The Emperor Unclothed: Woodward's State of Denial Book: A portrait of Bush as the victim of his own certitude...

Being currently previewed by NY Times and other media. Some quotes:

Mr. Woodward writes: "It was only one example of a visitor to the Oval Office not telling the president the whole story or the truth. Likewise, in these moments where Bush had someone from the field there in the chair beside him, he did not press, did not try to open the door himself and ask what the visitor had seen and thought. The whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal court, with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good news and a good time had by all." Were the war in Iraq not a real war that has resulted in more than 2,700 American military casualties and more than 56,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, the picture of the Bush administration that emerges from this book might resemble a farce. It’s like something out of "The Daily Show" or a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, with Freudian Bush family dramas and high-school-like rivalries between cabinet members who refuse to look at one another at meetings being played out on the world stage.

There’s the president, who once said, "I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy," deciding that he's going to remake the Middle East and alter the course of American foreign policy. There’s his father, former President George Herbert Walker Bush (who went to war against the same country a decade ago), worrying about the wisdom of another war but reluctant to offer his opinions to his son because he believes in the principle of “let him be himself.” There’s the president’s national security adviser whining to him that the defense secretary won’t return her phone calls...

See other reviews and quotes.

HABEAS CORPUS, R.I.P. 1215 - 2006

Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006)
With a smug stroke of his pen, President Bush is set to wipe out a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta.
by Molly Ivins


AUSTIN, Texas - Oh dear. I’m sure he didn’t mean it. In Illinois’ Sixth Congressional District, long represented by Henry Hyde, Republican candidate Peter Roskam accused his Democratic opponent, Tammy Duckworth, of planning to “cut and run” on Iraq.

Duckworth is a former Army major and chopper pilot who lost both legs in Iraq after her helicopter got hit by an RPG. “I just could not believe he would say that to me,” said Duckworth, who walks on artificial legs and uses a cane. Every election cycle produces some wincers, but how do you apologize for that one?

The legislative equivalent of that remark is the detainee bill now being passed by Congress. Beloveds, this is so much worse than even that pathetic deal reached last Thursday between the White House and Republican Sens. John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The White House has since reinserted a number of “technical fixes” that were the point of the putative “compromise.” It leaves the president with the power to decide who is an enemy combatant.

This bill is not a national security issue—this is about torturing helpless human beings without any proof they are our enemies. Perhaps this could be considered if we knew the administration would use the power with enormous care and thoughtfulness. But of the over 700 prisoners sent to Gitmo, only 10 have ever been formally charged with anything. Among other things, this bill is a CYA for torture of the innocent that has already taken place.

Death by torture by Americans was first reported in 2003 in a New York Times article by Carlotta Gall. The military had announced the prisoner died of a heart attack, but when Gall saw the death certificate, written in English and issued by the military, it said the cause of death was homicide. The “heart attack” came after he had been beaten so often on this legs that they had “basically been pulpified,” according to the coroner.

The story of why and how it took the Times so long to print this information is in the current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review. The press in general has been late and slow in reporting torture, so very few Americans have any idea how far it has spread. As is often true in hierarchical, top-down institutions, the orders get passed on in what I call the downward communications exaggeration spiral.

For example, on a newspaper, a top editor may remark casually, “Let’s give the new mayor a chance to see what he can do before we start attacking him.”

This gets passed on as “Don’t touch the mayor unless he really screws up.”

And it ultimately arrives at the reporter level as “We can’t say anything negative about the mayor.”

The version of the detainee bill now in the Senate not only undoes much of the McCain-Warner-Graham work, but it is actually much worse than the administration’s first proposal. In one change, the original compromise language said a suspect had the right to “examine and respond to” all evidence used against him. The three senators said the clause was necessary to avoid secret trials. The bill has now dropped the word “examine” and left only “respond to.”

In another change, a clause said that evidence obtained outside the United States could be admitted in court even if it had been gathered without a search warrant. But the bill now drops the words “outside the United States,” which means prosecutors can ignore American legal standards on warrants.

The bill also expands the definition of an unlawful enemy combatant to cover anyone who has “has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” Quick, define “purposefully and materially.” One person has already been charged with aiding terrorists because he sold a satellite TV package that includes the Hezbollah network.

The bill simply removes a suspect’s right to challenge his detention in court. This is a rule of law that goes back to the Magna Carta in 1215. That pretty much leaves the barn door open.

As Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident, wrote, an intelligence service free to torture soon “degenerates into a playground for sadists.” But not unbridled sadism—you will be relieved that the compromise took out the words permitting interrogation involving “severe pain” and substituted “serious pain,” which is defined as “bodily injury that involves extreme physical pain.”

In July 2003, George Bush said in a speech: “The United States is committed to worldwide elimination of torture, and we are leading this fight by example. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes, whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit.”

Fellow citizens, this bill throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems it necessary—these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law.

I’d like those supporting this evil bill to spare me one affliction: Do not, please, pretend to be shocked by the consequences of this legislation. And do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.

To find out more about Molly Ivins and see works by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Copyright 2006 TruthDig

###

Pope Benedict's Hierarchy of Truth. . . .James Carroll, Boston Globe

Published on Monday, September 25, 2006 by the Boston Globe
Pope Benedict's Hierarchy of Truth, Faith
by James Carroll


Rome has spoken. Once, that meant the question was settled. Now that means the question has been inflamed. In this case, the question is whether to accept Osama bin Laden's invitation to the clash of civilizations. Sure, why not?

Pope Benedict XVI celebrated the fifth anniversary of 9/11 by citing, on the next day, a 14th-century slur that Mohammed brought ``things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." The patently false characterization of Mohammed's teaching, displaying an ignorance of the Koran, of the magnificence of Islamic devotion, and of history was offered almost as an aside in the pope's otherwise esoteric lecture about reason and faith. After Muslim uproar, the pope, while not really apologizing, insisted he had meant no harm.

President Bush famously used the word ``crusade," then backed away from it. But playing by bin Laden's script, Bush launched a catastrophic war that has become a crusade in all but name. Now Benedict has supplied a religious underpinning for that crusade. Claiming to defend rationality and nonviolence in religion, the pope has made irrationality and violence more likely, not less. Bush and Benedict are in sync, and bin Laden is grinning.

Even abstracting from the offending citation, the pope's lecture reveals a deeper and insulting problem. Benedict properly affirms the rationality of faith, and the corollary that faith should be spread by reasoned argument and not by violent coercion. But he does so as a way of positing Christian superiority to other faiths.

That was the point of the passing comparison with Islam -- which, supposedly, is irrational and therefore intrinsically violent, unlike Christianity which is rational and intrinsically eschews coercion.

But this ignores history: Christianity, beginning with Constantine and continuing through the Crusades up until the Enlightenment, routinely ``spread by the sword the faith" it preached; Islam sponsored rare religious amity among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the very period from which the insulting quote comes.

More significant, though, for any discussion of reason and faith is the fact that Christian theology's breakthrough embrace of the rational method, typified by St. Thomas Aquinas's appropriation of Aristotle, and summarized by Benedict as ``this inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry," was made possible by such Islamic scholars as Averroes, whose translations of Aristotle rescued that precious tradition for the Latin West.

Benedict makes no mention of this Islamic provenance of European and Christian culture. Indeed, he cannot, because his main purpose in this lecture is to emphasize the exclusively Christian character of that culture. The ``convergence" of Greek philosophy and Biblical faith, ``with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can be rightly called Europe." Europe remains Christian. That is why the pope, as Cardinal Ratzinger, opposed the admission of Muslim Turkey to the European Union.

Benedict seems to have forgotten that the European rejection of violent coercion in religion came about not through religion but through the secular impulses of the Enlightenment.

The separation of church and state, in defense of the primacy of individual conscience, was the sine qua non of that rejection of religious coercion -- an idea that the Catholic Church fought into the 20th century. Even now, Benedict campaigns against basic tenets of Enlightenment politics, condemning pluralism, for example, and what he calls the ``dictatorship of relativism."

The pope's refusal to reckon with historical facts that contradict Catholic moral primacy has been particularly disturbing in relation to the church's past with Jews. Last year, he said Nazi anti-Semitism was ``born of neo-paganism," as if Christian anti-Judaism was not central. This year, at Auschwitz, he blamed the Holocaust on a ``ring of criminals," exonerating the German nation. By exterminating Jews, the Nazis were ``ultimately" attacking the church. He decried God's silence, not his predecessor's. A pattern begins to show itself. Forget church offenses against Jews. Denigrate Islam. Caricature modernity and dismiss it.

In all of this, Benedict is defending a hierarchy of truth. Faith is superior to reason. Christian faith is superior to other faiths (especially Islam). Roman Catholicism is superior to other Christian faiths. And the pope is supreme among Catholics. He does not mean to insult when he defends this schema, yet seems ignorant of how inevitably insulting it is. Nor does the pope understand that, today, such narcissism of power comes attached to a fuse.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. His most recent book is "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War."

© 2006 Boston Globe

Pope Benedict's Hierarchy of Truth. . . .James Carroll, Boston Globe

Published on Monday, September 25, 2006 by the Boston Globe
Pope Benedict's Hierarchy of Truth, Faith
by James Carroll


Rome has spoken. Once, that meant the question was settled. Now that means the question has been inflamed. In this case, the question is whether to accept Osama bin Laden's invitation to the clash of civilizations. Sure, why not?

Pope Benedict XVI celebrated the fifth anniversary of 9/11 by citing, on the next day, a 14th-century slur that Mohammed brought ``things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." The patently false characterization of Mohammed's teaching, displaying an ignorance of the Koran, of the magnificence of Islamic devotion, and of history was offered almost as an aside in the pope's otherwise esoteric lecture about reason and faith. After Muslim uproar, the pope, while not really apologizing, insisted he had meant no harm.

President Bush famously used the word ``crusade," then backed away from it. But playing by bin Laden's script, Bush launched a catastrophic war that has become a crusade in all but name. Now Benedict has supplied a religious underpinning for that crusade. Claiming to defend rationality and nonviolence in religion, the pope has made irrationality and violence more likely, not less. Bush and Benedict are in sync, and bin Laden is grinning.

Even abstracting from the offending citation, the pope's lecture reveals a deeper and insulting problem. Benedict properly affirms the rationality of faith, and the corollary that faith should be spread by reasoned argument and not by violent coercion. But he does so as a way of positing Christian superiority to other faiths.

That was the point of the passing comparison with Islam -- which, supposedly, is irrational and therefore intrinsically violent, unlike Christianity which is rational and intrinsically eschews coercion.

But this ignores history: Christianity, beginning with Constantine and continuing through the Crusades up until the Enlightenment, routinely ``spread by the sword the faith" it preached; Islam sponsored rare religious amity among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the very period from which the insulting quote comes.

More significant, though, for any discussion of reason and faith is the fact that Christian theology's breakthrough embrace of the rational method, typified by St. Thomas Aquinas's appropriation of Aristotle, and summarized by Benedict as ``this inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry," was made possible by such Islamic scholars as Averroes, whose translations of Aristotle rescued that precious tradition for the Latin West.

Benedict makes no mention of this Islamic provenance of European and Christian culture. Indeed, he cannot, because his main purpose in this lecture is to emphasize the exclusively Christian character of that culture. The ``convergence" of Greek philosophy and Biblical faith, ``with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can be rightly called Europe." Europe remains Christian. That is why the pope, as Cardinal Ratzinger, opposed the admission of Muslim Turkey to the European Union.

Benedict seems to have forgotten that the European rejection of violent coercion in religion came about not through religion but through the secular impulses of the Enlightenment.

The separation of church and state, in defense of the primacy of individual conscience, was the sine qua non of that rejection of religious coercion -- an idea that the Catholic Church fought into the 20th century. Even now, Benedict campaigns against basic tenets of Enlightenment politics, condemning pluralism, for example, and what he calls the ``dictatorship of relativism."

The pope's refusal to reckon with historical facts that contradict Catholic moral primacy has been particularly disturbing in relation to the church's past with Jews. Last year, he said Nazi anti-Semitism was ``born of neo-paganism," as if Christian anti-Judaism was not central. This year, at Auschwitz, he blamed the Holocaust on a ``ring of criminals," exonerating the German nation. By exterminating Jews, the Nazis were ``ultimately" attacking the church. He decried God's silence, not his predecessor's. A pattern begins to show itself. Forget church offenses against Jews. Denigrate Islam. Caricature modernity and dismiss it.

In all of this, Benedict is defending a hierarchy of truth. Faith is superior to reason. Christian faith is superior to other faiths (especially Islam). Roman Catholicism is superior to other Christian faiths. And the pope is supreme among Catholics. He does not mean to insult when he defends this schema, yet seems ignorant of how inevitably insulting it is. Nor does the pope understand that, today, such narcissism of power comes attached to a fuse.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. His most recent book is "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War."

© 2006 Boston Globe

Torture with your tax monies? Yes,

ublished on Thursday, September 21, 2006 by TruthDig
A Tortured Debate
by Molly Ivins


AUSTIN, Texas - Some country is about to have a Senate debate on a bill to legalize torture. How weird is that?

I'd like to thank Sens. John McCain, Lindsay Graham—a former military lawyer—and John Warner of Virginia. I will always think fondly of John Warner for this one reason: Forty years ago, this country was involved in an unprovoked and unnecessary war. It ended so badly the vets finally had to hold their own homecoming parade, years after they came home. The only member of Congress who attended was John Warner.

A debate on torture. I don’t know—what do you think? I guess we have to define it, first. The White House has already specified “water boarding,” making some guy think he’s drowning for long periods, as a perfectly good interrogation technique. Maybe, but it was also a great favorite of the Gestapo and has been described and condemned in thousands of memoirs and novels in highly unpleasant terms.

I don't think we can give it a good name again, and I personally kind of don't like being identified with the Gestapo. How icky. (Somewhere inside me, a small voice is shrieking, "Are you insane?")

The safe position is, "Torture doesn't work.”

Well, actually, it works to this extent—anybody can be tortured into telling anything that’s true and anything that’s not true. The more people are tortured, the more they make up to please the torturer. Then the torturer has to figure out when the vic started lying. Since our torturers are, in George Bush’s immortal phrase, "professionals” and this whole legislative fight is over making torture legal so the "professionals" can’t later be charged with breaking the Geneva Conventions, Bush has vowed to end "the program" completely if he doesn't get what he wants. (The same thin voice is shrieking, "Professional torturers trained with my tax money?")

Bush's problem is that despite repeated warnings, he went ahead with “the program” without waiting for Congress to provide a fig leaf of legality. Actually, we have been torturing prisoners at Gitmo, prisons in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan for years.

Since only seven of the several hundred prisoners at Gitmo have ever been charged with anything, we face the unhappy prospect that the rest of them are innocent. And will sue. That's going to be quite an expensive settlement. The Canadian upon whom we practiced "rendition," sending him to Syria for 10 months of torture, will doubtlessly be first on the legal docket. I wonder how high up the chain of command a civil suit can go? Any old war criminals wandering around?

I was interested to find that the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition is so in favor of torture he told McCain that the senator either supports the torture bill or he can forget about the evangelical Christian vote. I’d like to see an evangelical vote on that one. I don’t know how Sheldon defines traditional values, but deliberately inflicting terrible physical pain or stress on someone who is completely helpless strikes me as ... well, torture. And, um, wrong. And I’ve smoked dope! Boy, everything those conservatives tell us about the terrible moral values of us liberals must be true after all.

Now, in addition to the slightly surreal awakening to find we live in a country that's having a serious debate on a torture bill, can we do anything about it? The answer is: We better. We better do something about it. Now, right away. What do we do? The answer is: anything ... phone, fax, e-mail, mail, demonstrate—go stand outside their offices or the nearest federal building in the cold and sing hymns or shout rude slogans, chant or make a speech, or start attacking federal property, like a postal box, so they have to arrest you. Gather peacefully and make a lot of noise. Get publicity, too.

How will you feel if you didn’t do something? "Well, honey, when the United States decided to adopt torture as an official policy, I was dipping the dog for ticks."

As Ann Richards used to say, “I don’t want my tombstone to read: ‘She kept a clean house.’”

To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C.

Neighbor Love is Never Neutral, sermon.by Rev. Bacon

Neighbor Love is Never Neutral
Sunday's Sermon at the All Saints Church Being Targetted by the IRS for Anti-War Sermon
September 17, 2006
Pasadena, California
by Rev. Ed Bacon Jr


I want to begin this sermon by once again expressing my gratitude to the Internal Revenue Service. Those brothers and sisters really know how to shine a spotlight on a church and swell the numbers of worshipers. I will try to explain briefly what is going on between the IRS and All Saints in just a moment.

But first I want to welcome those of you who have come as visitors to All Saints this morning. This Sunday is Homecoming Sunday, the annual celebration in which we kick off the new program year. We often have a bit of a summer diaspora here at All Saints. This is the Sunday when all hands are back on deck, ready, rested, and raring to go to celebrate a new year of transformation. We believe in transformation here – the transformation of those who worship together in order for each of us in turn to do our part to transform the world to be more like that dream God has for creation. A world that has not yet been but can be and will be if we will dedicate our energies to it. A world of healing, love, and justice for all, a world of peace among peoples and nations, and a world where every human being is fully alive without bigotry, violence, injustice, oppression, terrorism, war or torture.

Homecoming Sunday notes the reality that the more each of us is rooted in a community where we feel at home, the more joyful energy we have available for this journey of transformation of self, church, and world. As Anne Peterson’s Homecoming poem reads, “If home is where the heart is – Some safe, comfortable place Where one is loved as-is, without condition – Then you are home.”

So, my friends, members of long-standing, members who have just come, and those of you who are sniffing us out this morning for whatever reason, welcome. We have come together, come home today, to recommit ourselves to another year of worship that moves the heart and challenges the mind, another year of working for compassion, healing, inclusion, justice, and peace AND to have hearts full of joy while we’re at it.

Now, a word about our relationship with the IRS: If you need background information about the IRS investigation of All Saints, let me ask that you go to our website to download relevant historic documents, including a copy of the sermon that our Rector Emeritus, George Regas, preached prior to the presidential election in 2004. You can also find copies of the two summonses served on me Friday.

The more recent events calling for our prayerful attention this morning include the fact that this past July we heard from the IRS for the first time in 8 months. They had not answered either our written or oral communications to them since November of last year. The July 2006 letter requested a lengthy list of documents from us, including every instance in which we mention any elected official or candidate in our worship. Since we pray for President Bush by name Sunday by Sunday and because of the breadth of the other IRS questions, we noted that the volume of paper required to respond would be both overwhelming and irrelevant to the examination.

So in August we asked that all the IRS’ requests be reformulated with appropriate specificity. For those reasons and others, including the fact that All Saints wants to preserve our right to challenge the government’s procedures in the case, we respectfully requested that their demands be reissued in the form of an administrative summons. We heard nothing from them until this past Thursday afternoon when they called asking me to be available Friday to receive the service of two summonses by an IRS agent.

My senior warden, Bob Long, came over Friday morning. The IRS agent arrived soon thereafter. I received the summonses – one calls for a lengthy list of documents, the other requires my appearance at an IRS hearing next month. After the very kind IRS agent exited, wishing us good luck, Bob and I then analyzed the list of requests for documents and discussed our options with our attorneys by phone.

During this next week, we will decide which course of action we will now take. One option is to present the documents and myself for testimony as the summonses dictate. On the other hand we may choose respectfully to inform the IRS that we intend not to comply with these summonses. It would then be up to the IRS to decide to take this matter into the U.S. Judicial system for a hearing and ruling on whether or not the courts would enforce the summonses. A courtroom would provide a venue in the halls of justice for us to make our argument. Our argument is that there is no objective basis for the IRS to have a reasonable belief that we have in deed participated in campaign intervention. Furthermore we would argue that this entire case has been an intrusion, in fact an attack upon this Church’s first amendment rights to the exercise of freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

I would be happy to receive your thoughts about our upcoming decision by email or letter. And I will keep you informed of all the legal proceedings.

With those legal details noted I want now to address what I see at stake in our religious and political lives as a result of this latest IRS action. The current administration of the IRS apparently thinks that religious organizations should stay neutral when political issues are concerned. What that thinking totally misses is that we do not have a choice about whether or not to be neutral in the face of dehumanization, injustice, and violence. Our faith mandates that always stopping short of endorsing or opposing political candidates, the church can neither be silent nor indifferent when there are public policies causing detriment to the least of these.

History is shamefully littered with the moral bankruptcy of people who were Christian in name but not behavior who were silent or indifferent or neutral in the face of dehumanizing and destructive public policies. We remember Christians who would own slaves, expecting them to have the Sunday meal prepared when they returned from church. We remember Christians who would go to Easter services not far from death camps brushing the ashes off their Easter finery to enter churches where their pulpits were silent in the face of the Holocaust. Neutrality and silence in the face of oppression always aids the oppressors.

Neutrality, silence and indifference are not an option for us. We must express our conscience in word and in deed or we will lose our soul in addition to losing our way. If the IRS is successful in chilling the voices in American pulpits and houses of worship, religion in America will lose all relevance and moral authority and offer nothing but impotence in the face of this war of aggression in Iraq, the genocide in Darfur, the explosive growth of terrorism, the violence of occupations in Palestine and Iraq, the global AIDS pandemic, the death of one child every three seconds in the world due to disease and poverty, torture in secret detainee camps, the shredding of the Geneva Conventions, bigotry based on race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, underfunded public education, and the growth in poverty. Every human life is sacred: Iraqi, Iranian, Palestinian, Sudanese, North Korea, Israeli, Lebanese, and American and American pulpits must not cower from speaking truth to power, including any and every expression of imperial American exceptionalism that through policy and practice values American life above other life. All life is sacred to God.

For pulpits in the USA to become even more neutral than they already are will make religion even more of a problem than it is already. Jesus proclaimed that religion too frequently is not a part of the solution. Too often religion is not only a part of the problem. It is the problem. Jesus said that religious institutions can become like salt that has lost its flavor. Its only good then is to be thrown away. The book of Revelation (chapter 3) speaks of the Church of Laodicea that had become so bland, so ineffectual, so callous to human suffering, so cowering before the saber rattling of the empire of the day, so lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, that God said, “I will spew you out of my mouth.” That is exactly what happens to churches and other faith communities that do not stand up, speak up, and act up when human beings are not treated with the dignity and honor due those who bear the image of God. The fundamental commandment that pulsates at the core of our being is a three-fold love: To love God with all our being and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Love of neighbor is never neutral.

I have known a lot of faith communities who think religion consists only of beautiful worship, saying one’s prayers, all the while hermetically sealed in ignoring those forces which are destroying the least of these. All Saints will always invest great resources in movingly beautiful worship. That is often how the heart is opened and moved. At the same time we will never ask someone to check their conscience or their courage at the door. We stand in the prophetic tradition where movingly beautiful worship is valuable only to the degree that it heals the human heart and then empowers the people to daring action on behalf of the oppressed.

In our lesson from the Hebrew scriptures this morning, (Isa. 50: 4-9a), the prophet says, “God wakens me every morning, wakens my ear to listen like a student.” Listen to God speaking through the prophet Isaiah (1: 14-17) , speaking to us the students of God:

14 Your New Moon festivals and your appointed feasts
my soul hates.
They have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them.
15 When you spread out your hands in prayer,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even if you offer many prayers,
I will not listen.
Because your hands are full of blood;
16 wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds
out of my sight!
Stop doing wrong,
17 learn to do right!
Seek justice,
encourage the oppressed.
Defend the cause of those without parents,
plead the case of those who are widowed.

Listen to the prophet Amos when he speaks for God (Amos 5: 21, 23-24)

"I hate, I despise your religious feasts;
I cannot stand your assemblies.
23 Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
24 But let justice roll down like a river,
and righteousness like a never-failing stream!

That is the prophetic tradition that tells us that we have no choice about the matters of justice. When Jesus preached his inaugural sermon in his hometown of Nazareth, the reading from which he preached was from the prophets – Isaiah 61 to be exact. This shows that of all the traditions and theologies in Hebrew scripture, Jesus was grounding his ministry in the prophets and their tradition. Here is the account.

Luke 4: 14-21

Jesus stood up to read. 17 The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

18 "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because she has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, 21 and he began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

Psalm 15 has been summarized by some scholars as saying this, “Those who do justice dwell in the presence of the Lord.”

My friends, there is something about a moral argument that clarifies the mind about why we what we do. And I have never felt more energized and joyful than I do this morning about expressing with passion what is at stake in this argument we have with the IRS. And my heart is filled with hope that there are millions of Americans who are standing with us and will stand with us in the claim that loving your neighbor as yourself has no place for neutrality and silence in the face of anything that demeans another human being.

Whenever I am tempted to despair, tempted to think I am in this work alone, I think of the following quotation from Robert F. Kennedy. It both gives me hope and shows me how justice rolls down like water and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man/woman stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he/she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope; and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance…. I believe that … those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world.” Kennedy, Robert F., quoted in Make Gentle the Life of this World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, ed by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, p. 133

Welcome home, my friends. Happy Homecoming. Let us never forget that our true home is the heart of God where each of us is loved just as we are and each of us is given this beautiful, energizing, audacious gift to resist any efforts to dehumanize others or to block God’s dream of turning the human race into the human family.

Amen.

What the Pope Should have said. . . .?

What the Pope Should Have Said to the Islamic World

Diary Entry by Eileen Fleming



Tell A Friend

The Pope might have opened with...

::::::::
by Author and Theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether

On September 12 Pope Benedict XVI aroused the fury of the Islamic world with a speech given at the University of Regensburg in which he assailed the Muslim concept of holy war as a violation of God's will and nature. The Pope quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, who derided Islam and its founder Muhammad for introducing "things only inhuman and evil," such as spreading the faith by the sword. The Pope held up (Catholic) Christianity, by contrast, as a model religion that promoted a "profound encounter of faith and reason."

From many parts of the Islamic world there were angry reactions to the Pope's words, reminding the Pope of the evil history of Christian crusades. Although Western Christians may think the crusades are ancient history, these medieval wars in which Christian crusaders slaughtered Muslims and established crusader states in Palestine are vivid memories for Muslims. Current Western threats against Islam and invasions of Islamic countries, such as Iraq , are seen as a continuation of the crusades. The US and other Western nations who promote such wars are regularly referred to as "crusaders" in the Muslim press.

The Pope's words condemning Islam and its founder for holy war, while holding up Christianity as innocent of any such warlike tendencies, has infuriated Muslims and deeply damaged Catholic-Muslim relations. In using a Byzantine emperor to assail Islam, the Pope also failed to reckon with the fact that the Fourth Crusade (1201-4), called by Pope Innocent III, was diverted into an assault on the capital of the Byzantine empire, Constantinople . The Crusaders pillaged and occupied the city, leading to a weakening of the Byzantine world and its eventual fall to the Muslims

Although the Vatican has not invited me to be a papal speech writer, I would like to suggest what the Pope should have said about holy war that would have won Muslim good will and opened up new dialogue between these embattled worlds. The Pope might have opened with some generalities deploring the current state of war and violence in the world. Then he would remark that such tendencies to war are deeply aggravated when religion and the name of God are wrongly used to foment violence and hatred between peoples. God desires peace and love, not war, he might have said.

The Pope would then turn to the history of the crusades and acknowledge with sorrow that Christianity has often been wrongly used to promote hatred and violence against others, perhaps quoting some pithy statements of popes who called for crusades against Islam. He would then declare that Christians must repent of such religiously inspired war-making. He would ask for forgiveness from "our Muslim brothers and sisters" for having wronged them in the past by calling for crusades against them. He would end with a call for all peoples to unite to overcome war and violence, and to reject any use of religion to promote violence.

This speech, I suggest, would have won the hearts of Muslims around the world and would have made the Pope welcome in Turkey for his planned visit there on November 28 of this year rather than putting this trip into jeopardy. Catholic-Muslim dialogue would have been put on a new and positive footing by having the "leading cleric" of the Western world publicly repent of the errors of the crusades. It would also have put Christians in the US and elsewhere on notice that the language of promoting Western "anti-terrorist" wars against the Muslim world in the name of a "crusade" (the term George W. Bush actually proposed for his wars against Afghanistan and Iraq) are not acceptable.

Some more historically aware advisors of the Bush administration realized the volatile nature of this term and warned him against his use of it. But Christians need to do more than not use the term "crusade," while continually the reality of such war and warlike God-talk. We need to confront the questionable history of such wars against the Muslim world and the use of Christianity to promote such wars.

Is it too late? Although my influence in Vatican circles is limited, there is no reason why other Christian bodies, Catholic and Protestant, might not come together to publicly issue an apology to the Muslim world for the crusades and to call for a rejection of militarist responses to terrorism and the use of religious language to justify such militarism.

Bush Stance on coercive interrogation is morally wrong! Colin Powell

Bush Stance on al-Qaida Suspects is Morally Wrong, says Colin Powell
· Geneva convention must be respected
· Setback for White House military tribunals plan
by Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington


The former Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday repudiated White House plans to allow coercive interrogations of al-Qaida suspects, saying it would erode the moral basis of the US "war on terror".

In a letter to Senator John McCain, one of a trio of powerful Republicans who have opposed White House proposals for new legislation on detainees, Mr Powell warned that it would be a mistake to reduce America's commitment to the Geneva convention on treatment of prisoners. "The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism," Mr Powell wrote.

The intervention from Mr Powell, a four-star general almost universally respected by civilians and former colleagues in the military, dealt a serious setback to White House efforts to bring in legislation on the war on terror ahead of November's mid-term congressional elections.

Mr Bush announced last week that 14 high-profile al-Qaida suspects, including the architect of the September 11 attacks, had been transferred to Guantánamo and would be put on trial before military tribunals. The announcement was seen as an effort by Mr Bush to move the focus away from the war in Iraq and towards national security, where the Republicans traditionally outperform Democrats.

However, Mr Bush has faced strenuous opposition, spearheaded by Republican senators, to his plans for legislation that would set up the tribunals but would also dilute US compliance with a section of the convention calling for humane treatment of prisoners. The White House says the measure is necessary to shield US personnel from prosecution for war crimes.

On Wednesday the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, said that the CIA would be unable to effectively interrogate prisoners unless it were guaranteed freedom from prosecution. Yesterday Mr Bush said: "It is very important for the American people to understand that in order to protect this country we must be able to interrogate people who have information about future attacks."

But Mr Powell, a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, added his voice to those of military judges who say that America would imperil its own soldiers if it watered down its compliance with the Geneva convention.

The White House was forced to seek legal authorization from Congress on the issue of detainees after the supreme court ruled last June that the military tribunals for Guantánamo suspects were illegal and violated the convention.

The White House's tribunal plans would deprive the detainees of the right to see evidence against them that is classified. They could also be prosecuted with evidence obtained through torture.

Republican senators object to both measures. But while the senators won some praise for seeking guarantees on the treatment of detainees, lawyers representing the 440 inmates at Guantánamo yesterday accused Congress of being prepared to strip the prisoners of the right to challenge their detention in court.

Both versions of the bill on military tribunals would bar detainees from challenging their detention in US courts. So far some 200 Guantánamo inmates have filed suits challenging their detention.

© Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Presidents Don't End Wars They Start

Published on Friday, September 15, 2006 by the Chicago Sun Times
Presidents Don't End Wars They Start
by Andrew Greeley


Much of the history of the United States in the last half century has involved wars that the country should not have waged and from which it could not extricate itself.

In Korea the United States mistakenly decided to take on China after America had won a great military victory in the legendary landing at Inchon. If the United States had ended the war when it drove the communists out of South Korea, American casualties would have been light and the communists humiliated. Unfortunately, General MacArthur made the terrible mistake of assuming that China could accept an American army on its Yalu River boundary.

Hence one can generalize that mistaken wars will end only after there is a change of administrations. Korea was Harry Truman's war, Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson's war, and the Iraq war is George W. Bush's war. Only when the president who started the war leaves can this country manage to end the war which was identified with a previous president.

President Eisenhower promised that if elected he would go to Korea, though that promise was hardly enough to persuade the Chinese army to go home. President Nixon had a "plan" to end the Vietnam war, though in fact he did not. Although he and Henry Kissinger messed around in search for a dignified withdrawal and caused more U.S. casualties, he (and President Ford) could finally end the war that Johnson could not end. It is clear today Bush cannot (which means will not) end this most foolish of the three wars.

Why is it so difficult to extricate U.S. troops from an impossible situation?

The commander in chief was in each case personally responsible for the decision. Moreover, to rally support for the decision that in retrospect was a serious mistake (underestimating the enemy in each case), the president had to rally the national will with appeals to patriotism, honor and American self-interest. His emotional involvement in "victory" increased as the casualties did -- and in the case of Johnson and Bush some kind of identification with Abraham Lincoln took place. Finally, the president's political party resisted the temptation for a long time to criticize him.

Moreover, a substantial segment of the American public, especially Southern and Evangelical, believe that patriotism demands that the nation emerge clearly victorious no matter what the price. These people wave flags, talk about the threat to the United States (of a much weaker enemy) and accept the patriotic appeal that we simply don't lose wars and we must stand by our troops.

When they are told that we will not defeat the enemy because we cannot, they scream defeatism, surrender, betrayal. They also suggest that we should nuke the enemy. The pathological super patriots always fall back on the power of nuclear weapons to obliterate the enemy. Those who argue for withdrawal from an impossible situation are accused of cowardice and infidelity to our fallen heroes. A substantial segment of the officer corps of the military -- mostly out of harm's way -- become furious, though they were the ones who provided the advice on which the war was based.

It would seem, sadly, that we have learned nothing since the Inchon landing. A successful imperialist power (which the United States is not, cannot and should not ever be) has to be able to override a public turn against the conflict. Nor does the myth of American power, which is indeed great but not invincible, especially against peasant guerrillas, cause the leadership -- military and political -- to consider carefully all the risks of charging off to an easy victory against weaker opponents.

Indeed those, like Messrs. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

A war will probably not end when the party whose war it is loses a congressional election. That is not likely to happen in November anyway because the fear/patriotism/betrayal campaign will keep Republicans in control of Congress.

Copyright © 2006 Sun Times

Who is that Stranger in the mirror?

The Stranger in the Mirror
by Bob Herbert


We had elections in New York and around the country on Tuesday. But it seems to me that the biggest issue of our time is getting very short shrift from the politicians, and that’s the fact that the very character of the United States is changing, and not for the better.

One of the things that stands out in my mind amid the memories of the carnage and chaos of Sept. 11, 2001, is the eerie quiet — an almost prayerful quiet — that hovered over a scene on the western edge of Manhattan that afternoon.

I stood for a long time outside the triage center that had been set up at the Chelsea Piers sports and entertainment complex. Sunlight glistened off the roofs of ambulances lined up in military fashion on the West Side Highway. Doctors, nurses and other medical personnel were standing by, waiting for what they thought would be the arrival of legions of seriously wounded victims in need of emergency care.

There seemed to be very little talking. As I recall, most of the people maintained a kind of stunned, awed silence.

The expected onslaught of victims never came. As the afternoon faded, I headed east, along with others, toward the morgue at Bellevue Hospital.

What I thought was the greatest expression of the American character in my lifetime occurred in the immediate aftermath of those catastrophic attacks. The country came together in the kind of resolute unity that I imagined was similar to the feeling most Americans felt after Pearl Harbor. We soon knew who the enemy was, and there was remarkable agreement on what needed to be done. Americans were united and the world was with us.

For a brief moment.

The invasion of Iraq marked the beginning of the change in the American character. During the Cuban missile crisis, when the hawks were hot for bombing — or an invasion — Robert Kennedy counseled against a U.S. first strike. That’s not something the U.S. would do, he said.

Fast-forward 40 years or so and not only does the U.S. launch an unprovoked invasion and occupation of a small nation — Iraq — but it does so in response to an attack inside the U.S. that the small nation had nothing to do with.

Who are we?

Another example: There was a time, I thought, when there was general agreement among Americans that torture was beyond the pale. But when people are frightened enough, nothing is beyond the pale. And we’re in an era in which the highest leaders in the land stoke — rather than attempt to allay — the fears of ordinary citizens. Islamic terrorists are equated with Nazi Germany. We’re told that we’re in a clash of civilizations.

If, as President Bush says, we’re engaged in “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” why isn’t the entire nation mobilizing to meet this dire threat?

The president put us on this path away from the better angels of our nature, and he has shown no inclination to turn back. Lately he has touted legislation to try terror suspects in a way that would make a mockery of the American ideals of justice and fairness. To get a sense of just how far out the administration’s approach has been, consider the comments of Brig. Gen. James Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines. Speaking at a Congressional hearing last week, he said no civilized country denies defendants the right to see the evidence against them. The United States, he said, “should not be the first.”

And Senator Lindsey Graham, a conservative South Carolina Republican who is a former military judge, said, “It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them.”

How weird is it that this possibility could even be considered?

The character of the U.S. has changed. We’re in danger of being completely ruled by fear. Most Americans have not shared the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Very few Americans are aware, as the Center for Constitutional Rights tells us, that of the hundreds of men held by the U.S. in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, many “have never been charged and will never be charged because there is no evidence justifying their detention.”

Even fewer care.

We could benefit from looking in a mirror, and absorbing the shock of not recognizing what we’ve become.

© Copyright 2006 New York Times Company
Published September 14, 2006

Impeaching George Bush, by Elizabeth Holtzman, author, Interview by Truthdig.

Elizabeth Holtzman on Impeaching George W. Bush
http://www.truthdig.com/interview/item/20060912_elizabeth_holtzman_impeachment_bush/
Posted on Sep 12, 2006

By Blair Golson

On Wednesday, Sept. 13, former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman will hold a discussion at UCLA with former White House aide John Dean, titled “Bush and the Potential for Impeachment.”

Holtzman, who served in the U.S. House from 1973 to 1981 and later became Brooklyn’s district attorney, co-authored a book this year titled “The Impeachment of George W. Bush,” which lays out a case that the president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors and should be removed from office.

Holtzman was also a key member of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 during the Nixon impeachment hearings—the same hearings in which Dean, initially a conspirator in the Watergate coverup, eventually came forward and cooperated with prosecutors to expose the wrongdoings of the White House.

The youngest woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Congress now practices law in New York City, and Truthdig managing editor Blair Golson interviewed her in advance of her Sept. 13 event at UCLA’s Royce Hall. They discussed Bush’s use of signing statements; the congressional abuse of power that was Bill Clinton’s impeachment; and how it will feel to share a stage with the person who was effectively the Alberto Gonzales of his day.



Blair Golson: In your book, you lay out five main issues on which Bush could be impeached [“Deceptions in Taking the Country into War in Iraq”; “Reckless Indifference to Human Life in Katrina and Iraq”; “Illegal Wiretapping and Surveillance of Americans”; “Permitting Torture”; and “Leaking Classified Information.”] Which of these do you feel has the strongest chance of being provable and leading to actual impeachment hearings?

Elizabeth Holtzman: They’re all provable. The issue isn’t whether there are grounds. There are grounds, and they’re overwhelming, in my opinion. And they spring directly from the constitutional standard that was used during Watergate. The issue is whether there’s political will in Congress to use this tool that was designed by the framers of the Constitution to serve our democracy. We see that this Congress, controlled by Republicans, has no interest in holding the president accountable in ordinary kinds of ways—through investigations or inquiries, trying to find out the facts—much less through impeachments. But if control of Congress shifts, there may be an opportunity to hold the president accountable as the Constitution permits.

If a president can do what he wants, if he’s not bound by the rule of law, he can violate whatever laws he chooses, whenever he chooses, then we’re on the road to dictatorship.

BG: If the Democrats do retake the house, and Rep. John Conyers takes over the Judiciary Committee, do you foresee him being able to mobilize a groundswell to make this happen?

EH: It doesn’t happen because Congress wants it. Impeachment can only happen when the American people demand it. And we’ve seen two political impeachments: one with Andrew Johnson, which was a failure and highly partisan; and one with Bill Clinton, also highly partisan and contrary to what the American people wanted. During Watergate and the Nixon impeachment proceedings, it was the American people who demanded that Congress act. If the American people don’t support it, it can’t happen. But if people demand it, it will happen, it can happen, and it should happen.

You said impeachment can only happen with a groundswell from the American people. But Bill Clinton was hugely popular before and after the impeachment. What happened there?

President Clinton was not removed from office. When I said “impeachment,” I meant it as shorthand for removal from office. He was not removed from office.

The impeachment proceeding against Bill Clinton was itself a congressional abuse of power. There were no grounds for impeachment. It was a partisan effort to undo an election. It was not to protect the country from an abuse of power, which is what impeachment is all about. The framers understood—because they had lived through a monarchy—that when you have a president, even though you have a limited four-year term, even though you have checks and balances through the Supreme Court and the Congress, a president can still abuse his power, become a despot, oppress the people, and have to be removed from office. That’s why they created the impeachment power; it’s part of the way of preserving our democracy; but it has to be very carefully used, because it undoes the results of a presidential election. It cannot be used as the Republican majority tried to [with Clinton]. The American people won’t stand for it and shouldn’t stand for it.

Contra-wise, when you have a president who so seriously abuses his power as President Bush does, who signs a bill into law but says that he doesn’t have to obey it; that he doesn’t have to obey 750 bills that became laws because of his signature; that he doesn’t have to obey the explicit terms of the federal wiretapping law.... What happens to a democracy if a president says, “I’m above the law”? We dealt with that in the Nixon impeachment. The Supreme Court dealt with it when President Truman said, “I’m the commander in chief; I can seize steel mills.” [In the famous Youngstown decision] The Supreme Court said no.

Critics are quick to point out during discussions about signing statements, to which you appear to be alluding, that Bush is not the first president to make use of them, that previous presidents have written their own interpretations of bills that they’re signing into law.

No, no president, as far as I know, has ever taken the position that he’s not bound by the law he’s signing.

I’m fairly sure that while Bush has taken this practice to an extreme, signing statements did not start with Bush.



The president can be removed from office for grave offenses against our democracy. That doesn’t necessarily mean a criminal offense.

Signing statements are one thing—if a president tries to explain, or give his view of what the law means. What President Bush has done is not give his view of what the law means; what he has done is say, “I am not bound by this law, because Congress and the law cannot bind me.” That’s a very different position. We can’t survive as a democracy if any president gets up there and says, “You have a law on the books? You can’t bind me, I’m president. I’m commander in chief.” As the president is not going to obey the law, the people of this country and the Congress of the United States need to remove that president from power, because what does this tell us about our democracy? It doesn’t exist. If a president can do what he wants, if he’s not bound by the rule of law, he can violate whatever laws he chooses, whenever he chooses, then we’re on the road to dictatorship.

Can you describe the political atmosphere back in ’74 when you were serving on the Judiciary Committee?

We saw a president of the United States who said, in similar ways to President Bush, “Oh, Congress passed a law requiring me to spend money to do x, y, y? Well, I’m not going to do that.” He didn’t have the power to do that, but he wanted to act in a unilateral way. You saw that in regard to revelations about the secret bombing of Cambodia. The president decided that unilaterally and lied to Congress about it. Where’s the power to do that?

Of course there was the obstruction of justice in connection with Watergate itself, and the lying about the payment of hush money, and so forth. And then of course, what ultimately triggered the impeachment itself was when Richard Nixon told the special prosecutor who was investigating Watergate, “Enough is enough. You can’t investigate me. You’re fired.” And the American people said, “Enough is enough with regard to you!” So the American people rose up and demanded that Congress act.

The irony, though, is that Nixon’s reelection had given him a huge mandate, not so unlike Bush.

When Richard Nixon was reelected in 1972 with one of the largest margins in the history of the United States, I don’t think anybody thought he would be subject to impeachment proceedings just nine months later. But revelations about Watergate, coupled with the arrogance of power and the other abuses, forced Congress to act.

You wrote in your book, in relation to Bush, “High crimes and misdemeanors are not limited to actual crimes.” What do you mean by that?

The president can be removed from office for grave offenses against our democracy. That doesn’t necessarily mean a criminal offense. That was something that we studied very carefully during Watergate. The House Judiciary Committee examined that issue at great length. An abuse of power—a serious and grave abuse of power—provides the grounds for impeachment.



The impeachment proceeding against Bill Clinton was itself a congressional abuse of power.

But the precedent for that isn’t in the Constitution?

The Constitution just says that the president can be removed from office “for high crimes and misdemeanors.” But if you look at the debates on the impeachment clause, you’ll see that the term high crimes and misdemeanors comes from British law and it generally means an abuse of power, not a violation of the criminal code. And during Watergate, we saw a huge abuse of power. For example, the president ordered the IRS to audit tax returns of political enemies of the president—people who were opposed to the war in Vietnam. That may not have been a crime, but it was an abuse of power, a very grave abuse of power; because the government can’t be perverted into spying on and retaliating against political enemies in that kind of way.

And any mere violation of the criminal code doesn’t provide grounds for impeachment. The impeachment clause was mean to protect the country and our democracy. And that’s why it can’t be limited by what the criminal code is at any moment. That’s way, for example, the president’s lying to the American people and Congress about the reasons for going to war in Iraq, that may not be a crime; but it doesn’t need to be a crime to be an impeachable offense. But to pervert the democracy, to subvert it by depriving Congress and the American people of the actual facts, is a huge abuse of power, because it deprives them of the ability to participate in a rational way about one of the gravest decisions that can ever be made in a democracy, namely whether to go to war or not.

Considering John Dean’s role in the Nixon impeachment saga, how does it feel to be sharing the stage with him in such a way?

It’s kind of interesting. It’s an odd feeling. He was part of a White House that was abusing power, and I guess it’s really remarkable to see how level-headed he is about the abuses of power we’re seeing now, and I think having seen them from the inside, he’s very sensitive to the subject. And I’m very impressed that he is.

For people who may not understand his role back then, who is a present-day analogue of his position?

Well, remember, John Dean played a role in the coverup. He was part and parcel of the process. It would be as though Alberto Gonzales came forward and said, “You know, I believe the president and I broke the law when I told him it was OK to do wiretapping in violation of the federal wiretapping law.”

So should we infer from that that you’re a believer in redemption?

[laughs] I don’t want to get into religion here. But I think John Dean, during the Watergate process, he understood, maybe he was participating in the beginning, but then he tried to warn the president. That was the first revelation that the president himself might have been involved in the Watergate coverup. Because he told the Senate Watergate Committee that he warned Nixon that there was “a cancer on the presidency.” That hush money was being paid, that pardons were being offered to the Watergate burglars. Even at that point, although he had been a participant, he was trying to warn the president and trying to stop the wrongdoing.

So I think at that point, even though he may have engaged in some misconduct, he understood it was wrong, it was bad, it was harming the presidency, it was harming the country. And then he finally did the right thing and talked to the prosecutors. So I think he began to see the light at that time, even during the coverup itself he tried to put an end to it. So I have to respect that. There were a lot of people who never had a twinge of conscience; and I think the important thing is having lived through such a serious abuse of power and such criminality, for him to be speaking the truth now, even though I don’t think he’s a Democrat. And he just wrote a book indicating his close affinity with Barry Goldwater and his views. So I have to respect wh

Five years after 9/11, Drop the War Metaphor, by Goerge Lakoff

Language matters, because it can determine how we think and act.

For a few hours after the towers fell on 9/11, administration spokesmen referred to the event as a "crime." Indeed, Colin Powell argued within the administration that it be treated as a crime.
This would have involved international crime-fighting techniques: checking banks accounts, wire-tapping, recruiting spies and informants, engaging in diplomacy, cooperating with intelligence agencies in other governments, and if necessary, engaging in limited "police actions" with military force. Indeed, such methods have been the most successful so far in dealing with terrorism.

But the crime frame did not prevail in the Bush administration. Instead, a war metaphor was chosen: the "War on Terror." Literal --not metaphorical -- wars are conducted against armies of other nations. They end when the armies are defeated militarily and a peace treaty is signed. Terror is an emotional state. It is in us. It is not an army. And you can't defeat it militarily and you can't sign a peace treaty with it.

The war metaphor was chosen for political reasons. First and foremost, it was chosen for the domestic political reasons. The war metaphor defined war as the only way to defend the nation. From within the war metaphor, being against war as a response was to be unpatriotic, to be against defending the nation. The war metaphor put progressives on the defensive. Once the war metaphor took hold, any refusal to grant the president full authority to conduct the war would open progressives in Congress to the charge of being unpatriotic, unwilling to defend America, defeatist. And once the military went into battle, the war metaphor created a new reality that reinforced the metaphor.

Once adopted, the war metaphor allowed the president to assume war powers, which made him politically immune from serious criticism and gave him extraordinary domestic power to carry the agenda of the radical right: Power to shift money and resources away from social needs and to the military and related industries. Power to override environmental safeguards on the grounds of military need. Power to set up a domestic surveillance system to spy on our citizens and to intimidate political enemies. Power over political discussion, since war trumps all other topics. In short, power to reshape America to the vision of the radical right -- with no end date.

In addition, the war metaphor was used as justification for the invasion of Iraq, which Bush had planned for since his first week in office. Frank Luntz, the right-wing language expert, recommended referring to the Iraq war as part of the "War on Terror" -- even when it was known that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and indeed saw Osama bin Laden as an enemy. Fox News used "War on Terror" as a headline when showing film clips from Iraq. Remember "Weapons of Mass Destruction?" They were invented by the Bush administration to strike terror into the hearts of Americans and to justify the invasion. Remember that the Iraq War was advocated before 9/11 and promoted as early as 1997 by the members of the Project for the New American Century, who later came to dominate in the Bush administration. Why?

The right-wing strategy was to use the American military to achieve economic and strategic goals in the Middle East: to gain control of the second largest oil reserve in the world; to place military bases right in the heart of the Middle East for the sake of economic and political intimidation; to open up Middle East markets and economic opportunities for American corporations; and to place American culture and a controllable government in the heart of the Middle East. The justification was 9/11 -- to identify the Iraq invasion as part of the "War on Terror" and claim that it is necessary in order to protect America and spread democracy.

What has been the result?

Domestically, the "War on Terror" has been a major success for the radical right. Bush has been returned to office and the radical right controls all branches of our government. They are realizing their goals. Social programs are being gutted. Deregulation and privatization are thriving. Even highways are being privatized. Taxpayers' money is being transferred to the ultra-rich making them richer. Two right-wing justices have been appointed to the Supreme Court and right-wing judges are taking over courts all over America. The environment continues to be plundered. Domestic surveillance is in place. Corporate profits have doubled while wage levels have declined. Oil profits are astronomical. And the radical rights social agenda is taking hold. The "culture war" is being won on many fronts. And it is still widely accepted that we are fighting a "War on Terror." The metaphor is still in place. We are still taking off our shoes at the airports, and now we cannot take bottled water on the planes. Terror is being propped up.

But while the radical right has done well on the domestic front, America and Americans have fared less well both at home and abroad.

What was the moral of 9/11?

To Osama bin Laden, the moral was simple: American power can be used against America itself. This moral has defined the post 9/11 world: the more America uses military force in the Middle East, the more damage is done to America and Americans.

The more Americans kill and terrorize Muslims, the more we recruit Muslims to become terrorists and fight against us.

The war in Iraq was over in 2003 when the US forces defeated Saddam's army. Then the American occupation began -- an occupation by insufficient troops ill-suited to be occupiers, especially in a country on the brink of a civil war, where neither side wants us there.

The number of lives lost on 9/11 is currently listed as 2973. As of this writing 2662 Americans have been sent to their deaths in Iraq, a Muslim country that did not attack us. At the current rate, within months more Americans will have been sent to their deaths by Bush than were murdered at the hands of bin Laden.

9/11 was a crime -- a crime against humanity -- and terrorism is best dealt with as crime on an international level.

It is time to toss the war metaphor into the garbage can.

The war metaphor is still intimidating progressives. To come out against "staying the course" is to be called unpatriotic, weak, and defeatist. To say, "no, we're just as strong, but we're smarter" is to keep and reinforce the war metaphor, which the conservatives have a patent on.

It is time for progressives to jettison the war metaphor itself. It is time to tell some truths that progressives have been holding back on. What has worked in stopping terrorism is just what has worked in stopping international crime -- like the recent police work in England. What has failed is the war approach, which just recruits more terrorists. In Iraq, the war was over when we defeated Saddam's army. Then the occupation began. Our troops are dying because they are not trained be occupiers in hostile territory on the cusp of a civil war.

Bush is an occupation president, not a war president, and his war powers should be immediately rescinded. Rep. Lynn Woolsey's resolution to do just that (H.R. 5875) should be taken seriously and made the subject of national debate.

I am suggesting a conscious discussion of the war metaphor as a metaphor. The very discussion would require the nation to think of it as a metaphor, and allow the nation to take seriously the truth of our presence in Iraq as an occupation that must be ended. You don't win or lose an occupation; you just exit as gracefully as possible.

Openly discussing the war metaphor as a metaphor would allow the case to be made that terrorism is most effectively treated as a crime -- like wiping out a crime syndicate -- not as an occasion for sending over a hundred thousand troops and doing massive bombing that only recruits more terrorists.

Finally, openly discussing the war metaphor as a metaphor would raise the question of the domestic effect of giving the president war powers, and the fact that the Bush administration has shamelessly exploited 9/11 to achieve the political goals of the radical right -- with all the disasters that has brought to our country. It would allow us to name right-wing ideology, to spell it out, look at its effects, and to see what awful things it has done, is doing, and threatens to keep on doing. The blame for what has gone wrong in Iraq, in New Orleans, in our economy, and throughout the country at large should be placed squarely where it belongs -- on right-wing ideology that calls itself "conservative" but mocks real American values.

Metaphors cannot be seen or touched, but they create massive effects, and political intimidation is one such effect. It is time for political courage and political realism. It is time to end the political intimidation of the war metaphor and the terror it has loosed on America.

ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE

'Izzy' an Early Fighter against Bigotry
by Helen Thomas


WASHINGTON - A brilliant biography of the controversial newspaper columnist I.F. Stone, whose career spanned most of the historical highlights of the 20th century, resonates with the political scene today.

Journalist Myra MacPherson vividly retraces the life and times of the rebel newsman in her new book titled "All Governments Lie."

An iconoclast and a pariah who became a journalistic icon in later life, Stone started his own newspaper at the age of 14. Known to friends and foes as "Izzy," Stone rooted for the underdog in the turbulent labor and racial struggles of the past century and later battled fascism and McCarthy witch hunts.

He was a leftist, sure, socialist, probably, but not a card-carrying communist, according to MacPherson.

Nonetheless, he was often dubbed a "commie" by his political detractors, especially J. Edgar Hoover, the formidable FBI director, who kept voluminous files on him.

Long before former Presidents Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush succeeded in demonizing the label "liberal," Stone was indeed a liberal until the day he died in 1989 at the age of 81.

In 1941, Stone escorted William Hastie, a black man and dean of Howard University Law School, to the all-white, all-male National Press Club but they were never served, "not even a glass of water," MacPherson wrote.

Stone resigned when his protest received little support from fellow members. Toward the end of his life, he was lauded at a club award luncheon.

The first black member was taken into the club in 1955, and women were admitted as members in 1971.

Stone's defiant views were self-published in the "I.F. Stone Weekly." This newspaper had a small circulation but a large impact on readers, who sought more than the compliant mainstream press had to offer.

Stone was far ahead of his colleagues in detecting the rise of fascism and Hitler.

"Izzy's remarkable immediacy leaps off the pages," MacPherson wrote. "His views take on vital importance as if he had just written them this morning, illuminating the tumultuous first five years of the 21st century."

Stone wrote of U.S. policy: "There was increased reliance at home and abroad on suppression by force and an increasingly arrogant determination 'to go it alone' in the world."

MacPherson notes that Stone wrote this during the Cold War escalation, but it could have been written when President Bush ignored the United Nations, colleagues, international treaties and the advice of allies and started a war by invading Iraq in 2003.

MacPherson was struck when Stone said that "all governments are run by liars," and it inspired the title of her book.

Stone's view of federal fibs "was not about the weapons of mass destruction or subsequent other Iraq war lies," MacPherson writes, but about lies told during the Vietnam War.

Stone's writings recalled past limitations of U.S. liberties during times of fear of anarchists and communists, MacPherson wrote, adding: "This was not about the excesses of the Patriot Act but about investigative assaults and secret surveillance of citizens in 1949."

The First Amendment was Stone's "bible and Jefferson his God," she said.

Stone never stopped preaching against secrecy in government, MacPherson said, and he combed government documents for what he called the "significant trifle," which gave him deeper insight into Washington doings.

MacPherson said Stone wrote "millions upon millions of words on everything from Woodrow Wilson's peace initiatives to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars."

Stone, born to immigrant Russian Jewish parents, "had a roiling history with fellow Jews," MacPherson wrote. He was "beloved when he became the first reporter to travel illegally with Holocaust survivors to Palestine, he was soon denounced by some as a Jew hater for championing the rights of displaced Palestinians," she said.

Stone was attacked for thinking the road to peace with Communist regimes was through diplomacy rather than tough threats of war. He felt vindicated when President Nixon made his breakthrough trip to China and Reagan -- an ardent foe of the "evil empire" -- went to a Moscow summit meeting.

As long as he lived, Stone fought against bigotry and for individual freedom, the rights of man and a free press. Through it all he used to say: "I'm having so much fun I ought to be arrested."

© 1998-2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Are we colorblind? Louisville, Boston and the Supreme Court, opinion.

The Myth of Colorblindness
Blacks and whites don't see racism the same way, which is why we can't solve America's racial woes
By JENINNE LEE-ST. JOHN

When the Supreme Court reconvenes next month, the justices will take on the case against integration policies in Louisville and Seattle. Both cities, in an effort to overcome residential self-segregation, use race as a factor in assigning students to public schools — a practice that white parents have complained discriminates against their children. Predictably, the Bush administration agrees. In a friend of the court brief supporting the Kentucky petitioners, Solicitor General Paul D. Clement wrote, "The United States remains deeply committed to [the] objective [of Brown vs. Board of Education]. But once the effects of past de jure segregation have been remedied, the path forward does not involve new instances of de jure discrimination."

I laughed out loud when I read this.

The effects of legalized segregation have been remedied? Recent studies indicate that schools in many communities are growing more segregated. Just 50% of blacks earn a regular high school diploma, compared with 74% of whites, according to research by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and the Urban Institute. Brown was decided more than 50 years ago, but cities like Louisville and Boston were still rioting over busing plans in the 1970s. And is two generations really long enough to counteract 300 prior years of institutionalized inequity?

I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised. It's long been assumed that blacks and whites don't experience race or recall racism in America in the same way. Now there's proof. In a fascinating new study, sociologists at the University of Minnesota asked whites, blacks and Hispanics what caused whites in the U.S. to have an advantage and blacks to have a disadvantage, and how much they adhered to "colorblind" ideals.

Among the findings (which I summarized in another article) were these telling nuggets: First, most whites believe that prejudice and discrimination put blacks at a disadvantage—75% agreed with that statement, compared with 88% of blacks and Hispanics. But fewer whites say those factors gave white people an advantage (62%, versus 79% of the non-whites). Second, whites are only about half as likely as blacks or Hispanics to attribute white advantage and black disadvantage to laws and institutions. White Republicans in the survey specifically resisted crediting the legal system as an important to white advantage.

One of the major questions the researchers were trying to answer, according to Douglas Hartmann, a co-author of the study, was "whether whites see the problem of race as one of white privilege as opposed to African-American disadvantage." And this is no small distinction.

"If one looks at the response patterns for African-American disadvantage, one might conclude that most white Americans would be supportive of policies designed to equalize opportunities for African Americans," the authors write. "It is not until looking at the response patterns for white advantage that we can see that white Americans may not be overtly racist but may, in fact, have very different (if not na�ve and simplistic) visions of the social system of race. This is an important finding with implications... for how we understand the policies Americans adopt (or fail to adopt) to challenge [racial] inequities."

That is to say, taken together, these stats shed light on why so many white Americans have a tough time getting onboard with affirmative action. In a Pew poll, 54% of whites said programs to increase the number of minorities in college are a good thing, compared with 87% of blacks.

"That to me is a reflection of how ahistorical and individualist so many Americans are," Hartmann told me. "We understand that history matters but don't want to see how it pervades our culture. It's kind of surprising but also really typical of how Americans can't reconcile race problems. To support affirmative action, you have to have a historical understanding of where these problems come from."

These days, Americans prefer to talk about "colorblindness." I hate the term. For one, it's an impossibility. Color is immutable and unavoidable; it's the first thing you notice about someone, whether you register it consciously or not. For another, it's offensive. "It blurs the real problems of jobs and education that communities of color are struggling with," Hartmann says. And just as your race affects how you experience the world, it also determines the perspective that you bring to any group dynamic—and we should value those different perspectives.

Diverse classrooms enhance learning for all students, as the Seattle school officials argue. Perhaps more important, exposure to diversity, racial and otherwise, is in itself a form of education that remains today in too short supply.

Copyright © 2006 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without perm

WAR is not a solution to "Terrorism" because....

Published on Saturday, September 2, 2006 by the Boston Globe
War is Not a Solution for Terrorism
by Howard Zinn


There is something important to be learned from the recent experience of the United States and Israel in the Middle East: that massive military attacks, inevitably indiscriminate, are not only morally reprehensible, but useless in achieving the stated aims of those who carry them out.

The United States, in three years of war, which began with shock-and-awe bombardment and goes on with day-to-day violence and chaos, has been an utter failure in its claimed objective of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. The Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon has not brought security to Israel; indeed it has increased the number of its enemies, whether in Hezbollah or Hamas or among Arabs who belong to neither of those groups.

I remember John Hersey's novel, "The War Lover," in which a macho American pilot, who loves to drop bombs on people and also to boast about his sexual conquests, turns out to be impotent. President Bush, strutting in his flight jacket on an aircraft carrier and announcing victory in Iraq, has turned out to be much like the Hersey character, his words equally boastful, his military machine impotent.

The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations -- the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan -- and were forced to withdraw.

Even the "victories" of great military powers turn out to be elusive. Presumably, after attacking and invading Afghanistan, the president was able to declare that the Taliban were defeated. But more than four years later, Afghanistan is rife with violence, and the Taliban are active in much of the country.

The two most powerful nations after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union, with all their military might, have not been able to control events in countries that they considered to be in their sphere of influence -- the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the United States in Latin America.

Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a "war on terrorism" is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.

The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.

This is a false distinction, quickly refuted with a bit of thought. If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a ``suspected terrorist" is inside (note the frequent use of the word suspected as evidence of the uncertainty surrounding targets), the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is "inevitable."

So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians. And when you consider that the number of innocent people dying inevitably in "accidental" events has been far, far greater than all the deaths deliberately caused by terrorists, one must reject war as a solution for terrorism.

For instance, more than a million civilians in Vietnam were killed by US bombs, presumably by "accident." Add up all the terrorist attacks throughout the world in the 20th century and they do not equal that awful toll.

If reacting to terrorist attacks by war is inevitably immoral, then we must look for ways other than war to end terrorism, including the terrorism of war. And if military retaliation for terrorism is not only immoral but futile, then political leaders, however cold-blooded their calculations, may have to reconsider their policies.

Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier, is the author of the best-selling "A People's History of the United States".

© Copyright 2006 Boston Globe

The Bush Rhetoric on Iraq, please notice. . .

Editorial:
Loose talk / The Bush rhetoric on Iraq is sounding desperate

Friday, September 01, 2006
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

There are at least three pieces of falsely based rhetoric that are beginning to emerge in the fall political campaign that need to be put into context now, early in the game.

All three are being put forward by senior U.S. government officials or Republican candidates, notably Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Pennsylvania's own nonresident peddler of nontruths, Sen. Rick Santorum.
, pp
The first of these is that any American who does not believe that the United States should stay in Iraq, to pursue President Bush's vanity war to the end and continue to lose young fighting Americans as well as burn up formidable amounts of cash, is somehow not only wrongheaded but also a traitor who does not really love freedom.

This is a scurrilous lie, insulting and a disgusting slur on good Americans -- Democrats, Republicans or independents -- who believe that it is time the nation found a way to bring an end to a war that is now more than 3 years old.

A second, very misleading, line that, notably, Republican Senate candidate Santorum is using, most recently at a talk in Harrisburg on Monday, is that America's current war is against "Islamic fascism." This concept is inaccurate and unhelpful to the United States in both of its words. Anyone with half a brain can see that Islam is by no means unified or unanimous in its support of al-Qaida, terrorism or even Hezbollah and Hamas. Think of the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Or think of Indonesia, Bangladesh and Malaysia, majority Islamic countries that have offered troops to the United Nations to stand between Hezbollah and the Israeli Defense Forces in defending the integrity of southern Lebanon.

In addition, what is going on in the Middle East does not meet the definition of fascism. Fascism is a political philosophy, albeit a scrofulous one, and is generally a national phenomenon, not cross-national and religious in its scope.

Mr. Santorum has given no previous indication of any knowledge of foreign affairs, but waving around the words "Islamic fascism" may take the cake.

The third falsely based line that some Republicans are throwing around is an effort to draw a link between the situation in Europe in the 1930s -- Hitler, British Prime Minister A. Neville Chamberlain's 1938 Munich deal, the Holocaust carried out by Germany and other nations against the Jews of Europe -- and some Americans' advocacy of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The two situations have nothing whatsoever in common -- even the fact that Mr. Chamberlain saw himself as trying to preserve peace in Europe, whereas the Bush administration is trying to find a way to say it's been successful in Iraq despite the fact that none of its stated invasion objectives (apart from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) have been achieved.

What would be most useful for America at this point is that its 2006 electoral campaign be waged on the basis of truths -- about its economic situation, of primary importance, as well as the current position of the United States in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. Feeding lies into the system -- with claims that advocacy of withdrawal is disloyalty, "Islamic fascism" is the problem or the situation in the Middle East is like that in 1930s Europe -- is stupid and counterproductive to useful debate among competing candidates. It needs to stop now before it goes any further.

Copyrigtt Pittsburg Post - Gazette

Sierra Club and others take Global Warning to Supreme Court.

Sierra Club et al. Take Global Warming to the Supreme Court
Powerful Coalition Petitions Supreme Court to Order EPA to Obey the Law
Sierra Club, Nineteen States and Cities, and Numerous Others File Opening Briefs Seeking Enforcement of Clean Air Act


WASHINGTON - August 31 - Today a vast coalition of the Sierra Club, states, cities, political leaders, other environmental groups, and utilities filed opening briefs with the Supreme Court in the most far-reaching global warming case to be heard by the nation’s highest court. The Court’s decision in the case, Massachusetts et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency et al., could have a potentially decisive impact on federal, state, and local efforts to tackle global warming. The Sierra Club, the twelve states involved, and the numerous other petitioners have taken this case to the high court to force EPA to comply with the Clean Air Act’s provisions requiring it to regulate any air pollutant that "endanger[s] public health or welfare."

"For six years, the Bush administration and its friends in Congress have fought tooth and nail to avoid doing anything to fight global warming," commented Carl Pope,

for more see web site
http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/0831-08.htm
or Common Dreams website.