Discontented Soul

Dying for Consumption
by Paul Campos
Published on Friday, December 10, 2004 by the Daily Camera

I'm standing in the parking lot of an enormous shopping mall, staring at a Ford Excursion. A 7,700-pound hunk of metal, the Excursion gets horrible gas mileage, while spewing massive amounts of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere.
It's the official policy of our federal government to offer Americans bribes, in the form of huge tax deductions, to encourage the purchase of such vehicles. In 2003, Congress enacted a provision allowing people who bought SUVs weighing at least 6,000 pounds to deduct the entire purchase price from their taxable income, if they claimed to use the things for "business purposes."
Manufacturers scrambled to add even more weight to vehicles, to make them eligible for the deduction. This further decreased the gas mileage and increased the pollution emitted by these environmental disasters on wheels.
The most awe-inspiring feature of this particular Excursion is a plastic decal shaped like a yellow ribbon, which its owner has affixed to the back door. The ribbon is embossed with the message, "Support Our Troops."...

So Little Time, So Many Regimes to Change
by Jim Lobe
Published on Friday, December 10, 2004 by the Inter Press Service

Perhaps it is that Colin Powell, who until now stayed as close to Washington as he could to try to prevent Vice President Dick Cheney or Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld from pushing phony intelligence and aggressive policy advice policies on the president in his absence, has been traveling virtually all over the world, assuring appropriately skeptical foreign leaders that Bush will really -- REALLY -- be committed to multilateralism in his second term.
Now that Powell has been informed his services will no longer be required, the least-traveled secretary of state in the last generation is finally getting out to see the sights, even if his credibility as a spokesman for future U.S. foreign policy is less than it was for the past four years.
Or perhaps it is the sense of anticipation in some quarters, dread in others, of what will actually happen in the coming term...

A Defeat For an Empire
by Robert Jensen
Published on Thursday, December 9, 2004 by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram / Texas

The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that's a good thing.
I don't mean that the loss of American and Iraqi lives is to be celebrated. The death and destruction are numbingly tragic, and the suffering in Iraq is hard for most of us in the United States to comprehend.
The tragedy is compounded because these deaths haven't protected Americans or brought freedom to Iraqis. They have come in the quest to extend the American empire in this "new American century."
So, as a US citizen, I welcome the US defeat for a simple reason: It isn't the defeat of the United States - its people or their ideals - but of that empire. And it's essential that the American empire be defeated and dismantled...

Reality Bites

by Zachary Wales

The scene was all too familiar to a country imbued with Schindler's List, The Piano and multi-million dollar monuments declaring, "Never again": A young Palestinian violinist ridiculed at an army checkpoint, forced to "play something sad."
Not surprisingly, the handful of Jews who witnessed this first hand were reminded of Majdanek, one of the Nazi extermination camps where Jewish musicians were forced to play something sad as their brethren walked into death.
But since it was Thanksgiving and the violinist was named Wissam Tayem, The New York Times' Greg Myre placed the scene discretely in the last paragraph of an article on Arafat's possible successor. Like mother saying, "Pass the gravy."
Three days earlier, Myre won my personal objectivity award for reporting the murder of 13-year-old Iman al-Hams - the 529th Palestinian child killed by Israel's army since 2000, according to Israeli sources - with complete sentimental detachment. Although al-Hams' killer,
who shot her 15 times at "point blank" (according to The Jerusalem Post), told Israeli military prosecutors that he would have killed her if she were three (according to The Guardian), Myre couched the indictment as an allegation.
So stoic was Myre that he chose not to report the killer's admission that the girl posed no apparent threat before he initially took aim.
Turn back even further to Israel's "Days of Penitence" operation that killed over 130 Palestinians in October. Then, The New York Times afforded skimpy, arguably misleading, coverage of this war on civilians, while its leading stories focused on the political flak Sharon
received for his unilateral - though not yet actual - plan to disengage from Gaza. For those who were conscious of the ongoing massacre, perhaps conscious enough to donate to the Palestine Children's Welfare Fund, the Times' Web site left a special reminder: Steven Erlanger's gratuitous video clip of the September 1 suicide bombing in Beersheba.
(Note to over-educated Kerry-liberals: Last October, when you asked your Palestine-sympathetic friends what they thought of Sharon's political situation and they looked at you like you were laughing at a funeral, this was why.)
Why then can't the Times acknowledge the symbolic value Wissam Tayem or Imam al-Hams? Would it somehow cheapen the historical scale of the Holocaust to draw parallels between its perpetrators and its victims' descendents? Was the Holocaust not the sum of many terrible elements, several of which Israel has already employed against Palestinians? What about the Times' readers, who are taxed some $5 billion annually to uphold Israel's colonial occupation?
These questions came to mind last week when I read Myre's latest attempt to save Israel from itself. The article, titled, "Israeli TV Tackles War for Hearts and Minds," described Israel's new "reality" show, The Ambassador, in which multi-lingual Israeli youths are flown around the world - I actually don't want to know how my tax dollars figure into this - vying for bragging rights in the army's, I mean, the country's propaganda campaign. The show's most recent
loser, Ofra Bin Nun, took her exit after trying to "make it clear that Israel has not taken anything from anyone" (her words).
But there is an element that makes Myre's story simultaneously fitting and misplaced, outrageous and practical, idiotic and genius: He writes about a reality show while ignoring reality
altogether.
Myre opens with the statement, "For many Israelis, it is received wisdom that their country is misunderstood by the world, and that its official representatives compound the problem through inept diplomacy." Interesting. Although I monitor Middle Eastern news more regularly than I floss, I somehow missed that time that Sharon punched the Queen of England in the face. Or that UN summit where Netanyahu was caught peeing on the ice sculpture of Nelson Mandela.
To illustrate what he means, Myre quotes Joey Low, a New York businessman and promoter of The Ambassador. Low tells Myre that the show might serve a useful purpose, "because Israelis don't always know how they are being perceived abroad."
And how is Israel being perceived in the US? In the six months between January and June, 2001 Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting conducted a study showing National Public Radio's (NPR) coverage trends of the "Israeli/Palestinian conflict." Though often credited as the US'
leading progressive broadcaster, NPR reported 81 percent of Israeli deaths during that period, while acknowledging only 34 percent of Palestinian deaths.
Similarly, Alison Weir's research of the San Francisco Chronicle showed that between September 2000 and March 2001, the newspaper reported 150 percent of Israeli children's deaths (sometimes covering the same incident more than once), and only five percent of Palestinian children killed. The figures seem even more baffling when one considers the actual number of Israeli to Palestinian children killed: four to 93.
But the PR MyreWire is too busy selling an image to consider journalistic scrutiny, or even a token Palestinian viewpoint. Myre instead pursues a formula described best by Israel's acclaimed spin doctor, Abba Eban: "Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what you do not necessarily believe yourself."
One example is Myre's paragraph about The Ambassador's judge, Nachman Shai, who is a former Israeli military spokesperson - a burning bush of irony that Myre somehow misses. While describing Shai's background, Myre mentions the 1967 war as one of the instances in which Israel faced "actual or imminent attack."
Meanwhile, Myre ignores a rather glaring historical record, most notably, Israel's admission that it struck preemptively in 1967. Or war architect Ezer Weizman's claim that Israel faced "no threat of destruction" in June 1967, and that "the threat of destruction was already removed from Israel during the [1948] War of Independence" - the last three words are, for the record, forever and ever, not mine.
There is a scene in the cult classic "Animal House," where John Belushi's character, in a heated pep talk, says, "What did we do when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?" to which his fraternity brother comments, "Don't stop him, he's rolling." So Myre ushers us into the following sentence: "But now [Israel] is often portrayed as the aggressor in the fighting with the Palestinians," and with a territorial middle finger to The Guardian - why not? - Myre adds, "particularly in the European news media."
Myre's work is not done, of course, without a Biblical reference to all at once invoke his readers' Catholic guilt, Jewish discipline and Protestant hysteria. "The David and Goliath roles have been reversed, and it's more difficult to explain what we're doing today," Shai tells us.
Well soldier, if Israel is losing, then please tell us who is winning.

Zachary Wales is a journalist, media analyst and graduate student of international public policy, Columbia University.

Pro-War Christians Should Come Clean
by Darrell Dow

Leading up to the war in Iraq, evangelical Christians became perhaps the most enthusiastic advocates of imperium. Though politicians have often abused "Just War theory," it is still an integral part of Christian ethics when examining issues of war and peace. Thus, one must ask, was the Iraq war "just" based on the criteria of historic Just War theory?
Lets look at a sampling of comments proffered by Evangelical leaders leading up to the war.

Men will “rule” over women as long as women let them … as long as little girls look to their daddies for protection, as long as teenage girls dream of marriage and babies and white picket fences, as long as mothers think that their sons can do no wrong, as long as adult women believe that male doctors, clergy, authors and even radio and TV presenters are more “reliable” than female ones — in short as long as women are socialized to look for that “one special man to give themselves to."

Hypocritical puritans hounded a leading US sex researcher to the grave. Now, they're after his movie.
by John Patterson
Published on Sunday, December 5, 2004 by the Sydney Morning Herald

Bill Condon's biopic Kinsey would be an important movie at any time, but right now, with the "moral values" crowd in the ascendant and thirsty for the blood of heretics in the aftermath of George Bush's re-election, it's an absolutely essential movie.
Dr Alfred Kinsey, played by Liam Neeson, was the Harvard-trained entomologist who pioneered research into the sexual habits of Americans. After interviewing tens of thousands of men and women, he collected his findings in two books that changed the way Americans comprehended sex.
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, and its female counterpart (1953), revealed the bedroom (and locker room and barnyard) habits of Americans in a way that blew the lid off puritanism forever. "God, what a gap between social front and reality!" was the conclusion he came to. Kinsey's been dead for nearly half a century and now, thanks to the movie, the religious right want to dig him up and kill him all over again.
Working at the University of Indiana - about as "red" as you could hope to find nowadays, and sponsored by that well-known fifth-column, the Rockefeller Foundation - Kinsey and his team developed as precise an interview formula as was possible in a country still mired in sexual ignorance and fear.
He interviewed single and married straights, gays, lesbians, incarcerated rapists and sex criminals, even those who had sought congress with beasts of the field and farmyard, all without surrendering scientific objectivity or passing moral judgments.
Before he published his work, Americans assumed that sex occurred only after marriage, that homosexuals and lesbians were demonic inverts, and that masturbation led to godless communism, hairy-handedness and imbecilized high-school quarterbacks drooling on college jackets.
Kinsey's two books were bestsellers, but he became entangled in the neuroses of his time. The Rockefeller folk were hounded into dropping their support, and J Edgar Hoover demanded - but didn't receive - Kinsey's assistance in witch-hunting gays at the US State Department. That Hoover was a cross-dressing, closeted homosexual who lived with his overpromoted pretty-boy assistant, FBI director Clyde Tolson, speaks volumes about the grotesque hypocrisy of public figures in those days. Kinsey's detractors lined up around the block to get their licks in, then as now, and it's possible that their efforts helped speed his early demise in 1956 aged 62.
Condon's movie does a splendid job of recreating the quasi-Victorian sexual politics of a time when people scarcely knew what to do or feel about their ungovernable sex drives. The film shows interview subjects startled to learn that babies do not emerge from the female bellybutton or that there's more than one position for coitus.
Kinsey is one of the inventors of our modern sex lives. He stands with Margaret Sanger, who agitated for birth control and backed research that gave us the pill by 1960 - which in turn gave us the unzipped sexual revolution and the bra-burning women's movement - and with Hugh Hefner, who 'fessed up and said flat out that, yup, he was hornier than a dog with two dicks and didn't care who knew it. If you've ever had a guilt-and-fear-free orgasm, you owe them all big time.
And because of that, the religious right still fear and despise Kinsey and his works. Check out some of the responses to the movie. "Kinsey's proper place is with the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele," says Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America, inadvertently showing us what he thinks of the Holocaust. Robert Peters of Morality in Media: "That's part of Kinsey's legacy: AIDS, abortion, the high divorce rate, pornography."
Focus on the Family's film critic, Tom Neven, calls the movie "rank propaganda for the sexual revolution and the homosexual agenda". And Judith Reisman, who has waged a long war against Kinsey's memory, refers to "a legacy of massive venereal disease, broken hearts and broken souls". These people are of a piece with new Republican congressmen who have sex on the brain, such as Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who thinks there is an epidemic of lesbianism in Oklahoma schools, and South Carolina's Jim DeMint who wants gays and pregnant single mothers barred from teaching decent, God-fearing folk.
At the dawn of a digitized, globalized millennium, these creeps want the clocks turned back to when the church held sway over our sexuality. They prefer us ignorant and terrified, alone in the dark, the better for them to control us through fear and guilt. Too bad for them that we live in the bright, vivid light of our incandescent dirty dreams.

Rock That Man in His Little Boat
by Joyce Marcel
Published on Wednesday December 8, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Is it just me or is there an air of sexual repression wafting through our country?
For example, our president, such as he is, wants more money to teach - or is it preach? - abstinence to young people.
Promoting sexual abstinence ignores several large obstacles, including the danger of unprotected (ignorant) sex, raging teen hormones, and the highly sexualized American culture stimulating those hormones for profit.
But the worst part of abstinence comes when impressionable young people go to their marriage beds inexperienced in the art of love and the workings of their own and their partners' bodies. Perhaps the young man has had a grope with a prostitute or seen a few porn videos, but that's not the best way to understand the complicated hydraulics of sexual activity.
Unless our young couple are extremely lucky in love, they will remain ignorant and dissatisfied throughout their lifetimes. If anything, they will have only idealized images of Hollywood sex to guide them. They won't know that rolling your eyes back, rolling your head back on the pillow, opening your mouth wide and making strange sounds in the back of your throat is not usually the way sex happens. They won't know that laughter is a large part of healthy sex. And they won't know that unlike the movies, people don't always reach orgasm at the same time.
One of the most important things they won't know is the location of the clitoris. I speak as something of a published expert in this area, because the only time my byline has ever appeared in The New York Times Magazine, it was in a letter to the editor about this topic. The Times had run a story about married southern Christian women who hold Tupperware-like parties in their homes to sample and buy sex toys. The women need the parties because - don't be too surprised here - they don't know much about sex. Or, to put it more bluntly, their husbands don't.
One shy woman whispered grateful thanks to the saleswoman for helping her find her clitoris, or, as she called it, "the little man in the boat." In my letter I saluted these women for learning about their bodies, but pointed out the vast disconnect between the gender of the euphemism and the female organ it represented.
Female sexuality has always put the male establishment - whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim - on edge. From our angry Biblical forefathers, who always seemed to be seeking a rationale for locking up their wayward daughters, to the even more drastic solution of female circumcision, the idea that women are equipped - by God, no less - to enjoy the greatest of sexual pleasures seems to drive authoritarian males (and the women who, for some reason, do their heavy lifting) mad.
That is why I was not surprised when, recently, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel refused to recommend approval of a new medical patch, Intrinsa, which increases women's sexual pleasure. The panel claimed it needed more data before exposing women to heart attack and stroke for "a marginal increase in sexual satisfaction."
The FDA is right to be concerned about drug safety for women, given its dismal track record in the area: the first birth control pills featured scarily high doses of estrogen; then came the Prempro debacle - for decades the FDA assured women it was safe, and then we learned that it increased the risk of heart attack, stroke and breast cancer.
But with Intrinsa, how much do you want to bet that the idea of women having better orgasms was just a little too much for the good doctors of the FDA, who intend to remain gainfully employed throughout the long dark years of the Bush Administration?
Another example of repression is how the new biopic "Kinsey" has once again unleashed that hound of hell, Judith Reisman. She believes that Dr. Alfred Kinsey, whose groundbreaking work on sexuality was first published in 1948, was Satan incarnate, and the sexual revolution he sparked led to "fifty years of cultural terrorism," according to an article in The New Yorker.
Reisman, who just won a lifetime award for her work promoting abstinence-only sex education, is also against homosexuality, pornography and masturbation. She also believes that Nazi Germany and the Holocaust were the creations of German homosexuals, and that homosexuals today are planning a similar movement. Clearly a raving lunatic, the fact that Reisman currently enjoys strong credibility on Capitol Hill should give us all reason for concern.
Once again we are facing the great American sex dichotomy - the love-hate relationship which will not die: the $10 billion sex industry, the popularity of trash television, advertising, music videos and the rest, vs. the hypocritical Bible-thumpers from the south - where, by the way, we also find the highest rates of teen pregnancy and divorce - who want to repress sexual pleasure.
The sexual revolution was, for the most part, a positive thing for this country. As long as God created us as sexual beings, isn't it our duty to love one another, and to keep rocking that little man in his little boat?
Joyce Marcel is a free-lance journalist who lives in Vermont and writes about culture, politics, economics and travel. She can be reached at joycemarcel@yahoo.com.

Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power
by Thom Hartmann
Published on Tuesday, December 7, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War? What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats?
What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life? What if our "enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by rogue and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam? What if that hype was done largely to enhance the power, electability, and stature of George W. Bush and Tony Blair?
And what if the world was to discover the most shocking dimensions of these twin deceits - that the same men promulgated them in the 1970s and today?
It happened...

Sorry, Young America
by Joy-Ann Reid
Originally Published on Tuesday, December 7, 2004 by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Days after the election, a group of blue staters put up a Web site called SorryEverybody.com, on which fellow 48-percenters can post apologies to the world for the re-election of George W. Bush ("the world" recently responded with ApologiesAccepted.com.)
Well, someone should publish a Web site where Americans can apologize to the 21 million-plus 18-to-29-year-olds who voted on Nov. 2, because, with all due respect to the rest of humanity, it is young Americans who will pay most dearly in the long run for Bush's four more years...

Afraid To Look in the Moral Abyss
by James Carroll
Published on Tuesday, December 7, 2004 by the Boston Globe

Why don't we Americans look directly at the war? We avert our gaze, knowing that the situation in Iraq grows more desperate by the day. Vaunted "coalition" efforts to "break the back" of the "insurgency" have only strengthened it. The violence among Iraqis would surely qualify as civil war -- except that only one side is fighting. The structures of relief and repair are gone. Whole cities are destroyed, populations displaced. The hope of Iraqi elections is mortally compromised. "Coalition" members are dropping out. The mission of American force is to secure the country, but it can't secure itself. The performance of US intelligence has been consistent: Its strategic failures caused the war, and its tactical ignorance of the enemy is losing the war.
Meanwhile, in America, this, the gravest foreign policy crisis in a generation, source of a crisis of conscience for tens of millions of citizens, is not a subject of political debate. For many months, overt opposition to the war was sublimated in the effort to defeat George W. Bush in the November election. John Kerry's fatal ambivalence about Iraq sealed the war off from the great quadrennial decision, with the result that the voices of those who hated the war were muted, and the uneasiness of those who were troubled by it was never addressed.

$20 Million Aid Package to the Palestinians - Or to Israel?

On December 1, the Bush administration announced that it would provide direct aid of $20 million to the Palestinian Authority as a public expression of its support of the upcoming Palestinian presidential elections. The pot of aid doesn't require the approval of Congress, and therefore is not subject to any congressional restrictions. Colin Powell is reported to have told Palestinian Authority leaders when he meet them in late November in Ramallah that he would seek aid to "facilitate elections and improve security" (New York Times, November 22, 2004).This seems to be the same $20 million that was offered a year and a half ago by the Bush administration to shore up Mahmoud Abbas when he served briefly as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority - just after Bush's appearance at Aqaba. It was never delivered.The announcement has prompted two Congressional "Dear Colleague" letters. One of them, emanating from the office of Gary Ackerman (D-NY), ranking minority member of the House International Relations Committee, urges his colleagues to publicly endorse the aid package since it will "help the Palestinians pay back debts owed to Israel" (read the text here, scroll down).According to a Reuters report, the aid is not meant for Palestinians but will allow the Palestinians to pay the Israelis for electricity they have received from Israeli grids over the last years. Said one senior State Department official, the aid is intended to cover "significant arrearages to Israeli companies."Is this the extent of US support for the Palestinian elections and concern for security?Another letter (read the press release) comes from the office of Anthony Weiner (D-NY) and C.L. Butch Otter (R-ID), and expresses the views of Tom Delay (R-TX), who is adamantly opposed to any aid to Palestinians until the violence against Israel ends. The letter opposes the aid package altogether.A congressional aide is reported in Maariv (6 December) to have complained, "There is no mechanism for monitoring." Since the whole of US aid to Israel is not monitored, shouldn't some "mechanism" be put in place? It sounds as if this aid package is no more than another $20 million gift to Israel in the guise of helping the "peace process."

The Langley Lobotomy
By David Ignatius
The Washington Post

Driving past the George Bush Centre for Intelligence, as the CIA headquarters is officially known, you can't help wondering how on earth America's spy service has become
the favorite whipping boy of the right wing.
It's crazy for a nation at war to be purging its spies. But that's what has been happening in the weeks since former representative Porter Goss (R-Fla.) and a phalanx of conservative congressional aides took over at the CIA. What makes the putsch genuinely scary is that it seems to be driven by an animus toward the CIA that could do real damage to the nation's security.

Goss's supporters argue that he's just trying to rebuild an agency that needs a shakeup. And certainly the CIA could improve its performance: It is too risk-averse, too prone to groupthink, too mired in mediocrity. But the cure for these problems is hardly to send in a team of ideologues from Capitol Hill and drive out the agency's most experienced intelligence officers. This politicization can only make the agency's underlying problems even worse. And heaven knows what foreign intelligence services, which are America's crucial partners in the war on terrorism, make of the spectacle at Langley.
But I doubt that performance issues are what's really motivating this housecleaning. The CIA, after all, did a better job of recognizing the al Qaeda threat before Sept. 11, 2001, than did the FBI, the Pentagon or the National Security Council. And while the CIA could certainly improve
its operations in Iraq, the agency at least understood that the United States would face a bloody postwar insurgency there. If performance were the yardstick, surely it would be the official who bungled postwar planning for Iraq, Undersecretary of Defence Douglas Feith, who would be out
on his ear.
The conservative CIA-bashers also complain about leaks and criticism of the administration by agency personnel. Their prime example is Michael Scheuer, former head of the Osama bin Laden unit and author, under the pen name "Anonymous," of two books critical of US anti-terrorism strategy.
Right-wingers speak of Scheuer as if he were some kind of closet Kerry follower, but clearly they haven't read his bloodcurdling books. "Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes," he writes in "Imperial Hubris." "With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of
infrastructure." Not the usual liberal bromides, to say the least.
No, what's driving the Langley Lobotomy is a belief among conservatives that the CIA is an impediment to Bush administration foreign policy. Civilian officials at the Pentagon and neoconservatives at Washington think tanks have been badmouthing the agency relentlessly for the past four years. Their arguments are sometimes driven by special pleading - complaints that the CIA opposed the neoconservatives' favorite Iraqi, Ahmed Chalabi, for example; or that it was too close to Sunni Arab countries such as Jordan, Egypt and Morocco; or that it was too
skeptical of the administration's optimism about transforming Iraq and the Arab world.
Sometimes, as in the case of the military, the issue has been turf; more power for the agency meant less for the generals and admirals who run the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and other intelligence-collection units. That turf consciousness, combined with the Pentagon's ferocious lobbying power, seems to have crippled or killed outright the Sept. 11 commission's proposals for intelligence reform.
If the military were facing a similar political purge, the public would rightly be indignant. But for some reason, the protected status accorded the military in recent years does not extend to their brethren at the CIA. Intelligence officers have been fair game for political attack for decades. The CIA-bashers were once on the left. Now it's the right that demonizes the CIA as an elitist "rogue agency," but the effect is the same. The agency wears a permanent "Kick Me" sign on its backside. It's the excuse for everyone's problems. Even Sen. John McCain, who should know better, has joined in the public flaying of the CIA, calling it "dysfunctional." Doesn't he see that the current assault on career intelligence officers is like the post-Vietnam attacks on an unpopular U.S. military?
What's disturbing is that all this is happening under the eye of a reelected President Bush. Does the man who campaigned as a resolute wartime leader really think it makes sense for conservative Republicans to gut the CIA and derail the intelligence reform bill? Why does he find it so hard to speak up for the politically battered officers who staff the George Bush Centre for Intelligence?
If there's a logic here, other than misguided partisan politics, it escapes me.

All Mosquitos, No Swamp; No Elephants Either
by Ray McGovern
Published on Sunday, December 5, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Thursday’s conference on “Al Qaeda 2.0: Transnational Terrorism After 9/11,” sponsored by the New America Foundation and the New York University Center on Law & Security, was a valuable gift to those wanting an update on informed opinion on the subject. The event proved to be as highly instructive for what was not addressed, though, as for the issues that were. The elephants known to be present remained largely unacknowledged.
The cavernous Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building was full to the gunnels. Panel after panel of distinguished presenters from near and far, from right and left—including authors Peter Bergen, Michael Scheuer, Jessica Stern and Col. Pat Lang— exuded and freely shared their expertise. But there was myopia as well.
The mosquitos of terrorism were dissected and examined as carefully as biology students once did drosophila, but typing the generic DNA of terrorism proved more elusive. Worse, no attention was given to the swamp in which terrorists breed. Were it not for a few impertinent questions from the audience evoking a pungent smell, the swamps might have eluded attention altogether...

You Asked for my Evidence, Mr Ambassador. Here It Is
In Iraq, the US Does Eliminate Those Who Dare to Count the Dead
by Naomi Klein
Published on Saturday, December 4, 2004 by the Guardian/UK

David T Johnson,Acting ambassador,US Embassy, London
Dear Mr Johnson,
On November 26, your press counselor sent a letter to the Guardian taking strong exception to a sentence in my column of the same day. The sentence read: "In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone - doctors, clerics, journalists - who dares to count the bodies." Of particular concern was the word "eliminating".
The letter suggested that my charge was "baseless" and asked the Guardian either to withdraw it, or provide "evidence of this extremely grave accusation". It is quite rare for US embassy officials to openly involve themselves in the free press of a foreign country, so I took the letter extremely seriously. But while I agree that the accusation is grave, I have no intention of withdrawing it. Here, instead, is the evidence you requested...

Dissent: Placing Country Above Party: Preservation of democracy requires Republicans and Democrats to foster opposition
by Byron Williams
Published on Monday, December 6, 2004 by Working For Change

"The dissenter is every human being at those moments in life when one resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for themselves." -- Archibald Macleish
I have come to believe that many Americans prefer the kind of dissent that is neatly tucked away in the past -- where it does not raise uncomfortable questions, nor challenge the prevailing preconceived notions.
With an eye toward the past we applaud Martin Luther King, Jr., for his courage to oppose the war in Vietnam. But dissent in the present, concerning matters of great national importance, is something very different.
How quickly we forget that King, minus the benefit of history, was vilified by many of his contemporary allies for his opposition...

Iran's Nuclear Issue
by Dilip Hiro
Published on Friday, December 3, 2004 by TomDispatch.com

Imagine a pious Muslim faced with a ban on fabricating a certain kind of weapon. He is committed to obeying unquestioningly the fatwas of his religious leader and yet discovers that producing such a weapon, or threatening to do so, is a strong lever for gaining benefits from a powerful group living in the neighborhood. Replace "a pious Muslim" with "Iran," and "a powerful group" with the 25-member European Union (EU), and the above sentences aptly sum up the current Iranian-EU relationship...

The Public Cost of Privatization
by Susan Jhirad

Published on Friday, December 3, 2004 by the Boston Globe

AS BIG DIG holes leak taxpayer dollars by the gallon, as Halliburton overbills the Pentagon by millions, as Enron CEOs go to jail for defrauding stockholders, and as HMOs provide less and less health care for higher and higher fees, it is time to reexamine that great myth spawned by the Reagan revolution: the myth of privatization.
For too long, Republicans have been able to promote, unchallenged, the notion that the private sector can deliver goods and even public services more efficiently, more cheaply, and better.
"Privatization" has meant a variety of things: from giving corporations taxpayer money with little government oversight, as in the Big Dig, to turning public schools into for-profit charters, to forcing community colleges like my own to rely less on state funding and more on private fund-raising, including raising student fees in order to survive. Whatever its form, privatization is based on the general concept that business is good, government is bad...

...In the presidential debates, George W. Bush was proud to claim (falsely) that Senator John Kerry wanted to impose "another big government healthcare program, like in France or Canada." Never mind that countries with national health plans like Canada, France, and England, wouldn't dream of trading their free universal coverage, with all its imperfections, for our system, where millions lack any healthcare at all...

...But in all these matters, who will pay and who will profit? Does privatization really deliver better goods and services at lower cost, or does it just transfer public wealth into private pockets? Are we gradually eliminating all public services, replacing them with a system of pay-as-you-go benefits that serve only the wealthy?...