Hannah's Blog

Message from bin Laden

Text of bin Laden message

30oct04

THE following is a translation from Arabic of the text of a message to the American people by al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden:

"O American people, this is what I have to say about the causes and results (of the September 11, 2001 attacks) and the way to avoid another Manhattan.

"I tell you that security is a major pillar of human life. Free men do not renounce their security, irrespective of (US President George W.) Bush's claims that we hate freedom.

"Let him (Mr Bush) tell us why we did not attack Sweden, for example. It is obvious that those who hate freedom cannot have the pride of the 19 (September 11 suicide hijackers), God rest their souls. If we fought you, it is because we are free men, we do not ignore values, we want to return freedom to our nation. If you play havoc with our security, we play havoc with yours.

"You astonish me. Despite the fact that we are into the fourth year after September 11, Bush is still misleading you and hiding the real reason from you, which means that the reasons to repeat what happened remain.

"I will tell you about the reasons of these events and about the moments in which the decision (to attack) was taken so you will ponder them. I swear we never thought of attacking the towers, but when we saw the injustice and arbitrariness of the US-Israeli alliance against our brethren in Palestine and Lebanon, it became too much and the idea came to me.

"The events which affected me directly go back to 1982 ... when America gave the Israelis the green light to invade Lebanon, with the backing of the US Sixth Fleet. It is difficult to describe what I felt in these painful moments, but it created an overwhelming feeling of refusal of injustice and a compelling determination to punish the unjust.

"As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me that the unjust should suffer the same, that the towers in America must be destroyed so that America gets a taste of what we went through, so that it will stop killing our children and women.

"We did not find it hard to deal with Bush and his administration given the similarity with the regimes in our countries, half of which are governed by soldiers and the other half by the offspring of kings and presidents. We have a long experience with those. Both categories count people who are arrogant, greedy and embezzle (public) funds.

"The similarity began at the time of visits by Bush the father (former US president George Bush) to the region. At a time when some of our kinfolk were impressed by America and hoped that these visits would impact on our countries, it turned out that he was the one affected by these monarchies and military regimes, envying them for keeping their posts tens of years, embezzling public funds without being held accountable or monitored.

"He transferred tyranny and repression of freedoms to his son and they called it a national law (US Patriot Act, introduced) under the pretext of combating terrorism.

"Bush's father thought it was a good thing to put his sons to govern states. And he did not forget to transfer (election-) forging skills from the presidents of the region to Florida to use them in critical times.

"We had agreed with (suicide hijacker) Mohammad Atta, God rest his soul, that he finishes all operations in 20 minutes before Bush and his administration take notice.

"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the US armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone at a time when they were most in need of him.

"He reckoned that it was more important to preoccupy himself with the talk of the little girl about her goat ... than with the planes and their strike on the skyscrapers, giving us three times the time required to carry out the operations, thanks be to God.

"Your security is not in the hands of (Democratic presidential candidate John) Kerry, Bush or al-Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any (presidential) mandate which does not play havoc with our security would automatically ensure its own security."

CARGO

http://laramiecrocker.com/cargo.html

This flash movie takes about 5 minutes to download on dialup.

DIY?---Yes

Kimmy Cash continues

October 24
Since I wrote last I've discovered some info and come to some conclusions that I should share because the buzz in our community proves there are far too many people that can't be left in the dark.

One, getting the "expert opinion" and/or specialist second opinion might be virtually impossible due to a couple of factors:

1) her condition - it's becoming all to clear to me that transferring her at this moment could in and of itself be fatal. At the very least it would significantly alter her mortality rate. (based on a combination of my research into ICU transfers, mortality indicators and opinion from our Dean family) I'm still discussing this with my mom and dad trying to get everyone on the same page. Balancing or trying to balance the emotional state of everyone is VERY difficult for me right now but I am making concrete steps --- Could you make that decision? Would you transfer your loved one at this point? My thought process was that the risk of leaving her there and not taking this huge leap... Well, you know what I mean.
2) The apprehension from individual Dr's around the Nation has a common link: malpractice. Seems noone wants to touch her or give opinion because of the type of conditions --hospital acquired maybe and work already performed on her by Methodist. It's very difficult getting a hospital to agree to take her or getting a specialist to come in - Now were talking about money also. See, it's their job and hospital profit that could be screwed..it's MY sister's human life ya know? Ok...let me continue before I get too pissed..

Two, I've put together a pattern . Since the day she went in the care has gone like this:
Unknown condition "A" causes "B" and "C".
"B" is worked on , treated or concentrated on, "A" is disregarded and "C" takes the backseat.
C (on the back burner) and B's side effects together create "D" and "E". Seems we forgot about "A", the underlying-
Now D and E belong to an even bigger problem and remember A?
I'm confusing myself.. Ok, bottom line? She is being treated after the fact, it's just a catch up routine and prevention does not seem to be part of the protocol, IMO. . Repair what goes wrong with no advance thought as to what can (and does everytime) happen next and deal with the underlying issues later, after they become severe. Proven over and over again... Since day one my parents have relayed the symptoms, I've researched the hell out of it, came up with 3 or 4 things that are undeniable (IM uneducated O) and sure enough all of those things become fact with time.

The question is :
**** Is this a communication problem? god complex (I know everything, I can manage so I disregard etc) or problems relaying the findings or getting someone to act on them?
or
****Is her critical care team incomplete (or incompetent)?

My opinion is that there is no prevention going on here. For whatever reason the hospital team is incomplete. Individually are they totally ALL incompetent? I would say NO based on the current surgeon's actions and the Infectious Dr's guess at her fungus. Too many cooks backing in and out of the kitchen perhaps? Dr's have been backing in and out of her case since day one when I arrived. The hospital switches patients at the beginning of the month this I know for what we have been told is a teaching process. (great) When the immediate emergency is blood-related for example, the OBGYN backs out. When it's surgery, the infectious backs out. Example? When they assumed prematurely that the Sepsis was cleared they sent her to a regular floor and the Blood Doctor said he was "backing out and removing himself from the case" now. Huge mistake . Number one a Xygris patient is supposed to be monitored for 30 days after according to the drug makers site. Two, clotting (the underlying DIC!? ) is a side effect. Remember now according to her surgeon clotting is what caused the rotting of her entire stomach, spleen. preforations in intestines, coding etc etc. She should NOT have been sent to that floor and she should have been closely monitored by none other than..the blood team. DUH!. This would have saved her organs and there would not now fungus/bacteria issues. Fact? She wouldn't be where she is had it not been for the ischemia/total gastrectomy complications.

Check this out: Dad arrives last night and calls to give me an update. Says Chirsty looks surprisingly good- the only thing he noticed off hand was that her eyes were yellowish and when he went back to work last week they were bright white.

Ok, so I remember that when researching the disseminated intravascular coagulation I came across this somewhere. So I stayed up all night and after alot of digging I found that this yellowing occurs when there is excessive bilirubin (def: waste that comes from the breakdown of the hemoglobin from worn out red blood cells) in NEW blood and the liver can't keep up. Going even further brought me to a disease called hyperbilirubenemia and Hemolysis. There is ALOT to this info and it's not as simple as I'm writing but the bottom line? I give all of this info to my Dad before the 8 am Dr arrivals so he's armed..he calmly asks and immediately they order tests on a bilirubim count which had not been done for some time!!! See? The count had NOT BEEN DONE! We get these results back today. Also discovered that the TPN (tube feeding) itself causes the liver to slow down making it unable to process the collection of bilirubin. Now, without a spleen (removed during gastrectomy), the TPN (tube feeding) and no day to day watch of her bilirubin count--- well, another HUGE problem (severely life threatening) can come into play.

So my conclusion is that the DIY ethic (do-it-yourself) I (we all) cling to--- well, it HAS to apply to every single aspect in life. 15 years ago it was only about making my own clothes so I didn't have to buy them. Producing our own CD's because labels sucked. Writing our own zines etc etc. In the past 2 years D.I.Y. it turned into mass political action because our communities and people were suffering and from our campaign of course, expecting others to fix it was ignorant . Now, my god..now today, its something else entirely. Never in my life would I have thought that you couldn't even rely on trained, educated medical professionals in an emergency situation. It's true. Of course Dr's aren't a "god" and of course there are freak things that supposedly just happen. Of course you should be aware of your own body and seek knowledge etc etc. ( I thought us girls were only supposed to keep track of our periods, JESUS!) But.. for me.. I don't know. I never imagined that you couldn't count on emergency medical care in this country at least just a TEENY, TINY bit. Questioning what is going on has taken too much of our time. I'm thinking that with persistence and a clear mind I (we) can beat them to the punch and I think I (we) can get one step ahead of it. It sounds like a lofty or mighty goal I'm sure but I'm convinced you guys. We just HAVE to research it ourselves, get one step ahead of these Dr's and save her. That's it. That's all I can do at this point. That's what has to be done.

I'm still very much seeking opinion and gathering it all. I'm getting ALOT of it so it takes time to weed through but I'll do it quickly. Still, every single piece of information is welcome. Even if you think its the oddest thing or may be irrelevant..keep it coming!

Oh yeah and FINALLY, it's high time to hire a lawyer. (thanks guys) ( I suppose after that we'll have to do D.I.Y legal work too representing ourselves in the end anyway!)

(shit..one more side note (sorry): important info came from a blogger that contacted an old work partner who knew someone through an old friend (whew) Well that old friend was already aware of Christy's situation via her own daily lurking on our Dean blog--amazing.!! There are several instances of this.. Thank you Renee, thank you guys!! )

Takin' My Country Back

Listen to the MP3

For the Lyrics--------

Country music's got mammas and daddys, they got bar rooms and old heartbreak songs, but I'm here today to stand up and say how I feel about my home sweet home, what's left, what's right and what's wrong.
'N I'm takin' my country back. Son, you ain't been doin' her right. Oh, I been watchin' you and I don't like how you been treatin' my stars and stripes.
You took out our jobs and sent 'em over-seas; now we owe billions to the red Chinese.
You blew the budget and you bounced Iraq. So I'm takin' my country back.
We had a bundle in the treasury drawer, more than there had ever been before, but every day we're down and deeper in debt. Maybe four years should be all you get. Then you gave tax breaks to the millionaires and you tried to make the workin' man pay, but you can't tax a man when his job's not there. Now lookit where we are today.
Hey, I'm takin' my country back. Son, you ain't been doin' her right. Oh, I been watchin' you and I don't like how you been treatin' my stars and stripes.
You got too many fancy friends for me. The Saudis treat you like you're royalty. You blew the budget and you lost Iraq. Now I'm takin' my country back.
Now, I can understand why you were hot, 'cause bin Laden never did get caught. So you said we had Saddam to blame, tried to tell us it was all the same. Now the years roll by and our kids keep dyin'. You don't even have a plan to bring 'em home. Those WMD, you promised on TV--hey admit it, you figured it wrong. So, I'm takin' my country back.
Now, you don't know my name, but you know who I am. I'm your everyday work hard, play hard, raise kids and pray hard common man. And Lord knows I love this land. So, I'm takin' my country back. Son, you ain't been doin' her right. Oh, I been watchin' you and I don't like how you been treatin' my stars and stripes.
You say you're not but you designed this war to beat each other on the city floor and we're supposed to be above all that. So, I'm takin' my country back.
I've got my family and my church and flag and I'm takin' my country back.

Bush's Brain Again

Over the years I've had the opportunity of getting know a number of African Americans, poorly educated but ambitious, who managed to acquire the vocabulary of their bureaucratic and academic peers, without understanding the meaning of the terminology they were repeating.

Of course, this lack of understanding was not immediately apparent. Everyone with whom they talked assumed that they knew what they were talking about. Bureacrats and academics heard nothing in their speech to disabuse them and their home community just concluded that, if they couldn't be understood, it was probably because they had learned to speak like the experts. It wasn't until the words led to action that it became obvious that there was a serious disconnect between the expectations that had been created and what was actually happening.

Not surprisingly, people in the community concluded that they had been deceived--that the people they trusted had turned on them. But, that's not what the problem was. The problem was that the meaning of the terminology had not been understood.

Many of us have become aware that politicians, bureaucrats and promoters of all kinds, are often inclined to describe things in terms that are more favorable or optimistic than the things being described warrant. But, that's not what I'm talking about here. A failure to understand isn't necessarily the result of deception of any kind.

Take, for example, the phrase "community redevelopment." What that suggests to a person who has no experience of such a process is that community of which she is a part is intended to be done over--"improved." What that phrase means to the bureaucrat is that a group of people, living in close proximity to each other, which may or may not share a sense of community, is going to be removed and relocated, in order to facilitate the razing of worn-out structures (and infra-structure) and make it easy for a "developer" to start all over again.

The justification for this disruptive process, whose particulars the African American participants tended to miss, was, in addition to the obvious benefit of getting rid of blighted conditions which everyone recognized, the assumption that the new and modern development would result in a new and vibrant community taking shape all on its own.

Which, of course, is the logic at the base of the assault on Iraq--just on a grander scale. If we take out the old regime by force, a new and better one will spring up on its own. All that will be needed is a little redevelopment expertise and money.

Of course, we already know from our experience here at home, that's not how it works.
But, does the commander-in-chief of this enterprise know that? I doubt it. While the bureaucrats who have hatched this project are simply doing what they've always done--promoted the interests of the development community--George W. Bush strikes me as a poorly educated person who has learned to speak in set phrases without understanding their true meaning.

From his actions it seems increasingly obvious that he has no idea what "freedom," "democracy" or even "privacy" mean. But what's perhaps more telling is his affection for the phrase "personal savings account." He likes the words "personal," "saving" and "account"--the latter no doubt because that's what some of his courses at Harvard were about--but I would be willing to bet that he's never had a "savings account" in a bank and he certainly has no experience being accountable for himself. Whether he has any sense of himself as a person is doubtful.

But, you are right to object, George W. Bush is certainly not lacking in the quality of his education. Indeed, he has been provided with the best. Which leads to the conclusion that there's something else which must account for his obvious lack of understanding--some disconnect in his brain which keeps him from relating the words he speaks to experience.

Some people might argue that the acquisition of language, of the words to describe things, comes before or leads to understanding. I disagree. I think our senses perceive the world in and around us and then we formulate words to describe those sensations and share them with others. But, the repetition of sounds we recognize as words is not necessarily evidence of comprehension. A parrot can do it. Dogs, on the other hand, can comprehend the meaning of words (as evidenced by their ability to follow instructions) even though they can't formulate sounds recognizable by humans as speech. Humans can learn to speak and be quite fluent without connecting with the real world. Indeed, that seems to be increasingly apparent in people whom we now perceive to be suffering from a brain disease, unless, like Ronald Reagan, their pronouncements are directed and monitored by a large support system--a system which actually benefits from not having to be accountable for its actions.

Voting early in NC

October 22. I am up early. Today is important. I have waited a long time for today.

I put on my Dean t-shirt and head out the door, stopping to pick up the bumper sticker I ordered from makestickers.com, just for today:

My vote goes to The Nominee.
My heart stays with Dean.
Get over it.

I put it on my car, above all my Dean stickers. I get in and drive toward the closest early voting location. I slide my Dean CD, the one with the Great Restoration Speech, into the CD player. I turn the volume up LOUD. I pull into the parking lot at the polling location just as Dean is saying, ??and we call ourselves?Americans.? I sit and listen to the end, ?YOU have the power to take back this country!? before switching off the ignition. I am ready.

I walk into the polling place. There are a couple of dozen voters there; I?m one of two who are white. I look at all those faces, people who never went to a Meetup, never waved signs at a rally, never heard of a blog. Who just showed up when it mattered. My eyes fill with tears. This country may turn out to still be worth something after all. Part of it, anyway.

I stand in line for a few minutes, then I give my name and address, sign the verification form. I get my ballot. I go to one of the tables to vote. I fill in the arrow for The Nominee. Tears well up again. I?ve waited so long to vote for Anybody But. And, looking at those faces, I believe we really *are* going to take our country back.

Having paid my ?lesser of evils? dues for this election cycle, I continue down the ballot, crying as I go, voting for whomever the hell I please?

I vote for the Libertarian for the US Senate. The Republican is awful, the Democrat is pretty dreadful, and I liked what the Libertarian had to say about the state of the two parties.

I happily vote for the Democratic incumbent in the U.S. House race.

I vote for a Libertarian again for Governor. The Democrat is so-so, and he will win this without my vote. He?s electable. I want my vote to count, so I vote outside the two-party system and for the woman instead. It?s a win/win situation for me.

I happily vote for the Democrat for Lieutenant Governor. She kicked off the election year in her county by advising local Democrats to "open that big umbrella the Democrats have" to Independents and Republicans "who aren't real happy with what's going on. We're going to win big in North Carolina." And they will, too.

I vote for the Republican for Attorney General?a real shocker when you consider how I feel about Ashcroft. But our local left-leaning independent weekly endorsed him over the Democrat, and made a very good case for it.

I slide down the next 7 state offices, voting for Democrats all the way. North Carolina always goes Democratic at the state level; I think the Republicans have mostly stopped trying.

I happily vote for the Republican for the NC Senate. I would rather have voted for Julia Boseman, our Dean Dozen candidate, but she?s not in my district. The Republican running out of my district got good reviews from almost everybody, and her website has a link labeled ?Democrats for?? Reminds me of a guy I used to know.

I happily vote for the Democrat for the NC House. He seems to be pretty good. And I?m less self-indulgent when it comes to choosing those who will make our laws.

I vote happily for one Democrat and one Republican seeking one of the five open seats for our County Commission. The Democrat has a reputation for being fair and for not toeing any ideological lines, and he says he always votes his conscience. Reminds me of a guy I used to know. The Republican? That?s a long story. Just an ordinary citizen without a clue has to how her government works, but she wants to make a difference and has more spunk than the rest of candidates combined. A black female Republican running in an overwhelmingly Democratic county, she will lose huge. Except for Anybody But, it?s my favorite vote of the day. I vote comfortably for one other Democrat and pass over the rest?ho hum.

I dutifully vote for the lone candidate for Register of Deeds, a Democrat. I voted for his opponent in the primary?my mistake, I found out later. So I vote for him, even though he?s uncontested in the general. I owed him one.

I go straight Dem on the all the judiciary candidates. Again, I?m less self-indulgent when it comes to those who make law. And it's easy anyway...in all but one race voting for the Democrat is voting for the woman.

Let?s see?that makes a total of 19 Democrats, two Libertarians, and three Republicans; 10 women and 14 men; 18 whites and 6 blacks. Feels like a democracy to me.

I finish up with votes on the proposed constitutional amendments and go over to our voting machines. They are all optical scanners, and I think warm thoughts about the head of our Board of Elections. I insert my ballot and watch the little counter tick up.

A poll worker gives me the little ?I Voted? sticker and I turn to leave. I look at all the black faces filing in the door and I start crying again. As I exit the building, two black women coming up the walk notice my tears. They frown with concern. I give them a thumbs up and a smile. ?I?m happy,? I say. Their faces relax. ?Thank you so much, ? I add. ?We?re going to throw those SOBs out of there.? They both break into bright smiles. ?We sure are, honey,? they say. ?We sure are.?

I walk out to the parking lot. I take a deep breath. I?m done. It?s been 16 months to the day since I signed up with the Dean for America campaign, having no idea how it would change my life. Back then, I was just hoping to take back my country. Now I want to do better than that. But today?after all this time?I finally got to vote to stop the madness.

It felt really good.

Posted by Free Spirit at October 22, 2004 10:06 PM

Florida for Kerry

Michael Moore at the O'Dome

First Florida Vote for Kerry

DFA Warriors

Free Spirit

Puddleriver

Secret Courts

The case that wasn't there

While still in prison in January 2002, Bellahouel filed a legal challenge to his custody. That's when the real secrecy began.

The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Paul C. Huck in Miami, yet the grounds of the petition are unknown because all documents have been sealed.

For more than a year, the petition -- known as a "writ of habeas corpus" -- was litigated in absolute secrecy, even as it made its way to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta (11th Cir.). Every pleading was filed under seal. Every hearing was held in a closed courtroom. Most remarkably, the case's very existence was withheld from the public docket. In short, there was literally no public record that Bellahouel had brought a case.

Notably, the Eleventh Circuit, in which the U.S. District Court in Miami is located, is one of the few courts in the country that has explicit precedent banning the use of secret dockets. In the 1993 bribery case United States v. Valenti, the court ruled that recording proceedings on a nonpublic docket is a violation of the First Amendment because doing so "can effectively preclude the public and the press from seeking to exercise their constitutional right of access" to judicial proceedings.

To read more, go to

http://www.rcfp.org/news/mag/28-1/cov-blackout.html

Gore on Bush

Monday, October 18th, 2004

Transcript: The Failed Presidency of George W. Bush

4:34 PM PST

Remarks as delivered by former Vice President Al Gore
Gaston Hall at Georgetown University
Monday, October 18, 2004

Thank you. I really appreciate that enthusiastic and warm welcome. And I want to thank Eli Pariser for his generous introduction, also even more for the tremendous energy that he and his colleagues at MoveOn.org have brought to the democratic process in America. I'm really a big fan of Eli and all of those who work with him at Move On. And I want to say a special word of thanks to Gerard Alolod who is the Lecture Fund chair, and I wish to thank Georgetown University for the courtesy of allowing me to speak here, and president John DeGioia. Allow me also to express my condolences to the family of the student who had an accidental death on Friday, and condolences to the student body.

This is a great, great university. I have spoken here before, and it is always an honor, particularly to come to this magnificent hall. So, again, thank you very much. So I come, as I have said at other occasions, as a recovering politician. I'm on about step nine, and an enthusiastic welcome like that always presents the danger of a relapse, so I'm on my guard. I came here because I have made a series of speeches about the policies of the Bush-Cheney administration with regard to Iraq, the war on terror, civil liberties, the global environment, and other issues, a series that began more than two years ago with a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, prior to the president's decision to invade Iraq.

During this series of speeches, I have tried hard to understand what it is that gives so many Americans an uneasy feeling that something very basic has gone wrong in our democracy. There are many people in both political parties who worry that there is something deeply troubling about President Bush's relationship to reason, about his disdain for facts, his incuriosity about new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he wrestles with on behalf of the country.

One group mistakenly maligns the president as not being smart enough to have a normal active curiosity about separating fact from myth. A second group seems to be convinced that his personal religious conversion experience was so profound that he relies on religious faith in place of logical analysis. But I disagree with both of those groups and reject both of those cartoon images. I know President Bush is plenty smart, and while I have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine, and it's an important motivation for many things that he does in life, as it is for me, and for most of you, I'm convinced that most of the president's frequent departures from fact based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible. And it is crucially important to be precise in describing exactly what it is he believes in so strongly, and then insulates from any logical challenge or even debate. It is ideology, and not his religious faith that is the source of this troubling inflexibility.

Most of the problems President Bush has caused for this country stemmed not from his belief in God but his belief in the infallibility of the right-wing Republican ideology that exalts the interest of the wealthy, and of large corporations over and above the interests of the American people. It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency.

The surprising current dominance of American politics by right- wing politicians whose core beliefs are usually wildly at odds with the opinions of the majority of Americans is a dominance that has resulted from the careful building of a coalition of interest groups that have little in common with each other besides a desire for power that can be devoted to the achievement of a narrow agenda.

The two most important blocks in this coalition are, first, what I would call the economic royalists, those corporate leaders and high net worth families with vast fortunes at their disposal who are primarily interested in an economic agenda that will eliminate as much of their own taxation as possible, and an agenda that removes regulatory obstacles and any competition they might face from smaller, newer firms in the marketplace. They provide the bulk of the resources that have financed the now extensive network of foundations, think tanks, political action committees, media companies, and front groups capable of simulating grassroots activism.

The second of the two pillars of this coalition are social conservatives, many of whom want to roll back most of the progressive social changes of the 20th Century, including many women's rights, social integration, the social safety net, the government social programs of the progressive era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and their coalition includes a number of powerful interest groups like the National Rifle Association, the anti-abortion coalition, and other groups that have agreed to support each other's agendas in order to obtain their own. You could call it the 300 musketeers, one for all and all for one. And, indeed, those who raise more than $100,000 are called not musketeers, but pioneers.

Now, Bush's seeming immunity to doubt is often interpreted by people who see and hear him on television as evidence of the strength of his conviction when, in fact, it is this very inflexibility based on a willful refusal to even consider alternative opinions or conflicting evidence that poses the most serious danger to our country.

By the same token, the simplicity of many of his pronouncements, which are often misinterpreted as evidence that he has penetrated to the core of a complex issue, are in fact exactly the opposite because they usually mark his refusal to even consider complexity. And that's a particularly difficult problem in a world where the challenges America faces are often quite complex and require rigorous sustained disciplined analysis.

The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals, and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities.

Truly, President Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the American people, and give as much of it as possible to the already wealthy and privileged. And these wealthy and privileged look at his agenda and they say, as Dick Cheney said to former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, "this is our due."

The central elements of President Bush's political as opposed to religious belief system are actually plain to see. First, the public interest is a dangerous myth according to Bush's ideology -- a fiction created by those hated liberals who use the notion of public interest as an excuse to take away from the wealthy and powerful what they do believe is their due. Therefore, government in this system of beliefs, government of, by, and for the people is bad -- except when government can help members of his coalition. Laws and regulations are also therefore bad, again except when they can be used to help members of his coalition. Therefore, also, whenever laws must be enforced and regulations administered, it is important in their view to assign those responsibilities to individuals who can be depended upon not to fall prey to this dangerous illusion that there is such a thing as the public interest, those who will instead reliably serve the narrow and specific interests of industries and interest groups.

This is the reason, for example, that President Bush put the former chairman of Enron, Ken Lay, in charge of vetting all of the Bush appointees to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Enron had already helped the Bush team with such favors as ferrying their rent-a-mob to Florida in 2000 to permanently halt the counting of legally cast ballots. They flew on the Enron plane. And then, after members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission were appointed with Mr. Lay's personal review and approval, Enron went on to bilk the electric rate payers of California and other states without the inconvenience of federal regulators protecting citizens against their criminal behavior.

Or, to take another example, this explains why all -- virtually all -- of the important EPA positions have been carefully filled with lawyers and lobbyists representing the worst polluters in their respective industries in order to make sure that those polluters are not inconvenienced by the actual enforcement of the law against excessive pollution.

In Bush's ideology there is an interweaving of the agendas of large corporations that support them and his own ostensibly public agenda for the government that he leads. Their preferences become his policies, and his politics become their business.

Any new taxes in this ideology are of course bad, especially if they add anything at all to the already unbearable burden placed on the wealthy and powerful. There are exceptions tot his rule of course for new taxes that are paid by lower income Americans, which have the redeeming virtue of simultaneously lifting the burden of paying for government from the wealthy, and then also potentially recruiting those presently considered to pay to pay taxes into the anti-tax bandwagon.

In the international arena, treaties and international agreements are also considered bad, because they can interfere with the exercise of power the same way domestic laws can. The Geneva Convention, for example, and the U.S. law prohibiting torture were both described by President Bush's White House counsel as "quaint," and then effectively discarded as a constraint, so that Bush and Rumsfeld could institute policies that resulted in the widespread torture of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and numerous secret locations elsewhere. And even though new information has now confirmed that Donald Rumsfeld was personally involved in reviewing the specific extreme measures authorized to be used by interrogators, he has still not been held accountable for the most shameful and humiliating violation of American principles in recent memory -- (applause) -- because this president never told anyone in his accountable no matter what they do.

Most dangerous of all, this Bush ideology promotes the making of policy in secret, based on information that is not available to the public and in a process that is insulated from any meaningful participation by Congress or the American people. When Congress's approval is required under our current Constitution, it is to be given without meaningful debate. As Bush said to one Republican senator in a meeting described in Time magazine -- and I quote from the magazine's account -- "Look, I want your vote -- I'm not going to debate it with you."

At the urging of the Bush White House, Republican leaders in Congress have even taken the unprecedented step of routinely barring Democrats from serving on many important conference committees, and then allowing lobbyists for special interests to actually draft brand- new legislative language introduced in conference committees, language that has not been considered or voted upon in either the House or the Senate.

It has also become common for President Bush to rely on special interests for his basic information about the policies important to them. And he trusts what they tell him over any contrary view that might emerge from public debate. He has in effect outsourced the truth.

Most disturbing of all: his contempt for the rule of reason and his early successes in persuading the nation that his ideologically based views accurately describe the world have now tempted him to the hubristic an genuinely dangerous illusion that reality is itself a commodity that can be created with clever public relations and propaganda skills; and, where specific controversies are concerned, simply purchased as a turnkey operation from the industries most affected.

George Orwell said, and I quote, "The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue. And then when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right." Intellectually it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time. The only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality -- usually on a battlefield.

In one of the speeches that I have a year ago last August, I proposed that one reason why the normal processes of our democracy have seemed dysfunctional is that our nation acquired a large number of false impressions about the choices before us including for example that -- the false impression that Saddam Hussein was the person primarily responsible for attacking us on September 11th, 2001. According to Time magazine again, 70 percent thought that in November of 2002. Or, to take another example, an impression that there was a tight linkage and close partnership and cooperation between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, between the terrorist group al Qaeda, which did attack us, and Iraq which did not. And the impression that Saddam had a massive supply of weapons of mass destruction and that he was on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons, and that he was about to give nuclear weapons to the al Qaeda terrorist group, which would then use them against American cities. Also the impression was widely shared that Iraq would welcome our invading army with garlands of flowers. And even though the rest of the world opposed the war when it began, they would quickly fall in line after we won, and then they'd contribute lots of money and soldiers, so there wouldn't be a risk that our taxpayers would foot the whole bill. And, in any case, there would be more than enough money from Iraqi oil supplies which would flow in abundance quickly after the invasion -- we could use that money to offset expenses, and the net cost to America would be zero. The impression also was widespread was that the size of the force required would be relatively small and would not put a strain on our military or our reserves, and would not jeopardize other commitments we have around the world. Now, of course every single one of these impressions was wrong.

And, unfortunately, the consequences have been catastrophic for our country. And the plague of false impressions seem to settle on other policy debates as well. For example, in considering President Bush's gigantic tax cut, many somehow got the impression that first the majority of that tax cut would not go disproportionately to the wealthy but would go to the middle class; second, that it would not lead to large deficits, because it would stimulate the economy so much it would pay for itself; and, third, not only would there be no job losses, but we would have big increases in employment as a result. And of course, as everyone knows, here to every one of these impressions was completely wrong.

Now, last year I did not accuse the president of intentionally deceiving the American people, but rather noted the remarkable coincidence that all of his arguments turned out to be based on falsehoods. But since that time we have learned from information that has become public in a variety of ways that in virtually every case the president chose to ignore, and indeed often to suppress studies, reports, information, facts, that were directly contrary to the false impressions he was in the process of giving to the American people. In most every case he chose to reject information that was prepared for him by objective analysts and to rely instead on information that was prepared by sources of questionable reliability who had a private interest in the policy choice that the president was recommending -- a choice that was conflicted with the public interest. For example, when the president and his team were confidently asserting that Saddam Hussein had aluminum tubes that had been acquired in order to enrich uranium for atomic bombs, numerous experts at the Department of Energy and elsewhere in the intelligence community were certain that the information being presented to our country by the president was completely wrong. The true experts on uranium enrichment are at Oak Ridge, where most enrichment has taken place in the U.S., in my home state of Tennessee. They told me early on that in their opinion there was virtually zero possibility that the tubes in question were for the purpose of enrichment. And yet they received a directive at Oak Ridge forbidding them from making any public statement that disagreed with the assertions being made to the people by President Bush.

In another example, we now know that two months before the Iraq war began, President Bush received detailed and comprehensive secret reports warning him that the likely result of an American-led invasion of Iraq would be increased support for Islamic fundamentalism, deep divisions in Iraqi society, high levels of violent internal conflict and guerrilla warfare aimed at U.S. forces.

And yet in spite of those analyses, President Bush chose to suppress those warnings, conceal that information, and instead went right on conveying to the American people the absurdly Pollyanna-ish view of highly questionable and obviously biased sources like Ahmad Chalabi, the convicted felon and known swindler, who the Bush administration put on its payroll and gave a seat adjacent to First Lady Laura Bush at the State of the Union address, who they then flew into Baghdad on a military jet with a private security force, but then the following year decided was actually a spy for Iran who had been hoodwinking the president all along with phony facts and false predictions.

There is a growing tension between President Bush's portrait of the situation in which we find ourselves and the real facts on the ground. In fact, his entire agenda is collapsing around his ankles. Iraq is in flames, with a growing U.S. casualty rate and a growing prospect of a civil war, with the attendant chaos and risk of an Islamic fundamentalist state.

America's moral authority in the world has been severely damaged, and our ability to persuade others to follow our lead has virtually disappeared. The latest to announce they are beginning to withdraw from the coalition are Poland and Italy. (Scattered applause.) Our troops, because they are already bearing more than 90 percent of the burden borne by non-Iraqis, are stretched thin, under-supplied, and placed in intolerable situations without adequate equipment or training.

In the latest U.S.-sponsored public opinion survey of Iraqis, only 2 percent say they view our troops as liberators. More than 90 percent of Arab Iraqis have a hostile view of what they describe as an occupation.

Our friends in the Middle East, including most prominently Israel, have been placed in greater danger because of the policy blunders and sheer incompetence with which the civilian Pentagon officials have conducted this war.

This war in Iraq has become a recruiting bonanza for terrorists who use it as their most damning indictment of the United States and of U.S. policy. The massive casualties suffered by civilians in Iraq and the horrible TV footage of women and children being pulled dead or injured from the rubble of their homes, shown routinely and constantly on the Arab television stations throughout the Middle East, this has been a propaganda victory for Osama bin Laden beyond his wildest dreams. And it is tragic, and it was avoidable.

Moreover, America's honor and reputation have been severely damaged by President Bush's decision to authorize policies and legal hair-splitting that resulted in the widespread torture by U.S. soldiers and contractors of Iraqi citizens and others in facilities from Guantanamo to Afghanistan and elsewhere. Astonishingly and shamefully, investigators also found that more than 90 percent of those tortured and abused were completely innocent of any crime or wrongdoing whatsoever.

The prestigious Jaffe think tank in Israel released a devastating indictment just last week of how this misadventure in Iraq has been a deadly distraction from the crucial war on terror.

We now know from Paul Bremer, the person chosen by President Bush to be in charge of U.S. policy in Iraq immediately following the invasion, that he was repeatedly telling the White House that there were insufficient troops on the ground to make the policy a success.

And yet at the time Bremer was telling the White House his views, President Bush was simultaneously repeating -- repeatedly asserting to the American people that he was relying on those Americans in Iraq for his opinion -- confident opinion, of course -- that we had more than enough troops and no more were needed.

We now know from the Central Intelligence Agency that a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the likely consequences of the invasion accurately predicted the chaos, popular resentment and growing likelihood of civil war, and that this analysis was presented to the president and that other similar analyses were stacked in front of the president's team on the desk in the Cabinet Room in the White House, even as the president continued to confidently assure America that the aftermath of our invasion would be the speedy establishment of representative democracy and market capitalism by grateful Iraqis.

Now, most Americans have tended naturally to give the Bush-Cheney administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their failure to take any action in advance of 9/11 to prepare our nation against an attack. After all, we all know that hindsight always casts a harsh light on mistakes that could not be nearly as visible at the time those mistakes were made. And we all know that's true.

But with the benefit of all of the new studies and investigations that have been made public over the last year, it is now no longer clear that the administration deserves this act of political grace from the American people.

For example, we now know from the 9/11 commission that the chief law enforcement officer appointed by President Bush to be in charge of counterterrorism, John Ashcroft, was repeatedly asked by the FBI official in charge of protecting us against terrorism, repeatedly asked to pay attention to the many warning signs that were being picked up by the FBI throughout the summer of 2001.

Former FBI acting director Thomas J. Pickard, the man in charge of presenting these warnings to General Ashcroft, testified under oath that Ashcroft angrily told him he did not want to hear this information anymore and shut down the discussion.

Now, that is an affirmative action by the administration that's very different from simple negligence. That is an extremely serious error in judgment that constitutes a reckless disregard for the safety of the American people.

It is worth remembering that among the reports the FBI was receiving, that Ashcroft had ordered them not to show him anymore, was an expression of alarm in one field office that the nation ought to immediately check on the possibility that Osama bin Laden was having people trained in commercial flight schools around the U.S., and another from a field office warning that a potential terrorist was learning how to fly commercial airliners and yet had made it clear he had no interest in learning how to land.

And it was in this period of recklessly willful ignorance on the part of the attorney general that the CIA was also picking up unprecedented warnings that an attack on the United States by al Qaeda was imminent. In his famous phrase, George Tenet wrote that the system was "blinking red." It was in this context that the president himself was presented with a CIA report that carried a headline more alarming and more pointed than any I saw in eight years of six-days-a-week CIA briefings. The headline said, as many of you know, "Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S."

The only warnings of this nature that remotely resembled the one given to George Bush that I recall was about the so-called millennium threats predicted for the end of the year 1999, and somewhat less specific warnings about the dangers that might face the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. And in both cases, these warnings in the president's daily briefing were followed immediately, on the same day, by the beginning of urgent daily meetings in the White House of all the agencies and offices involved in preparing our nation to prevent the threatened attack.

By contrast, when President Bush received his fateful and historic warning of 9/11, he did not convene the National Security Council, did not bring together the FBI and CIA and other agencies with responsibility to protect the nation, and apparently did not even ask follow-up questions later about the warning.

The bipartisan 9/11 commission summarized, in its unanimous report, what happened. And I quote: "We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11th between the president and his advisors about the possibility of a threat of al Qaeda attack in the United States," end quote.

The commissioners went on to report that in spite of all the warnings to different parts of the administration, the nation's -- again, I quote -- "domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction and did not have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law authorities were not marshaled to augment the FBI's efforts. The public was not warned," end quote.

After the attack of 9/11, we know from the commission's report that within hours, Secretary Rumsfeld was busy attempting to find a way to link Saddam Hussein with 9/11.

We know the sworn testimony of the president's White House head of counterterrorism, Richard Clarke, that on the day after the attack, September 12th, and I quote from Clarke's account, "The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' I said, 'Mr. President, there's no connection.' He came back at me and said, "Iraq. Saddam. Find out if there's a connection.' We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. They all cleared the report, and we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the national security advisor or deputy. It got bounced and was sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. Do it again.' And I don't think he" -- I'm continuing the quote from Richard Clarke -- "I don't think he, the president, sees memos that he wouldn't like the answer," end quote. This was the day after the attack, and the president did not ask about Osama bin Laden. He did not ask Mr. Clarke, in any case, about al Qaeda. He did not ask about Saudi Arabia or any other country other than Iraq.

When Clark responded to that first question by saying that Iraq was not responsible for the attack and that al Qaeda was, the president persisted in focusing on Iraq. And again as Clarke spent his time on this day after the worst attack in the history of the United States on our soil -- to spend his time as the man in charge of counterterrorism in the White House, to spend his time trying to find a linkage between the attack and someone who had absolutely nothing to do with it. Again, this is not hindsight. This is the way the president was thinking at the time he was planning America's response to the attack. This was not an unfortunate misreading of the available evidence, causing a mistaken linkage between al Qaeda and Iraq. No, this was something else: a willful choice to make a specific linkage, whether evidence existed to support it or not. Think about that. Think about that, because whoever is elected on November 2nd will face other questions and we'll face other challenges and we'll have to make other difficult judgments about how to protect this nation.

Earlier this month we had an independent report of what information was presented on the alleged -- the impression of a linkage. Secretary Rumsfeld, who saw all of the intelligence available to President Bush that might bear on the alleged connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, finally admitted under tough repeated questioning from reporters, and I quote, "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two," end quote.

This is not negligence. When the administration is told specifically and repeatedly that there is no linkage, and simultaneously makes bold assertions in a confident manner to the American people that leave the impression with 70 percent of the country that Saddam Hussein was primarily responsible for the attack, this is deception. This is deception.

It is clear that President Bush has absolute faith in a rigid right-wing ideology and does not feel the same desire that many of us would in gathering facts relevant to the question at hand. He ignores the warning of his experts, he forbids any dissent, never tests his assumptions against the best available evidence. In fact, he is arrogantly out of touch with reality. He refuses to ever admit mistakes, which means that so long as he is our president we are doomed to repeat his mistakes! It is beyond incompetence! It is recklessness that risks the safety and security of the American people. We were told also that our allies would join in a massive coalition so that we would not bear the burden alone. And it's known by one and all now we are in fact bearing that burden -- more than 90 percent of those who are not Iraqis. And, as I mentioned, the second and third largest contingents in the non-American group have announced just this week that they will begin withdrawing soon after the U.S. election.

We were told by the president that war was his last choice. But it now clear from the newly available evidence that it was always his first preference. His former secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, confirmed that Iraq was topic A at the very first meeting of the Bush National Security Council just 10 days after the inauguration, and I quote: "It was about finding a way to do it." That was the tone of the president saying, "Go find me a way to do this."

His encounter was similar to Richard Clarke's. We the American people were told that the president would give the international system every opportunity to function, but we now know that he allowed that system to operate only briefly as a sop to his secretary of State and for cosmetic reasons. Bush promised that if he took us to war, it would be on the basis of the most carefully worked out plans. Instead, we now know, in sharp contrast to what he told us at the time, that he went to war virtually without thought, and certainly without preparation for the aftermath -- an aftermath that tragically has now claimed more than a thousand American lives and many multiples of that among the Iraqis. He now claims he went to war for humanitarian reasons. But the record shows he used that argument only after his first public rationale, that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction, completely collapsed.

He claimed that he was going to war in order to deal with an imminent threat to the United States. But again the evidence shows clearly that there was no such imminent threat, and that Bush knew that at the time -- or at least had been told that by those in the best position to know. He claims that gaining dominance of Iraqi oil fields for American producers was never part of his calculation. But we now know, from a document uncovered by the New Yorker magazine, and dated just two weeks to the day after Bush's inauguration, that his National Security Council was ordered to meld its review of operational policies toward rogue states with the secretive Cheney energy task force's, quote "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields," end quote.

We also know from documents obtained in discovery proceedings against that Cheney task force, by the odd combination of Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club that one of the documents that was receiving scrutiny by the task force during that same time period was a highly detailed map of Iraq -- showing none of the cities, none of the places where people lived, but showing in great detail the location of every single oil deposit known to exist in the country, with dotted lines demarking blocks for promising exploration -- a map which in the words of a Canadian journalists resembled a butcher's drawing of a steer with the prime cuts delineated by dotted lines.

We know that Cheney himself while heading Halliburton did more business with Iraq than any other nation, even though it was under U.N. sanctions at the time. And we know that Cheney stated in a public speech to the London Petroleum Institute in 1999 that over the coming decade the world will need, in his words, "50 million barrels a day of extra oil," and he asked, quote, "Where is it going to come from?" And answering his own question he said, "The Middle East" -- with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies.

In the spring of 2001, when Vice President Cheney issued the administration's national energy plan, the one that had been devised in secret by corporations and lobbyists that he still refuses to name, the report included a declaration, and I quote, "The Persian Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy." Remember, that in January -- or February of that same year that policy was directed to be melded with the policy toward rogue states like Iraq. Less than two months later, in July of 2001, in one of the more bizarre parts of Bush's policy process, Richard Perle, before he was forced to resign on conflict-of-interest charges as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, invited a presentation to the board by a Rand Corporation analyst who recommended that the U.S. consider military seizure of Saudi Arabia's oil fields. Now, the board certainly did not adopt that recommendation. But the cynical belief by some that oil played an outsized role in Bush's perception and policy toward Iraq was later enhanced when it became clear that the Iraqi Oil Ministry was the only facility in the entire country that was secured by our troops following the invasion. The Iraqi National Museum with its priceless archaeological treasures depicting the origins of human civilization; the electric, water and sewage facilities so crucial to maintaining a standard of living for Iraqi citizens during the occupation that was soon to begin; schools, hospitals and ministries of every kind -- all of those were left to the looters.

An extensive investigation published today in the Knight Ridder newspapers uncovers the astonishing truth that even as the invasion began there was quite literally no plan at all for the postwar period. Indeed, on the eve of war, when the formal presentation of America's plan to the military leaders and intelligence officers and others neared its conclusion, the slide describing President Bush's plan for the postwar phase, the Pentagon's plan for the postwar phase, was labeled "to be provided" -- literally -- because it simply did not exist.

We have also learned in today's Washington Post that at the same time the president was falsely asserting to the American people that he was making sure that he was providing all the equipment and supplies to the soldiers that their commanders said they needed, at that moment the top military commander in Iraq, General Sanchez, was pleading desperately -- and repeatedly -- for a response to his request for more equipment and more body armor, among other things, to protect the troops. And he wrote that under this situation the Army units he was commanding were "struggling just to maintain relatively low readiness rates." Even as late as three months ago, when the growing chaos and violence in Iraq was obvious to anyone watching the television news, President Bush went out of his way to demean the significance of a formal national intelligence estimate warning that his policy in Iraq was falling apart, and events were spinning out of control. Bush described this rigorous and formal analysis as, in his words, "just guessing."

If that's all the respect the president has for reports given to him by the CIA, then perhaps it explains why he completely ignored the warning he received on August 6th, 2001, that bin Laden was determined to attack our country. From all appearances, he never gave a second thought on that report until he finished reading My Pet Goat on September 11th.

Iraq is far from the only policy where the president has made bold assertions about the need for dramatic change in policy, change that he has said is mandated by controversial assertions differing radically from accepted views of reality in that particular policy area. And as with Iraq, there are many other cases where subsequently available information shows that the president did actually have analyses he was given at the time from reputable sources directly contrary to what he was telling the American people. And in virtually every case, the president, it is now evident, rejected the information that later turned out to be accurate, and instead chose to rely on and to forcefully present to the American people information that subsequently turned out to be false. And in every case, a flawed analysis was provided to him from sources that often had a direct interest, financial or otherwise, in the radically new policy that the president adopted. And in those cases where that policy has been implemented, the consequences have been to the detriment of the American people, often catastrophically so.

In other cases, the consequences still lie in the future but are, nonetheless, perfectly predictable for anyone who believes in the rule of reason. In yet other cases, the policies have not yet been implemented, but have been carefully designated by the president as priorities for the second term he has asked for from the American people. At the top of his list is the privatization of Social Security. Indeed, President Bush made it clear during his third debate with Senator Kerry that he intends to make privatizing Social Security a top priority if he has a second term. In a lengthy profile of President Bush published yesterday in the New York Times, the president was quoted by several top Republican fundraisers who were at the same meeting who said that the president told them that he intends to "come out strong," these are the president's words as they quoted him, that he "intends to come out strong after my swearing in with" -- he mentioned a few things and then said, "privatizing Social Security." President Bush asserts, again without any corroborating evidence, that the diversion of $2 trillion worth of payroll taxes presently paid into the Social Security Trust Fund will not result in any need to make up that $2 trillion from some other source, and will not result in cutting Social Security benefits to current retirees or raising taxes, but the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, run by a Republican appointee, is one of many respected reality-based organizations that have concluded that the president is completely wrong in making that assertion. The president has been given facts and figures clearly demonstrating to any reasonable person that the assertion is wrong, and yet he continues to make it.

Now, the proposal for diverting money out of the Social Security Trust Fund into private accounts would generate large fees for financial organizations that have advocated the radical new policy, and have provided President Bush with the ideologically based argument in its favor, and have made massive campaign contributions to Bush and Cheney.

One of the things willfully ignored by Bush is the certainty of catastrophic consequences for the tens of millions of retirees who depend on Social Security benefits and who might well lose 25 to 40 percent of their benefits under his proposal. Their expectation for a check each month to pay their bills is reality-based. The president's reckless proposal is not.

Similarly, the president's vigorous and relentless advocacy of medical savings accounts, a radical change in the Medicare program, would, according to all serious financial analysts, have the same effect on Medicare that his privatization proposal would have on Social Security, and deprive Medicare of a massive amount of money that it must have in order to continue paying medical bills for Medicare recipients. The president's ideologically based proposal originated with another large campaign contributor, a company called Golden Rule that expects to make a huge amount of money from managing private medical savings accounts.

He's also mangled the Medicare program with another radical new proposal you know about on Medicare drug policy, this one prepared by the major pharmaceutical companies, also large campaign contributors, also who presented the policy to the president and it is a policy contrary to the public interest. Information they have given, again, turns out to be completely and totally false. Indeed, the Bush appointee in charge of Medicare was secretly ordered, we now know after the fact, to withhold from the Congress the truth about the president's proposal, and it's real cost, until the Congress had finished considering and voting on the proposal. When a number of Congressmen balked at supporting the proposal, the president's henchmen violated the rules of Congress by holding the 15-minute vote open for more than two hours while they brazenly attempted to bribe and intimidate members of Congress who had initially voted against the president, and forced them to change their votes in sufficient numbers to cause it narrowly pass.

The House Ethics Committee, as you know, in an all too rare slap on the wrist, took formal action against Tom DeLay for his unethical behavior during this episode. But, for the Bush team it is all part of the same pattern, falsehood, intimidation, bullying, suppression of the truth, present lobbyist memos as the gospel truth, and collect money for the next campaign.

In the case of the global climate crisis, Bush has publicly demeaned the authors of official scientific reports, by scientists in his administration, that underscore the extreme danger facing the U.S. and the world. And instead, has preferred a crackpot analysis financed by the largest oil company on the planet, Exxon-Mobile. He even went so far as to censor elements of an EPA report dealing with global warming, and substitute in the official government report language from the crackpot Exxon-Mobile report. The consequences of accepting Exxon-Mobile's advice, that is to do nothing to counter global warming, are almost literally unthinkable.

Just in the last few weeks scientists have reached newer and stronger consensuses that global warming is increasing the destructive power of hurricanes by as much as one half of one full category on the one to five scale typically used by forecasters. So in Florida a hurricane hitting in the future that would have been a category three in the past, will on average become a category four hurricane. Is that important, Mr. President? Scientists around the world are also alarmed by what appears to be an increase in the rate of CO2 build up in the atmosphere, a development which if confirmed in subsequent years, could signal the beginning of an extremely dangerous runaway greenhouse effect.

Yet, a third group has just reported that the melting of ice in Antarctica, 95 percent of all the ice in the world, has dramatically accelerated. Yet, President Bush continues to rely for his scientific advice on global warming on the one company that most stands to benefit by delaying a recognition of reality.

The same dangerous dynamic has led the president to reject the recommendations of anti-terrorism experts, to increase domestic security, because they're opposed by large contributors in the chemical industry, the hazardous materials industry, and the nuclear industry. Even though his own Coast Guard recommends increased port security, he has chosen, instead, to reject the recommendation, relying on information provided to him by the commercial interests managing the ports, who don't want the expense and inconvenience of implementing new security measures.

The same pattern that produced America's catastrophe in Iraq has also produced a catastrophe for our domestic economy. So President Bush's distinctive approach, and habit of mind, is clearly recognizable. He asserted over and over again that his massive tax cut would not primarily benefit the wealthy, would stimulate jobs, would increase economic growth. Now, we face the largest deficits in the history of our nation. Simultaneously we face the largest trade deficit and current account deficits in our history.

He asserted that under no circumstances would such deficits appear, even though commonsense led most everyone else to conclude that it certainly would. He asserted confidently that what has happened in the job market, with massive job losses would not occur. And yet, just as he relied on private analysis in Iraq, from people who had self-interest, he here relied on high net worth individuals and organizations representing them who stood to gain the most from the lopsided tax proposal, and chose their analysis over that of respected economists.

As was the case with Iraq policy, the administration actively suppressed the publication of facts and figures from his own Treasury Department analysts, that were inconveniently in conflict with his own. As a result of this pattern, the president and the Congress adopted the plan, and now the consequences are clear. We've completely dissipated the $5 trillion surplus that had been projected, and now we have a projected $3-1/2 trillion deficit. We would have been able to assist the nation in dealing with the impending retirement of the baby-boom generation, but instead this tremendous projected deficit will make it much more difficult for us to deal with the same period. The largest absolute deficits ever experienced.

So the pattern is very clear. It is not based in religion, it is based in ideology. Indeed, after four years of this policy, a time in which the president has had complete control of the legislative branch of government, and a majority or dominance in the judicial branch of government, the consequences speak for themselves. For the first time since the presidency of Herbert Hoover we have had a net loss of jobs. It's true that 9/11 occurred during this period, but it's also true that economists quantify its economic impact as small compared with the impact of Bush's policies. Under other presidents we have absorbed other disasters, Pearl Harbor, World War II, the Vietnam War, and others, corrections like the one in 1987, and still ended up with a net gain of jobs. Only Bush ranks with Hoover.

Confronted with this devastating indictment of a net loss of jobs, Treasury Secretary John Snow said last week in Ohio said that the job loss was a myth, and this is in keeping with the Bush team's general contempt for reality as a basis for policy. Unfortunately, that job loss is all too real for the more than 200,000 people in Ohio, where he called their job loss a myth.

In yesterday's New York Times, Ron Suskind related a truly startling conversation with a White House official who was angry that he had written an article in 2002 that the White House didn't like. And this senior advisor to Bush told Suskind that reporters like him live, "in what we called the reality-based community." And he denigrated such people for believing that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. He went on to say, that's not the way the world really works anymore, when we act we create our own reality, and while you're studying that reality, judiciously as you will, we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, he said, and you, all of you will be left to just study what we do.

By failing to adjust their policies to unexpected realities, they have made it difficult to carry out any of their policies competently. Indeed, this is the answer to what some have regarded as a mystery, how could a team so skilled in politics be so fumbling and incompetent when it comes to policy. The truth is that the same insularity and zeal that makes him effective at smash mouth politics, makes him terrible at governing. The Bush-Cheney administration is a rarity in American history, it is simultaneously dishonest and incompetent.

Not coincidentally the first audits of the massive sums flowing through the U.S. authorities in Iraq now show, not only with money appropriated by Congress, but also from the Iraqi oil revenues, that billions of dollars have disappeared with absolutely no record of where it went, to whom, for what, or when. And charges of massive corruption are now widespread.

Just as the appointment of industry lobbyists to key positions in agencies that oversee their former employers result in a kind of institutionalized corruption and the abandonment of law enforcement and regulations at home, the outrageous decision to brazenly violate the law in granting sole-source no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars to Vice President Cheney's company Halliburton, which still pays him money every year, has convinced many observers that incompetence, cronyism and corruption have played a significant role in undermining U.S. policy in Iraq.

The former four-star general in charge of Central Command, Tony Zinni, named by President Bush as his personal emissary to the Middle East in 2001, offered this view of the situation in his recent book: Quote, "In the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility; at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption; false rationales presented as a justification, a flawed strategy, lack of planning, the unnecessary alienation of our allies, the underestimation of the task, the unnecessary distraction from real threats, and the unbearable strain dumped on our overstretched military. All of these caused me," he said, "to speak out, and I was called a traitor and a turncoat by civilian Pentagon officials." Massive incompetence, endemic corruption, official justification for torture, wholesale abuse of civil liberties, arrogance masquerading as principle -- these are new, unfamiliar and unpleasant realities for the United States of America. We hardly recognize our country when we look in the mirror of what Jefferson called the "opinion of humankind." How could we have come to this point?

America was founded on the principle that all just power is derived from the consent of the governed, and our Founders assumed that in the process of giving their consent the governed would be informed by free and open discussion of the relevant facts in a healthy and robust public forum. But for Bush-Cheney administration the will to power has become its own justification. This explains Bush's lack of reverence for democracy itself. The widespread efforts by Bush's political allies to suppress voting have reached epidemic proportions.

Some of the scandals of Florida four years ago are now being repeated in broad daylight, even as we meet here today. Harpers magazine reports in an article published today that tens of thousands of registered voters unjustly denied their right to vote four years ago have still not been allowed back on the rolls.

An increasing number of Republicans, including veterans of the Reagan White House, and even including the father of the conservative movement, are now openly expressing dismay over the epic failures of the Bush presidency.

Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a veteran of both the Heritage Foundation and the Reagan White House, wrote recently in Salon.com, and I quote, "Seriously conservatives must fear for the country if Bush is reelected. Based on the results" -- (applause) -- He went on to write, "Based on the results of his presidency, a Bush victory would be catastrophic. Conservatives," he went on, "should choose principles over power." He seemed most concerned about Bush's unhealthy habits of mind, saying, and I quote again, "He does not appear to reflect on his actions, and seems unable to concede even the slightest mistake. Nor is he willing to hold anyone else responsible for anything. It is," he concluded, "a damning combination," end quote. Bandow described the Bush foreign policy as, and I quote, "a shambles, with Iraq aflame and America increasingly reviled by friend and foe alike." The conservative co-host of "Cross-Fire," Tucker Carlson, said about Bush's Iraq policy, and I quote, "I think it is a total nightmare and disaster, and I am ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting him."

William F. Buckley, Jr., widely acknowledged as the founder of the modern conservative movement in America, wrote of the Iraq war, and I quote, "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

A former Republican governor of Minnesota, Elmer Andersen, announced in Minneapolis that for the first time in his life he was abandoning the Republican Party in this election because Bush and Cheney, in his words, "believe their own spin. Both men spew outright untruths with evangelistic fervor," end quote. He attributed his switch to President Bush's, quote, "misguided and blatantly false misrepresentations of the threat of weapons of mass destruction. The terrorist seat," he said, "was Afghanistan. Iraq had no connection to this act of terror, was not a serious threat to the United States, as this president claimed, and there was no relation, it is now obvious, to any serious weaponry." Governor Andersen was also offended, he said, by Bush's, quote, "phony posturing as cocksure leader of the free world," period, end quote.

Now, Andersen and many other Republicans are joining with Democrats and millions of independents this year in proudly supporting the Kerry-Edwards ticket. In every way, John Kerry and John Edwards represent an approach to governing that is the opposite of the Bush-Cheney approach. Where Bush remains out of touch, Kerry is a proud member of the reality-based community. Where Bush will bend to his corporate backers, Kerry stands strongly with the public interest.

My friends, there are now 15 days left before our country makes this fateful choice for us and the whole world, and it is particularly crucial for one final reason: the last feature of Bush's ideology involves ducking accountability for his mistakes. He has neutralized accountability by the Congress by intimidating the Republican leadership and transforming the Republican majority into a true rubber stamp, unlike any that has ever existed in American history. He has appointed right-wing judges who have helped to insulate him from accountability in the courts. And if he wins again, he will likely get to appoint up to four Supreme Court justices. He has ducked accountability from the press with his obsessive secrecy and refusal to conduct the public's business openly. So there is now only one center of power left in our Constitution and in our country capable of at long last holding George W. Bush accountable, and it is you, the voters. There are 15 days left. Help me and help John Kerry and John Edwards take our country back. Thank you.

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Works vs. Words

Why abortion rate is up in Bush years
By GLEN HAROLD STASSEN and GARY KRANE

I, Glen, am a Christian ethicist, and trained in statistical analysis. I am consistently pro-life. My son David is one witness. For my family, "pro-life" is personal. My wife caught rubella in the eighth week of her pregnancy. We decided not to terminate, to love and raise our baby. David is legally blind and severely handicapped; he also is a blessing to us and to the world. Gary Krane is an investigative journalist.

We look at the fruits of political policies more than words. We analyzed the data on abortion during the Bush presidency. There is no single source for this information -- federal reports go only to the year 2000, and many states do not report -- but we found enough data to identify trends. Our findings are disturbing.

Abortion was decreasing. When President Bush took office, the nation's abortion rates were at a 24-year low, after a 17.4 percent decline during the 1990s. This was a steady decrease averaging 1.7 percent per year. (The data come from Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life using the Guttmacher Institute's studies.)

Enter George W. Bush in 2001. One would expect the abortion rate to continue its consistent course downward, if not plunge. Instead, the opposite happened.

We found four states that have posted three-year statistics: Kentucky's increased by 3.2 percent from 2000 to 2003. Michigan's increased by 11.3 percent from 2000 to 2003. Pennsylvania's increased by 1.9 percent from 1999 to 2002. Colorado's rates skyrocketed 111 percent. We found 12 additional states that reported statistics for 2001 and 2002. Eight states saw an increase in abortion rates (14.6 percent average increase), and four saw a decrease (4.3 percent average).

Under Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed. Given the trends of the 1990s, 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction.

For anyone familiar with why most women have abortions, this is no surprise:

Two-thirds of women who have abortions cite "inability to afford a child" as their primary reason (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life). In the Bush presidency, unemployment rates increased half again. Not since Herbert Hoover had there been a net loss of jobs during a presidency until the current administration. Average real incomes decreased, and for seven years the minimum wage has not been raised to match inflation. With less income, many prospective mothers fear another mouth to feed.

Half of all women who abort say they do not have a reliable mate. And men who are jobless usually do not marry. In the 16 states, there were 16,392 fewer marriages than the year before, and 7,869 more abortions. As male unemployment increases, marriages fall and abortion rises.

Women worry about health care for themselves and their children. Since 5.2 million more people have no health insurance now than before this presidency -- with women of childbearing age overrepresented in those 5.2 million -- abortion increases.

My wife and I know -- as does my son David -- that doctors, nurses, hospitals, medical insurance, special schooling and parental employment are crucial for a special child. David attended the Kentucky School for the Blind, as well as schools for children with cerebral palsy and other disabilities. He was mainstreamed in public schools as well. We have two other sons and five grandchildren, and we know that every mother, every father and every child needs public and family support.

What does this tell us? Economic policy and abortion are not separate issues; they form one moral imperative. Rhetoric is hollow, mere tinkling brass, without health care, insurance, jobs, child care and a living wage. Pro-life in deed, not merely in word, means we need a president who will do something about jobs, health insurance and support for mothers.

Glen Stassen is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, in Pasadena, Calif. He can be e-mailed at gstassen@fuller.edu.

Krane is an independent investigative journalist in Philadelphia.Readers can write to him at 151 Tulpehocken, Philadelphia, PA 19144 or Coordinator@FairElections.us.

Perry Florida

October 7, 2004
Bombing the Panhandle
Fighting the Pentagon in Rural Florida

By BRUCE K. GAGNON

JI have just returned from a one-day trip to Perry, Florida to speak to a gathering of concerned citizens who are organizing to stop the placement of a new bombing range in their rural community. It was one of the most inspiring trips that I have ever made.

Perry is up in the Florida panhandle, just south of the capital city of Tallahassee. The region is called the nature coast as Taylor county touches the Gulf of Mexico and has several key rivers that run through its pine tree forests to the gulf. The county has a relatively small population as Florida goes and that is one reason the Pentagon sees it as a good place to put a bombing range.

There is a bombing range already in the region, just further west at Eglin AFB near Ft Walton Beach. I lived there while in high school when my father was stationed at Eglin and I hiked through the middle of the bombing range as an explorer scout. It is one of the largest military bases in the nation but population has grown near the base to the point where the noise from the bombing range has begun to draw complaints. Most recently the Mother of all Bombs (MOAB) was tested at Eglin. The MOAB is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever created that creates a mushroom cloud and shockwaves similar to a small nuclear explosion.

Rural Taylor County already has huge problems. The Buckeye paper mill has been contaminating the Fenholloway River that flows into the Gulf. Long ago classified as an industrial river, it is essentially dead and dumps toxic pollution into the Gulf. Groundwater contamination in Perry has long been a result and one local activist, Joy Towles Ezell, has been working to organize people in their company controlled town for years. Joy is a fifth generation Taylor County resident who has now taken on the military over the bombing range.

I met Joy years ago when I worked for the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice. We tried to support her work around the paper mill and she supported our efforts to alert people when cruise missiles were fired from Navy ships in the Gulf that flew over the panhandle and then crashed into the Eglin bombing range. Before the meeting Tuesday night Joy showed me a letter she wrote to then Gov. Lawton Chiles in 1991 on our behalf protesting the cruise missile tests. Years later when I organized a 700-mile Walk for the Earth from the Everglades to Tallahassee we camped on her land outside of Perry and held a rally at the paper mill. My son had a great time riding one of her prized mules while we were there.

Fifty local residents gathered Tuesday night in the back room at the Chaparral restaurant. The first thing Joy did when we arrived was make two of us go out front and put up on the portable advertising sign the words "Don't Bomb Nature Coast Meeting 7:00 pm" just below the words "Country Buffet."

The first speaker was Dr. Ronald Saff from Florida State University in Tallahassee who is an expert on coal fired power plant pollution. In addition to the paper mill and the bombing range, there are also plans to build a coal power plant in Taylor County. The decision has been made to turn the county into a wasteland, a sacrifice area.

Taylor County is your basic southern, rural, conservative place. People vote Republican and they don't take to outsiders very well. They don't do radical politics either. That is what made the meeting Tuesday night so special.

These 50 folks who gathered were retired school teachers, good church goers, the local industrial development officer, well dressed, quiet and concerned. One of them, a refined southern woman, Republican and Episcopalian, had been in the group that the Air Force recently flew to Eglin so they could see how nice the bombing range looked. The Taylor County delegation was promised that depleted uranium would not be used in their county. Joy was not invited to go along on the trip.

The Eglin AFB bombing range has been testing depleted Uranium (DU) and since 1973 over 220,000 pounds of DU penetrators were expended there. Cruise missiles that crashed on the Eglin range carried DU as ballast in the nose cones in place of a warhead. After so-called "clean-up" a public health assessment at Eglin estimates that 90-95% of the DU remains in the soil.

People in Taylor County have been told that cruise missiles will be tested over their heads and that the weapons will circle around in Alabama and come back to the proposed bombing range to crash land. The military "needs" the Taylor County range they say because they need to practice flying cruise missiles off ships in the Gulf of Mexico. The Pentagon has been telling the residents that the tests are practice for "missile defense" as part of homeland security. A pro-bombing range group called "Citizens for Homeland Security" has been set up but residents say it is just a couple of those who are involved in the money trail behind the bombing range and the coal plant.

I told the residents that it was time to redefine the term "homeland security." I asked how secure they were when their water, air and land was becoming so contaminated that they future generations could not live there? I also told them cruise missiles were first-strike, sneak attack weapons that have nothing to do with "defense." I told them cruise missiles are part of a preemptive military policy that violates international law. I asked them how they'd feel if another country launched sneak attack weapons onto the U.S.?

The local Rotary Club has been offered a gift of $10,000 if they will support the bombing range. The county government has been offered $40 million. Local hunters have been promised continued access to the range so they can hunt deer and wild boar on the land. In spite of all that the local residents are organizing and have forced a non-binding referendum on the question on the November ballot. They think they will win the vote but fear the county will agree to the range anyway.

The folks have yard signs, buttons, bumperstickers and will have a booth at the up-coming forest service "Forest Festival" and draws 20,000 from the region. They keep letters to the editor flowing into their local paper in order to combat new rumors put out by the military.

The meeting ended with Joy calling Vieques, Puerto Rico and getting one of the leaders of their long and successful campaign to close down the military bombing range on their beautiful island. I can't describe the feeling to listen to Robert Rabin as Joy held the microphone up to her cell phone. I looked around the room at the people as they deeply listened as Robert told the story how the Navy dropped a bomb on a Navy building killing one of their own security guards. A moan went through the room like a knife through the heart. The Taylor County community had been promised by the military that they never have accidents. It was incredible to hear Robert use the word love a dozen times to describe the core of their campaign against the Navy and how they used non-violent civil disobedience. The people just listened and after his 15 minute talk they applauded with great vigor.

There is nothing like life experience to change people. The folks in Taylor County are changing rapidly. One woman, a life long Christian and good Republican, told me she'd never vote for another Republican again. (I couldn't help but think how stupid the Bush administration is to bring this bombing range issue up right before the November election in a state where EVERY VOTE really counts.)

At the end of the meeting the people asked me two things. What more can we do and do you think we can win? I told them that the people in Vieques won because they became a "pain in the ass" and they had to do the same. I also told them they could not do this alone, that they needed to send folks out around the state to educate others about the issue. I acknowledged two people in the audience from the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice (John Linnehan from Jacksonville and Bob Tancig from Gainesville. Bob is the new director of the organization. John had picked me up at the Jacksonville airport and drove me to Perry.) They pledged the support of the Florida Coalition.

I urge others to send a message of solidarity to Joy and the folks in Taylor County. They could use some encouragement and some hope. I know they have just given me a bunch of it. You can reach Joy Towles Ezell at hope@gtcom.net

This is how America will change.

Bruce K. Gagnon is Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He can be reached at: globalnet@mindspring.com

Weekend Edition Features for September 18 / 19, 2004

Sign Here Kid

Thursday 14th October 2004 :
"Sign Here Kid"

by Mike Ferner

Veterans For Peace Newsletter, Fal 2004

http://www.veteransforpeace.org/news/Newsletter-Fall2004-web.pdf

He trolled for teenagers in North Carolina high schools, barked orders at recruits in boot camp, and pulled charred civilian corpses out of cars in Iraq. Now Jimmy Massey is making good on his promise to tell the whole world what he learned as a Marine. For the first ten years, Massey loved being in the USMC.

With a quick mind and an easy manner he and his superiors knew he?d make a great recruiter. And by the luck of the draw, he was assigned to the area around Asheville, NC, not far from where he grew up.

"It was an advantage being a recruiter in this area. I understand the mentality of mountain people. When we?d talk about topics like the economy and industry around here, I knew what people were talking about. And too, people here usually don?t open up to strangers."

Contrary to what some believe, Marine Corps recruiters don?t get paid commissions for going over quota, the 32 year-old former Staff Sergeant explained. "My monthly quota was three in the summer and two in the winter. You could get five one month, but still go from hero to zero next month when you started over again." Recruiters do get Special Duty Assignment pay "an extra $475 a month, when I was in," he said, to offset the higher cost of living in the civilian economy. "An E-5 recruiter would make about $1500 every two weeks including SDA pay. But being a recruiter is expensive.

There?s extra costs, like taking a guy to Hooters for some wings. The government gives me a credit card but it?s in my name, and the bill comes to me. I have to pay it and then get reimbursed." "You have to have a nice car, you can?t go rolling down the street in some old family wagon. You can?t be talkin? to a kid about financial stability and drivin? an old Ford Ranger."

Massey drove a Mustang, and Army recruiters he knew drove "decked-out Expeditions with 20-inch rims." And not just a fat ride, he added, "You have to have a little ?bling? (gold, jewelry, etc.) on you...that kind of thing. I made sure I always dressed nice when I was off duty. You gotta play the part. Young kids are really materialistic minded."

Often the biggest enticement a recruiter can offer young men and women trying to escape poverty is the promise of job training. Conversely, not getting the job a recruiter "guarantees" can be a source of real discontent among the troops. "The Marine Corps can guarantee you a job all day long," Massey said, "but that doesn?t mean you?re going to actually get it." "There?s a whole network within the community to enable recruiters to make their quotas, the sheriff?s department, police department, schools...all the way up to the local congressional office."

"A recruiter is like a private eye," Massey said. "They know everything about the kids they?re recruiting." For example, he learned the names of virtually every graduating high school senior in his seven-county district-about 1,000 youngsters annually in that largely rural area.

And high school students weren?t the only people he got to know well. "We knew the names of the District Attorneys in every county, and went to them to get certain things [charges] reduced or dismissed on kids we were recruiting."

Massey explained the Marines? Systematic Recruiting method that includes use of a working file of Prospective Applicant Cards on which information is routinely entered. "I?d put all the information down that I knew...maybe Johnny Smith had some problems with the law. That?s when I?d go to the D.A. and ask if Johnny was salvageable. If he was, I?d tell the D.A., ?well I talked with Johnny and he?s thinking of going into the Marine Corps.? More likely than not the response would be, ?Oh yeah? Well, that?s just great!?

While the "Systematic Recruiting" method concentrated on a kid?s social weaknesses, it might ignore a potentially life-threatening medical condition, say, asthma. "I?d ask an applicant concerned about his asthma if he uses an inhaler. If he answered ?yes,? I?d tell him that if he controlled it with an inhaler then he really didn?t have it. Then I?d tell him to give me 10 pushups. If he did that with no trouble, I?d say, ?See, you don?t have asthma!?" By 2000, his last year as a recruiter, Jimmy Massey got "...tired of lying. I felt like I was close to a nervous breakdown. I was diagnosed with major depression and put on medication. I wrote a letter to my commanding officer about how Marine Corps recruiting should be more ethical."

The Recruiter Instructor who once monitored Massey?s work, told him he thought it was one of the best statements anyone had ever written about recruiting practices. Massey decided to quit being a recruiter, but also to reenlist to get back to "the regular Marine Corps duty" he enjoyed.

Soon he felt "good enough to get off anti-depressants." Then came his orders to northern Kuwait, and within two months, he was invading Iraq with 130,000 other U.S. troops. As they made their way north towards Baghdad, through the towns of Safwan and Basra, Massey said his unit?s "main job was to set up roadblocks. We had permission to fire on anyone who got through them. In one 48-hour period, we killed over 30 civilians. We just ?lit ?em up? with gunfire. But when we went to pull the charred corpses out of the cars we never found any weapons. They were just civilians. I could start feeling the depression come back. I knew what it was from."

In a meeting one day his Lieutenant asked if he was feeling okay, and Massey replied "No. We?re committing genocide, and leaving enough depleted uranium around to continue genocidal activity for a long time." "Do you really believe that," the LT asked? "Yes," replied Massey, "or I wouldn?t have said it." At that point, Massey knew his career in the Marine Corps was over. Two months after the invasion, Massey was sent to a Navy psychiatrist in Kerbala, Iraq, rediagnosed with major depression, and PTSD, and told that he would be medevac?d out. Since his honorable, medical discharge from the Corps, Jimmy Massey has been applying the hard lessons of war to the cause of peace. He is a founding member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, and has started writing a book about his experiences. When asked what advice he would give to a teenager when visiting a military recruiter, Massey thought a moment and answered, "Take a veteran with you to the recruiter. We?re never going to stop that kid bound and determined to play Rambo, but getting the facts out, educating kids.. that?s why I keep speaking out."

Indeed, Massey put the Marines on notice just before he left. Speaking to a Colonel he pledged that, "the moment I get out of here, I?m going to tell the whole world what I?ve learned."

by : Mike Ferner
Thursday 14th October 2004

Primus Inter Pares

???What kind of man do I expect President Kerry to be?

Well, let me first state what I don't expect. I don't expect him to be a Miracle Man, nor am I looking for the Music Man. I don't even want him to be a Man for all Seasons.

What I am looking for is a President that is ?primus inter pares?--the first among equals. By which I mean that he will surround himself with individuals who are equally expert in their fields of expertise, not a coterie of self-serving, manipulative, private-interest sycophants.
Since President Kerry's expertise has been primarily in the legal arena, both as a law-enforcement executive and a law-maker, I expect a heavy emphasis on law enforcement and order--not the kind of law enforcement that harasses individuals, but the kind that is focused on creating and maintaining an orderly society. Moreover, since the agents of the greatest dis-order are often governmental agencies and corporations, I expect the focus of the executive to be on those segments of society. Presumably, local law enforcement agencies, with a little federal assistance, will be able to deal with less wide-ranging criminal activities.
On the international level, I expect the new President's respect for the law to carry over into his co-operation with other countries who share our concern for behavior that conforms itself to internationally-recognized law. And I expect that the violators of international law, including, among others, the Geneva Conventions, will be apprehended and dealt with according to the judgement of the courts.
Indeed, I expect that respect for the individual, for other nations and for the principles on which our government is based will be the hallmark of the Kerry presidency. That will do much to restore our reputation among the other nations with whom we share this globe. But, it won't happen all at once. There's a long row to hoe

Bishop John Spong

One doesn?t think of long-serving bishops as being on the cutting edge of the church. A bitter joke says the reason three bishops lay their hands on a new one is not to pass on the Holy Spirit, but to remove the new bishop?s spine. If that were true, the operation was a singular failure in the case of John Shelby Spong.

An Essay by John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey 

The Republican Convention in New York City forced me to face the fact that my feelings about the Bush Administration have reached a visceral negativity, the intensity of which surprises even me. So I decided to search introspectively to identify its source. Is it simply runaway partisanship? That is certainly how it sounds to many who make that charge publicly, but that has not been my history. I did not react this way to other Republican presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford or Reagan. My feelings are quite specifically Bush related.

I first became aware of them in 1988 when George H. W. Bush's campaign employed the Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis. This dirty trick was successful and the insinuation entered the body politic that to be the governor of a multi-racial state where all were treated fairly meant that you favored freeing black criminals to commit murder. Lee Atwater, mentor of Karl Rove, devised that campaign. The Willie Horton episode said to me that these people believed that no dishonest tactic was to be avoided if it helped your candidate to victory.

The next manifestation of this mentality came in the South Carolina primary in George W. Bush's campaign in 2000, when the patriotism of John McCain was viciously attacked. It appeared that five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam was not sufficient to prove one's loyalty to America. The third episode came when the operatives of this administration destroyed Georgia's Senator Max Cleland in 2002, by accusing him of being soft on national security, despite the fact that this veteran had lost three of his limbs in the service of his country. Each of these attacks brought defeat to its victims but they also brought defeat to truth and integrity.

In 2004 we have seen the pattern repeated. John Kerry, a veteran who served with honor and distinction in Vietnam was told in countless surrogate ads that his service was not worthy and that his three purple hearts and his Silver Star for heroism were cheaply won. For a candidate who ducked military service by securing a preferential appointment to the Texas National Guard,part of which was served in Alabama, this takes gall indeed.

Then Senator Zell Miller, his face contorted with anger, recited a litany of weapons systems that he said Senator Kerry had opposed. What he failed to say was that most of these military cuts were recommended by a Secretary of Defense named Richard Cheney in the first Bush Administration! The last time I looked, the Ten Commandments still included an injunction against bearing false witness.

Yes, other campaigns bend the truth but these tactics go beyond just bending, they assassinate character and suggest traitorous behavior. When that is combined with the fact that this party does this while proclaiming itself the party of religion, cultural values and faith-based initiatives is the final straw for me. I experience the religious right as a deeply racist enterprise that seeks to hide its intolerance under the rhetoric of super patriotism and "family values." For those who think that this is too strong a charge or too out of bounds politically, I invite you to look at the record.

It was George H. W. Bush who gave us Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, calling him "the most qualified person in America." Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall, who had been the legal hero to black Americans during the struggle over segregation. Clarence Thomas, the opponent of every governmental program that made his own life possible, is today an embarrassment to blacks in America. To appoint a black man to do the racist work against blackpeople is demonic. Consistent with that pattern, this administration entered an amicus brief against the University of Michigan's Law School because in the quest for a representative student body that Law School used race as one factor in determining admissions. The strange 'Orwellian' rhetoric again was deceiving. "We want America to be a nation where race is not counted for anything and all are to be judged on merit alone." Those are fair sounding words until one factors in centuries of slavery and segregation, or the quality of public education in urban America which just happens to be predominantly black. Next one cannot help noticing the concerted Republican effort to limit black suffrage in many states like Florida where it has been most overt, and to deny the power of the ballot to all the citizens of Washington, D.C. Does anyone doubt that the people of Washington have no vote for any other reason than that they are overwhelmingly black?

Only when I touched these wells of resentment, did I discover how deeply personal my feelings are about the Bushes. I grew up in the southern, religious world they seek to exploit. I went to a church that combined piety with segregation, quoted the Bible to keep women in secondary positions, and encouraged me to hate both my enemies and other religions, especially Jews. It taught me that homosexual people choose their lifestyle because they are either mentally sick or morally depraved. I hear these same definitions echoed in the pious phrases of those who want to "defend marriage against the gay onslaught." Are the leaders of this party the only educated people who seem not to know that their attitudes about homosexuality are uninformed? People no more choose their sexual orientation than they choose to be left-handed! To play on both ignorance and fear for political gain is a page lifted right out of the racial struggle that shaped my region. Racism simply hides today under new pseudonyms.

I lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, before Jerry Falwell rose to national prominence. He was a race baiting segregationist to his core. Liberty Baptist College began as a segregation academy. Super patriot Falwell condemned Nelson Mandela as a 'communist' and praised the apartheid regime in South Africa as a 'bulwark for Christian civilization.' I have heard Pat Robertson attack the movement to give equality to women by referring to feminists as Lesbians who want to destroy the family, while quoting the Bible to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. The homophobic rhetoric that spews so frequently out of the mouths of these "Jesus preaching" right-wingers has been mentioned time and again as factors that encourage hate crimes.

I am aware that the former Chief Justice Roy Moore of Alabama, famous for his attempt to place a three-ton monument of the Ten Commandments in his Montgomery courthouse to the delight of southern preachers, is on record as saying that homosexuality is inherently evil."

I lived through the brutality that greeted the civil rights movement in the South during its early days. Congressman John Lewis of Atlanta can tell you what it means to be beaten into unconsciousness on a "freedom ride." I remember the names of Southerners who covered their hate-filled racism with the blanket of religion to enable them to win the governors' mansions in the deep South: John Patterson and George Wallace in Alabama, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, Orville Faubus in Arkansas, Mills Godwin in Virginia and Strom Thurmond in South Carolina. I know the religious dimensions of North Carolina that kept Jesse Helms in the Senate for five terms. Now we have learned that Strom Thurmond, who protected segregation in the Senate when he could not impose it by winning the presidency in 1948, also fathered a daughter by an underage black girl. I know that Congressman Robert Barr of Georgia, who introduced the Defense of Marriage Act in 1988, has been married three times. I know that Pat Robertson's Congressman in Norfolk, Ed Schrock, courted religious votes while condemning homosexual people until he was outed as a gay man and was forced to resign his seat.

I know that the bulk of the voters from the Religious Right today are the George Wallace voters of yesterday, who simply transformed their racial prejudices and called them "family values." That mentality is now present in this administration. It starts with the President, embraces the Attorney General John Ashcroft and spreads out in every direction.

I have known Southern mobs that have acted in violence against black people while couching that violence in the sweetness of Evangelical Christianity. I abhor that kind of religion. I resent more than I can express the fact that my Christ has been employed in the service of this mentality. My Christ, who refused to condemn the woman taken in the act of adultery; my Christ who embraced the lepers, the most feared social outcasts of his day; my Christ who implored us to see the face of God in the faces of "the least of these our brothers and sisters;" my Christ who opposed the prejudice being expressed against the racially impure Samaritans, is today being used politically to dehumanize others by those who play on base instincts.

David Halberstam, in his book on the Civil Rights movement entitled The Children, quotes Lyndon Johnson talking with Bill Moyers right after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had passed by large margins in the Congress of the United States. This positive vote followed the arousing of the public's consciousness by the Abu Ghraib-like use of dogs and fire hoses on black citizens in Alabama. Klan groups, under the direct protection of Southern State Troopers and local police, had also attacked blacks with baseball bats and lead pipes in public places, which had been seen on national television. Moyers expected to find President Johnson jubilant over this legislative victory. Instead he found the President strangely silent. When Moyers enquired as to the reason, Johnson said rather prophetically, "Bill, I've just handed the South to the Republicans for fifty years, certainly for the rest of our life times."

That is surely correct. Bush's polls popped after his convention. It is now his election to lose. The combination of super patriotism with piety, used in the service of fear to elicit votes while suppressing equality works, but it is lethal for America and lethal for Christianity. It may be a winning formula but it has no integrity and it feels dreadful to this particular Christian.

-- John Shelby Spong

 

Traditional Values

A flyer was found in Tennessee. It can be seen here

http://www.traditionalvalues.org/images/BushOlympics.JPG

and here
Posted by Hannah at 03:21 PM | Comments (0)