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Today's News and Views

Lobbying for Armageddon

By Sarah Posner, AlterNet
Posted on August 3, 2006, Printed on August 3, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/39748/

In a perfect world, a reporter at last week's press conference with George Bush and Tony Blair would have asked Bush, in the presence of his principal European ally, if he believes the European Union is the Antichrist.

Although it sounds like the kind of Pat Robertson lunacy that makes even the wingnuts run for the nearest exit, it's a question Bush should be forced to answer. Bush and other leading Republicans have lined up behind a growing movement of Christian Zionists for whom a European Antichrist figures prominently in an end-times scenario. So they should be forced to explain to the rest of us why they're courting the votes of people who believe our allies are evil incarnate. Could it be that the central requirement for their breathlessly anticipated Armageddon -- that the United States confront Iran -- happens to dovetail so nicely with the neoconservative war agenda?

At the center of it all is Pastor John Hagee, a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. While Hagee has long prophesized about the end times, he ratcheted up his rhetoric this year with the publication of his book, "Jerusalem Countdown," in which he argues that a confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. In the best-selling book, Hagee insists that the United States must join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West. Shortly after the book's publication, he launched Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which, as the Christian version of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he said would cause "a political earthquake."

At CUFI's kick-off banquet at the Washington Hilton, attended by over 3,500 members, Republican support for both Hagee's effort and his drumbeat for war with Iran were on full view. Republican National Committee Chair Ken Mehlman told the group that "no regime is more central to the global jihad" than Iran. Just two days before, Newt Gingrich and John McCain made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows to sound the same message, leading Benny Elon, a member of the Israeli Knesset, to comment to the Jerusalem Post that their remarks originated with Hagee. Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback also addressed the group, and Bush sent words of support to the gathering. Republicans, and even some Democrats, spoke at CUFI events to show their "support for Israel." But while public and media attention was on the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, Hagee's focus continued to be on Iran.

While the crisis at the Israel-Lebanon border drew more mainstream media attention to CUFI's activities, Hagee's supporters have long known that leading Republicans are listening. Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a prominent Jewish ally of the evangelical right (and friend of Jack Abramoff) has said that Hagee "without question, yes, absolutely" has the ear of the White House. Hagee's annual Night to Honor Israel at his church has drawn prominent Republicans, including Tom DeLay, who was the keynote speaker in 2002.

Although Republicans would never admit it -- they claim their support for Christian Zionists like Hagee is based on their own support for Israel -- it is clear that they know they need the votes of this constituency to win. In the same way that Karl Rove courted conservative evangelicals in 2004 by appealing to their homophobia, Republican campaign rhetoric for 2006 and 2008 has already shown signs of playing to voters who have been hearing hype for a war with Iran for months -- at church.

While Washington insiders wonder what it means when Republicans like Mehlman and presidential aspirants Gingrich and McCain finger Iran as the central player in an epic clash of civilizations, Hagee already has spent months mobilizing the shock troops in support of another war. As diplomats, experts and pundits debate how many years Iran will need to develop a viable nuclear weapon, Hagee says the mullahs already possess the means to destroy Israel and America. And although Bush insists that diplomatic options are still on the table, Hagee has dismissed pussyfooting diplomacy and primed his followers for a conflagration.

Hagee wields "a very large megaphone" that reaches "a very large group of people," said Rabbi James Rudin of the American Jewish Committee, who has studied the Christian right for 30 years. With CUFI, the pastor has exponentially expanded the reach of his megaphone beyond his television audience. Thanks to the viral marketing made possible by the hundreds of evangelical leaders who have signed on to his new organization, his warmongering has rippled through megachurches across America for months. Hagee calls pastors "the spiritual generals of America," an appropriate phrase given his reliance on them to rally their troops behind his message.

The CUFI board of directors includes the Rev. Jerry Falwell, former Republican presidential candidate and religious right activist Gary Bauer, and George Morrison, pastor of the 8,000-member Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, Colo., and chairman of the board of Promise Keepers. Rod Parsley, the Ohio televangelist who is rapidly becoming a major political player in the Christian right, signed on to be a regional director.

For Hagee's new project, his influence in Washington is probably less important than his influence over his audience. With the clout of his listeners, he can serve Bush administration hawks by firing up grassroots support for a military strike against Iran. Over 700,000 people purchased his book, "Jerusalem Countdown," and countless more have heard him promote it on Christian radio and television programming. Dramatic, doomsday advertising has been heard by listeners of Christian media as well as on Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly's radio programs. The pages of "Jerusalem Countdown" provide a peculiar mix of biblical prophecy, purported inside information from Israeli government officials and a mixed-up, pared-down lesson in nuclear physics.

"I wrote this book in April 2005, and when people read it, they will think I wrote it late last night after the FOX News report," says the author without a trace of irony. "It's that close to where we are and beyond."

Hagee speaks simultaneously to two audiences about Iran's nuclear capabilities: one that fears a terrorist attack by Iran and another that embraces a biblically mandated apocalypse. To impress the fearful, he mimics Bush's deceptions about Iraq's capacity to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction, Condoleezza Rice's warnings of mushroom clouds, and Dick Cheney's dissembling about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. Comparing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler, Hagee argues that Iran's development of nuclear weapons must be stopped to protect America and Israel from a nuclear attack. Preying on legitimate worries about terrorism, and invoking 9/11, he vividly describes a supposed Iranian-led plan to simultaneously explode nuclear suitcase bombs in seven American cities, or to use an electromagnetic pulse device to create "an American Hiroshima."

When addressing audiences receptive to Scriptural prophecy, however, Hagee welcomes the coming confrontation. He argues that a strike against Iran will cause Arab nations to unite under Russia's leadership, as outlined in chapters 38 and 39 of the Book of Ezekiel, leading to an "inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon." In Hagee's telling, Israel has no choice but to strike at Iran's nuclear facilities, with or without America's help. The strike will provoke Russia -- which wants Persian Gulf oil -- to lead an army of Arab nations against Israel. Then God will wipe out all but one-sixth of the Russian-led army, as the world watches "with shock and awe," he says, lending either a divine quality to the Bush administration phrase or a Bush-like quality to God's wrath.

But Hagee doesn't stop there. He adds that Ezekiel predicts fire "upon those who live in security in the coastlands." From this sentence, he concludes that there will be judgment upon all who stood by while the Russian-led force invaded Israel, and issues a stark warning to the United States to intervene: "Could it be that America, who refuses to defend Israel from the Russian invasion, will experience nuclear warfare on our east and west coasts?" He says yes, citing Genesis 12:3, in which God said to Israel: "I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you."

To fill the power vacuum left by God's decimation of the Russian army, the Antichrist -- the head of the EU -- will rule "a one-world government, a one-world currency and a one-world religion" for three and a half years. (Hagee adds that "one need only be a casual observer of current events to see that all three of these things are coming into reality." The "demonic world leader" will then be confronted by a false prophet, identified by Hagee as China, at Armageddon, the Mount of Megiddo in Israel. As they prepare for the final battle, Jesus will return on a white horse and cast both villains -- and presumably any nonbelievers -- into a "lake of fire burning with brimstone," thus marking the beginning of his millennial reign.

Hagee doesn't fear a nuclear conflagration, but rather God's wrath for standing by as Iran executes its supposed plot to destroy Israel. A nuclear confrontation between America and Iran, which he says is foretold in the Book of Jeremiah, will not lead to the end of the world, but rather to God's renewal of the Garden of Eden. But Hagee is ultimately less concerned with the fate of Israel or the Jews than with a theocratic Christian right agenda. When Jesus returns for his millennial reign, he tells his television audience, "the righteous are going to rule the nations of the earth When Jesus Christ comes back, he's not going to ask the ACLU if it's all right to pray, he's not going to ask the churches if they can ordain pedophile bishops and priests, he's not going to ask if it's all right to put the Ten Commandments in the statehouses. He's not going to endorse abortion, he's going to run the world by the word of God The world will never end. It's going to become a Garden of Eden, and Christ is going to rule it."

Sarah Posner has covered the religious right for The American Prospect, The Gadflyer, and AlterNet. This article is adapted from "Pastor Strangelove," which appeared in the June 2006 issue of The American Prospect.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/39748/

Seventy percent of people who give credence to these theories also say they've become angrier with the federal government than they used to be.

Thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them "because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."

"One out of three sounds high, but that may very well be right," said Lee Hamilton, former vice chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also called the 9/11 commission.) His congressionally appointed investigation concluded that federal officials bungled their attempts to prevent, but did not participate in, the attacks by al Qaeda five years ago.

"A lot of people I've encountered believe the U.S. government was involved," Hamilton said. "Many say the government planned the whole thing. Of course, we don't think the evidence leads that way at all."

The poll also found that 16 percent of Americans speculate that secretly planted explosives, not burning passenger jets, were the real reason the massive twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed.

Conspiracy groups for at least two years have also questioned why the World Trade Center collapsed when fires that heavily damaged similar skyscrapers around the world did not cause such destruction. Sixteen percent said it's "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that "the collapse of the twin towers in New York was aided by explosives secretly planted in the two buildings."

Twelve percent suspect the Pentagon was struck by a military cruise missile in 2001 rather than by an airliner captured by terrorists.

That lower percentage may result from an effort by the conservative Washington-based Judicial Watch advocacy group to debunk the claim. The group filed claims under the Freedom of Information Act and got two fill loops released from Pentagon security cameras.

"Some people claim they can't see anything, but I see a plane hitting the Pentagon at incredibly high speed," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "I see the nose of the plane clearly entering the frame of one video and the tail of the plane entering the Pentagon in the other video."

Many conspiracy Web sites have posted the video loops and report the films are inconclusive or were manipulated by the government.

"Some folks will never be convinced," Fitton said. "But I'm hoping that these videos will dissuade reasonable people from falling into a trap with these conspiracy theories."

University of Florida law professor Mark Fenster, author of the book "Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture," said the poll's findings reflect public anger at the unpopular Iraq war, realization that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction and growing doubts of the veracity of the Bush administration.

"What has amazed me is not that there are conspiracy theories, but that they didn't seem to be getting any purchase among the American public until the last year or so," Fenster said. "Although the Iraq war was not directly related to the 9/11 attacks, people are now looking back at 9/11 with much more skepticism than they used to."

Conspiracy-believing participants in the poll agree their suspicions are recent.

"I certainly didn't think of conspiracies when 9/11 first happened," said Elaine Tripp, 62, of Tabernacle, N.J. "I don't know if President Bush was aware of the exact time it was going to happen. But he certainly didn't do enough to stop it. Bush was so intent on having his own little war."

Garrett Johnson, 19, of Manassas, Va., said it was "well after the fact" before he started questioning the official explanation of the attacks. "But then people I know started talking about it. And the Internet had a lot to do with this. After reading all of the different articles there, I started to think we weren't being told the truth."

The Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University has tracked the level of resentment people feel toward the federal government since 1995, starting shortly after Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. Forty-seven percent then said they, personally, feel "more angry at the federal government" than they used to. That percentage dropped to 42 percent in 1997, 34 percent in 1998 and only 12 percent shortly after 9/11 during the groundswell of patriotism and support for the government after the attacks.

But the new survey found that 77 percent say their friends and acquaintances have become angrier with government recently and 54 percent say they, themselves, have become angrier _ both record levels.

The survey also found that people who regularly use the Internet but who do not regularly use so-called "mainstream" media are significantly more likely to believe in 9/11 conspiracies. People who regularly read daily newspapers or listen to radio newscasts were especially unlikely to believe in the conspiracies.

"We know that there are a lot of people now asking questions," said Janice Matthews, executive director of 911Truth.org, one of the most sophisticated Internet sites raising doubts about official explanations of the attacks. "We didn't have the Internet after Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin or the Kennedy assassination. But we live in different times now."

Matthews' Web site averaged 4,000 "hits" a day last year, but currently has at least 12,000 visits every 24 hours. The site, according to its online policy statement, is dedicated to showing the public that "elements within the U.S. government must have orchestrated or participated in the execution of the attacks for these to have happened the way in which they did."

Participants in the poll were asked to respond to "several serious accusations that some people have made against the federal government in recent years." Five conspiracy theories were described and participants were asked if each was "very likely, somewhat likely or unlikely."

The level of suspicion of U.S. official involvement in a 9/11 conspiracy was only slightly behind the 40 percent who suspect "officials in the federal government were directly responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy" and the 38 percent who believe "the federal government is withholding proof of the existence of intelligent life from other planets."

The poll found that a majority of young adults give at least some credence to a 9/11 conspiracy compared to less than a fourth of people 65 or older. Members of racial and ethnic minorities, people with only a high school education and Democrats were especially likely to suspect federal involvement in 9/11.

The survey was conducted by telephone from July 6-24 at the Scripps Survey Research Center at the University of Ohio under a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. The poll has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

(Thomas Hargrove is a reporter for Scripps Howard News Service. Guido H. Stempel III is director of the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University.)

All materials copyright 2006 Scripps Media Center and Scripps Howard News Service except where otherwise noted.

Rolling Stone

THE LOW POST: The Mansion Family

In the first installment of his weekly Web-only column, Matt Taibbi writes that yuppie paranoia (and David Brooks) guarantees the Democrats are still -- and forever -- doomed.

MATT TAIBBI

"The conservative mansion has many rooms. In one chamber there are the resurgent Burkeans . . . In another chamber are the staunch Churchillians . . . But I wonder if amid all the din there might be a room, even just a utility closet, for those of us in yet another rightward sect, the neocon incrementalists." -- David Brooks, "Onward Cautious Soldiers," The New York Times, July 23, 2006

So David Brooks wants to go into the closet with his fellow neocon incrementalists. And I thought The New York Times was a family newspaper!

There are many people out there who are baffled by the career of David Brooks, but I am not one of them. Any man willing to admit in print that he can get a boner surveying the "awesome resumes" of marrying Ivy Leaguers on the New York Times wedding page ("you can almost feel the force of mingling SAT scores," he coos in his book Bobos In Paradise) is always going to occupy an important spot in the American media landscape; the ruling class always needs its house bumlickers. And Brooks does the job well, although at times I think he's so craven that he does his masters a disservice. I mean, seriously -- a mansion of conservatism? Why not go all the way: The yacht of Republicanism has a great many berths . . .

Brooks is the perfect priest of American conservatism, and by conservatism I don't mean the bloodthirsty, gun-toting, go-back-to-Africa, welfare-bashing right-winger conservatism of the NRA and Sean Hannity and the Bible Belt. I mean the dickless, power-worshipping, good-consumer pragmatic conservatism of Times readers and those other Bobos in Paradise who have exquisitely developed taste in furniture, coffee and television programming but would rather leave the uglier questions of politics to more decisive people, so long as they aren't dangerous radicals like Michael Moore or Markos Zuniga.

That's why the marriage of David Brooks and the Democratic Leadership Council makes perfect sense. It's repugnant and the kind of thing one should shield young children from knowing about, but it makes perfect sense. Both prefer a policy of being "cautious soldiers," "incrementalists" who shun upheavals and vote the status quo, although they subscribe to this policy for different reasons. Brooks worships the status quo because he has no penis and wants to spend the rest of his life buying periwinkle bath towels without troubling interruptions of conscience. The DLC, a nonprofit created in the mid-1980s to help big business have a say in the Democratic Party platform, supports the status quo because they are paid agents of the commercial interests that define it.

Moreover, Brooks and the DLC have this in common: While they both frown on the open flag-waving and ostentatious religiosity of the talk-radio right-wing as being gauche and in bad form, they're only truly offended by people of their own background who happen to be idealistic.

Hence the recurring backlash by both against the various angry electoral challenges to the establishment of the Democratic Party -- including, most recently, the campaign of Ned Lamont, challenger to Joe Lieberman's Senate Seat in Connecticut.

Brooks's column of a few weeks ago on the subject of Lieberman/Lamont, titled "The Liberal Inquisition," was a masterpiece of yuppie paranoia. In an editorial line that would be repeated by other writers all across the country, Brooks blasted the "netroots" supporters of Lamont for being leftist extremists driven by "moral manias" and "mob psychology" to liquidate the "scarred old warhorse" Lieberman, whom he calls "transparently the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men." This is the archetypal suburban-conservative nightmare -- anonymous hordes of leftist boat-rockers viciously assaulting the champion of the decent people, who is just a really nice guy given to tending his lawn and minding his own business.

Being "nice" is a central part of the Brooks yuppie's guilt-proofing self-image rationale; so long as you're the kind of guy who lets people merge on highways, stands politely in line at Starbucks, doesn't put garish Christmas decorations on his lawn and pays his taxes, you're not really doing anything wrong. It gets a little tiring after a while, hearing people who vote for wars tell you how nice they are.

But the most objectionable thing about the Brooks column was its crude parroting of a suspiciously similar DLC editorial published about a month before (See Road Rage, from the August 10th, 2006, issue of Rolling Stone) entitled "The Return of Liberal Fundamentalism." Both columns described Lamont's Internet supporters as "fundamentalist" liberals bent on a "purge" of poor nice old Joe Lieberman, who represents heterodoxy, centrism and bipartisanship. Brooks used the word "purge" twice; the author of the DLC column, Ed Kilgore, used it eight times.

Let's be clear about what we're dealing with here. These people are professional communicators. They don't repeatedly use words like "purge" and "fundamentalist" -- terms obviously associated with communism and Islamic terrorism -- by accident. They know exactly what they're doing. It's an authoritarian tactic and it should piss you off. It pissed me off. When I called the DLC about the editorial, Kilgore was not available, but they put Will Marshall on the line.

Marshall is the president of the DLC's Progressive Policy Institute and owns the distinction of being the first public figure to use the term "body count" in a positive sense with regard to the Iraq war ("Coalition forces still face daily attacks but the body count tilts massively in their favor"). He wasted no time in giving me the party line: "What we're seeing is an ideological purge," he said cheerily. "It's national effort by the left to get rid of somebody they've decided to demonize . . . we have concerns about narrow dogmatism. . ."

We went back and forth for a while. I noted that his conception of "narrow dogmatists" included the readers of Daily Kos, a website with something like 440,000 visitors a day; I also noted that recent Gallup polls showed that fully 91 percent of Democrats supported a withdrawal of some kind from Iraq.

"So these hundreds of thousands of Democrats who are against the war are narrow dogmatists," I said, "and. . . how many people are there in your office? Ten? Twenty? Thirty?"

"Well, it'd probably be in the thirty zone," sighed Marshall.

I asked Marshall if there was a publicly available list of donors to the DLC.

"Uh, I don't know," he said. "I'd have to refer you to the press office for that. They can help you there . . ." (Note: a DLC spokeswoman would later tell me the DLC has a policy of "no public disclosure," although she did say the group is funded in half by corporate donations, in half by individuals).

"So let me get this straight," I said. "We have thirty corporate-funded spokesmen telling hundreds of thousands of actual voters that they're narrow dogmatists?"

He paused and sighed, clearly exasperated. "Look," he said. "Everybody in politics draws money from the same basic sources. It's the same pool of companies and wealthy individuals . . ."

"Okay," I said. "So basically in this dispute over Lieberman, we have people on one side, and companies on the other? Would it be correct to say that?" I asked.

"Well, I guess if you live in a cartoon world you could say that," he said.

The DLC are the lowest kind of scum; we're talking about people who are paid by the likes of Eli Lilly and Union Carbide to go on television and call suburban moms and college kids who happen to be against the war commies and jihadists. On the ignominious-sellout scale, that's lower than doing PR for a utility that turns your grandmother's heat off at Christmas. And that's pretty bad -- but with enough money and enough of the right kind of publicity their side still might win in the Lamont/Lieberman primary on August 8th.

Which tells you just about everything you need to know about the modern Democratic Party. Why is anyone surprised that the Republicans never lose?

Think the Democrats are doomed? Tell us why. Plus: Check out Taibbi's latest Road Rage column, "Lieberman: Bush's Favorite Democrat."

Posted Aug 02, 2006 8:22 AM

©RealNetworks, Inc.

©Copyright 2006 Rolling Stone

STANFORD IDEOLOGICAL WAR LEADS TO SUIT
Middle East professor sues conservative who linked criticism of Bush to terrorism

Carrie Sturrock, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, August 4, 2006

Stanford University's Joel Beinin is used to criticism for his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but when a conservative commentator put the professor's photo on the cover of a booklet titled "Campus Support for Terrorism,'' it started a whole new war.

Beinin, a prominent Middle Eastern scholar, filed suit in March -- turning his ideological clash with FrontPageMag.com Editor in Chief David Horowitz into a legal one.

Horowitz removed the photo from later printings, but Beinin said the harm had already been done and is demanding unspecified damages. With the United States at war in Iraq, Beinin said, it's a scary time to be labeled a supporter of terrorism.

"Horowitz is -- if not a coordinated part -- part of a broader attack against people who speak out against Bush's Middle Eastern policies," said Beinin, past president of the Middle Eastern Studies Association. "If you don't fight back and allow the Horowitzes to do and say what they want, it pollutes the political environment to the point where you can't have intelligent discussions about what we do in the world."

While he believes what Horowitz did was libelous, Beinin isn't suing on those grounds. Instead, he selected a more clear-cut legal challenge -- copyright infringement for unauthorized use of his photo.

Horowitz, who said he didn't know the photo was copyrighted, argues he's the victim in the dispute.

"It's an abuse of the courts to chill my free speech," Horowitz said of Beinin's lawsuit. "If he wants a debate, I will come to Stanford and debate him."

Both men are Jewish, but they stand on opposite sides of a deep fault line of opinion on Israel and its actions in the Middle East. Beinin believes Horowitz's antipathy toward him stems in part from the fact that he is Jewish -- Horowitz calls Beinin a "self-hating Jew" -- and that he has criticized Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and called for a Palestinian state.

Horowitz, who is frequently seen on cable television programs such as "The O'Reilly Factor," is a 1960s radical turned conservative who founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. The center has since been renamed the David Horowitz Freedom Center and is publisher of the online magazine Front Page. His books include "Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left."

He calls Beinin an "apologist for terror" and not only published Beinin's photo on the cover of "Campus Support for Terrorism" but featured him in his subsequent book, "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America."

He accuses Beinin, among other things, of saying the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shouldn't be considered a terrorist but should be respected as the Palestinian Authority's elected president.

Beinin called that a typical Horowitz distortion.

"He gets everything wrong," Beinin said. "His mode of operation is to distort and misquote and confuse people by piecing things together that don't belong together."

Arafat, Beinin agrees, was responsible for many acts of terror but as president of the Palestinian Authority needed to be dealt with internationally as a statesman.

Beinin's lawsuit reads in part, "Mr. Horowitz's most recent 'campaign' has been to attack the integrity, scholarship and patriotism of academics who question American foreign policy in an overt attempt to intimidate and silence them for fear of being labeled as Islamic terrorists or collaborators."

He is seeking an unspecified amount in damages in federal court.

Beinin was one of the nation's first Middle Eastern scholars fluent in both Hebrew and Arabic. He spent a year on the Kibbutz Lahav in Israel before earning a master's degree at Harvard. Briefly disillusioned with academia, he made doors for Dodge trucks in Detroit, where he helped Arab autoworkers understand their rights.

Talking about Israel and the Palestinians has always been difficult in the United States, he said, and during his doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, he followed his thesis supervisor's advice not to write about the subject if he wanted a job in academia. Stanford hired him in 1983 to teach Middle Eastern studies.

The Beinin-Horowitz controversy is just one example of how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has seeped into academia here and abroad. In Britain, the largest association of higher education instructors voted in May to ask its members to consider boycotting their Israeli academic counterparts who don't publicly dissociate themselves from Israel's policies toward the Palestinians.

In the United States, the activist group Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, held a conference at San Francisco State University in July and called on Palestinians to protest at the Israeli consulate, while the Philadelphia-based organization Campus Watch began asking students in 2002 to monitor their professors for perceived anti-Israel bias.

In recent years, Middle Eastern studies in the United States have come under scrutiny by Horowitz and others who believe faculty are too sympathetic to Palestinian issues and unreasonably hostile to Israeli policies, said Jonathan Knight, who directs the program in academic freedom and tenure for the American Association of University Professors in Washington.

"As long as faculty are free to question accepted ideas and notions, there will always be those disturbed by their questioning, and there will always be those who will call for restraints on freedom," he said.

Knight cited Columbia University, where the administration formed an ad hoc committee in 2005 to investigate the classroom behavior of Middle Eastern studies Professor Joseph Massad after student complaints. Knight fears such censure is having a chilling affect on academia.

Campus Watch -- a project by the Middle East Forum -- has encouraged students to monitor professors for perceived anti-Israel bias and report their findings. The Campus Watch Web site has many articles about Beinin.

To stop professors from discussing their political opinions in the classroom, Horowitz has shopped his "Academic Bill of Rights" around the country and has succeeded in getting legislation to that effect introduced in 16 states, although no legislature has passed it. Still, Horowitz said he believes his bill has influenced debate.

"My model for academia is the Columbia I went to in the 1950s -- I want to see it depoliticized," he said. "I never heard a teacher one time express a political opinion. That's what I want. There's massive abuse going on."

He is incensed that in 2003 Beinin held a class lecture at a "teach-in" against the Iraq war in Stanford's quad.

The lecture that day on the Gulf War happened to be relevant, Beinin said, but was "definitely an act of solidarity with the teach-in."

"This is as close to the line of putting politics in the classroom that I've ever done," he said. "I don't hide my opinion."

E-mail Carrie Sturrock at csturrock@sfchronicle.com.

©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

Bush's talent: subverting the truth

In case you hadn’t noticed, President Bush has a tendency to say things that aren’t exactly true. This is a longstanding habit. Remember, he was all for restricting greenhouse gasses…until he took office. Iraq posed a “grave” threat to the U.S.,…only it didn’t. We’ve found weapons of mass destruction there…except we haven’t.  His tax cuts have reduced income inequality…in truth, well, don’t get me started.

Mr. Bush’s latest diversion into the realm of the forked tongue involves our prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In June, standing in the Rose Garden, Bush said, “I’d like to close Guantanamo,” leaving the impression he might actually be planning to do such a thing.

At that moment, his statement left room for hope that the administration was not entirely impervious to reality. “Gitmo” had already become a travesty, an affront to democratic principles, a source of national shame. The Supreme Court, which had already rejected a “blank-check” wartime presidency, was about to declare Bush’s planned military tribunals unconstitutional. Our own officers were admitting that most of the detainees were likely guilty of nothing more than bad luck.

Now, we learn that while Bush mused about closing down the infamous facility, plans were being realized to expand the prison, the contract having been awarded to - who else? - a Halliburton subsidiary.

Isn’t it past time we realized that whenever Bush or his allies seem to admit an uncomfortable truth, it’s only a tactical retreat. They’re really just trying to get through the day. Then, when we’ve stopped paying attention, they’ll go back to doing what they’re good at: subverting the truth. 

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© 2006 MSNBC.com

Accused U.S. Soldiers Refuse to Testify

By RYAN LENZ
Associated Press Writer
Published August 3, 2006, 1:25 PM CDT

TIKRIT, Iraq -- Four U.S. soldiers accused of murdering Iraqi detainees refused to testify Thursday at a military hearing, where witnesses described how one of the victims spat blood as he lay dying and another was covered in brain matter.

The four invoked their right not to testify for fear of incriminating themselves at the hearing to determine if they should be court-martialed for the May 9 shooting deaths. Instead, their attorneys submitted sworn statements and rested their case on the third day of the hearing.

The defendants -- Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, Spc. William B. Hunsaker, Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard and Spc. Juston R. Graber -- initially said the three detainees were killed because they tried to escape, but military prosecutors have said they were freed before being shot.

The shootings have raised questions about the Army's rules of engagement during combat and dealt another blow to the reputation of U.S. soldiers, fueling anger against the coalition presence. The U.S. military's conduct has also come under criticism from international human rights groups.

In his testimony, witness Cpl. Brandon Helton said he was the last man off the helicopter that brought the accused and other soldiers to a corner of a marshy island outside Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, in search of suspected al-Qaida operatives.

Helton said the three Iraqis had already been detained when he arrived, but he saw them trying to flee before they were shot. Some of the detainees had their blindfolds down and were "running at full sprint," he said.

At that point, the soldiers fired.

"The first one fell flat down and the second one, whenever he got shot, it was kind of like what you'd see in a movie where he spun around and landed on his back," Helton said. "I seen one spitting up blood."

Another witness, Spc. Micah Bivens, a medic, recalled hearing shots but said he did not see the soldiers fire.

Bivens said as he approached the fallen men, he knew immediately two were dead. "There was nothing there to sustain life," he said. "The last few seconds of life."

He said he checked the third person. "To me there is no way that he could have been alive considering there was brain on the ground."

Defense lawyers are arguing the soldiers were only following the orders of brigade commander Col. Michael Steele to "kill all military-aged males." Bivens said he doesn't recall hearing such an order.

Steele, who led Army Rangers during the 1993 battle for Mogadishu in Somalia, has denied the allegations. He declined to speak to reporters about the charges, and has also invoked his right not to testify.

Girouard, Hunsaker, Clagett and Graber could face the death penalty if the case is passed on for a court-martial. They are accused of concocting a story to justify the shootings and covering it up from military prosecutors.

The first three are also accused of obstruction of justice for allegedly threatening to kill Pfc. Bradley Mason, the prosecution's leading witness, who testified Wednesday.

"It's our position that you didn't prove anything in this case," Paul Bergrin, a civilian attorney, said Thursday to prosecutors after submitting the sworn statement by his client, Clagett.

All the soldiers were assigned to the 101st Airborne Division's 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment.

The hearing is expected to conclude Friday with testimony from Iraqi soldiers who took part in the raid the Army had dubbed "Operation Iron Triangle."

Copyright © 2006, The Associated Press

Inconvenient truths
by George Ochenski
Government no place for selective editing

Last week’s altercation between Sen. Conrad Burns and the Augusta Hotshot crew has been extensively covered already. In short, Burns threatened, berated, and insulted the tired firefighters while they were waiting for their flight out of the Billings airport. Burns’ trail is littered with ignorant blurbs, but what may be far more important than his blunders in the long run are the actions by employees of Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) who, on their own, decided to sanitize the Senator’s most egregious comments in their final report.

Unlike Conrad Burns, those of us who have donned hard hats and yellow fire shirts to cut line with a Pulaski for 16 hours at a time in searing heat and smoke while being blasted with aerial retardant would never think of accusing fellow firefighters of not doing “a God-damned thing.” Burns should have kept his gob shut or simply told the firefighters “thanks.” But he didn’t—and is now being righteously ripped across the nation by an outraged populace and press.

Then again, this is the same senator who called Arabs “ragheads,” told a single-mother flight attendent that she should be home taking care of her kids, and then publicly declared he wanted to get “knee-walking drunk.” It’s also the same senator who took more money than any other member of Congress from corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff and, in turn, voted for Abramoff’s clients. Suffice it to say that thanks in large part to his own actions, come the November elections we’ll see a final end to Burns embarrassing Montanans on a national level.

What is of significantly greater concern for open government is the apparent self-censorship by the DNRC employees who took comments from Burns and the Hot Shots following the incident. Were it not for some good work by Chuck Johnson, Lee Newspapers’ veteran Capitol Bureau chief, in obtaining a copy of the original incident report, the media, the public and the decisionmakers would never have known the truth of Burns’ transgressions—because they were omitted from the final report released to the media. And therein lies the rub.

We deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth from people on the public payroll. It is not their job—not by law, rule, or convention—to determine what part of the truth should be released or what should be left unsaid. Yet that is exactly what happened in the Burns incident. As reported by Johnson: “Most of Burns’ highly critical comments, made to state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation employee Paula Rosenthal, were omitted from the version of her report released to reporters Wednesday and Thursday.”

In the original incident report, Rosenthal wrote that Burns pointed to a member of the firefighting crew across the airport lobby and told her: “See that guy over there? He hasn’t done a God-damned thing. They sit around. I saw it up on the Wedge fire and in northwestern Montana some years ago. It’s wasteful. You probably paid that guy $10,000 to sit around. It’s gotta change.”

Instead of reporting it as Burns said it, Rosenthal told Johnson that she had discussed Burns’ remarks with State Forester Bob Harrington and decided to delete Burns’ quote from her final report. “It’s an inflammatory remark,” Rosenthal told Johnson, adding: “I thought the remark was captured in other comments. It had nothing to do with any politics…There was no coercion or pressure from anybody [to delete it].” She went on to say the report was an internal management tool and “not fodder for the press.” Ironically, Rosenthal claims she “wanted to present accurate information, including [Burns’] concerns and examples, so they could respond. I thought it was going to be a productive working document for the management.”

If you’re puzzled why someone would think editing Burns’ “inflammatory comments” out of a report released by a government agency to the media would produce “accurate information,” you’re not alone. Unfortunately, while this may be the latest example of such creative editing, it is not without precedent.

Those with good memories may recall a little incident back in the Racicot administration, in which former Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) Communications Manager Cathy Siegner resigned from the agency after sending a letter to Director Mark Simonich in which she called the agency’s top officials “spin doctors” and “truth-twisters.” Siegner, who now publishes Helena’s Queen City News, said her conscience wouldn’t allow her to continue to work for DEQ, adding: “I will not stand by on the state payroll and watch you stretch the truth in order to further some agenda that is neither publicly discussed or collectively supported.”

More recently, it can certainly be argued that similar editing of official reports by government employees was responsible for the decision by Congress to give President Bush the authority to wage war in Iraq. In that case, contradictory evidence concerning the Bush administration’s claims that Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction and were obtaining yellow-cake nuclear material were simply omitted from official reports. The horrific consequences of that little piece of editing continue to this day and are likely to extend far into the future.

So what can be done? Well, at the federal level, probably nothing. This administration is one of the most corrupt ever and will be especially noted for its inability to tell the truth.

But at the state level it’s a different story. If Gov. Schweitzer is serious about his “New Day in Montana,” it is incumbent upon him to tell employees in all state agencies that good decisions can only be based on good facts—and that no employee has the right to edit comments from a report just because they consider them “inflammatory.” There are simply far too many possible religious, political and personal biases scattered throughout the ranks of state employees to allow such editing—however inconvenient the truth may be.

When not lobbying the Montana Legislature, George Ochenski is rattling the cage of the political establishment as a political analyst for the Independent. Contact Ochenski at opinion@missoulanews.com.

Estimates of the crowd by organizers ranged from 250,000 to 1 million, which would make it the biggest protest in the Middle East in support of Hezbollah since Israel launched attacks last month after the Shiite insurgency group seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. But the U.S. military said in a news release that calculations based on pictures taken from unmanned surveillance aircraft put the crowd at 14,000.

The convergence of so many Sadr supporters, including members of the cleric's personal militia known as the Mahdi Army, had raised concern that the march would provoke bloodshed. But the Iraqi Defense Ministry allowed it to take place, and the event was overwhelmingly peaceful. Many supporters traveled up from Shiite-dominated areas in southern Iraq.

Sadr issued a call for Friday's demonstration early in the week and has repeatedly denounced Israel's military assault in Lebanon. Both Sadr and Hezbollah share ties to Iran, and Sadr is believed to be modeling his movement after Hezbollah.

Shiite leaders in Iraq's government have also expressed solidarity with Hezbollah. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose ruling coalition of Shiite parties includes several loyal to Sadr, has called for a cease-fire in Lebanon and has criticized Israel -- a stance at odds with that of the Iraqi government's backers in Washington.

Sadr's Mahdi Army staged two armed uprisings against U.S. and Iraqi forces in 2004 and has been widely accused of involvement in the sectarian killings that claim scores of lives every day in Iraq. Tensions persist between U.S. forces and Sadr's militia.

On Thursday, a van full of Sadr supporters on their way to the demonstration in Baghdad exchanged fire with U.S. and Iraqi forces at a checkpoint near Mahmudiyah, U.S. and Iraqi sources said.

A statement issued by the U.S. military in Baghdad said that occupants of the van fired on U.S. Army soldiers in a security tower and that the soldiers returned fire, killing two Iraqis. Al-Amiry, of the Sadr-allied God's Martyr Foundation, accused the Americans of firing first.

Maliki has vowed that his government will dismantle the militias, but many of the country's factional forces seem as potent as ever, including the one associated with Maliki's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

While the level of violence in Baghdad was far lower than in recent days, bombings and gunfights Friday claimed more than a dozen lives in and around the northern city of Kirkuk.

In Mosul, police battled insurgents in the streets of the city, 220 miles north of Baghdad, from early morning until afternoon, according to Wathiq al-Hamdani, the Mosul police commander. Two car bombs, he added, killed four police officers and wounded eight.

About 35 miles south of Mosul in the town of Hatra, a suicide bomber drove a car filled with explosives into a crowd of spectators during a soccer match between police and a local team, according to the Ninevah province police.

The bomb killed 10 people, including seven police officers, and wounded 12.

And in western Iraq, two American soldiers assigned to the 1st Armored Division's 1st Brigade were killed in combat Friday, according to a U.S. military statement that provided no additional details.

Special correspondents Saad Sarhan in Najaf and Dlovan Brwari in Mosul contributed to this report.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Pakistani Reactor Not as Significant As Was Reported, Administration Says

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 5, 2006; A14

Days after it confirmed the existence of a partially completed heavy-water reactor in central Pakistan, the administration took steps this week to play down the significance of the project, saying the new facility will produce far less plutonium than initial reports indicated.

That stance puts the administration in conflict with independent nuclear experts over that crucial question and what the answer means for South Asia's nuclear arms race.

The nuclear analysts who brought the reactor to light stood by their conclusion that the reactor would dramatically boost Pakistan's capacity to develop plutonium-based warheads. Pakistan is believed to possess fewer than 50 warheads, all of them based on highly enriched uranium. Uranium-based bombs are heavier and harder to mount on missiles.

"We are confident that this is a large reactor vessel," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington nonprofit group that assesses the capabilities and weapons stockpiles of nuclear states.

The ISIS report, described in a July 24 Washington Post report, was based on an assessment of satellite photos of the reactor, which is inside a Pakistani nuclear complex that already has a small reactor for producing plutonium. The scale of the facility under construction suggests a powerful heavy-water reactor with a capacity of at least 1,000 megawatts thermal and a maximum annual plutonium output of 200 kilograms, enough for 40 to 50 warheads, ISIS said.

The report warned of the possibility of a new round of nuclear competition between Pakistan and India, which both possess the bomb.

Administration officials, citing government intelligence and nuclear experts, said the ISIS estimate was off the mark. They offered few specifics, saying the government's analysis remained classified.

"The reactor will be over 10 times less capable" than the ISIS report's estimates, State Department spokesman Edgar Matthews said. Matthews acknowledged that Pakistan appears to be diversifying its ability to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons, and noted that the new reactor would not be subject to international monitoring and inspection.

Yesterday, a spokesman for the Pakistani government echoed the administration's position, saying the reactor's annual output would be significantly less than 200 kilograms of plutonium.

"The capacity has been highly exaggerated," said M. Akram Shaheedi, press minister for Pakistan Embassy. He acknowledged that Pakistan is was modernizing its nuclear program to "maintain a credible nuclear deterrent."

In a statement posted on the group's Web site, ISIS defended its analysis and offered additional detail on how it reached its conclusions. A key factor, the group said, was the size of the reactor vessel under construction, which ISIS described as much larger than the modest plutonium-production reactor Pakistan has operated since 1998.

ISIS said the new reactor is comparable in size to reactor vessels at the Savannah River nuclear site, which for decades produced plutonium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Those large reactors began operation in the 1950s at 500 to 1,000 megawatts each, but were increased in power over several years to 2,000 megawatts.

"It is true that someone can operate at less than maximum power, but the capacity is there," Albright said in an interview. "The reactor gives Pakistan the ability to step up the power of the reactor over time, regardless of what the nameplate power of the reactor is now."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

The heat wave burned its way east from California, where it killed more than 100 people. It moved relentlessly across the nation's midsection, sparking record-high temperatures in state after state, mimicking a heat wave that killed more than 700 people in the Midwest in 1995.

For the past couple of days it has tormented the East Coast, draining power systems and creating a hellish environment for the frail and infirm, and especially for the elderly poor struggling to survive without the blessings of air-conditioning.

You can't blame any single weather event on global warming. But with polar bears drowning because they can't swim far enough to make it from one ice floe to another; with the once-glorious snows of Kilimanjaro about to bring down the final curtain on their long, long run; with the virtual disappearance of Lake Chad in Africa, which was once the size of Lake Erie, it may be time to get serious about trying to slow this catastrophic trend.

(It's also time to aggressively counter the dangerous nonsense of people like Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has been openly contemptuous of the idea that human activity has contributed to global warming, and Senator Conrad Burns, a Montana Republican whose head has always had the habit of migrating to extremely peculiar places, in this instance into the very hot sand.

(Senator Inhofe has said that "man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." Senator Burns, according to a publication called "Environment and Energy Daily," shrugged the matter off completely, saying: "You remember the ice age? It's been warming ever since, and there ain't nothing we can do to stop it.")

As I'm writing this, the lights have been dimmed in much of The New York Times Building, in accordance with the request of Mayor Michael Bloomberg that New Yorkers conserve as much energy as possible. The temperature in the city is right around 100 degrees.

It's certainly true that heat waves in July and August are not unusual. But we need to keep in mind that the first six months of this year were the warmest ever recorded in the United States. And that this summer, according to the National Climatic Data Center, more than 50 cities in the continental U.S. have set records for high temperature.

We should keep in mind, as Al Gore has pointed out, that of the 21 hottest years ever measured, 20 have occurred within the last 25 years. And the hottest year of this recent hottest wave was last year.

Those who are familiar with the cold and fog of the Bay Area in northern California should consider the following summation of the latest heat wave from Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle: "In northern California, it was hotter for longer than ever on record, hitting 110 degrees four consecutive days in the nine-county Bay Area."

There's more. Seth Borenstein, the science writer for The Associated Press, reported yesterday that in recent years, the U.S. has had more than three times its normal share of extremely hot summer nights. "That is a particularly dangerous trend," Mr. Borenstein wrote. "During heat waves, like the one that now has a grip on much of the East, one of the major causes of heat deaths is the lack of night cooling that would normally allow a stressed body to recover."

Referring to the spike in nighttime temperatures, Richard Heim, a research meteorologist at the climate center, said in the article: "This is unbelievable. Something strange has happened in the last 10 to 15 years."

Unlike Senator Burns, there are people who understand that there are things we can do to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. We'd better do something fast. We're no longer waiting for the tragedies predicted to result from extremely high temperatures, extreme weather events, storm surges and so forth. We're already enduring them.

Remember New Orleans? And the thousands who died from the heat in Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest in 1995? And, as incredible as it still seems, the 35,000 killed by a monster heat wave in Europe in 2003?

I think the single most effective thing most ordinary Americans could do to become more informed about global warming — and the steps we need to take to fight it — is to go see Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," and read his book of the same title.

It would be a shame if it turns out that Americans have been so deprived of leadership for so long that they fail to recognize it when it's offered to them.

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Yesterday, the New York Times ran an interesting story about how men between the ages of 30 and 54 are voluntarily dropping out of work, unable to find a job that interests them, and preferring instead to live at home, doing things that they find more fulfilling. The numbers are hardly insignificant: about 10 percent of men in this age group—roughly 3 million workers—are out of work and not looking for jobs.

The article mostly delves into the causes of this trend—in particular, there's the decline of stable, unionized jobs, especially in manufacturing and technology, and the unwillingness of those who are laid off to seek work that's beneath them, preferring instead to pursue other interests. In that case, the fault resides with an economy that's chiefly creating low-paying, unfulfilling, and overly stressful jobs. There's also the fact that roughly 2 million men in this age group have prison records, thanks largely to the surge of drug-related convictions in the 1980s and '90s, and have trouble finding work.

- Bradford Plumer

© 2006 The Foundation for National Progress