George McGovern: "I Expect To See Cheney And Bush Forced To Resign"

George McGovern: Cheney is wrong about me, wrong about war

The 1972 presidential nominee strikes back at the vice president for comparing today's Democrats to the McGovern platform.

By George S. McGovern

GEORGE S. MCGOVERN, a former U.S. senator from South Dakota, was the Democratic nominee for president in 1972.

April 24, 2007

VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney recently attacked my 1972 presidential platform and contended that today's Democratic Party has reverted to the views I advocated in 1972. In a sense, this is a compliment, both to me and the Democratic Party. Cheney intended no such compliment. Instead, he twisted my views and those of my party beyond recognition. The city where the vice president spoke, Chicago, is sometimes dubbed "the Windy City." Cheney converted the chilly wind of Chicago into hot air.

Cheney said that today's Democrats have adopted my platform from the 1972 presidential race and that, in doing so, they will raise taxes. But my platform offered a balanced budget. I proposed nothing new without a carefully defined way of paying for it. By contrast, Cheney and his team have run the national debt to an all-time high.

He also said that the McGovern way is to surrender in Iraq and leave the U.S. exposed to new dangers. The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.

In the war of my youth, World War II, I volunteered for military service at the age of 19 and flew 35 combat missions, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross as the pilot of a B-24 bomber. By contrast, in the war of his youth, the Vietnam War, Cheney got five deferments and has never seen a day of combat — a record matched by President Bush.

Cheney charged that today's Democrats don't appreciate the terrorist danger when they move to end U.S. involvement in the Iraq war. The fact is that Bush and Cheney misled the public when they implied that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks. That was the work of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda team. Cheney and Bush blew the effort to trap Bin Laden in Afghanistan by their sluggish and inept response after the 9/11 attacks.

They then foolishly sent U.S. forces into Iraq against the advice and experience of such knowledgeable men as former President George H.W. Bush, his secretary of State, James A. Baker III, and his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft.

Just as the Bush administration mistakenly asserted Iraq's involvement in the 9/11 attacks, it also falsely contended that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. When former Ambassador Joseph Wilson exploded the myth that Iraq attempted to obtain nuclear materials from Niger, Cheney's top aide and other Bush officials leaked to the media that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent (knowingly revealing the identity of a covert agent is illegal).

In attacking my positions in 1972 as representative of "that old party of the early 1970s," Cheney seems oblivious to the realities of that time. Does he remember that the Democratic Party, with me in the lead, reformed the presidential nomination process to ensure that women, young people and minorities would be represented fairly? The so-called McGovern reform rules are still in effect and, indeed, have been largely copied by the Republicans.

The Democrats' 1972 platform was also in the forefront in pushing for affordable healthcare, full employment with better wages, a stronger environmental and energy effort, support for education at every level and a foreign policy with less confrontation and belligerence and more cooperation and conciliation.

Cheney also still has his eyes closed to the folly of the Vietnam War, in which 58,000 young Americans and more than 2 million Vietnamese died. Vietnam was no threat to the United States.

On one point I do agree with Cheney: Today's Democrats are taking positions on the Iraq war similar to the views I held toward the Vietnam War. But that is all to the good.

The war in Iraq has greatly increased the terrorist danger. There was little or no terrorism, insurgency or civil war in Iraq before Bush and Cheney took us into war there five years ago. Now Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism, a bloody insurgency against our troops and a civil war.

Beyond the deaths of more than 3,100 young Americans and an estimated 600,000 Iraqis, we have spent nearly $500 billion on the war, which has dragged on longer than World War II.

The Democrats are right. Let's bring our troops home from this hopeless war.

There is one more point about 1972 for Cheney's consideration. After winning 11 state primaries in a field of 16 contenders, I won the Democratic presidential nomination. I then lost the general election to President Nixon. Indeed, the entrenched incumbent president, with a campaign budget 10 times the size of mine, the power of the White House behind him and a highly negative and unethical campaign, defeated me overwhelmingly. But lest Cheney has forgotten, a few months after the election, investigations by the Senate and an impeachment proceeding in the House forced Nixon to become the only president in American history to resign the presidency in disgrace.

Who was the real loser of '72?



THE VICE PRESIDENT spoke with contempt of my '72 campaign, but he might do well to recall that I began that effort with these words: "I make one pledge above all others — to seek and speak the truth." We made some costly tactical errors after winning the nomination, but I never broke my pledge to speak the truth. That is why I have never felt like a loser since 1972. In contrast, Cheney and Bush have repeatedly lied to the American people.

It is my firm belief that the Cheney-Bush team has committed offenses that are worse than those that drove Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew and Atty. Gen. John Mitchell from office after 1972. Indeed, as their repeated violations of the Constitution and federal statutes, as well as their repudiation of international law, come under increased consideration, I expect to see Cheney and Bush forced to resign their offices before 2008 is over.

Aside from a growing list of impeachable offenses, the vice president has demonstrated his ignorance of foreign policy by attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for visiting Syria. Apparently he thinks it is wrong to visit important Middle East states that sometimes disagree with us. Isn't it generally agreed that Nixon's greatest achievement was talking to the Chinese Communist leaders, which opened the door to that nation? And wasn't President Reagan's greatest achievement talking with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev until the two men worked out an end to the Cold War? Does Cheney believe that it's better to go to war rather than talk with countries with which we have differences?

We, of course, already know that when Cheney endorses a war, he exempts himself from participation. On second thought, maybe it's wise to keep Cheney off the battlefield — he might end up shooting his comrades rather than the enemy.

On a more serious note, instead of listening to the foolishness of the neoconservative ideologues, the Cheney-Bush team might better heed the words of a real conservative, Edmund Burke: "A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood."

The Martial Law Act of 2007

Congress Rubberstamps Martial Law
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The American Conservative posted online my article on how Congress rolled out the red carpet for martial law. This piece vivifies how neither party in Washington gives a darn about the risks of dictatorship in America.

April 23, 2007

Working for the Clampdown

What might the president do with his new power to declare martial law?

by James Bovard

How many pipe bombs might it take to end American democracy? Far fewer than it would have taken a year ago.

The Defense Authorization Act of 2006, passed on Sept. 30, empowers President George W. Bush to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist “incident,” if he or other federal officials perceive a shortfall of “public order,” or even in response to antiwar protests that get unruly as a result of government provocations.

The media and most of Capitol Hill ignored or cheered on this grant of nearly boundless power. But now that the president’s arsenal of authority is swollen and consecrated, a few voices of complaint are being heard. Even the New York Times recently condemned the new law for “making martial law easier.”

It only took a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to raze one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president’s ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened these restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the U.S. without the express permission of Congress. But there is a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act.

Section 1076 of the Defense Authorization Act of 2006 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from “Insurrection Act” to “Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act.” The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The new law expands the list to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition”—and such “condition” is not defined or limited.

These new pretexts are even more expansive than they appear. FEMA proclaims the equivalent of a natural disaster when bad snowstorms occur, and Congress routinely proclaims a natural disaster (and awards more farm subsidies) when there is a shortfall of rain in states with upcoming elections. A terrorist “incident” could be something as stupid as the flashing toys scattered around Boston last fall.

The new law also empowers the president to commandeer the National Guard of one state to send to another state for up to 365 days. Bush could send the Alabama National Guard to suppress antiwar protests in Boston. Or the next president could send the New York National Guard to disarm the residents of Mississippi if they resisted a federal law that prohibited private ownership of semiautomatic weapons. Governors’ control of the National Guard can be trumped with a simple presidential declaration.

The story of how Section 1076 became law vivifies how expanding government power is almost always the correct answer in Washington. Some people have claimed the provision was slipped into the bill in the middle of the night. In reality, the administration clearly signaled its intent and almost no one in the media or Congress tried to stop it.

The Katrina debacle seems to have drowned Washington’s resistance to military rule. Bush declared, “I want there to be a robust discussion about the best way for the federal government, in certain extreme circumstances, to be able to rally assets for the good of the people.” His initial proposal generated a smattering of criticism and no groundswell of support. There was no “robust discussion.” On Aug. 29, 2006, the administration upped the ante, labeling the breached levees “the equivalent of a weapon of mass effect being used on the city of New Orleans.” Nobody ever defined a “weapon of mass effect,” but the term wasn’t challenged.

Section 1076 was supported by both conservatives and liberals. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, co-wrote the provision along with committee chairman Sen. John Warner (R-Va.). Sen. Ted Kennedy openly endorsed it, and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), then-chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was an avid proponent.

Every governor in the country opposed the changes, and the National Governors Association repeatedly and loudly objected. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned on Sept. 19 that “we certainly do not need to make it easier for Presidents to declare martial law,” but his alarm got no response. Ten days later, he commented in the Congressional Record: “Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.” Leahy further condemned the process, declaring that it “was just slipped in the defense bill as a rider with little study. Other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”

Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein wrote an excellent article in December on how the provision became law with minimal examination or controversy. A Republican Senate aide blamed the governors for failing to raise more fuss: “My understanding is that they sent form letters to offices. If they really want a piece of legislation considered they should have called offices and pushed the matter. No office can handle the amount of form letters that come in each day.”

Thus, the Senate was not guilty by reason of form letters. Plus, the issue was not on the front page of the Washington Post within the 48 hours before the Senate voted on it. Surely no reasonable person can expect senators to know what they were doing when they voted 100 to 0 in favor of the bill? In reality, they were too busy to notice the latest coffin nails they hammered into the Constitution.

This expansion of presidential prerogative illustrates how every federal failure redounds to the benefit of leviathan. FEMA was greatly expanded during the Clinton years for crises like the New Orleans flood. It, along with local and state agencies, floundered. Yet the federal belly flop on the Gulf Coast somehow anointed the president to send in troops where he sees fit.

“Martial law” is a euphemism for military dictatorship. When foreign democracies are overthrown and a junta establishes martial law, Americans usually recognize that a fundamental change has occurred. Perhaps some conservatives believe that the only change when martial law is declared is that people are no longer read their Miranda rights when they are locked away. “Martial law” means obey soldiers’ commands or be shot. The abuses of military rule in southern states during Reconstruction were legendary, but they have been swept under the historical rug.

Section 1076 is Enabling Act-type legislation—something that purports to preserve law-and-order while formally empowering the president to rule by decree. The Bush team is rarely remiss in stretching power beyond reasonable bounds. Bush talks as if any constraint on his war-making prerogative or budget is “aiding and abetting the enemy.” Can such a man be trusted to reasonably define insurrection or disorder? Can Hillary Clinton?

Bush can commandeer a state’s National Guard any time he declares a “state has refused to enforce applicable laws.” Does this refer to the laws as they are commonly understood—or the laws after Bush fixes them with a signing statement?

Some will consider concern about Bush or future presidents exploiting martial law to be alarmist. This is the same reflex many people have had to each administration proposal or power grab from the Patriot Act in October 2001 to the president’s enemy-combatant decree in November 2001 to the setting up the Guantanamo prison in early 2002 to the doctrine of preemptive war. The administration has perennially denied that its new powers pose any threat even after the evidence of abuses—illegal wiretapping, torture, a global network of secret prisons, Iraq in ruins—becomes overwhelming. If the administration does not hesitate to trample the First Amendment with “free speech zones,” why expect it to be diffident about powers that could stifle protests en masse?

On Feb. 24, the White House conducted a highly publicized drill to test responses to IEDs going off simultaneously in ten American cities. The White House has not disclosed the details of how the feds will respond, but it would be out of character for this president to let new powers he sought to gather dust. There is nothing more to prevent a president from declaring martial law on a pretext than there is to prevent him from launching a war on the basis of manufactured intelligence. And when the lies become exposed years later, it could be far too late to resurrect lost liberties.

Senators Leahy and Kit Bond (R-Mo.) are sponsoring a bill to repeal the changes, but it is not setting the woods on fire on Capitol Hill. Leahy urged his colleagues to consider the Section 1076 fix, declaring, “It is difficult to see how any Senator could disagree with the advisability of having a more transparent and thoughtful approach to this sensitive issue.”

He deserves credit for fighting hard on this issue, but there is little reason to expect most members of Congress to give it a second look. The Section 1042 debacle exemplifies how the Washington establishment pretends that new power will not be abused, regardless of how much existing power has been mishandled. Why worry about martial law when there is pork to be harvested and photo ops to attend? It is still unfashionable in Washington to worry about the danger of the open barn door until after the horse is two miles down the road.

_____________________________________

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy and eight other books.

*******

Working for the Clampdown

Note: The printed version of this article had an incorrect number for the section of the statute which changed the law (based on an earlier version of the Defense Authorization bill). This online version corrects that error.

Finding the Courage to Negotiate: Pelosi, AIPAC and Foreign Policy

The Berkeley Daily Planet

Editorial

By Becky O’Malley


So let us begin anew, remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.
—President John F. Kennedy


These words are from Kennedy’s first inaugural address. That speech marked a generation, my generation. Nancy Pelosi, a politically aware woman of my own age, like me a college student in 1961, cannot have escaped hearing that speech and being influenced by it all of her adult life, as we all were. The attitude it embodied ultimately resulted in the end of a repressive regime in the former Soviet Union, without the atomic war that many in 1961 thought was inevitable. Kennedy described the belief system he hoped to counter: “[B]oth sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.” Kennedy and his successors made many mistakes along the way, but his assertion that negotiation was the only way to end the balance of terror and avoid the atomic Armageddon which threatened to destroy the planet paid off in the end.

Pelosi, now a grandmother like me, is continuing to follow Kennedy’s advice by visiting leaders of potentially warring nations in the Mideast and urging negotiations. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor in Congress, is going along. Her credentials as a supporter of Israel, like his, are rock-solid, but no matter, the twerps are nipping at their heels.

Dick Cheney, briefly emerging from his undisclosed hidey-hole, led the attack, which has now trickled down to lesser-con luminaries like columnist Debra Saunders. The most foolish version of all this was Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s suggestion that Pelosi shouldn’t have worn a headscarf when she visited a mosque. “I just don’t know what got into her head, to be completely honest with you,” he said. “Her going to a state which is, without question, a sponsor of terror, and having her picture taken with Assad and being seen in a head scarf and so forth is sending the wrong signal to the people of Syria and to the people of the Middle East.”

Perhaps Romney, who is a Mormon, doesn’t knew that when Nancy and I were growing up Catholic women were always required to cover their heads in church, and that even Protestant princesses (there were no women Speakers in those days) donned veils when calling on the Pope. As a mayor’s daughter she’s undoubtedly grown up seeing politicians of all faiths bobby-pin yarmulkes to their heads when courting Jewish voters. Wearing a scarf is no big deal.

Lantos has even suggested that a trip to Iran should be the next item on the agenda, a proposal which Pelosi’s political staff quickly rejected, but don’t bet against it nevertheless. The time for talking to all parties is now, as sensible Israelis and Americans, even some Republicans, are starting to admit. Pelosi carried what she thought was a peace message to Syria from Israel, only to have clueless Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert deny that he’d intended any such thing, probably under pressure from the Bush White House.

But the time has come to talk. George Soros, international financier, philanthropist and determined advocate of what he believes to be human rights imperatives, came out of the political closet with a piece in the April 12 New York Review of Books.

He said that “The Bush administration is once again in the process of committing a major policy blunder in the Middle East, one that is liable to have disastrous consequences and is not receiving the attention it should. This time it concerns the Israeli–Palestinian relationship. The Bush administration is actively supporting the Israeli government in its refusal to recognize a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas, which the U.S. State Department considers a terrorist organization. This precludes any progress toward a peace settlement at a time when progress on the Palestinian problem could help avert a conflagration in the greater Middle East.” His statement was dated March 15, before Pelosi’s trip, but its endorsement of the necessity of negotiation certainly applies to talking to Syria as well.

With a great deal of trepidation, remarkable in someone with as much influence and even power as Soros has, he zeroed in on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as one of the principal obstacles to peace:

“I am not sufficiently engaged in Jewish affairs to be involved in the reform of AIPAC; but I must speak out in favor of the critical process that is at the heart of our open society. I believe that a much-needed self-examination of American policy in the Middle East has started in this country; but it can’t make much headway as long as AIPAC retains powerful influence in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Some leaders of the Democratic Party have promised to bring about a change of direction but they cannot deliver on that promise until they are able to resist the dictates of AIPAC.” Even though Soros is himself Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel, he knows that he is exposing himself to personal attacks for taking this position.

Pelosi, like many Democratic politicians in the Bay Area including Lantos, Assemblymember Hancock and Mayor Bates among others, has in the past been a vocal and visible supporter of AIPAC. That puts her in a good position to jump boldly into the negotiating process, just as Nixon’s history of anti-Communism put him in a good position to open negotiations with China. Even so, it has taken a considerable amount of courage for her to do so, and for Lantos and Congressman Henry Waxman to get her back as she does. It’s not too much to ask that other Democratic political leaders, especially those in safer-than-safe Northern California seats, should now demonstrate similar courage in resisting AIPAC’s undue influence on American and Israeli policy and speaking out in favor of open negotiations with all parties in the Middle East.

War on Terror looks like a fraud

April 13, 2007

It's becoming pretty clear that Iraq has been "pacified" solely for the purpose of economic aggression

By JOHN GLEESON

Contrary to the "patriots" who try to use the deaths of our soldiers in Afghanistan to stifle debate on Canada's involvement in the War on Terror, I would say that as new evidence presents itself, we would indeed be cowards to ignore it simply because we've lost troops in the field and are therefore blindly committed to the mission.

And new evidence is piling up around us, arguably strong enough to declare the whole War on Terror an undeniable fraud.

Virtually ignored by mainstream media, the Americans showed their hand this year with the new Iraqi oil law, now making its way through Iraq's parliament.

The law -- which tens of thousands of Iraqis marched peacefully against on Monday when they called for the immediate expulsion of U.S. forces -- would transfer control of one of the largest oil reserves on the planet from Baghdad to Big Oil, delivering "the prize" at last that Vice-President Dick Cheney famously talked about in 1999 when he was CEO of Halliburton.

"The key point of the law," wrote Mother Jones' Washington correspondent James Ridgeway on March 1, "is that Iraq's immense oil wealth (115 billion barrels of proven reserves, third in the world after Saudi Arabia and Iran) will be under the iron rule of a fuzzy 'Federal Oil and Gas Council' boasting 'a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq.' That is, nothing less than predominantly U.S. Big Oil executives.

'Savage privatization'

"The law represents no less than institutionalized raping and pillaging of Iraq's oil wealth. It represents the death knell of nationalized Iraqi resources, now replaced by production sharing agreements, which translate into savage privatization and monster profit rates of up to 75% for (basically U.S.) Big Oil. Sixty-five of Iraq's roughly 80 oilfields already known will be offered for Big Oil to exploit."

While the U.S. argues that the oil deal will give Iraqis their shot at "freedom and stability," the International Committee of the Red Cross reported this week that millions of Iraqis are in a "disastrous" situation that continues to deteriorate, with "mothers appealing for someone to pick up the bodies littering the street so their children will be spared the horror of looking at them on their way to school."

Four years after the invasion, it's becoming pretty clear that Iraq has been "pacified" solely for the purpose of economic aggression. Humanitarian considerations are moot. The awful plight of Iraq's one million Christians, who have no place in the new Iraq, underscores this ugly truth.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, has given the U.S. a strategic military beachhead in Central Asia (which "American primacy" advocates called for in the '90s) and it was quietly reported in November that plans are being accelerated for a $3.3-billion natural gas pipeline "to help Afghanistan become an energy bridge in the region."

With many Americans (including academics and former top U.S. government officials) now questioning even the physical facts of 9/11 and seriously disputing the "militant Islam" spin, with the media more brain-dead than it's been in our lifetimes, now is not the time for jingoism and blind faith in the likes of Cheney, George W. Bush and Robert Gates.

Our young men are worth more than that -- aren't they, Mr. Harper?

Making Sense of the Georgia Thompson Ruling

EDITORIAL

by Shepherd Express Staff

April 12, 2007

Thursday’s ruling by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, which immediately freed former state worker Georgia Thompson, was a stunner. Not only did the three federal judges immediately give Thompson her freedom, but they also delivered a smack-down to the Milwaukee office of U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic, calling the evidence in the case “beyond thin.”

So how did that happen? Why would a prosecutor, working on the taxpayers’ dime, press charges when the evidence was negligible? Why did a jury convict based on that same evidence? And why was Thompson given the unusual punishment of going to federal prison while her case was being appealed?

Why? Because the political climate—in George W. Bush’s America, in Wisconsin and in Milwaukee, in particular, where the case was decided—is so poisoned by political games that the jury sent a message that wasn’t based on the evidence introduced in the courtroom.

Once the case was heard by three neutral judges, two of which were appointed by Republican presidents, who only looked at the facts in the case and not the screaming headlines about Gov. Jim Doyle’s alleged corruption, the court made the right call. And in doing so the appeals court revealed much about what’s happening behind the scenes at the Department of Justice under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Believe it or not, there was once a time when the Justice Department was supposed to be removed from politics; fortunately, the appeals court judges didn’t realize that times have changed.

Last June, just as the race for governor was heating up, Georgia Thompson was convicted of improperly steering a state contract to the Adelman Travel Group, which is run by a politically involved family that has a history of favoring Democrats.

Predictably, almost daily headlines blaring the latest developments in the “travelgate” saga were used in campaign advertisements against Doyle. Mark Green supporters—right-wing WTMJ radio talkers and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel included—plumped up the allegations against Thompson and buried her defense, if it reported her side of the story at all. (In interviews after the verdict, juror Marvin Bizzelle claimed that Doyle had orchestrated the whole matter, even though Biskupic didn’t make that allegation. Gee, wonder where Bizzelle could have gotten that information? And why did he bring that information into deliberations, when jurors are supposed to render a verdict on the evidence brought forth in the courtroom?)

The case was curious from the beginning. As Thompson’s attorney, Stephen Hurley, noted, the state worker was a civil servant hired during Republican Gov. Scott McCallum’s tenure, making Thompson’s supposed bias toward Doyle seem improbable; she didn’t profit from the contract; no one else was named in connection with her supposed fraud; she didn’t name names or plead to a lesser charge to save herself; and the contract did, indeed, go to the lowest bidder, as is required. So where’s the crime?

But other factors bothered us. Why was Thompson charged with federal crimes? As we noted in a news article last summer, Thompson’s attorney argued that “at best, the evidence demonstrates a violation of the applicable sections of the Wisconsin Administrative Code.”

It also seemed curious that Thompson was tried in the U.S. District Court Eastern District of Wisconsin, in Milwaukee. She lived and worked in Madison and was a state employee, and the fact that Adelman Travel’s headquarters is located in Milwaukee has nothing to do with the case. Even though then-Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager and Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard helped to investigate the case, they declined to bring charges. But Biskupic, a Bush appointee, did, even though it really didn’t have anything to do with his jurisdiction. At the time of the trial, we wondered whether Biskupic truly believed he had a strong case, which would cause one to question his competence, or whether he knew that there really wasn’t a case but succumbed to Republican political pressure.

But now, after weeks of news about Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department, we may have an answer to our questions. Feeling the political pressure, Biskupic first tried to find the massive voter fraud that the Republican Party and the Journal Sentinel, along with their talk-radio friends, screamed was rampant in the city of Milwaukee. They even provided hundreds of names of “illegal voters” that Biskupic attempted to track down. After spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars, he found that there was no rampant voter fraud.

So Biskupic, in an attempt to satisfy his bosses, then went after Georgia Thompson. To destroy an innocent woman’s life was no problem for Biskupic if it could be used to help defeat Gov. Doyle. Once Georgia Thompson was charged, the Republican Party, the Journal Sentinel and the right-wing talk-show hosts used this indictment to try to make Doyle look corrupt.

Now Biskupic is at it again. He has indicted Dennis Troha for illegally channeling donations to Doyle. Once again, the political target of Biskupic is being tried in the press, on the front pages of the Journal Sentinel, which has already decided that Doyle is corrupt and just needs the right case—or perhaps the right prosecutor—to prove it.

The real question is why Biskupic hasn’t investigated Troha family contributions of tens of thousands of dollars to U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan and President Bush. Rep. Ryan received more than $50,000 in campaign contributions from the Troha family. The only difference is that Paul Ryan actually introduced special-interest legislation for Troha, signed by Bush, that substantially increased the value of Troha’s business. Ryan provided a clear quid pro quo and he should be investigated and perhaps indicted. Ryan, of course, denied he knew this was happening; however, when a congressman introduces special-interest legislation for a major contributor, what is he thinking about? If Biskupic is really trying to ferret out corruption, why isn’t he investigating Ryan, where there is actually a smoking gun of corruption? But, wait a second, isn’t Paul Ryan a Republican?

Iran: the war ahead

Politics

John Pilger

Published 16 April 2007

The sailors' ordeal was a diversion from the bigger danger. The US and UK identified their new enemy long ago and are preparing the propaganda for the war ahead.

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. "They were sick and some were dying," she says. "Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from the side'."

It is time we in Britain stopped looking from the side. We are being led towards perhaps the most serious crisis in modern history as the Bush-Cheney-Blair "long war" edges closer to Iran for no reason other than that nation's independence from rapacious America. The safe delivery of the 15 British sailors into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and his rivals (with tales of their "ordeal" almost certainly authored by the Ministry of Defence - until it got the wind up) is both a farce and a distraction. The Bush administration, in secret connivance with Blair, has spent four years preparing for "Operation Iranian Freedom". Forty-five cruise missiles are primed to strike. According to Russia's leading strategic thinker General Leonid Ivashov: "Nuclear facilities will be secondary targets . . . at least 20 such facilities need to be destroyed. Combat nuclear weapons may be used. This will result in the radioactive contamination of all the Iranian territory, and beyond."

And yet there is a surreal silence in Britain, save for the noise of "news" in which our powerful broadcasters gesture cryptically at the obvious but dare not make sense of it, lest the one-way moral screen erected between us and the consequences of an imperial foreign policy collapse and the truth be revealed. John Bolton, formerly Bush's man at the United Nations, recently spelled out the truth: that the Bush-Cheney-Blair plan for the Middle East is "an agenda to maintain division and ethnic tension and the only way to finally capture and enslave a country that has historically thrown out its occupiers on every occasion". He was referring to Iraq, but he also meant Iran, which would be next. That is the news.

One million Iraqis fill the streets of Najaf demanding that Bush and Blair get out of their homeland - that is the news: not our nabbed sailor-spies, nor the political danse macabre of the pretenders to Blair's Duce delusions. Whether it is Gordon Brown, the paymaster of the Iraq bloodbath, or John Reid, who sent British troops to pointless deaths in Afghanistan, or any of the others who sat through cabinet meetings knowing that Blair and his acolytes were lying through their teeth, only mutual distrust separates them now. They knew about Blair's plotting with Bush. They knew about the fake 45-minute "warning". They knew about the fitting up of Iran as the next "enemy".

Declared Brown to the Daily Mail: "The days of Britain having to apo logise for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it." In Late Victorian Holocausts, the historian Mike Davis documents that as many as 21 million Indians died unnecessarily in famines criminally imposed by British colonial policies. Moreover, since the formal demise of that glorious imperium, declassified files make it clear that British governments have borne "significant responsibility" for the direct or indirect deaths of between 8.6 million and 13.5 million people throughout the world from military interventions and at the hands of regimes strongly supported by Britain. The historian Mark Curtis calls these victims "unpeople". Rejoice! said Margaret Thatcher. Celebrate! says Brown. Spot the difference.

Brown is no different from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the other warmongering Democrats he admires and who support an unprovoked attack on Iran and the subjugation of the Middle East to "our interests" - and Israel's, of course. Nothing has changed since the US and Britain destroyed Iran's democratic government in 1953 and installed Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose regime had "the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture" that was "beyond belief" (Amnesty).

True carnage

Look behind the one-way moral screen and you will dis tinguish the Blairite elite by its loathing of real democracy. They used to be discreet about this, but no more. Two examples spring to mind. In 2004, Blair used the secretive "royal prerogative" to overturn a high court judgment that had restored the very principle of human rights set out in Magna Carta to the people of the Chagos Islands, a British colony in the Indian Ocean. There was no debate. As ruthless as any dictator, Blair dealt his coup de grâce with the lawless expulsion of the islanders from their homeland, now a US military base, from which Bush has bombed Iraq and Afghanistan and will bomb Iran.

In the second example, only the degree of suffering is dif ferent. Last October, the Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion. Downing Street officials derided the study as "flawed". They were lying. In fact, the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Roy Anderson, had backed the survey, describing its methods as "robust" and "close to best practice", and other government officials had secretly approved the "tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones". The figure for Iraqi deaths is now estimated at close to a million - carnage equivalent to that caused by the Anglo-American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s, which produced the deaths of half a million infants under the age of five, verified by Unicef. That, too, was dismissed contemptuously by Blair.

"This Labour government, which includes Gordon Brown as much as it does Tony Blair," wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, "is party to a war crime of monstrous proportions. Yet our political consensus prevents any judicial or civil society response. Britain is paralysed by its own indifference."

Such is the scale of the crime and of our "looking from the side". According to the Observer of 8 April, the voters' "damning verdict" on the Blair regime is expressed by a majority who have "lost faith" in their government. No surprise there. Polls have long shown a widespread revulsion to Blair, demonstrated at the last general election, which produced the second lowest turnout since the franchise. No mention was made of the Observer's own contribution to this national loss of faith. Once celebrated as a bastion of liberalism that stood against Anthony Eden's lawless attack on Egypt in 1956, the new right-wing, lifestyle Observer enthusiastically backed Blair's lawless attack on Iraq, having helped lay the ground with major articles falsely linking Iraq with the 9/11 attacks - claims now regarded even by the Pentagon as fake.

As hysteria is again fabricated, for Iraq, read Iran. According to the former US treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, the Bush cabal decided to attack Iraq on "day one" of Bush's administration, long before 11 September 2001. The main reason was oil. O'Neill was shown a Pentagon document entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts", which outlined the carve-up of Iraq's oil wealth among the major Anglo-American companies. Under a law written by US and British officials, the Iraqi puppet regime is about to hand over the extraction of the largest concentration of oil on earth to Anglo-American companies.

Nothing like this piracy has happened before in the modern Middle East, where Opec has ensured that oil business is conducted between states. Across the Shatt al-Arab waterway is another prize: Iran's vast oilfields. Just as non existent weapons of mass destruction or facile concerns for democracy had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq, so non-existent nuclear weapons have nothing to do with the coming American onslaught on Iran. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations. The International Atomic Energy Agency has never cited Iran for diverting its civilian programme to military use. For the past three years, IAEA inspectors have said they have been allowed to "go anywhere". The recent UN Security Council sanctions against Iran are the result of Washington's bribery.

Until recently, the British were unaware that their government was one of the world's most consistent abusers of human rights and backers of state terrorism. Few Britons knew that the Muslim Brotherhood, the forerunner of al-Qaeda, was sponsored by British intelligence as a means of systematically destroying secular Arab nationalism, or that MI6 recruited young British Muslims in the 1980s as part of a $4bn Anglo-American-backed jihad against the Soviet Union known as "Operation Cyclone". In 2001, few Britons knew that 3,000 innocent Afghan civilians were bombed to death as revenge for the attacks of 11 September. No Afghans brought down the twin towers, only citizens of Saudi Arabia, Britain's biggest arms client, which was not bombed. Thanks to Bush and Blair, awareness in Britain and all over the world has risen as never before. When home-grown terrorists struck London in July 2005, few doubted that the attack on Iraq had provoked the atrocity and that the bombs which killed 52 Londoners were, in effect, Blair's bombs.

In my experience, most people do not indulge the absurdity and cruelty of the "rules" of rampant power. They do not contort their morality and intellect to comply with double standards and the notion of approved evil, of worthy and unworthy victims. They would, if they knew, grieve for all the lives, families, careers, hopes and dreams destroyed by Blair and Bush. The sure evidence is the British public's wholehearted response to the 2004 tsunami, shaming that of the government.

Certainly, they would agree wholeheartedly with Robert H Jackson, chief of counsel for the United States at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders at the end of the Second World War. "Crimes are crimes," he said, "whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."

As with Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld, who dare not travel to certain countries for fear of being prosecuted as war criminals, Blair as a private citizen may no longer be untouchable. On 20 March, Baltasar Garzón, the tenacious Spanish judge who pursued Augusto Pinochet, called for indictments against those responsible for "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history" - Iraq. Five days later, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, said that Blair could one day face war-crimes charges.

These are critical changes in the way the sane world thinks - again, thanks to the Reich of Blair and Bush. However, we live in the most dangerous of times. On 6 April, Blair accused "elements of the Iranian regime" of "backing, financing, arming and supporting terrorism in Iraq". He offered no evidence, and the Ministry of Defence has none. This is the same Goebbels-like refrain with which he and his coterie, Gordon Brown included, brought an epic bloodletting to Iraq. How long will the rest of us continue looking from the side?

John Pilger's new film "The War on Democracy" will be previewed at the National Film Theatre, London SE1, on 11 May. http://www.bfi.org.uk/nft

http://www.johnpilger.com

John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John Pilger," wrote Harold Pinter, "unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him."
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John Pilger Videos/Films

John Pilger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For God’s Sake: PAUL KRUGMAN

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
THE NEW YORK TIMES

OP-ED COLUMNIST

For God’s Sake

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 13, 2007

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda is one of the most important stories of the last six years.

In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement — the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right — suggested that the movement could achieve power by stealth. “Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure,” he wrote, “and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide “Christian leadership to change the world,” boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

Unfortunately for the image of the school, where Mr. Robertson is chancellor and president, the most famous of those graduates is Monica Goodling, a product of the university’s law school. She’s the former top aide to Alberto Gonzales who appears central to the scandal of the fired U.S. attorneys and has declared that she will take the Fifth rather than testify to Congress on the matter.

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda — which is very different from simply being people of faith — is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It’s also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.

But this conspiracy is no theory. The official platform of the Texas Republican Party pledges to “dispel the myth of the separation of church and state.” And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing their best to fulfill that pledge. . .

And there’s another thing most reporting fails to convey: the sheer extremism of these people.

You see, Regent isn’t a religious university the way Loyola or Yeshiva are religious universities. It’s run by someone whose first reaction to 9/11 was to brand it God’s punishment for America’s sins. . .

Next week Rudy Giuliani will be speaking at Regent’s Executive Leadership Series.

--MORE--

45% Favor Congress Withholding Funds In Face Of Veto

Q: If George W. Bush vetoes the legislation, do you think Congress should pass another version of the bill that provides funding for the war without any conditions for troop withdrawal, or should Congress refuse to pass any funding bill until Bush agrees to accept conditions for withdrawal?

Fund the war without conditions: 43%
Withhold funding until Bush signs: 45%
Don't know: 12%

---

THE TIMES / BLOOMBERG POLL

Most say Gonzales should quit over fired prosecutors

An even larger percentage believe White House aides should testify about the matter under oath, poll finds.

By Doyle McManus
Times Staff Writer

7:28 PM PDT, April 10, 2007

WASHINGTON — Most Americans believe Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales should resign because of the controversy over his office's firing of federal prosecutors, and a big majority want White House aides to testify under oath about the issue, the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Poll has found.

The survey, conducted Thursday through Monday, found that 53% said Gonzales should step down because he claimed he had no role in the dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys last year — an account later contradicted by Justice Department documents and congressional testimony by his top assistant.

Senate and House Democratic leaders have asked White House aides to testify under oath about the firings, in part to answer questions about the roles of Gonzales and Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political strategist. Bush has rejected those requests, but the poll found that 74% of the public believes his aides, including Rove, should comply.

Even among Republicans, 49% said they thought the aides should testify; 43% said they should not.

"I don't know whether Gonzales needs to resign; I think he's going to have to seriously think about it," said David Brennan, 43, a poll respondent who is a telephone technician in Bend, Ore., and described himself as a conservative Republican. "But I do think, no matter what, [the aides] should have to speak about it under oath. They should tell the truth, Republican or Democrat."

Respondents were divided along party lines as to whether Gonzales should resign. Among Democrats, 68% said he should do so; among Republicans, 33% said he should depart.

Independents tip the balance — 57% said they supported calls for his resignation, while 22% said they thought he should stay.

On another issue, the poll found that Americans are also split along partisan lines over pending congressional legislation that would provide new funding for the war in Iraq, but require a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from the country.

Asked whether Bush should accept or veto a bill that included a timetable, 48% said he should sign such a measure while 43% said he should reject it. A significant majority of Democrats — 74% — backed signing the bill; an even bigger majority of Republicans, 80%, supported a veto.

Bush has pledged to veto a war funding bill if Congress sends it to him with withdrawal language.

If the president carries out his promise, Democratic voters do not want the party's legislators in Washington to reach an accord with him.

Some Democratic congressional leaders have conceded that that they almost assuredly cannot get the two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate needed to override a veto. So they would then face a choice between approving the war funding bill without a timetable or blocking the money — and come under withering criticism from Bush for failing to support U.S. troops on the battlefield.

Given that choice, 66% of Democrats want Congress to hold firm and withhold the funding unless Bush accepts some conditions for a troop withdrawal.

Among Republicans, 73% say they want Congress to fund the war without conditions.

One implication of those numbers is that a Democrat who acknowledges that ultimately the party will accede to Bush is likely to face attacks from the party's antiwar wing — as happened to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) two weeks ago when he predicted that Congress would eventually pass the funding without stringent conditions.

The Times/Bloomberg poll interviewed 1,373 respondents by telephone nationwide under the supervision of poll Director Susan Pinkus. The survey's margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The poll found that Americans have grown more pessimistic since the beginning of the year.

About two-thirds, 66%, said they believed the country is "seriously off on the wrong track," up from 61% in a Times/Bloomberg Poll in January.

Bush received a positive job approval rating from 36% of those interviewed, down from 39% in January (and well below a 45% approval rating he registered in a similar survey in September).

The Democratic-led Congress has seen its luster dim.

In a poll before November's election, only 30% of respondents said they approved of the job the Republican-led Congress was doing.

After Democrats had assumed control of the House and Senate, a poll in March found 41% approving of the job they were doing. In the new poll, 34% of respondents said they approved of the job Congress was doing.

"The honeymoon is definitely over," Pinkus said.

Sidney Spiegel, 87, a retired hydrogeologist in Littleton, Colo., who responded to the poll, said of the legislators: "They're holding investigations, but they aren't taking care of things they should have fixed years ago, like Social Security."

Asked whether the Democratic-led Congress has launched its current wave of investigations into conduct by the Bush administration out of genuine concern for government ethics or to gain political advantage, 63% of respondents said the aim was political.

One piece of encouraging news for Bush: a majority of respondents in both parties said they favor changes to immigration policy that combine tougher enforcement of existing laws with a program to provide temporary "guest worker" visas for undocumented workers.

A strong majority of respondents, 77%, said employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants should be punished. That included 87% of Republicans and 72% of Democrats.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Ganging up on Iran

Published: 27/03/2007 12:00 AM (UAE)

By Linda S. Heard, Special to Gulf News

I'll begin with a question. Is Iran an aggressor or a victim? If you've answered aggressor then may I suggest you take a moment to reflect.

Unfortunately, the fabricated scenario that led us into Iraq is at play again. And once again we're being suckered into being accepting of a neoconservative plan designed to ensure America's domination over this region's oilfields and maintain Israel as the sole nuclear power in the Middle East.

This is practically a replay of events leading up to the invasion of Iraq. In this case, the US-driven UN Security Council has ganged up to coerce Iran with sanctions into giving up its legitimate right to enrich uranium under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 30 days, the UN screws will, no doubt, be further tightened.

Iran's angry response is to reduce cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and to threaten prosecution of British sailors and marines for operating in Iranian waters.

Backed by the US and the EU, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair is becoming bellicose over that issue while a slew of Israeli spokesmen make demands on the international community to forcibly prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

What you don't hear is that there is no proof that Iran intends to develop nukes. IAEA chief Mohammad Al Baradei has repeatedly said there is no smoking gun.

Moreover, as even the hawkish former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton has admitted on CNN, US intelligence on the subject of Iran is sparse. Indeed, the latest National Intelligence Estimate suggests that Iran wouldn't be capable of producing a bomb until 2015, so, in that case, what's the rush?

Iran's numerous calls for a nuclear-free Middle East have been barely mentioned in the Western media and have not been taken seriously by the UN, fearful of debate over Israel's policy of "nuclear ambiguity".

The US has been gunning for Iran ever since the overthrow of its puppet, the Shah, in 1979 when the US embassy was seized. In 1980, the Carter administration authorised radio broadcasts to Iran calling for the toppling of Khomeini.

That same year Saddam Hussain, then Washington's friend, launched a war on Iraq that lasted eight years and which adversely affected or robbed the lives of millions.

As the Guardian reported on December 31 2002, "Ronald Reagan signed a secret order instruction the administration to do 'whatever was necessary and legal' to prevent Iraq losing the war" with Iran.

Now let's fast forward to January 29, 2002, the day that George W. Bush famously included Iran in an "Axis of Evil" along with Iraq and North Korea. This was no accidental inclusion.

General Wesley Clark reveals this on page 130 of his book Winning Modern Wars.

"As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more.

"This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran Somalia and Sudan." Clark says he left the Pentagon that afternoon "deeply concerned".

Gels perfectly

Clark's revelation gels perfectly with the Project for a New American Century document Rebuilding America's Defences; a blueprint for a global Pax Americana, signed onto by Dick Cheney and his neocon friends in 2000.

So now ask yourself the question posed at the beginning of this column again. Is Iran an aggressor or a victim?

Perhaps you're still not convinced. Before you answer think on this.

In 2003, Tehran proposed negotiations with the White House over its nuclear programme and offered to cease its support for groups that the US deems "terrorist". This overture was rejected out of hand by President Bush.

Today, Bush and co are intent on cornering Iran with the object of regime change. According to the New Yorker's investigative journalist Seymour Hersh there are plans on the table to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities using bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons. Ironic isn't it! Hersh says Bush privately calls the Iranian president "the new Hitler".

Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February that the Bush administration is seeking a pretext to attack Iran.

At the same time Washington is funding Iranian opposition groups in the diaspora as well as militant ethnic separatist groups within Iran. There have already been several violent incidents in country stamped with the CIA's fingerprint.

Draw your own conclusions as to who is aggressing whom but bear in mind that Iran has never threatened to attack the US or its allies other than in retaliation for a strike on it. Moreover, unlike the US, Iran does not harbour neo-imperialist ambitions and does not have a record of launching wars or invading other countries.

It is true that the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn't pull any punches when it comes to Israel but the feeling is mutual.

In reality, Iran would be justified in fearing the US and Israel, which, together, constitute the most potent force in the world, than vice-versa.

I've got one final question. Should we fear a country that has no record of invasion or occupation and no nuclear weapons above one that espouses not only full spectrum dominance over the planet's resources, waters and skies but also outer space?

Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She can be contacted at lheard@gulfnews.com

The War of Terror and the US “National Interest”

by Kim Petersen

March 28, 2007

Why is it that US politicians feel compelled to appear before a small, delimited section of the United States and pronounce unwavering support for Israel -- which is de facto support for ethnic cleansing and slow motion genocide? Why is it the administration of a superpower feels forced to address this small segment of the US population? Is this in the US “national interest”?

US vice president Dick Cheney, a major figure in the drive to invade and occupy Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, claims that it is in the interest of US security. He shirks responsibility for the massive devastation wreaked by the occupiers in Iraq and denounces critics of the destruction for exercising 20/20 hindsight. But many progressive commentators were opposed prior to the invasion-occupation of Iraq. They had attacked the nugatory evidence for Iraq’s possession of outlawed weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) as propagandistic.

While eschewing hindsight, Cheney has the audacity to claim foresight. This past 24 March, Cheney spoke to the Republican Jewish Coalition leadership in Florida. He said, “But the biggest mistake of all can be seen in advance: A sudden withdrawal of our coalition [in Iraq] would dissipate much of the effort that has gone into fighting the global war on terror, and result in chaos and mounting danger.”

Cheney declaimed, “We must consider . . . just what a precipitous withdrawal would mean to our other efforts in the war on terror, to our interests in the broader Middle East, and to Israel.”

Let’s consider this. First, besides exposing the fraudulent casus belli of possessing WMD, the aggression of Iraq adduced that it was no threat by quickly toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein. The aggression has given rise to a vigorous resistance that has dented the notion of an invincible US military. Second, as Cheney noted, it was not US interests in Israel, but US interests to Israel! Why does the US vice president genuflect to Jewish-Israeli interests? Certainly Palestinian-Israeli interests are not considered.

Twice this month in the build-up to an attack on Iran, Cheney has spoken publicly to Jewish groups but not publicly to Arab or Muslim groups. But that is not surprising, as the enemy is identified as being among Arabs and Muslims, and there is no talking to that “enemy.” Cheney stated, “An enemy with fantasies of martyrdom is not going to sit down at a table for negotiations. . . . The only option for our security and survival is to go on the offensive -- facing the threat directly, patiently, and systematically, until the enemy is destroyed.”

The Bush-Cheney regime’s focus is on violence. “The first priority is to remember that we are a nation at war . . .” So in Iraq, there is a push for a troop build-up, and in Afghanistan the US and NATO forces prepare for further violence.

Cheney undermined his raison d’être for the invasion-occupation of Iraq when he stated the mission’s focus is based on the “attacks of September 11th, 2001, and the loss that morning of nearly 3,000 innocent people here in the United States.” Iraq’s involvement in those attacks has never been demonstrated. None of the 9-11 suspects were Iraqi. No connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda has been demonstrated. Yet, Cheney asserted ex cathedra that Iraq’s non-involvement is a myth.

Cheney concluded, “If you support the war on terror, then it only makes sense to support it where the terrorists are fighting us.”

It is easy to demonize the “enemy” with language, but what is clear is that the killing of one million Iraqis is a genocidal campaign. Americans and citizens of the world do have a choice: support US terrorism and the continued destruction of the cradle of civilization or stand for peace.


Kim Petersen, Co-Editor of Dissident Voice, can be reached at: kim@dissidentvoice.org.

Sampson: U.S. attorneys fired over Bush priorities

Sampson: U.S. attorneys fired over priorities

Democratic panel chair Leahy says Justice Dept. motivation was improper

The Associated Press

Updated: 9:29 a.m. MT March 29, 2007

WASHINGTON - Eight federal prosecutors were fired last year because they did not sufficiently support President Bush's priorities, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' former chief of staff said Thursday, defending a standard that Democrats called "highly improper."

"The distinction between 'political' and 'performance-related' reasons for removing a United States attorney is, in my view, largely artificial," Kyle Sampson told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "A U.S. attorney who is unsuccessful from a political perspective ... is unsuccessful."

The committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter, scolded Sampson for causing an uproar that has distracted the Justice Department and jeopardized Gonzales' job.

"It is generally acknowledged that the Department of Justice is in a state of disrepair, perhaps even dysfunction, because of what has happened," Specter, of Pennsylvania, said. The remaining U.S. attorneys are skittish, he said, "not knowing when the other shoe may drop."

Democrats on the panel immediately rejected the concept of mixing politics with federal law enforcement. They accused the Bush administration of cronyism and trying to circumvent the Senate confirmation process by installing favored GOP allies in plum jobs as U.S. attorneys.

"It corrodes the public's trust in our system of Justice. It's wrong," said Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. "When anybody tries a backdoor way to get around the Senate's constitutional duty and obligation of advise and consent, it does not sit well."

Misleading accounts?
After being sworn, Sampson, who quit earlier this month amid the furor, disputed Democratic charges that the firings were a purge by intimidation and a warning to the remaining prosecutors to fall in line. Nor, he said, were the prosecutors dismissed to interfere with corruption investigations.

"To my knowledge, nothing of the sort occurred here," Sampson told the committee.

Sampson testified that federal prosecutors serve at the president's pleasure and are judged in large part on whether they pursue or resist administration policy.

"I came here today because this episode has been personally devastating to me and my family," Sampson told the panel. "It's my hope that I can come up here today and share the information that this committee and the Congress wants, and frankly put this behind me and my family."

Inaccurate information on Rove
Democrats said Sampson's testimony is key to finding the answers to the political question and a second, investigative query: Did Gonzales and the Justice Department provide misleading accounts of the run-up to the firings?

The answer to both questions is yes, according to a Justice Department letter accompanying new documents released hours before Sampson's appearance.

"The distinction between 'political' and 'performance-related' reasons for removing a United States attorney is, in my view, largely artificial," he said. "A U.S. attorney who is unsuccessful from a political perspective ... is unsuccessful."

The Justice Department admitted Wednesday that it gave senators inaccurate information about the firings and presidential political adviser Karl Rove's role in trying to secure a U.S. attorney's post in Arkansas for one of his former aides, Tim Griffin.

Justice officials acknowledged that a Feb. 23 letter to four Democratic senators erred in asserting that the department was not aware of any role Rove played in the decision to appoint Griffin to replace U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins in Little Rock, Ark.

Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard Hertling said that certain statements in last month's letter to Democratic lawmakers appeared to be "contradicted by department documents included in our production."

'Artificial' distinctions
That admission, only hours before Sampson's testimony, took some of the sting out of Democrats' key pieces of evidence that the administration had misled Congress.

Still, Sampson provided plenty of fodder. He acknowledged planning the firings as much as two years ago with the considered, collective judgment of a number of senior Justice Department officials.

However, he denied that the firings were improper, and he spoke dismissively of Democrats' condemnation of what they call political pressure in the firings.

Sampson maintained that adherence to the priorities of the president and attorney general was a legitimate standard.

"Presidential appointees are judged not only on their professional skills but also their management abilities, their relationships with law enforcement and other governmental leaders and their support for the priorities of the president and the attorney general," he said.

The Rove factor
Sampson strongly denied Democrats' allegations that some of the prosecutors were dismissed for pursuing Republicans too much and Democrats not enough in corruption cases.

"To my knowledge, nothing of the sort occurred here," he said.

The White House said it will withhold comment on Sampson's testimony until he actually testifies.

The Feb. 23 letter, which was written by Sampson but signed by Hertling, emphatically stated that "the department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin." It also said that "the Department of Justice is not aware of anyone lobbying, either inside or outside of the administration, for Mr. Griffin's appointment."

Those assertions are contradicted by e-mails from Sampson to White House aide Christopher G. Oprison on Dec. 19, 2006, about a strategy to deal with senators' opposition to Griffin's appointment. In the e-mail, Sampson says there is a risk that senators might balk and repeal the attorney general's newly won broader authority to appoint U.S. attorneys.

"I'm not 100 percent sure that Tim was the guy on which to test drive this authority, but know that getting him appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc," Sampson wrote. Former White House Counsel Harriet Miers was among the first people to suggest Griffin as a replacement for Cummins.

Said White House spokesman Tony Fratto:"We have been open about the fact that Karl Rove and others were enthusiastic supporters of Tim Griffin."

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Academic slams Israel for land grab

Web posted at: 3/29/2007 8:20:5
Source ::: The Peninsula

by Mohammed Iqbal

Doha • Dr Ilan Pappe is the only Jewish academic in Israel who is vehemently critical of Zionism and the formation of the Israeli state in the land of Palestine.

A senior lecturer of political science at Haifa University, Pappe says that he is now planning to migrate to the UK with his family, as he has found it increasingly difficult to live in Israel with his “unwelcome” views and convictions.

“I was boycotted in my university and there had been attempts to expel me from my job. I am getting threatening calls from people every day. I am not being viewed as a threat to the Israeli society but my people think that I am either insane or my views are irrelevant. Many Israelis also believe that I am working as a mercenary for the Arabs,” said Pappe in an interview with The Peninsula yesterday.

On his first-ever visit to a Gulf state, Pappe was in Doha yesterday at the invitation of the Qatar Foundation to speak at the Doha Debates. He believes that two independent states cannot co-exist in the land of Palestine and the only lasting solution to the issue is formation of one state, shared by Jews, Arabs and other communities living there. He also feels that there is no immediate solution to the crisis and only international pressure can force Israel to end the occupation and the continuing atrocities against the Palestinians.

"Over the past six years, the Israeli government has become more oppressive, thanks to the strong support from the Bush administration. They now feel that they can do anything they want," said Pappe.

He was born in Israel in 1954 of German parents who fled Nazi oppression during the1930s. They migrated to Palestine directly from Germany, years before the formation of the Israeli state in 1948.

Pappe's transformation from a "typical" Jew to a strong critic of Zionism started in the Eighties while he was studying history in England. "I re-examined the events of 1948, which changed my perceptions and I realised how the Israeli state was formed at the expense of the Palestinians. I don't subscribe to the view that a community which has a claim to a land that goes back thousands of years had the right to occupy it by dispossessing indigenous communities," Pappe said.

He noted that the Jews constituted a mere one per cent of the Palestinian population before the Israeli state was formed. The West, he felt, was supportive of Israel because of its "guilt complex" about the Holocaust and the oppression of the Jews.

"The Nazi movement and the Holocaust were not just German phenomena but a part of European history. The Western countries thought they can bury this chapter forever by creating a Jewish state in Palestine. But later they realised that the Palestinian issue is much more complex that what they had calculated," said Pappe.

There is a glimmer of hope with international public opinion growing against Israel, even among the powerful Jewish community in the West. There is a movement formed by a group of Jews in the US which called `Not in My Name'" As the name itself implies, members of this group do not want atrocities being committed by Israel to be attributed to Jews across the world. They are clearly trying to distance themselves from crimes being committed by Israel in the occupied territories.

The historian felt the George W Bush administration is mainly responsible for the current situation and the US policy towards Israel would change with a change in the government. "The policy of supporting Israel and seeking friendship with the Arabs cannot go hand-in-hand," said Pappe.

A bit surprisingly, he said: "I support Hamas in its resistance against the Israeli occupation though I disagree with their political ideology. I am for separating state from religion," said Pappe.

He feels that Israeli democracy is meant only for Jews and there is no space for other communities. "Any state that perpetrates occupation cannot be called a democratic state," he commented.

Bush's Budget Projects $333 Billion Tax Increase

Editor's note: I am moving to post at the primary blog(also see new articles below).
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Related
The Power Elite Uses the State To Rob the People
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March 26, 2007

Joint Tax Committee Releases Description of Tax Provisions in President's Budget, Projects $333 Billion Tax Increase from Proposed Standard Deduction for Health Insurance

The Joint Committee on Taxation today released Description of Revenue Provisions Contained in the President's Fiscal Year 2008 Budget Proposal (JCS-2-07):

This document, prepared by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, provides a description and analysis of the revenue provisions modifying the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 (the “Code”) that are contained in the President’s fiscal year 2008 budget proposal, as submitted to the Congress on February 5, 2007. The document generally follows the order of the proposals as included in the Department of the Treasury’s explanation of the President’s budget proposal. For each provision, there is a description of present law and the proposal (including effective date), a reference to relevant prior budget proposals or recent legislative action, and an analysis of policy issues related to the proposal.

On page 301, the Joint Committee projects that the President's proposed standard deduction for health insurance, coupled with repeal of the exclusion for employer-paid health insurance, self-employed health insurance deduction, and itemized medical deductions, would result in a $333 billion tax increase over 10 years.

March 26, 2007 in Congressional News | Permalink

Poll Backs Supoenas of Bush Aides

Poll Backs Supoenas of Bush Aides
"Americans overwhelmingly support a congressional investigation into White House involvement in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, and they say President Bush and his aides should answer questions about it without invoking executive privilege. In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday-Sunday, respondents said by nearly 3-to-1 that Congress should issue subpoenas to force White House officials to testify." (USA Today)

Poll Backs Supoenas of Bush Aides

Poll Backs Supoenas of Bush Aides
"Americans overwhelmingly support a congressional investigation into White House involvement in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, and they say President Bush and his aides should answer questions about it without invoking executive privilege. In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday-Sunday, respondents said by nearly 3-to-1 that Congress should issue subpoenas to force White House officials to testify." (USA Today)

Getting Serious About the "I" Word

BLOG | Posted 03/27/2007 @ 05:05am

John Nichols

Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough had me on his MSNBC show tonight to talk about impeachment.

It was smart, civil discussion that treated the prospect of impeaching the president as a serious matter.

Scarborough took the lead in suggesting that Bush's biggest problem might be that Republicans in the House and Senate who -- fearful of the threat Bush poses to their political survival -- do not appear to be rallying 'round the president. The host's sentiments were echoed by two other guests, columnist Mike Barnicle and Salon's Joan Walsh.

The impetus for the show was Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel's ongoing discussion of the impeachment prospect -- Hagel's not quite a supporter of sanctioning Bush, more a speculator about the prospect -- and a new column by Robert Novak that suggests Bush has dwindling support within the congressional wing of the GOP.

Speaking about impeachment on ABC's "This Week," Hagel said, "Any president who says 'I don't care' or 'I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else' or 'I don't care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed' -- if a president really believes that, then there (are) ways to deal with that."

Novak wrote "The I-word (incompetence) is used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to described a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. 'We always have claimed that we were the party of better management,' one House leader told me. 'How can we claim that anymore?'"

Scarborough drew the two statements together for the purpose of asking whether Bush could count on Republicans to block moves by Congressional Democrats to hold Bush to account for high crimes and misdemeanors.

When a conservative commentator who was on the frontlines of Newt Gingrich's "Republican revolution" entertains a thoughtful conversation about the politics and processes of impeachment on a major cable news network, it should be clear that the cloistered conversation about sanctioning this president has begun to open up.

No, Scarborough is not jumping on the impeachment bandwagon.

He is simply treating the prospect seriously, as did CNN's Wolf Blitzer earlier in the day.

What I told Scarborough is what I have been saying in public forums for the past several weeks: We are nearing an impeachment moment. The Alberto Gonzales scandal, the under-covered but very real controversy involving abuses of the Patriot Act and the president's increasingly belligerent refusals to treat Congress as a co-equal branch of government are putting the discussion of presidential accountability onto the table from which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tried to remove it.

Does this mean Bush and Cheney will be impeached? That, of course, will be decided by the people. Impeachment at its best is always an organic process; it needs popular support or it fizzles -- as with the attempt by House Republican leaders to remove former President Clinton in a process that, fairly or not, seemed to be all about blue dresses.

While the people saved Clinton – by signaling to their representatives that they opposed sanctioning a president's personal morals – it does not appear that they are inclined to protect Bush.

With each new revelation about what Gonzales did at the behest of the Bush White House to politicize prosecutions by U.S. Attorneys, the revulsion with the way this president has disregarded the Constitution and the rule of law becomes more intense. And citizens are not cutting their president much slack.

A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll -- conducted over the weekend -- shows that, by close to a 3-to-1 margin, Americans want Congress to issue subpoenas to force White House officials to testify in the Gonzales case. Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed say the president should drop his claim of executive privilege in this matter, while only 26 percent agree with the reasoning Bush has used to try and block a meaningful inquiry.

If the president wants to get in a fight with Congress over how to read the Constitution, it appears that the people will back Congress. And that backing is what will begin to restore the backbones of House members who, despite Pelosi's attempts to quiet talk of impeachment, are getting more and more intrigued by the prospect of holding this president to account.

As Hagel says, "This is not a monarchy. There are ways to deal with (executive excess). And I would hope the president understands that."

If Bush doesn't recognize this reality now, he soon will.

Republican Party loyalty in 'dramatic' decline

Republican Party loyalty in decline since 2002

By Janet Hook, Times Staff Writer
12:31 PM PDT, March 22, 2007

Related
-	Pew Research Center for People and the Press

WASHINGTON -- Public allegiance to the Republican Party has plunged since the second year of George W. Bush's presidency, as attitudes have edged away from some of the conservative values that fueled GOP political dominance for more than a decade, a major new survey has found.

The survey, by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for People and the Press, found a "dramatic shift" in political party identification since 2002, when Republicans and Democrats were at rough parity. Now, half of those surveyed identified with or leaned toward Democrats, while only 35% aligned with Republicans.

What's more, the survey found the public attitudes are drifting toward Democrats' values: Support for government aid to the disadvantaged has grown since the mid-1990s, skepticism about the use of military force has increased and support for traditional family values has edged down.

Those findings suggest that Republicans' political challenges reach beyond the unpopularity of the war in Iraq and Bush.

"Iraq has played a large part; the pushback on the Republican Party has to do with Bush, but there are other things going on here that Republicans will have to contend with," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "There is a difference in the landscape."

A key question is whether those trends signal a broad and lasting change in the balance of power between the parties or just a mood swing that will soon pass or moderate. It remains to be seen whether Democrats can capitalize on Republicans' weakness and gain a durable position of political dominance.

"This is the beginning of a Democratic opportunity," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. "The question is whether we blow it or not."

Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster, said he believed the Pew poll exaggerates his party's problems and that the situation will improve as attention shifts to choosing Bush's successor.

"Once we have new nominees to redefine the Republican and Democratic party in 2008, then we will have a far more level playing field than we have today," Ayres said.

But other Republicans believe such poll results signal a clear end to the era of GOP domination that began with President Reagan's election, continued when the party took control of Capitol Hill in 1994, and helped elect Bush twice to the White House.

"There are cycles in history where one party or one movement ascends for a while and then it sews the seeds of its own self-destruction," said Bruce Bartlett, a conservative analyst and author of a 2006 book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted American and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."

"It's clear we have come to an end of a Republican conservative era," he said.

The Pew poll measured the views of 2,007 adults from Dec. 12 through Jan. 9. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The study of long-term shifts in political attitudes and values is part of series of periodic reports dating back to 1987.

The gap between Republican and Democratic identification, which Pew measured by counting people who are leaning toward one party or the other as well as those with a firm allegiances, is the widest spread between the parties since Pew began since the studies.

Although the gap between Republican and Democratic allegiances speaks to the GOP's current troubles, Kohut said that the shift mostly reflects the defection of independents from the party rather than a more favorable overall assessment of the Democratic Party.

The proportion expressing a positive view of Democrats has declined since January 2001 by six points, to 54%. But the public's regard for Republicans cratered during the Bush years, as the proportion holding a favorable view of the GOP dropped 15 points to 41%.

Republicans seem to be paying a price for a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the state of the country during the Bush years. Three out of 10 people said they were satisfied with the way things are going in the country--a 25-point drop in the last seven years.

While Republicans rode to political power calling for smaller government, support for government action to help the disadvantaged has risen since the GOP took control of Congress in 1994. Back then, 57% believed the government had a responsibility to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves; now 69% believe that.

On the other hand support for Bush's signature issue--a strong, proactive military posture--has waned since 2002, when 62% said that the best way to ensure peace is through military strength. Now, only 49% believe that.

On social issues, the survey found that support for some key conservative positions has edged down: The people who said they supported "old-fashioned values about family and marriage" dipped from 84% in 1994 to 76%.

Support for allowing school boards to have the right to fire homosexual teachers dropped from 39% in 1994 to 28% in 2007.

janet.hook @latimes.com

Why Bush Refuses to Allow Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to Testify Before Congress

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New Developments in the U.S. Attorney Controversy:
Why Bush Refuses to Allow Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to Testify Before Congress, and What Role New White House Counsel Fred Fielding May Play

By JOHN W. DEAN

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Friday, Mar. 23, 2007

At the outset of this column -- which discusses Bush's new White House Counsel, Fred Fielding -- I must acknowledge that I am the person who first hired, and brought Fielding into the government. He served as my deputy in the Nixon White House, and was untouched by Watergate, because I shielded all my staff from that unpleasant business. Fred is an able lawyer, and now finds himself in the hot seat, with President Bush seemingly looking for a fight with Congress. (But that's what makes the job interesting.)

One further disclosure: I have never been an advocate of executive privilege, except as it might relate to the most sensitive national security information. To the contrary, you show me a White House aide who does not want his conversations and advice to the president revealed, and I will show you someone who should not be talking with or advising a president.

Of course, I do not know what is transpiring behind closed doors at the White House right now. But I do believe there is more occurring than meets the eye with respect to the potential confrontation developing between the Democratic Congress and the Bush White House. On the surface, the clash appears rather simple: Congress wants information, and Bush does want to provide it if it means breaching the sanctity of the realm in which he receives advice from his aides privately. But this surface conflict, as I will explain, does not get to the bottom of this developing dust-up.

In truth, much more is at stake here for both the Congress and the White House than this bare description of the conflict would indicate. These issues strike at the heart of what post-Watergate conservative Republicans seek to create: an all-powerful presidency. Thus, for the same reason that Vice President Cheney went to extreme lengths to block Congress from getting information about the work of his National Energy Task Force, as I discussed in prior columns such as this one, I expect President Bush to take what will appear to be a similar irrational posture. For both Bush and Cheney, virtually any limit on presidential power is too great.

And this conflict, in the end, is all about presidential power. Moreover, underlying the Administration's defense of unchecked power, is a term that has not been heard since Justice Alito's confirmation hearings: "the unitary executive theory." Once, conservatives rejected a strong presidency. Today, however, the opposite is the case, and the unitary executive theory is central to their argument.

Clashing institutions make good news copy. But understanding why two co-equal branches of our government each have such strong feelings about their need to prevail in this conflict, may help to get to the heart of the matter.

The Contemporary Conservative Vision of Executive Power: A Strong Presidency

In a piece last year for The New Republic's July issue, legal journalist Jeffery Rosen summed up George W. Bush's outlook on the presidency: "One of the defining principles of the Bush administration has been a belief in unfettered executive power. Indeed, President Bush has taken the principle to such unprecedented extremes that an ironic reversal has taken place: A conservative ideology that had always been devoted to limiting government power has been transformed into the largest expansion of executive power since FDR."

Rosen reported that Bush's perspective is not "mere political opportunism--a cynical rationale devised after September 11 to allow the president to do whatever he likes in the war on terrorism." Rather, Rosen explained, Bush's actions stem from his embrace of the "unitary executive theory." (Of course, Bush may not himself have mastered the fine points of this theory, but it is clear he understands the core idea, and acts accordingly.)

Column continues below ↓

Bush's governing style is not surprising to those who took a close look at how he governed before he arrived in Washington. Indeed, the perceptive conservative commentator George Will saw it coming.

Will visited Governor Bush in Texas in 1999, and talked as well with the team Bush had assembled to work on his presidential campaign. "They are recasting conservatism by expunging the traditional conservative ambivalence about presidential power," Will reported at the time. "Hence the presence on the cluttered desk of chief speechwriter Mike Gerson of Terry Eastland's book, Energy in the Executive: The Case for the Strong Presidency. Eastland's title comes from Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Paper Number 70: 'Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.'" Will then explained the theory that would turn out, later, to be Bush's bottom line: "Eastland's thesis is that 'the strong presidency is necessary to effect ends sought by most conservatives.'"

Strikingly, Will concluded his report with a savvy prediction: "A second Bush presidency would be more muscular than the first in exercising executive power." Will, obviously, made this prediction long before 9/11. His article and his take on the situation are thus excellent evidence that even in a hypothetical world without 9/11, we still would have seen additional executive power grabs from a second-term President Bush.

I raise Terry Eastland's book, in particular, because I have always believed it has been something of a bible for Bush II and his staff. The book is also directly related to the "unitary executive theory." Eastland draws his view of the presidency from the same source attorneys in the Reagan Administration Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel did, when they came up with the phrase "unitary executive theory" to describe their effort to provide legal justification for the President's taking increasingly aggressive control of the executive branch. At that time, the clash was between the Executive and the independent regulatory agencies, but the principle was the same.

The source upon which both Eastland and those who coined the "unitary executive" theory relied, of course, was Hamilton's Federalists No. 70 -- as I will discuss further below.

What Exactly Is the Unitary Executive Theory? A Short Answer

Before the Alito confirmation hearings, Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank correctly described the "unitary executive theory" as an "obscure philosophy … that favors an extraordinarily powerful president." Milbank found an invocation of this philosophy in the notorious "torture memos."

For example, Milbank quoted a passage from one of the memos that was laced with conservative pipe-dream rhetoric: "The Framers understood the [Commander in Chief] clause as investing the president with the fullest range of power," the memo claimed, including power over "the conduct of warfare and the defense of the nation unless expressly assigned in the Constitution to Congress." Such power was given, the memo theorized, because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action that characterize the presidency rather than Congress." (Conservative scholars, I have discovered, have a unique skill of channeling the thinking of the Founders in their writing.)

When the obscure philosophy surfaced during the Alito hearings, Writ guest columnist Jennifer Van Bergen assembled a brisk overview of its salient points. But for a quick and a bit more in-depth course in Unitary Executive Theory 101, I would suggest an analysis by Loyola Law School Professors Karl Manheim and Allan Ides.

Professors Manheim and Ides trace the origins, evolution, and current uses of the unitary executive theory. While it is beyond the scope of their analysis, they also, along the way, provide information useful to deconstruct and critically analyze this concocted effort at legal (and historical) legerdemain. This is not the place for me to unload on this hogwash theory, but I must pause to comment, at least, on its purported links to Alexander Hamilton's purported vision of "a unitary executive."

This was not remotely Hamilton's vision. Listen, for example, to what Morton Rosenberg says; he is a specialist in American Public Law at the non-partisan Congressional Reference Service of the Library of Congress, and he is described by many of those who know him as the smartest guy in the place. Rosenberg was one of the first to correct this loopy scholarship when it began appearing in the early 1980s.

Rosenberg places Hamilton in a realistic context, as he knocks down several shaky pillars upon which unitary executive theorists have tried to build: "The framers had no reason to envisage the management of an industrial nation as the essential function of the office [of the president.]," Rosenberg explains. "Whatever managerial insights Hamilton had were confined to commerce, banking, and monetary policy…. Nor did [the framers] conceive of the presidency as an institutionalized representation of popular will distinct from, let alone capable of opposition to, the will expressed by the legislature. Even Hamilton's most strenuous defenses of executive authority emphasized the president's role as the managerial agent for the legislature, not his popular independence in reflection of some other popular will."

Manheim and Ides explain that the essence of the unitary executive "theory" is "more about power than it is about law." And power, here, means presidential power: The "unitary executive" theory is a theoretical, legal, historical, and Constitutional hook conservatives have invented to expand presidential power.

These "unitarians" postulate, as Manheim and Ides note, "that the authority to enforce federal law and to implement federal policy rest exclusively in the Executive Branch and, most importantly, the ultimate prerogative over this executive function is vested solely and completely in the President, who sits atop the hierarchy of executive power and responsibility." This exclusivity, in the unitarians' view, precludes any but the most minimal role for Congress: Its role, they believe, is simply to decide whether to appropriate money; otherwise, it must butt out completely.

The Relationship of Unitary Executive Theory and Executive Privilege

Eastland's tutorial, set forth in his book, instructed President Bush and his staff to make a big deal out of protecting presidential prerogatives. So, too, does the unitary executive theory, which was developed at the same time that Reagan's Justice Department was doing what Presidents Ford and Carter had been too wary to do: revive Executive Privilege. Neither Ford nor Carter issued guidelines for the executive branch regarding the use of this privilege, for Nixon had given it such a bad name they dared not use it. But the Reagan Administration dared, and did.

Indeed, Reagan's Attorney General, William French Smith had the nerve to issue a memorandum opinion expressly relying on U.S. v Nixon -- the famous Nixon tapes case. In the language quoted by French, the Supreme Court concluded: "The expectation of a President to the confidentiality of his conversations and correspondence … has all the values to which we accord deference for the privacy of all citizens and, added to those values, is the necessity for protection of the public interest in candid, objective, and even blunt or harsh opinions in Presidential decision-making. A President and those who assist him must be free to explore alternatives in the process of shaping policies and making decisions and to do so in a way many would be unwilling to express except privately. These are the considerations justifying a presumptive privilege for Presidential communications. The privilege is fundamental to the operation of Government and inextricably rooted in the separation of powers under the Constitution."

The point that French, elided, however, was that the Court had rejected Nixon's claim of an unqualified privilege, and directed that the tapes be produced for in camera inspection (that is, inspection that is secret even from the parties and their attorneys) by the relevant court.

Moreover, in explaining its holding, the Court reasoned as follows: "[W]hen the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises. Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets, we find it difficult to accept the argument that even the very important interest in confidentiality of Presidential communications is significantly diminished by production of such material for in camera inspection…."

Not only did this holding result in the rejection of an executive privilege claim, it is also quite vague, and it applies to a judicial, not a legislative subpoena. Nevertheless, Attorney General Smith drew upon it to opine, consistent with the philosophy of protecting presidential prerogatives, that "[t]he interest of Congress in obtaining information for oversight purposes is, I believe, considerably weaker than its interest when specific legislative proposals are in question."

Thus, Smith encouraged President Reagan (and presidents generally) to deny information to Congress when conducting oversight, except "in the most unusual circumstances."

Past Is Probably Not Prologue for Bush: The Gorsuch Fiasco

Interestingly, however, to the displeasure of many, Reagan's White House Counsel Fred Fielding -- now at the center of the current clash, as Bush's counsel -- did not protect the president's prerogatives as vigorously as Reagan's Attorney General would have preferred.

A leading scholar on Executive Privilege, Mark Rozell, reports that although "President Reagan invoked executive privilege on several occasions, he never fully exercised that power. When confronted by congressional demands for information, Reagan generally followed a pattern of initial resistance followed by accommodation of Congress's request. Reagan never made a concerted effort to defend his prerogative in this area. As a result, he further weakened a constitutional presidential power …."

How much of Reagan's reluctance to press the "executive privilege" issue derived from Fielding, Reagan himself, or other Reagan aides, is not known. Also, some of the criticism of Reagan's decision not to aggressively assert the privilege occurred largely after Fielding had left. For instance, Vice President Cheney later insisted that Reagan provided too much information to Congress during their Iran-Contra investigation.

Fielding was White House Counsel, however, during one of the more thrilling episodes involving executive privilege -- one that could parallel the current situation, with Congress calling for testimony by White House aide Karl Rove and former aide Harriet Miers. In explaining what happened back in 1982, I've drawn heavily on -- paraphrasing, greatly abbreviating, and then quoting -- Mark Rozell's report:

Two House committees issued subpoenas to EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch, directing her to appear before Congress with certain documents. Gorsuch was prepared to turn over the documents, but the Justice Department urged President Reagan to assert executive privilege. When he did so, White House Counsel Fielding assured Gorsuch that "the administration would stand solidly behind this claim of executive privilege."

When Gorsuch invoked the privilege, both committees voted to hold her in contempt, and on December 16, 1982, the House of Representatives voted 259-105 to find her in contempt of Congress. Immediately following the House vote, however, the Justice Department filed civil suit against the House of Representatives. Then, rather than follow the language of the contempt statute, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia -- obviously after being instructed by the Justice Department regarding this matter- refused to "bring the matter before the grand jury for their action" while the suit against the House was pending. (It was a delaying ploy.)

The House requested that the federal district court dismiss the civil lawsuit, which the court did. The court also encouraged the two branches "to settle their differences without further judicial involvement" and warned that "[i]f these two co-equal branches maintain their present adversarial positions, the Judicial Branch will be required to resolve the dispute by determining the validity of the Administrator's claim of executive privilege."

Two weeks later, the Administration made a deal with one of the congressional committees, agreeing to a limited disclosure of the requested information. Again, EPA administrator Gorsuch pushed for full disclosure, but the White House disagreed. Meanwhile, the other congressional committee would not agree to a limited release and continued to press for full disclosure, advising the White House that the investigations would continue until the documents were provided.

Having had enough, Gorsuch resigned her position as head of EPA when the White House finally agreed to release its documents Congress wanted. Following the contempt statute, the U.S. attorney presented a contempt citation to a grand jury, which unanimously declined to indict Gorsuch.

Rozell concludes, "Although the administration initially had taken a strong stand on executive privilege, it backed down in the face of mounting political pressure. The decision to compromise did not settle the executive privilege controversy. The House Committee on the Judiciary further investigated the Justice Department role in the controversy and concluded that the department had misused executive privilege by advocating the withholding of documents that had not been thoroughly reviewed. T bghe committee also alleged that the department withheld documents to cover up wrongdoing at EPA. The administration's compromise served as a temporary political expedient which eventually allowed Congress to examine previously withheld documents and draw broader conclusions about the exercise of executive privilege. Reagan may have won a temporary reprieve from political pressures, but he had lost ground in his effort to re-establish the viability of the doctrine of executive privilege."

It Seems Likely Bush, with Fielding, Will Go to the Wall on Executive Privilege

This time, it is my belief that Bush -- unlike Reagan before him -- will not blink. He will not let Fielding strike a deal, as Fielding did for Reagan. Rather, Bush feels that he has his manhood on the line. He knows what his conservative constituency wants: a strong president who protects his prerogatives. He believes in the unitary executive theory of protecting those prerogatives, and of strengthening the presidency by defying Congress.

In short, all those who have wanted to see Karl Rove in jail may get their wish, for he will not cave in, either -- and may well be prosecuted for contempt, as Gorsuch was not. Bush's greatest problem here, however, is Harriett Miers. It is dubious he can exert any privilege over a former White House Counsel; I doubt she is ready to go to prison for him; and all who know her say if she is under oath, she will not lie. That could be a problem.

JOHN W. DEAN

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John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the president.