Exxon and the president

This morning as I was driving to the Center I heard a report on NPR about Tony Blair's talks with Bush regarding global climate change. Bush refused to get on board with the prime minister saying that there needs to be more "study". I just sighed with exasperation. The studies are out there. I've posted them on this blog, for crying out loud; they are not hard to find. And the studies are conclusive. The glaciers are melting, the sea is rising, ocean temperature is changing, ecosystems are being seriously disturbed. What more can he want?

Then I got to work and started reading the news on line. Seems there's a Guardian article entitled, "Revealed: how oil giant influenced Bush". Here's how it gets started:

President's George Bush's decision not to sign the United States up to the Kyoto global warming treaty was partly a result of pressure from ExxonMobil, the world's most powerful oil company, and other industries, according to US State Department papers seen by the Guardian.

The documents, which emerged as Tony Blair visited the White House for discussions on climate change before next month's G8 meeting, reinforce widely-held suspicions of how close the company is to the administration and its role in helping to formulate US policy.

In briefing papers given before meetings to the US under-secretary of state, Paula Dobriansky, between 2001 and 2004, the administration is found thanking Exxon executives for the company's "active involvement" in helping to determine climate change policy, and also seeking its advice on what climate change policies the company might find acceptable.

We can thank Greenpeace for uncovering this information:

Until now Exxon has publicly maintained that it had no involvement in the US government's rejection of Kyoto. But the documents, obtained by Greenpeace under US freedom of information legislation, suggest this is not the case."

Potus [president of the United States] rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you [the Global Climate Coalition]," says one briefing note before Ms Dobriansky's meeting with the GCC, the main anti-Kyoto US industry group, which was dominated by Exxon.

The papers further state that the White House considered Exxon "among the companies most actively and prominently opposed to binding approaches [like
Kyoto] to cut greenhouse gas emissions".

But in evidence to the UK House of Lords science and technology committee in 2003, Exxon's head of public affairs, Nick Thomas, said: "I think we can say categorically we have not campaigned with the United States government or any other government to take any sort of position over Kyoto."

So not only did Exxon have inappropriate influence, they lied about it.

Whatever happened to the concept of conflict of interest???

It makes me almost physically ill to consider that short term profits are considered more important than the survival of the planet as a suitable habitat for living beings. What action can we take? Well, we can give money to environmental protection groups like Greenpeace. We can write letters and make phone calls to our senators and congresspersons. And we can order our lives around conservation and recycling. Let's not lose heart. Let's commit to doing what we can.

Stop calling him "popular"

Eric Alterman's blog said this yesterday:

The new ABC News/Washington Post poll, here, shows 52 percent of Americans disapprove of the job President Bush is doing overall, reports ABC News' Polling director Gary Langer — the most in more than 75 ABC/Post polls since his presidency began. His approval rating is 48 percent.

Bush's Iraq approval ratings haven't fared much better: 41 percent said they approve of the job the President is doing in Iraq, while 58 percent disapprove — matching his career-high Iraq disapproval mark.

George W. Bush’s approval rating is now a full twenty points lower than Bill Clinton’s was on the day he was impeached. Dear media, that means you gotta stop referring to him as a “popular president,” and no less important, stop treating him like one. If you want to be wimps about everything, fine, just don’t blame it on his ‘popularity.’ Blame it on yourselves.

I'm starting to think that the only way forward is to taunt the press mercilessly about the non-job they're doing. It will take that before they stop being the fawning lap-dogs they've become.

A congressman with guts

Here's a statement by Rep. John Conyers, Jr. entitled, "Did Bush deliberately deceive America about Iraq?". His conclusion is "yes". Here's an excerpt:

Essentially, the question boils down to what lawyers call "mens rea". Before a defendant can be convicted of a crime the judge or jury must find not only that the defendant committed the wrongful act but also did so with a state of mind indicating culpability. In the case of a fraud, the jury must find that there was intent to deceive. In the case of Iraq, the weight of evidence continues to accumulate indicating that the American people and Congress may well have been the victims of a deliberate deception.

On page A26 of the Sunday, May 22 edition of the Washington Post, under the headline "Prewar Findings Worried Analysts," we learned that four days before the President made the now retracted claim that Iraq was trying to buy "significant quantities" of uranium from Africa, the National Security Council thought this case was so weak that it put out a frantic call for new intelligence.

In the same article, we learned that before an Oct. 7, 2002 Presidential speech in which the President claimed there was a potential threat to the U.S. by Iraq through unmanned aircraft "that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons," and a contemporaneous claim to Congress by Vice President Cheney and then-CIA Director George Tenet that this was the "smoking gun" justifying the war, " the CIA was still uncertain whether the [source of the information] was lying."

Conyers then goes on to tell us that, far from being held accountable for their failures, analysts who pushed questionable intelligence were rewarded for doing so. He concludes this way:

Early this morning on the Associated Press wire, under the headline "Bolton Said to Orchestrate Unlawful Firing," we learn that the President's nominee to be Ambassador to the United Nations once again exercised his unique diplomatic talents, flying "to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved." The diplomat,s sin? He was "trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war."

Thus, absent any contradictory evidence, in the past two weeks alone (leaving out the reports of the last three years), we have a pretty clear pattern. This Administration had a cover story, namely that a clear and present danger to the United States was posed by Iraq's WMD, for something they knew they wanted to do: go to war with Iraq. Those who brought forward the weight of evidence disputing these claims were first ignored and later punished. Those who assisted in the cover story were rewarded.

Sounds like the intelligence and facts were being "fixed" around the policy, as the Downing Street Minutes claim. That sounds like deliberate deception to me.

Sounds like it to me too. It's refreshing, to say the least, to read the words of a Democrat with spine. John Kerry was supposed to have raised the issue of the Downing Street memo on the senate floor yesterday. To my great disappointment, he cancelled his appearance. Why, I don't know. Let's hope he had a good reason.

Oh, the lies

Okay. Just read these quotes and look carefully at the dates:

There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

The Downing Street Memo. July 23, 2002

[Saddam] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq.

-- Colin Powell, February 24, 2001

We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.

-- Condoleeza Rice, July 2001

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

-- Dick Cheney, Speech to VFW National Convention, August 26, 2002

Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

-- George W. Bush, Speech to UN General Assembly, September 12, 2002

We know for a fact that there are weapons there.

-- Ari Fleischer, Press Briefing, January 9, 2003

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.

-- George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003

We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more.

-- Colin Powell, Remarks to UN Security Council, February 5, 2003

There's more where that came from. See the page entitled Iraq: The Words of Mass Deception on the What Really Happened website. Let's all get used to the words, "impeachable offenses". Because that's what this is about.

More Abu Ghraib photos

I want to share an article with you from The Independent (UK) entitled, "Judge orders Pentagon to release 100 new photos of Abu Ghraib prison abuse". Here are the pertinent passages:

A US judge has ordered the Bush administration to release more than 100 new photographs and videos of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib, creating a fresh public relations nightmare for government officials as they seek to rebut accusations that the US is sponsoring torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.
...
Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the New York federal court granted a petition by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to release the materials after viewing eight sample photos last week. It is not known exactly what the 144 photographs and videos depict, but they are from the same sources as the graphic images of prisoners being piled up on top of each other, threatened by attack dogs and forced into sexually compromising positions that triggered scandal and outrage just over a year ago.

"These images may be ugly and shocking, but they depict how the torture was more than the actions of a few rogue soldiers," said ACLU director Anthony Romero. "The American public deserves to know what is being done in our name. Perhaps after these and other photos are forced into the light of day, the government will at long last appoint an outside special counsel to investigate the torture and abuse of detainees."
...
[A] Pentagon spokesman indicated yesterday that the administration would not give up the materials without a further fight.

We need to see what is really happening. Maybe that will break the mesmerism that is so clouding the reality testing ability of the ordinary American.

Fundamentalist revisionists

Just today I got an email from the Tulsa Interfaith Alliance about a fundamentalist Christian who is demanding that creationist displays be put next to the scientific time line on evolution at the Tulsa Zoo. And so I really appreciated the powerful rant I found this morning by Harvey Wasserman entitled, "Attack on separation of church and state defames America". Here's how it gets started:

The right-wing's multi-front war on American democracy now aims at our core belief in separation of church and state. It includes an attempt to say the founding fathers endorsed the idea that this is a "Christian nation," with an official religion.

But the founders---and a vast majority of Americans---repeatedly, vehemently and with stunning clarity denounced, rejected and despised such beliefs.

Nowhere in the Constitution they wrote does the word "Christian" or the name of Christ appear. The very first phrase of the First Amendment demands that "Congress shall make no law concerning an establishment of religion."

One major reason Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Ethan Allen and the vast majority of early Americans rejected the merger of church and state was the lingering stench of Puritan intolerance. The infamous theocratic murders of the Salem witch trials sickened the American soul, just as today's power grab by Karl Rove's new corporate fundamentalists creates an atmosphere of intolerance and fear, defined by the world's largest prison gulag.

With characteristic duplicity, the radical right is attempting to re-write another of this nation's most cherished beliefs.

Wasserman goes on to discuss in more detail how the revisionists are trying to claim that Puritan intolerance is our real heritage as a nation. Then he makes this point:

The Deistic God of Franklin, Jefferson, and their Enlightened cohorts was in fact a humanistic divinity, rooted in the possibilities of the mind and spirit. America's true founding faith drew strength from diverse sources, including native America, pacifist Quakerism and the actual teachings of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount: broad, peace-loving, tolerant, egalitarian, pluralistic, loving.

Then Wasserman talks about the true American values:

It is not the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments that form the bedrock of American values. It is the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. If anything should be chiseled in stone on our public buildings, it's the Bill of Rights.

Which is precisely what this attack on our history means to burn at the stake. Awakened America rose up in revolt against King, corporation and clergy. Its rejection of a state-sponsored church, Christian or otherwise, was fiercely explicit and decidedly mainstream.

Today's corporate-funded fundamentalist jihad is at war with America's uniquely diverse revolutionary soul. Spitting in the face of our historic core, the Big Lie of a "Christian nation" is vintage Rove at his most Orwellian.

I know I've talked to you before about Americans United for Separation of Church and State. I want to give you that link again and suggest that you click through and find out about this marvelous organization that needs our support now more than ever. Please give what you can.

Koran desecration

All right. The accusations are true. Even the Pentagon is admitting it. The Times of London reports on Koran desecration in an article entitled, "Pentagon admits guard urinated on Koran at Guantanamo". Here's how it starts:

An American guard at Guantanamo Bay urinated on a copy of the Koran while others kicked, stepped on and soaked copies with water balloons, the Pentagon admitted last night.

A two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of another copy. One interrogator was fined for "a pattern of unacceptable behaviour", according to a month-long inquiry.

The details will cause further embarrassment for the Pentagon, which has been fighting claims that the Koran was systematically mishandled as a tactic by US interrogators to break detainees.

The findings were deliberately released late into the night in an attempt to minimise the damage. But Pentagon chiefs insisted that despite the problems uncovered, the investigation revealed that the vast majority of personnel respected the Koran.

Well, isn't that just peachy. The "vast majority" of personnel are respectful. That doesn't sound like an appropriate apology for the affect on Muslim sensibilities throughout the world for the significant minority who are not respectful.

President Bush has challenged the stories of former detainees released from Guantanamo Bay, calling them lies. The remark was in response to a report from Amnesty International that branded Guantanamo Bay, which houses 550 prisoners from Afghanistan and the War on Terror, a "modern-day Gulag".

General Hood revealed last week that investigators had found five cases of mishandling of the Koran. Further details emerged last night and confirmed that one US soldier deliberately kicked a copy of the Koran and an interrogator stepped on one as part of a pattern of unauthorised behaviour. One unidentified American urinated through an air vent onto a detainee and his Koran. In other confirmed incidents, guards threw water balloons that left an unspecified number of Korans wet.

What I'm most ashamed of is America's self-righteous dishonesty. Now, who's going to apologize to Newsweek????

It speaks for itself.

Another Memo-gate website

Here's another website about the "smoking gun memo" entitled, After Downing Street. This one specifically calls for President Bush's impeachment.

ADS is a coalition of veterans' groups, peace groups, and political activist groups, which launched on May 26, 2005, a campaign to urge the U.S. Congress to begin a formal investigation into whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war. The campaign focuses on evidence that recently emerged in a British memo containing minutes of a secret July 2002 meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top national security officials.

The site provides a large number of articles as well as opportunities for activism. Let me especially recommend the article, "Downing Street for Dummies".

Friday Cat Blogging!

Here is Leroy hiding in a trash can. He's such a funny cat!

Photo by Cynthia Burgess

Just in case you missed this

Here's another example of how woefully illiterate our president is:

In reference to Amnesty International, Bush said:

It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people who have been trained in some instances to disassemble, that means not to tell the truth.

Of course, what he meant was "dissemble,"

There's been a lot of ironic snark about this on various liberal blogs over the past few days. It's entered the Bushisms lexicon - like "the internets" and "nucular". My goodness, it's embarrassing to have a president who regularly brutalizes the language.

And then, of course, why wouldn't people hate America if they were detained, mistreated, and then released due to complete lack of evidence against them?

Impeachable offense

Here's an article from a small newspaper in Maine calling for President Bush's impeachment. It references the Downing Street memo that is shamefully receiving so little serious attention in the mainstream press. But the internet is abuzz right now with calls for impeachment - among the progressive bloggers, that is. The article is by Robert Shetterly and is entitled, "Administration's offenses impeachable". Here are pertinent passages:

A British citizen leaked a memo to London's Sunday Times. The memo was of the written account of a meeting that a man named Richard Dearlove had with the Bush administration in July 2002. Dearlove was the head of the England's MI-6, the equivalent of the CIA. On July 23, 2002, Dearlove briefed Tony Blair about the meeting. He said that Bush was determined to attack Iraq. He said that Bush knew that U.S. intelligence had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no links to foreign terrorists, that there was no imminent danger to the U.S. from Iraq. But, since Bush was determined to go to war, "Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy." "Fixed" means faked, manufactured, conjured, hyped - the product of whole cloth fabrication.

So we got aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds imported from Niger, biological weapons labs in weather trucks, fear and trembling, the phony ultimatums to Saddam Hussein to turn over the weapons he didn't have and thus couldn't. We got the call to arms, the stifling of dissent, the parade of retired generals strategizing on the "news" shows, with us or against us, flags in the lapel, a craven media afraid to look for a truth that might disturb their corporate owners who would profit from the war. Shock and Awe. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib.

It was all a lie. Many of us have said for a long time it was a lie. But here it is in black and white: Lies from a president who has taken a sacred trust to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Shetterly then proceeds to reflect on the implications of this information. I particularly like this paragraph:

What's curious is why anyone like me should have to even point this out. Don't our senators and congressmen feel betrayed? Are they content to continue the murdering rather than do what truth demands? Do they think they can lie to history, too? Do they think that this little Iraq problem will somehow just go away, that the courageous resistance to the United States occupation will give up and hand Bush the keys to the oil wells? Do they think that any of the grave crises facing the world now - energy consumption, global warming, species extinction - can be solved by lying about them?

He concludes by appealing to the senators and congressmen from Maine:

We are living in an age of no accountability. It's also an age upon which may hang the survival of human life on this earth. One should not bet one's future on people who abjure responsibility. The first courageous step is to come to terms with what we know is true: America's president lied to America's people to create an unnecessary war. I ask Sens. Snowe and Collins, Reps. Allen and Michaud to take that step. Begin impeachment proceedings. It's really no more or less than their duty. It's also the first step toward restoring America's integrity.

All right. It's just one guest writer for one small town newspaper. But it is a start. The article is now on one of the most visited liberal news blogs. We need to keep the energy going. If ever a president deserved to be impeached, it is this one.

The memo

Here's a new website devoted to the Downing Street Memo. I particularly recommend the page entitled, "Why Care?"

This ought to be the issue that brings down Bush and Company. Deliberately to "fix" intelligence in order to go to war is undoubtedly an impeachable offense. It's important not to let this issue die.

Culture of life

No longer a great newspaper

An editorial in last Thursday's Washington Post started out with these words: "It's always sad when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings..." What's tragic is that these words were written without a trace of irony. Because the Post was ostensibly talking about Amnesty International. That opening statement, however, really applies to the Post itself. Here's how the editorial starts:

It's always sad when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse. It's particularly sad when the institution is Amnesty International, which for more than 40 years has been a tough, single-minded defender of political prisoners around the world and a scourge of left- and right-wing dictators alike. True, Amnesty continues to keep track of the world's political prisoners, as it has always done, and its reports remain a vital source of human rights information. But lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United
States.

Maybe because we deserve it, huh? There are none so blind as those who will not see. Why not assume that Amnesty International is still solid and trustworthy but that it's the United States that has lost its bearings? Because the Washington Post has lost its willingness or ability (or both) to speak truth to power. How ironic that now, following the disclosure of Deep Throat's identity, the once great newpaper is glorying in its own past role in exposing the Watergate scandal. Greg Palast speaks to this in an article entitled, "Deep Throat cover blown — Washington Post still sucks". Here's some of what he says:

I've been gagging all morning on the Washington Post's self-congratulatory preening about its glory days of the Watergate investigation. Think about it. It's been 33 years since cub reporters Woodward and Bernstein pulled down the pants of the Nixon operation and exposed its tie-in to the Watergate burglary. That marks a third of a century since the Washington Post has broken a major investigative story. I got a hint why there's been such a dry spell after I met Mark Hosenball, investigative reporter for the Washington Post's magazine, Newsweek.

It was in the summer of 2001. A few months earlier, for the Guardian papers of Britain, I'd discovered that Katherine Harris and Governor Jeb Bush of Florida had removed tens of thousands of African-Americans from voter registries before the 2000 election, thereby fixing the race for George Bush. Hosenball said the Post-Newsweek team "looked into it and couldn't find anything."

Nothing at all? What I found noteworthy about the Post's investigation was that "looking into it" involved their reporters chatting with Florida officials -- but not bothering to look at the voter purge list itself.

Yes, I admit the Washington Post ran my story -- seven months after the election -- but with the key info siphoned out, such as the Bush crew's destruction of evidence and the salient fact that almost all those purged were Democrats. In other words, the story was drained of anything which might discomfit the new residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Palast then talks about the way today's journalists have sold their souls for access to people in power. He concludes this way:

The Washington Post has no monopoly on journalistic evil. If anything, the Post is probably better than most of the bilge contaminating our news outlets. This is about the death-march of investigative journalism in America; or, at least, its dearth under the "mainstream" mastheads.

Why don't we read more "Watergate" investigative stories in the US press? Given that the Woodwards of today dance on their hind legs begging officialdom for "access", news without official blessing doesn't stand a chance.

The Post follows current American news industry practice of killing any story based on evidence from a confidential source if a government honcho privately denies it. A flat-out "we didn't do it" is enough to kill an investigation in its cradle. And by that rule, there is no chance that the Managing Editor of the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, would today run Deep Throat's story of the Watergate break-in.

And that sucks.

It sucks indeed. How Bob Woodward can live with what he has become is beyond me. He's just sold out - plain and simple. Journalists who don't, of course, are attacked - like Bill Moyers. The difference in courage between the two men is stunning.

Amnesty International responds

I'm sure it has come to your attention that President Bush called the recent Amnesty International's report citing abuses at Guantanomo "absurd". Here is Amnesty's press release in response:

AMNESTY INTERNATIONALPRESS RELEASE
AI Index: AMR 51/087/2005 (Public)
News Service No: 149
31 May 2005

USA: Response to President Bush

President Bush again failed to address longstanding concerns regarding US detention policies and practices in the context of the "war on terror", Amnesty International said in response to his comments today.

At Guantánamo, the US has operated an isolated prison camp in which people are confined arbitrarily, held virtually incommunicado, without charge, trial or access to due process. Not a single Guantánamo detainee has had the legality of their detention reviewed by a court, despite the Supreme Court ruling of last year."

Guantánamo is only the visible part of the story. Evidence continues to mount that the US operates a network of detention centres where people are held in secret or outside any proper legal framework -– from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond," said Amnesty International.

US interrogation and detention policies and practices during the "war on terror", have deliberately and systematically breached the absolute prohibition of torture and Ill-treatment. Individuals held in US custody have been transferred for interrogation to countries known to practice torture."

If President Bush and his administration are serious about freedom and human dignity they should recommit to the rule of law and human rights."

Amnesty International continues to call on the US administration to:
* end all secret and incommunicado detentions;
* grant the International Committee of the Red Cross full access to all detainees including those held in secret locations;
* ensure recourse to the law for all detainees;
* establish a full independent commission of inquiry into all allegations of
torture, ill-treatment, arbitrary detentions and "disappearances";
* bring to justice anyone responsible for authorizing or committing human rights violations

Background Information

When asked to comment about Amnesty International's report during a White House Briefing President Bush said: "I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. (…) The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world. When there's accusations made about certain actions by our people, they're fully investigated in a transparent way."

For more information, please see:

"Guantánamo and beyond: The continuing pursuit of unchecked executive power": http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAMR510632005

"USA: Human dignity denied: Torture and accountability in the 'war on terror'":

http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAMR511452004

Public Document
****************************************
For more information please call Amnesty International's press office in London, UK, on +44 20 7413 5566
Amnesty International, 1 Easton St., London WC1X 0DW. web: http://www.amnesty.org/

For latest human rights news view http://news.amnesty.org

Jesus news

Have you noticed that network news has been promoting conservative Christianity? So has Susan J. Douglas in an article entitled, "Jesus, is this news?" Here are some passages:

Blinded by their own erroneous news frame that the last election was all about "moral values," the news media are devoting more airtime to everything Jesus.

No matter how much columnists and media critics bemoan the sorry state of American journalism, no matter how low the press sinks in the estimation of the American people, the news media, particularly on television, remains defiantly abysmal. Now, on top of the usual toxic doses of runaway brides, irrelevant celebrity trials and President Bush holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah, we have the rise of Jesus News.

Blinded by their own erroneous news frame that the last election was all about "moral values," and pressured to give religion more coverage by an evangelical right running on methamphetamines, the news media are devoting more airtime to everything Jesus.
...
What are we to make of the rise of Jesus news? Yes, it is indeed important to know what the religious right is up to, especially as they seek to pack the courts with Jesus freaks, outlaw the teaching of evolution, reverse decades of environmental regulation because "the rapture" is just around the corner, and suppress free speech and academic freedom on college campuses by charging that evangelical students are "silenced' and "harassed" and thus should be able to sue.

But that's not the detailed coverage we're getting, at least not on TV. Instead, Jesus news embezzles time away from stories people really need to hear, like much more detailed coverage of the Bush/Republican energy bill, which got a total of six minutes of coverage from all three networks when it passed the house the week of April 18.
...
The parade of evangelicals on TV exaggerates the numbers of these folks and makes them seem much more influential than they are--or certainly should be. Rather than clones of the Christian Broadcasting Network, we need solid, investigative work about the money, organizations and, indeed, the cynicism behind all of these crusading efforts to turn our country into a giant Bible camp.

I think this trend is very troubling. Yesterday's Smirking Chimp published an article entitled, "Dominionism is an evil child". I do think the hijacking of the mainstream news outlets by the religious right is part of an overall strategy to establish a theocracy in the United States. It is very important that we support such organizations as the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State that are fighting the strategy of the hard right.

Sowing the seeds of destruction

Here's an article by Sean Gonsalves, entitled "Military Creating 'Rods from God'", about our plans to weaponize space. It's a very worrying issue. Here are pertinent passages:

''Full-Spectrum Dominance'' comes right out of U.S. military doctrine as outlined in documents such as ''Full Spectrum Dominance and Air Force Space Command Strategic Master Plan FY06,'' which states that the U.S. military goal is to fight war ''in, from and through'' space, based on the Rumsfeld logic that whoever controls space will dominate earth.
...
As you read this, defense officials are developing plans to put weapons in space, things like hypervelocity rod bundles, which insiders call ''Rods from God,'' whose purpose is to penetrate subterranean targets.

Our policy planners and so-called leaders are provoking China and Russia in their pursuit of God-like powers to dominate the earth, which is the most dangerous form of idolatry imaginable.

Meanwhile, most Americans have never heard of this stuff, even from the ''liberal'' media, as conservative Christians, who seem to be hogging the national microphone, debate about same-sex marriage and stem-cell research.

If it's ''the kids'' and future generations we're really concerned about, we had better get more acquainted with ''full-spectrum dominance'' and re-acquaint ourselves with words like proportionality, priorities and moral discernment.

What's ironic, as the article points out, is that the defense systems proposed are demonstrably unworkable. And I am very disturbed by the name, "Rods from God". The hubris is breathtaking.

A courageous newspaper

Yesterday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published a scathing editorial for Memorial Day. It's entitled, "Memorial Day/Praise bravery, seek forgiveness" and speaks to the issue of the Downing Street Memo that has been relatively ignored by the mainstream press. Here's an excerpt:

In exchange for our uniformed young people's willingness to offer the gift of their lives, civilian Americans owe them something important: It is our duty to ensure that they never are called to make that sacrifice unless it is truly necessary for the security of the country. In the case of Iraq, the American public has failed them; we did not prevent the Bush administration from spending their blood in an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. President Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let them. Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes. Perhaps it happened because Americans, understandably, don't expect untruths from those in power. But that works better as an explanation than as an excuse.

The "smoking gun," as some call it, surfaced on May 1 in the London Times. It is a highly classified document containing the minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting at 10 Downing Street in which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair on talks he'd just held in Washington. His mission was to determine the Bush administration's intentions toward Iraq.

At a time when the White House was saying it had "no plans" for an invasion, the British document says Dearlove reported that there had been "a perceptible shift in attitude" in Washington. "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The (National Security Council) had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

It turns out that former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill were right. Both have been pilloried for writing that by summer 2002 Bush had already decided to invade.

Walter Pincus, writing in the Washington Post on May 22, provides further evidence that the administration did, indeed, fix the intelligence on Iraq to fit a policy it had already embraced: invasion and regime change. Just four days before Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003, Pincus writes, the National Security Council staff "put out a call for new intelligence to bolster claims" about Saddam Hussein's WMD programs. The call went out because the NSC staff believed the case was weak. Moreover, Pincus says, "as the war approached, many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein's alleged weapons programs." But no one at high ranks in the administration would listen to them.

If the press would just do its job, this fixing of intelligence would be seen for the impeachable offense it is. But the Washington Post buried the Pincus story on page 26. Shameful.

Remember

If you are able,
Save a place for them
Inside of you.
And save one backward glance
When you are leaving for the places they can no longer go.
Be not ashamed to say that you loved them,
Though you may not have always.
Take what they have left,
And what they have taught you
With their dying
And keep it your own.
And in a time
When men decide and feel safe
To call war insane,
Take one moment to embrace
Those gentle heroes
You left behind.

Written by Major Michael Davis O'Donnell, helicopter pilot; 1 January 1970, KIA, Vietnam, on March 24, 1970