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Volume 1 Issue 127, 128, 129   Today’s News and Views

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"The governor hasn't pardoned anyone, be it alive or deceased," said Mr. Barbour's spokesman, Pete Smith. "The governor isn't going to issue a pardon here."

Mr. Smith added that a pardon would be an empty gesture.

"The governor believes that Clyde Kennard was wronged, and if he were alive today his rights would be restored," Mr. Smith said. "There's nothing the governor can do for Clyde Kennard right now."

Mr. Kennard's case, which was the subject of a recent three-month investigation by The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., has also been pursued by students at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill., and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University's law school, in Chicago. Several of the students involved said they were baffled by Mr. Barbour's response.

"Please," said Mona Ghadiri, 17, a senior at Stevenson High, addressing Governor Barbour, "if you are going to say no, at least give us a decent reason."

The only evidence against Mr. Kennard was the testimony of a black man named Johnny Lee Roberts, then 19, who said that Mr. Kennard, 33, had asked him to steal the chicken feed. Mr. Roberts, who did the stealing, received a suspended sentence. Mr. Kennard, convicted as an accessory, got a year for every $3.57 of feed.

Mr. Roberts has recanted, first to Jerry Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger and then in a sworn statement before a judge.

"Kennard did not ask me to steal," Mr. Roberts said in the sworn statement. "Kennard did not ask me to do anything illegal. Kennard is not guilty of burglary or any other crime."

"I have always felt bad about what happened to Clyde," Mr. Roberts continued. "He was a good man."

Joyce A. Ladner, a sociologist, remembered being mentored by Mr. Kennard when she was a teenager. "He was a quiet, very dignified guy, a real gentleman," Ms. Ladner said of Mr. Kennard.

Aubrey K. Lucas, the director of admissions at the college when Mr. Kennard applied, recalled in an interview that it was the governor, J. P. Coleman, who decided against admitting Mr. Kennard.

That was a mistake, said Mr. Lucas, who went on to be president of what became the University of Southern Mississippi. "Kennard would have been the perfect person to integrate this university," Mr. Lucas said. "He didn't bring attorneys with him. He didn't bring the N.A.A.C.P. leadership."

There was little question of Mr. Kennard's qualifications.

"Everybody who knew him refers to him as brilliant — not as a smart man but as a brilliant man," said Barry Bradford, the teacher at Stevenson High who directed its project on Mr. Kennard, available at www.clydekennard.org.

State authorities had a different reaction. The files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the state's segregationist spy agency, show that killing or framing Mr. Kennard was openly discussed as preferable to allowing him to enroll at the college.

March 30 was Clyde Kennard Day in Mississippi, and Governor Barbour issued a proclamation. He urged citizens to remember Mr. Kennard's "determination, the injustices he suffered, and his significant role in the history of the civil rights movement in Mississippi."

There has apparently never been a posthumous pardon in Mississippi, but there have been such pardons in 10 other states and in the federal system. Yesterday, Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana posthumously pardoned 78 people convicted of sedition early in the last century.

Mr. Lucas said pardoning Mr. Kennard might cost Mr. Barbour a few votes.

"There are some people around here still," Mr. Lucas said, "who think we should be separate as races and who refuse to see the errors of our past. But I can't imagine it would be a factor in his re-election."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

SCOT LEHIGH

Our monarch, above the law

By Scot Lehigh, Globe Columnist  |  May 2, 2006

HAS GEORGE W. Bush come to believe he's king?

That's the question that springs to mind upon reading Charlie Savage's front-page report in Sunday's Globe detailing the president's sotto voce assertion that he can disregard laws if he thinks they impinge on his constitutional powers.

That novel claim resides in the ''signing statements" the administration issues outlining its legal interpretation of laws the president has signed -- interpretations that often run contrary to the statute's clear intent.

As Savage reports, Bush has registered hundreds of those reservations, adding them to statutes on subjects ranging from military rules and regulations to affirmative action language to congressionally mandated reporting requirements to protections Congress has passed for whistle-blowers to legal assurances against political meddling in government-funded research.

Bush's position reduces to this: The president needn't execute the laws as they are written and passed, but rather, has the right to implement -- or ignore -- them as he sees fit. (Were it not for our pesky written Constitution, perhaps George II could take his cue from Charles I, dismiss Congress, and rule -- ah, govern -- without any legislative interference whatsoever.)

Even members of the president's own party have balked at that claim.

After Republican Senator John McCain succeeded in passing a ban on the torture of detainees in US custody, forcing it upon an unwilling White House, the president's signing statement made it clear he thought he could disregard the law if he deemed it necessary. That brought a pointed rebuke from McCain and fellow Republican Senator John Warner.

Other presidents have periodically appended signing statements to legislation, setting the objectionable precedent that Bush has followed here. But as Savage reports, this president has taken it to a new level, issuing such statements on more than 750 laws, or on more than 10 percent of the bills he has signed.

Rendering Bush's assertion more worrisome is this reality: Because so much of what this administration does is shrouded in secrecy, it's hard to know which laws are being followed and which are being ignored.

That makes it difficult for matters to ripen into a court challenge, notes Boston attorney Harvey Silverglate. ''He is setting it up so that the people hurt by what this administration is doing are unable to get to court, because it is secret," Silverglate says.

We certainly do know that this president is ready to ignore even established laws if he finds them too cumbersome. Although the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 prohibits warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, Bush has authorized such snooping. In trying to justify that, the administration has claimed that Congress's post-Sept. 11 resolution authorizing force against terrorists somehow imparted the authority for warrantless wiretapping.

That's farfetched, and members of the president's own party have said as much.

Congressional figures of both parties have signaled a willingness to consider the president's concerns with a wiretap-approval process that is already all but pro forma.

The White House, however, has displayed little interest in meaningful compromise.

Bush has a recourse if he doesn't agree with a newly passed law, of course: He can veto it. (So far he hasn't exercised that prerogative even once.)

But the president shouldn't be allowed to quietly disregard or reinterpret provisions of a law he dislikes, for in doing so, he is not protecting his own authority, but rather usurping the legitimate power of Congress. Further, his assumption that it is within his purview to decide whether a law is constitutional treads on ground that is the clear province of the Supreme Court.

Thus far, the Republican congressional leadership has been dismayingly compliant. But one Republican unwilling to let Bush interpret the law as he sees fit is Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Specter, who is pushing legislation to have the closed-door FISA court rule on the constitutionality of Bush's wiretapping program, noted last week that he had filed -- but would not seek an immediate vote on -- an amendment to block funding for any domestic eavesdropping until the administration provides Congress with much more information.

It speaks volumes about the attitude of this White House that a member of the president's own party would have to make such a move to protect bedrock constitutional principles.

Yet it will probably take something much more dramatic than Specter's tentative threat to remind George W. Bush that he's president, and not king.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.  

    Wednesday 03 May 2006

    Death in Iraq. It is relentless and incessant.

    Know what it is like when scores of your fellow citizens are being killed every single day while the world proceeds unheedingly on? As a journalist I've had but a taste of that poison during my eight months in Iraq. Try it out: be an Iraqi for a day, into your fourth year of being occupied, humiliated, tortured and killed, doing all you can just to survive.

    All communication with my Iraqi friends is punctuated by and smattered with their use of the words "praying," "God," and "Insha'allah" (God willing). Perhaps there is need to invoke something else altogether?

And all the dead air is alive. With the smell of America's God.
- Harold Pinter, "War With Iraq"

    On one of the days when multiple car bombs drained the blood and souls of scores in Baghdad, my closest friend wrote from there: "Dahr, This is a very sad letter I'm writing you as a friend. My tears are coming down due to the humiliation, suffering, frustration, thwarting defeat and discomfiture we the Iraqi are living in. Please let people know some of the news of what is happening to my country, my people and my religion."

    Death lurks everywhere in Iraq today. Keeping up with the numbers of dead is impossible. A doctor working at one of the larger hospitals in Baghdad recently called it a "camp" because the courtyard of the hospital is constantly filled with members of the Shia Badr militia, who continue to carry out their death squad activities of killing Sunnis and rival Shia. "The Badr are all over the hospital, looking for people," said the doctor. "The injured brought here sometimes die before even reaching the ward, because the Badr are being obstacles for us. One of the men running our morgue was killed by the Badr. My friends are warning me to be careful, to keep my mouth shut."

    The numbers are being hidden … and the Badr, operating out of the Ministry of Interior, which is funded by the US, are making sure the numbers remain shrouded.

    Yet on Tuesday of this week, a spokesman at that same hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity of course, announced that in the last 48 hours alone Yarmouk Hospital had received 65 bodies, most of them slaughtered by death squads in execution-style murders. That day they had received 40 bodies, and Monday, 25.

    Iraqis are at far greater risk when they speak out about the true number of the dead than western journalists. Those who speak out jeopardize their lives, like Faik Bakir, the director of the Baghdad morgue. Bakir fled Iraq fearing for his life in early March, after reporting that over 7,000 people had been killed by death squads in recent months. In an article in the Guardian on March 2nd, it was made clear by John Pace, a UN official who worked in Iraq until February, that "The vast majority of bodies showed signs of summary execution - many with their hands tied behind their back. Some showed evidence of torture, with arms and leg joints broken by electric drills." He said that the killings had been ongoing long before the rampant bloodshed that followed the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra. The article added, "Mr. Pace, whose contract in Iraq ended last month, said many killings were carried out by Shia militias linked to the interior ministry run by Bayan Jabr, a leading figure in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri)."

    This past Saturday I received information from the main morgue in Baghdad from a doctor there, name withheld for security reasons. "Yesterday we received 36 bodies from the police pickups. All of them are unknown, without IDs, and we don't have refrigerators to put them in since all of ours are completely full already. So we had to keep them on the ground. 12 of them were handcuffed, most of them received between 2 and 10 bullets, some many more than 10. We are not going to put them into biopsy. Reason for their death is known. Most of them are between 20 to 30 years … This is the number that was brought directly to us in one day, plus there are the dead who are sent to the hospitals. They will be put in the hospitals' morgues. We don't receive bodies from hospitals nowadays, because we don't have a place to keep them. I can't tell the exact number of killed people now, but it depends on the situation. But what I can assure you of is that since the shrine explosion, deaths have almost doubled. Daily, we receive between 70 to 80 bodies … you can see within these 40 minutes that I've talked with you, we received 9 bodies. Nearly every morning the count will be doubled twice this number, for the police find them at night. Most are either found in the streets or killed without sending them to hospitals. Four days ago we received 24 bodies in just 2 hours."

    At this same morgue back in June 2004, I interviewed the aforementioned director, Dr. Faiq Bakir, who had to flee for his life. He said that their maximum holding capacity with the freezers was 90 bodies, and since January 2004 an average of well over 600 bodies each month had been brought there. The cause of death for at least half of these were gunshots or explosions. He also pointed out that those numbers did not include the heavy fighting areas of Fallujah and Najaf.

    In addition, he told me, "We deal only with suspicious deaths, not deaths from natural causes. And so many bodies are buried that never go to a morgue anywhere."

    According to Dr. Bakir, the rate of bodies brought to the Baghdad Morgue even back then was 3-4 times greater than it ever was during the regime of Saddam Hussein. "I am sure that not all of the bodies that should come here do," he continued before very diplomatically adding, "Because our legal system has some problems right now."

    Before the invasion, there was a coordinated system between Baghdad and the other governorates, which allowed his morgue to track deaths throughout the country, but this too had been smashed along with the rest of the infrastructure of his country.

    More recently, a doctor at another hospital shared information which puts this in clearer perspective.

    This past Sunday, a doctor from al-Numan hospital in the al-Adhamiya district of Baghdad reported to my source in Baghdad: "Every major hospital has either one or two refrigerators, depending on the population of the area. As for Adhamiya we have one refrigerator that holds a maximum of 10 bodies. Meanwhile there are two refrigerators in the Shula hospital. We have not less than 18 major hospitals inside Baghdad, in addition to the main morgue, which has 6 refrigerators that contain 20 bodies each. In the emergencies we use refrigeration trucks to put bodies inside - this is very familiar to the main morgue. I went there a week ago. I have seen three refrigeration trucks inside the yard. They were filled with bodies. They keep the bodies in the main morgue for not more than 15 days, and if no one asks for them, they send the bodies to the cemetery administration to deal with them. This administration hands the bodies to some individuals who will bury them, mostly in Najaf or in the cemeteries around Baghdad."

    Reuters recently ran a story titled, "In Baghdad, some killings get noticed, some don't." The story read, "When gunmen killed a sister of an Iraqi vice president on Thursday, it grabbed world headlines. A few streets away, however, another slaying, typical of hundreds in Baghdad in recent weeks, went all but unnoticed. Indeed it might never have been recorded had 73-year-old Khatab al-Ani not been shot outside the home of a journalist." The only part of this I would amend is "in recent weeks," because I know for a fact that random unreported killings have been the norm in the capital city of Iraq for over two years now.

    Another Iraqi source of mine works for an Iraqi relief NGO in Fallujah. He told me that from the April and November 2004 US assaults on Fallujah there were a minimum of 4,500 dead or missing (most of them dead), and "killings in Fallujah and Ramadi are a daily reality for us." According to this source, "Doctors in Fallujah estimate that an average of 3.5 people are being killed in Fallujah every day during 2006, while doctors we know in Baghdad estimate that the number there is between 150 and 200 per day."

    He went on to say, "The Lancet reported over 100,000 killed over a year ago. This was even before many of the crimes committed by US troops, the Iraqi so-called Army and the Government militias, who are all first class killers, came to light. This brings the number to over 200,000 at the least. On the other hand, those people (Bush and those claiming less than 100,000 dead) not reporting the correct number of civilian casualties - that is a major crime in itself. It looks like they don't give a damn how many Iraqi people get killed."

    Even the UN Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) humanitarian news agency reported on April 26 that "More than 90 women become widows each day due to continuing violence countrywide, according to government officials and non-governmental organizations devoted to women's issues."

    Another extremely telling point in the IRIN report is that "Although few reliable statistics are available on the total number of widows in Iraq, the Ministry of Women's Affairs says that there are at least 300,000 in Baghdad alone, with another eight million throughout the country." The report said that at least 15 police officers' wives are widowed every day, and that local NGOs in Iraq said the situation had become much worse since the 2003 US-led invasion of the country, which has brought horrific violence on a level not seen before.

    "Saddam Hussein was responsible for killing thousands of men during his 25 years of brutal rule," said Ibtissam Kamal in the IRIN report. Kamal, a member of a local organization that works on the issue but prefers anonymity of the organization for security reasons, added, "But more people have died during the past three years, most of them men …"

    The vast majority of deaths in Iraq are not being counted. Anyone who has spent any time there knows this. It was and remains common knowledge amongst my colleagues who worked on the streets, rather than those "embedding" or conducting "hotel journalism."

    Several of my colleagues who have reported from Iraq feel the number of Iraqis killed during the occupation far exceeds 100,000.

    "If one counts excess mortality from collapsed healthcare, polluted water, poverty and the like - at least 100,000 Iraqis have died since the US invaded Iraq," Christian Parenti, author of the book The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq wrote me this week. Parenti, who has reported for over 5 months from Iraq and is a regularly contributor to The Nation magazine, added, "How many people have been killed by US troops? How many in sectarian violence? It's impossible to say, but the point is this: Iraq has been destroyed by the US invasion and the process of its disintegration will go on for years. It is a horror no matter what the numbers are."

    David Enders, an American freelance journalist who has spent 18 months reporting from Iraq and author of the book Baghdad Bulletin, told me yesterday, "I visited the Baghdad morgue, and they were receiving between 30-40 bodies every day. That didn't include car bombs and people who'd died for obvious reasons. That was more than a year ago, and that was just for Baghdad. I think it's probably safe to say that well over 100,000 Iraqis have died during the occupation."

    Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk writes for the Independent in the UK and has reported from the region for over 30 years. He had this to say in a piece written on March 20th titled, "The Iraq War: Three Years On - The march of folly that has led to a bloodbath":

    "The Iraqis? Well, they are lesser beings whose casualties cannot be revealed to us by the Iraqi ministry of health, on orders from the Americans and British; creatures whose suffering, far greater than our own, must be submerged in the democracy and freedom in which we are drowning them; whose casualties "more or less" [mocking the infamous quote from George W. Bush] are probably nearer to 150,000. After all, if 1,000 Iraqis could die by violence last July - in Baghdad alone; and if they are being killed at 60 or 70 a day, then we have a near genocidal bloodbath on our hands. Iraqis, however, are now our Untermenschen for whom, frankly, we do not greatly care."

    By far and away the survey that comes closest to the true number of dead in Iraq to date was the one conducted for the Lancet. Yet even Les Roberts, the lead author of that report and one of the world's top epidemiologists with the Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said this February that there might be as many as 300,000 Iraqi civilian deaths generated by the US invasion and occupation. So as not to skew the results, it is important to note that the survey did not include areas where major combat had occurred such as Fallujah, Najaf, and Sadr City - home to roughly three million Iraqis.

    Any news agency, government, or other organization reporting anything less are actively attempting to hide the level of slaughter and mayhem and thus aiding and abetting the ongoing war crimes in Iraq.

    My aforementioned friend in Fallujah is both frustrated and angry that most news agencies choose not to report the number of dead in Iraq more accurately. "I know there are some organizations who claim that they have an accurate count, which is less than 40,000 dead Iraqis," he wrote me recently. He went on to reference Bush Junior, "And as if that number itself isn't shameful enough for the US and the whole world to see. Anyone claiming that low number who calls himself a humanitarian is a shameful guy."

we leave civilian dead
as litter in the streets
ignored by us their numbers
unmarked as are their names
- Labi Siffre

    Anyone who's been in a war zone knows what it feels like to lie in bed at night listening to the cracking of gunfire, or the sound of thudding bombs. Knowing that each report means death or maiming. It is true that the dead do not talk, but each shot fired or bomb detonated means someone is dead, and the killers know and must live with that knowledge forever - that they have killed a human being.

    And we cannot escape that knowledge either.

    Not hearing the sounds of death, but knowing that somewhere this instant in Iraq is a family that will have to suffer a loss in perpetuity.

Your silence will not protect you …
- Audre Lorde

     Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of US war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City in January 2006. He writes regularly for TruthOut, Inter Press Service, Asia Times and TomDispatch, and maintains his own web site, dahrjamailiraq.com.

© : t r u t h o u t 2006

© Copyrighted 1997-2006
www.commondreams.org

So, Bill Frist, Harry Reid, pull together a bipartisan panel made up of your toughest, most skeptical prosecutional-minded members, hire a couple of junkyard dog lawyers to act as GOP and Dem counsels, and let the long overdue hearings begin.

Subpoena everyone who had anything to do with those meetings, including secretaries who transcribed the original minutes. Oh, and when you call oil industry execs back, put them under oath this time. Because they lied last time when they said they had no idea...

(Washington Post, May 2005) A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress ...The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.

I mean really guys -- if not now, when?

Almost everyone else except Congress has tried to get this information out of the administration. The non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) filed suit in April 2002 seeking access to the records of Cheney's energy task force. But one of those "liberal activist federal judges" dismissed the suit. The Sierra Club carried its fight for those records all the way to the US Supreme Court, which in 2004 voted 7-2 to uphold "a paramount necessity of protecting the executive branch from vexatious litigation."

But just to make sure no one got lucky in court, the administration built a wide moat around all things it feels are none of our damn business; including whatever deals Cheney made in 2001 with energy company CEOs.

"WASHINGTON - As the Bush administration has dramatically accelerated the classification of information as 'top secret' or 'confidential,' one office is refusing to report on its annual activity in classifying documents: the office of Vice President Dick Cheney ... A standing executive order, strengthened by President Bush in 2003, requires all agencies and 'any other entity within the executive branch' to provide an annual accounting of their classification of documents. More than 80 agencies have collectively reported to the National Archives that they made 15.6 million decisions in 2004 to classify information, nearly double the number in 2001, but Cheney continues to insist he is exempt. (Full Story)

It's not as though we don't have good reason to suspect skullduggery was afoot at those meeting -- skullduggery that has now been allowed to manifest itself in the form of war, economic hardship for average Americans and record profits for the Big Energy folk who attended the meetings. Over the past four years we have learned little about what happened at those meetings, but what little we have learned startles even those of us who thought we had seen it all:

"Documents turned over in the summer of 2003 by the Commerce Department as a result of the Sierra Club's and Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.' The documents, dated March 2001, also feature maps of Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supporting charts with details of the major oil and gas development projects in each country that provide information on the project's costs, capacity, oil company and status or completion date." (Full Text)

So, did Cheney and oil company executives lick their chops over Iraqi oil less than two years before we attacked over non-existent WMD? When the administration brushed off questions about Cheney's meetings by telling us they concerned "securing America's energy future," was this the plan they cooked up? To overthrow Saddam, set up a puppet government and pump, pump, pump? If so, that plan has gone terribly wrong.

So, shouldn't Congress find out? If not now, when?

Well, let me correct myself. Not everything went wrong for everyone; just 2,800 American kids who died and tens of thousands of Iraqis who died. Now American motorists are getting the shaft. But look who came out smelling like a rose. By disrupting oil supplies from Iraq, the world's third largest producer, and destabilizing the entire oil producing region, and now by threatening Iran, oil companies with oil assets in the Gulf, Alaska and other regions, have seen the price of their oil skyrocket. Clearly a seat at those energy task force meetings was a seat worth having -- worth billions.

"Last week, Exxon Mobil (the majority owner of Imperial Oil (AKA 'Esso') announced its first-quarter profits had risen 14 per cent to $8.4 billion over the same period last year. That followed similar announcements by Conoco/Phillips and Chevron, the next two largest U.S. integrated oil companies. Chevron's profits jumped 50 per cent to $4 billion while Conoco/Phillips saw its profits climb 13 per cent to $3.3 billion."

A citizen would think that such obscene profits, at the very time real wages of working Americans are falling, the cost of heating and cooling their homes rises every month and transportation costs soar, would provide Congress with some backbone.

Senators, this is where the proverbial rubber hits the road. Investigate. Not just Big Oil, but Big Dick as well. Inquiring minds want to know. We are waiting and we are watching. If not now, when? 

Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including "Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans," which was nominated for a Pulitzer.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/35754/

Baghdad Burning

... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

American Hostages...

It was around the 10th or 11th of April, 2003. There had been no electricity in our area since the last days of March. The water was also cut off and most Iraqis still didn’t have generators. We spent the days- and nights- listening to American and British war planes, listening for the tanks as they invaded the city, and praying. We also tried desperately to follow the news.

The state-controlled Iraqi channels had, seemingly, ceased to exist. Transmission had been bad since the war began- sometimes, we’d be able to access the channel clearly, and at other times, it was only a fuzzy blur of faces and scratchy national anthems. The official Iraqi radio station was no better- sometimes it seemed like they were transmitting from Mars- it was so far away. When we did get it clearly, none of it made sense: Sahhaf, the Minister of Information, would say, “There are no tanks in Baghdad!” and yet, explosions and the carcasses of burnt up cars with families still inside, said otherwise.

By the beginning of April, we had given up on getting any information from television and had to rely completely on the news we received through radio stations such as Monte Carlo, BBC and the Voice of America. VOA was nearly as useless as Sahhaf- we could never tell if the news they were broadcasting was real or if it was simply propaganda. In between news, VOA would broadcast the same songs over and over and over. I still can’t hear Celine Dion’s “A New Day Has Come” without shuddering because in my head I hear the sounds of war. “I was waiting for someone…” the roar of a plane overhead … “For a miracle to come…” the BOOM of a missile… “My heart told me to be strong…” the rat-tat-tat of an AK-47... I hate that song today.

One television station that had been broadcasting since the beginning of the war was an Iranian station called “Al Alam”. They had been broadcasting for the Iraqi public in Arabic with permission from the former government and they continued broadcasting even after the Iraqi stations stopped. Their coverage of the war was rather neutral. They gave facts and avoided unnecessary commentary or opinion and that, to a certain extent, made them trustworthy- especially since we really didn’t have any other options.

We had heard about the statue being pulled down on one radio station or another, but none of us had seen it because we had no television due to a lack of electricity. Some Iraqis were taking old televisions and connecting them to an ordinary car battery which is what they did back in 1991. E. and the cousin managed to dig up a small, old, black and white television my aunt had managed to overlook during last years spring cleaning. They had it hooked up and working in a matter of twenty minutes (and after a thorough dusting). There was no longer an Iraqi television station. There was only the Iranian one, transmitting clearly. The tanks were rolling through Baghdad and bombing everything in their path. The Apaches were flying low and it seemed like every hour the gunfire and explosions were intensifying.

It was around 9 pm on the 11th of April when we finally saw the footage of Saddam’s statue being pulled down by American troops- the American flag plastered on his face. We watched, stunned, as Baghdad was looted and burned by hordes of men, being watched and saluted by American soldiers in tanks. Looking back at it now, it is properly ironic that our first glimpses of the ‘fall of Baghdad’ and the occupation of Iraq came to us via Iran- through that Iranian channel.

We immediately began hearing about the Iranian revolutionary guard, and how they had formed a militia of Iraqis who had defected to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. We heard how they were already inside of the country and were helping to loot and burn everything from governmental facilities to museums. The Hakims and Badr made their debut, followed by several other clerics with their personal guard and militias, all seeping in from Iran.

Today they rule the country. Over the duration of three years, and through the use of vicious militias, assassinations and abductions, they’ve managed to install themselves firmly in the Green Zone. We constantly hear our new puppets rant and rave against Syria, against Saudi Arabia, against Turkey, even against the country they have to thank for their rise to power- America… But no one dares to talk about the role Iran is planning in the country.

The last few days we’ve been hearing about Iranian attacks on northern Iraq- parts of Kurdistan that are on the Iranian border. Several sites were bombed and various news sources are reporting Iranian troops by the thousand standing ready at the Iraqi border. Prior to this, there has been talk of Iranian revolutionary guard infiltrating areas like Diyala and even parts of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the new puppets (simply a rotation of the same OLD puppets), after taking several months to finally decide who gets to play the role of prime minister, are now wrangling and wrestling over the ‘major’ ministries and which political party should receive what ministry. The reason behind this is that as soon as a minister is named from, say, SCIRI, that minister brings in ‘his people’ to key positions- his relatives, his friends and cronies, and most importantly- his personal militia. As soon as Al-Maliki was made prime minister, he announced that armed militias would be made a part of the Iraqi army (which can only mean the Badrists and Sadr’s goons).

A few days ago, we were watching one of several ceremonies they held after naming the new prime minister. Talbani stood in front of various politicians in a large room in the Green Zone and said, rather brazenly, that Iraq would not stand any ‘tadakhul’ or meddling by neighboring countries because Iraq was a ‘sovereign country free of foreign influence’. The cousin almost fainted from laughter and E. was wiping his eyes and gasping for air… as Talbani pompously made his statement- all big belly and grins- smiling back at him was a group of American army commanders or generals and to his left was Khalilzad, patting him fondly on the arm and gazing at him like a father looking at his first-born!

So while Iraqis are dying by the hundreds, with corpses turning up everywhere (last week they found a dead man in the open area in front of my cousins daughters school), the Iraqi puppets are taking their time trying to decide who gets to do the most stealing and in which ministry. Embezzlement, after all, is not to be taken lightly- one must give it the proper amount of thought and debate- even if the country is coming unhinged.

As for news of the new Iraqi army, it isn’t going as smoothly as Bush and his crew portray. Today we watched footage of Iraqi soldiers in Anbar graduating. The whole ceremony was quite ordinary up until nearly the end- their commander announced they would be deployed to various areas and suddenly it was chaos. The soldiers began stripping their fatigues and throwing them around, verbally attacking their seniors and yelling and shoving. They were promised, when they signed up for the army in their areas, that they would be deployed inside of their own areas- which does make sense. There is news that they are currently on strike- refusing to be deployed outside of their own provinces.

One can’t help but wonder if the ‘area’ they were supposed to be deployed to was the north of Iraq? Especially with Iranian troops on the border… Talbani announced a few days ago that the protection of Kurdistan was the responsibility of Iraq and I completely agree for a change- because Kurdistan IS a part of Iraq. Before he made this statement, it was always understood that only the Peshmerga would protect Kurdistan- apparently, against Iran, they aren’t nearly enough.

The big question is- what will the US do about Iran? There are the hints of the possibility of bombings, etc. While I hate the Iranian government, the people don’t deserve the chaos and damage of air strikes and war. I don’t really worry about that though, because if you live in Iraq- you know America’s hands are tied. Just as soon as Washington makes a move against Tehran, American troops inside Iraq will come under attack. It’s that simple- Washington has big guns and planes… But Iran has 150,000 American hostages.

- posted by river @ 12:59 AM

FIGHTING FOR THE SOUL OF OUR COUNTRY! --A Battle Cry for Our Movement

By Andrew Bard Schmookler

[This is the latest in those pieces in which I offer my vision of how our struggle to save our country should be waged. In particular, it is a sequel to the piece of last week, "There's Only One Scandal." If you believe that the ideas here can be useful, I hope you'll help disseminate this piece to as many others as possible who could make use of it.]


It is clear: America is engaged in a great struggle now. One set of headlines after another declares it: something is amiss in the realm of power at the highest levels, and an increasing number of Americans recognize it.

And what is amiss is that evil forces have taken over our country. Evil in that:

* they have governed through lies, even on matters of life and death, war and peace;
* they have wantonly broken the laws and rules that are supposed to circumscribe the wielding of their great power;
* they have created division and conflict in every realm they've touched;
* they have shown indifference to the well-being of future generations (in their burdening them with debt and in their disregard of and lies about the gathering disaster of climate change);
* they have shown an insatiable greed and lust for power (consistently sacrificing the poor and weak in favor of the already rich and mighty);
* they have acted with shameless hypocrisy.

This list could be expanded at some length.

For some of those most impassioned about this struggle, the drive for the impeachment of this president is quite central in their thoughts. And well it might be: it is doubtful that there has ever been in the history of this country a presidency as deeply enmired as the present one in the kinds of criminal abuse of power that warranted impeachment --including the "national nightmare" involving the presidency of Richard Nixon.

But impeachment is not the appropriate rallying cry for this vital struggle, because it does not really hit the nail on the head.

The idea of impeachment implies: 1) that there's something seriously amiss at the highest levels of power, and 2) that this serious problem can be located in a particular individual, whose removal will substantially solve the problem.

The first of these is certainly true. But the second? That appears doubtful.

Imagine we were to remove George W. Bush, but leave in place the likes of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Don Rumsfeld. These three have acted like gangsters and have been in cahoots with the man --their fellow gangster, their fool, or perhaps both-- who has been presumably at the top. Remove him, and how much would we have solved our basic problem?

Surely, removing all these people from power --and the other political actors who have abetted this lying and criminal regime-- would certainly loosen the grip of the evil forces over our country, but even that is not sufficient to meet the challenge of this dangerous moment. What has been manifested through this presidency is much bigger than this group of people, even bigger than any particular set of individuals.

The soul of America will not be safe unless and until the American people see beyond those personalities to the forces in our country that have used this presidency as a means to advance their agendas. It is not only these individuals, but also these forces that have done so much to damage what has made this country great.

That is the essential nature of the struggle going on in America today: we are fighting to save the soul of our country.

Will we Americans recognize that the dark times brought on by this Bushite regime are the consequence of the evil forces these leaders represent?

** Will we as a people condemn those corporate powers that have been willing to corrupt our democracy in order to enact unjust laws to make the very rich and powerful still richer and more powerful? Will we discredit that greedy and unscrupulous force that has arisen from American corporate capitalism and has allied itself with these lying, law-breaking Bushites?

** Will we discredit that form of religiosity that has given evidence of its true nature by its tight embrace with this lying, criminal regime? Will we recognize that the drive to create conflict and to impose religious doctrine is not a godly one, that punishment of those who are different is not spiritual wisdom but rather part of how evil works in the world?

** Will we as a people recognize that American imperialism is a temptation we should resist –certainly because of our values, but also because of what our experience in Vietnam and in Iraq reveals about what such ventures bring us? Will we embrace the truth that, as much as possible, our role in the world should be to lead and not to dominate with force? And will we repudiate the approach to our nations practiced by this regime, an approach which has turned us into a nation with which other countries must cope, but not one to whom they look for leadership in seeking good for the world?

** Will we recognize that it is an unacceptable abuse of our marketplace of ideas to use the public forum as a means to lie and distort, to pander to people's prejudices and to compound their ignorance? Will we cast into disgrace those voices that have so willingly acted as a mere propaganda arm for this lying regime?

These are the essential aspects of this struggle. These are the questions on which depends the soul of America-- whether it will express what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," or whether it will remain under the thrall of these dark forces.

Yes, it is essential that we strip these individuals of their power to prevent them from doing more damage. But the necessary first step for achieving that is for us to reach a national consensus that these people, and the forces they represent, are a national disgrace.

Once the American public has agreed together that this Bushite regime is a disgrace, their moral authority will disappear. That is an important step in draining away their power. And other steps, if they are needed, can follow from that.

But for the sake of our country's future, we must work now not just to remove this destructive cabal, but to discredit in the eyes of our countrymen all those forces that have revealed their true dark and evil nature by the nature of the regime they have banded together to empower.

We are fighting for the soul of our country. For what else is a country's soul but the spirit that animates its course?

Fighting for America's soul. This should be the battle cry of the grassroots movement that opposes this destructive regime. This should be the issue on which the campaign of 2006 is waged, because --at this moment in America's history-- there is no more vital issue facing our country.



Authors Website: http://nonesoblind.org/

Authors Bio: Andrew Bard Schmookler's website –www.nonesoblind.org —is devoted to understanding the roots of America’s present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America’s Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states. Schmookler can be reached at andythebard@comcast.net

Copyright © OpEdNews, 2002-2006

Once more unto the breach

Scott Ritter

May 2, 2006 12:46 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/scott_ritter/2006/05/post_62.html

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has just released a report concerning Iran's nuclear programme, in which it notes that Iran has failed to comply with the UN security council's demands to cease its nuclear enrichment programmes. The IAEA report finds that Iran has, in defiance of the security council, in fact carried out a successful test to enrich uranium to the low levels needed in the production of nuclear energy. The IAEA also found that Iran had failed to provide a level of cooperation and transparency necessary for the IAEA to exclude the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme being carried out under the guise of civilian nuclear energy activities.

While the IAEA's report has underscored Iran's disturbing disregard for responding to the concerns of both the IAEA and the UN security council, it does not certify Iran as a clear and present danger, requiring a strong and immediate response from the international community. And yet the IAEA report has generated rhetoric from both the United States and Europe that seems well beyond that which the content of the report seems to merit. The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, has joined US officials in condemning the Iranian government for its failure to halt its nuclear enrichment efforts, and has called for the UN security council to "increase the pressure on Iran". Many officials in Europe have echoed the UK position, believing, it seems, that such action represents a manifestation of President George Bush's stated objective of resolving the Iranian matter "diplomatically and peacefully".

Just how naive can Europe be? While public sentiment against the US-led invasion (and ongoing occupation) of Iraq remains high, manifesting itself in the reduction of the original "coalition of the willing" to pathetic levels, Europe ("old" and "new") continues to behave as if the current conflict with Iraq and the potential of future conflict with Iran remain two separate and distinct issues.

It is shocking to see European officials, skilled in the heavily nuanced world of EU diplomacy, accept without question the sophomoric equivocation by the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice that "Iran is not Iraq". This phrase has been used repeatedly by Rice to deflect any query as to whether or not there are any parallels between the current US "diplomatic" stance on Iran and the "diplomacy" undertaken in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, which has widely been acknowledged as representing little more than a smokescreen behind which the Bush administration prepared for a war already decided upon.

Iran may not be Iraq, but these two nations are inextricably linked through the Machiavellian machinations of a US national security strategy that not only embraces the legitimacy of pre-emptive war, but also the notion of America's inherent right to pursue a policy of "regional transformation" in the Middle East, a policy that has as its core operational thematic pre-emptive military action to remove the regimes of so-called "failed" and "rogue" states. In the 2006 version of this national security strategy, Iran is named 16 times as the leading threat to the national security of the United States. I would hope every European diplomat has read this document, and takes its contents to heart. The national security strategy of the United States, circa 2006, can leave no doubt as to what the true intent of the Bush administration is regarding Iran: regime change. The current "crisis" regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions represents nothing more than an emotionally-charged facilitator for war.

Europe continues to act as if the American policy objective of regime change is nothing more than the irresponsible blathering of rightwing media pundits. The self-delusion that encompasses this way of thinking holds that Europe's stance vis-á-vis Iran serves more as a brake toward conflict, than the accelerant it actually is. As such, the European nations taking the lead on the Iranian issue - the UK, France and Germany - will meet on May 2 in Paris with representatives from Russia, China and the United States as a precursor for a meeting of the security council on May 3. The United States has already made clear its intent to introduce a draft resolution under Chapter VII of the UN charter, elevating Iran's obstinacy to the level of a clear and present danger to international peace and security, and paving the way for the imposition of stringent economic sanctions against Iran. The United States will be lobbying quite hard for such a resolution, and is looking to a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Paris group in New York on May 9 as the time and place for bringing this issue to a head.

While such measures appear on the surface to represent sound, measured diplomatic responses, the reality is that once the United States introduces a Chapter VII resolution, even in draft form, war with Iran is all but assured. Russia and China, both permanent members of the security council with veto powers, have made clear their collective objection to any Chapter VII action against Iran. However, by endorsing the transfer of the Iranian issue from the International Atomic Energy Agency to the security council, as well as the original security council "warning" against Iran, both Russia and China have played into the hands of US policy-makers, who have and will continue to use these actions as a clear endorsement of their position that Iran and its nuclear programme represents a threat to international security.

If the Russians and Chinese balk over the imposition of Chapter VII-linked measures against Iran, as they have indicated they will, then the Bush administration will simply declare that the security council has become impotent and irrelevant in dealing with threats that it has itself declared to exist, and, as such, the United States, not wanting to have its own national security interests so hijacked, will have no choice but to move forward void of any security council endorsement or authorisation. This model of action directly parallels that undertaken by the US and UK regarding Iraq, and has been strongly alluded to in recent statements made by Vice-President Cheney, the US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, and Rice.

The United States has positioned itself masterfully in this regard. But the sense of urgency being pushed by the Bush administration does not match the reality painted by its own director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, who recently testified before the US Congress that Iran was, at best, 10 years away from having a nuclear weapons capability. As such, there is no need for the security council to pursue this matter under the guise of a Chapter VII resolution. In fact, there is no need for the security council to be engaged on this issue at all, at least at this time.

The one real hope of side-stepping this mad rush towards war with Iran lays in a statement made by the Iranian government, offering to deal openly and transparently with the concerns listed in the IAEA's report within a matter of weeks, if the Iranian nuclear issue is transferred away from the security council and back to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The best thing the Europeans could do at this time would be to join ranks with the Russians and Chinese to take up the Iranian offer, defusing a very tense and dangerous situation that, as it currently stands, seems to be spinning close toward yet another needless war in the Middle East.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006.

May 02, 2006

Colbert Affair Exposes Loss of Rights

Don Imus was the speaker at the 1996 Correspondent's dinner and his talk insulted President Clinton along the lines of the ongoing "conservative movement" narrative. Whitewater, Susan McDougal getting payoffs, Clintons getting indicted, missing billing records... The press had a field day -- coverage everywhere. NY Times, TV Notes;Imus in the Spotlight,

Perhaps the only person more delighted than Don Imus about the flash flood of publicity following his spicy speech at a Washington dinner last week was Mike Wallace of CBS.

This is no big deal, except when compared with this week's press response to Stephen Colbert's appearance Saturday. The only way to describe the press response is: intentional blackout. The New York Times, for example, wrote an article about the dinner and did not mention Colbert in the article at all. A scan of Google News finds almost no coverage outside of the blogs.

Why is there such an obvious difference in the coverage given Bush in general, compared to the coverage given Clinton? The press coverage of President Clinton led to his impeachment, even when all of the Republican-initiated investigations found he had done nothing wrong. In contrast the press continues its blackout of coverage or even discussion of possible crimes committed by President Bush.

In 1987 Ronald Reagan ordered the FCC to abolish the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcast media to provide balanced coverage of issues. Majorities in the Congress voted to restore the Fairness Doctrine and were blocked by Republican vetoes and filibusters. (Any time you hear a Republican complain about the "liberal media" ask them why it is Republicans, not Democrats, who oppose the Fairness Doctrine.) Following that, Republicans began to allow fewer and fewer large corporations to control more and more of these information channels. (PLEASE click the links. More here and here.)

Before these changes you would see representatives of Labor, Democrats, anti-war, religions other than far-right Christianity, and other now-banned viewpoints. One particular viewpoint you would see expressed was a concern that concentrated corporate ownership of the channels of information would harm democracy. That viewpoint is also banned now.

It used to be considered essential to democracy that the public had access to information. The pubic used to have the right to demand diversity of opinion in the media. Now even expressing such ideas is banned.

Do you think "banned" is too strong a word? Tell me when was the last time you saw or heard these viewpoints expressed? When was the last time you heard a representative of Labor expressing that employees should join unions?

Posted by Dave Johnson at May 2, 2006 07:58 AM

A Tale of Two Americas

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

We are living in two Americas now.

There is the Madison Avenue/Hollywood propaganda production of a presidency transmitted to Americans through transcribers (aka reporters) working for the corporate media that is in the tank with the White House.

Then there is the famous "reality-based" world of the people who are supposed to be running America: us.

In the reality-based world, the latest poll shows that only 30% of Americans approve of Bush's Iraqmire debacle. But the mainstream media still covers Iraq as if it could turn positive any minute, just as the White House and Don "Dementia" Rumsfeld dictate to them.

That's quite a gap between the fantasy world of the Busheviks and the "reality-based" world of the citizens who elect the American government.

The mainstream media is supposed to serve the interests of the national and local communities of America. But they don't. They represent the White House perspective, because the White House is the hand that feeds the financial interests of the corporate conglomerates. It's a business relationship.

The mainstream media giants use the same "K" Street lobbyists that Exxon/Mobil do. These so-called providers of news know that their bottom line is threatened with every truthful story about the Busheviks, because as the White House has shown many a time, they take no prisoners, just revenge.

Meanwhile, the Busheviks are marching us toward a partisan, politically-driven war with Iran, in which nuclear weapons may be used, using the same game plan as they did for Iraq. And the media plays deaf, dumb and mute for a second time.

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld continue to act as if polls and public opinion don't matter. Bush has hit a record rock bottom in approval ratings, and he's off smirking and bike riding. It's as if the Busheviks feel the referees have been paid off (as in Bushevik judges sitting on the federal bench ready to rule in their favor on most issues) and the game is fixed. It doesn't matter what we think; they've got the power and they are not giving it up.

As Stephen Colbert observed in his brilliant April 29th Washington "Correspondents" Dinner remarks, "Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality.' And reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Of course, they can only keep their power by cranking up the fear, a rally around the Commander-in-Chief war cry, stealing elections, and continuing to control Congress and the courts. And they've shown that they can accomplish this without any strong show of opposition from the Democrats on the Hill. So they have a right to be confident.

They are still in office, still making disastrous decisions, aren't they?

They look and act like people who plan to do just what they've been doing -- with the confidence that no one is going to try or is able to stop them.

Their threats against Iran are just warmed over rhetoric from the pre-Iraq War stage. These are predictable Machiavellis. They mean what they say; and they'll do whatever they have to do to stay in power.

As BuzzFlash has said before, from their perspective they ARE winning the Iraq War. They control the oil and they are building mega-permanent military bases in Iraq, as well as an embassy worthy of the British empire.

But the oil industry in Iraq has nearly been brought to a standstill, and if Bush attacks Iran (U.S. special forces and proxy militias are already allegedly operating inside Iran), our soldiers in Iraq (as the Iraqi blogger Riverbend predicts) will be sitting ducks as the Iran Shiite loyalists in Iraq seek revenge upon our soldiers.

Even in Iraq, you see, the Busheviks have constructed two countries: the one of the Neo-Con, oil profiteering fantasy and the one of destructive bloody reality.

The mainstream media is now not a news operation; it's primarily a propaganda arm of the White House whose goal is to support and sell "Brand Bush."

You see, reality doesn't enter into it, just ensuring profits for the big media. That's their only reality.

Meanwhile, reality-based Americans are helpless pawns in a game of madness unchecked.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

© BuzzFlash.

Nativists declare open season on undocumented immigrants

Bill Berkowitz - WorkingForChange

05.04.06 - Even as millions of people demonstrated across the United States Monday to call for amnesty for the nation's 11 million undocumented workers, other events have shed more heat than light and have turned into boisterous anti-immigrant gatherings where violence against immigrants has become a rallying cry. On April 27 -- four days before a mass movement that included undocumented workers, legal immigrants and U.S. citizens who refused to go to work or school in observation of the "Great American Boycott" -- more than 1,000 people attended an anti-immigrant meeting called "Demagnetize America" in Franklin, Tennessee.

Those in attendance heard Nashville radio talk show host Phil Valentine say that he thought that U.S. Border Patrol Agents should consider shooting undocumented immigrants as they come across the border.

According to the news story posted at the Web site of the Center for New Community's Building Democracy Initiative, Susan Tully, the national field director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) -- present at the event -- "chuckled at the idea, while the large crowd erupted into applause".

The meeting was hosted by Valentine and broadcast over SuperTalk 99.7 WTN radio.

Devin Burghart, an expert on nativism at the Chicago-based civil rights organization, said an interview that the Center for New Community "was the first organization to report on Valentine's shooting remark.”

According to Burghart, the center has received a number of reports of veiled threats of violence coming from radio talk show hosts in other parts of the country as well.

"In early March, Brian James, a fill-in talk radio show host with Phoenix AM radio station KFYI, suggested on the air that a solution to the immigration problem in Arizona would be to kill undocumented immigrants as they cross the border. 'What we'll do is randomly pick one night every week where we will kill whoever crosses the border,' James said in the broadcast. 'Step over there and you die. You get to decide whether it's your lucky night or not. I think that would be more fun.'"

Burghart pointed out that "James said that he'd be 'happy to sit there with my high-powered rifle and my night scope' and kill people as the cross the border. He also suggested that the National Guard shoot illegal immigrants and receive '$100 a head.'"

Even worse than the increasingly violent rhetoric is the marked increase in violent incidents, most recently exemplified by "the brutal attack in the Houston suburb of Spring, Texas, where two white power skinheads attacked a 16-year-old Latino, brutally sexually assaulting him with a PVC pipe, and stomping his head with their boots while cursing him as being a Mexican," Burghart said.

Recently, two civil rights organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) and the Anti- Defamation League (ADL), issued reports documenting the rise in both violence and the threat of violence against undocumented immigrants.

The SPLC reported that Laine Lawless of the anti- immigrant group, the Border Guardians, has repeatedly called for violence against undocumented workers.

An e-mail dated April 3 and sent to Mark Martin, commander of the Western Ohio unit of the National Socialist Movement, was titled, 'How to GET RID OF THEM!'

According to SPLC's report, Lawless, who was an original member of Chris Simcox's vigilante militia before it became the Minuteman Project in early 2005, suggested a number of ways to harass and terrorize undocumented immigrants, including robbery and 'beating up illegals' as they leave their workplace. 'Make every illegal alien feel the heat of being a person without status... I hear the rednecks in the South are beating up illegals as the textile mills have closed. Use your imagination,' Lawless wrote.

'Discourage Spanish-speaking children from going to school. Be creative,' she said.

'Create an anonymous propaganda campaign warning that any further illegal immigrants will be shot, maimed or seriously messed-up upon crossing the border. This should be fairly easy to do, considering the hysteria of the Spanish language press, and how they view the Minutemen as 'racists and vigilantes.''

In its report entitled "Extremists Declare 'Open Season' on Immigrants: Hispanics Target of Incitement and Violence", the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) examines "how white supremacists, racist skinheads and others identifying with far- right extremist groups are using the national debate over immigration reform as a means to encourage likeminded racists to speak out, or even commit violent acts against immigrants.”

"It is time to shine the spotlight on those who have seized upon the immigration debate as an opportunity to advance their agenda of hate, bigotry and white supremacy," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL national director. "This report reminds us that there is a direct connection between the national policy debate and the atmosphere surrounding the daily lives of immigrants. Extremist groups are seeking to exploit the flow of foreign workers into this country to spread a message of xenophobia, to promote hateful stereotypes and to incite bigotry and violence against Hispanics, regardless of their status as citizens."

While the overwrought Phil Valentine and Brian James, and a handful of neo-Nazi groups have openly advocated violence against the undocumented, anti-immigrant politicos and several cable news television personalities have contributed to the increasingly toxic climate.

On April 24, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a longtime media watchdog group, issued a press release pointing out that anti-immigrant fervor was being stirred up on a regular basis by Lou Dobbs, the host of CNN's nightly program "Lou Dobbs Tonight."

FAIR pointed out that "Dobbs' tone on immigration is consistently alarmist; he warns his viewers of Mexican immigrants who see themselves as an 'army of invaders' intent upon re-annexing parts of the Southwestern United States to Mexico, announces that 'illegal alien smugglers and drug traffickers are on the verge of ruining some of our national treasures,' and declares that 'the invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many