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Volume 1 Issue 166              Today’s News and Views             Monday, June 12, 2006

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Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2492

Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 300

Figures provided by

the Iraq Coalition Causality website

For Immediate Release                                                                                                June 10, 2006

2500 American Deaths in Iraq are Near:

We say, “Not one more.” Call for Peace Now.

Press Contacts:

Harold P. Donle, Veterans for Peace, Inc. #49, hdonle@insightbb.com 317/698-2450.

Heather Allen-Garde, Hoosiers for Peace, heather@hoosiersforpeace.org, 317/202-9302.

Jim Wolfe, Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, jwolfe@butler.edu, 317/255-3857.

Members of Veterans for Peace, Chapter 49, Hoosiers for Peace and the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center are asking Indiana citizens to assemble at the south side of Veterans Memorial Plaza  in downtown Indianapolis on the day that the 2500^th American is reported killed to mark this tragic occurrence. The target date at the current rate of KIAs is on or about Tuesday, June 13^th, three (3) days from today.

This action is to honor the soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq and their families, and to give our fellow Indiana citizens a visual representation of what 2500 looks like. We are against war because it kills our family members, wreaks havoc on our national treasury, makes the world a more dangerous place, and psychically damages our humanity.

Hundreds of Hoosiers have been invited to participate in this event that will combine an installation of 2500 flags to honor the dead and a memorial ceremony to call for an end to war. If the number is reached on a weekday (Mon.- Fri.) the group will gather at 6 P.M and if the number is reached on a weekend the group will gather at 4 P.M. at Veterans Memorial Plaza  in downtown Indianapolis. (The Plaza is bounded by Michigan to the south, Meridian to the west, North Street to the north, and Pennsylvania to the west.) At that time, the assembled will create a field of flags on Veterans Memorial Plaza. There will be a period of brief remarks and a memorial ceremony in closing.

For more information contact Harold Donle at (317)698-2450.

Support Our Troops

IMPEACH Bush/Cheney

Hoosiers for Peace requests the honor of your presence…

What: Share Sunday Gravy with Local Progressives at Pasta for Peace. Good Food, Stimulating Conversation, Inspirational Music, Film, and Art and a Silent Auction. Did we mention the pasta was shaped like peace signs? To reserve your seat, call 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org. Seats are limited and going fast.

When: June 25, 2006 from 1 to 4 p.m. (with dinner at 2 p.m.)

Where: Indianapolis Peace and Learning Center (6040 DeLong Rd.) in Eagle Creek Park.

Why:  Now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace. Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. To find out more visit www.hoosiersforpeace.org

Cost: Adults $20, Children 5-12 $7, Children under 5 eat free. All proceeds will go towards the advertising campaign. Seats are limited, contact Heather for tickets today: 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. 
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

May 7, 2006

Dear Peacemakers,

Will you help to spread and encourage peace? With a record number of American soldiers dying in April 2006 and possible military action against Iran becoming daily news, now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace.

Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. We are contacting dozens of organizations to make a proposal to form a coalition to raise funds and send a collaborative message to Hoosiers to Call for Peace. The message is: Call your friends, your family, and your representatives and ask them to support the Call for Peace.

Like most Americans, we oppose war based on the following, which will be reflected in the advertisement:

A.    War Kills. More than 2,400 American Soldiers have died and nearly 1,000 Hoosier soldiers are in harms way.

B.    War depletes our resources. Billions of dollars are going to sustain war efforts while ordinary citizens struggle for social services.

C.    War will not make us secure. Studies have shown that the U.S. is no more secure today than it was before 911.

Hoosiers for Peace, a website sponsored by Progressive Indiana, requests your support to make this advertisement a success. We will use the advertisement to call for peace. Each group in the coalition  working on this project will be listed in the ad. Each group will be asked to raise $1000 by October 1, 2006. Below are some suggestions for fundraising:

1.                Letter Writing Campaign: Contact your family and friends and ask them to support this call for peace. Tell them how many people we can reach and ask them to make a generous donation and spread the word. You may collect the money through your organization or you may refer them to Progressive Indiana. Donations may be sent through our secure online giving by going to www.progressiveindiana.org and click on donate now or log onto www.hoosiersforpeace and click on donate now. Checks may also be made payable to Progressive Indiana and mailed to:

                Progressive Indiana

                P.O. Box 55253

                Indianapolis, Indiana 46205-0253

2.                Host a house party. Go grassroots and organize a pasta dinner or backyard barbecue and ask for a donation from each guest. Play poker and donate half of each pot to the campaign for peace. Have a bake sale through your church or place of employment.

3.                Plan a small event.  Invite your community to an event and ask for donations for the ad. Small concerts, speakers, and socials are some ideas for these events. Get creative and network!

We need at least 14 groups to join the coalition and many more people to join the campaign to help fill in possible gaps. If we join together we can make this happen and we can bring Hoosiers together through this ad. As we Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, and call for an End to the War we can stand united for peace. We can make a difference by showing ordinary Hoosiers that there are many people like them working for peace. Please contact us as soon as possible if you would like to participate in this campaign. With a little work and collaboration we can make a large impact on our community.

In Peace,

Heather Allen-Garde

Director, Hoosiers For Peace

heather@hooisersforpeace.org

heatherreneeallen@yahoo.com

317/202-9302

It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it – Eleanor Roosevelt

David Korten

Butler University

June 26, 2006

7pm

Reilley Room

Atherton Hall

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Today's News and Views

ROBERT KUTTNER

A losing formula

By Robert Kuttner  |  June 10, 2006

IT HAS now become less politically risky for Democrats to accept gay marriage than to support taxing the richest 1 percent of Americans. And that reality speaks volumes about the Democratic dilemma.

On Wednesday, Senate Republicans offered a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that they knew had no chance of passage. Their purpose was simple and cynical: Rally the faltering Republican hard-core base, and force a vote that they hoped would embarrass Democrats.

The constitutional measure, which required 67 votes to pass, got only 49. Just one Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, supported it. Seven Republicans, including all five New England GOP senators, voted against. It's not that most Democrats endorse same-sex marriage (though civil union commands wide support). Democrats said they opposed the measure because marriage is an issue for the states. Yet you can be sure that in this fall's elections, Republicans will chide Democrats for failing to vote for a constitutional ban on gay marriage.

A day later, the Senate took up repeal of the estate tax. Just one estate in 100 pays the tax. At a time when deficits are headed skyward, the Iraq war is costing a projected $1.3 trillion, and valued domestic public outlays are being sacrificed on the altar of deficit-reduction, repeal of estate taxes would balloon deficits by another trillion dollars over a decade.

Yet in Thursday's vote to cut off debate, fully 57 senators (three short of the necessary 60) voted for total and permanent repeal. They included four Democrats, including the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus of Montana.

Despite this defeat for repeal, the issue isn't dead. Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, joined by enabler Baucus, is promoting a ``compromise" to keep a token estate tax, applied only to estates of $5 million to $7 million and with a far lower rate. This would increase deficits by $300 billion to $500 billion.

Several Democrats attended a strategy meeting convened by Baucus after the vote to consider what partial repeal they might support. These reportedly included Ken Salazar of Colorado, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Prior of Arkansas, Maria Cantwell of Washington State, and Nelson. All of these worthies, save Nelson, found the nerve to vote against the gay marriage ban.

The idea that same-sex marriage somehow threatens traditional marriage is of course preposterous. A New Yorker cartoon expressed it best. A wife, bags packed, tells her husband: ``It's not you, it's gay marriage." So Democrats are to be applauded for not succumbing to demagoguery on the issue. But the Democratic Party has taken a bullet for its intermittent progress in advancing gay and other rights.

The remedy is not to back off on rights issues, but to remember where Democrats stand on economic ones. For if anything can bullet-proof the Democrats' tolerance on social issues, it is delivering for the pocketbooks of working Americans.

During the past 30 years, per capita gross domestic product has about doubled, yet about four Americans in five are actually worse off. All the growth went to the top, mostly to the top 1 percent. But three decades of Republican government-bashing, often with such Democrats as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton piling on, have made it nearly impossible for Democrats to deliver remedies.

There's a paradox here. Big programs enacted in a bolder era, such as Social Security, Medicare, and college aid, are immensely popular, suggesting a latent support for tax-and-spend. But expectations about what government can do to help ordinary people have been so lowered that many Democrats are now reluctant to tax even the richest to pay for programs that benefit everyone else.

Another vote this week was emblematic. California voters rejected a ballot initiative to provide optional pre-kindergarten for all 4-year-olds. The measure was to be financed by a new surtax that would hit only individuals making over $400,000 a year, and $800,000 for couples. Most politicians just ducked.

What could change this blockage? Leadership, both by elected officials and activists. Here in Massachusetts, the Legislature managed to begin the process of providing universal health coverage, partly defrayed by a token tax on businesses that fail to cover their workers. The sky didn't fall.

Since Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrats' winning formula has been to serve economic needs of ordinary people, and use that political capital to expand rights for often unpopular minorities. The opposite formula just doesn't work. Defending the richest doesn't buy running room to advance rights, and it leaves Democrats with little to offer economically frustrated Americans save more tax-cutting.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe.

 Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Hundreds of Iraqi soldiers deserting
Big News Network
Saturday 10th June, 2006  (UPI)

Erratic pay, inadequate food and poor living conditions are driving several hundred Iraqi soldiers out of the army every month.

Lt. Moktat Uosef is a company commander in the 4th Brigade of the 7th Iraqi Army Division. U.S. Marines working with the brigade told Stars and Stripes, the U.S. armed forces newspaper, that its strength dropped from 2,200 soldiers in December to 1,400 in May.

Many of my soldiers have not gotten paid in six months, Uosef said. Sometimes, they don't eat for two or three days at a time. I tell my commander, but what else am I supposed to do?

Desertions are a major problem in Anbar Province, the major stronghold of the insurgency. But officials say logistical problems are hurting morale far more than danger is.

In April, hundreds of soldiers staged what amounted to a short strike, refusing for two days to go on patrol. The job action strained their relationship with U.S. troops.

We won't make any real progress until we stop hemorrhaging the personnel, said Lt. Col. Jeffrey Kenny, who commands the Marines working with the 2nd Brigade, 7th Army.

Mr Bush said the meeting would decide "how to best deploy America's resources in Iraq and achieve our shared goal of an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself".

But despite fierce domestic pressure to reduce troop levels before November's critical mid-term elections, there were growing signals that Gen George Casey, America's Iraq commander, may raise troop levels in the short-term.

Mr Bush said in his weekend radio address that "violence in Iraq may escalate" as terrorists tried to prove that they had survived the loss of their leader.

American commanders are also worried by the situation in the Sunni areas at the heart of the insurgency, where American units have complained of a shortage of men.

Mr Maliki pledged in a Washington Post article to confront the Shia militia, but his plan to "re-establish a state monopoly on weapons" could well generate a confrontation between ultra-religious gunmen and the fledgling Iraq security forces.

America's military would be drawn into any defining battle over who rules Iraq.

Gen Casey has already summoned his main reserve unit, a 3,500-man armoured brigade based in Kuwait and has alerted a Germany-based brigade that it may be needed soon.

Military planners have begun to assess the costs of keeping a 50,000-man force in Iraq for a protracted period of time. At present the total number of serving American troops is about 500,000.

The plan has not yet received presidential approval. But it would fit with the administration's belief that while troops numbers will fall, American forces will have to remain in Iraq beyond Mr Bush's departure from the White House in early 2009.

Military analysts have noted that significant American spending is already being committed to permanent bases in Iraq. They say Iraq's military may soon be able to fight by itself, but it cannot feed or supply itself and it has no air force to speak of.

The Camp David meeting will be attended by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, Gen Michael Hayden, the CIA director and Gen Peter Pace, America's top soldier.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2006.

Several months ago, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada decided that U.S. involvement in Iraq is illegal and immoral. Like so many of us, Watada concluded that intelligence was manipulated to "justify" the invasion. Unlike so many of us, he has had the courage to stick his neck out and pay the price for resistance.

We should, I suppose, give the neck its due. It is a pleasant thing -- a convenient connection between head and torso. We do not risk it out of caprice. But if there is nothing for which we will risk that neck, then it has become our idol. And necks are not worthy of this status. Finally, an active duty U.S .Army officer has refused to engage in that kind of idol worship.

No publicity seeker, Watada earlier this year quietly submitted a request to resign from the Army. The request was denied. He then refused to deploy to Iraq with his unit this summer and is prepared to face prison rather than violate his conscience. Meanwhile, he fully expects the kind of ostracism encountered by those few Army enlisted men who objected to the torture at Abu Ghraib. In what might well be the understatement of the month, Watada says he may be "the most unpopular person at Fort Lewis."

… and a gift for Dan Berrigan

Watada may not realize this, but he has presented a pearl of great price to longtime war resister, Jesuit priest and poet Dan Berrigan, who celebrates his 85th birthday this weekend in New York. Facing ridicule and ostracism for acting on their principled opposition to the war in Vietnam, Dan and his late brother Phil were no strangers to prison -- or to profound disappointment at the dearth of those willing to witness in the way of Watada.

In "No Bars to Manhood," Dan wrote:

"Of course, let us have peace," we cry, "but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties …" There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war -- at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison, and death in its wake.

Dan Berrigan will be encouraged by Watada's resistance. And so, I hope, will Faiza Al Araji, one of the courageous Iraqi women who came to the United States in March to give firsthand testimony to the suffering of the Iraqi people. Executive manager of Arab Water Treatment Co., Faiza is a highly educated engineer who took a month off to appeal to U.S. citizens to do something to end the tragedy of her people.

I had the privilege of sharing speaking duties with her on several panels arranged by progressives in California. It was painful. Faiza would pour out her heart, only to be met with expressions of sympathy -- and impotence. After three successive days of this, she found a way to express her outrage without wearing out her welcome. We were in Santa Cruz, Calif., speaking to a standing-room-only audience. After Faiza's account of the horrors being experienced by her people elicited the all-too-familiar, hand-wringing moans of "What can we do?" she lost it.

Candid sharing …

Returning to her seat next to me on the panel, she grabbed my notebook and filled the top page with what she really wanted to say. Her poignant words, as she wrote them:

So, Iraqis are in the middle between American people who don't know what to do always? An American administration who had plans to war and never listen! Where is the key to help poor Iraqis?

In the beginning of my meeting I feel sad for American people but after passing of time my people are dying and Americans still asking stupid questions like 'What can I do?'

I feel sick.

Faiza could see it. We are, for the most part, blissfully (perhaps studiously?) unaware of our own power -- the power we still enjoy as Americans, even as the claws of fascism creep steadily closer. We in the dominant culture often feel impotent, despite the power of our inherent privilege. Perhaps it's a subconscious thing. Maybe we prefer to remain in denial because, otherwise, we would have to look in the mirror and decide whether we have the courage to put that power into play.

… and becoming aware

At the Servant Leadership School in Washington, D.C., we are constantly grappling with the debilitating accoutrements of white privilege and unexplored racism. At one point an African-American trainer threw up his hands, looked at us, and -- as calmly as he could -- explained:

"If someone has their foot on my neck, I will say once, please get off my neck. If you continue to stand on my neck and explain how you didn't know you were there and why you were there and how difficult it is to move, I cannot be nice about it any more. It's not about conversation; in the end it's about getting your foot off my neck."

And so, we are back to necks. We must stop the handwringing and find ways to get our country's foot off Iraq's neck.

What can we do? Get together with a few friends and figure it out! If we were willing to put something on the line, if we were willing to stick out our own necks, as Lt. Watada has done, things could change.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. In a public forum last month he confronted Donald Rumsfeld directly about the lies he has told about the war in Iraq.

This story was originally posted on Truthout.org.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute.

Using Children as 'God's Army'

By Kirsten A. Powers, The American Prospect
Posted on June 12, 2006, Printed on June 12, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/37373/

Gandhi once said if Christians lived according to their faith, there would be no Hindus left in India. He knew how powerful the fundamental tenets of Christianity -- fighting poverty, caring for the least among us, loving your enemies, eschewing materialism and embracing humility -- could be if everyone who called themselves a Christian truly followed them.

The new documentary, Jesus Camp, which chronicles a North Dakota summer camp where kids as young as 6 are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in "God's army," is an illustration of this sentiment in the extreme.

The film, by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the duo who also directed the critically-acclaimed The Boys of Baraka, opened to an appreciative and flabbergasted audience at the 2006 TriBeca Film Festival, where it received the Special Jury Award. The directors skillfully captured the daily interactions of a world that would be foreign to most viewers: children speaking in tongues and talking of being "born again" at age 5.

The star of the film is Pastor Becky Fischer, who explains the startling mission of her "Kids on Fire" camp: "I want young people to be as committed to laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are in Pakistan." At the camp, the children are asked: "How many of you want to be those who will give up your life for Jesus?" Little hands shoot up from every direction. They are told: "We have to break the power of the enemy over the government." At one point, Becky yells: "This means war! Are you a part of it or not?" More little hands.

The directors take us into the homes of the children, where we see them "pledge allegiance to the Christian flag" and play a video game called "Creation Adventure" that debunks evolution. A mother helps her children with homework and informs them that, "Global warming is not going to happen. Science doesn't prove anything."

The film takes us back to the camp, where the children are gathered for their daily teaching. Suddenly, a camp counselor places a life-size cardboard cutout before the group. No, it's not Jesus. It's George Bush. Clapping erupts and Becky encourages them to "say hello to the President." Becky claims that "President Bush has added credibility to being a Christian."

Statistics about the spectacular number of "evangelicals" in the United States are ominously flashed onscreen throughout the movie, implicitly suggesting that Becky and her assembled camp are giving us a peek into the inner workings of the "evangelical movement." But it might be worth questioning the conventional wisdom that the 100 million Americans who call themselves evangelicals all march to the same beat. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and James Dobson have a vested interest in presenting this group as a conservative monolith under their exclusive and unquestioned control. And while there is no denying the electoral power of the Religious Right, Democrats should not assume that all, or even a majority, of evangelicals naturally hew to the Republican line.

While it's never disclosed in the movie, Jesus Camp is in fact a Pentecostal camp, which puts it far to the right theologically and politically, even within the evangelical movement. The directors explained that they didn't want to confuse audiences by disclosing this and instead referred to the camp only as "evangelical." Unfortunately, they unwittingly added to the enormous confusion that people like Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, has been trying to clear up for years.

Wallis, who is the founder and editor of Sojourners, a progressive Christian magazine, spends much of his time traveling the country talking to students and meeting with evangelical leaders. Wallis believes the future of the country is in the hands of moderate evangelical voters. He estimates, based on polls and personal experience, that about half of evangelicals are the immovable Religious Right but the other half are open to, if not hungry for, progressive leadership.

"The facts on the ground are changing," says Wallis. He reports a marked increase in attendance of his speeches on Christian campuses and the issues he gets asked about the most are not gay marriage or abortion. Wallis says abortion will naturally remain important issue to the moderate evangelical voter, but it is not a litmus test. They want leaders who will acknowledge their moral concerns about this issue and who are committed to decreasing the number of abortions, a position that puts them well within the mainstream of Democratic voters.

And it's no different if Wallis is meeting with the leader of an evangelical mega-church. One such leader recently told Wallis, "I'm a conservative on Jesus, the Bible and the Resurrection, but I'm becoming a social liberal." When Wallis asked why, he heard what has become a familiar refrain: evangelicals are increasingly despairing over the neglect of the poor, the environment, and the U.S. inaction on fighting the genocide in Darfur.

White evangelicals make up close to 25 percent of the electorate and, in 2004, a whopping 78 percent of them voted for George Bush. But evangelicals didn't always line up behind the Republican candidate. According to Pew Research, in 1987, white evangelicals were almost evenly divided between the two parties. And today, many evangelical leaders believe that a growing number of these voters are prepared to return to the Democratic fold, but only if Democrats stop misunderstanding, neglecting, and even intentionally ignoring what was and should be a natural constituency.

Meanwhile, evangelical groups are finding their voice on many progressive issues. U2 front man Bono has talked extensively of the unlikely partnership he has forged with evangelical leaders in fighting the AIDS crisis. One of those leaders is Ted Haggard, a staunch Republican who founded the now 12,000-person New Life Church and heads the National Association of Evangelicals. Haggard personally counseled British Prime Minister Blair on how to persuade President Bush to support Third World debt relief and has made protecting the environment a central issue of concern for his church.

In February, Christianity Today's cover blasted "Why Torture is Always Wrong." Joining with the Catholic Church, more than 50 evangelical Christian leaders and organizations recently voiced their support for an immigration bill that would allow illegal immigrants to become U.S. citizens without returning to their native countries. And earlier this year, a group of 86 evangelical Christian leaders launched a campaign to educate Christians about climate change and urged the U.S. Congress to enact legislation to curb global warming. The campaign calls on Christians to battle global warming, "which will hit the poor the hardest because those areas likely to be significantly affected first are the poorest regions of the world."

These concerns sounds pretty progressive. So, why are so few white evangelicals voting Democratic? Wallis believes Democrats have ceded the territory of religion to the Republican side, allowing them to use it to divide the electorate. Or, as Wallis has said, "I think this idea that all the Christians, all the religious people are jammed in the red states and the blue states are full of agnostics is a bit overblown in the media. It's more complicated than that."

Much, much more complicated.

Copyright © 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

Kirsten A. Powers served in the Clinton administration as Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Public Affairs and has worked in New York state and city politics.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute

Truth Is for 'Liberals'

[from the June 26, 2006 issue]

Here we are, five and a half years into the Bush Administration, and the press corps still hasn't figured out how to handle the White House's primary tactic of media management: lying.

During George W. Bush's first term, reporters had a powerful confluence of motivations for their difficulty in calling the President to task. First was tradition; mere journalists lacked the authority to call a President a liar. Second, post-9/11 they were intimidated by Bush's McCarthyite with-us-or-ag'in-us rhetoric as well as by a bloodthirsty right-wing punditocracy. (New York Times White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller admitted that she and her colleagues found it "frightening to stand up there," and "no one wanted to get into an argument with the President at this very serious time.")

Finally, though much of what Bush said during his first term was laughable, it was not easily disprovable in a normative sense. Would the poor and the middle class be the primary beneficiaries of tax cuts designed almost exclusively to enrich the extremely wealthy? Could right-wing church groups and ideology factories replace the services provided by traditional government health and welfare agencies? Does abstinence-only education based on disinformation reduce teen pregnancy? Were WMD-infested, bin-Laden-loving Iraqis eager to be "liberated" by a power that instructs them that our God is bigger than their God? "Well maybe," replied most reporters. "Time will tell."

Because the mainstream media make a fetish of a particularly brainless form of objectivity, the Bush Administration has been able to deceive the American public on a dizzying array of issues, from war to economics to science to, well, you name it. Lying has usually damaged the Presidents who do it, as I argued in my book When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences. But the media proved so timid in the face of this Administration's deceptions that the reckoning was delayed long enough for Bush to squeak into a second term.

Now the results are in--and reporters, under siege from several directions, are still trapped in self-eviscerating sanctimony. Jim Lehrer explained the peculiar form of "objectivity" he and his colleagues practice to CJR Daily's Liz Cox Barrett not long ago: "I don't deal in terms like 'blatantly untrue,'" he averred. "That's for other people to decide.... I'm not in the judgment part of journalism. I'm in the reporting part of journalism." As Todd Gitlin pointed out on TPM Cafe, Lehrer's interview sounded an awful lot like Rob Corddry lecturing a befuddled Jon Stewart, "I don't have 'o-pin-i-ons.' I'm a reporter, Jon, and my job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called 'objectivity'--might wanna look it up someday."

Of course, even when they did catch Bush in the occasional bald-faced, easily demonstrable lie, most Washington journalists thought it gauche to make a big deal out of it. Dana Milbank wrote the classic 2002 Washington Post article about Bush's tendency to mislead, deliberately--all without ever using the "L" word. When asked by CNN's Howard "conflict of interest" Kurtz specifically about an incontrovertible lie by Bush about why we invaded Iraq--the President claimed that Saddam Hussein would not allow inspectors in--Milbank excused the liar: "This is just the President being the President." He meant it as a compliment.

Now Bush's lies are news again. When replacing his Treasury Secretary recently, he told another one that reporters have had trouble ignoring. Asked by Bloomberg's Richard Keil, "Has Treasury Secretary Snow given you any indication that he intends to leave his job anytime soon?" Bush responded, "No, he has not talked to me about resignation. I think he's doing a fine job." In fact, as Washington Post.com's Dan Froomkin reported, "Tony Snow [no relation] confirmed that Bush had offered John Snow's job to Goldman Sachs chairman Henry Paulson several days before the press conference, and the spokesman didn't deny that Bush and his treasury secretary had talked about it." Quizzed about the discrepancy, Tony Snow called Bush's response "artfully worded." By Bush Administration standards, that's sad but true.

Froomkin devoted a column to the incident, brazenly titled "Bush's Lie." In it he wondered at all the reasons reporters are reluctant to call a lie a lie. He quoted his own newspaper's coverage by Peter Baker and Paul Blustein, which gave no indication of the President's purposeful mendacity. "Bush, when asked about the Treasury Secretary at his news conference last night, indicated only that he had not spoken directly with Snow and quickly changed the subject to positive economic indicators." In other words: "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" (Also writing about the incident, Slate's John Dickerson explained, mystifyingly, "I'm reluctant to call it a lie, but the President abused our trust.")

Interestingly, Froomkin's attentiveness to the issue of what's true and what's false in the President's statements has earned him the reputation around the office of being an ideologue. Late last year Washington Post executive editor Len Downie spoke of his desire to "make sure people in the administration know that our news coverage by White House reporters is separate from what appears in Froomkin's column." National political editor John Harris admitted at the same time that he had "heard from Republicans" who thought Froomkin "unfair." To offer readers "balance," Post honchos demonstrated just what they consider to be the proper antidote to a twenty-year veteran reporter who submits Administration rhetoric to truth tests: In March they hired a 24-year-old former Bush/Cheney political operative named Ben Domenech, who had little (if any) experience as a journalist but plenty, it turned out, as a plagiarist.

So truth is for "liberals." Were it not for the fact that our democracy is being undermined by the liars in office, we might be flattered. But even the collapse of the President's popularity has not installed much backbone in the press corps. Bush can still lie about whatever he wants whenever he wants; treasury secretaries one day; war the next. It's "just the President being the President."

Copyright © 2006 The Nation

Public Secrets

By Robert G. Kaiser
Sunday, June 11, 2006; B01

Why does The Washington Post willingly publish "classified" information affecting national security? Should Post journalists and others who reveal the government's secrets be subject to criminal prosecution for doing so? These questions, raised with new urgency of late, deserve careful answers.

There's a reason why we're hearing these questions now. We live in tense times. The country is anxious about war and terrorism. Washington is more sharply divided along ideological lines than at any time since I came to work at The Post in 1963. The Bush administration has unabashedly sought to enhance the powers of the executive branch as it wages what it calls a "war on terror," many of whose components are classified secrets.

These are new circumstances, but to a reporter who has been watching the contest between press and government for four decades, what isn't new here seems more significant than what is. What isn't new is a government trying to hide its activities from the public, and a press trying to find out what is being hidden.

Thanks to resourceful reporters, we have learned a great deal about the war that the administration apparently never intended to reveal: that the CIA never could assure the White House that Saddam Hussein's Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction; that U.S. forces egregiously abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib; that the United States had a policy of rendering terrorism suspects to countries such as Egypt and Jordan where torture is commonplace; that the United States established secret prisons in Eastern Europe for terrorism suspects; that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping without warrants on the phone calls of countless Americans, as well as keeping track of whom Americans called from home and work.

You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America's name, shouldn't Americans understand how it is being waged?

Secrecy and security are not the same. On this point, Exhibit A for journalists here at The Post is the 1971 Pentagon Papers case. The Pentagon Papers were a top-secret history of the Vietnam War written inside the Pentagon and leaked to the New York Times and then The Post. Top-secret means a document is so sensitive that its revelation could cause "exceptionally grave damage to the national security." The Nixon administration was in power, and it went to court to block publication on grounds that revealing this history would endanger the nation. A court in New York enjoined the two papers from publishing the information for several days.

But the Supreme Court decided, 6 to 3, that the government had failed to make a case that overrode the constitutional bias in favor of publication. The man who argued the case was Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold. Eighteen years later, Griswold wrote a confession for the op-ed page of this newspaper: "I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication [of the Papers]. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat."

There have been many more. In 1986, William Casey, then the director of central intelligence, threatened The Post with legal action if we disclosed an intelligence-gathering operation code-named Ivy Bells. "There's no way you can run that story without endangering the national security," Casey ominously warned Ben Bradlee, The Post's executive editor at the time.

But it turned out that when Casey issued this warning, the Soviet Union had already learned about Ivy Bells from its spy Ronald Pelton; because of Pelton, the Soviets had captured the hardware that had allowed the United States to listen to Soviet naval communications. So in reality we proposed to publish old news. But Casey had intimidated us; even after learning that the Soviets knew the secret, we equivocated for weeks. Finally, NBC News scooped us on our own story, then we published our version. As the editor supervising preparation of the story, I was humiliated; I also learned a good lesson.

Another aspect of our experience colors our reactions to various officials' complaints about our reporting on classified information. If you relied on the public comments of members of Congress or the example of the Pentagon Papers, you might conclude that we get these stories simply because some disgruntled employee decides to "leak" them to us. In fact, this is a rare occurrence.

The image of the rogue leaker was promoted again this spring when the CIA fired a senior officer named Mary McCarthy while anonymous official sources passed the word that she had been a source of Post reporter Dana Priest's Pulitzer Prize-winning scoop disclosing secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. McCarthy's lawyer has flatly denied this, saying she never knew about the prisons before Priest published her article.

I am not going to disclose Priest's sources (I don't know who they were), but I do know there were many of them. I know that she traveled extensively to report the story. I know that her article, like virtually all the best investigative reporting on sensitive subjects that we publish, was assembled like a Lego skyscraper, brick by brick. Often the sources who help reporters with this difficult task don't even realize that they have contributed a brick or two to the construction. Typically, many of the sources who contribute know only a sliver of the story themselves. A good reporter such as Priest can spend weeks or months on a single story, looking for those bricks.

I want to add, immodestly, that The Post's record on stories of this kind is good. I don't know of a single case when the paper had to retract or correct an important story containing classified information. Nor do I know of a case when we compromised a secret government program, or put someone's life in danger, or gave an enemy significant assistance.

These are the criteria we generally use when evaluating a report based on classified information. Editors here spend long hours on these stories. We never rush them into print; our lawyers usually read them along with editors.

We publish news we think is important, which is usually easy to recognize. We always ask the administration of the day to comment on sensitive stories, knowing that we may be inviting efforts to dissuade us from publication. This happened in the case of Priest's story on the secret prisons. The Bush administration asked Leonard Downie Jr., our executive editor, not to mention the names of the countries in which these prisons were located, on grounds that naming them could disrupt important intelligence relationships. He agreed, in part because "naming the countries wasn't necessary for American readers," he said later.

But Downie rejected the suggestion that he kill the story altogether. "It raised important issues for American voters about how their country was treating prisoners, and it raised significant civil liberties issues," he said. Journalists are inclined to publish what we learn -- that's our job.

But we don't assert that the government has no right to keep secrets. On the contrary, we have probably helped the government keep secrets more often than we should have. But we exercise common sense, and seek guidance from knowledgeable people when we're uncertain. We avoid the gratuitous revelation of secrets. If we learn next week that the United States has found Osama bin Laden's hiding place, you are unlikely to read a story about it here before the government takes some action.

The American experiment is an experiment in self -government. The Founders established Americans' right to govern themselves. Abuse of government power was their abiding concern. The Founders saw a free press as a tool to control the abuse of power, which is why they gave the press special protection in the First Amendment to the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press."

The history of the First Amendment makes clear why the Founders embraced it. Consider, for example, an early draft of the journalist's favorite provision offered to the Constitutional Convention by James Madison: "The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments, and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable."

Information is the bulwark Madison had in mind. The people had to know what the government was doing in their name to be able to respond like good citizens. Accountability is only possible when citizens, including members of Congress, know what is going on. None of us has ever been held accountable for an act no one knew we committed.

Self-government and self-defense are two values that don't always coexist easily -- they have to be balanced. But balance is the Founders' greatest gift. They gave us three branches of government to prevent any one from getting an upper hand. And they gave us a free press, a completely independent observer to keep the people informed about the doings of the other three.

Once we understand the need for balance, it follows logically that no single authority should be able to decide what information should reach the public. Some readers ask us why the president's decisions on how best to protect the nation shouldn't govern us, and specifically our choices of what to publish. The answer is that in the American system of checks and balances, the president cannot be allowed to decide what the voters need to know to hold him accountable. A king may have such power, but the elected executive of a republic cannot, or we will have no more republic.

Labeling something "classified" or important to "national security" does not make it so. The government overclassifies with abandon. And the definition of "national security" is elusive. Some politicians act as though revealing any classified information threatens our nation's security, but that seems preposterous.

The Bush administration has been publicly toying with the idea of using the Espionage Act, passed by Congress in 1917 when the country was swept up in an emotional response to our entry into World War I, to prosecute journalists for disclosing classified information. The legislative history of the act convinces me that its authors never intended for it to be used to censor the press, and since World War I it has never been used for that purpose. Numerous legal scholars from right to left say that doing so would violate the First Amendment. But Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said recently that invoking the Espionage Act against the press "is a possibility."

I heard Gonzales's remark as an attempt at intimidation. Intimidation by classification already seems to be a hallmark of this administration, which has created classified secrets at an unprecedented pace -- 14 million in fiscal 2005, compared with 8 million in 2001, according to the National Archives. The Bush administration has encouraged the use of more than 60 new categories ("sensitive but unclassified," for example) to control the distribution of millions more facts and documents.

Steven Aftergood, who works on classification issues for the Federation of American Scientists, calls the administration's approach to secrets "a cultivation of fear as a policy driver." He adds: "We are being told that nothing is more important than the external threat that confronts us, and nothing is more valuable than security in the face of that threat." Aftergood calls this "craven, and an insult to the millions of Americans who have given their lives to defend this country."

For the Founders, the issue was freedom and how best to secure it. Addressing that point in his Pentagon Papers opinion, Justice Hugo Black captured the spirit that animates my profession in just two sentences:

"The government's power to censor the press was abolished [by the First Amendment] so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people."

robertgkaiser@yahoo.com

Robert G. Kaiser is an associate editor of

The Washington Post. He served as the paper's managing editor from 1991 to 1998.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

UN report accuses Afghan MPs of torture and massacres

· Publication delayed by fears over former warlords
· Diplomats unhappy over police chief appointments

Declan Walsh in Kabul
Monday June 12, 2006

Guardian

A controversial UN report that has been shelved for 18 months names and shames leading Afghan politicians and officials accused of orchestrating massacres, torture, mass rape and other war crimes.

The 220-page report by the UN high commissioner for human rights, which the Guardian has obtained, details atrocities committed by communist, mujahideen, Soviet and Taliban fighters over 23 years of conflict. Originally scheduled for release in January 2005, the report's publication has been delayed repeatedly due to sensitivities over identifying former warlords still in positions of power.

"The UN has been intimidated. It is afraid to rock the boat because of these guys," said Sam Zarifi of Human Rights Watch. "But the boat is taking on water and they are going to pull it down."

Debate over the role of former warlords has grown more heated since anti-foreigner riots rocked Kabul two weeks ago, casting clouds over the $12bn (£6.5bn) western-funded reconstruction effort. European diplomats are angered that days after the riots President Hamid Karzai appointed 13 former commanders with links to drugs smuggling, organised crime and illegal mil