The First Stone

The July Surprises

July 19, 2004

The Bush administration is trying to manipulate the war on terrorism to further President George W. Bush’s re-election efforts.

The New Republic’s John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman and Massoud Ansari report that the Bush administration has been pressuring Pakistan to capture or kill “high-value targets” (HVTs) Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri and Taliban leader Muhammed Omar before the upcoming election.

One source in Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA, said: “The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the U.S. elections.”

A second source, in the Pakistani Interior Ministry, said: “The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections.”

A third source, who works under the ISI director Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, said: “[The Pakistanis] have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must. … The last 10 days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq’s] meetings in Washington.” This source said a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring, “It would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on 26, 27 or 28 [of] July.” (The Democratic Convention opens on July 26.)

A fourth source, a Pakistani general, fears that if Pakistan doesn’t deliver the HVTs before to the election, the Bush administration will focus attention on the role Pakistan’s security establishment played in nuclear physicist A.Q. Khan’s transfer of nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. The general said: “If we don’t find these guys by the election, they are going to stick this whole nuclear mess up our asshole.”

The investigative report validates what many have long thought: Bush is manipulating the war on terrorism to further his political fortunes. In effect, we must now infer that for the past two years the administration has allowed Osama bin Laden to run free in order to kill or capture him as a pre-election- publicity stunt.

Recall the 1980 election when one-time CIA director and Reagan running mate George H.W. Bush negotiated a secret deal in October with representatives of the Ayatollah Khomeini to delay the release of the 52 American hostages held in Iran until after the election to ensure Jimmy Carter’s defeat. (For the most definitive information on what has become known as the October Surprise click here.)

The Bush administration will no doubt use its influence in the media to try to discredit Judas et al., in the same way it tried to denature Michael Moore following the release of Fahrenheit 9/11, using friends in the press like Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff.

In the June 28 issue, Isikoff dismissed Fahrenheit 9/11 as “a mélange of investigative journalism, partisan commentary and conspiracy theories.” He goes on to dispute three of what he calls “Moore’s most provocative allegations,” thereby leading the unsuspecting reader to wonder what else Moore has fabricated. More on that later. First some history about Isikoff’s own “mélange.”

In April 1989, John Kerry’s Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terror-ism, Narcotics and International Operations released an exhaustive report that concluded that the Contras were involved in drug trafficking and that Reagan administration officials were aware of that involvement.

In an April 14, 1989, Washington Post article, Isikoff trivialized the report’s findings and asserted that claims of drug trafficking by high-level Contras “could not be substantiated.” Subsequently, Newsweek’s “Conventional Wisdom Watch” dubbed Kerry “a randy conspiracy buff.”

The Post had little more to say on the subject until the fall of 1991, when Gen. Manuel Noriega went to trial on drug-trafficking charges in Miami. Isikoff then wrote: “Allegations that the federal government worked with known drug dealers to arm the Contras have been raised for years, but congressional investigations in the late 1980s found little evidence to back charges that it was an organized activity approved by high-level U.S. officials.”

That assertion was soon contradicted by the U.S. government’s own witnesses against Noriega. In November 1991, convicted Colombian drug lord and government witness Carlos Lehder told the court that an unnamed U.S. official offered to allow him to smuggle cocaine into the United States in exchange for use of a Bahamian island that he owned as part of the Contra supply route. Lehder went on to testify that the Colombian cartel had donated about $ 10 million to the Contras.

At this point, the Post finally took notice. “The Kerry hearings didn’t get the attention they deserved at the time,” its editorial concluded. “The Noriega trial brings this sordid aspect of the Nicaraguan engagement to fresh public attention.” The Post editorial writer might have added, “Indeed, our own reporter Michael Isikoff let us down.”

Isikoff did a number on Bill and Hilary Clinton promoting the Whitewater Scandal. In a series of Post stories in late 1993 and early 1994, Isikoff, citing unnamed sources, offered ominous-sounding revelations about bureaucratic maneuvers (“Justice Department officials are moving forward with two separate inquiries that have been expanded”) and unsubstantiated speculation from more unnamed sources (“Bill and Hillary Clinton ‘could possibly have benefited from the alleged scheme.’”) The rest of the press followed suit and a publicly funded $52 million investigati0n turned up nothing.

Now Isikoff has set his sights on Moore.

Isikoff contends that, contrary to the facts presented in Fahrenheit 9/11, the six charted airplane flights that flew the Saudis out of the United States “didn’t begin until September 14, after airspace reopened.” The movie says this:

It turns out that the White House approved planes to pick up the bin Ladens and numerous other Saudis. At least six private jets and nearly two-dozen commercial planes carried the Saudis and the bin Ladens out of the U.S. after September 13. In all, 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family were allowed to leave the country.

Indeed, the St. Petersburg Times reported in June that, according to Tampa International Airport records-, on September 13, while most of the nation’s air traffic was still grounded, a private jet landed in Tampa and picked up three young Saudi men and then left.

Isikoff also disputes the movie’s claim that the Carlyle Group—a private investment firm in which both George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and members of the bin Laden family were involved—profited “from September 11 because it owned United Defense, a military contractor.” Isikoff contends, “United Defense’s $11 billion Crusader artillery rocket system developed for the U.S. Army is one of the only weapons systems canceled by the Bush administration.”

Again, Isikoff is twisting the truth. The Crusader contract was canceled after the Carlyle Group sold United Defense. Fahrenheit 9/11 says this:

September 11th guaranteed that United Defense was going to have a very good year. Just six weeks after 9/11 Carlyle filed to take United Defense public and in December made a one day profit of $237 million dollars.

On January 10, 2002, the Los Angeles Times’ Mark Fineman, wrote:

On a single day last month, Carlyle earned $237 million selling shares in United Defense Industries, the Army’s fifth-largest contractor. The stock offering was well timed: Carlyle officials say they decided to take the company public only after the September 11 attacks. … On September 26 [2001], the Army signed a $655-million modified contract with United Defense through April 2003 to complete the Crusader’s development phase. In October, the company listed the Crusader, and the attacks themselves, as selling pints for its stock offering.

Critics of the film are worried that Fahrenheit 9/11 could have an effect on the presidential election. After all, the film has so far raked in $60 million while showing on 1,725 screens.

To fight back, some unknown person or organization hired the PR firm Russo, Marsh & Rogers of Sacramento, California. The company, which has strong ties to the Republican Party, set up a Web site, MoveAmericaForward.org, to attack Fahrenheit 9/11. The PR flacks who managed the site encouraged:

Americans who found in Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11 an attempt to undermine the war on terror, to let movie theater operators know about their objections. Think about it. … If you walked into a Wal-Mart store and saw they were selling merchandise that attacked the military, our troops and America’s battle against Islamic terrorism, wouldn’t you complain to the store manager or write a letter and ask that they not sell that product because it was undermining our national effort?

Others on the right aim to counter Moore with a movie of their own making, Michael Moore Hates America: A Documentary That Tells the Truth about a Great Nation.

That will be a hard sell to anyone who sees the film. Fahrenheit 9/11 makes clear that Michael Moore loves America. It’s the Bush administration he can’t stand.

Beating a Dead Horse

June 29, 2004

Conventional wisdom has it that you won’t get far beating a dead horse. But let us give it one last whack, for in Reagan’s case the old horse still has legs, two hind ones holding up an ass—George Bush.

Not only are Reagan and Bush strangers to the truth (See Editorial, page 3), their administrations’ policies are strikingly parallel.

In the same way that Reagan led a war against communism in Central America, Bush has gone to war against terrorism in Iraq. In both cases the pretext was bogus.

In Central America, popular movements in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua threatened only ruling oligarchies and the holdings of a few U.S. multinational corporations. Yet the United States still supported death squads and the proxy Contra army to put down these rebellions at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.

Similarily, in Iraq, the Bush administration uses the war on terrorism to pursue its scheme to reshape the political landscape of the Middle East and, in the process, control one of the world’s largest oil reserves. Never mind that Saddam had no connection to bin Laden or that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would only aid al Qaeda recruitment efforts, while diverting attention and resources from the very real threat posed by al Qaeda.

Of course, the scheme would not have worked had the Bush administration not taken a chapter from the Reagan administration playbook.

The Reagan administration sold its war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government by mounting a domestic covert operation. In 1983 CIA Director William Casey set up an elaborate propaganda apparatus with the help of corporate America. “A group of public relations specialists met with Bill Casey a few days ago,” reads a 1983 National Security Council memo. “The group included Bill Greener, the public affairs head at Phillip Morris, and two or three others. They stated what needed to be done to generate a nationwide campaign … an effective communications system inside the government. The overall purpose would be to sell a ‘new product’—Central America.”

That “inside system” became the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean, headed by Otto Reich (who resigned as Bush’s special envoy to Latin America on June 16). Operating out of the State Department, though reporting directly to the National Security Council, Reich commanded a unit of psyops, or psychological operations, agents on loan from the Army. The mission of this covert operation was to sell Congress, the media and the American people on the administration’s war against leftists in Central America. The overall theme of the propaganda campaign: “The Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters are fighters for freedom in the American tradition, FSLN [Sandinistas] are evil.”

A similar campaign was mounted by the Bush administration to sell a “new product”—Iraq. At its head was John Rendon, who for the past decade has worked on Iraq for the Pentagon and CIA. In a speech to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Rendon said: “I am a politician and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.” As John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton observed, “Rendon’s description of himself as a ‘perception manager’ echoes the language of Pentagon planners, who define ‘perception management’ as ‘actions to convey and (or) deny selected information and indicators to influence emotions, motives and objective reasoning. … In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psyops.’ ” (See “How to Sell a War,” September 1, 2003.)

During Reagan’s reign, reporters who refused to toe the administration’s line on Central America were hounded. Reich, in his role as information minister, conducted dozens of visits to newspapers and networks, including one to National Public Radio (NPR), where he raged about coverage of the war in Nicaragua. Reich warned news editors there that he had “a special consultant listening to all NPR programs.”

Harassing visits to NPR are a thing of the past. This administration is working to stack the board of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, which provides public funds to NPR and PBS, and thereby influence content.

The budget priorities of the two administrations also are much alike. A perpetual state of war, whether against communism or terrorism, is expensive, and Bush, like Reagan, has responded by calling for huge increases in the defense budget—increases made possible only by cutting social programs.

During Reagan’s last formal press conference in December 1988, the first question he took was from the indefatigable Helen Thomas. She asked Reagan: “As you leave office, the nation is saddled with a $2.6 trillion debt, an enormous deficit, caused perhaps by the tripling of military spending and tax cuts. … Some of your former associates claim that you deliberately created a larger deficit in order to dismantle the compassionate social programs for the poor, the sick, the needy, the handicapped, the elderly, which you didn’t like. Is that true?” He responded, “No, Helen that is not true, and that is, I guess, political propaganda.”

Today the deficit is approaching record levels and the same charges are being made against Bush. The difference is that Thomas, now 83, has been relegated from her front-row seat to the back of the room and the president never calls on her. This happened when, after covering the White House for 40 years, Thomas had the temerity to announce in regard to Bush, “This is the worst president ever. He is the worst president in all of American history.”

And considering Reagan’s record, that is saying a lot.

Take AIDS. Consider the following October 15, 1982, exchange between a reporter and Reagan Press Secretary Larry Speakes:

Reporter Larry, does the president have any reaction to the announcement—the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta—that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases.

Speakes What’s AIDS?

Reporter Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” [Laughter.] No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that has this have died. And I wondered if the president is aware of it?

Speakes I don’t have it. Do you? [Laughter.]

Reporter No I don’t.

Speakes You didn’t answer my question.

Reporter Well, I just wondered, does the president …

Speakes How do you know? [Laughter.]

Reporter In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?

Five years, and 41,027 deaths later, Reagan finally uttered “AIDS” in public.

Today, 21.8 million AIDS deaths later, Bush on the one hand extols the virtues of sexual abstinence, perhaps a worthy goal for teenagers, but not a lesson the 40 million people in the world currently living with AIDS need to hear. On the other, he protects the patent rights of the pharmaceutical industry from infringement by Third World countries in desperate need of life-saving AIDS drugs.

Such policies, or lack thereof, accurately reflect the morally bankrupt nature of both the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Recall how Reagan came to power.

In his inaugural speech on January 20, 1981, Reagan bragged, “In the eyes of many in the world, this every-four-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.” If so, it was a day of miracles: Just minutes after Reagan was sworn in, 52 American hostages were freed by Iranian militants after being held captive for 444 days.

But in the cynical and calculated world of international diplomacy, real miracles are rare. As a large body of circumstantial evidence suggests, Reagan’s eventful Inauguration Day had less to do with Providence than his campaign’s illegal, covert efforts to persuade Iran to delay the release of the hostages until after Election Day to ensure Jimmy Carter’s defeat.

It came to be known as the “October Surprise,” a scandal involving high crimes—the treasonous activity and subversion of constitutional government by a cabal of private individuals. The October Surprise inaugurated an era of Republican deception, dirty tricks and coverups—Iran-Contra, Whitewater, the 2000 election in Florida—that continues to this day.

Listen to the Canary

June 9, 2004

The Day After Tomorrow tells the story of a planet suddenly beset by catastrophic weather. Yes, the movie is hyperbolic but not entirely off the mark. Contrary to conventional wisdom, global warming could well make its presence felt suddenly and catastrophically, unless humans do something about climate change soon.

About 10 years ago, Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University, went up to the middle of Greenland and collected a core of ice that contains the annual ice deposits of the last 100,000 years or so. Alley found that about 12,000 years ago Greenland’s climate changed within the space of 10 years from a climate that was cold, dry and windy to one that was warmer, wetter and less windy. It was, he told National Public Radio’s Richard Harris, as if in one decade the weather in Chicago became like that of Atlanta.

“What we know is that there are threshold points, there are flipping points, in the Earth’s climate,” he said. Alley provided this analogy: “If you sit in a canoe and you lean a little bit, not much happens, and you lean a little more and not much happens, and you lean a little—and you’re in the water.”

Are we approaching such a tipping point?

The ’90s was the warmest decade on record and probably the warmest in the last 1,000 years and probably longer, says Mark Lynas, author of the just released High Tide: The Truth About our Climate Crisis. The top five warmest years ever recorded are 1998, 2002, 2001, 1997 and 1995.

The U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has examined several scenarios and predicted a rise in temperature in the 21st Century between 3 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The lower estimate is more than double the change in the 20th Century, while the higher projection is in the catastrophic range—a point at which civilization, indeed life, on Earth as we know it ceases to exist.

Lynas traveled the globe to chronicle the climate changes humans are already experiencing. He went to Barrow, Alaska, 340 miles above the Arctic Circle, where average wintertime temperatures have shot up an average of 11 degrees Fahrenheit. For the first time in recorded history the people of Barrow have experienced thunderstorms. “Some Native American elders thought that the loud bangs of thunder were bombs going off,” he writes.

The permafrost in Fairbanks, 125 miles south of the Arctic Circle, is disappearing and the wooden houses in the town are sinking into the melting soil. Vicki Heiker’s house is totally lopsided. She told Lynas, “When you spill something it’s like you don’t have much of a chance. You’ve got to clean it up fast otherwise it will get away from you.”

Indeed, the Arctic is experiencing temperatures that are rising 10 times faster than the rest of the world. “In many ways Alaska is the canary in the coal mine, showing the rest of the world what lies ahead as global warming accelerates,” writes Lynas.

So what does global warming portend? The IPCC predicts that hurricanes will get stronger and floods and droughts will become endemic. Tropical diseases will move northward. (West Nile virus anyone?) Billions of people will lose their supply of potable water. Ecosystems will unravel. The agricultural economy will become chaotic as food supplies are endangered. And the safer, northern climes, writes Lynas, will become the destination of “environmental refugees, when millions will be made homeless by extreme weather and seawater flooding of low-lying areas.”

“The most realistic aspect of The Day After Tomorrow isn’t its scientific basis but its portrayal of a country and a vice president in denial about global warming,” says Lynas. “The Bush administration is trying to shy away from the scientific consensus and the reality that it represents a catastrophe worse than the one portrayed by Hollywood. Global warming is taking us into a world that hasn’t been seen for at least 50 million years. This will drive the majority of plants and animals over the edge to extinction and also likely lead to the collapse of human civilization as well.”

Putting the brakes on global warming is only possible if the United States, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, takes action. But that is not likely to happen unless public opinion shifts dramatically. Lynas writes:

As a result of a devastating combination of greed and denial, the American people have been subjected to one of the most pervasive misinformation campaigns ever undertaken. The executive branch of government, in tandem with powerful far-right think tanks and a woefully compliant media, has labored to convince every citizen that climate change is either not happening, not dangerous, or merely in need of more research.

Which brings us to the leaked NASA directive that instructed its scientists “not to do interviews or otherwise comment on anything having to do with [The Day After Tomorrow].”

“It’s just another attempt to play down anything that might lead to the conclusion that something must be done,” an unnamed government climate scientist told the New York Times. He and other federal researchers can speak only off the record, given the Bush administration has, in effect, banned federal climatologists from talking to the press.

NASA rescinded the order once it became public, and then did Day After Tomorrow damage control on its Web site, which informs any concerned citizen:

Most climate experts agree that climate change is occurring now and may accelerate in the future, although not as drastic as some fiction might portray. Scientists agree that a sudden shift in our climate such as flipping from today’s slowly warming planet to an icebox is bogus and does not obey fundamental rules of physics. …

A more realistic scenario might include regional disruptions in climate, spanning over decades not days. … One thing is for certain: the climate system is extremely complex, and many questions remain.

Yes questions remain, yet the underlying facts remain the same. Global warming is already with us and it will get much worse unless we cut back on global greenhouse gas emissions radically within the next two decades. Lynas is troubled by the fact that, when researching his book, many U.S. atmospheric scientists would speak with him only off the record. He writes in High Tide, “A very powerful section of the U.S. media and political establishment are in total denial about the reality of global warming and as long as this situation continues it is going to be impossible for the United States to join a global effort to bring down greenhouse gas emissions.”

“Climate change is a matter of atmospheric physics, it is not something you can believe in or not believe in,” says Lynas. “Saying you don’t believe in global warming is like saying you don’t believe in the second law of thermodynamics.”

James E. Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, first sounded alarms about global warming back in the late ’80s. In the March 2004 Scientific American, he writes that even though the Earth’s climate is “closer to the level of ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference’ than has been realized,” he is “optimistic” because he knows it is possible to reduce and stabilize greenhouse gas emissions.

“I am optimistic,” he writes, “because I expect empirical evidence for climate change and its impacts to continue to accumulate, and that this will influence the public, public interest groups, industry, and governments at various levels. The question is: Will we act soon enough? It is a matter of time.”

Déjà Violence

June 7, 2004

For all the hooha over the horror of U.S. treatment of Iraqi prisoners, the fact is such torture has been the rule, not the exception. Indeed, this scandal features a cast of characters who were in power the last time the U.S. sanctioned torture.

Take Donald Rumsfeld. In 1983, he didn’t let a few gassed Kurds get in the way of maintaining good relations with Saddam Hussein. Seymour Hersh convincingly reports in the New Yorker that Rumsfeld authorized expanding the “black” program used to interrogate Taliban “enemy combatants” in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib’s “prisoners of war” in Iraq.

And who could forget John Negroponte? Between 1981 and 1985, he was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. As ambassador, Negroponte filed reports with the State Department that gave the impression that the Honduran military supported human rights. At the same time, he was overseeing the construction of El Aguacate airbase, which was used as a U.S. training camp for the Nicaraguan Contras and as a torture center for Battalion 316, a Honduran army intelligence unit. The Baltimore Sun reported in 1995 that Battalion 316, which was trained and supported by the CIA, used “shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.” In August 2001, a mass grave was unearthed at El Aguacate containing 185 corpses, including two Americans.

Negroponte will become the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in July. Judging by his record, he is the man for the job.

The use of torture by the Honduran army under U.S. guidance was not an aberration but a matter of policy. Until 1992, the last year of Dick Cheney’s stint as Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Army used CIA-prepared torture manuals to train foreign military officers both at the School of the Americas and on-site in Latin America. One of these, the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual—1983, had these tips:

For centuries “questioners” have employed various methods of inducing physical weaknesses: prolonged constraint; prolonged exertion; extremes of heat, cold or moisture; and deprivation of food or sleep. … Subject is completely stripped and told to take a shower. Blindfold remains in place while showering and guard watches throughout. Subject is given a thorough medical examination, including all body cavities. … Throughout his detention, subject must be convinced that his ‘questioner’ controls his ultimate destiny, and that his absolute cooperation is necessary for survival. … The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. For example, the threat to inflict pain can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain. ... A threat should be delivered coldly, not shouted in anger. … If a subject refuses to comply once a threat has been made, it must be carried out. The torture situation is an external conflict, a conflict between the subject and his tormentor.

The CIA’s training manual does caution, “The routine use of torture lowers the moral caliber of the organization that uses it and corrupts those that rely on it.” Look no further than the Bush administration.

This manual, along with others, was supposedly withdrawn from circulation and destroyed in 1992. However, their expertise apparently made its way to Iraq. For example, another CIA manual, advised that in order to forcibly recruit spies, “the counterintelligence agent could cause the arrest of the employee’s parents, imprison the employee, or give him a beating as part of the placement plan.”

The situation in Iraq is different than in Central America in the ’80s. For one thing, the United States’ crusade against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua used a privately-funded proxy army, the Contras. As the Iran-Contra scandal proved, such off-the-books arrangements can get politically messy. Indeed, were it not for pardons by President George H.W. Bush, some Reagan administration officials and current Bush administration officials would have done time.

To avoid such embarrassments, the Pentagon now uses legal, if secret, contracts to outsource work to bona fide corporations. This outsourcing of military contracts mushroomed during the first Bush administration as a policy initiative of then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who would later go on to make millions working for the same companies he provided contracts to, such as Halliburton.

Like the privately-funded Contras in the ’80s, today publicly funded yet legally unaccountable corporations do the dirty work: corporations operating under secret government contracts, like CACI, two of whose employees have been implicated in the torture at Abu Ghraib; corporations, like the one, as yet unnamed, whose interrogator is being investigated by the Justice Department for possible murder; and corporations like DynCorp.

In the late ’90s, DynCorp employees who worked for the U.N.’s international police force in Bosnia were involved in gun running, rape and sex trafficking. The DynCorp site supervisor, for example, videotaped himself raping two young women, while another employee bought an underage girl as a sex slave for $700 and kept her in his apartment. Two DynCorp employees who reported these crimes to the company were summarily fired. The guilty sex offenders also were fired but never charged with a crime. The company is currently under a 10-year contract with the State Department to hire 1,000 law enforcement officers to train the Iraqi police and run the Iraqi prison system.

There are no laws in place that regulate the overseas behavior of the employees of Pentagon contractors. In an interview with “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross, P.W. Singer, author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry put it this way:

We have a senior military leadership and a senior political leadership that’s in denial. … When Secretary Rumsfeld talks about military outsourcing, the examples that he uses are things like mowing lawns at military bases or answering phones. … The reality is that contractors are out there doing everything from logistics to training up local forces to actually fighting in battles in Iraq to doing interrogations, and we have to deal with this broader system. Right now, it’s unregulated and there are not the laws in place to deal with what happens when it goes bad.

And the scandal will continue to unfold. Al-Watan, a Saudi daily, has quoted a European intelligence service report as saying that “worse and uglier violations” have taken place at other prisons in Iraq, such as the systematic rape of women, the sodomy of men and the use of electric shock against the Iraqi prisoners.

Which brings to mind Rumsfeld’s response to the looting of Baghdad after the fall of Saddam: “Stuff happens.” Of course some stuff didn’t happen, like the destruction of the Iraqi national oil ministry, which was guarded from the get-go. In other words, what happens or doesn’t happen is a matter of policy—not fate.

The Buck Stops With Us

June 4, 2004

Scott Ritter, a former Marine intelligence officer and a veteran of the first Gulf War, served as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq for seven years. He had this to say during a recent talk in Santa Fe, New Mexico:

Our Congress failed us. They are as culpable as the president of the United States. But it’s not just Congress, guys. It’s the media, the ones that spoon-fed the lies to us. … The media didn’t ask questions, they didn’t demand the answers. So the media has the blood of American soldiers on their hands, too. But you know what? I say the buck stops at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but that would only be the truth, in the end, if this were a dictatorship. It’s a representative democracy, ladies and gentlemen. … We are culpable as well. It is our fault we are at war in Iraq. … If the president lied and he is not held accountable for it, then what we stand for as a people means nothing. ... Collectively in this country we have stopped functioning as citizens. … This is a nation that is infected with a disease, a disease of complacency, a disease that is destroying citizenship, a disease that is destroying the Constitution that defines who we are as a nation. We have to cure this disease, not just the symptoms. Not just by voting Bush out of office in 2004 and making ourselves feel good. Bush is a symptom of the problem. Iraq is a manifestation of the problem. We have to start redefining our lives as citizens, good citizens, people who believe in this country and will live a life of citizenship dedicated to the ideals and values represented in the Constitution.

The Constitution Hijacked

May 21, 2004

Thomas Linzey

Thomas Linzey believes that corporations use—and abuse—the Constitution to usurp the right of the people to govern themselves democratically. But Linzey is not interested in promoting corporate responsibility, corporate accountability, corporate ethics or corporate codes of conduct. The 35-year-old lawyer, who heads the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, provides local governments with model legal briefs they can use to fight corporate power.

Linzey has helped 10 Pennsylvania communities enact “The Family Farm Protection Ordinance.” This ordinance prohibits corporations from owning or controlling farms, and thereby keeps factory farms out of communities. He has also helped 58 communities pass ordinances that curtail the application of sewage sludge as fertilizer by requiring sludge corporations to pay for the testing of each load of sludge they want to dump.

Most recently, Linzey and Richard Grossman, of the Program on Corporations Law and Democracy, have written a model brief that directly confronts corporate power. Their “Corporate Rights Elimination Ordinance” helps citizens strip corporations of their constitutional privileges at the municipal level. In the summary of the ordinance, they write:

Courts have illegitimately bestowed upon corporations immense constitutional powers. … Wielding those constitutional rights and freedoms, corporations regularly and illegitimately deny the people their inalienable rights, including their most fundamental right to a republican form of government. … Accordingly, the constitutional claims asserted by the [x corporation] against the [y government] must be dismissed because those claims deny the people’s rights to life and liberty, and their fundamental right to self-governance.

So far two townships in Pennsylvania have passed this ordinance in an effort to inoculate themselves from corporations that might go to court to overturn local statutes that curtail the land-based application of sewage sludge as fertilizer. Two other Pennsylvania townships are preparing to pass it.

“The ordinances grew from a real and practical need—the necessity of protecting self-government from federally conferred ‘corporate rights,’ ” says Linzey. “The ordinances are defensive ordinances, which will be used if sludge and factory farm corporations sue to overturn the underlying, substantive factory farm and sludge ordinances. In that context, the local government would assert that the corporations have no right to assert constitutional rights to overturn local law. That scenario establishes the right dynamic that can then be taken on appeal through the appellate courts, eventually ending up at the Supreme Court.”

Corporations in Pennsylvania responded to Linzey’s ordinances by getting the Pennsylvania legislature to pass an anti-democratic law that stripped municipal governments of their power to pass local ordinances. In response to that direct attack on local control, a broad-based, statewide coalition emerged built around democratic ideals. In that way the single-issue battles against sludge and factory farms were transformed into a movement for democratic control over corporations. The people were heard and Governor Ed Rendell vetoed the pro-corporate legislation.

Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is working to export this model of anti-corporate organizing around the country by sponsoring weekend Democracy Schools (http://www.celdf.org).

Education is sorely needed. Few people realize that the Constitution grants bloodless corporate entities some of the same constitutional rights as human beings. Of particular note is the landmark case that granted corporations rights under the 14th Amendment. That amendment, which states “no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law,” was adopted during Reconstruction to protect recently emancipated slaves in a hostile South. But in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), the Court, invoking the 14th Amendment, defined corporations as “persons” and ruled that California could not tax corporations (i.e. deprive them of property) differently than individuals. By extension it followed that corporations, as legal “persons,” had First Amendment rights as well.

Using this definition of corporations as persons, the High Court proceeded to strike down a range of state regulations. In 1938, Justice Hugo Black noted that in the 50 years after Santa Clara, “less than one-half of 1 percent [of Supreme Court rulings that cited the 14th Amenement] invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than 50 percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations.” Subsequent Supreme Court decisions redefined the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and permitted governments to regulate corporations. Corporations, however, managed to retain the First Amendment rights of personhood granted in Santa Clara.

Yet corporations are different from us mortals. They feel no pain. They can live for centuries. They do not need clean air to breathe, potable water to drink or healthy food to eat. Their only reason for being is to grow richer, bigger and more powerful.

So instead of treating these institutional constructions as if they were flesh and blood, the political and legal systems should acknowledge the fact that corporations are merely one way that people organize themselves to do business. They are not “endowed by the creator with unalienable rights” but rather are human-made creations that can just as easily be unmade when they cease to serve a worthwhile public function.

“A sustained movement, anchored in local governments across the country challenging corporate constitutional rights through hundreds of different single issues areas is the key to eventually changing the law,” says Linzey. “It’s not enough to simply register dissent or play within the rules that have been written precisely to divert our energies elsewhere. It is time to withdraw our consent from the actions being taken by the federal government in our names. Only then will it be revealed that a democracy cannot function when corporations have hijacked what our forebears fought, bled and died for in the Revolution.”