Keep the Internet Free!

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The Conyers Report: It’s Not Bedtime Reading!

Yes, I realize it’s lengthy, but John Conyers’s report is a real eye-opener. If it matters to you that George W. Bush manipulated and lied this nation into invading Iraq, and if it matters to you that George W. Bush broke American laws, then you need to read Representative Conyers’s investigation report.

Congress Holds Working Americans Hostage

Republicans in Congress have no qualms about holding American workers hostage. The political football du jour? The measly increase to the measly minimum wage. Yes, fellow Americans, Republicans were “willing” to discuss increasing the minimum wage, but it was all a scam: they just wanted to ram through more repeals to the estate tax. Since the inception of the minimum wage, Congress has voted itself more in raises than minimum wage workers earn working 40-hour weeks. Please sign this petition asking Congress to raise the minimum wage without adding riders giving even more handouts to those who need it least.

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The Federalist Papers--Today's Installment

I introduced the Federalist Papers in an earlier post, and I will continue to post the introduction below before each of the remaining papers. They are worth our consideration. The first paper was written by Alexander Hamilton.

The Federalist Papers were written and published during the years 1787 and 1788 in several New York State newspapers to persuade New York voters to ratify the proposed constitution. They consist of 85 essays outlining how this new government would operate and why this type of government was the best choice for the United States of America. The essays were signed PUBLIUS. The authors of some papers are under dispute, but the general consensus is that Alexander Hamilton wrote 52, James Madison wrote 28, and John Jay contributed the remaining five. The Federalist Papers remain today as an excellent reference for anyone who wants to understand the U.S. Constitution.

To the People of the State of New York:

AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

This idea will add the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism, to heighten the solicitude which all considerate and good men must feel for the event. Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected. The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon too many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.

Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.

It is not, however, my design to dwell upon observations of this nature. I am well aware that it would be disingenuous to resolve indiscriminately the opposition of any set of men (merely because their situations might subject them to suspicion) into interested or ambitious views. Candor will oblige us to admit that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted that much of the opposition which has made its appearance, or may hereafter make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable--the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears. So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

And yet, however just these sentiments will be allowed to be, we have already sufficient indications that it will happen in this as in all former cases of great national discussion. A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

In the course of the preceding observations, I have had an eye, my fellow-citizens, to putting you upon your guard against all attempts, from whatever quarter, to influence your decision in a matter of the utmost moment to your welfare, by any impressions other than those which may result from the evidence of truth. You will, no doubt, at the same time, have collected from the general scope of them, that they proceed from a source not unfriendly to the new Constitution. Yes, my countrymen, I own to you that, after having given it an attentive consideration, I am clearly of opinion it is your interest to adopt it. I am convinced that this is the safest course for your liberty, your dignity, and your happiness. I affect not reserves which I do not feel. I will not amuse you with an appearance of deliberation when I have decided. I frankly acknowledge to you my convictions, and I will freely lay before you the reasons on which they are founded. The consciousness of good intentions disdains ambiguity. I shall not, however, multiply professions on this head. My motives must remain in the depository of my own breast. My arguments will be open to all, and may be judged of by all. They shall at least be offered in a spirit which will not disgrace the cause of truth.

In the progress of this discussion I shall endeavor to give a satisfactory answer to all the objections which shall have made their appearance, that may seem to have any claim to your attention.

It may perhaps be thought superfluous to offer arguments to prove the utility of the UNION, a point, no doubt, deeply engraved on the hearts of the great body of the people in every State, and one, which it may be imagined, has no adversaries. But the fact is, that we already hear it whispered in the private circles of those who oppose the new Constitution, that the thirteen States are of too great extent for any general system, and that we must of necessity resort to separate confederacies of distinct portions of the whole.1 This doctrine will, in all probability, be gradually propagated, till it has votaries enough to countenance an open avowal of it. For nothing can be more evident, to those who are able to take an enlarged view of the subject, than the alternative of an adoption of the new Constitution or a dismemberment of the Union. It will therefore be of use to begin by examining the advantages of that Union, the certain evils, and the probable dangers, to which every State will be exposed from its dissolution. This shall accordingly constitute the subject of my next address.

PUBLIUS.

Rise of the MegaChurch

A new phenomenon is taking shape in America--one that is radically redefining the “Christian experience.” What is this trend, and why is it gaining popularity?

Albany Seeks School Control In A Long Island District

by Doreen Carvajal, New York Times Reporter

With a state official calling the Roosevelt school system an "educational and financial failure," the State Board of Regents voted unanimously today to proceed with the first state takeover of a school district in New York history. Meeting in Albany, the regents decided to hold a public hearing on ousting Roosevelt's five-member school board, the final step required by law before a takeover can begin. Board members vowed to resist removal.

The New York State Education Department is seeking last-minute legislation that would allow it for the first time to seize "immediate control" of a crisis-ridden school district, state officials said yesterday.

The state proposal, which would wrest control of the Roosevelt school district on Long Island from the local elected school board, follows a series of inspections revealing many problems at the 1,050-student Roosevelt Junior-Senior High School.

Meanwhile, the Future of the Iraq Program

The Occupation
by Patrick Cockburn

How many times have you been to Iraq, before and since the Anglo-American invasion?

I went to Iraq in 1978, and I’ve been there I suppose fifty or sixty times. Sometimes for as long as three months, at other times for a fortnight or so. In all, I have spent a bit more than half my time in Iraq since the Occupation. I was there before, during, and after the invasion, initially based in Kurdistan since I couldn’t get a visa to Baghdad, because I and my brother had written a book on Iraq in the nineties. So when the US-led attack began, I was in the North. I was in Kirkuk and Mosul when they fell, and as soon as the road south was open, I drove down the main highway from Arbil to Baghdad. By the time I left the city, looting was still proceeding apace. The Information Ministry was being set on fire as I set off to Jordan, thick clouds of smoke rising over Baghdad and driving west you could already see all these battered little white pickups, which are very typical in Iraq, loaded with loot, going along the main highway and then turning off the road to Ramadi and Fallujah.

Is this the same Iraq that the administration has been reporting on? Where are the chocolates? Where are the flowers? No chocolate? No flowers?

Bummer.

Domestic Political Incentives for the Gulf War

Condensed from article by Jon Wiener

Why did the United States fight the Gulf War? What factors entered into George Bush’s decision to avoid a negotiated solution? The timing of that decision goes some way to answering these questions, and two conflicting theories have been offered: first, that Bush wanted war from the beginning, but couldn’t make that clear until after the Congressional elections; second, that he did not come down firmly in favor of war until late October, when he decided to double the number of troops and set the timetable for air and ground attacks. Bob Woodward’s new book, The Commanders, provides important new information about this decision from General Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Although Bush publicly declared on 5 August, ‘this will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait,’ his efforts to reverse the invasion focused on UN sanctions and covert CIA operations; it was not until October, according to Woodward, that the president requested a military briefing on ‘how to conduct an offensive operation against Saddam’s forces.’ Late in October, before Bush decided to double US ground forces, Woodward writes, Powell tried to persuade the president that ‘containment’ of Iraq through economic and military pressures could force Saddam out of Kuwait without war, but that it would take time. Bush, according to Woodward’s account, answered, ‘I don’t think there’s time politically for that strategy.’

Problems began immediately after Baghdad fell--despite administration officials being warned, the National Museum (its collections going back to the beginning of human civilization) was looted while U.S. forces watched; later Wolfowitz claimed all but 38 artifacts were recovered, ignoring the thousands smashed and stolen from storerooms. Similarly, the National Library--a repository of Iraq's recent history was burned. Elsewhere almost two tons of Iraqi yellowcake was looted post invasion, again while U.S. troops were nearby; Saddam's supposed recent yellowcake acquisitions were part of the justification for the invasion. Looters also took high explosives used to initiate nuclear explosions. Personnel files with names/addresses of Saddam Fedayeen (those attacking US forces) were found and reported to Wolfowitz--again no action. The US had simply assumed that Iraq's police and bureaucrats would report for work the day after Baghdad fell--despite the warnings of experts.

Galbraith ultimately asks What would an Iraqi government govern? Answering his own question, he contends that it would not include the Kurdish area (Baghdad ministries are not even allowed to open offices there), the Shiite south (now run by clerics, militias, and religious parties as an Islamic state), nor Baghdad or the Sunni Arab heartland (will continue to be battlegrounds).

Galbraith's Recommendations: help the Kurds rule on their own, pull out of southern Iraq (would also give us more military strength vs. Iran), and put Sunni army/police in charge of Sunni areas while maintaining U.S. emergency reaction forces in the Kurdish areas.

Stand Down when They Stand Up?

NOT SO MUCH! This administration has screwed up big time! The cost of this fiasco is staggering: lost lives (both American and Iraqi); lost wealth: the generations the it will take for this country to dig its way out of debt; lost reputation around the world (our reputation will suffer for generations); lost confidence in our government (the voting public has never witnessed such manipulation of facts); lost confidence in our press; lost confidence in our voting machines; war profiteering; and on and on. And here’s a News Flash: Iraqis will never be ready to stand up! Why? Why should they? They are perfectly happy to see the American soldiers get killed rather than themselves. Oops! This administration didn’t think that one through.

W: America's Worst Nightmare

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How should George W. Bush be mentioned in History Books?
How about “the worst nightmare to happen to America in the
21st century”?
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The Bankruptcy Bill

How are bills passed into law? Earmarks and riders are added into a small number of bills; Republicans shake hands behind closed doors; and the bill is then sneaked in and passed. No debate.

Remember the K Street Project?

When the Republicans took the majority, they attempted to infiltrate fascist insiders into our government. Trade associations were shaken down in exchange for favors. Fact is, Tom DeLay placed his cronies in government in the largest scandal in this country’s history. DeLay gave American taxpayer dollars to family members, oversaw horrible human rights scandals in the Mariana islands, used public funds to purchase Congress members for sale, and hobnobbed with the likes of Duke Cunningham and Katherine Harris. Pork rolled like at no other time in our country’s history. Read Broken Branch by Norm Ornstein for the whole story.

A Closer Look at Karl Rove, Boy Genius

by James Traub

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Karl Rove, the political mastermind George W. Bush called “Boy Genius,” was wont to draw an analogy with the election of 1896, in which the Republican William McKinley drubbed William Jennings Bryan. McKinley's election ushered in a 35-year era chiefly characterized by G.O.P. dominance; so, too, Rove argued, would Bush's hasten the progress toward an era of virtual one-party rule. And Rove's bold prediction seemed plausible. Over time, the Republicans have increased their margin in Congress and reversed years of Democratic dominance in statehouses and State Legislatures. The conservative columnist Fred Barnes declared in 2003 that Republicans had attained a state of dominance last seen in the 1920's, the end of the period McKinley ushered in. Realignment, he wrote, "has reached its entrenchment phase."

Or has it? President Bush is now more unpopular than Bill Clinton was at any time in his tenure, while public approval of the G.O.P.-dominated Congress has plummeted to 23 percent, a level last seen in October 1994, the month before the Democrats suffered one of the most humiliating wipeouts in the history of Congressional elections. Many political analysts now say that the Democrats have a real shot at retaking the House of Representatives and an outside chance of winning the Senate too. A great deal can happen between now and November, not to mention between now and 2008, but the Boy Genius certainly looks a lot less brilliant than he did a few years back.

It is not hard to see why Rove fastened on McKinley as Bush's precursor. McKinley was an amiable governor around whom Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove of the day, could raise enormous sums of money from industrial and financial circles. But Rove also insisted on a more far-reaching parallel: with the Civil War a fading memory, the Republicans of 1896 could no longer run as the party of the Union and needed to forge a new politics. McKinley, "the advance agent of prosperity," as he was known, offered himself as a tribune not only of the new business class but also of an emerging industrial society, as against Bryan's appeal to agrarian values and to the dispossessed. McKinley made Republicans the party of the future. And he brought new voting blocs to the Grand Old Party. Rove noted in a 2002 speech that McKinley "attempted deliberately to break with the Gilded Age politics" he had inherited by appealing to "Portuguese fishermen and Slovak coal miners and Serbian ironworkers," all of whom he made a very public point of receiving at his Ohio home in the course of his "front-porch campaign."

Rove postulated that Bush, like McKinley, had arrived at a moment when the old politics no longer applied and the new had yet to be formed. By offering himself as a pro-immigrant, pro-growth, "compassionate" conservative, he would attract the new voters of the day, including Hispanic immigrants, as well as workers in the post-industrial economy, while at the same time mobilizing the party's conservative Christian base. He would be the candidate of growth and the future while casting his rival, Al Gore, as the embodiment of an exhausted big-government credo. And this strategy worked: in 2000, Bush made gains among Hispanics and carried 97 of the country's 100 fastest-growing counties. Of course, Gore won the popular vote and, by some accounts, the election. And yet since that time, the Democrats have come to look like the party of the underprivileged and the highly educated and scarcely anyone else.

So why doesn't 2006 recall the G.O.P.'s glory years? First of all, McKinley was facing a particularly hapless generation of Democrats. A long period of deadlock had come to an end in the off-year election of 1894, when the failure of the incumbent Democrats to stem a financial panic led to a colossal electoral rout. In a shambles, the party took a decisive turn to the left in 1896 by choosing the populist Bryan, who ran again in 1900 and 1908. Today's Democrats are much closer to the mainstream, and the realignment has been correspondingly shallower. Over the last decade, as the political analyst Michael Barone observes, the national vote for president and for Congress has divided almost down the middle. Second, while McKinley had the good fortune to arrive at the dawn of a new era, Bush came along three decades after Republicans broke into the Democrats' solid South to establish a new majority. The historic tide may have already been ebbing.

And finally, George W. Bush is no William McKinley. The figure we meet in the biography by Lewis Gould, McKinley's great champion and Rove's teacher at the University of Texas, is a canny political veteran, more pragmatist than dogmatist. McKinley governed from the center the Democrats began to vacate in the Bryan era. The president not only made a show of mingling with workers but also appointed labor leaders to his cabinet and publicly supported the call for an eight-hour day for government employees. And for all his reputation as an imperialist who provoked a war with Spain, McKinley appears to have held out as long as he could against the rabid jingoism of the public and Congress, especially after the sinking of the Maine in Havana's harbor in February 1898. "What is remarkable," Gould concludes after reviewing the evidence, "is how long the president was able to obtain time for the conducting of peaceful diplomacy."

George W. Bush is, by contrast, a radical figure, a profoundly self-confident leader willing to stake all on his unshakable inner convictions--which is to say that this president made himself a hostage to fortune in a way that the coldly calculating McKinley never would have done. Thanks in no small part to the supreme self-assurance, the disdain for more cautious points of view, of the president and his inner circle, the administration has run aground on Iraq.

The war in Iraq is the biggest, but not the only, reason for the growing crisis. It is instructive that only one-third of mainline Protestants now say they approve of President Bush's performance (as opposed to one-half two years ago), according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. A Congress that spends days arguing over the body of Terry Schiavo or the merits of a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage does not feel like the embodiment of the future to more moderate or more secular Republicans. Rove and Bush have driven an already conservative party to the right. "The McKinley party was still plausibly the party of Lincoln," as the historian Sean Wilentz observes. "But Bush and Rove are the culmination of 30 years of realignment in which the Republicans became the party of the South the way the Democrats were in McKinley's day."

John McCain could reinvigorate the party should he succeed Bush, just as the equally magnetic Teddy Roosevelt did when he took office following McKinley's assassination in 1901. But even if that happens, McCain's party is likely to be very different from George W. Bush's. Walter Dean Burnham, the political scientist, defined political realignments as America's "surrogate for revolution." It may be that Karl Rove's revolution was one Americans did not want and have now begun to reject.

A Wave of Sexual Terrorism in Iraq

by Ruth Rosen

Behind the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and her family lies a far larger story of what's happened to women in Iraq since they were “liberated” by the Bush administration.

Abu Ghraib. Haditha. Guantanamo. These are words that shame our country. Now, add to them Mahmudiya, a town 20 miles south of Baghdad. There, this March, a group of five American soldiers allegedly were involved in the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza, a young Iraqi girl. Her body was then set on fire to cover up their crimes, her father, mother, and sister murdered. The rape of this one girl, if proven true, is probably not simply an isolated incident. But how would we know? In Iraq, rape is a taboo subject. Shamed by the rape, relatives of this girl wouldn't even hold a public funeral and were reluctant to reveal where she is buried.

This specific rape of one Iraqi girl, however, is now becoming symbolic of the way the Bush administration has violated Iraq's honor; Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has already launched an inquest into the crime. In an administration that normally doesn't know the meaning of an apology, the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad and the top American commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. both publicly apologized.

Rape and sexual humiliation in prisons
The scandal of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib focused on the torture, sexual abuse, and humiliation of Iraqi men. A variety of sources suggest that female prisoners suffered similar treatment, including rape.

Few Americans probably realize that the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib also held female detainees. Some of them were arrested by Americans for political reasons -- because they were relatives of Baathist leaders or because the occupying forces thought they could use them as bargaining chips to force male relatives to inform on insurgents or give themselves up.

On the condition of anonymity and in great fear, some female detainees nevertheless did speak with human rights workers after being released from detention. They have described beatings, torture, and isolation. Like their male counterparts, they reserve their greatest bitterness for sexual humiliations suffered in American custody. Nearly all female detainees reported being threatened with rape. Some women were interrogated naked and subjected to derision and humiliating remarks by soldiers.

The British Guardian reported that one female prisoner managed to smuggle a note out of Abu Ghraib. She claimed that American guards were raping the few female detainees held in the prison and that some of them were now pregnant. In desperation, she urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail in order to spare the women further shame.

Professor Huda Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University, also told the Guardian that women in Abu Ghraib have been sexually abused and raped. She identified one woman, in particular, who was raped by an American military policeman, became pregnant, and later disappeared.

Sexual Terrorism on the Streets
The chaos of the war has also led to a rash of kidnappings and rapes of women outside of prison walls. After interviewing rape and abduction victims, as well as eyewitnesses, Iraqi police and health professionals, and U.S. military police and civil affairs officers, Human Rights Watch released a report in July, 2003, titled Climate of Fear: Sexual Violence and Abduction of Women and Girls in Baghdad.

The U.S. State Department's June 2005 report on the trafficking of women suggested that the extent of the problem in Iraq is "difficult to appropriately gauge" under current chaotic circumstances, but cited an unknown number of Iraqi women and girls being sent to Yemen, Syria, Jordan, and Persian Gulf countries for sexual exploitation.

In May 2006, Brian Bennett wrote in Time Magazine that a visit to "the Khadamiyah Women's Prison in the northern part of Baghdad immediately produces several tales of abduction and abandonment. A stunning 18-year-old nicknamed Amna, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail, says she was taken from an orphanage by an armed gang just after the US invasion and sent to brothels in Samarra, al-Qaim on the border with Syria, and Mosul in the north before she was taken back to Baghdad, drugged with pills, dressed in a suicide belt and sent to bomb a cleric's office in Khadamiyah, where she turned herself in to the police. A judge gave her a seven-year jail sentence 'for her sake' to protect her from the gang, according to the prison director."

Disappearing women
To avoid such dangers, countless Iraqi women have become shut-ins in their own homes. Historian Marjorie Lasky has described this situation in "Iraqi Women Under Siege," a 2006 report for Codepink, an anti-war women's organization. Before the war, she points out, many educated Iraqi women participated fully in the work force and in public life. Now, many of them rarely go out. They fear kidnap and rape; they are terrified of getting caught in the cross-fire between Americans and insurgents; they are frightened by sectarian reprisals; and they are scared of Islamic militants who intimidate or beat them if they are not "properly covered."

"In the British-occupied south," Terri Judd reported in the British Independent,"where Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi's Army retains a stranglehold, women insist the situation is at its worst. Here they are forced to live behind closed doors only to emerge, concealed behind scarves, hidden behind husbands and fathers. Even wearing a pair of trousers is considered an act of defiance, punishable by death."

This, then, is a hidden part of the unnecessary suffering loosed by the reckless invasion of Iraq. Amid the daily explosions and gunfire that make the papers is a wave of sexual terrorism, whose exact dimensions we have no way of knowing, and that no one here notices, unleashed by the Bush administration in the name of exporting "democracy" and fighting "the war on terror."

Ruth Rosen is a historian and journalist who teaches public policy at UC Berkeley. She is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute.