Republican dirty tricks

Nothing new from the protectors of Family and American values

Convicted, he won't go away.

Why should he, when his pals are still eating at the trough?

We Answer to the Name of Liberals
by Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin

From the November print issue: A response to Tony Judt, and a manifesto for liberals in the waning Bush era.

The President Gets His Wish: He's The Dictator
by Bob Cesca

Your granny -- blue hair and Life Alert Button flapping in the breeze -- could be arrested and whisked off to Guantanamo or any number of secret CIA prisons abroad.

Sami's Shame, and Ours - New York Times
The New York Times

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 17, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Sami's Shame, and Ours
By
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

There is no public evidence that Sami al-Hajj committed any crime other than
journalism for a television network the Bush administration doesn't like.

But the U.S. has been holding Mr. Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera, for
nearly five years without trial, mostly at Guantánamo Bay. With the jailing
of Mr.
Hajj and of four journalists in Iraq, the U.S. ranked No. 6 in the world in
the number of journalists it imprisoned last year, just behind Uzbekistan
and
tied with Burma, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

This week, President Bush is expected to sign the Military Commissions Act
concerning prisoners at Guantánamo, and he has hailed the law as "a strong
signal
to the terrorists." But the closer you look at Guantánamo the more you feel
that it will be remembered mostly as a national disgrace.

Mr. Hajj is the only journalist known to be there, and, of course, it's
possible that he is guilty of terrorist-related crimes. If so, he should be
tried,
convicted and sentenced.

But so far, the evidence turned up by his lawyers and by the Committee to
Protect Journalists - which published an excellent report on Mr. Hajj's case
this
month - suggests that the U.S. military may be keeping him in hopes of
forcing him to become a spy.

Mr. Hajj, 37, who attended university and speaks English, joined Al Jazeera
as a cameraman in April 2000 and covered the war in Afghanistan. He was
detained
on Dec. 15, 2001, and taken to the American military prison in Bagram,
Afghanistan.

"They were the longest days of my life," Mr. Hajj's lawyers quoted him as
saying. He told them he was repeatedly beaten, kicked, starved, left out in
the
freezing cold and subjected to anal cavity searches in public "just to
humiliate me."

In June 2002, Mr. Hajj was flown to Guantánamo, where he says the beatings
initially were brutal but have since subsided somewhat.

At first, interrogators said Mr. Hajj had shot video of Osama bin Laden
during an Al Jazeera interview, but it turned out that they may have mixed
him up
with another cameraman of a similar name. When that assertion fell apart,
the authorities offered accusations that he had ferried a large sum of money
to a suspicious Islamic charity, that he had supported Chechen rebels, and
that he had once given a car ride and other assistance to an official of Al
Qaeda.

One indication that even our government may not take those accusations so
seriously is that the interrogations barely touched on them, Mr. Hajj's
lawyers
say.

"About 95 percent of the interrogations he went through were about Al
Jazeera," said one of the lawyers, Zachary Katznelson of London. "Sami would
say,
'What about me? Will you ask about me?' "

He added, "It really does seem that the focus of the inquiry is about his
employer, Al Jazeera, and not about him or any actions he may have taken."

Mr. Katznelson also says that interrogators told Mr. Hajj they would free
him immediately if he would agree to go back to Al Jazeera and spy on it. He
once
asked what would happen if he backed out of the deal after he was free.

"You would not do that," Mr. Hajj quoted his interrogator as saying,
"because it would endanger your child."

The Defense Department declined to comment on Mr. Hajj's case, saying that
in general, it does not comment on specific detainees at Guantánamo.

While Mr. Hajj is unknown in the U.S., his case has received wide attention
in the Arab world. The Bush administration is thus doing long-term damage to
American interests.

Mr. Hajj's lawyers say he has two torn ligaments in his knee from abuse in
his first weeks in custody, making it exceptionally painful for him to use
the
squat toilet in his cell. The lawyers say he has been offered treatment for
his knee and a sitting toilet that would be less painful to use - but only
if he spills dirt on Al Jazeera. And he says he has none to spill.

And while Defense Department documents indicate that he has been a model
inmate at Guantánamo, he protests that he has been called racial epithets
(he is
black) and that he has seen guards desecrate the Koran.

When Sudan detained an American journalist, Paul Salopek, in August in
Darfur, journalists and human rights groups reacted with outrage until he
was freed
a month later. We should be just as offended when it is our own government
that is sinking to Sudanese standards of justice.

This doesn't look like a war on terrorism, but a war on our own values.

Copyright 2006
The New York Times Company

Posted by Miriam V.

The Killing Fields of Iraq

by Robert Scheer

Martin Luther King Jr., shortly before his assassination, grieved that his own nation was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He was referring to the U.S. quagmire in Vietnam, but were he alive today, his prophetic voice would no doubt similarly question the bloodbath in Iraq. In response to the 9/11 killing of 3,000 Americans by a gang of mostly Saudi Arabian terrorists with no links to Iraq, the president has rendered that country a veritable killing field. An occupation initially advertised as a “cakewalk” war to disarm a tyrant is now, according to our politically desperate president, a fight for the soul of the world—good versus evil, democracy versus tyranny.

But the carnage we have visited upon Iraq represents nothing of the sort. We are not building democracy, we are creating mayhem.

The evidence arrives daily in the form of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of mutilated bodies. But even the few ghastly images that actually make it onto the television actually underestimate the horror. And it is getting worse, not better: The killing of innocents is now 10 times higher than a year ago.

The most thorough appraisal of Iraqi deaths, done by British and American epidemiologists using accepted norms for public health research and published in the respected medical journal The Lancet, puts the number of war- and occupation-related dead at an appalling 650,000.

The authors, being serious scientists, concede that counting the dead in a country turned into a war zone is a difficult enterprise, but even the lowest figure in their estimate, more than 300,000 dead, is shocking enough.

Perhaps most important, it is not only the derided “cut and run” domestic critics of the president’s policy who recognize that our continued presence is part of the problem rather than of the solution, but 90 percent of the Iraqi people we are supposedly trying to help, according to recent U.S. government and scholarly public-opinion surveys.

Even more shocking: Six in 10 believe it actually is acceptable to target U.S. troops for assassination. And while President Bush on Monday once again reassured the impotent puppet government in Baghdad that the United States is prepared to “stay the course,” the vast majority of both Shiite and Sunnis want us to leave within the next year.

That is not because, as the president insists, they want the outcome of an Al Qaeda-dominated Iraq; on the contrary, all of the polling data shows that Osama bin Laden remains enormously unpopular in Iraq. It is rather that they feel strongly that they could do a better job of providing security on their own, and they are afraid that the destabilizing U.S. presence, the main recruiting poster for terrorists, threatens to be permanent.

This makes the relevance of King’s earlier condemnation of a pigheaded stay-the-course policy in Vietnam all the more relevant. The point is that it is time for the Iraqis, like the Vietnamese, to make their own history. They can hardly make a worse mess of it.

One cannot predict with any certainty the future of Iraq, or the region, in the face of a U.S. military withdrawal, but clearly Bush is wrong in insisting that our continued occupation of Iraq lessens rather than increases the likelihood of future terrorist attacks on the United States. Iraqis, like the Vietnamese, are most of all nationalists, preoccupied with the future of their own country rather than, as the president insists, challenging America’s way of life. We still have not a single example of a disgruntled Iraqi carrying the battle to U.S. soil, but the longer we stay, the greater the likelihood of just such blowback.

Staying the course is a prescription for disaster. That is why a commission backed by Bush and led by the former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican and a longtime aide to the Bush family, intends to propose—against the repeatedly stated wishes of the president—significant changes in the administration’s strategy by early next year, according to the Los Angeles Times and other papers. “Two options under consideration would represent reversals of U.S. policy: withdrawing American troops in phases, and bringing neighboring Iran and Syria into a joint effort to stop the fighting,” reported the paper. At least one commission participant says they have already decided Bush is dead wrong: “It’s not going to be ‘stay the course,’ ” the participant told the Times. “The bottom line is, [U.S. policy] isn’t working.... There’s got to be another way.”

In other words, Bush’s critics were right all along.

Iraq for Sale Update: DVD Becoming a Weapon in 06 Election
by Arianna Huffington

A growing number of Democratic leaders are using Iraq for Sale to call attention to the GOP's failure to reign in the contractor abuse and fraud that have been the hallmark of the Iraq war privatization fiasco. It's also allowed them to go on the offensive and reframe the national security debate -- showing how the Republicans sacrificed the well-being of our troops and the Iraqi people on the altar of rewarding their corporate backers. I can't help but picture these newly emboldened Dems as campaign ninjas, but instead of throwing deadly pointed stars, they are flinging Iraq for Sale DVDs -- carving up the idea that the GOP is more patriotic, more concerned about America's soldiers, and more able to keep us safe.

Fw: Hillary-Condoleesa Ho-Down

From Miriam
----- Original Message -----
From: <ATROYNY@aol.com>
To: <jahola55@yahoo.com>; <Arleene2@Verizon.net>; <sbelgard@comcast.net>;
<MBochner@aol.com>; <Shebock@aol.com>; <LamarRN1@aol.com>;
<MBurns@nyc.rr.com>; <Eisphil@aol.com>; <Bethellor57@aol.com>;
<elsie25@gmail.com>; <andrea.fallick@sascorp.org>; <sams144@gmail.com>;
<jeanworthnewyork@yahoo.com>; <jbkaplan@pclearn.com>; "Rita Kasky"
<development@gouldfarm.org>; <LAKizner@yahoo.com>; <Biknyc@aol.com>;
<kklein7@nyc.rr.com>; <Ctll266@aol.com>; <MELipinski@aol.com>;
<Phyllow@aol.com>; <Kslupi@aol.com>; <mar.sil@verizon.net>;
<diane.rode@msnyuhealth.org>; <KLSands106@aol.com>; <SharonMag@aol.com>;
<glenda3042@yahoo.com>; <miriamvieni@optonline.net>; <Barb@hrconnected.org>;
<marydiperna@mdpsystemsinc.com>; <hermail@newhavenrtc.com>;
<law.62@osu.edu>; <graceklein@optonline.net>;
<FFASMARIS@Family.optonline.net>; <frydough@yahoo.com>; <ATROYNY@aol.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 9:52 AM
Subject: FWD: Hillary-Condoleesa Ho-Down

> This is to die (laughing) for.
> http://i.euniverse.com/funpages/cms_content/13180/HillaryCondi_HoDown.swf
>

BUSH AND BLAIR ISOLATED AS CRITICISM OF WAR GROWS

The End of American Democracy.

Countdown's Keith Olberman explains:

Are YOU the Enemy?

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is an eradication of the most basic protections of liberty enshrined for over 200 years in our sacred Constitution. The all-encompassing powers granted to the president by this law potentially forbid any man, woman, or child deemed an enemy of the administration or its policies from seeking judicial relief from unlawful imprisonment. Most terrifying of all, this law enthrones President Bush — and his successors, whether Democrat or Republican — as the ultimate arbiters of justice to those suspected of being America's enemies. You can only hope that that person is not you.

Those who fail to see the dire gravity of this legislation and who prefer to take refuge in the naive partisan belief that President Bush and the Republican Congress would never abuse this tremendous power, should contemplate well the fact that both the White House and Congress may very possibly change to Democrat control in the near future. Then will the supporters of the Bush administration's grasp for power have a leg to stand on to even protest, let alone stop, dictatorial exercise of the same power under a Democrat regime run by Clinton, Feinstein, Boxer, Pelosi, Schumer, and the like?

This law, as well as other recently chronicled usurpations, sacrifices the due process of law on the altar of absolutism. There can be but one final obstacle to complete executive power — the people of the United States of America. We must hold every member of Congress accountable who voted for this unprecedented and unconscionable breach of our constitutional rule of law, and we must seek out and support men and women determined to uphold the federal oath of office and courageously defend the Constitution against all enemies — foreign or domestic. If we do not do this, are we really better than the terrorists?

A Stain on Our Democracy

Today, America's own Fearless Leader signed into the law Presidential powers unlike any ever enacted in our history. With the compliance of a paid-for Congress and an opposition party afraid to make waves, George W. Bush became King.

From today on, any President can arbitrarily deem anyone, even full fledged citizens, "unlawful enemy combatants". This means you can be held indefinitely in secret prisons, tortured and disappeared, without any recourse to law.

Never before has the Constitution being discarded in such a disgraceful manner, all in the name of "protecting our freedoms."

WaPo: Bush In A Snit...
by David Froomkin

More Grist For the Mill aka Bush/Cheney Gang Arrests

Seems the ALL have their hands dirty

Fun, fun, fun till Daddy took the Iraq war away

Bush's Iraq disaster is taking the GOP down, and his father's old pal James Baker is about to tell him what to do. By Gary Kamiya

From the same crooks who stole Ohio for Bush in 2004

The New York Times

October 17, 2006
Editorial
And the Winner Is ... Me

Voters in Ohio can be forgiven if they feel they have been beamed out of the Midwest and dropped into a third-world autocracy. The latest news from the state’s governor’s race is that the Republican nominee, Kenneth Blackwell, who is also the Ohio secretary of state, could rule that his opponent is ineligible to run because of a technicality. We’d like to think that his office would not ultimately do that, or that if it did, such a ruling would not be allowed to stand. But the mere fact that an elected official and political candidate has the authority to toss his opponent out of a race is further evidence of a serious flaw in our democracy.

Ted Strickland, the Democratic nominee, is leading Mr. Blackwell by as much as 28 points, according to one recent poll. In their panic, some Blackwell supporters have hit on the idea of trying to prevent the election from occurring. One of them filed a complaint alleging that Mr. Strickland, who is a member of Congress, does not live in the apartment where he is registered to vote. Mr. Strickland owns a condominium in another part of Ohio, and the complaint alleges that he actually lives there. If Mr. Strickland was not a qualified voter, he would be prohibited from running for governor.

The complaint itself is without merit. No one disputes that Mr. Strickland lives in Ohio, or that he is registered. The only issue is which of his two homes he chose to register from, and the law gives voters with multiple homes broad discretion in choosing among them.

What is more interesting, and troubling, is the way the complaint is proceeding. The county board that heard it broke down 2 to 2, on party lines, about whether to hold a hearing. In the case of a tie vote at the county level, complaints like these get forwarded to the secretary of state’s office to be resolved. Mr. Blackwell says he has designated his assistant secretary to handle duties that could conflict with his candidacy. But passing these matters on to a subordinate who is a political ally and owes his job to the candidate hardly removes the conflict.

Election administration should be removed from partisan politics, in Ohio and everywhere else. Decisions like these should be made by nonpartisan bodies or, failing that, by people who do their utmost to insulate themselves from partisan politics. In 2004, Mr. Blackwell chose to become co-chairman of President Bush’s Ohio campaign, and then issued rulings that helped the campaign. Now we have the even more bizarre prospect of Mr. Blackwell, or his deputy, potentially participating in the baseless disqualification of his opponent.

We are confident it will not come to that. But however this particular case is resolved, it underscores the need for Ohio, and other states, to find a way to administer elections that is insulated from partisan politics.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Why Aren't We Shocked? - New York Times
The New York Times

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 16, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Why Aren't We Shocked?
By
BOB HERBERT

"Who needs a brain when you have these?"

- message on an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt for young women

In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and a
large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their way to
separate
the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the girls.

Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was killed
and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack.

In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made
of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into
a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then
shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.

There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first
recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind
of murderous
bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the
attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.

None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so
accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence
against
females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and
mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as
weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that
this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it
happened
to girls.

The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so
pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to
shock. Guys at
sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising
an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major
long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a
billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, "When was the last time
you got screwed?"

An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman's face with the lotion
spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn video.

We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women
every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational
stories,
large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We've been
watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for
10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we're still watching the
video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.

What have we learned since then? That there's big money to be made from
thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic
culture,
it's never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really
matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.

A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the
U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond
the
ability of any agency to count. We're all implicated in this carnage because
the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the
wider society's casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see
them first and foremost as sexual vessels - objects - and never, ever as the
equals
of men.

"Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible," said Taina
Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women's advocacy group Equality Now.

That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of pornography that
have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream America. Forget the
embarrassed,
inhibited raincoat crowd of the old days. Now Mr. Solid Citizen can come
home, log on to this $7 billion mega-industry and get his kicks watching
real
women being beaten and sexually assaulted on Web sites with names like
"Ravished Bride" and "Rough Sex - Where Whores Get Owned."

Then, of course, there's gangsta rap, and the video games where the players
themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of pimp culture (the
Academy
Award-winning song this year was "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp"), and on
and on.

You're deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It's all part
of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches
down
in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel
Mines, Pa.

Copyright 2006
The New York Times Company

Posted by Miriam V.

Osama's Perogative

Bin Laden 'fantasised over' Whitney Houston
RACHEL WILLIAMS IN NEW YORK

OSAMA bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, was obsessed with the singer Whitney Houston and wanted to marry her, a new book claims.

Kola Boof, a Sudanese poet and novelist, who says she was kept against her will as the terrorism mastermind's mistress in 1996, writes in her autobiography that he wanted to give the star a mansion and make her one of his wives.

"He told me that Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen," Boof claims in Diary of a Lost Girl, excerpts of which are published in Harper's magazine.

But bin Laden had less respect for Houston's husband Bobby Brown, apparently talking about the possibility of having him killed.

"He said that he had a paramount desire for Whitney Houston and although he claimed music was evil, he spoke of some day spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting with the superstar," Boof writes.

"He said he wanted to give Whitney Houston a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum.

"He explained to me that to possess Whitney, he would be willing to break his colour rule and make her one of his wives."

Bin Laden would speak constantly about "how beautiful she [Houston] is, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband - Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have women's husbands killed."

Boof, who also says the al- Qaeda leader would "ramble on" about his favourite TV shows, The Wonder Years, Miami Vice and MacGyver, adds: "In his briefcase, I would come across photographs of the star, as well as copies of Playboy ... It would soon come to the point where I was sick of hearing Whitney Houston's name."

Bin Laden was first married in 1974, at the age of 17, to Najwa Ghanem, his mother's niece.

Although bin Laden has reportedly married four other women, he divorced one, Umm Ali bin Laden, a university lecturer, who studied in Saudi Arabia, and spent holidays in Khartoum, Sudan, where Osama later settled during his exile in the years 1991 to 1996.

The three latter wives of bin Laden were all university lecturers.

The al-Qaeda leader has fathered at least 24 children. His wife Najwa reportedly has 11 children by him.

NAACP to monitor elections in 10 states
By ALEX DOMINGUEZ, Associated Press Writer

The NAACP said Monday that it will monitor voting in 10 states next month, sending observers to polling places, taking citizen complaints and notifying the Justice Department of any serious problems.

The states were chosen based on those with pivotal elections, states with concentrations of black voters, and those with a history of polling problems, according to the Baltimore-based civil rights organization.

President Bruce Gordon urged voters to persist in trying to cast ballots.

"While the NAACP will take steps to counter obstacles to voter participation, we are encouraging our communities to cast their votes, even if it requires extra effort," he said in a statement released before a news conference at the group's headquarters.

"Civil rights activists went to extraordinary lengths to earn the right for black Americans to vote. Some lost their lives. We owe it to them and ourselves to honor their sacrifice by voting, no matter what challenges we face."

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People plans to have hundreds of volunteers monitoring elections in Maryland, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Cleaning Up the Mess
by Robert Kuttner

On every issue you can name, victorious Democrats would face an enormous task just picking up the pieces from the wreckage that Bush has left.