted Rall

The Cartoon Corner

This edition we're proud to showcase the cartoons of Ben Sargent

Stuck In The BBBR*

Sung to the tune of "Back In The U.S.S.R.
With apolgies to The Beatles

It started out in Palm Beach County, Florida
Didn't get the ballot right,
They said we voted Nazi, and we said, "NO WAY!"
Almost got into a fight,

We're stuck in the BBBR
You don't know how cranky we are now,
Stuck in the BBBR.

Blacks took their voting cards into the polling place,
Just to find their names were gone,
Cops and troopers tried to get up in their face,
Said "driving while black" is wrong,

We're stuck in the BBBR
You don't know how grumpy we are now,
Stuck in the BB-, Stuck in the BB-, Stuck in the BBBR.

WELL!
Then Katherine Harris went and joined the coup,
Towing the Party Line.
She threw the election to you-know-who,
When she said the counts were out of ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-time.

Aw, Come on!

[KICK-ASS GUITAR LEAD]

We're stuck in the BBBR
You don't know how worked up we are now,
Stuck in the BBBR.

Well the Florida Supremes made a bitchin' call,
Said to count the votes statewide.
But Rehnquist and his buddies went and stalled it all
Cuz they were on the loser's si-si-si-si-si-si-si-side.

OH!
Tell me when we lost the right to call the score...
For who we want to lead the pack.
If the votes of five "Supremes" count so much more,
It's time to take our franchise back.
We're stuck in the BBBR
You don't know how pissed off we are now,
Stuck in the BBBR.

Ahhh, let's protest, People!
New lyrics by The Diva
*BBBR = "Bush Brothers Banana Republic"

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing." ... Edmund Burke

Voter March Extends Its Deepest Sympathies To The Thousands Of Innocent Victims Of The September 11th Disaster

And to their family and friends. Voter March condemns all forms of terrorism and fully supports responsible efforts to combat terrorism and improve airline security. For the Voter March information page on the September 11th Disaster, click on http://www.votermarch.org/S11.htm

There has been a lot of discussion on the Voter (and other) eGroup Boards on the September 11th Disaster at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. To accommodate those people who want an eGroup exclusively on this subject, I have started a new eGroup, September 11th Disaster. To join, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SeptemberDisaster or email to SeptemberDisaster-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

September 24th, Monday, 9:30 AM, United Nations, NYC

Voter March will hold a solidarity rally for the victims of the September 11th disaster and their families and friends. The Voter March solidarity rally will be held across from the United Nations where the General Assembly is meeting at 10:00 AM. The Voter March solidarity rally will be held at Ralph Bunche Park at First Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets from 9:30 am to 1:30 pm.

September 29th, Saturday and Sept. 30th, Sunday, Wash.DC

Voter March will hold a solidarity rally for the victims of the September 11th disaster and their families and friends. A Voter March candle light vigil for our fellow Americans will be held Saturday evening on the East Front Capitol Steps. Voter March has now secured a permit site for all day Saturday and Sunday at the East Front Capitol Steps directly across from the U.S. Supreme Court. Les Souci will be the Grand Marshall for the East Front Capitol steps and volunteers should email Les Souci at Souci@votermarch.org. Under the proposed permit, there will be no music, but we may have amplified sound for speakers.

LAUGH OF THE CENTURY .....

http://www.orgop.org/OR2001-WesternLdrshpRegist.pdf

The Republican Leadership Conference has scheduled Katherine Harris, secretary of State, FL as a guest speaker on Friday October 5th.

The "subjest" is VOTER FRAUD!! There is a registration form at the link above if anyone wants to attend & I assume, learn how to commit voter fraud! Did you Florida voters know that there is a special provision in the new Florida "Reform" to allow military to vote by FAX and WITHOUT BEING REGISTERED TO VOTE?!!

FOR FLORIDA VOTERS WHO ARE TIRED OF PAYING FOR KATHERINE HARRIS'S LUXURY TRIPS.....this is the info given on the hotel. There are 160 luxury guest rooms at The Resort at the Mountain. Several other lodging places are mentioned but:

Do you have any doubts as to where Katherine Harris will be staying? I would think that this is the time to write to the unhonorable Sec. of State and tell her to pay her own damn bills. She was born with more money than God and we should not have to pay for the flozzie to take luxury trips with Jebbie, Dubya, etc.

Something's rotten in Florida? Are we going to just sit idly by and do nothing?

Maggie
Pensacola, FL - My vote did not count
© 2001 G.A.G.

SUPPORT THE OREGON DEMOCRATS' PROPOSAL TO IMPEACH THE FELONIOUS FIVE!

Here's what you can do to help:

1. Write your members of Congress and urge them to support the Democratic Party of Oregon's resolution.

2. Contact your local and/or state Democratic Party office urging them to also support the resolution.

3. Contribute to the Democratic Party of Oregon. We plan to continue to promote this resolution and your contribution, no matter how small, will help us in this fight for democracy. Click on Democratic Party of Oregon to send your support today!

Supreme Injustice
by STEVE COBBLE

Lest we forget--just over six months ago, the Rehnquist Court stole an election in broad daylight. In fear of the truth, the Scalia Five intervened to block all votes from being counted, an action "unprecedented" (both historically and judicially) in US history. Though the June 12 "anniversary" went unnoticed by the media, we must never forget.

Was it the worst Supreme Court decision in US history, as American University Constitutional scholar Jamin Raskin has suggested? Considering that Raskin is a staunch civil rights advocate, the very thought that he would rank Bush v. Gore lower than both the Dred Scott and Plessy rulings is instructive. Nor does Raskin stand alone in his opinion of this judicial coup.

Justice John Paul Stevens: "One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law. I respectfully dissent."

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "In sum, the Court's conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the Court's own judgment will not allow to be tested. Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States. I dissent." And related is the unsigned per curiam decision of the Scalia 5, a transparent attempt to try to avoid history's scarlet letter.

Hendrik Hertzberg, former presidential speechwriter: "The election of 2000 was not stolen. It was expropriated."

David Kairys, Temple University: "We had a constitutional crisis, and it was Bush v. Gore. History will not be kind."

Suzanna Sherry, Vanderbilt University: "There is really very little way to reconcile this opinion other than that they wanted Bush to win."

Jeffrey Rosen, legal scholar: "They have...made it impossible for citizens of the United States to sustain any kind of faith in the rule of law as something larger than the self-interested political preferences of William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, and Sandra Day O'Connor."

Randall Kennedy, Harvard University: "But we should also insist that there be no confirmation for Scalia-like champions of the right-wing agenda. The Supreme Court has hurt its own reputation by wrongly intervening to ensure the victory of George W. Bush. Those who abhor what the Court did should say so and say so loudly and clearly."

Jesse Jackson and John Sweeney: "But if it comes down for justices to the 14th amendment and the promise of equal protection, one can only hope for the sake of the country that they consider how not counting all the votes mirrors too closely the habits of heart and mind that brought us slavery and segregation--the original sins of our nation that the equal protection clause sought to repair."

And, of course, Vincent Bugliosi, prosecutor of Charles Manson and author of several bestselling true-crime books, in The Betrayal of America: ". . . the Court committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law.... [The Court searched] mightily for a way, any way at all, to aid their choice for president, Bush, in the suppression of the truth, finally settling, in their judicial coup d'État, on the untenable argument that there was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause..."

Recent polls indicate the public's growing dissatisfaction with the results of the Scalia Five's decision. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and Princeton Survey Research Associates (June 13-17) showed George W. Bush's job approval rating at just 50 percent, down six points from March; the New York Times survey with CBS News (June 14-18) put the rating at 53 percent, down seven points from March. And Democracy Corps's Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll (June 11-13) found that 48 percent of likely voters think the nation is currently on the "wrong track." Perhaps most tellingly, 25 percent of voters in the Democracy Corps poll said that the phrase "not really elected President" describes Bush "very well," with another 15 percent saying that it describes him "well"--in other words, six months after the Scalia Five coup, 40 percent of likely voters still believe Bush was not really elected President.

What then, is to be done?

The least we can do is know our own history, and to understand that what the Injustices did was an insult to the dreams and ideals of Lexington and Concord, Valley Forge and Jefferson and Paine, Gettsyburg and Lincoln and Douglass, Selma and King, Seneca Falls and Anthony, Delano and Chavez, Flint and Debs and Lewis. We can bear witness to injustice, in the nonviolent protest tradition of Thoreau, Gandhi, King, Havel, Robinson, Chavez.

The Scalia Five's judicial coup came down on the second Tuesday last December. So, on the second Tuesday of July, July 10, 2001, the Tuesday after the Pro-Democracy Convention in Philadelphia, the Tuesday between Independence Day and Bastille Day, the Institute for Policy Studies and friends are calling for a peaceful, nonviolent vigil at the Supreme Court building, at noon.

On July 10--and each Tuesday at noon from then on--let's gather at the scene of the crime, and bear witness to the truth. The Scalia Five won't be there; but we should be.

Bring a candle or a bell, like the Czechs a decade ago. Bring a copy of the Voters' Bill of Rights, or the US Constitution. Send an e-mail to all your friends, with your favorite quote from this list. Bring Pablo Neruda's and Marge Piercy's poems. Bring the next generation, so they will never forget. Bring your commitment to restore, rebuild, and expand American democracy. The Supreme Court cheated. Democracy lost. For now.
©2001 STEVE COBBLE

Send $100 or $1000 to The Heritage Foundation or Other Right-Wing Groups

This ultra-conservative group needs donations! Lend them a helping hand by sending them a few $100 or $1000 bills ... Confederate ones! Click here to print or download the bills. Send them to other right-wing groups as well!

And if you still want to annoy the Heritage Foundation, you can always go to their online donation form as soon as you try to leave the page, a pop-up window appears asking why you decided not to donate. Give them an explanation, but remember to be polite!

TO OUR REPRESENTATIVES AND SENATORS IN THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS

We, the undersigned voters, know that our cherished democracy is endangered from within by the grave and potentially fatal flaws in our voting systems exposed by the Presidential Election of 2000.

As our elected representatives, you have the duty, the opportunity, and the privilege to correct these flaws and to restore fair and honest elections throughout our nation. To this end, we charge you to construct and pass a VOTERS BILL OF RIGHTS, which shall include:

Strict enforcement and extension of the Voting Rights Act to prevent the disenfranchisement of voters and require full investigation and criminal prosecution of any offenders;

Standardized, easily understandable federal election ballots

Funding to replace old and unreliable voting machines to ensure that every vote is counted fairly and accurately

Genuine campaign finance reform that bans campaign contributions from special interests

Replacement of the Electoral College with a majority-rule election, or substantial reform of the Electoral College to allow for proportional representation

Measures to increase voter participation by eliminating bureaucratic hurdles to voter registration and turnout, including language barriers, physical barriers, archaic equipment, and lack of resources

Enactment and enforcement of a VOTERS BILL OF RIGHTS will restore trust in our government and encourage participation in our democratic processes. The linchpin of a democracy is the process by which we select our representatives and leaders. The right to vote is our defining right as citizens of this nation. We call upon our elected representatives to protect our Constitution from abusive exercise of government power by enacting a VOTERS BILL OF RIGHTS.

We pledge our full and constant support for enactment of a VOTERS BILL OF RIGHTS.

A Note of Protest:

It is likely that 50% of the U.S. population is strongly dissatisfied with the ascendancy of George W. Bush to the office of President. There are three likely reasons:
1. Bush won the election under questionable circumstances;
2. Bush has espoused a reactionary platform that places him far to the right of mainstream America;
3. Bush has demonstrated none of the intellectual attributes expected of a president.

In the interest of democracy, one could discredit election gripes (point number one) as being unfair to our longstanding electoral college process.. Also, one might disregard Bush’s agenda (point number two) because the hallmark of the United States Constitution is tolerance for divergent political and moral beliefs.

However, point number three leads to a more egregious problem, namely that a rather anonymous man, with no distinguishing ambition or vision has, by virtue of family wealth and connection, been installed as President of the United States. Even the most cursory glance at George W. Bush’s history and character builds a strong case for charges of nepotism and cronyism. Such a glaring display of favoritism, to benefit an individual with no considerable talent, runs counter to the spirit of competition and fair play that has driven the engine of American capitalism for more than two hundred years.

There is a way to tangibly and immediately raise a voice in protest of George W. Bush as President. For the remainder of his term, conscientious Americans should simply write "George W. Bush is an Idiot" on all U.S. currency that passes through their hands.

This protest has already begun. The first bills were marked and spent in San Francisco as of January 26, 2001. What is important, though, is to not only begin marking all currency (and to continue the effort throughout the Bush presidency), but to forward this memo as much as possible so as to replicate the message throughout our money supply.

In an effort to mark money more industriously, many of us have ordered a BUSH IS A FRAUD rubber stamp; these self-inking rubber stamps are useful for marking the "Fraud" message in red ink.

Make your voice heard,
Steven Capozzola
San Francisco, California