Impeachment is Not Enough- Let's Lock Em All Up

The New York Times

April 22, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Iraq Is the Ultimate Aphrodisiac
By FRANK RICH

PRESIDENT BUSH has skipped the funerals of the troops he sent to Iraq. He took his sweet time to get to Katrina-devastated New Orleans. But last week he raced to Virginia Tech with an alacrity not seen since he hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo’s end-of-life medical care. Mr. Bush assumes the role of mourner in chief on a selective basis, and, as usual with the decider, the decisive factor is politics. Let Walter Reed erupt in scandal, and he’ll take six weeks to show his face — and on a Friday at that, to hide the story in the Saturday papers. The heinous slaughter in Blacksburg, Va., by contrast, was a rare opportunity for him to ostentatiously feel the pain of families whose suffering cannot be blamed on the administration.

But he couldn’t inspire the kind of public acclaim that followed his post-9/11 visit to ground zero or the political comeback that buoyed his predecessor after Oklahoma City. The cancer on the Bush White House, Iraq, is now spreading too fast. The president had barely returned to Washington when the empty hope of the “surge” was hideously mocked by a one-day Baghdad civilian death toll more than five times that of Blacksburg’s. McClatchy Newspapers reported that the death rate for American troops over the past six months was at its all-time high for this war.

At home, the president is also hobbled by the Iraq cancer’s metastasis — the twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz. Technically, both men have been pilloried for sins unrelated to the war. The attorney general has repeatedly been caught changing his story about the extent of his involvement in purging eight federal prosecutors. The Financial Times caught the former deputy secretary of defense turned World Bank president privately dictating the extravagant terms of a State Department sinecure for a crony (a k a romantic partner) that showers her with more take-home pay than Condoleezza Rice.

Yet each man’s latest infractions, however serious, are mere misdemeanors next to their roles in the Iraq war. What’s being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders.

Mr. Gonzales’s politicizing of the Justice Department is a mere bagatelle next to his role as White House counsel in 2002, when he helped shape the administration’s legal argument to justify torture. That paved the way for Abu Ghraib, the episode that destroyed America’s image and gave terrorists a moral victory. But his efforts to sabotage national security didn’t end there. In a front-page exposé lost in the Imus avalanche two Sundays ago, The Washington Post uncovered Mr. Gonzales’s reckless role in vetting the nomination of Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security in December 2004.

Mr. Kerik, you may recall, withdrew from consideration for that cabinet post after a week of embarrassing headlines. Back then, the White House ducked any culpability for the mess by attributing it to a single legal issue, a supposedly undocumented nanny, and by pinning it on a single, nonadministration scapegoat, Mr. Kerik’s longtime patron, Rudy Giuliani. The president’s spokesman at the time, Scott McClellan, told reporters that the White House had had “no reason to believe” that Mr. Kerik lied during his vetting process and that it would be inaccurate to say that process had been rushed.

THANKS to John Solomon and Peter Baker of The Post, we now know that Mr. McClellan’s spin was no more accurate than his exoneration of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Wilson leak case. The Kerik vetting process was indeed rushed — by Mr. Gonzales — and the administration had every reason to believe that it was turning over homeland security to a liar. Mr. Gonzales was privy from the get-go to a Kerik dossier ablaze with red flags pointing to “questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption,” not to mention a “friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime.” Yet Mr. Gonzales and the president persisted in shoving Mr. Kerik into the top job of an already troubled federal department encompassing 22 agencies, 180,000 employees and the very safety of America in the post-9/11 era.

Mr. Kerik may soon face federal charges, and at a most inopportune time for the Giuliani presidential campaign. But it’s as a paradigm of the Bush White House’s waging of the Iraq war that the Kerik case is most telling. The crucial point to remember is this: Even had there been no alleged improprieties in the former police chief’s New York résumé, there still would have been his public record in Iraq to disqualify him from any administration job.

The year before Mr. Kerik’s nomination to the cabinet, he was dispatched by the president to take charge of training the Iraqi police — and completely failed at that mission. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran recounts in his invaluable chronicle of Green Zone shenanigans, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” Mr. Kerik slept all day and held only two staff meetings, one upon arrival and one for the benefit of a Times reporter doing a profile. Rather than train Iraqi police, Mr. Kerik gave upbeat McCain-esque appraisals of the dandy shopping in Baghdad’s markets.

Had Mr. Kerik actually helped stand up an Iraqi police force instead of hastening its descent into a haven for sectarian death squads, there might not now be extended tours for American troops in an open-ended escalation of the war. But in the White House’s priorities, rebuilding Iraq came in a poor third to cronyism and domestic politics. Mr. Kerik’s P.R. usefulness as a symbol of 9/11 was particularly irresistible to an administration that has exploited the carnage of 9/11 in ways both grandiose (to gin up the Iraq invasion) and tacky (in 2004 campaign ads).

Mr. Kerik was an exploiter of 9/11 in his own right: he had commandeered an apartment assigned to ground zero police and rescue workers to carry out his extramarital tryst with the publisher Judith Regan. The sex angle of Mr. Wolfowitz’s scandal is a comparable symptom of the hubris that warped the judgment of those in power after 9/11. Not only did he help secure Shaha Riza her over-the-top raise in 2005, but as The Times reported, he also helped get her a junket to Iraq when he was riding high at the Pentagon in 2003. No one seems to know what she actually accomplished there, but the bill was paid by a Defense Department contractor that has since come under official scrutiny for its noncompetitive contracts and poor performance. So it went with the entire Iraq fiasco.

You don’t have to be a cynic to ask if the White House’s practice of bestowing better jobs on those who bungled the war might be a form of hush money. Mr. Wolfowitz was promoted to the World Bank despite a Pentagon record that included (in part) his prewar hyping of bogus intelligence about W.M.D. and a nonexistent 9/11-Saddam connection; his assurance to the world that Iraq’s oil revenues would pay for reconstruction; and his public humiliation of Gen. Eric Shinseki after the general dared tell Congress (correctly) that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure Iraq after the invasion. Once the war began, Mr. Wolfowitz cited national security to bar businesses from noncoalition countries (like Germany) from competing for major contracts in Iraq. That helped ensure the disastrous monopoly of Halliburton and other White House-connected companies, including the one that employed Ms. Riza.

Had Iraqi reconstruction, like the training of Iraqi police, not been betrayed by politics and cronyism, the Iraq story might have a different ending. But maybe not all that different. The cancer on the Bush White House connects and contaminates all its organs. It’s no surprise that one United States attorney fired without plausible cause by the Gonzales Justice Department, Carol Lam, was in hot pursuit of defense contractors with administration connections. Or that another crony brought by Mr. Wolfowitz to the World Bank was caught asking the Air Force secretary to secure a job for her brother at a defense contractor while she was overseeing aspects of the Air Force budget at the White House. A government with values this sleazy couldn’t possibly win a war.

Like the C.I.A. leak case, each new scandal is filling in a different piece of the elaborate White House scheme to cover up the lies that took us into Iraq and the failures that keep us mired there. As the cover-up unravels and Congress steps up its confrontation over the war’s endgame, our desperate president is reverting to his old fear-mongering habit of invoking 9/11 incessantly in every speech. The more we learn, the more it’s clear that he’s the one with reason to be afraid.

It’s the Guns, Stupid

by E.J. Dionne —

With enough money behind it, any ridiculous argument will find supporters, especially in Congress. It shouldn’t take mass murder for politicians to realize the obvious: Guns kill people.

Guns, Drugs, and the Massacre in Virginia

by Robert B. Reich

Why aren't handguns as strictly regulated as prescription medication?

Neanderthal Supreme Court Decision on Abortion
By Matthew Rothschild
Supreme Court justices have exchanged their black robes for white ones, never bothering to go to med school for the privilege.
read more

Gonzales's Tortured Testimony
In his testimony before Congress, the embattled Attorney General acknowledges no wrongdoing, but says he talked with Rove and Bush about pressuring US Attorneys.
by John Nichols.

A Gonzales resignation is not enough
By Joe Conason

Kucinich to press for Dick Cheney impeachment
Posted by Sabrina Eaton

Cleveland congressman Dennis Kucinich sent his Democratic colleagues a two-sentence email this morning announcing imminent plans to introduce "Articles of Impeachment with respect to the conduct of Vice President Cheney."

"Please have your staff contact my office," the missive continued,"if you would like to receive a confidential copy of the document prior to its introduction in the House."

Kucinich press secretary Natalie Laber refused to comment on Kucinich's email or to provide any more information about his efforts to push for Cheney's impeachment. The Plain Dealer obtained the email from a different Democratic congressional office.

Cheney's deputy press secretary, Megan McGinn, said she couldn't comment on Kucinich's email because she hadn't seen it.

Asked whether Cheney had done anything he could be impeached for, McGinn replied: "The vice president has had nearly 40 years of government service and has done so in an honorable fashion."

While Democratic activists have called for impeachment of Cheney, President Bush and other administration officials, Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have not expressed interest in doing so.

The President's Veto Threat Does Not Dictate the Law of Our Land
by Sen. Robert Byrd
Members of Congress are elected to make laws based on sound public policy, not to capitulate to presidential threats. Let the president issue his veto threats, but also let the Congress dutifully represent the will of the people.

The Surge is a Disaster
by Stephen Schlesinger
The addition of more troops has made absolutely no difference to the way this war is being conducted. It has only reinforced the fury of the Sunni irregulars, the Al Qaeda opportunists, the Shiite fundamentalists.

Wolfowitz's girlfriend problem gets messier
By Sidney Blumenthal

The U.S. attorneys scandal gets dirty
As Congress prepares to grill Alberto Gonzales, Salon has uncovered another partisan issue connected to the mass firings: Pornography
By Mark Follman

A Dark Day for Women's Health and Safety

by Cecile Richards

In the last 24 hours, people all across America have expressed their outrage at a Supreme Court ruling that has brought about a seismic shift on reproductive freedom.

The Emperor Has No Guns
by Mark Green

The boilerplate response to the Virginia shootings from pro-gun Republicans is, sorry about the loss but we all still have to recognize the Second Amendment right to own guns. What right?

Heck of a Job, Wolfie

by Robert Scheer —
Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense who helped sell a stupid war, now finds himself in a bit of trouble. As head of the World Bank, he secured a cushy pay raise for his girlfriend, lied about it and alienated his staff in the process. Not to worry—President Bush still thinks he’s doing a bang-up job.

Virginia Shooter Had No Difficulty Buying Guns

As more details emerge from the massacre at Virginia Tech, it has become tragically clear that the least remarkable aspect of the crime was the purchase of the weapons that killed 33 people. An investigation has found that Cho Seung Hui bought two pistols quickly, affordably and, for the most part, legally.
CONTINUE

Hail and Farewell: The End of the American Empire
by Gore Vidal

Whenever The New York Times finally gets the point to what is going on in our native land a celestial choir can be heard in Times Square, shouting hosannas. This happened recently, on April 14th, when they realized that there could be a dark explanation for what W. is doing when he sends a Mr. Bolton, a U.N. hater, to be ambassador to that body or a Mr. Wolfowitz to the World Bank, a man as ignorant of history and finance as the president himself. Maureen Dowd in the Times was allowed to set the pitch for the latest revelations with her “More Con Than Neo” headline. Meanwhile, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of incompetents are now cluttering the Justice Department while known incompetents are in place to wreck from within regulatory systems and even mighty Walter Reed Hospital itself.

And then such investigations that W. has cut back—particularly at the height of the pet food investigation, a matter of such passionate interest to our countrymen.

Needless to say, the Times, instinctively pro-Bush, as it too is an inept creature of our leviathan master: corporate America. But though the Times now notes a mysterious problem with Bush’s general relations to the outside world, the Times, as usual, cannot grasp what so many of us fans of the American Republic can see so clearly: In the name of Manichaean religious cults he is eager to destroy every last trace of the New Deal (privatize Social Security) by destroying both the state and its global imperium.

W.’s love of torture and the death penalty suggests this that is Caligula Redux, but actually he is a home-grown Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor as viewed by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt and refashioned by me in an English version that played on Broadway in the 1960s. As the play opens, the northern barbarians are closing in on Rome, while the emperor dawdles, neglecting to appoint a “war tsar” to defend the city itself. What is wrong with him? Well, he does have a plan. When Odoaker, the king of the Teutons, arrives, Romulus expects to be executed, but Odoaker also has a plan: The two rulers will unite in a realm of peace. Romulus then admits that all his actions and non-actions had a single end: the destruction of the bloody empire he had inherited.

For the admiring Teutons he holds up an imaginary globe. “Now watch,” he says, as the emperor dissolves his empire. “Look, all of you, once more upon this tinted globe, this dream of a great empire, floating in space, driven by the slightest breath of my lips, yes, look once more upon the far-flung lands encircling the blue sea with its dancing dolphins, these rich provinces golden with wheat, these teeming cities overflowing with life, yes, the empire was once a sun, warming mankind, but at its zenith it scorched the world. Now it is a harmless bubble, and in the hands of the emperor it dissolves into nothing. And, thus, the throne of blood is overturned!”

Obviously, our weird little emperor is incapable of moral reflection, thus inviting us to reflect morally upon him as he has gone about his systematic wrecking of our common empire, which, after 1945, should have come into its own but thanks to Truman et al. it stayed forever at war and now but, Hark! what is the Times chorus singing now? Can it be a new weekend edition? Without troubling news? Or has W. finally snapped our military machine for fun if not global peace. On a high moral ground Romulus the Great disowned his empire. W. the Minuscule, driven by ignorance and greed like his cronies, leaves us defenseless and at sea in a terrorized world of prisons, phony trials, renditions, executions without due process of law, while leaving in the Middle East a vast charnel house which he likes to call “a fledgling democracy.”

At the end of the Broadway play, one Roman soldier (played by Robert Duvall) eager to save Rome joins Romulus but Romulus tells him “the Roman empire has been dissolved,” as surely as W. is dissolving us as hurricanes, tempests, droughts of his making ravage our alabaster cities and amber waves of grain. Ave Atque Vale.

Jane Smiley: What I Think About Guns

Grievance is something right-wingers do, no matter how much power they have. They are shocked, shocked, that they don't have all the power, shocked and victimized and angry. You could tell it in Bush's response to today's shooting. First he said he was shocked and saddened. Then he said everyone has the right to bear arms. He wouldn't want to let any of those NRA-types imagine for a second that any amount of senseless killing could possibly shake his commitment to a fully-armed populace.

What Rudy Believes

by Michael Tomasky

Gun control? Welcoming immigrants? A woman's right to choose? Never mind his past positions. The only -ism that Rudy Giuliani believes in is sadism.

Could Those Lost E-mails Cause Fitzgerald to Re-open Leak Case?

Whoopsie! We lost 5 million e-mails! Thus spoke the White House, as Dan blogged earlier today. And a particularly huge number seem to belong to a certain Mr. Rove. All of these e-mails were exchanged during the period of time U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald investigated in connection with the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity. Fitzgerald had been led to believe that he had a full accounting of official communications during the period in question. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—a watchdog group that is also representing Joe and Valerie Wilson in their civil suit against administration officials—is now calling on Fitzgerald to re-open his investigation, given that the source of the leak may well have covered his electronic tracks. This is getting fun, isn't it?

Posted by Cameron Scott

Murdoch’s NY Post and the front page of shame on Corzine
By: John Amato

Calling Gov. Corzine a crash dummy is pretty appalling. This was a tragic event, and a serious car wreck, but these morons can't help themselves. Yes, he should have worn his seat belt, but his family are suffering tremendously right now and you'd think they would give it a few days before they turned ugly like they always do.

US generals urge climate action

BBC NEWS

Former US military leaders have called on the Bush administration to make major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

In a report, they say global warming poses a serious threat to national security, as the US could be drawn into wars over water and other conflicts.

They appear to criticise President George W Bush's refusal to join an international treaty to cut emissions.

Among the 11 authors are ex-Army chief of staff Gordon Sullivan and Mr Bush's ex-Mid-East peace envoy Anthony Zinni.

The report says the US "must become a more constructive partner" with other nations to fight global warming and deal with its consequences.

It warns that over the next 30 to 40 years, there will be conflicts over water resources, as well as increased instability resulting from rising sea levels and global warming-related refugees.

"The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism," the 35-page report predicts.

'Pay now - or later'

Writing in the report, Gen Zinni, a former commander of US Central Command, says: "It's not hard to make the connection between climate change and instability, or climate change and terrorism."

He adds: "We will pay for this one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we'll have to take an economic hit of some kind.

"Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll."

The report was issued by a Virginia-based national security think-tank, The CNA Corporation, and was written by six retired admirals and five retired generals.

Climate scientists broadly endorsed the report.

But Stanford scientist Terry Root, a joint author of this month's international scientific report on the effects of global warming on life on Earth, said its timescale might be too alarmist, as some of the predicted events - while likely to occur - could take longer than 30 years to happen.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/6557803.stm

Published: 2007/04/15 16:46:52 GMT

© BBC MMVII

Jonathan Alter On McCain's Meltdown

Daily Show: Bush Redefines Progress

George W. Bush is upset with the Democrats for wanting to withdraw from Iraq, just when we’ve finally started to make progress. Just starting? The president has been citing “progress” in Iraq for years now, and Jon Stewart has the clips to prove it.

Watch it here.

Rudy Giuliani’s Dubious Leadership

by Joe Conason —
The Republican front-runner prides himself on his leadership but has an unfortunate history of valuing loyalty over wisdom and stubbornly pursuing ill-conceived policies against the better judgment of experts. Sound familiar?

White House 'Lost' E-mails About Attorneys

Senator Leahy isn't buying Bush's Rose Mary Woods Defense, writes John Nichols. Those e-mails aren't missing; they're incriminating.

I ah told ya So......Iran and Iraq have no monopoly on mullahs

The New York Times

April 13, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
For God’s Sake
By PAUL KRUGMAN

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

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

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

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

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

Kay Cole James, who had extensive connections to the religious right and was the dean of Regent’s government school, was the federal government’s chief personnel officer from 2001 to 2005. (Curious fact: she then took a job with Mitchell Wade, the businessman who bribed Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham.) And it’s clear that unqualified people were hired throughout the administration because of their religious connections.

For example, The Boston Globe reports on one Regent law school graduate who was interviewed by the Justice Department’s civil rights division. Asked what Supreme Court decision of the past 20 years he most disagreed with, he named the decision to strike down a Texas anti-sodomy law. When he was hired, it was his only job offer.

Or consider George Deutsch, the presidential appointee at NASA who told a Web site designer to add the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang, to leave open the possibility of “intelligent design by a creator.” He turned out not to have, as he claimed, a degree from Texas A&M.

One measure of just how many Bushies were appointed to promote a religious agenda is how often a Christian right connection surfaces when we learn about a Bush administration scandal.

There’s Ms. Goodling, of course. But did you know that Rachel Paulose, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota — three of whose deputies recently stepped down, reportedly in protest over her management style — is, according to a local news report, in the habit of quoting Bible verses in the office?

Or there’s the case of Claude Allen, the presidential aide and former deputy secretary of health and human services, who stepped down after being investigated for petty theft. Most press reports, though they mentioned Mr. Allen’s faith, failed to convey the fact that he built his career as a man of the hard-line Christian right.

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

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

Two days after the terrorist attacks, Mr. Robertson held a conversation with Jerry Falwell on Mr. Robertson’s TV show “The 700 Club.” Mr. Falwell laid blame for the attack at the feet of “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians,” not to mention the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way. “Well, I totally concur,” said Mr. Robertson.

The Bush administration’s implosion clearly represents a setback for the Christian right’s strategy of infiltration. But it would be wildly premature to declare the danger over. This is a movement that has shown great resilience over the years. It will surely find new champions.

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

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

"We have a President who knows absolutely no history, and he is surrounded by men who pay no attention to history. They imagine that they are great politicians inventing something new. In fact, it’s really quite old stuff: tyranny. But they imagine they’re being creative."-Kurt Vonnegut

John McCain Fucked by the Republican Fantasy World

by Bill Maher

John McCain's not an idiot. I'm sure he knows that it's not safe in Baghdad, but he has to pretend that it's safe in Baghdad because that's what the GOP base wants to hear.
We keep hearing that a significant majority of Americans think the war was a mistake and want the troops out.


And that's true. But those figures are an average of all voters and are pretty deceptive, because most Republicans are still gung-ho about the war. In fact, two-thirds of likely GOP primary voters support what Bush is doing in Iraq. They support the surge. They've swallowed so much Kool-Aid that any change in their diet would kill them.


What this means is, every GOP candidate has to say the war is going great, whether they believe it or not, at least until the primaries are over. Giuliani's very rah-rah about the war, Romney doesn't like to talk about it, but then he has his own religious jihad to worry about. But none of them will be able to say anything other than "the surge is working," or "if we leave now things will get really bad" because the base won't stand for it. And this means they're going to look increasingly ridiculous and out-of-touch as the months go on. And there's no way they can "move to the middle" once the primary is over on an issue like this

Op-Ed Contributor: Trash Talk Radio
by Gwen Ifill

Meet Seymour Hersh The White House's Most Hated Reporter

Rush to Judgment

Lampooning environmentalists as "wackos," Rush Limbaugh lulled millions of Americans into happy complacency. As the country wakes up to the climate crisis, James Wolcott asks: Who looks wacko now?

John McCain's Iraq problem
By Juan Cole

North Koreans Arm Ethiopians as U.S. Assents

April 8, 2007

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, April 7 — Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on North Korea because of the country’s nuclear test, Bush administration officials allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from the North, in what appears to be a violation of the restrictions, according to senior American officials.

The United States allowed the arms delivery to go through in January in part because Ethiopia was in the midst of a military offensive against Islamic militias inside Somalia, a campaign that aided the American policy of combating religious extremists in the Horn of Africa.

American officials said that they were still encouraging Ethiopia to wean itself from its longstanding reliance on North Korea for cheap Soviet-era military equipment to supply its armed forces and that Ethiopian officials appeared receptive. But the arms deal is an example of the compromises that result from the clash of two foreign policy absolutes: the Bush administration’s commitment to fighting Islamic radicalism and its effort to starve the North Korean government of money it could use to build up its nuclear weapons program.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, as the administration has made counterterrorism its top foreign policy concern, the White House has sometimes shown a willingness to tolerate misconduct by allies that it might otherwise criticize, like human rights violations in Central Asia and antidemocratic crackdowns in a number of Arab nations.

It is also not the first time that the Bush administration has made an exception for allies in their dealings with North Korea. In 2002, Spain intercepted a ship carrying Scud missiles from North Korea to Yemen. At the time, Yemen was working with the United States to hunt members of Al Qaeda operating within its borders, and after its government protested, the United States asked that the freighter be released. Yemen said at the time that it was the last shipment from an earlier missile purchase and would not be repeated.

American officials from a number of agencies described details of the Ethiopian episode on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal Bush administration deliberations.

Several officials said they first learned that Ethiopia planned to receive a delivery of military cargo from North Korea when the country’s government alerted the American Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, after the adoption on Oct. 14 of the United Nations Security Council measure imposing sanctions.

“The Ethiopians came back to us and said, ‘Look, we know we need to transition to different customers, but we just can’t do that overnight,’ ” said one American official, who added that the issue had been handled properly. “They pledged to work with us at the most senior levels.”

American intelligence agencies in late January reported that an Ethiopian cargo ship that was probably carrying tank parts and other military equipment had left a North Korean port.

The value of the shipment is unclear, but Ethiopia purchased $20 million worth of arms from North Korea in 2001, according to American estimates, a pattern that officials said had continued. The United States gives Ethiopia millions of dollars of foreign aid and some nonlethal military equipment.

After a brief debate in Washington, the decision was made not to block the arms deal and to press Ethiopia not to make future purchases.

John R. Bolton, who helped to push the resolution imposing sanctions on North Korea through the Security Council in October, before stepping down as United Nations ambassador, said that the Ethiopians had long known that Washington was concerned about their arms purchases from North Korea and that the Bush administration should not have tolerated the January shipment.

“To make it clear to everyone how strongly we feel on this issue we should have gone to the Ethiopians and said they should send it back,” said Mr. Bolton, who added that he had been unaware of the deal before being contacted for this article. “I know they have been helpful in Somalia, but there is a nuclear weapons program in North Korea that is unhelpful for everybody worldwide.

“Never underestimate the strength of ‘clientitis’ at the State Department,” said Mr. Bolton, using Washington jargon for a situation in which State Department officials are deemed to be overly sympathetic to the countries they conduct diplomacy with.

Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, declined to comment on the specifics of the arms shipment but said the United States was “deeply committed to upholding and enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions.” Repeated efforts to contact the Ethiopian Embassy were unsuccessful.

In other cases, the United States has been strict in enforcing the Security Council resolution. For instance, late last year, American intelligence agencies tracked a North Korean freighter suspected of carrying illicit weapons and pressed several nations to refuse to allow the ship to dock. Myanmar, formerly Burma, allowed it to anchor and insisted that there was no violation.

North Korea conducted its first nuclear test on Oct. 9, and the Security Council resolution, adopted less than a week later, was hailed by President Bush as “swift and tough,” and a “clear message to the leader of North Korea regarding his weapons programs.”

Among the biggest sticking points during the negotiations over the resolution were Chinese and Russian objections to language requiring inspections of ships leaving North Korea. The United States repeatedly pressed China and Russia to agree to the inspections, saying they were essential to enforcing the resolution’s embargo on North Korea’s sale of dangerous weapons, like ballistic missiles. In addition to the ban on the purchase of weapons from North Korea, the resolution also called for a ban on the sale of luxury goods to it and the freezing of its financial assets in banks worldwide.

The measure had special relevance for several African states that have long purchased low-cost military equipment from North Korea. Ethiopia has an arsenal of T-55 tanks that it acquired years ago from the Soviet Union and Eastern European nations. For years, it has turned to North Korea for tank parts and other equipment to keep its military running.

The Ethiopians bought the equipment at a bargain price; the North Koreans received some badly needed cash. In 2005, the Bush administration told Ethiopia and other African nations that it wanted them to phase out their purchases from North Korea. But the Security Council resolution put an international imprimatur on the earlier American request, and the administration sought to reinforce the message.

“They really are one of the larger conventional arms purchasers from North Korea, and we’re pressing them hard and saying, ‘Let’s get you out of that business,’ ” said the American official.

Another American official, who is involved in Africa policy, said: “These are cash on the barrel transactions. The Ethiopians know that they can get the best deal in Pyongyang,” a reference to North Korea’s capital.

In late January, the Central Intelligence Agency reported that an Ethiopian-flagged vessel had left a North Korean port and that its cargo probably included “tank parts,” among other military equipment.

American officials said that the ship, the Tekeze, a modern vessel bought from a company in Montenegro and named after an Ethiopian river, unloaded its cargo in Djibouti, a former French colony where the United States has based Special Operations troops and other military forces. From there, the cargo was transported overland to Ethiopia.

The Security Council resolution’s list of prohibited items included spare parts. Because the cargo was never inspected, some administration officials say the United States cannot say for certain that the shipment violated the resolution.

It is not clear if the United States ever reported the arms shipment to the Security Council. But because the intelligence reports indicated that the cargo was likely to have included tank parts, some Pentagon officials described the shipment as an unambiguous Security Council violation.

American officials said that the Ethiopians acknowledged that the ship was en route and said they needed the military equipment to sustain their Soviet-era military. Ethiopia has a longstanding border dispute with Eritrea, but of more concern to Washington, Ethiopia was also focused on neighboring Somalia, where Islamic forces that had taken over Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, six months earlier were attacking Baidoa, the seat of a relatively powerless transitional government that was formed with the support of the United Nations.

The timing of the shipment was extremely awkward, as the Ethiopian military was preoccupied with Somalia and also quietly cooperating with the United States. Ethiopia began an offensive in Somalia to drive back the Islamic forces and install the transitional government in Mogadishu late last year. The United States was providing it with detailed intelligence about the positions of the Islamic forces and positioned Navy ships off Somalia’s coast to capture fighters trying to escape the battlefield by sea.

On Jan. 7, American AC-130 gunships launched two strikes on terrorist targets from an airstrip inside Ethiopia, though it did not appear that the casualties included any of the few top Qaeda operatives American officials suspected were hiding in Somalia.

After some internal debate, the Bush administration decided not to make an issue of the cargo ship.

American officials insist that they are keeping up the pressure on Ethiopia. While Ethiopia has not provided an ironclad assurance that it will accept no more arms shipments from North Korea, it has told the United States that it will look for other weapons suppliers.

“There was a lot going on at that particular moment in time,” said the senior American official. “They seem to have the readiness to do the right thing.”

John Updike reviews

Einstein :

His Life and Universe

Iraq Body Count is 650,000

British government scientists say the Johns Hopkins study on Iraq civilian mortality was accurate and reliable. This paper, published in the Lancet last October, estimated a death toll of 650,000 Iraqi civilians.

"Two hundred years from now, the Iraq war will be mourned as the moment when Britain violated its delicate democratic constitution and joined the ranks of nations that use extreme pre-emptive killing as a tactic of foreign policy. Some anniversary that will be."

Blair to Bush: Back off and shut up
by smintheus

From today's Guardian, we learn that the Bush administration wanted to escalate tensions with Iran after the 15 British sailors were seized two weeks ago. How predictable; for Bush and Cheney, any resort to diplomacy is a token of weakness. Bush offered to use American naval forces provocatively in order to threaten Iran.

Instead, Blair told them to stay out of it. He also asked Bush & Co. to tone down the rhetoric while Britain tried to free the hostages without provoking a war.

Hence Bush's closest ally in his Middle East fiasco has concluded that he cannot be trusted with any sensitive issues. No wonder that the success of the British negotiations has sent Bush's apologists into orbit. It's an insult to everything their guy stands for, not to give war a chance.

Leave Your Morals at the Border

by Robert Scheer —
The Supreme Court may not be interested in applying American values to Guantanamo Bay, but at least one soldier has taken a principled stand against the prison’s tortured justice system.

How to Get Out of Iraq
by Juan Cole
Bush's ineptitude has made a regional war in the Middle East a real possibility. Can diplomacy find a way out?

The President's Global War of Terror
by Tom Engelhardt

Terror is only terror when they do it. When we do it, it's foreign policy.

Stopping the Showdown with Iran
There's no way of knowing if the White House is planning war with Iran, Noam Chomsky writes. To stop an intentional or accidental war, we need to promote democracy at home.

Why neocons are apoplectic about Pelosi's Syria trip
By Joe Conason

My Response to the President's Veto Threat
by Rep. John Murtha
The stress on our military due to the manner in which the president has waged the war in Iraq is no longer tolerable.

Supreme Court Stands Up for the Polar Bears
William Greider In two big decisions, the Court rules against Bush's junk science on global warming.

Bush Tells Congress To "Get Off Their Vacation" Right Before His Vacation

Reid Pushes Back Against Bush Veto Threat

Henry Kissinger, Madman and Proxy President

Newly opened archives from the Nixon presidency show Kissinger to be sycophantic, jealous, suicidal, catty, backstabbing -- and ready to grab unprecedented power in an unbelievably unstable White House. Vanity Fair

Bogus Letter Became a Case for War
It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his now-famous State of the Union address. Later that day, an investigative reporter for an Italian newsweekly read newspaper accounts of Bush's remarks. When she did, she wondered: How could the American president have mentioned a uranium sale from Africa?
By Peter Eisner

Stem Cell Team Grows Heart Valve
Opponents of stem cell research might want to reconsider their position if any of their nearest and dearest have ever had heart problems. A team of British scientists has successfully grown a human heart valve from stem cells, an astonishing feat 10 years in the making.

Howard Zinn: Are We Politicians or Citizens?
We who protest the war are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress.

How Congress can end the war without hurting the troops
Sen. Reid and I are introducing a bill that would require President Bush to begin redeployment and effectively end our military mission in Iraq by March 31, 2008.
By Sen. Russ Feingold

Iran's new hostage crisis: Brits out of Iraq!
By Juan Cole

Schoolgirls Slaughtered, Shiites Executed In Separate Iraq Attacks

Making progress in Iraq

from www.juancole.com

Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi told the Associated Press that he met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and 3 other grand ayatollahs in Najaf on Sunday, and that they rejected a measure recently passed by the Iraqi cabinet offering to reinstate Baath officials to their jobs in government if they severed links to the insurgency. Chalabi is quoted as reporting, "The grand ayatollahs said it is dangerous for the criminals to return to leading posts in the state." Chalabi has often proved himself willing to lie, as when he hoodwinked the US into invading Iraq on false pretences, and was indicted in Jordan and Switzerland for embezzling $300 million from his Petra bank. Nevertheless, this particular statement is likely true, since one of Sistani's clerical aides underlined the position in his Friday prayers sermon a few days ago (I blogged it Saturday). The majority Shiites in parliament, and their Kurdish allies, would already be reluctant to pass the provision, since they have a grudge against the Baath Party, which persecuted them and killed their relatives. Sistani's opposition may well doom the measure, which the Bush administration had set as one of four benchmarks it wanted the al-Maliki government to achieve by June.

And maybe an up-armored bus?
It turns out that John McCain was right: There really are "neighborhoods in Baghdad . . . you and I could walk through" today -- so long as one of us brings the body armor, five military helicopters and about 100 U.S. troops.

Is McCain a little embarrassed about the way his pre-trip proclamations of progress in Iraq mesh with the security precautions that were needed when he actually arrived in Baghdad over the weekend? Apparently not. McCain told reporters after his armed-escort tour: "Things are getting better in Iraq, and I am pleased with the progress that has been made."

-- Tim Grieve

Bypassing the Electoral College
by E.J. Dionne
The American way of electing presidents is antiquated, impractical and dangerous.

Giuliani Meltdown?

Truthdigger of the Week: The Late César E. Chávez

Truthdig tips its hat this week to César E. Chávez, the Mexican-American labor organizer and activist who fought for the rights of farm workers, Latinos and other disenfranchised groups from the early 1950s until his death in 1993. He was instrumental in the formation of several farm workers unions, including the National Farm Workers Association and the United Farm Workers, and his method of nonviolent organizing, boycotting and striking led to major changes in workers’ conditions and inspired many other groups to adopt a similar approach.

Chávez’s influence continues to grow, as evidenced by the streets, parks and schools around the country that have been named or renamed after him. However, his significance extends far beyond the level of architectural commemoration. The César E. Chávez Foundation, for example, is partly an educational resource about his life and work, but it also focuses on outreach programs to help people improve their communities using his methods and values.

While Chávez’s birthday is recognized as a holiday in several states for state workers, many Latinos are protesting to make César Chávez Day a day off for schoolchildren and county workers, according to the Los Angeles Times. On Friday, hundreds of students from middle school through college either walked out of class or didn’t show up in order to join a march to City Hall to honor Chávez and to raise awareness about workers’ rights and migration issues—a testimony to his living legacy.

More links:
The César E. Chávez Foundation home
The National Chávez Center
Events calendar at the foundation
United Farm Workers home page
L.A. Times on Friday’s student walkouts (Registration wall)

Your modern-day Republican Party

Leading GOP presidential candidates believe in the power of imprisoning American citizens with no charges or review.

By Glenn Greenwald

Earth on 'highway to extinction'?

Horror Story

Lydia Cacho's Exposé of Pedophilia Has Her Critics Up in Arms

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 1, 2007; D01

CANCUN, Mexico -- The bodyguards linger in the steakhouse foyer, conspicuous with their handguns in lumpy fanny packs. The bulletproof SUV sits in quick-getaway position outside.

And now Lydia Cacho Ribeiro's cellphone rings.

"Yes, I got in okay," Cacho says from an out-of-the-way table. "I'm fine."

Cacho sets the phone down, a weary smile forming beneath high cheekbones and dark, deep-set eyes.

"He was worried," she says of her longtime partner, the prominent Mexican editor and columnist Jorge Zepeda Patterson. "This is my life."

A crusade against pedophiles has made Cacho, who will be in Washington tomorrow and Tuesday to be honored by Amnesty International, one of Mexico's most celebrated and imperiled journalists. She is a target in a country where at least 17 journalists have been killed in the past five years and that trailed only Iraq in media deaths during 2006. Do-gooders and victims want to meet her, want to share their stories. Bad guys -- well, they want her in a coffin.

In the spring of 2005, Cacho published a searing exposé of the child abuse and pornography rings flourishing amid the $500-a-night resorts and sugar-white beaches of Cancun. Her book "The Demons of Eden: The Power That Protects Child Pornography" chronicles in cringe-inducing detail the alleged habits of wealthy men whose sexual tastes run to 4-year-old girls.

But her book was just a middling seller, and her fight against child abusers was getting little attention until one afternoon in mid-December 2005 -- the afternoon the cops showed up.

On that day, seven months after her book was published, Cacho says, police officers from the far-off state of Puebla shoved her into a van outside the women's center she runs on a crumbling side street well removed from Cancun's gaudy hotel strip. They drove her 950 miles across Mexico, she says, jamming gun barrels into her face and taunting her for 20 hours with threats that she would be drowned, raped or murdered. The police have disputed her version of events, saying she was treated well.

Cacho found herself in police custody because Mexico's "Denim King," the textile magnate Kamel Nacif, had accused her of defamation, which at the time was a criminal offense under Mexican law. (Inspired by Cacho's case, the Mexican Congress recently passed a law decriminalizing defamation.) Cacho had written that Nacif used his influence to protect a suspected child molester, Cancun hotel owner Jean Succar Kuri, and that one of Succar's alleged victims was certain Nacif also abused underage girls.

Cacho's arrest set off a furious chain reaction. She had triggered her car alarm as she was being taken into custody, a predetermined signal to alert her staff to trouble. Friends suspected that the men in uniform were only posing as police. E-mails and phone calls zinged from Cancun to Mexico City, and from there to international human rights groups. While Cacho, who was recovering from pneumonia, tried unsuccessfully to persuade her captors to stop for medicine, her friends were panicking and demanding answers.

"There was so much fear," recalled Lucero Saldaña, then a Mexican senator. "We were thinking there might have been an attempt on her life, that she might have been kidnapped."

Saldaña, taking no chances, was waiting when Cacho arrived at the jail in Puebla, a picturesque city east of Mexico City famed for its rich, chili-infused molé. Shescrambled to arrange bail. But even the presence of a fired-up Mexican senator could not save Cacho from a humiliating strip search while a clutch of male officers loitered on the other side of a thin plastic curtain.

After nearly half a day in jail, Cacho was free on bond, though rattled. She was soon to find out how highly placed her enemies were.
Anonymous Voices

Two months later, tapes started airing on Mexican radio stations, crude male voices spewing obscenities out of car speakers in Mexico City's perpetual traffic jam and everywhere else in the country. It was clear the men were talking about Lydia Cacho. The tapes had been delivered anonymously to Mexico City newspaper and broadcast reporters, but no one knows who made the recordings .

In one conversation, presumably recorded the day of Cacho's arrest, an unidentified voice tells Nacif to pay "a woman in the jail to rape her."

"No, no, no," Nacif responds, "I've already given the order. . . . She's with the crazies and the lesbians."

But the real blockbuster was on another tape.

"My precious governor," Nacif can be heard saying.

"My hero," another voice says.

That second voice was unmistakable. It was Puebla Gov. Mario Marín, a stalwart of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which dominated Mexico in authoritarian style for seven decades before losing its grip on the presidency in 2000.

"Well, yesterday, I gave a [expletive] whack on the head to that old bitch," Marín tells Nacif.

Nacif thanks his "precious governor" for ordering Cacho's arrest and says he will send Marín "a beautiful bottle of cognac."

Marín acknowledged to the press that the voice was his, but he said the recordings were taken out of context. His rebuttal had almost no impact. In the court of public opinion, the verdict was clear: Cacho was the victim of influence peddling and a political vendetta.

Cacho has since persuaded Mexico's Supreme Court to hear a human rights complaint -- the first such case involving a journalist for a court that previously had only looked into human rights cases from the distant past. But in Mexico, where corruption and violence against women are rampant, there have been no repercussions for the central players.

Still, with each new tape, commentators went wild, many calling for Marín's resignation. Satirists went even wilder. Almost overnight, performance artists were taking to stages to mock the governor, songs were being composed and satiric cognac ads were being posted on the Internet.

"For that very special occasion, to celebrate among friends, arrives the commemorative cognac 'My Precious Governor,' begins one spoof advertisement set to the new-agey strains of Enya's "Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)." "My Precious Governor. So that you can become a good pedophile."

Suddenly, Cacho was everywhere: the evening news, talk shows, newspaper front pages. Nacif and Marín, unwittingly, had made her a star.
Feminist From the Start

Lydia Cacho is 42 years old, but she looks younger. She keeps fit with a yoga regimen and favors tight jeans, spike-heel boots and plunging necklines. She's a head-turner and she knows it.

She also knows she doesn't fit the mold of a feminist expected by the old-style, "machismo"-dominated political system that she says infuriates her for neglecting women.

"They think we're all ugly, fat, mustachioed feminists," Cacho, who studied humanities at the Sorbonne and speaks four languages, said one recent afternoon over hibiscus flower tea at a Cancun cafe. "I don't have to dress like a man to demonstrate that I am intelligent. I am a woman. I dress like I want. If they have a problem with my attractiveness, with my sexuality, that's their problem."

Cacho's feminism sprouted in the "lost cities" outside Mexico City, the impoverished squatters' hells that developed in the 1960s and 1970s with almost no government regulation. She didn't much like playing with dolls, she says, so she spent weekends as a child in the lost cities working on homespun social aid programs with her mother, Paulette Ribeiro Monteiro, an early Mexican feminist who died four years ago.

"Her passion comes from her mother," said Lucía Lagunes, director of a Mexico City news agency that focuses on women's issues. "Her mother taught her to have ideals and to fight for them."

In more than two decades straddling activism and journalism, those ideals have been tested. Cacho has run from angry drug dealers waving AK-47s because she sheltered their battered wives. She has been threatened too many times to count.

She's gotten used to death and says she doesn't fear her own. Her grandfather, she says, died in her arms when she was 17. He was the first of 20 people who she says have breathed their last while she held them, most clients of an AIDS shelter she founded.

In 1999, she says, she was raped by a man in a bus station bathroom.

"He left me for dead and I walked out of the public bathroom at the bus station with fractured bones, but the adrenaline of fear," Cacho wrote in an e-mail. "As a journalist before, I kept writing about the importance of filing reports with the police, and after the rape I learned that the main thing is to recover and to be protected and to be more sensitive to victims of violent crimes."

A friend in the prosecutor's office told her she was probably attacked as revenge for her social work and her newspaper columns. But she decided not to pursue the case.

"I did not want to be news (ha ha)," she wrote. "I just wanted to keep going."
Digging Deep

In 2004, a journalist friend asked Cacho to co-write a book about a burgeoning child abuse scandal in Cancun. A young woman had approached the authorities and said Succar, the multimillionaire Cancun hotel owner, had begun abusing her when she was 13. Others, including her sister and girls as young as 8, also had been molested, the young woman said.

Cacho had hosted her own local radio and television shows, as well as written newspaper columns for years, but this was to be her first attempt at a nonfiction book. Still, she spun an outline in a matter of days for a book that would not only allege Succar had abused more than 100 girls, but also accuse him of laundering money for organized crime and of being protected by powerful politicians.

"Are you crazy?" she recalls her friend telling her.

The friend, whose name she keeps secret for fear of repercussions, quickly dropped out. Cacho started writing.

"Demons of Eden" opens with a 13-year-old girl, whom Cacho calls "Cintia," clutching a stuffed animal as she tells a psychologist how Succar -- the man she called "Uncle Johnny" -- molested her at the age of 8. Afterward, Cintia says, he brandished a knife and threatened to cut her "into pieces." Cacho quotes the girl saying, "He is the devil."

In muscular, stinging prose, Cacho writes that Succar's victims suffer as much after they approach authorities as before. A local prosecutor calls a news conference and distributes photographs of the girls, their addresses, their parents' names and even their cellphone numbers. A school "morals teacher" reveals that she knew about Succar's abuse for years but did nothing about it.

The reporters following the case are depicted as vile as well. Cacho writes of overhearing a group of male journalists speculating in a smoke-filled room about whether a 12-year-old could enjoy sex and commenting that "old Succar likes young meat."

A key moment comes when Succar's first accuser, whom Cacho calls "Emma" in her book, lures Succar to a Cancun restaurant equipped with a hidden camera set in place by law enforcement officials. In the video, Succar describes sex with 4-year-old girls as "my vice" and says he knows he is committing a crime.

Armed with such damning evidence, Cacho says, the authorities do nothing, except tip off Succar about the allegations. The heads-up gives him ample time in late 2003, she writes, to buy a first-class ticket to the United States, where he owns a Los Angeles mansion.

Succar was arrested in Arizona in February 2004 and was extradited last July to Mexico, where he is being held in a maximum-security prison while his case is argued. José Wenceslao Cisneros, Succar's attorney, said in an interview that six of seven accusers have submitted signed affidavits recanting their testimony. He also says Emma was not a minor when she had what he calls a consensual relationship with Succar.

"Succar Kuri never abused a minor," Wenceslao says. The tapes, he says, were doctored by law enforcement officials, whom he accuses of trying to extort $1 million from his client. As for Cacho, he calls her "a little crazy one."

Cacho says Succar bribed and pressured his accusers to sign papers recanting their allegations, adding that Emma, in particular, suffers from Stockholm syndrome.

Emma didn't want to sign, Cacho says, but her abuser still can dominate her.
'Closed Off'

It's night in Mexico City and Cacho has slipped away from her bodyguards, a risky move, but one she undertakes for a brief and increasingly rare taste of freedom. A waiter spreads shot glasses around the table at La Covadunga, the crowded and smoky hangout of Mexico City intellectuals where the clientele shouts to be heard over the slap of dominoes on tabletops.

"When you toast with tequila, you have to look a person in the eye," Cacho says as the glasses are raised. "If not, you have seven years of bad sex, which is worse than no sex."

Cacho calls over the shoeshine man and lifts her boot dramatically to be polished. Everyone is watching. A man at a neighboring table timidly asks her to autograph his copy of her book, then races off, only to return moments later to show off a sheaf of pictures of Cacho.

The conversation soon turns back to sex. Cacho likes the subject. She once wrote a novel about a couple struggling to repair their relationship after the husband contracts HIV from a prostitute.

"I love sex, don't you?" she asks, laughing and tossing back her long mane of thick, black hair.

Some of Cacho's rage at the pedophiles she has tracked so obsessively comes from her certainty that they rob victims of normal sex lives as adults. She writes of Emma struggling with sobbing fits when she tries to be intimate. Cintia, Cacho writes, wears four pairs of underwear since being molested by Succar.

"Moved by fear," Cacho writes, "her sexuality had been closed off, her right to pleasure."

Despite Cacho's notoriety, Lagunes, the news agency director, laments that child abuse still gets little attention in Mexico. The media here focus on the political scandal spawned by her case rather than the abuse itself in a country where an estimated 20,000 children are abused each year.

"It's disgraceful," Lagunes says.

Cacho writes in her epilogue that "hundreds of Mexican girls are and continue to be tortured, violated and trained by powerful men to be sold and photographed."

But she has still more to say.

Cacho is already at work on a new book, this one focused on the trafficking of women and girls. At La Covadunga, she whispers that tomorrow she has a meeting with "a really good source." She raises her eyebrows in anticipation and rubs her hands together.

Run Rudy Run

Bomb’s toll deadliest in Iraq war

Exporting Gag Orders from Gitmo
by Devilstower

After five years of holding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without charges or trial, Australian David Hicks was sentenced after confessing to multiple changes related to terrorism. That the Bush administration treats this moment of justice hugely delayed and distorted as a source of pride, tells you all you need know about the administration.

However, there's more here than just the first prisoner rolling down the conveyor belt our new, oversight-free, justice system. Rather than showing that loyal Bushies are starting to swirl a dash of integrity into their daily bowl of oppression and obsessive secrecy, the Hicks case is a reason to be worried that all our worst fears about Guantanamo may well be true. The panel that tried Hicks was convinced that he had dealings with four separate terrorist organizations, and as a result sentenced him to seven years of further confinement. However, unknown even to the trial officials, a secret deal had been worked out.

Hicks was today sentenced to seven years jail, but will serve only nine months after the rest of the sentence was suspended.

What kind of deal had Hicks made? Did he offer to provide the names of hidden terrorists in the United States? Did he reveal Osama's secret hiding place? Did he help foil one of those vaguely-defined plots Bush is always alluding to?

Just what could a man who supposedly was involved in plotting attacks against the west both with the Taliban and al Qaeda have to offer? His silence.

Mr Downer rejected suggestions the sentence, which includes a 12-month gag order, was made for the convenience of the government in an election year.

Hicks has to keep his mouth shut about the tribunal. About how he came to confess. And especially about his treatment at Guantanamo. There's an election coming up in Australia, and many people Down Under have suggested that Hicks has been ordered to keep a sock in it so as not to harm the chances of the Bush-worshipping Howard government.

Greens leader Bob Brown claimed the nine months sentence was a political farce. "This is more about saving Mr Howard's political hide than about justice for Hicks," he said in a statement.

However, convenient as Hicks' silence may be for Howard, there's a better chance the soon to be former detainee is being kept quiet not because of any events in Australia, but because of what others are saying about Guantanamo.

A prisoner held by the American military at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said he had confessed to several terrorist attacks and plots only because he had been tortured, according to a transcript of a hearing held on March 14 and released yesterday by the Pentagon.

Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri has been tagged as the mastermind behind the bombing of the USS Cole, and he's often been used by the Bush administration as an example of the "worst of the worst" held at Guantanamo. However, al-Rahim claims that... actually, we don't know what he claimed. When asked to describe what had happened to him before a review panel, al-Rahim spoke at length on the different techniques that had been used to extract his multiple confessions.

The four-paragraph passage that followed in the transcript was redacted in six places, and the 36-page transcript, of a two-hour hearing, was redacted in many other places.

David Hicks may well be guilty of everything to which he confessed. Al-Rahid may be responsible for everything the Bush administration says and then some. But how can we ever know?

The corrosive effects of what's going on at Guantanamo Bay extend around the world. It's impossible that Americans should ever come to trust the results produced by the "heavily redacted" methods used there, or accepting of the rulings produced by the tribunals. For the rest of the world, Guantanamo is worse than a laughing stock -- it's a touchstone for America's disdain for any sense of common decency.

David Hicks may by an Australian, but what he found on the far side of the world was a kangaroo court. What possible reason could there be for sentencing him to silence if there is nothing to hide?

Emails the White House Didn’t Want You to See
The U.S Attorney firings provide more evidence of the Bush administration avoiding its own email system (and accountability, posterity, prosecution). Dan Schulman

Elizabeth Holtzman/Cynthia Cooper:Questions For Karl Rove - and President Bush

General Warned Bush Not To Publicize Tillman Death

Risks Might Pay Off in ’08 Race
by E.J. Dionne —
Candidates on both sides are playing it safe, but the signs are that voters will reward strong ideas and bold positions.

Ignore the Pundits and Bark Louder
by Joe Conason —
The Washington press elite has warned the Democrats not to pursue the U.S. attorney scandal, but lawmakers should listen to the polls, not the “cable sages” who have so frequently been wrong.

WP: Kerik may face felony charges

E-mails could be this year's secret White House tapes
By Sidney Blumenthal

JibJab: What We Call The News

Message to the Man in the Bunker

Take a deep breath, William Greider writes of Congress's historic votes to set a deadline for Iraq withdrawal: The people's call to end the war has been heard. But will the man in the White House bunker get the message?