Greetings, fellow Freedom Fighters™ and Defenders of Democracy™!

We have a jam-packed edition this week! Here are this week’s top stories:

-- From our “Too important to miss” department, the Chris Hedges interview with Amy Goodman regarding the rise of the Christian right and the war on America and our democracy

-- Another “Too important to miss” story: the WaPo expose on the abysmal conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center ... Bush and his adherents, of course, claim “they didn't know” and “it's not their fault.” Well, we of The Scallion beg to differ: OF COURSE BUSH KNEW, AND OF COURSE IT'S BUSH'S FAULT -- BUSH IS THE ONE WHO HAS BEEN CUTTING THE VA'S FUNDING EVER SINCE HE SENT THE FIRST ILL-FATED TROOPS INTO IRAQ!!!!!

-- Also from our “Too important to miss” department, the ugly life and nasty times of Donald Rumsfeld, who has singlehandedly taken large chunks out of our democracy through privatization of the military, an insidious practice which hides all the important doings under the table and which destroys any notion of accountability

-- Don't miss this interview with Noam Chomsky, who discusses WHY Bush will most likely attack Iran ... yes, it's about the oil, but it's not about U.S. access to oil ... it's about U.S. control of the oil so that we can play “keep away” from the rest of the world what doesn't kowtow to our whims and wishes (http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/48494/)

-- Don't miss the AlterNet link to a video featuring Sy Hersh as he describes how BUSH IS FUNNELING MONEY INTO AL-QAEDA-RELATED GROUPS!!! Yes, gentle Readers -- you read right. Bush is so dead set against the Shiites gaining an upper hand that he is funding Sunni groups, even those that are linked to al Qaeda. And you thought that Osama bin Laden was America's enemy ... well, with friends like George W. Bush, America doesn't NEED enemies!!! (http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/48501/)

-- Matt Taibbi, of RollingStone.com, remarks that maybe Americans deserve to be ripped of by the billionaires. While America obsessed about Brittany's shaved head, Bush offered a budget that offers $32.7 billion in tax cuts to the Wal-Mart family alone while cutting $28 billion from Medicaid.

-- George W. Bush claims of Osama bin Laden “I will screw him in the ass!” Well, we all knew that Bush and bin Laden were bestest buddies, but we of The Scallion didn't realize that they were THAT close!

-- ACTION: Tell Dems not to let themselves get screwed by Fox News

-- Thanks to U.S. immigration policy, children (including infants and toddlers) whose parents are in immigration courts are being locked up at detention centers.

-- Hillary Clinton, who refuses to admit her mistakes re Iraq and who is clearly determined to make the same mistakes re Iran, says “Bring it on,” inviting voters to turn elsewhere for an anti-war presidential candidate. We of The Scallion will gladly oblige.

-- From our “WTF?!??” department, Attorney General Gonzales deputizes Southern Baptists to enforce religious freedom laws!

-- It Can Happen Here! According to Joe Conason, in light of the series of laws passed in Congress and precedents set by the Bush administration, people have good reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in America.

-- In Iraq until 2012? 2017? Michael Hirsh thinks so.

-- Whatever you do, don't miss George Takei's hilarious video to former NBA player Tim Hardaway (it's at the very bottom of the post as a reward for reading to the bottom!)

-- Al Gore's global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, last night won two Academy Awards for Best Documentary and Best Original Song.

-- DN! posts this headline: “Ex-Congressional Aide says that Karl Rove Personally Received (And Ignored) Iranian Peace Offer in 2003”

If we do nothing else, we must all work together to mandate Congress to revoke any further funding for Bush’s wars and invasions of aggression and greed.

Keep the faith and keep fighting: together, we WILL win our nation back!

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Too important to miss

This week, we of The Scallion present a few items we mentioned last week. We reproduce them here in their entirety because, if you missed them last week, you won’t want to miss them this week. The implications of these articles are too important for the present and future of our beleaguered nation and its weak, suffering democracy.

The first piece is the DN! interview with Chris Hedges on the rise of American theocratic fascism. The second is the WaPo article about the neglect that our wounded soldiers are suffering as they come home from Iraq. The third item is the history of Donald Rumsfeld, who is responsible for the outsourcing of far too many of our military’s needs to the mercenary contractors.

Read ‘em and weep.

DN!: Chris Hedges on “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America”

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/19/1545218

Monday, February 19th, 2007

Chris Hedges's new book examines how Christian dominionists are seeking absolute power and a Christian state. According to Hedges, the movement bears a strong resemblance to the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s. Hedges is the former New York Times Middle East bureau chief and author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." [includes rush transcript] A new book by Chris Hedges called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America” investigates the highly organized and well-funded "dominionist movement." The book investigates their agenda, examines the movement's origins and motivations and uncovers its ideological underpinnings. “American Fascists” argues that dominionism seeks absolute power in a Christian state. According to Hedges, the movement bears a strong resemblance to the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s.

Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for many years where he won a Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" and "Losing Moses on the Freeway." Chris has a Master's degree in theology from Harvard University and is the son of a Presbyterian minister. He is currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute - and he is here with me now in the studio.

* Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times who has reported from more than 50 countries over the last 20 years. Chris is currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He is author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" and "Losing Moses on the Freeway." Chris has a master's degree in theology from Harvard University and is the son of a Presbyterian minister. His new book is "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America."

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the religious right and the rise of it in this country. A new book by Chris Hedges is called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. It investigates the highly organized and well-funded dominionist movement. The book looks at their agenda, examines the movement’s origins and motivations and uncovers its ideological underpinnings. American Fascists argues that dominionism seeks absolute power in a Christian state. According to Hedges, the movement bears a strong resemblance to the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s.

Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for many years, where he won a Pulitzer Prize. He’s also the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Losing Moses on the Freeway. Chris Hedges has a Master's degree in theology from Harvard University and is the son of a Presbyterian minister. He is currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and joins me in studio now. Welcome to Democracy Now!

CHRIS HEDGES: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Why did you write this book?

CHRIS HEDGES: Anger. I mean, I grew up in the Church and, of course, as you mentioned, graduated from seminary, and I think these people have completely perverted and distorted and manipulated the Christian message into something that is the very antithesis of certainly what Jesus preached in the Gospels.

AMY GOODMAN: Who are “these people”?

CHRIS HEDGES: These are -- you know, they’re not -- we use terms like “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” to describe them, and I think that those are incorrect terms. Traditional fundamentalists always called on believers to remove themselves from the contaminants of secular society, shun involvement in politics. Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham's always warned followers to keep their distance from political power. He, of course, was burned by Richard Nixon, came to Nixon’s defense and then when it publicly came out that Nixon lied, it taught a lesson to Graham.

This is a new movement, as embodied by people like James Dobson or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, who call for the creation of a Christian state, who talk about attaining secular power. And they are more properly called dominionists or Christian reconstructionists, although it’s not a widespread term, but they're certainly not traditional fundamentalists and not traditional evangelicals. They fused the language and iconography of the Christian religion with the worst forms of American nationalism and then created this sort of radical mutation, which has built alliances with powerful rightwing interests, including corporate interests, and made tremendous inroads over the last two decades into the corridors of power.

AMY GOODMAN: Why the term “dominionist”?

CHRIS HEDGES: It come out of Genesis, you know, where God gives humankind dominion over creation. It’s articulated by ideologues, such as Rousas Rushdoony, Francis Schaeffer and others, and essentially is a new concept within the radical Christian right, and it’s used sparingly. And some dominionists don’t like the term, but I think it denotes or is probably a better term for denoting those people who want to take political power.

AMY GOODMAN: On the back of your book, Chris, is a quote from your professor at Harvard, Dr. James Luther Adams, who said that in a few decades we would all be fighting “Christian fascists.” Who was he, and why did he think this?

CHRIS HEDGES: James Luther Adams was my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School. He had spent the years 1935 and 1936 in Germany working with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Confessing Church or anti-Nazi church and eventually was picked up by the Gestapo and told to leave the country. He came back -- and this was in the early 1980s, when I was in seminary -- and saw the articulation of this new political religion, this religion that talked about seizing control of mainstream denominations, as well as institutions, creating a parallel media empire through Christian radio and broadcasting, and ultimately taking control of the government itself.

And he understood, in a visceral way, how when countries fall into despair -- of course, this began -- it was the time that began the assault on the American working class, which has been accelerated and essentially left tens of millions of people within our own country dispossessed -- he understood how demagogues use that despair. And I think we can say there, in many ways, has been a kind of Weimarization of the American working class. And he saw what we were doing through globalization, what we were doing to our working class and our middle class, coupled with the rise of these so-called Christian demagogues, as a frightening and toxic combination, which, if left unchecked, would destroy our democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Why do you begin with Umberto Eco? And explain who he is.

CHRIS HEDGES: Umberto Eco is the great Italian writer -- I mean, he wrote that very popular book, The Name of the Rose, and he had a nice little book of essays called Five Moral Pieces, and in it he writes about the salient qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism,” or eternal fascism. And I wanted to list those -- I thought it was probably as good a list as I’d ever seen compiled on what the main tenets of fascism are -- to begin the book, because my argument is that this is not a religious movement. Although it certainly depends on the support of many earnest, well-meaning, decent people who are religious, I would argue that they are manipulated not only, of course, to be fleeced for their own money, but essentially to give up moral choice and surrender to the authoritarian demands of these leaders to march forward and essentially dismantle our democratic state. And I think that when we look closely at what it is that this Christian right movement espouses, it does bear many similarities to, you know, the main pillars of fascist movements: the cult of masculinity, the war against --

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “the cult of masculinity”?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, the fact that, you know, they elevate male figures within the megachurches, who cannot be questioned, who speak directly for God. Any kind of questioning or self-criticism becomes essentially battling the forces of Satan. That power structure is to be replicated in the family. Much of this movement is about the disempowerment of women. Children have to be obedient. And so, that power structure of the family with the dominant male and everyone else submissive is replicated in the megachurches, which oftentimes -- and I’ve been in many over the last two years -- revolve around cults of personality.

When we look at the sort of empires that people like Pat Robertson run, you know, this man is worth hundreds of millions, some people say up to $1 billion, surrounded by bodyguards, flying around on private jets, investing in blood diamonds in Sierra Leone. He has rock star status. I mean, if you’ve ever been to an event where he appears, people are weeping and want to be touched by him. There is no question. He essentially runs a despotic little fiefdom.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the blood diamonds part.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, he uses the money, which he takes from, really, people who live on the fringes of American society and should not be mailing him their checks, in all sorts of very dirty investments in Africa. And one of them was essentially getting involved in the trade of diamonds essentially for weapons that rend Sierra Leone.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Chris Hedges. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, went to seminary and has written a number of books. His latest is called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. We’ll be back with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Chris Hedges. His latest book called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. We were just talking about Pat Robertson. I wanted to go back to that famous quote of his. This had to do with foreign policy and the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

PAT ROBERTSON: You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don’t think any oil shipments will stop, but this man is a terrific danger. This is in our sphere of influence, so we can’t let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine. We have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

AMY GOODMAN: Pat Robertson. Your response, Chris Hedges?

CHRIS HEDGES: That’s a deeply Christian message, calling for assassination. You know, I covered the war in Central America, and Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell came down to support the murderous rampages of Rios Montt in Guatemala, the military dictatorship that were running death squads that were killing 800 to 1,000 people a month in El Salvador, and, of course, the Contras, whose main contribution in Nicaragua was walking into towns drunk out of their mind, raping the women and killing the men and burning the villages. And they describe these battles as essentially a war against Satan, against Satanic forces, godless communism that had to be defeated. There are no international boundaries in Satan’s kingdom, if you look at it from their ideology. I think that the kinds of the wholehearted support for genocidal killers in Central America, which Pat Robertson was one of the stalwarts, is a tip-off as to, you know, without legal restraints, what they would like to do within our own borders.

And I think that the quote or the clip that you just played is a perfect illustration of how dark the intentions of this movement is and how, if we don’t begin to stand up and fight back, if we believe that these people can be domesticated and brought into the political arena where they will act responsibly, we’re very, very naive. And we should all sit down, and as unpalatable as it is, and listen to Christian -- so-called Christian radio and television to see the kinds of messages of hate and exclusion that they are spewing out over the airwaves.

AMY GOODMAN: The quote of Jerry Falwell right after September 11th that became quite famous: “I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’” He was speaking on September 13, 2001, on Pat Robertson's 700 Club program.

CHRIS HEDGES: That’s right. And, you know, this is -- I mean, essentially, when you follow the logical conclusion of the ideology they preach, there really are only two options for people who do not submit to their authority. And it’s about submission, because these people claim to speak for God and not only understand the will of God, but be able to carry it out. Either you convert, or you’re exterminated. That’s what the obsession with the End Times with the Rapture, which, by the way, is not in the Bible, is about. It is about instilling -- it’s, of course, a fear-based movement, and it’s about saying, ultimately, if you do not give up control to us, you will be physically eradicated by a vengeful God. And that lust for violence, I think that sort of -- you know, the notion, that final aesthetic being violence is very common to totalitarian movements, the belief that massive catastrophic violence can be used as a cleansing agent to purge the world. And that’s, you know, something that this movement bears in common with other despotic and frightening radical movements that we’ve seen over the past -- throughout the past century.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about some of the meetings you attended, from the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation to the Evangelism Explosion that was a seminar taught by Dr. D. James Kennedy?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, the Evangelism Explosion was a one-week seminar taught by Kennedy, was about certifying people to be able to go out and teach this conversion technique. And what was fascinating about it is how manipulative and dishonest it was. You know, what they do is essentially they cook the testimonies. They promise people that if they commit themselves to Christ, they can get rid of the deepest existential dreads of human existence: the fear of mortality, you know, grief, one of the -- we were supposed to read testimonies. We would turn them into the teachers, and they would send them back. And it was always about, you know, I have 100% certainty that I know that if I die tomorrow, I will go to heaven. Or, I lost my son -- one of the examples was -- in the war in Vietnam, but I don’t grieve, because I know I’m going to meet him in heaven.

And they talked about targeting people who are vulnerable. They used a technique very common to cults. It’s called love-bombing -- it’s a term taken from Margaret Singer -- where you -- three or four people go and you sort of focus intently on the person and are fascinated by everything that they say. You build false friendships. And eventually, of course, the goal is to draw them into these megachurches.

This movement talks about family, but it is the great destroyer of family. And I would stand up in these -- or I would be in these meetings and see people stand up weeping, and they would be weeping for unsaved spouses or children, because once you get sucked into these organizations, your leisure time, your religious worship time, you end up becoming involved in groups, you’re essentially removed from your old community and placed into this authoritarian community, where there is no questioning of those above you. You’re often assigned -- you’re called a baby Christian when you first come, and you’re assigned spiritual guides to teach you to think and act in the appropriate manner.

When I went to the National Religious Broadcasters Association in California, the most interesting thing about it was how these radical dominionists, these people who have built an alliance around the drive to create a Christian state, have taken over virtually all Christian radio and television stations. And there are traditional evangelicals who would like to step back from this political agenda, and they have been very ruthlessly brushed aside.

You saw it in the purging of the Southern Baptist Convention, when essentially dominionists like Richard Land took it over in 1980. There were many ministers who were very conservative and thought abortion was murder, were no friends to sort of gays and lesbians, but they didn’t buy into that political agenda, which of course has been fused with rapacious capitalism.

I mean, this movement talks about acculturating the society with a Christian religion. In fact, it’s the inverse. What they’ve done is acculturate the Christian religion with the worst aspects of American imperialism and American capitalism. And there’s that kind of uneasy alliance with many of these corporate interests. But it serves their turn. I mean, when you’re creating the corporate state, it’s very convenient to have an ideology that says, “Don’t worry. You don’t need health insurance, because if you have enough faith, Jesus will cure you. It doesn’t matter if all of your jobs are outsourced and there are no labor unions, because, you know, God takes care of his own. And not only that, but God will make you materially wealthy.” This is, you know, the gospel of prosperity. So, essentially, what we’ve seen is that fusion between those who want to build a corporate state and this ideological movement that thrusts believers who come out of deep despair into a world of magic and miracles and angels.

AMY GOODMAN: And what are the corporations that are part of this?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, DeVos, a guy who founded Amway; Target; Sam's Club. You know, they bring in -- a lot of these corporations like Wal-Mart and Sam's Club and others bring in these sort of dominionist or evangelical ministers into the plants as a way to mollify workers. Subscribing to this belief system is essentially about disempowerment.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Chris Hedges. He has written the book, American Fascists. How does this fit into the race for president in 2008?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, certainly this movement has tremendous reach within the Republican Party, Amy, and I think we could argue it all but controls the Republican Party at this point. We see it with John McCain, who in 2000 called Falwell and Robertson “agents of intolerance” and is now sort of falling all over himself to court this movement.

I think it’s a mistake to think that George Bush somehow embodies the movement. I think there’s a great deal of frustration with Bush, remember, on the issue of immigration, and there is a tension, an uneasy alliance between these corporate interests and this radical movement, and I think, you know, we should also say, as Robert Paxton points out in his book, Anatomy of Fascism, that fascist movements always build alliances with conservative or industrial interests, and oftentimes these alliances are not seamless. But on the issue of immigration, Bush sided with the corporations, who want illegal immigrants for cheap labor. There’s a huge nativist element, a huge hostility towards immigrants within the movement, and that angered the Christian right.

I think they’re going to go searching for another candidate -- maybe Brownback, I don't know -- who they feel -- I mean, it boils down to the fact that they feel Bush was not radical enough. And they’re going to go searching for a candidate that is going to swing further right, further towards the radical agenda that they have at their core. And this clip from Robertson, I think, is a public display of -- you know, unleashed how far they would like to go.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, Iran. Let's talk about Iraq, Iran, war, and what you call the American fascists.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, that’s a really important point, because none of these movements can take power unless there is a period of prolonged instability or a crisis. They can make creeping gains, and they have made tremendous gains, including taking hundreds of millions of dollars of American taxpayer money through the faith-based initiative program. But I think, as weak as our democracy is, we can hold them off, unless we enter a period of instability.

From my reading of the Bush White House, I think there's a very strong possibility that before the end of the Bush administration, they will make a strike against Iran. I think that what they’ve done is -- or what Karl Rove has done is essentially adopt a corruption of Leon Trotsky's notion of a permanent revolution -- only, it’s permanent war. Now, you know, the military-industrial complex, which is making huge profits off the war in Iraq, let's not forget, is essentially driving this administration. I think these people live in an alternate reality. I think they really do believe that they dropping cruise missiles and bunker busters and making conventional air strikes against supposed sites that they’ve targeted in Iran -- 700 to 1000, according to Sy Hersh -- will bring the Iranian regime down. Having spent seven years in the Middle East, a lot of that time in Iran and Iraq, I’m quite certain that they will have no more success in Iran than the Israelis had in Lebanon.

The problem with striking Iran is that it has the potential to create a regional conflict. I mean, we’re already fighting a proxy war with Iran through Hezbollah in Iraq -- there’s no question that the Iraqi Shiites are getting assistance from Iran and always have been -- and to a certain extent with the conflict with Hamas, which probably gets some help from Iran, as well. But a strike against Iran would be, in the eyes of Shiites throughout the Middle East, a strike against Shiism. You have two million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, many of whom work in the oil sector, Bahraini Shia, huge Shia minority in Pakistan, and, of course, most of Iraq is Shia. And I think that that kind of a hit would -- has the potential to unleash a regional conflict.

I think we should remember that Iran does not have the conventional capacity to do anything to the United States, but they could very well strike Israel, especially. Of course, there’s talk of Israeli involvement in some kinds of air strikes. That would provoke a retaliation. Hezbollah would not sit by quietly. I think that in sort of unconventional weapons -- I don’t know what those would be -- I mean, you know, Iran, it’s an unprovoked attack. I mean, under international law, Iran has a right to strike back, and I think that they would. And that could really create a spiral, a kind of death spiral that frightens me deeply. And I think what really frightens me is that no one in the Democratic Party is speaking up, with the exception of Kucinich. Nobody has spoken out against hitting Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about this latest headline that we read today. You have, what came out in the last few weeks, reporters in Baghdad getting this unusual briefing where there weren’t allowed to name names or even take in their video cameras, being told that Iran was supplying -- what was it? -- highest levels of the Iranian government sending sophisticated roadside bombs to Iraq that have killed 170 coalition troops since 2004. I wanted to ask about Michael Gordon, your former colleague at the New York Times, the person who was so-called breaking the story, who was deeply involved with the weapons of mass destruction myths also in his writings with Judith Miller, and now this latest today, the Iranian government accusing the US and Britain of being involved in an attack last week that killed eleven members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Start with Michael Gordon.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, that’s probably the best reason to watch Democracy Now!, rather than read the New York Times, about the war in Iraq. It’s almost -- one’s left sort of speechless. I guess it’s proof that some people never learn anything. I mean, I was on the investigative team and got briefly sort of tarnished with that dirt. I was based in Paris covering al-Qaeda but did get sucked into one of these sort of sham Chalabi stories.

AMY GOODMAN: Which one?

CHRIS HEDGES: It was the one where they supposedly had a defector in Lebanon. It wasn’t my story, but, I mean, it ended up -- you tend on investigative units to work as teams. It was Lowell Bergman’s story, which was broadcast on Frontline, but he could not fly to Beirut to interview the guy, so I did. But, I mean, it was my body. I was there. And --

AMY GOODMAN: Explain who he was, the person you interviewed?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, he was an impostor. Supposedly, he was a general, and he was talking about training camps that were being run in Iraq for al-Qaeda. I think it’s been pretty well discredited. So I find it -- I mean, I find the tactics -- and we see it, you know, ratcheting up with the rhetoric with Iran. I mean, we see that they're familiar tactics and familiar lies. And it’s just stunning that people as bright as Michael Gordon buy into it. I don’t get it.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, it’s not just Michael Gordon. He writes the piece, and then the institution of the Times, well, they put it on the front page --

CHRIS HEDGES: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: -- and they’re the ones that make it the big exclusive story based on unnamed sources. And it beats this drum for war.

CHRIS HEDGES: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: What will you do if the US attacks Iran?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I’m not going to pay my income taxes. I just am in such despair over the consequences of that war and the fact that there just really is no -- seems to be no organized opposition. And I think that I have a kind of moral responsibility as someone who comes out of the Middle East and has, I mean, directly, you know, friends throughout the years that I spent there who would suffer tremendously from that. And I sort of -- it may not change anything, and it may be sort of futile, but I think that at least when it’s over, I’ll have earned the right to ask for their forgiveness.

AMY GOODMAN: Christian Zionist Movement, how does it fit into this?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, the relationship between this radical movement and the radical right in Israel is one that really brings together Messianic Jews and Messianic Christians who believe that they have been given a divine or a moral right to control one-fifth of the world's population who are Muslim. It’s a really repugnant ideology. The radical Christian right in this country is deeply anti-Semitic. I mean, look at what they -- you know, when the end times come, except for this 144,000 Jews who flee to Petra and are converted -- I think this was a creation of Tim LaHaye -- Jews will be destroyed, along with all other nonbelievers, including people like myself who are nominal Christians, in their eyes. You know, there is no respect for Judaism in and of itself. It’s an abstraction. It’s, you know, Jews have to control Israel, because that is one more step towards Armageddon. And I find that alliance strange and very shortsighted on the part of many rightwing Israelis and rightwing Jews in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: This latest story, the Anti-Defamation League calling on Georgia State Rep. Ben Bridges to apologize for a memo distributed under his name that says the teaching of evolution should be banned in public schools, because it is a religious deception stemming from an ancient Jewish sect. The memo calls on lawmakers to introduce legislation that would end the teaching of evolution in public schools, because it's “a deception that is causing incalculable harm to every student and every truth-loving citizen.”

CHRIS HEDGES: And there’s a bill now in the Texas state legislature that will abolish all mention of evolution in school textbooks and make Bible study mandatory in public schools. And the role of creationism is extremely important in this movement. It’s not just wacky pseudoscience. It is really a war against truth. It is not about presenting an alternative. It’s about saying facts are interchangeable with opinions, that lies are true, that we can believe whatever we want. And once they successfully elevate creationism, which, of course, is a myth -- I mean, teaching creation out of the Book of Genesis is an absurdity. The writers of the Book of Genesis thought the earth was flat with rivers of above and below us. But what it does is destroy the possibility or sanctity of honest, dispassionate, intellectual and scientific inquiry. And when they do that, they have made a huge step towards creating a totalitarian state.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Chris Hedges is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Thanks for joining us.

CHRIS HEDGES: Thanks, Amy.

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Duhbya [hearts] soldiers

WaPo: Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army's Top Medical Facility

By Dana Priest and Anne Hull

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, February 18, 2007; A01

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely -- a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them -- the majority soldiers, with some Marines -- have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.

They suffer from brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress. Their legions have grown so exponentially -- they outnumber hospital patients at Walter Reed 17 to 1 -- that they take up every available bed on post and spill into dozens of nearby hotels and apartments leased by the Army. The average stay is 10 months, but some have been stuck there for as long as two years.

Not all of the quarters are as bleak as Duncan's, but the despair of Building 18 symbolizes a larger problem in Walter Reed's treatment of the wounded, according to dozens of soldiers, family members, veterans aid groups, and current and former Walter Reed staff members interviewed by two Washington Post reporters, who spent more than four months visiting the outpatient world without the knowledge or permission of Walter Reed officials. Many agreed to be quoted by name; others said they feared Army retribution if they complained publicly.

While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.

On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of "Catch-22." The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.

Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.

"We've done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it," said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. "We don't know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling."

Soldiers, family members, volunteers and caregivers who have tried to fix the system say each mishap seems trivial by itself, but the cumulative effect wears down the spirits of the wounded and can stall their recovery.

"It creates resentment and disenfranchisement," said Joe Wilson, a clinical social worker at Walter Reed. "These soldiers will withdraw and stay in their rooms. They will actively avoid the very treatment and services that are meant to be helpful."

Danny Soto, a national service officer for Disabled American Veterans who helps dozens of wounded service members each week at Walter Reed, said soldiers "get awesome medical care and their lives are being saved," but, "Then they get into the administrative part of it and they are like, 'You saved me for what?' The soldiers feel like they are not getting proper respect. This leads to anger."

This world is invisible to outsiders. Walter Reed occasionally showcases the heroism of these wounded soldiers and emphasizes that all is well under the circumstances. President Bush, former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and members of Congress have promised the best care during their regular visits to the hospital's spit-polished amputee unit, Ward 57.

"We owe them all we can give them," Bush said during his last visit, a few days before Christmas. "Not only for when they're in harm's way, but when they come home to help them adjust if they have wounds, or help them adjust after their time in service."

Along with the government promises, the American public, determined not to repeat the divisive Vietnam experience, has embraced the soldiers even as the war grows more controversial at home. Walter Reed is awash in the generosity of volunteers, businesses and celebrities who donate money, plane tickets, telephone cards and steak dinners.

Yet at a deeper level, the soldiers say they feel alone and frustrated. Seventy-five percent of the troops polled by Walter Reed last March said their experience was "stressful." Suicide attempts and unintentional overdoses from prescription drugs and alcohol, which is sold on post, are part of the narrative here.

Vera Heron spent 15 frustrating months living on post to help care for her son. "It just absolutely took forever to get anything done," Heron said. "They do the paperwork, they lose the paperwork. Then they have to redo the paperwork. You are talking about guys and girls whose lives are disrupted for the rest of their lives, and they don't put any priority on it."

Family members who speak only Spanish have had to rely on Salvadoran housekeepers, a Cuban bus driver, the Panamanian bartender and a Mexican floor cleaner for help. Walter Reed maintains a list of bilingual staffers, but they are rarely called on, according to soldiers and families and Walter Reed staff members.

Evis Morales's severely wounded son was transferred to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda for surgery shortly after she arrived at Walter Reed. She had checked into her government-paid room on post, but she slept in the lobby of the Bethesda hospital for two weeks because no one told her there is a free shuttle between the two facilities. "They just let me off the bus and said 'Bye-bye,' " recalled Morales, a Puerto Rico resident.

Morales found help after she ran out of money, when she called a hotline number and a Spanish-speaking operator happened to answer.

"If they can have Spanish-speaking recruits to convince my son to go into the Army, why can't they have Spanish-speaking translators when he's injured?" Morales asked. "It's so confusing, so disorienting."

Soldiers, wives, mothers, social workers and the heads of volunteer organizations have complained repeatedly to the military command about what one called "The Handbook No One Gets" that would explain life as an outpatient. Most soldiers polled in the March survey said they got their information from friends. Only 12 percent said any Army literature had been helpful.

"They've been behind from Day One," said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), who headed the House Government Reform Committee, which investigated problems at Walter Reed and other Army facilities. "Even the stuff they've fixed has only been patched."

Among the public, Davis said, "there's vast appreciation for soldiers, but there's a lack of focus on what happens to them" when they return. "It's awful."

Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, commander at Walter Reed, said in an interview last week that a major reason outpatients stay so long, a change from the days when injured soldiers were discharged as quickly as possible, is that the Army wants to be able to hang on to as many soldiers as it can, "because this is the first time this country has fought a war for so long with an all-volunteer force since the Revolution."

Acknowledging the problems with outpatient care, Weightman said Walter Reed has taken steps over the past year to improve conditions for the outpatient army, which at its peak in summer 2005 numbered nearly 900, not to mention the hundreds of family members who come to care for them. One platoon sergeant used to be in charge of 125 patients; now each one manages 30. Platoon sergeants with psychological problems are more carefully screened. And officials have increased the numbers of case managers and patient advocates to help with the complex disability benefit process, which Weightman called "one of the biggest sources of delay."

And to help steer the wounded and their families through the complicated bureaucracy, Weightman said, Walter Reed has recently begun holding twice-weekly informational meetings. "We felt we were pushing information out before, but the reality is, it was overwhelming," he said. "Is it fail-proof? No. But we've put more resources on it."

He said a 21,500-troop increase in Iraq has Walter Reed bracing for "potentially a lot more" casualties.

Bureaucratic Battles

The best known of the Army's medical centers, Walter Reed opened in 1909 with 10 patients. It has treated the wounded from every war since, and nearly one of every four service members injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The outpatients are assigned to one of five buildings attached to the post, including Building 18, just across from the front gates on Georgia Avenue. To accommodate the overflow, some are sent to nearby hotels and apartments. Living conditions range from the disrepair of Building 18 to the relative elegance of Mologne House, a hotel that opened on the post in 1998, when the typical guest was a visiting family member or a retiree on vacation.

The Pentagon has announced plans to close Walter Reed by 2011, but that hasn't stopped the flow of casualties. Three times a week, school buses painted white and fitted with stretchers and blackened windows stream down Georgia Avenue. Sirens blaring, they deliver soldiers groggy from a pain-relief cocktail at the end of their long trip from Iraq via Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and Andrews Air Force Base.

Staff Sgt. John Daniel Shannon, 43, came in on one of those buses in November 2004 and spent several weeks on the fifth floor of Walter Reed's hospital. His eye and skull were shattered by an AK-47 round. His odyssey in the Other Walter Reed has lasted more than two years, but it began when someone handed him a map of the grounds and told him to find his room across post.

A reconnaissance and land-navigation expert, Shannon was so disoriented that he couldn't even find north. Holding the map, he stumbled around outside the hospital, sliding against walls and trying to keep himself upright, he said. He asked anyone he found for directions.

Shannon had led the 2nd Infantry Division's Ghost Recon Platoon until he was felled in a gun battle in Ramadi. He liked the solitary work of a sniper; "Lone Wolf" was his call name. But he did not expect to be left alone by the Army after such serious surgery and a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. He had appointments during his first two weeks as an outpatient, then nothing.

"I thought, 'Shouldn't they contact me?' " he said. "I didn't understand the paperwork. I'd start calling phone numbers, asking if I had appointments. I finally ran across someone who said: 'I'm your case manager. Where have you been?'

"Well, I've been here! Jeez Louise, people, I'm your hospital patient!"

Like Shannon, many soldiers with impaired memory from brain injuries sat for weeks with no appointments and no help from the staff to arrange them. Many disappeared even longer. Some simply left for home.

One outpatient, a 57-year-old staff sergeant who had a heart attack in Afghanistan, was given 200 rooms to supervise at the end of 2005. He quickly discovered that some outpatients had left the post months earlier and would check in by phone. "We called them 'call-in patients,' " said Staff Sgt. Mike McCauley, whose dormant PTSD from Vietnam was triggered by what he saw on the job: so many young and wounded, and three bodies being carried from the hospital.

Life beyond the hospital bed is a frustrating mountain of paperwork. The typical soldier is required to file 22 documents with eight different commands -- most of them off-post -- to enter and exit the medical processing world, according to government investigators. Sixteen different information systems are used to process the forms, but few of them can communicate with one another. The Army's three personnel databases cannot read each other's files and can't interact with the separate pay system or the medical recordkeeping databases.

The disappearance of necessary forms and records is the most common reason soldiers languish at Walter Reed longer than they should, according to soldiers, family members and staffers. Sometimes the Army has no record that a soldier even served in Iraq. A combat medic who did three tours had to bring in letters and photos of herself in Iraq to show she that had been there, after a clerk couldn't find a record of her service.

Shannon, who wears an eye patch and a visible skull implant, said he had to prove he had served in Iraq when he tried to get a free uniform to replace the bloody one left behind on a medic's stretcher. When he finally tracked down the supply clerk, he discovered the problem: His name was mistakenly left off the "GWOT list" -- the list of "Global War on Terrorism" patients with priority funding from the Defense Department.

He brought his Purple Heart to the clerk to prove he was in Iraq.

Lost paperwork for new uniforms has forced some soldiers to attend their own Purple Heart ceremonies and the official birthday party for the Army in gym clothes, only to be chewed out by superiors.

The Army has tried to re-create the organization of a typical military unit at Walter Reed. Soldiers are assigned to one of two companies while they are outpatients -- the Medical Holding Company (Medhold) for active-duty soldiers and the Medical Holdover Company for Reserve and National Guard soldiers. The companies are broken into platoons that are led by platoon sergeants, the Army equivalent of a parent.

Under normal circumstances, good sergeants know everything about the soldiers under their charge: vices and talents, moods and bad habits, even family stresses.

At Walter Reed, however, outpatients have been drafted to serve as platoon sergeants and have struggled with their responsibilities. Sgt. David Thomas, a 42-year-old amputee with the Tennessee National Guard, said his platoon sergeant couldn't remember his name. "We wondered if he had mental problems," Thomas said. "Sometimes I'd wear my leg, other times I'd take my wheelchair. He would think I was a different person. We thought, 'My God, has this man lost it?' "

Civilian care coordinators and case managers are supposed to track injured soldiers and help them with appointments, but government investigators and soldiers complain that they are poorly trained and often do not understand the system.

One amputee, a senior enlisted man who asked not to be identified because he is back on active duty, said he received orders to report to a base in Germany as he sat drooling in his wheelchair in a haze of medication. "I went to Medhold many times in my wheelchair to fix it, but no one there could help me," he said.

Finally, his wife met an aide to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who got the erroneous paperwork corrected with one phone call. When the aide called with the news, he told the soldier, "They don't even know you exist."

"They didn't know who I was or where I was," the soldier said. "And I was in contact with my platoon sergeant every day."

The lack of accountability weighed on Shannon. He hated the isolation of the younger troops. The Army's failure to account for them each day wore on him. When a 19-year-old soldier down the hall died, Shannon knew he had to take action.

The soldier, Cpl. Jeremy Harper, returned from Iraq with PTSD after seeing three buddies die. He kept his room dark, refused his combat medals and always seemed heavily medicated, said people who knew him. According to his mother, Harper was drunkenly wandering the lobby of the Mologne House on New Year's Eve 2004, looking for a ride home to West Virginia. The next morning he was found dead in his room. An autopsy showed alcohol poisoning, she said.

"I can't understand how they could have let kids under the age of 21 have liquor," said Victoria Harper, crying. "He was supposed to be right there at Walter Reed hospital. . . . I feel that they didn't take care of him or watch him as close as they should have."

The Army posthumously awarded Harper a Bronze Star for his actions in Iraq.

Shannon viewed Harper's death as symptomatic of a larger tragedy -- the Army had broken its covenant with its troops. "Somebody didn't take care of him," he would later say. "It makes me want to cry. "

Shannon and another soldier decided to keep tabs on the brain injury ward. "I'm a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army, and I take care of people," he said. The two soldiers walked the ward every day with a list of names. If a name dropped off the large white board at the nurses' station, Shannon would hound the nurses to check their files and figure out where the soldier had gone.

Sometimes the patients had been transferred to another hospital. If they had been released to one of the residences on post, Shannon and his buddy would pester the front desk managers to make sure the new charges were indeed there. "But two out of 10, when I asked where they were, they'd just say, 'They're gone,' " Shannon said.

Even after Weightman and his commanders instituted new measures to keep better track of soldiers, two young men left post one night in November and died in a high-speed car crash in Virginia. The driver was supposed to be restricted to Walter Reed because he had tested positive for illegal drugs, Weightman said.

Part of the tension at Walter Reed comes from a setting that is both military and medical. Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, the squad leader who lost one leg and the use of his other in a grenade attack, said his recovery was made more difficult by a Marine liaison officer who had never seen combat but dogged him about having his mother in his room on post. The rules allowed her to be there, but the officer said she was taking up valuable bed space.

"When you join the Marine Corps, they tell you, you can forget about your mama. 'You have no mama. We are your mama,' " Groves said. "That training works in combat. It doesn't work when you are wounded."

Frustration at Every Turn

The frustrations of an outpatient's day begin before dawn. On a dark, rain-soaked morning this winter, Sgt. Archie Benware, 53, hobbled over to his National Guard platoon office at Walter Reed. Benware had done two tours in Iraq. His head had been crushed between two 2,100-pound concrete barriers in Ramadi, and now it was dented like a tin can. His legs were stiff from knee surgery. But here he was, trying to take care of business.

At the platoon office, he scanned the white board on the wall. Six soldiers were listed as AWOL. The platoon sergeant was nowhere to be found, leaving several soldiers stranded with their requests.

Benware walked around the corner to arrange a dental appointment -- his teeth were knocked out in the accident. He was told by a case manager that another case worker, not his doctor, would have to approve the procedure.

"Goddamn it, that's unbelievable!" snapped his wife, Barb, who accompanied him because he can no longer remember all of his appointments.

Not as unbelievable as the time he received a manila envelope containing the gynecological report of a young female soldier.

Next came 7 a.m. formation, one way Walter Reed tries to keep track of hundreds of wounded. Formation is also held to maintain some discipline. Soldiers limp to the old Red Cross building in rain, ice and snow. Army regulations say they can't use umbrellas, even here. A triple amputee has mastered the art of putting on his uniform by himself and rolling in just in time. Others are so gorked out on pills that they seem on the verge of nodding off.

"Fall in!" a platoon sergeant shouted at Friday formation. The noisy room of soldiers turned silent.

An Army chaplain opened with a verse from the Bible. "Why are we here?" she asked. She talked about heroes and service to country. "We were injured in many ways."

Someone announced free tickets to hockey games, a Ravens game, a movie screening, a dinner at McCormick and Schmick's, all compliments of local businesses.

Every formation includes a safety briefing. Usually it is a warning about mixing alcohol with meds, or driving too fast, or domestic abuse. "Do not beat your spouse or children. Do not let your spouse or children beat you," a sergeant said, to laughter. This morning's briefing included a warning about black ice, a particular menace to the amputees.

Dress warm, the sergeant said. "I see some guys rolling around in their wheelchairs in 30 degrees in T-shirts."

Soldiers hate formation for its petty condescension. They gutted out a year in the desert, and now they are being treated like children.

"I'm trying to think outside the box here, maybe moving formation to Wagner Gym," the commander said, addressing concerns that formation was too far from soldiers' quarters in the cold weather. "But guess what? Those are nice wood floors. They have to be covered by a tarp. There's a tarp that's got to be rolled out over the wooden floors. Then it has to be cleaned, with 400 soldiers stepping all over it. Then it's got to be rolled up."

"Now, who thinks Wagner Gym is a good idea?"

Explaining this strange world to family members is not easy. At an orientation for new arrivals, a staff sergeant walked them through the idiosyncrasies of Army financing. He said one relative could receive a 15-day advance on the $64 per diem either in cash or as an electronic transfer: "I highly recommend that you take the cash," he said. "There's no guarantee the transfer will get to your bank." The audience yawned.

Actually, he went on, relatives can collect only 80 percent of this advance, which comes to $51.20 a day. "The cashier has no change, so we drop to $50. We give you the rest" -- the $1.20 a day -- "when you leave."

The crowd was anxious, exhausted. A child crawled on the floor. The sergeant plowed on. "You need to figure out how long your loved one is going to be an inpatient," he said, something even the doctors can't accurately predict from day to day. "Because if you sign up for the lodging advance," which is $150 a day, "and they get out the next day, you owe the government the advance back of $150 a day."

A case manager took the floor to remind everyone that soldiers are required to be in uniform most of the time, though some of the wounded are amputees or their legs are pinned together by bulky braces. "We have break-away clothing with Velcro!" she announced with a smile. "Welcome to Walter Reed!"

A Bleak Life in Building 18

"Building 18! There is a rodent infestation issue!" bellowed the commander to his troops one morning at formation. "It doesn't help when you live like a rodent! I can't believe people live like that! I was appalled by some of your rooms!"

Life in Building 18 is the bleakest homecoming for men and women whose government promised them good care in return for their sacrifices.

One case manager was so disgusted, she bought roach bombs for the rooms. Mouse traps are handed out. It doesn't help that soldiers there subsist on carry-out food because the hospital cafeteria is such a hike on cold nights. They make do with microwaves and hot plates.

Army officials say they "started an aggressive campaign to deal with the mice infestation" last October and that the problem is now at a "manageable level." They also say they will "review all outstanding work orders" in the next 30 days.

Soldiers discharged from the psychiatric ward are often assigned to Building 18. Buses and ambulances blare all night. While injured soldiers pull guard duty in the foyer, a broken garage door allows unmonitored entry from the rear. Struggling with schizophrenia, PTSD, paranoid delusional disorder and traumatic brain injury, soldiers feel especially vulnerable in that setting, just outside the post gates, on a street where drug dealers work the corner at night.

"I've been close to mortars. I've held my own pretty good," said Spec. George Romero, 25, who came back from Iraq with a psychological disorder. "But here . . . I think it has affected my ability to get over it . . . dealing with potential threats every day."

After Spec. Jeremy Duncan, 30, got out of the hospital and was assigned to Building 18, he had to navigate across the traffic of Georgia Avenue for appointments. Even after knee surgery, he had to limp back and forth on crutches and in pain. Over time, black mold invaded his room.

But Duncan would rather suffer with the mold than move to another room and share his convalescence in tight quarters with a wounded stranger. "I have mold on the walls, a hole in the shower ceiling, but . . . I don't want someone waking me up coming in."

Wilson, the clinical social worker at Walter Reed, was part of a staff team that recognized Building 18's toll on the wounded. He mapped out a plan and, in September, was given a $30,000 grant from the Commander's Initiative Account for improvements. He ordered some equipment, including a pool table and air hockey table, which have not yet arrived. A Psychiatry Department functionary held up the rest of the money because she feared that buying a lot of recreational equipment close to Christmas would trigger an audit, Wilson said.

In January, Wilson was told that the funds were no longer available and that he would have to submit a new request. "It's absurd," he said. "Seven months of work down the drain. I have nothing to show for this project. It's a great example of what we're up against."

A pool table and two flat-screen TVs were eventually donated from elsewhere.

But Wilson had had enough. Three weeks ago he turned in his resignation. "It's too difficult to get anything done with this broken-down bureaucracy," he said.

At town hall meetings, the soldiers of Building 18 keep pushing commanders to improve conditions. But some things have gotten worse. In December, a contracting dispute held up building repairs.

"I hate it," said Romero, who stays in his room all day. "There are cockroaches. The elevator doesn't work. The garage door doesn't work. Sometimes there's no heat, no water. . . . I told my platoon sergeant I want to leave. I told the town hall meeting. I talked to the doctors and medical staff. They just said you kind of got to get used to the outside world. . . . My platoon sergeant said, 'Suck it up!' "

Tomgram: Roger Morris, The Rumsfeld Legacy

Here's a classic Rumsfeldism: "We do have a saying in America: if you're in a hole, stop digging ... erm, I'm not sure I should have said that." In Part 2 of his historical excavation of the life and world of Donald Rumsfeld (not to speak of the worlds of both President Bushes, the neocons, the U.S. military, the GOP, and an indolent media), Roger Morris, already deep in that hole, just keeps digging away. In doing so, he offers us the rest of Rumsfeld's long march to power, his lasting legacies, and the costly lessons of this comeback kid. So much that went unheeded in the years in which Rumsfeld once again scaled the heights of power is now, thanks to Morris, compactly on the record.

"The absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence" is another infamous Rumsfeldism. How true. And in Rumsfeld's absence, the evidence of how he changed our world for the worse will be with us to consider for years to come. So, if you missed it, check out "Sharp Elbows," the first part of "The Undertaker's Tally," and then settle in for the sequel, the one you thought you knew until you read "The Power and the Glory." Read it and remember, the bell tolls for thee. Tom

The Power and the Glory

The Undertaker's Tally (Part 2)

By Roger Morris

In 1976, when Jimmy Carter took the Presidency from Gerald Ford, outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went off to seek corporate wealth as head of G.D. Searle, a Skokie pharmaceutical company. His period running the business, inherited by the family of his North Shore friend and early backer Dan Searle, would become part of Rumsfeld's legend of success as a master manager, negligently accepted as fact by the media and Congressional representatives at his 2001 confirmation hearings.

The legend went this way: Political prodigy slashes payroll 60%, turns decrepit loser into mega-profit-maker, earns industry kudos and multiple millions. In looking at men of prominence like Rumsfeld who revolve in and out of the private sector, the Washington media almost invariably adopts the press-release or booster business-page version of events from what inside-the-Beltway types call "the real world." In Rumsfeld's case, behind the image of corporate savior lay a far more relevant and ominous history.

In the documented version of reality, derived from litigation and relatively obscure investigations in the U.S. and abroad, Searle turned out to enjoy its notable rise less thanks to Rumsfeldian innovative managerial genius than to old-fashioned reckless marketing of pharmaceuticals already on the shelf and the calling in of lobbying "markers" via its well-connected Republican CEO. And over it all wafted the distinctive odor of corrupt practices. A case in point was Searle's anti-diarrhea medicine Lomotil, sold ever more widely and profitably internationally (in industry terms "dumped") -- especially in Africa in the late 1970s -- despite the company's failure to warn of its potentially dire effects on younger children.

"A blindly harmful stopcock," one medical journal called the remedy, which could be poisonous to infants only slightly above Searle's recommended dosage. Even taken according to directions, Lomotil was known to mask dangerous dehydration and cause a lethal build-up of fluids internally. Having advertised the medicine as "ideal for every situation," Searle did not undertake a cautionary labeling change until the end of 1981, nearly five years into Rumsfeld's tenure, and then only when threatened with damaging publicity by children's advocacy groups. Part of the vast outrage of multinational "pharmas" exploiting the Third World, the company under Rumsfeld would, like the more publicized Upjohn with its Depo-Provera, be implicated in widespread bribery of officials (and others) in poorer countries to promote the sale of oral contraceptives which had been found unsafe for American or European women.

But Searle's magic potion, concocted well before Rumsfeld's arrival, was to be the controversial artificial sweetener aspartame, marketed under the trade name NutraSweet. By 1977, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had staunchly refused to approve aspartame for some 16 years, finding test data dubious or inconclusive and fearing that potential long-term dangers might prove prohibitive. As Rumsfeld took over in Skokie, the FDA was taking the rare step of recommending to Justice Department prosecutors that a grand jury investigate the company's applications for FDA approval for "willful and knowing failure to make reports… concealing material facts and making false statements" in connection with the statutory application process required by law and FDA standards.

Over the next four years, federal regulators held firm against Searle's heavily financed campaigns. Only with Reagan's election in 1980 did fix and favor supplant science and the public interest. Having campaigned for the new president and been named to his transition team, Rumsfeld told his Searle sales force, according to later testimony, that "he would call in all his markers and that no matter what, he would see to it that aspartame would be approved…"

The sequel would be a classic of the genre: Searle's reapplication to the FDA the day Reagan was inaugurated; the prompt appointment of an agreeable FDA commissioner who would later go to work for Searle's public relations firm for $1,000 a day; further questionable, company-commissioned tests with more doubts by FDA scientists but approval of aspartame nonetheless; a later plague of health problems but by then vast profits throughout the corporate food economy followed by lavish, multi-company contributions to Congressional committee members to stifle any outcry; eventually, a $350 million class-action suit alleging racketeering, fraud, and multiple abuses centering on Rumsfeld, who meanwhile had become gloriously rich from aspartame and the $2.7-billion sale of Searle to Monsanto in 1985.

In his return to the Pentagon in 2001, he would go duly unscathed by any of the company's history. By the time litigation would be filed, the United States was already 18 months into the occupation of Iraq.

Envoy

As it was, despite his business conquests, Rumsfeld missed an even greater prize. He had been on a short list to become Ronald Reagan's running mate in the 1980 presidential campaign when the candidate unexpectedly reached for his defeated primary rival (and Rumsfeld nemesis) George H.W. Bush. While, over the next 12 years, Bush went on to the vice-presidency and presidency, and Jim Baker -- equally detested by Rumsfeld -- went along with his patron to White House staff and cabinet power, Rumsfeld would build his Searle fortune and bide his time.

The one exception to his involuntary Reagan-era exile from government would be a stint in 1983-1984 as special presidential envoy to the Middle East. He would be sent to arrange U.S. support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq in its war with the hated Iranians of Ayatollah Khomeini, a role little noticed at the time which nonetheless produced the notorious photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with the Iraqi dictator. The deeper story was far more embarrassing than any simple handshake.

Most of the relevant records on Rumsfeld's several-month assignment are still classified, though it is clear that, as at the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO), he took on his mission with a passion. He worked to shower on Saddam (in a manner as unnoticed as possible) an infamous flow of intelligence, financial credits, and sensitive materials and technology that would come to underpin Iraqi chemical and bacteriological warfare programs, leading to hideous gas attacks on Shia dissidents and Kurds as well as the Iranian forces. In general, Rumsfeld put his shoulder to the wheel to shore up the war-worn Ba'athist regime that had attacked Iran in 1980.

In this mid-1980s de facto alliance with Saddam, as in much else, Rumsfeld was never alone. He was joined in this pro-Iraqi tilt in the Middle East by President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, National Security Advisors William Clark and Robert McFarlane, and a number of still obscure men like Paul Wolfowitz at State, Colin Powell, then Weinberger's aide at the Pentagon, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, not to speak of his zealot acolyte assistant Douglas Feith (who would return in a pivotal post under Rumsfeld in 2001) as well as Bill Casey and Robert Gates at the CIA, among other officials.

Their gambit was, in turn, backed by Senators and Congressmen in both parties who were briefed on Rumsfeld's mission and obligingly shunned oversight of the manifold aspects of the sometimes illegal collusion with the Iraqis. Their dereliction was assured, in part, by the general animus toward Iran on a Capitol Hill then effectively controlled by the Republicans, and increasingly under the bipartisan influence of the growing Israeli lobby and its Tel Aviv handlers. The lobby quietly, cynically pushed both for Reagan administration aid to Iraq and for covert arms-dealing with Iran (later exposed in the Iran-Contra scandal), viewing the ongoing no-winners carnage of two Islamic states as a boon. All this went on largely unreported, given the customary media diffidence or indolence on national security issues.

Historically, the moral outrage and far-reaching political folly of Washington's furtive arming of one tyranny to bleed another, with untold casualties on each side (including the murderous suppression of would-be democrats in both countries), would belong at the doorstep of Reagan's reactionary regime and the Washington foreign-policy establishment as a whole. Rumsfeld's role was instrumental and in some respects crucial, but only part of the larger disgrace.

At the same time, in the intelligence briefings he received as the first ranking U.S. official to go to Iraq since the Baghdad Pact of the 1950s, he would have been uniquely aware, as no other senior figure in Washington, of the brutal character of Saddam Hussein's regime and, in particular, the sectarian, regional, tribal, and clan politics that lay behind it. The Ba'athists were a government, after all, that the CIA itself had helped to recruit and install in the coup of 1963, reinstalled in 1968 when the Agency's original clients lost control, and then watched closely while Baghdad had a flirtation (involving an arms-supply relationship) with the feared Russians (whose influence the bloody 1963 coup was supposed to counter). This was particularly true in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 with its peace agreements from which Iraq emerged as a principal remaining challenge to Israel.

By 1983-1984, the volatile, complex currents of Iraq's political culture, Saddam's essentially family and clan rule, and the now crude, now subtle layering of Sunni and Shia in the Ba'athist bureaucracy and plutocracy, as well as the wartime distrust and savage repression of a suspect, subordinate Shia majority, were well known to outside intelligence agencies as well as scholars and journalists. The CIA, DIA and State Department Bureaus of Near Eastern Affairs and Intelligence and Research -- and certainly Rumsfeld as presidential envoy -- also had reason to understand much about Saddam's grandiose ambition, in Iraq's old rivalry with Egypt, to lead a pan-Arab nationalist renaissance to some kind of future parity with Israel's nuclear-armed military might.

In addition to the usual extensive intelligence-sharing with Israel's Mossad, less than two years before Rumsfeld's Iraq mission CIA operatives had literally lit the way for Israeli F-16 fighter bombers in their June 1981 surprise attack on Saddam's fledgling nuclear reactor at Osiraq. They planted guidance transmitters along the low-level flight path under Jordanian and Iraqi radar to the point of painting the target with lasers. The Agency and Mossad then watched as the Iraqis dauntlessly, defiantly began to rebuild and expand their nuclear program. From some 400 scientists and technicians with $400 million in funding, that program would grow to perhaps 7,000 scientists and technicians with as much as $10 billion at their command, some of which was indirectly made possible by the bounty Rumsfeld carried to Baghdad in the mid-1980s

For anyone dealing seriously with these issues, there could have been little doubt that Saddam would use the considerable aid and trade Rumsfeld was sliding his way under the table to mount a better-armed, more bloody war on Iran, to further the regime's most ambitious dreams of weapons development, and to tyrannize all the more savagely potentially rebellious Iraqi Shiites and Kurds. As Washington watched, he did all of that -- and no one could have been less surprised than Rumsfeld himself. Long afterward, as some of the ugly essence of his mission to Baghdad dribbled out amid the ruins of Bush's Iraqi occupation, Rumsfeld would be faulted for pandering to, and appeasing, Saddam (whose gassing of the Kurds had already begun) -- in the wake of a single, timorous, hypocritical statement issued in Washington in March 1984 criticizing his use of chemical weapons. The actual toll of the policy to which he was integral would prove so much higher as time passed.

Iraqi chemical weapons plants bombed in the 1991 Gulf War released agents to which some 100,000 American troops were exposed. The infamous Gulf War Syndrome might even be traced in some measure to the U.S. credits, materiel, and technology Rumsfeld knowingly conveyed seven years before. So, too, of course, could Saddam's brutal 1980s repression of the Shia, underlying the sectarian animus and resolve for vengeance and dominance by the U.S.-installed Shia regime after 2003 that shaped Rumsfeld's, and America's, historic failure in Iraq.

Others colluded at every turn in the long scandal of policy toward Iraq. Colin Powell, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defense during the First Gulf War, would, for instance, be directly complicit in the Syndrome outrage. Yet none of the participants in the larger post-9/11 disaster was more directly responsible than Rumsfeld.

While Reagan's special envoy was, with his usual energy and sharp elbows, dickering with the Iraqis in the mid-1980s, Condoleezza Rice was an assistant professor of no scholarly distinction at Stanford; Cheney a third-term congressman from Wyoming squirming up the House leadership ladder; future viceroy of Baghdad L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer moving from State Department clerk and Alexander Haig protégé to lavish-party giving ambassador to the Netherlands; and George W. Bush, still by his own account given to "heavy drinking," absorbed in changing the name of his chronically failed Arbusto Energy oil company to Bush Exploration.

Waiting Game

By 1987, Rumsfeld was flexing his muscles once more, preparing for the ultimate goal, assembling money and party support for a presidential run against George H. W. Bush in 1988. But after a dozen years out of office, and against the entrenched power of an heir apparent, he would soon enough discover that backing just was not there. Off more recent prominence and with a wider political base, Cheney would try to mount his own presidential campaign in the early 1990s, only to meet the same bitter rejection.

Historians will only guess at the rancor building in these two deeply ambitious, deeply disappointed figures at the president they had, George W. Bush, whom they no doubt saw as manifestly, maddeningly inferior. The Rumsfeld-Cheney recompense, at vast cost to the nation and world, would be their fierce seizure of power after September 11, 2001.

Rumsfeld spent the 1990s again in business, becoming CEO of General Instruments, then Chairman of Gilead Sciences Pharmaceuticals, with another history reminiscent of Searle. In 1990, he joined the board of ABB, a Swedish-Swiss conglomerate that had gobbled up companies in the latter 1980s, including Westinghouse energy operations, and would move aggressively to win a $200-million contract for "the design and key components" for light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea. Rumsfeld pursued this prize even while chairing a Congressional commission on missile threats that found a "clear danger" for the future from Pyongyang. In the alarming report, his otherwise fulsome résumé failed to mention that he was an ABB director.

In 1996, he took leave from Gilead to become chief foreign policy advisor, along with Wolfowitz, in Robert Dole's failed presidential run. He would end as the campaign's eighteen-hour-a-day manager. By 1997, amid the full-scale takeover of the Washington GOP by the long-churning cabal of neoconservatives, he joined Cheney and Wolfowitz on a Newt Gingrich-instigated Congressional Policy Advisory Board to shape attacks on the second Clinton Administration.

In January 1998, he signed the celebrated letter so publicly sent to Clinton from the right-wing, Israeli lobby-dominated Project for a New American Century. Alongside Wolfowitz, Perle, and others soon to be key players in the younger Bush's regime, he vigorously urged the "removal" of Saddam. In July 1998, there followed the "Rumsfeld Commission" report on missile threats, wildly claiming, in an unnamed debut of the "axis of evil" drawn from the testimony and staff work of right-wing ideologues, that Iran, Iraq, and North Korea would each be able to "inflict major destruction" on the U.S. by 2002. Through it all, including the first seven-and-a-half months of their rule after the seamy election of 2000, there would be no trace of the actual danger that erupted out of a September morning sky in 2001.

Though he had repaired surface relations with the Bushes, Rumsfeld took no major role in the 2000 race. In any case, the elder Bush had erased him from his son's list of possible running mates, while ultimately waving through Cheney, whose reactionary animus had been relatively well masked at the Pentagon in 1989-92. When, post-election, Cheney vetoed Governor Tom Ridge for the Pentagon, and there were throbbing neocon fears that a cosmetic Powell, bureaucrat at heart, would be far too equivocal at the State Department, Rumsfeld would be Cheney's, and so Bush's, antidote.

His appointment was a mark of the extreme poverty of Republican talent the administration reflected so graphically. The supposed party of national security, having held the White House for five of the last eight terms and dominated Congress for much of the previous 30 years, had no serious alternative to a man who had perched atop the Pentagon a full quarter-century before. Apart from the patently right-wing, widely discredited missile panel he had chaired, Rumsfeld had shown no palpable interest or competence in the ever more complex defense issues accumulating since then, much less the rapidly changing politics of the post-Cold War world. Nonetheless, fit, relatively youthful at 69, he strode again into the E-Ring. There was speculation that the old Halloween Massacre goal was still there, that Cheney, with his uncertain health, might step aside in 2004, that the undertaker might yet reach the Oval Office.

Mastery

Rumsfeld began his Pentagon reprise by seizing on a dead Russian marshal and an octogenarian Washington bureaucrat few had ever heard of.

Like Osama bin Laden, steely-haired Nikolai Ogarkov first came to light during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. In 1977, at 50, he had become a prodigal chief of the Soviet General Staff. In that superannuated, medal-mummified company, he proved a dynamic, technically inclined, forward-thinking young general. Over the ensuing years, he would be an impressive Moscow spokesman on arms control, and defend stubbornly, even abjectly, the 1983 shooting down of a civilian Korean Airlines 747 that had veered into Soviet air space.

Ogarkov would fall from power in a 1984 Kremlin struggle over weapons spending, write a valedictory book warning of American militarism, and die in post-Soviet obscurity in 1994. But his main, if esoteric, historical distinction would lie in a slight 1982 pamphlet in which he blamed the early, nearly lethal Russian defeats in World War II on a failure to adapt to the new German blitzkrieg concepts in tank warfare. Recent U.S. advances in weapons technology, he argued, could leave the Russians similarly vulnerable if they didn't adapt quickly enough.

Sweeping changes in tactics and arms as well as more agile, responsive armed forces were needed to face the American challenge, the Marshal advised. Otherwise, Soviet forces would fall into a series of devastating traps on a future remote-targeted battlefield in which the enemy would utilize the latest computerized surveillance and information systems in a new form of high-tech warfare. His vision soon gained vogue as much in Washington as amid the stultified upper reaches of the Soviet military of the early 1980s. It was grandly christened -- and welcomed by Pentagon aficionados -- as the "Revolution in Military Affairs" or, in that acronym-laden world, RMA.

There was a certain banality to Ogarkov's stress on technology. That a fighting force should be best attuned to the battlefield and adversary of the moment -- modern, adaptable, quick, and informed -- should have been self-evident, on the order of the bloody lesson 80 years before of the Tsarist cavalry charging entrenched machine guns in the Russo-Japanese War. Yet however obvious the premise, the RMA concept -- transported to the Pentagon and put in the context of an onrushing generation of electronic warfare, of near-nuclear effects with non-nuclear means, along with Ogarkov's call for fresh tactics (and thus new weaponry and higher spending) -- was taken up by innovators, opportunists, and their assorted hybrids on both sides of the Cold War.

This was particularly so among the Soviets, whose rusty Europe-heavy military was already being shaken and bled in Afghanistan by the Mujahideen -- in 1982-1983, despite ample Saudi money, still only partially armed by their cynical CIA, Pakistani, and Chinese handlers. At any rate, Ogarkov's truism was also grist for the Pentagon's back-ring band of civilian military "theorists," career bureaucrats ever in search of a mission and occupationally disposed to attribute evil genius -- requiring a suitable Washington budgetary response -- to the Red Menace.

Short, bald, and with stylishly severe wire-rimmed glasses, Andrew Marshall was a Dickensian clerk of a man who took up the bureaucratic cudgel RMA represented and brought it down inside the Pentagon. An economist by training, he had begun at RAND as an analyst in the late 1940s, when Rumsfeld was still in New Trier High School. Marshall was archetypical in the career-making fear and folly of the U.S.-Russian mirror-image rivalry. He had been a protégé of think-the-unthinkable, World War III theorist Herman Kahn, and then, via Henry Kissinger's mentor Fritz Kraemer, had gone to work for Kissinger at the National Security Council (NSC) in the first Nixon term. In 1973, he moved on to the Pentagon where he presided over his own obscure nest, the Office of Net Assessment, from Rumsfeld I to II, while gradually gaining the reputation of resident genius of new war methods.

Discreet guru to reactionaries, ignored but thought untouchable by Democrats when in power, Marshall looked on as the Joint Chiefs not only spied on Kissinger's arms control negotiations with the Russians, but also played an ardent supporting role in Nixon's fall. He subsequently signed on to Rumsfeld I's denial of defeat in Vietnam and then, on RMA's advent, used the concept to evoke ominous fears of a new Kremlin military prowess, justifying the orgy of Pentagon spending that took place during the Reagan era. (Ironically, of course, Ogarkov in 1982 was arguing for a Russian response to a still largely prospective American escalation of weaponry and warfare.) While the U.S. armaments spree of the 1980s paid for some new RMA developments, most of the expenditures fit snugly within the corrupt, obtuse old Cold War system, with America's armed forces tailored to a lumbering Soviet threat in Europe, and no serious anticipation of the neo-insurgency wars that actually lay ahead.

As Marshall toyed with "flexibility" -- and the Joint Chiefs cherry-picked his conjuring of Moscow's might for their own budgetary purposes, while ignoring the real import, and limits, of RMA -- the Cold War ended in the equivocations and evasions of Bill Clinton's two terms in office and the low-rent, self-congratulatory installing of mafia regimes in Bosnia and Kosovo. The gnome-like Marshall, well past retirement but a lionized witness before the missile-threat commission, hung on for Rumsfeld's return.

The resulting history is far too close for much documented detail, though its silhouette is plain enough. Summoning Marshall as soothsayer, Rumsfeld made RMA the logo of his determination to gain managerial dominance over the Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon bureaucracy, exactly the opportunity he thought he had missed 25 years earlier. Under the old banner of a clash between a brave, beleaguered secretary of defense and the recalcitrant brass astride an impossible, "glandular" system, he held up the all-purpose, all-seasons ideal of Pentagon "reform." That "reform" movement was to be his ultimate takedown, his claim to greatness, and perhaps -- who knew in 2001 -- one last shot at the presidency.

Amid the inevitable claims of "streamlining" and "modernizing," Democrats applauded and reporters gushed reflexively about Rumsfeld as a celebrity CEO and national quipster. The willing ignorance, denial, careless trust, or craven acquiescence that marked the essential submissiveness of the political and media culture to Rumsfeld's rule were only part of a larger, thoughtless national abdication of judgment and responsibility in the wars he would propel in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

In blindly striking out after 9/11 -- a reflexive, grandly opportunistic, richly self-satisfying political act in America -- without seriously understanding the politics or history of either country, he plunged the Pentagon into blundering, plundering occupations that made the nightmares of 2007 and beyond nearly inevitable.

That was the price -- in the utter absence of serious dialogue in the 2000 election or the first eight months of 2001 -- of the original uncontested surrender of foreign-policy power and initiative to such evident presidential incompetence (including the shocking ineptitude of NSC Advisor Condoleezza Rice and her staff) and the long predictable Rumsfeld-Cheney dominance. All of it was plain in Washington soon after George W. Bush's arrival in the Oval Office; none of it was then questioned, much less challenged, by Congress, the remnant foreign policy establishment, or the mainstream media. No democratic process so completely failed a test of substance as America's after 9/11. No ensuing catastrophe was more consensual.

History will unravel only slowly Rumsfeld's relationship to the neocons, who dominated the middle and upper reaches of his Pentagon, a relationship more complex than contemporary hagiographies or demonologies have had it. Historically, he was their ally, patron, legitimizing figurehead, but never really of them, never a fellow ideologue, dogmatist, or slavish adherent to much of what they pursued. In enlisting Wolfowitz, Perle and their train, he would use them, much as he used Marshall, as he had used so many before, as a means to what was so largely a personal, megalomaniacal end. But that use, too, was characteristically heedless of substance and cost.

He opened government as never before to men who habitually, automatically assumed that U.S. and Israeli interests were identical, with no objectivity about American policy in a Middle East they scarcely understood to begin with. Their ignorance and presumption were matched only by their zeal to cluster in decisive quarters of the new Bush regime where decisions of grand strategy, of war and peace, were now shaped and predetermined.

"Like cancer cells," as eyewitness, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, would describe them in action in Rumsfeld's Defense Department. Half-educated and fanatically loyal to the rote Israeli lobby view of the Middle East and the larger neocon craze for American post-Cold War global hegemony, they crowded the domains of the number three official at the Pentagon, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, whose career was a model of their kind and whose notorious Office of Special Plans was created as a fount for the fraudulent intelligence spurring the invasion of Iraq.

Historians will debate, too, the obvious blurred allegiance of what some call these American "Likudniks" with their utter conformity to the belligerent ultra-Zionist mentality of the Israeli right. Never before -- not even in the post-World War II heyday of the powerful China Lobby with its formidable grip on Capitol Hill but not within the upper reaches of the Executive itself -- had so many of such uncritical adherence to the policies of a foreign power been so well placed in Washington.

As often in American politics and government, however, no conspiracies were necessary, though a Pentagon-Israeli lobby spy scandal has yet to be played out. Unrelieved substantive shallowness, a perversely narrow sociology of knowledge, long-jockeyed-for power and career advancement, a grandiose parochial vision of a Pax Americana world nursed in a hundred forgotten think-tank papers and incestuous conferences -- all that as well imposed a stifling, disastrous orthodoxy on the administration.

Not least, they operated without the need to support their prejudices or delusions in authentic high-level debate, flourishing in their members-only domains of the Pentagon, the NSC Staff, and the State Department, enjoying exclusive channels of communication to the White House controlled by Cheney, and unchallenged under a President of uniquely closed mind.

As for Rumsfeld's relations with his generals, the subject of veiled accusations of his heedlessness to dissent or running roughshod over warnings of serious problems, we actually know very little. The calamity in Iraq has brought more public criticism by senior officers than any other war in American history, including Vietnam, but almost all of it hurled from the relatively safe seats of two-and three-star retirement -- and forlornly after the fact.

This much is clear: No major Pentagon leaks, the time-honored Washington weapon of dissenting commanders, marked the run-up to the invasion. There have been no public resignations in protest of his policies. And the negligence, incompetence, and inertia of commanders in recognizing and coping with the insurgency, in dealing with scandals of prisoner abuse, inadequate equipment and more, have been all too obvious. There is no evidence that any ranking American officer on duty pressed an intellectual or moral challenge to the unfolding debacle -- even after it was too glaring to be ignored. As in so much else in his long record, Rumsfeld enjoyed, by Washington's inimitable mix of careerism and cowardice, submission and opportunism, a large supporting cast in his folly.

Takedown

In the exhilarating dash to Baghdad in 2003, none of the admiring gallery seemed to notice that Rumsfeld's "new" military was largely the old one, "reformed" in name only; nor did many note that the vaunted lean, mean machine of RMA and the again-lionized Marshall had no grasp of how profoundly political was the act of overthrowing 40 years of Ba'athist rule; how deeply political was the campaign to which so many American lives, so much of the country's material and symbolic national treasures, would be committed.

Rumsfeld would take his victory tour in the Gulf that spring as if circling the mat after a stunningly swift pin. What was his toughest call, trailing reporters asked --part of the traditional garlands of victory tossed his way -- and how did he "feel" at such a victorious moment?

It was hardly the time for the media, the seemingly omnipotent military, or the rest of government and the political culture to reflect on how much "shock and awe" depended on overwhelming force brought down on the near-defenseless, on how much the concept reeked of racism and colonial pretense – of natives on the scene and in the vicinity "shocked and awed" like Zulus pounded and panicked by the Queen's own latest howitzers.

It was far too early for other questions -- about a force cosseted at the end of vulnerable supply lines, nicely photogenic in night goggles but without enough body armor; about acronyms like IED that had yet to enter the vocabularies of either commanders or reporters; about the familiar chase for medals and the absence of an enemy admitting defeat and ready to surrender (a missing essential of "victory" that would have much worried Maxwell Taylor).

Unreformed, uninformed commanders, uninstructed beyond brief battles, led their charges into Iraq relying on their generals. The generals relied on civilians. The civilians relied on (or were seduced or bullied by) the neocons. The neocons relied on their own ersatz expertise, Mossad insiders, and Iraqi exiles long out of touch with their homeland. The exiles -- holed up in Baghdad palaces with U.S.-paid-for mercenary guards, ignorant and contemptuous of the Iraq that had passed them by, and where they were now powerless, even with the might of the Pentagon behind them -- relied on the Americans.

Rumsfeld, as always, relied on himself. The ranks trusted him -- and political decision-makers -- to know and manage post-Saddam politics in Iraq to secure the victory as well as to provide the political setting that fulfilled the military triumph. When they failed miserably, condemning the American force to a corrupt, untenable occupation and slow-wasting attrition of men and prestige, the debacle was complete.

Beyond Iraq were his other lasting legacies.

As no other cabinet officer in history, he turned over crucial, self-sustaining functions of his department to privateers and private armies. He surrendered vital supply and commissariat services for the American military to profit-plundering contractors for whom U.S. forces were neither fellow warriors, nor even share-holders, but captive "customers" to be treated with the offhandedness afforded by guaranteed contracts. He ceded security and combat functions essential to the national mission to a corps of thousands of hired guns whose qualifications, standards of conduct and ultimate loyalty -- all integral to the safety and success of American forces -- were beyond effective governmental control or measure. (Exposed in a Congressional hearing February 7, the scandal of the infamous Blackwell Security Corporation, shirking amid vast profit the arming and protection of its own ranks, would be only a glimpse of the larger disgrace.)

Not since the British hired hordes of Hessians to crush George Washington's revolutionary army had a military force tracing to America been so utterly mercenary. The potential direct and indirect levy on policy and the armed forces would not be known for years.

As no other cabinet officer in history, he squandered the integrity of his department and the unique, indispensable code of honor of its services. He joined, and often led, the rest of an intellectually degraded administration, heedless of Constitutional and human rights, in violating the very heart of their ostensibly conservative convictions. With the ready sanctioning, and then de facto cover-up of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the less noticed but equally gruesome prisons at Bagram Air Base and elsewhere in Afghanistan, he changed, for untold millions, the symbol of America and its once-proud military from freedom and the rule of law to the unforgettable prisoner's hood and shackles. Rumsfeld's impact would not vanish with terms of office or elections. By the very nature of contracts, personnel practices, and imparted ethics -- some of Washington's most permanent monuments -- his legacies would remain deep in the tissue and soul of the institution he was entrusted to lead. At the end, a pathetic climax to his more than four decades either in government or imploringly on its threshold, there was only his hackneyed memo on Iraq policy -- leaked, even more pathetically, in an apparent attempt somehow to vindicate him after all.

Thus, he growled that the Iraqi regime, like some seedy wrestling team, should "pull up its socks"; and, most poignantly, ever the politician conducting lethal policy as politics, he advised that Washington "announce that whatever new approach the US decides on, the US is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to re-adjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not 'lose.'"

As he left office for the last time, it would be only the loss that mattered. As a pathologically unfit president struggled to recoup his historic blunder, as the neocons and Israeli lobby pressed on a gullible media and restive but still captive Congress the myth of an Iranian nuclear threat, as the Navy and Air Force, lesser actors in the Iraq action, promised wondrous results in Persia, the chaos and ineffable danger were left to Robert Gates, the puffy courtier.

Weeks after Rumsfeld's departure, history -- the little ever really known or understood -- was already being waved off, forgotten. The past was too complicated and troublesome, too guilt-ridden and close to home, too filled with chilling consequences.

The worst of it was the most basic and damning. Donald Rumsfeld and all he represented, all he did and did not do, came out of us. The undertaker's tally, including Iraq, was compiled at our leave, one way or another, at every turn. His tragedy was always ours.

Roger Morris, who served in the State Department and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, resigned in protest at the invasion of Cambodia. He then worked as a legislative advisor in the U.S. Senate and a director of policy studies at the Carnegie Endowment, and writes this Rumsfeldian history from intimate firsthand knowledge as well as extensive research. A Visiting Honors professor at the University of Washington and Research Fellow of the Green Institute (his work appears on its website), he is an award-winning historian and investigative journalist, including a National Book Award Silver Medal winner, and the author of books on Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and the Clintons. More recently, he co-authored with Sally Denton The Money and the Power, a history of Las Vegas as the paradigm of national corruption. His latest work, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of U.S. covert interventions and policy in the Middle East and South Asia over the past half-century, will be published in 2007 by Knopf.

Copyright 2007 Roger Morris

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From our information clearinghouse

These are items we receive from the countless mailing lists to which The Scallion collectively subscribes. They are worth the effort of at least a good skim.

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From AlterNet

Bush Is Badly Screwing Up the War on Terror
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The Lies They Tell: How to Stop the Fox Propaganda Machine
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New Study Shows Medical Value of Marijuana
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New research gives more ammunition to those hoping to change federal marijuana policy.

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Squeamish school librarians, screaming at a single word they deemed "offensive," have put the screws to an award-winning children's book.

Hillary's Calculations Add Up to War
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Clinton refuses to admit her mistakes about Iraq and proceeds to make the same ones with Iran.

Clinton To Anti-War Voters: Bring It On
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Clinton invites voters to turn elsewhere for an anti-war presidential candidate, and they will oblige.
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Why are we keeping a hopeless, for-profit health insurance system alive? Read more

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Hollywood Flicks Stiff the Working Class
By Robert Nathan, Jo-Ann Mort, The Nation
"Unionized" isn't a word you hear in many American movies. In time for the Academy Awards, here's a look at the dearth of films about working class life.

Walter Reed Is a Second Hell for Injured Vets
By Brady van Engelen, HuffingtonPost.com
The American people must make clear their disgust with the way the Pentagon treats injured service members.

Love Is In the Air for Big Business and Mainstream Enviros
By Amanda Griscom Little, Grist Magazine
The on-again-off-again flirtation between big business and the mainstream environmental movement seems to be progressing into a full-on steamy love affair -- and perhaps even a committed, long-term relationship.

In their own words: Members of Sunni militia speak out [VIDEO]
By Joshua Holland
This short clip says more about the situation in Iraq than a thousand blathering talking heads.

Fox Attacks Obama [VIDEO]
By Evan Derkacz
Netroots fight Fox...

Attorney General Gonzales Deputizes 20 Million Right Leaning Christians
By Bruce Wilson
DOJ asks Southern Baptists to enforce religious freedom laws

-----

Why the Mad Rush to the '08 Elections?
By Steve Fraser, Tomdispatch.com
We've already been swamped by 2008 presidential madness -- by Hillary, by Obama(mania), by Fox News smears and Republican pandering to religious extremists -- which suggests that a turning-point election is on the way. Read more

Tony Blair Finally Concedes Defeat in Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn, CounterPunch
The British Prime Minister's announced reduction in troops is admission of what George Bush still desperately denies: defeat.

The Jet Blue Blues
By Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet
Let's face it, JetBlue and the rest of you: Anything more than three hours on the ground isn't an airline delay, it's a hostage situation.

The Next Pat Tillman-Style Cover-Up?
By Philip Barron
The Army has much to answer for in its investigation of Private LaVena Johnson's death.

Careful Consumption Alone Can't Save the World's Fish
By Jennifer Jaquet, The Tyee
With fish suppliers changing the names of seafood to avoid catch limits, the only way to preserve fish stocks is by electing politicians committed to conservation and tight regulation.
PEEK and Video: The hottest buzz and videos on the web

Enviros score major win in Texas coal-plant fight
By Tara Lohan
It seems Gov. Perry is actually suppose to work for Texans and not TXU.

New Study: Iraq War increased deadly terrorism 607% [VIDEO]
By Evan Derkacz
Can it be put plainer? Bush helped terrorism by invading Iraq. Period.

In Iraq until 2012? 2017? Michael Hirsh thinks so.
By Joshua Holland
A must-read on the plan offered by Bush's new military commander.

-----

Chomsky on Why Bush Does Diplomacy Mafia-Style
By Michael Shank, Foreign Policy in Focus
Noam Chomsky explains what he thinks the U.S. will do to Iran, what is really at stake for America in Iraq, and why Palestinians are more likely to uphold their peace agreements than Israelis. Read more

Does Being a Feminist Mean Voting for Hillary?
By Courtney E. Martin, AlterNet
Are feminists obligated to support a political candidate just because she's a woman?

Candidates Who Shun Corporate Cash Are Winning
By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown
Electoral reform isn't just starry-eyed theory: Clean elections are taking place in states from Arizona to North Carolina, reversing the big-money corruption that rampages throughout our political system.

Torture Is Finally on Trial
By Naomi Klein, The Guardian
America has deliberately driven hundreds, perhaps thousands, of prisoners insane. Now it is being held to account in a Miami court.

Green-Collar Jobs for Urban America
By Van Jones, Ben Wyskida, YES! Magazine
The city of Oakland is creating jobs as unlikely allies push a green and local agenda to revitalize a depressed urban economy.

"Explosive" new Hersh scoop: Bush funneling money to Al Qaeda-related groups [VIDEO]
By Evan Derkacz
Oh, and we'll be 24 hours from attacking Iran...

NYT editor says women are bad military history writers
By Ann Friedman
NY Times Book Review ed. has "Larry Summers" moment.

-----

From the ACLU

Dear Friend,

Phone companies are voluntarily turning over millions of customer
records to the National Security Agency.

Acting without a court order or the knowledge or consent of their
customers, phone companies are providing the government with
potentially intimate details about who you know and who you talk to -
details that are stored in giant databases, and perhaps mined by the
NSA's supercomputers to scan through each of our associations and
interests for "suspicious" signs, whatever that may be.

This is illegal and un-American. Act now to protect your privacy:

http://action.aclu.org/site/R?i=3_SZqk9pWGzvesm3FuJYBg..

In May 2006, USA Today revealed that since shortly after 9/11 at least
two major phone companies - AT&T and Verizon - have been
voluntarily granting the NSA direct, mass access to their customers'
calling records, and that the NSA had compiled a giant database of
those records. This program extends to all Americans, not just those
suspected of terrorist or criminal activity.

The goal of this program, according to media reports, is to "create a
database of every call ever made within the nation's borders." This
information can easily be linked to determine your identity, your
friends, and your interests.

That's why the ACLU is supporting an effort by AT&T and Verizon
shareholders to force the companies to disclose how they handle
customers' personal information, any legal issues with assisting in
government spying and how much the companies have spent addressing the
spying scandal. Act now to protect your privacy:

http://action.aclu.org/site/R?i=egJZRjmHI3QPVg8Y8F3-Kg..

Both telecommunications companies are attempting to obstruct
discussion of this issue by appealing to the Securities and Exchange
Commission for permission to block the proposed shareholder
resolutions.

Act now to stop AT&T and Verizon from abusing your privacy:
http://action.aclu.org/site/R?i=A3FyL-nIAu6eWi7BmYoNyA..

As owners of publicly traded corporations, shareholders have a right
to vote on issues they feel are vital to preserve their
company's reputation and protect the long-term value of
investments and maintain customer privacy. AT&T and Verizon
customers, board members and shareholders must be aware of all the
issues inherent in assisting the government with its spying.

If you are a shareholder of these companies, a customer, or a
concerned citizen, your voice matters to hold AT&T and Verizon
accountable and to protect you privacy. So please take action today to
protect your privacy:

http://action.aclu.org/site/R?i=iV8UQEgNcuVAH4Lh4ko61g..

Sincerely,
Anthony D. Romero
Executive Director
ACLU


**********************************************
GET INVOLVED: HELP END UNCHECKED NSA SPYING

>> With the help of phone companies, the NSA is tapping phones
and reading email without a warrant. Make your voice heard now, and
stop warrantless spying by the phone companies:
http://action.aclu.org/site/R?i=RH7fQk-BlQDF-7d-UC8d5Q..

>> ACLU activists in dozens of states are calling for
oversight by the local utility commissions who regulate the phone
companies. See what's happening in your state and around the
country:
http://action.aclu.org/site/R?i=HKsU2XnKzoSeGOmPSjCJ1A..

>> On January 31, the ACLU urged the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals
to excercise its proper authority, uphold our initial ACLU v. NSA
victory, and require the president to shut down his program of
unchecked NSA wiretapping. Learn more about ACLU v. NSA:
http://action.aclu.org/site/R?i=YbdeOpfXy8KxcjSgPC_7nQ..

-----

From A.N.S.W.E.R.

I want to thank you for your very generous contribution and give you a quick update of where we are today with this unfolding Free Speech battle. I will continue to keep you posted in the coming week about important developments.

As you can imagine, the government's action to delay and obstruct our receiving all the basic permits is partly undertaken, we believe, with the aim of forcing us to divert energy from mass mobilizing for the March on the Pentagon during the critical last stage. We are taking great care to fight this Free Speech fight and not be thrown off track from our basic mission of mobilizing the largest possible turnout on March 17.

The government is also, as I mentioned in my letter two days ago, hoping to drive up our expenses with the hope that they will "spend us down" and force us to cancel. Because of the generous donations from you and others, however, we will thwart this effort as well. We are still far from achieving what we need in the next three weeks but we are very heartened by the strong response from the supporters of the anti-war movement.

Here is the latest news: Thursday, ANSWER Coalition leaders and our attorneys met with the representatives of the State of Virginia. At that meeting they requested that we sign a document agreeing to pay the the State of Virginia an unspecified amount for "reimbursed" expenses for the use of a section of Route 27 that leads to the Pentagon parking lot where we will have a major rally. They said that we must sign the document although they would not even tell us what the amount was that we were to agree to pay. They cited different possible figures, all in the range of thousands of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. We, of course, did not sign. They were also insisting that we post a $1 million insurance bond for the use of the roadway under their jurisdiction. This is an incredible affront to the First Amendment. The entire stretch of roadway that we are talking about is approximately 100 yards!

We, along with the renowned constitutional rights legal team from the Partnership of Civil Justice are launching a political and legal effort to defend the rights of the people to peaceably assemble and demonstrate. The Pentagon and the State of Virginia are not in territory that is exempt from the provisions of the Constitution. I have attached a copy of a letter sent yesterday from PCJ to the Attorney General of Virginia.

Thanks to the outpouring of support from people like you we are entirely confidant that we can raise the funds needed for the March on The Pentagon. We are not there yet, however, and we are urgently needing pay contractors for the sound, stage, set-up, and other logistical requirements for an activity that will draw many tens of thousands of people. If you are able to contribute again or know a friend or family member who might want to show their support either with an online donation or by sending a check, you can click on this link.

Thank you again for your commitment and support in the Free Speech fight. Please be sure to read our lawyer's letter to the Attorney General of Virginia which is attached as a link below.

Standing Together to Defend Free Speech and End the War,

Brian Becker
National Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition

Click on this link to see the letter we sent to the Attorney General of Virginia.

-----

From the Center for American Progress

GOOD NEWS

Australia will "phase out incandescent light bulbs and replace them with more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs," a move that could "reduce Australia s greenhouse gas emissions by 4 million tons by 2012."

STATE WATCH

MARYLAND: State House overwhelmingly approves legislation to force automobile producers to slash greenhouse emissions.

KANSAS: Legislators compromise to make English the state s official language, while also funding adult language classes.

ENVIRONMENT: Nine states sue the Bush administration for a "failure to regulate mercury and other pollutants from cement plants."

BLOG WATCH

THINK PROGRESS: White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and reporters slam the "hateful," "polarized" blogosphere.

MY TWO SENSE: CNN pundit Glenn Beck finds it "very difficult in some ways to feel bad for New Orleans."

HUFFINGTON POST: Sheryl Crow and global warming activist Laurie David will "embark on a multi-city tour to energize college students in the fight against global warming."

AMERICA BLOG: "Dad writes letter to the editor seeking donations for son's body armor."

DAILY GRILL

"Well, I look at it and see it is actually an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well."
-- Vice President Cheney, 2/21/07, reacting to the announcement of U.K. troop withdrawals from Iraq

VERSUS

"I want you to know that the American people will not support a policy of retreat."
-- Cheney, 2/21/07, telling soldiers on board the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk why the administration opposes withdrawing U.S. troops

-----

GOOD NEWS

"After years of holding out against equal prize money, Wimbledon bowed to public pressure Thursday and agreed to pay women players as much as the men at the world's most prestigious tennis tournament."

STATE WATCH

NEW JERSEY: State Supreme Court rules that students "who are bullied by other students because of their sexual orientation are protected by the state's antidiscrimination law."

SOUTH DAKOTA: State Senate rejects a bill "to ban most abortions in a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade."

CALIFORNIA: "People of color bear an unfair burden of exposure to air pollution in the Bay Area."

ENVIRONMENT: New Earth Day Network report scores the environmental performance of 72 U.S. cities.

BLOG WATCH

THINK PROGRESS: MSNBC's Joe Scarborough smacks Fox News's Bill O'Reilly for ignoring Iraq to focus on "NBC jihad."

ACS BLOG: REAL ID Act could endanger victims of domestic violence.

WAR ROOM: Problems at Walter Reed hospital reported in 2005.

INFORMED COMMENT: British withdrawal from Basra not a sign of progress.

DAILY GRILL

"The president listened too much to the Vice President. ... Of course, the president bears the ultimate responsibility, but he was very badly served by both the Vice President and, most of all, the Secretary of Defense."
-- Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), 1/24/07

VERSUS

"John said some nasty things about me the other day and then next time he saw me ran over to me and apologized. Maybe he'll apologize to Rumsfeld."
-- Vice President Dick Cheney, 2/21/07

-----

GOOD NEWS

Global Green USA has lined up 30 "environment-friendly rides" for "celebrities wanting to make a green statement on the way to the red carpet of the Oscars."

STATE WATCH

IDAHO: Conservative state lawmakers kill an effort to index Idaho's minimum wage to inflation.

ILLINOIS: State Rep. Greg Harris (D) introduced a bill yesterday to legalize same-sex marriage.

NORTH CAROLINA: State eyeing "green guidelines" to lead the battle against global warming.

WYOMING: Bill defeated in State House that would have banned Wyoming from recognizing gay marriages from other states.

BLOG WATCH

THINK PROGRESS: Pentagon's Iraq report contradicts White House's rosy rhetoric on U.K. troop withdrawals.

TAPPED: New York Times Book Review editor explains why there are so few female review: women are unable to write for a "general audience" on issues such as military affairs.

THE GAVEL: Military officials speak out on the strain of escalation on U.S. troops.

FEDSPENDING.ORG: New and improved searchable database of nearly all government spending since FY 2000.

DAILY GRILL

"I do not consider Building 18 to be substandard. ... We needed to do a better job on some of those rooms, and those of you that got in today saw that we frankly have fixed all of those problems. They weren't serious, and there weren't a lot of them."
-- Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, 2/22/07, at a press conference at Walter Reed's Building 18

VERSUS

"Kiley might have had a stronger case if men wearing Tyvek hazmat suits and gas masks hadn't walked through the lobby while the camera crews waited for the tour to start, or if he hadn't acknowledged, moments later, that the entire building would have to be closed for a complete renovation."
-- Dana Milbank, 2/23/07

-----

GOOD NEWS

Al Gore's global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, last night won two Academy Awards for Best Documentary and Best Original Song.

STATE WATCH

MARYLAND: The state legislature is revisiting a bill that would grant in-state college tuition to undocumented immigrants.

TEXAS: "Lower-income residents could be among the top beneficiaries" of an effort to expand wireless Internet access in Houston.

VIRGINIA: Virginia yesterday became the first state to apologize for slavery.

BLOG WATCH

THINK PROGRESS: Defense trust hails Scooter Libby as a "loyal soldier in the war on terror."

POLITICAL ANIMAL: Inaccurate U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (2003) and Iran (2007).

IRAQ SLOGGER: "Sadrist Web site: U.S. Undermining Maliki Govt?"

ERIC UMANSKY: On how Shaq is like President Bush.

DAILY GRILL

"If we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we'll do is validate the al Qaeda strategy. The al Qaeda strategy is to break the will of the American people."
-- Vice President Cheney, 2/21/07

VERSUS

"If you go back and see what Vice President Cheney has said for the last three or four years concerning Iraq, his batting average is abysmally low. He hasn't been right on hardly anything...and obviously this is not playing into the hands of al Qaeda."
-- Former President Jimmy Carter, 2/25/07

-----

From “Democracy Now!”

* New Iraq Oil Law To Open Iraq's Oil Reserves to Western Companies *

The Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar has obtained a copy of the proposed oil law
and has just translated it into English. He discusses the new law with
Antonia Juhasz, author of "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy
at a Time.”

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/20/1523250


* Jubilee USA Launches Campaign To Stop Vulture Fund Investors From
Profiting Off Debtor Nations in Developing World *

In response to Greg Palast's report last week on BBC and Democracy Now, the
debt-relief and economic justice group Jubilee USA is launching a new effort
today calling on Debt Advisory International to drop its efforts to collect
money from the Zambian government.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/20/1523254


* "Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11
World" *

Canadian human rights attorney and author Maureen Webb discusses the
comprehensive scope of government surveillance, and finds that the use of
sophisticated methods to search for terrorists is not identifying the right
suspects.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/20/1523257


* Headlines for February 20, 2007 *

- US Plans for Attack on Iran Revealed
- Second U.S. Aircraft Carries Arrives in Middle East
- Nine U.S. Troops Die In Iraq; U.S. Military Base Attacked
- Bush Given Greater Power to Declare Martial Law
- Cheney To Ask Japan & Australia to Send More Troops to Iraq
- Satellite Radio Networks Sirius & XM to Merge
- 65th Anniversary of Japanese Internment Camps Marked

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/20/1523245

-----

* Britain Announces Partial Withdrawal from Iraq *

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has announced plans for the withdrawal of
an initial 1,600 British troops from Iraq. We go to London to get reaction
from distinguished British politician Tony Benn.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/21/1522253

* Silent Gesture: Gold-Medalist Tommie Smith on His Historic Black Power
Salute at 1968 Olympics *

The raised fists of two African-American Olympic medal winners at the 1968
Olympics in Mexico City, is one of the most iconic images of our time. The
man standing on the podium in 1st place, Tommie Smith, talks about that
moment and his new autobiography, “Silent Gesture.”

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/21/1523224

* As Nuclear Deadline Passes, US and Iran Trade Accusations of Bombing
Involvement *

The White House has dismissed a suggestion from Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad that Iran would close its nuclear facilities as long as Western
nations did the same. His comments came as a deadline set by the UN for Iran
to freeze its uranium enrichment program expires today. Meanwhile Iran has
accused the US of backing a bomb attack that killed 11 Revolutionary Guards,
just one week after the US accused Iran of supplying bombs targeting US
troops in Iraq. We speak with retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/21/1523228


* Headlines for February 21, 2007 *

- Blair Announces Withdrawal of 1,600 UK Troops
- US Soldier Pleads Guilty to Iraq Rape, Murder
- Iran Calls for Unconditional Talks as Deadline Passes
- Poland, Europe to Host Parts of US Missile System
- Court Upholds Denying Court-Access to Gitmo Prisoners
- McConnell Sworn-in New National Intelligence Director
- Audit: Terror Statistics Inaccurate, Inflated

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/21/1522250

-----

* Walter Reed Ex-Patient, Wife Speak Out on Poor Conditions at Army's Top
Medical Facility *

The Army's Vice Chief of Staff General Richard Cody admitted on Wednesday
there has been a “breakdown in leadership” at the Walter Reed Army Medical
Center. His comments came three days after the Washington Post revealed that
hospital rooms at Walter Reed were infested with mouse droppings,
cockroaches, stained carpets, rodents and black mold. We speak with a former
Walter Reed patient; the wife of another patient, and a Salon.com reporter
who documented the problems at Walter Reed two years ago.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/22/1448218


* The Iraq Effect: New Study Finds 600% Rise in Terrorism Since US Invasion
of Iraq *

As the fourth anniversary of the Iraq approaches, a new study by Mother
Jones magazine has found that the number of fatal terrorist attacks has
increased by over 600 percent since the U.S. invasion. We speak with the
study's co-author, Paul Cruickshank.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/22/1448247


* Is Torture on Hit Fox TV Show “24” Encouraging US Soldiers to Abuse
Detainees? *

This past fall, the Dean of West Point, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan,
along with experienced military and FBI interrogators and representatives of
Human Rights First, met with the creative team behind the hit Fox Television
show “24” and tell them to stop using torture because American soldiers were
copying the show's tactics. We speak with two of the delegation's members --
former Army interrogator Tony Lagouranis, who served one year in Iraq and
David Danzig, director of the Prime Time Torture Project for Human Rights
First.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/22/1448252


* Headlines for February 22, 2007 *

- Following UK, Denmark to Pull 500 Troops from Iraq
- Lithuania Mulls Troop Withdrawal
- 2nd Rape Charge Emerges Against Iraqi Forces
- IAEA to Declare Iran in Violation of Deadline
- Italy PM Resigns over Foreign Policy Rebuke
- Libby Jury Begins Deliberating
- South Dakota Abortion Ban Defeated
- Groups: Immigrant Centers Share Prison-Like Conditions

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/22/1448233

-----

* Human Rights Groups Call for Closure of Texas Jail Holding Undocumented
Immigrants *

Human rights groups are calling for the U.S. government to shut down a jail
in Texas where about 200 immigrant children, some only infants, are being
detained. The Hutto facility in Taylor, Texas is owned by the private prison
company, Corrections Corporations of America. We speak to an immigrant
rights advocate who visited the center and an attorney for families being
held in Texas immigration detention centers.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/23/1530247


* "I Want To Be Free": 9-Year-Old Canadian Citizen Pleads From Texas
Immigration Jail *

Majid and his nine-year old son Kevin are Iranian immigrants currently being
held at the Hutto detention center. They've been forcibly detained since
their plane was forced made an emergency landing in Puerto Rico as they made
their way to Canada. Kevin says: “I want to be free. I want go to outside. I
want to go home to Canada.”

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/23/1532252


* Hundreds Protest NYU Republicans' “Find the Illegal Immigrant” Game *

Hundreds of people gathered at New York University on Thursday to protest a
game called “Find the Illegal Immigrant” organized by the school's
Republican club. Democracy Now! was there to speak with students on both
sides.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/23/1536241


* Raymondville: Inside the Largest Immigration Prison Camp in the US *

The largest immigrant prison camp is in Raymondville, Texas. Some two
thousand undocumented immigrants are currently being held in the prison
awaiting deportation. We speak with Jodi Goodwin, an immigration lawyer
representing a number of immigrants being held there.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/23/1536249


* Headlines for February 23, 2007 *

- Senate Dems Seek Repeal of 2002 War Authority
- Soldier Sentenced to 100-Years in Rape, Murder
- Report: UK to Send 1,000 Troops to Afghanistan
- IAEA: Iran in Defiance of Nuclear Deadline
- Doubts Raised Over US Intelligence on Iran Nuclear Facilities
- Nearly Half of Palestinians “Food Insecure”
- CIA Kidnap Victim Wants to Testify in Italy Trial
- Ex-Colombian Secret Police Head Arrested over Political Murders
- Lieberman May Switch to GOP

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/23/1529236

-----

* Ex-Congressional Aide: Karl Rove Personally Received (And Ignored) Iranian
Peace Offer in 2003 *

As Seymour Hersh reports the Pentagon has created a special panel to plan a
bombing attack on Iran, we examine how the Bush administration ignored a
secret offer to negotiate with Iran in 2003. We speak with the National
Iranian American Council's Trita Parsi, a former aide to Republican
congressman Bob Ney.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/26/157241

* As Tension Escalates Between the U.S. and Iran, An Iranian Student Shares
His Fears About A U.S. Attack on His Home Country *

Faced with the possibility of a US attack, how are the Iranian people
responding to the latest developments? And how has US policy in the Middle
East shaped Iranian public opinion? We speak with Hani Mansourian, a Masters
student in International Affairs at Columbia University.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/26/157248


* Danny Glover on the Oscars and the Panafrican Film and Television Festival
in Burkina Faso *

As the entertainment world focuses on the Oscars in Hollywood, we go to
Burkina Faso to speak with Danny Glover who is attending the Panafrican Film
and Television Festival -- Africa's most important film festival.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/26/157253


* Headlines for February 26, 2007 *

- Report: Pentagon Establishes Planning Group for Iran War
- U.S. & Saudis Covertly Pump Money To Sunni Groups
- Cheney on Iran: "All Options Are Still on the Table"
- U.S. Accused of Killing 26 in Ramadi
- Army File New Charges Against War Resister Ehren Watada
- 16 Million Americans Now in Deep Poverty
- U.S. Rejects International Call to Ban Cluster Bombs
- UN Report Compares Israel's Actions to Apartheid South Africa
- Al Sharpton's Ancestors Were Owned by Strom Thurmond's Family

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/26/157236

-----

From Jim Hightower

THE WORKPLACE BODY SNATCHERS

Thursday, February 15, 2007
Posted by Jim Hightower

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is learning the hard way that workers don't like bosses snooping on them.

Hizzoner the Mayor has taken $180 million from the city's meager treasury to buy a... [read more]

RUMMY WON'T GO AWAY

Friday, February 16, 2007
Posted by Jim Hightower

Old soldiers never die... they keep hanging on as consultants.

Actually Donnie Rumsfeld was not a soldier - he just played war at the Pentagon, using real soldiers to work out his neo-con, ideological fantasies about... [read more]

REIN IN BIG TOBACCO

Monday, February 19, 2007
Posted by Jim Hightower

The food and drug administration regulates the contents of Aspirin, potato chips... even dog food. But this safety watchdog has neither bite nor bark when it comes to setting standards for the deadliest product in our society: tobacco.

... [read more]

BUSH SEIZES MORE POWER

Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Posted by Jim Hightower

Oh, swell. George W is assigning a political nanny to every agency in the federal government.

In a new directive, Czar Bush says that each agency must henceforth create a regulatory policy office to be... [read more]

WOMEN OF WAL-MART FIGHT DISCRIMINATION

Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Posted by Jim Hightower

Get ready for another touchie-feelie Wal-Mart ad to saturate the airwaves soon.

Whenever this retailing behemoth gets caught in one of its many abusive practices, it races to cover-up the damage with a PR blitz. ... [read more]

-----

From Media Savvy

Sirius-XM Merger News Roundup
The news media reacts to the proposed Sirus-XM merger.

YouTube Loosed; Viacom Joost
A crack appears in Google's internet dominance as Viacom takes its videos to a new upstart video service.

Media Consolidation And The Future Of Liberty
The libertarian blogger from The Liberty Papers looks at the problem of consolidation and whether new technologies can save us.

Big Brother Is Reading Your Email - Video
A new bill that "would require ISPs to record all users' surfing activity" and NOW presents "new evidence suggesting the existence of a secret government program that intercepts millions of private e-mails."

Leaked Iraq Oil Law Document
Global Exchange's Iraq Project Director, Raed Jarrar, has obtained a purported Iraqi oil law document and translated it into English.

FOX ATTACKS OBAMA (Video)
Video presents the erroneous and slanted stories Fox recently ran about Barack Obama

How To Stop The Fox Propaganda Machine
The "Sliming Bowl" is well under way, and Fox's influence is too big -- and too damaging -- to ignore. Can the progressive Internet media and blogosphere bring it down?

BBC Breaks Iran Attack Plan, Bloggers Worried


The News Media Wonder Whether Iran Is Next
Last week, a scenario that had largely been confined to a few cable hosts - the role of Iran and the possibility of war there -made its way onto the media agenda.

China: Stern Treatment For Young Internet 'Addicts'
Alarmed by a survey that found that nearly 14 percent of teens in China are vulnerable to becoming addicted to the Internet, the Chinese government has launched a nationwide campaign to stamp out what the Communist Youth League calls "a grave social problem" that threatens the nation.

Pressing The Issue
Lessons of civil-rights-movement-era journalism

US Condemned Over 'Outrageous' Armed Raid On Iraqi Journalists' Union
The IFJ condemned as 'outrageous and inexcusable' the action of American soldiers who carried out an armed raid on the Baghdad offices of the Iraq Syndicate of Journalists.

WaPo's One-Sided Coverage Of Libby Trial
The Washington Post published four op-eds attacking prosecution and trial of Libby, none supporting them.

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From HuffPo

Arianna Huffington: Hillary's Campaign Would Rather Mudsling Than Get Its Facts Right

AP

Excerpted from Arianna Huffington's Blog:

Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton's communications director, is obviously a slow learner. Either that or he'd rather sling mud than get his facts right.

Why else would he appear on Hardball Wednesday night and once again refer to David Geffen as Barack Obama's "campaign finance chair" -- a full six hours after Geffen had made it clear he had "no official role in the campaign"?...
Click here to read more.

ON THE BLOG TODAY

Rory Kennedy: What I Discovered from The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

Jon Robin Baitz: Authenticity and Negative Space in Beverly Hills

Gen. Wesley Clark: StopIranWar.com

Bob Cesca: Cheney Enjoys Shangri-La While Vets Enjoy Crap

Robert Greenwald: Fox Attack: Enough is Enough

From Fox News

Excerpted from Robert Greenwald's Blog:

Watching FOX is painful and infuriating. Sometimes I just can't bring myself to watch it. But the NewsHounds do, as does Media Matters. So, when I started reading their alerts about FOX's vicious and irresponsible smear campaign against Barack Obama, the OutFoxed blood in me got boiling once again and I knew it was time to take action.

So my colleagues at Brave New Films and I went to work with our tool of choice -- FILM -- to illustrate what a biased and partisan mouthpiece for the right wing FOX is.

See the video and then DO SOMETHING...
Click here to read more.

ON THE BLOG TODAY

Ari Emanuel: Three Predictions

Patricia Zohn: Wallflower at the Oscar Ball

Marty Kaplan: The State of the Scrotum

Ken Levine: Who Will Win Best Picture?

Nora Ephron: Mistakes

AP

Excerpted from Nora Ephron's Blog:

Seven years ago, when Hillary Clinton first ran for Senate from New York, she said something that summed up everything, I'm afraid. "Here's what I've learned," she said. "I can't make a mistake."

I was truly horrified when she said this. One of the things I used to admire about Hillary Clinton was that she had politics - unlike her husband, who was merely political - and it seemed clear that she'd decided she had to give all that up in order to be elected...
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ON THE BLOG TODAY

Patricia Marx: Commentary on the Red Carpet Commentary

David Roberts: Gore's Oscar Appearance

Amy Ephron: Curly

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And now for something you'll really like!

Star Trek Actor's Satirical Response to Tim "I hate gay people" Hardaway [VIDEO]
By Evan Derkacz
Former Star Trek star and gay activist George Takei takes on former NBA player Tim Hardaway's homophobic statement by comically threatening to have sex with him.